I believe that a huge amount of real breakthroughs can be made by simply experimenting with one subject -- yourself. I have recorded everything I've felt, eaten & done since 1994. I quickly learned never to omit things from my journal, no matter how irrelevant they seemed. What seems irrelevant today is a key factor tomorrow. To be able to claim that a certain thing is irrelevant is to claim all-knowingness. I often change things up and juggle variables, often unconsciously. Good days seem to happen by accident. I often can't decode what happened for years. When I had my series of depth pb's in 2001, all I knew was that I could go deeper and deeper without running out of air, although it was 2 years before I understood what was happening.
Some of the things you can discover by this method may only work for you (which is useful in itself), but often you will discover things which work on others as well. By analyzing my journals I discovered the dramatic effect of food stuffs and phytochemicals such as garlic, potassium, thiocyanate, germanium, essential fatty acids, and so on. Later, I read in Mayol's book that garlic had been used by the polynesians for hundreds of years. Coincidence?
I had seen trends in my journals that after weeks of eating a diet high in cruciferous vegetables, I would always be cold, and have huge statics and dives, even a week after stopping the diet. I later discovered that uncooked cruciferous vegetables cause thiocyanate to be formed during digestion, inhibiting thyroid activity, and lowering your heat production & metabolic rate, basically making you temporarily hypothyroid, an effect which can last for weeks even after the thiocyanate is removed from the diet. My training partners experimented with this effect and confirmed my results, even though my 'experiment' was only done on myself.
Later, during my long hangs at 20m in 2002, I noticed very mysterious effects the day after eating sushi, and the same effect could be found the day after eating flax seed oil. The common ingredient is omega-3 (in flax) or EPA/DHA (in the salmon sashimi), where omega-3 will be metabolized into EPA/DHA. By loading distilled fish oil and/or flax oil, I was able to magnify the effect. Later, by searching on medline, I discovered that the omega-3 chain acids are vital for non-shivering thermogenesis and oxygen utilization. This discovery suddenly explained some long dives done by my buddy Tyler while on a high sushi/flax diet.
Several times, I tried to superhydrate with glycerol (like long distance athletes). After a few months, I realized that glycerol was having a very strange effect, having nothing to do with its superhydrating effect. It seemed to prevent me from shivering -- I still don't fully understand what it does, but many glycerol compounds such as triacylglycerols are involved in thermogenesis, and I have also learned that glycerol is often injected into organisms for cryogenic purposes. Glycerol's method of action remains a mystery.
When reading one of my thermogenesis books, I learned that the body's temperature sensors are primarily along the spinal cord. I theorized that if I put a heat pack along my spinal cord, my body would think that I was still warm, even though the rest of my body was freezing, resulting in a lowered temperature without thermogenesis (thus dramatically dropping O2 consumption). I tried this on my 20m hangs and it resulted in one pb after another--that is one case of a deliberate experiment which had positive effects. Some time later, I was unable to repeat the long hangs -- it was then that I realized I had forgotten to load omega-3 and use the heat pack along the spine -- after which I was able to repeat the long hangs.
By analyzing my journals, I discovered that I would perform good statics two days after a hard workout. I never pulled off a big one soon after or the day after a workout, or even the day after a dive. Also, when I hadn't exercised for a long time, good statics would be rare.
By September 2003, I had concluded that juggling of variables had such a huge effect that I decided that for the Sept-2003 CAFA regionals, I would do no training at all, and just juggle the variables. In the days leading up to the competition, while my opponents were training, I was reading past journals. I ended up with a pb in wet static and somehow managed to win both in static & constant! I couldn't help but chuckle during the competition wrap up, because I knew that most of the people in the competition had been training their butts off, and I hadn't done a wet static (or any static) for about half a year! Further, several of the competitors had pb's much bigger than mine. I would guess that their inconsistency was due to lack of logging.
So, let's just say that I believe a lot can be found by recording irrelevant things, and analyzing them later.
Eric Fattah
BC, Canada
