Recently, the YouTuber and bodybuilder Jeff Nippard released a video where he ran an interesting experiment. He did two days of training, each with a different budget. On the first day, he would have only $10 to cover all of his training related costs. This included four meals, gym and equipment costs, app based food tracking subscription costs (fair warning, he take the opportunity to plug his own app!), and supplement costs. He ultimately comes out under budget, needing just under nine dollars to cover everything.
For the second day, he ups his budget slightly, to $10,000. (Okay, maybe more than slightly!) With that kind of budget, he has custom, healthy meals prepared by a world-record holding, $500 per hour personal chef, trains at an elite gym under the guidance of a $700 per hour personal trainer, and avails himself of high-end recovery treatments like sensory depravation float chambers and luxury spa sessions. Even with all this, he actually only manages to spend about $6,000 in the effort. (Only?) But that’s still an increase by a factor of about six hundred.
So what were the differences between the two training days, in terms of actual training quality and results? Not very much, it turns out.
For example, while having a personal chef saved Nippard the effort of preparing the food himself, and the meals were certainly much fancier and tastier, the food on the ultra high-budget day wasn’t actually any better in terms of macronutrients, health, or nutrition than what Nippard put together on his ultra low-budget day. And while the fancy training coach was able to help him dial in his technique on various exercises, it ultimately turned out to be very incremental over just applying the proverbial basics. Nippard doesn’t put specific numbers on it, but my sense based on his summary was that spending 600 times more on his training probably constituted a 10% improvement, at most.
Economics stresses the importance of thinking on the margin. What are some of the margins we can derive from this?
One of them is pretty encouraging. The marginal cost of a nutrient rich diet that’s both healthy and robust enough to support the demands of a bodybuilding lifestyle is actually very low. Spending very little money can get you a lot of bang for your buck regarding health and fitness. And above that minimal level, increasing your budget hundreds of times over makes only a very small additional difference. That is, you reach the point of diminishing marginal returns very quickly.
So, does that mean that it’s inherently a waste of money to go big in a case like this? If you can get 90% of the benefit for 1/600th of the cost, why would anyone ever go for the high-budget option? Isn’t that just a waste?
Not necessarily. It would be wasteful if the increased marginal cost exceeds the additional marginal benefit. And for most people, in most scenarios, an extra 10% performance isn’t anywhere close to crossing that threshold. But in some cases, it very well might be. If you’re an athlete or a competitive bodybuilder performing at an elite level, 10% better results is an enormous difference. At that echelon of competition, 10% may very well be the gap between the person who wins the competition and someone who didn’t even qualify to compete. In those cases, the benefit of that extra 10% can be worth paying a very high marginal cost.
One event I’ve participated in a few times is a 10k race called the Cooper River Bridge Run, in Charleston, South Carolina. When going, I’ve made an effort to try to prep for the run, to try to beat my time from the previous run. (Most recent result, for the 2021 race, was 41:25, better than any of my previous attempts. Hurray!) If someone showed me a massive and time-consuming training program that would improve my run time by 10%, it wouldn’t be worth it to me to take up. My goals about beating my previous times were about little more than flattering my personal vanity – and while I’m willing to pay some price to do that, the margin closes pretty quickly. But the person who comes first place in the run also wins a cash prize of $10,000. For a runner skilled enough to have a shot at that, it would absolutely be worth going through a complicated or demanding training program for a 10% improvement. Their marginal payoff is much, much higher. (Or maybe I just value vanity too little?)
The more general upshot – be careful before you think someone is “wasting” their time, effort, or money on a pursuit of theirs. It’s very easy to think that the effort they’re putting into their personal passion project “isn’t worth it,” but you can’t know that without knowing that it’s worth to them. It doesn’t have to be about winning major accolades in an athletic competition – people can derive all manner of major joys from things that might seem tiny and trivial from the outside. And that’s a beautiful thing.
