The 4-Hour Body: Hitting Like Babe Ruth and Holding Your Breath
Tim Ferriss is jogging through Times Square during a blizzard with an 80-pound boxing heavybag across his shoulders. He and his batting coach went to the wrong hotel. No taxis. So they walk.
But he doesn’t mind. For the first time in his life, he feels like Babe Ruth.
Chapter 35: The Architecture of Babe Ruth
There’s a guy named Jaime Cevallos. While other kids were going to prom and house parties, he was in his front yard hitting baseballs through a tire hung from a tree branch. Taking notes. Making adjustments. Taking more notes.
Now Major League players pay him for those notes.
What the Numbers Say
In baseball, “slugging percentage” measures how far you get per at-bat. More bases per plate appearance means better hitting. Babe Ruth held the all-time record from 1921 until Barry Bonds broke it in 2001.
Jaime’s best case: Ben Zobrist. Before working with Jaime - three home runs in 303 plate appearances, .259 slugging. After - 17 home runs in 309 appearances, .520 slugging. He won Rays team MVP in 2009 and made the All-Star team. Three home runs to 27 in the same number of at-bats. In the majors, that’s unheard of.
The Test
Jaime flew from Dallas to New York with a radar gun, video camera, and a pile of bats coated in pine tar. Goal: turn Tim into a home run hitter in one session.
They set up in the batting cages at Pier 40. Balls hit off a tee at 35.25 inches to remove pitch variability.
After 45 minutes of coaching:
- Before training: average ball speed off the bat was 57.3 mph
- After first round: 65.2 mph
- After second round: 70.1 mph
At a 45-degree launch angle, that’s the difference between 158 feet and 214 feet. A 35% increase in distance. Not bad for less than an hour.
The Three Key Positions
Jaime breaks the swing into three checkpoints.
The Cushion. The moment when the front heel lands, before the forward swing starts. You want about 25 degrees of torque between shoulders and hips. This is how batters “buy time” against off-speed pitches - maintaining that torque instead of opening up the front shoulder early.
The Slot. Back elbow drops to the player’s side, spine stays vertical. The arms defer to the more powerful legs and hips, turning the whole body into a whip. Zobrist’s before-and-after photos at this position tell the whole story.
Impact Position. The fingerprint of the swing. Two angles matter: E (upper arm to forearm - you want it small, around 80 degrees) and W (top wrist to bat - you want it large, near 180 degrees).
Jaime created a single number from these: CSR (Cevallos Swing Rating) = 3 x (180 - E) + W. Higher CSR means better hitting. When you look at historical CSR numbers, they line up almost perfectly with actual slugging percentages.
Why High CSR Works
Two reasons. First, a high-CSR swing is tighter. The bat stays close to the torso because the elbow stays in. You physically cannot reach pitches outside the strike zone. The constraint makes you better - like a boxer holding a wallet under his chin to keep it down.
Second, contact happens further back, closer to the catcher. More time to read the pitch before committing.
The One Drill
Hit a heavybag (impact bag) with the bat, pause at impact, check your position. Do this for 10 minutes. Then hit balls off a tee trying to copy the same movement.
That’s it. That’s what Tim did for 45 minutes. It works.
One more thing: when stepping forward, point the front toes at about 10 o’clock (for a right-handed batter). This opens the hips for more torque. And focus on driving the back hip forward by forcefully extending the front leg. Tim says this produced the biggest speed gains - and intense soreness the next day.
Chapter 36: How to Hold Your Breath Longer Than Houdini
David Blaine started magic at four. By 2002, he was standing unharnessed on top of an 83-foot-tall, 22-inch-wide column in Bryant Park for 35 hours until buildings started looking like animal heads. Then he jumped off into cardboard boxes.
He’d been buried alive for a week. Frozen in ice for 64 hours. But he wanted something bigger - the breath-holding world record.
He tried cheating first. Breathing tube down the throat under sedation. Failed. All his tricks failed. So he did the craziest thing possible: actually learned to hold his breath.
After training with Navy SEALs and free divers, he held the Guinness world record for oxygen-assisted static apnea: 17 minutes and 4.4 seconds.
Tim’s Training
Tim ran into David at the TEDMED medical conference and begged him for a lesson. Here’s the thing - Tim was born premature with a collapsed left lung. He couldn’t hold his breath for more than a minute.
David agreed. The training lasted 15 minutes.
Before: 40 seconds. After: 3 minutes and 33 seconds.
Out of about 12 people David taught that evening, all but one beat Harry Houdini’s lifelong record of 3 minutes 30 seconds. One woman passed five minutes. Google’s Chief Health Strategist hit 4:05.
The Method
Everything is done seated. All breathing goes through the mouth.
Three types of breathing:
- Deep breathing: Big inhale through the mouth, hold one second, then slow exhale for 10 seconds through almost-closed mouth. Tongue pressed against lower teeth. Should make a “tsssss” sound.
- Purging: Strong exhale like blowing a toy sailboat across a pool (puffed cheeks, Big Bad Wolf style), then a big fast inhale. Stay still - rocking wastes oxygen.
- Semi-purging: Somewhere between the two. More forceful than deep breathing, less than full purging.
The protocol:
- 1:30 deep breathing
- 1:15 purging
- Hold breath - target 1:30, no more
- 3 semi-purge recovery breaths
- 1:30 deep breathing
- 1:30 purging
- Hold breath - target 2:30, no more
- 3 semi-purge recovery breaths
- 2:00 deep breathing
- 1:45 purging
- Hold breath - as long as possible
- 3-10 hard semi-purge breaths to recover
That’s it. Two warm-up rounds with capped holds, then one all-out attempt.
Tips That Matter
David suggests going from A to Z in your head during the hold, visualizing friends whose names start with each letter. Use celebrities when you run out of friends. The distraction helps enormously.
Don’t check the time often. People who heard the time every 5 seconds held their breath shorter than those who heard it every 30. Have someone else watch the clock.
Don’t eat for 4-6 hours before trying. David purposefully loses 30+ pounds during serious training to improve his lung-to-body ratio.
And the big one: never practice this in water. Not in a pool, not in a bathtub, not even with just your face submerged. If you pass out, drowning in two inches of water kills you just as dead as the deep end. David himself has nearly died multiple times. This is a sitting-on-a-couch party trick, not a swimming exercise.
David’s personal record with this method (no supplemental oxygen): 7 minutes 47 seconds. His heart rate dropped below 20 bpm.
Side effects: tingling hands, loss of sensation in fingers, colors looking weird. Tim was shaking after 3:20. All apparently normal. Still - have someone watching you.
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This is part of my 4-Hour Body retelling series. New posts every Saturday.