I ordered six new supplements that I want to try for health and gym performance. These are creatine, l-glutamine, zinc, omega-3, magnesium and ashwagandha. I want to know which of these are effective at improving my health and gym performance.

Evaluating By Iteratively Adding

Ideally when changing protocols (including food, workouts, sleep, etc.) to improve health you would add or remove one thing at a time. This to be able to evaluate the results in isolation. This may require 1-2 weeks of evaluation time.

Doing this you can learn more about how each supplement (or other protocol change) impacts your life. The downside being that it takes quites a long time. It doesn’t scale very well if there are many things that you want to test.

Let’s assume we use the methodology mentioned above and two weeks of evaluation time each. Then it would take me 12 weeks to try all of the 6 different supplements. And this is just a fraction of all the changes I want to try.

Evaluating By Batch Adding And Iteratively Subtracting

Another approach would be to start with all 6 at the same time. Then remove one of them every two weeks and evaluate the difference. If the difference of removing it is a change for the better or neutral, I should be able to safely remove the supplement. If the change on the other hand is negative when I remove the supplement, I can add it back and keep it while moving on to the next supplement to evaluate.

Doing it this way I can reach the expected better health benefits sooner. But I’ll also eventually be able to rule out any negative or non-existent effects.

The reason I want to rule out these are monetary and environmental in the zero effects case. In the negative effects case it’s health related.

Data Collection

Ideally I’d have a way to measure this beyond my subjective experience. This would make the evaluation more reliable and consistent. But for now I’ll rely on my subjective experience and journalling. Over time I’ll look into additional tools of measurements and data collection. Options include measuring sleep quality, doing blood tests, finding lean mass % and more.

How do you measure and evaluate your protocol changes?