Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness

The magic you're looking for is in the work you keep attempting to avoid. The work is the hack.

I have yet to see an interview with somebody who's in their 90s or 100s who sounds really stressed out.

For muscular hypertrophy, you need to get close to failure, but you probably don't need to train to failure to maximize hypertrophy, but you got to get pretty close ... To maximize strength, you're probably better off not touching failure very often.

I think protein distribution matters, but I think it matters much, much less than total protein intake per day.

If you want a quick and dirty hack for knowing who to follow, try not to listen so much to exactly the information people say; but listen to how they say it.

Know what you know, but always question everything—even the things we feel most fundamentally are true, because that is the job of a good scientist.

Total protein intake is the most important thing per day, and then if you can distribute it relatively evenly, that's maybe the last 5-10%.

We have way too many people worrying about the minutiae who just don't even exercise on a consistent basis, or they don't sleep well on a consistent basis, or they don't manage their psychological stress.

I have been brutally consistent for 25 years. In 25 years, the longest I ever took off of resistance training was 7 days...

You can take any food, even organic food, and you can find a compound in it that if you fed it in a high dose, it would have weird effects. Right? And so the question is not, if you eat something, are there compounds in it it that maybe activate negative biochemical pathways. The question is, what is the overall outcome?

Science is perfect ... But it's done by humans—and humans are fallible, imperfect people with their own personal beliefs and biases. And that's why I look at consensus of data first.

I don't plant my flag real strong very often. So when you see me do it, I'm not saying I'm not fallible, but if you see me do it, you probably should pay attention, because I don't usually do that.

I don't make big shifts in my opinions based on single studies.

You have to be very careful with people who cite studies ... There's nothing more dangerous than somebody who's read a biochemistry textbook—because they're going to see pathway, biochemical pathway, there must be an outcome.

When you're reading scientific studies... just because there's a headline, in even a paper, just because the conclusion says something, that is the author's opinion. You need to check to see did they actually test what they're talking about, and are the tests that use valid?

The single biggest lever I've pulled to get me consistently training and pain-free was becoming more relaxed and less stressed out all the time, managing my psychological stress better.