The Minimum Effective Dose
The Minimum Effective Dose (MED) is, in short, the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome. In pharmacological medicine, the application is obvious. Two pills in the morning lower your blood pressure to a “safe” level, so why take 5? You’re only causing yourself potential danger. But this concept can be used in many other ways. For instance, it can represent the minimal amount of work needed to finish a job. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. 100 degrees is the M.E.D. for boiling water. To heat water to 130 degrees with the intended goal of simply making it boil is nothing but a waste of energy. That extra 30 degrees won’t make the water any more boiled. If avoiding a speeding ticket means driving under 65 mph, doing 30 doesn’t make you even less likely to be pulled over.
The most interesting application of the Minimum Effective Dose falls in the strength and conditioning category. Ever met that guy who only goes to the gym 2-3 times per week and somehow achieves results quicker than those spending 5-7 days per week busting their butts? Or how about those people who exercise for 10-20 minutes per session while you spend 3 or more hours trying to shed belly fat, and nature seems to favor the others? It’s not coincidence, and it’s not entirely genetics either. Sometimes less is more. Unless you are a competitive athlete, your fitness goals likely include some sort of change in body composition, in which case the MED is intensity-specific. If your goal is fat loss, the MED is the stress level required to initiate a catabolic hormone response. If you want bigger muscles, tax the muscles with the minimum amount of work required to trigger both a local and systemic anabolic hypertrophy response, then go home. Use the extra time you would usually spend skyrocketing your cortisol levels by doing something more productive. If an overloaded muscle needs 48+ hours to recover and adapt to a training session, there is no hypertrophic benefit in bench pressing two days in a row, assuming you got it right the first time. In contrast, if your goal involves technical skill development and athletic performance, perhaps a few extra sets of clean and jerks can further smooth out that coordinated mind-muscle connection and grant you better insight into your mechanical faults. The MED for athletic training is the number of repetitions it takes to learn what is wrong with your performance and learn to adjust it.
How about strength development? Do you need to huff ammonia capsules and push/pull until you’re blue in the face in order to gain strength? 70% nerve activity is high enough for motor units to recruit all 3 muscle fiber types - the physiological goal in strength training. So anything beyond an absolute 70% power output during any lift is just exposing you to a greater chance of injury with minimal physiological benefit. It’s nice to blow off some steam every once in a while, but there’s a reason smart lifters avoid their 1-rep max until they are in competition, and they seem to gain strength just fine by hanging out in the 3- and 5-rep range.
Dieting? If consuming 500 calories less than you burn each day results in 1 pound of fat loss per week, then why not create a daily calorie deficit of 3,000 calories? Your stress hormones will spike, you will go into shock, and your health will crash. The most effective weight loss strategy is the one you can stick to over the long term while minimizing physiological stress.
The point of this post is to inform you that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. Minimalism is not laziness; it is efficiency. Bill Gates once stated, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
Work smart, not hard. Consult with a professional.
TJ Williamson, DC MS CSCS
