Minimum effective dose
25 comments
·February 2, 2025gopalv
monktastic1
Can you help me understand your comment? Being the best at one thing is very different from being good at everything, so it's unclear how that advice applies to your children.
Also, what does "do some" mean?
neom
Not OP but I read it as: It's ok to just do some. People stress about their abandoned side projects, their career progression, being the best, this world has become hyper competitive, hyper "do" - this wasn't and isn't the default for a lot of people and a lot of history, there is a lot of joy to be found in just "do some" - but it's a dying art.
kylecazar
I like the philosophy and employ it myself.
Regarding the gym, specifically lifting -- progressive overload ( thus muscle growth) can definitely be accomplished in a minimal amount of time. BUT, it requires a high to maximum amount of effort to be effective, so not sure if that counts.
Jcampuzano2
This could depend a bit on what your goals are with respect to minimal dose training.
If your goals are just longevity and health, you do not actually have to train very close to failure to reap most benefits of strength training, up to a point of course. Training even to mild discomfort is enough for strength gains and modest hypertrophy for beginners. So effort can be moderate up to a point.
Additionally a trained lifter who is just looking to maintain on minimal doses can do so with what research has shown is as little as a staggering 1/9th of the volume they normally use, and they would likely be accustomed to hard training.
If your goal is continuing progress it's sort of an optimization problem when it comes to minimum effective dose.
I think it still counts because it makes sense as with any task. You must make the tradeoff that while you are minimizing time at the task, you must increase the effort to match if you still want to see gains past a basic level.
wyre
It absolutely applies to lifting and progressive overload. A measure of progressive overload can be applied to amount of time spend lifting, also knows as time-under-tension, it can also apply inversely with shortened rest periods. Whether or not these methods align with your fitness goals, is a separate issue.
Effort, or what the fitness industry calls Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE), is another lever to pull with progressive overload, and is necessary in programming for all experience levels. Beginners start their programs using minimal weights, slowly increasing the weight each week as their skill improves and through that process their strength and muscles grow.
A more advanced lifter, will need a higher minimum effective dose due to what is needed to trigger adaptation, will manipulate RPE throughout their programming to manage fatigue accrued throughout the program.
A great personal trainer is someone that will help their clients find their own personal mimimum dose of training that aligns with their fitness goals.
johnneville
"240 minutes a month which is enough to finish 1-2 books"
this number stands out to me ! maybe i am slow reader but .5-1 seems more realistic
stevenwoo
Judging by length of audiobooks, four hours is the length of the novella long essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld adaptations all come in around 9-10 hours and those are short books that require my full attention due to the wordplay and setup for jokes sometimes being longish. One would have to double the speed and sacrifice comprehension to meet this goal. I had to listen to first hour of some Greg Egan book and the glossary about ten times before I grokked it.
aidenn0
I read light prose several times faster than an audio book; 60-100 pages in an hour for a typical paperback. That works out to 240-400 pages for the author's 240 minutes.
I read Going Postal by Pratchett in under 4 hours.
[edit]
Also, consumers of audiobooks may turn the speed up. My wife listens at 1.25-1.5x speed, depending on the narrator's pace.
wholinator2
How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed? Or is it like touch typing where you're hitting just close enough to get meaning but not enough to go deep?
Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?
kristianp
That raises the question: how much faster can we read without speaking, than read aloud? I'm guessing its a number less than 2 times.
alwa
Oh man. I’d go higher. Especially compared to vocalizing at “storytelling pace.”
I remember a while back being surprised to learn that there are readers who process language phonographically as opposed to orthographically, even when silent-reading. That is, they might read in their minds at the same pace that they speak, or “subvocalize”—reading aloud in everything except for producing the sounds. It was a dinner-party-grade conversation, not an academic-grade one, but once somebody talked to me about that distinction I’d notice people mouthing along to what they were reading—and it made sense why that was slower.
I’m not up on the details, but I remember an estimate in the 150-200wpm range for reading out loud. A little north of that for silent reading with subvocalization, and comfortably in the 400-600wpm range for skilled silent readers in an orthographic mode. And then the whole “speed reading” crowd clocking in faster, but at significant cost to comprehension. The general idea being that skilled orthographic readers can “chunk” entire words and phrases into larger visual units that they can parse all at once.
Looking for references now this is the best I can find:
https://theamericanscholar.org/reading-fast-and-slow/
But I wonder where the speed reading conversation intersects with this notion out of Caltech that we “live at 10 bits per second”:
soperj
I can definitely read 4 times faster in my head than out loud. I've read books to my kid out loud that take like 30 minutes per chapter, and i doubt it would take more than an hour to read the whole book. I read on the faster side though, and don't have an internal monologue.
stevenwoo
It depends upon the material for me. Sometimes with technical or historical books that are essentially reciting data points then conclusions I can read much faster than 2x because if one is paying attention one kind of knows where the writer(s) are going - though I might repeat or pause to write notes or do online research sometimes to memorize and understand new terminology, but for fiction I have to be in a very specific mindset to imagine all the things going on appropriately with movement and emotion and pondering character motivation and the setting, sometimes I just pause and think about what is being described in my minds eye before moving forward in the text.
aidenn0
My wife asked me this question, since I'm a considerably faster reader than her. We discovered that (if I try reading aloud as fast as possible) I can read aloud faster than she can read without speaking, though my tongue does occasionally trip over words at that speed. I read in my head faster yet.
ta2112
For me it's 1:1. I read aloud in my head at the same pace that I speak. It seems slow, but little by little I get through what I need. Also, I don't know how to do it another way. So it goes.
wccrawford
It depends on the books. I read a lot of fiction, and it's been a long time since I read a book that could be read in 2 hours.
But I've had a few lately that came close.
soupfordummies
Yeah a minute a page is a decent equivalence depending on the book and reading speed. 240 pages is still a rather short book. A book a month ain't bad though!
dgfitz
8 minutes a day is very specific and I struggle with that, maybe it’s an average? Do they have the exact same schedule all days of the week?
How big are the books? Are they “junk food” books or dense? All subject matter or strictly sci-fi or whatever?
I’m a big reader. Reading for 8 minutes at a time would either be a whole chapter or half a page depending on the book.
sedivy94
“Minimum effective dose” is a concept I picked up from years of amateur bodybuilding. Seeing that same context in the beginning of the article was a treat! Minimum effective dose has been a pretty powerful concept for me over the years and has some overlap with “The 80/20 Rule”. It’s allowed my to make small investments in goals and snuff out insecurities that arise, such as the feeling of not trying hard enough.
keyle
It 100% works. Totally agree with you.
robocat
> even if I can only read 5 minutes before bed, I do it anyway
I would worry about operant conditioning myself to associate reading with sleep.
One friend put on movies to help them go to sleep. Later she struggled to watch movies without falling asleep.
I overthink this concept, so I'm overly cautious about what activities I mix together because I fear the risk of training strange subconscious responses in myself.
> Nobody says we have to be good at everything we do
This is advice I have to push on my kids constantly, because they are obsessed with finding that one thing they are better than everyone else in the world.
"Do some" is not advice I got as a kid, but my mom eventually figured it out and told me that when was in my mid 20s or something.
Her words (from Malayalam) are best translated as "For whom a little is not enough, nothing is ever enough".
I think that's true for everything from money to self-worth. Enough is too hard to have.