M2M Day 297: Naked and hairless

Max Deutsch
Aug 25, 2017 · 3 min read

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For August, my goal is to complete one continuous set of 40 pull-ups.

Yesterday was supposed to be a rest day, but turned into a long workout, focusing on the non-back parts of my body.

Although, to be completely honest, I’m addicted to pull-ups and couldn’t leave the gym yesterday until I got a few sets in.

In other words, my “rest day” turned into a “workout day, but a rest day for my back” into a “full-body workout day”.

Well, actually, I still haven’t gotten it quite right… It wasn’t a true full-body workout because I completely neglected my legs.

In fact, I’ve stopped working out my legs entirely this month, so that my lower body is as light as possible (i.e. so I can minimize the weight I need to pull). I’m still walking about 15,000 steps per day, and standing for most of the workday, but I’m definitely not building mass in my legs.

This is actually fairly common amongst competitive gymnasts, who also want to optimize the ratio of their upper-body strength to weight.

Nevertheless, because of this selective training, my body is starting to look unbalanced. In fact, if you look back at the video, it looks like my arms are genuinely the same size as my legs — which is either great for my arms or not so great for my legs.

Once this month is over, I’m definitely going to return to training my legs seriously. Strong legs are quite important to long-term health.

Even before this month though, I never had very big calves (I have a genetically high insertion point), but my quads and butt are definitely the least muscular they’ve been in a while.


Completely neglecting my legs like this may seems a little extreme, especially just for the sake of a couple extra pull-ups. But, this is nothing compared to my other crazy ideas…

I’ve been joking that if I still can’t get 40 pull-ups in the last few days of the month, I have many options to help optimize my strength-to-weight ratio:

  1. I can completely shave my body. I have no idea how much my body hair weighs, but I’m not too hairy, so probably not enough to justify the look.
  2. I can perform my pull-ups completely naked. After all, my clothes weigh a few extra pounds. (You’ll notice that I’ve recently started removing my shoes before I do pull-ups. Next, it’s my socks, and then, before I know it, my pants…)
  3. I can amputate my legs. They aren’t really helping me with this month’s challenge anyway.
  4. I can drop a few wrestling weight-classes via extreme dehydration. I can just hangout in a sauna wearing many layers of winter clothing.

But, it would be very preferable to avoid these options, so I have a better idea:

5. Get stronger.

Still, imagine how easy 40 pull-ups would be if I was completely naked, with no body hair, no legs, and no water weight… Actually, you probably shouldn’t imagine that.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is a product manager at Intuit, the creator of Somebody.io and Rightspeed, and the guinea pig for Month to Master.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

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Max Deutsch

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Founder at https://LearnMonthly.com. Blogging at http://MonthToMaster.com. Get in touch at http://max.xyz.

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