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- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
where we discuss science
and science-based tools
for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of
neurobiology and ophthalmology
at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today my guest is Dr. Andy Galpin.
Dr. Galpin is a full and tenured professor
in the department of kinesiology
at California State
University in Fullerton.
He is also a world expert
in all things exercise
science and kinesiology.
Today, you are going to
hear what is essentially
a masterclass in how to build fitness,
no matter what level of
fitness you happen to have.
He talks about how to build endurance,
and the multiple types of endurance.
He talks about how to build
strength and hypertrophy,
which is the growth of muscle fibers.
So if you're seeking to get stronger,
or build bigger muscles,
or build endurance,
or all of those things, today
you're going to learn how.
You're also going to learn
how to build flexibility,
how to hydrate properly for exercise.
And we'll also talk about
nutrition and supplementation.
What makes Dr. Galpin so unique
is his ability to span all
levels of exercise science.
He has the ability to clearly communicate
the sets and repetition schemes
that one would want to follow,
for instance, to build more strength
or to build larger muscles.
He also clearly describes
exactly how to train
if you want to build more endurance,
or enhance cardiovascular function.
What's highly unique about Dr. Galpin
and the information he teaches,
and the way he communicates
that information,
is that he can take
specific recommendations
of how recreational exercisers,
or even professional
athletes ought to train
for their specific goals,
and link that to specific mechanisms.
That is the specific
changes that need to occur
in the nervous system
and in muscle fibers,
and indeed right down to the
genetics of individual cells
in your brain and body,
in order for those exercise
adaptations to occur.
It's truly rare to find
somebody that can span
so many different levels of analyses,
and who is able to communicate
all those levels of understanding
in such a clear and actionable way.
Indeed, Dr. Galpin is one
of just a handful of people
to which I and many others look
when they want to make sure
that the information that
they're getting about exercise
is gleaned from quality
peer-reviewed studies,
hands-on experience
with a wide variety of research subjects,
meaning everyday people
all the way up to professional athletes
in a wide variety of sports.
So it's no surprise that he's not only
one of the most knowledgeable,
but also the most trusted
voices in exercise science.
Dr. Galpin is also an avid communicator
of zero cost to consumer
information about exercise science.
You can find him on
Instagram at Dr. Andy Galpin,
and also on Twitter at Dr. Andy Galpin.
Both places he provides
terrific information
about recent studies,
both from his laboratory
and from other laboratories,
more in depth protocols of the sort
that you'll hear about today.
So if you're not already
following him, be sure to do so.
He provides only the best information.
He's extremely nuanced
and precise and clear
in delivering that information.
I'm certain that by the end
of today's conversation,
you'll come away with a
tremendous amount of new knowledge
that you can devote to
your exercise pursuits.
I'm pleased to announce
that I'm hosting two live events this May.
The first live event will be
hosted in Seattle, Washington
on May 17th.
The second live event will
be hosted in Portland, Oregon
on May 18th.
Both are part of a lecture series entitled
"The Brain Body Contract",
during which I will discuss
science and science-based tools
for mental health, physical
health, and performance.
I should point out that
while some of the material I'll cover
will overlap with information covered here
on the "Huberman Lab Podcast",
and on various social media posts,
most of the information I will
cover is going to be distinct
from information covered on
the podcast or elsewhere.
So once again, it's Seattle on May 17th,
Portland on May 18th.
You can access tickets by
going to hubermanlab.com/tour.
And I hope to see you there.
Before we begin, I'd like to
emphasize that this podcast
is separate from my teaching
and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of
my desire and effort
to bring zero cost to consumer information
about science and science-related tools
to the general public.
In keeping with that theme,
I'd like to thank the
sponsors of today's podcast.
Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens.
Athletic Greens is an all-in-one
vitamin mineral probiotic drink.
I've been taking Athletic
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so I'm delighted that they're
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The reason I started
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and the reason I still
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It makes up for any
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In addition, it has probiotics
which are vital for microbiome health.
I've done a couple of episodes now
on the so-called gut microbiome
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the microbiome interacts
with your immune system, with
your brain, to regulate mood,
and essentially with
every biological system
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your brain and body.
With Athletic Greens, I
get the vitamins I need,
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If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,
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They'll give you five free travel packs,
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There are a ton of data now showing that
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Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine,
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Today's episode is also
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Now, to be honest, I am not
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And now for my discussion
with Dr. Andy Galpin.
Welcome Dr. Professor Andy Galpin.
It's been a long time coming.
We have friends in common,
but this is actually the
first time we've sat down
face-to-face.
- Yeah, I'm very excited.
- Yeah, there are only a handful,
meaning about three or four people,
who I trust enough in the
exercise physiology space,
that when they speak, I not only listen,
but I modify my protocols,
and you are among those
three or four people.
So first of all, a debt
of gratitude, thank you.
You've greatly shaped
the protocols that I use.
And I know there's far more
for me and for others to learn.
So you're a professor,
you teach in university,
and you have a tremendous
range of levels of exploration.
Muscle biopsy, literally
images down the microscope,
all the way to training
professional athletes
and everything in between.
So you are truly an N-of-1.
And just to start us off,
I would love to have you share with us
what you think most everybody,
or even everybody should know,
about principles of strength training,
principles of endurance
training, and principles of,
let's call it hypertrophy power
and the other sort of
categories of training.
And this could be very top contour.
But what do you think everybody
on planet Earth should know
about these categories of
personal and athletic development?
- Well, that's a great first question.
Holy cow!
I think I'll start it this way.
I tend to think about,
there's about nine different adaptations
you can get from exercise.
Fat loss is not one of those.
It is a byproduct.
But that's not really what I'm getting at.
And so we can kind of
categorize everything like that.
And what we're going
to, we can talk about,
or what are the concepts
that you need to hit
within each one.
And then you could have
infinite discussion
of the different methodologies, right?
And so that first thing to hit is
the concepts are actually fairly few,
but the methods are many, right?
People have said that in
iterations throughout time.
So if you walk from the very beginning,
the first one to think about
is what we'll just call skill.
So this is improving anything
from say a golf swing,
to a squatting technique, to running.
And this is just simply
moving mechanically,
how you want your body to move.
I'm just going to
globally call that skill.
From there, we're going to get into speed.
So this is moving as fast as possible.
The next one is power, and
power is a function of speed,
but it is also a function of the next one,
which is strength.
So if you actually
multiply strength by speed,
you get power.
And the reason I'm making this
distinction by the way is,
some of these are very close,
and I'm going in a specific
order on purpose here.
For example, power is, like I just said,
it's a function of speed and strength.
So if you improve speed, you've
also likely improved power.
But not necessarily, right,
'cause it could've come from
the force direction either.
So there's carryover,
so like a lot of things that you would do
for the development of strength and power,
they are somewhat similar,
but then there's differences, right?
So things that you would
do correctly for power
would really not develop much
strength, and vice versa.
So we can get into all
these details later.
Once you get past strength,
and the next one kind of
down the list is hypertrophy,
this is muscle size, right?
Growing muscle mass is
one way to think about it.
After hypertrophy, you get
into these categories of,
the next one is,
these are all globally
endurance-based issues.
And the very first one is
called muscular endurance.
So this is your ability to do
how many pushups can you do
in one minute?
You know, things like that.
Past muscular endurance,
you're now into more of an energetic
or even cardiovascular fatigue.
So you've left the local muscle,
and you're now into the
entire physiological system,
and its ability to
produce and sustain work.
And we can get into a
bunch of differentiations
with an endurance,
but just to keep it
really simple right now,
the very first one, think about this as,
I call this anaerobic power, right?
So this is your ability
to produce a lot of work
for say 30 seconds to maybe one minute,
kind of two minutes like that.
The next one down then
is more closely aligned
to what we'll call your VO2 max.
So this is your ability to
kind of do the same thing,
but more of a time domain
of say three to 12 minutes.
So this is going to be
a maximum heart rate,
but it's going to be well
past just max heart rate.
Then after that we have what I
call long duration endurance.
So this is your ability to sustain work.
The time domain doesn't matter in terms of
how fast you're going.
It's how long can you sustain work?
This is 30 plus minutes of no break.
Like that.
So as just an high level overview,
those are the different
things you can target.
And again, some of those crossover,
and some are actually
a little bit contrarian
to the other ones.
So pushing towards one
is maybe going to
sacrifice something else.
So as an overall start, that's
really what we're looking at.
Within all those though, they
do have similar concepts,
in terms of there is a handful
of things you have got to do
to make all of those things work.
And we could talk about as
many of those as you want,
but one of them is functionally
called progressive overload.
So whichever one you're
trying to improve at,
if you want to continue to improve,
you have to have some method of overload.
And as you well know, and
you've talked about a lot,
adaptation, physiologically,
happens as a byproduct of stress.
So you have to push a system.
So if you continue to do
say the exact same workout
over time, you better not
expect much improvement.
You can keep maintenance,
but you're not going to be
adding additional stress.
So in general, you have
to have some sort of
progressive overload,
and we can talk in detail
about what that means for each category.
But this could come from
adding more weights.
This could come from
adding more repetitions.
It could come from doing
it more often in the week.
It could come from adding
complexity to the movement.
So going from say a
partial range of motion
to a full range of motion,
or adding other variables.
So there's a lot of
different ways to progress.
But you have to have some
sort of movement forward.
So if you have this kind of routine
where you've built Monday, Wednesday,
and Saturday or something, and
you just do that infinitely,
you're not going to get very far.
So that's, I guess the
most high level overview
of all the things people can go after,
and then we can go from
whatever direction you want from there.
- Well I'd love to do the
deep dive on each one of these
- Yeah man.
- for several hours.
But, and I imagine that
over time, we probably will.
I'd love to chat about a couple of these
in a bit more depth.
So in terms of defining
what the progressive
overload variables are,
- Yeah.
- for these
different categories,
maybe we could hit the two
most common combinations
of these nine things.
The first one being
strength and hypertrophy.
- Yeah.
- And maybe we could
lump power in there.
Maybe not.
You're the exercise
physiologist.
- Yes and no, yeah.
- But strength and hypertrophy,
which at least bears some relationship.
And then maybe separately we could explore
sustained work endurance.
This 30 minutes or longer continuously,
'cause I think many people
train in that regime.
And probably something like
VO2 max anaerobic as well,
because I know that a number
of people now incorporate
so-called HIIT or high
intensity interval training,
I think with the hopes of
either shortening their workout.
- Yeah.
- And or,
gaining some additional
cardiovascular benefit.
So if we could start with
strength and hypertrophy,
I know many people want to be stronger.
They want to grow larger muscles,
or at least maintain what they have.
So what are the progressive
overload principles
that are most effective over time
for strength and hypertrophy?
- Yeah, okay.
So I'll actually go a little step back.
With every one of those
categories I talked about,
you have what we call
your modifiable variables.
So this is a very short list
of all the things you can modify,
the different variables
within your workout
that can be modified, that
will change the outcome.
A fancy way of saying, if
you do this differently,
then you're going to
get a different result.
So modifiable variables.
The very first one of
those is called choice.
So this is the exercise
choice that you select.
Now one of, I'm going
to go double back here,
so I'm kind of doing a
little bit of inception.
So follow me here as I'm going up a layer
to come down a couple layers.
I have these fundamental laws
of strength and conditioning
that, they're kind of like
a little bit of a joke.
But progressive overload's
one of those laws.
Another one of those laws
is your exercises themselves
do not determine adaptations.
So here's what I mean.
If you're like I want to get stronger,
you can't select an exercise.
That doesn't determine you getting strong.
If you don't do the exercise correctly,
and I'm not even referring
to the technique.
That of course matters.
But if you don't execute
it in the right fashion,
then you're not going
to get that adaptation.
So if you choose I want to get stronger,
I'm going to do a bench press.
Well, if you do the wrong set range,
the wrong repetition
range, the wrong speed,
you won't get strength, you
maybe get muscular endurance,
and very little strength adaptation.
So the exercise selection
itself is important,
but it does not determine
the outcome adaptation.
So the very first thing
that you need to think about
if you're like I want to
get stronger or add muscle,
is not the exercise choice, right?
It is the application of the exercise.
What are the sets, what are the reps,
what are the rest ranges
that you're using?
That's going to be your
primary determinant.
Now some exercises are certainly better
for some adaptations.
For example, a deadlift is
probably not a great exercise
to do for long duration endurance.
Like you could theoretically do
30 straight minutes of dead-lifting,
but it's probably not
our best choice, right?
It's probably a pretty good choice
for strength development, right,
'cause you're going to do a
low repetition, high set range.
You could theoretically
do bicep curls for power,
but probably not your best choice, right?
Single joint isolation
movement is not the best
for developing power.
If you've ever done a bicep curl
as fast as you possibly can,
like that's not going to go well.
So in theory, any exercise
can produce any adaptation,
given the execution is performed properly.
So now that we've understood
that a little bit,
the exercise itself does not
determine the adaptation.
Coming within each one
of these categories,
exercise choice is an important variable
because it does lend you to things like
what movement pattern you're in.
So in other words, if
you want to get stronger
and you're thinking, okay,
what exercise do I do,
you need to think a little bit about
what muscle groups do I want to use,
and that's going to be leading
you towards the exercise choice.
For example, I want to use my quads more.
Okay, fine.
Maybe you're going to
choose more of a front squat
type of variation, a goblet squat,
so the bar, the load is in front of you.
If you want to emphasize
maybe more of your hamstrings and glutes,
you're going to maybe put
a barbell on your back
or do a different one.
So the exercise choice is
important to the prescription
because it's going to determine
a lot of your success.
Okay, another kind of simpler
way to think about this.
If you're a beginner, or
moderate to intermediate,
or maybe you don't have a coach,
you probably want to hedge
towards an exercise selection
that is a little bit easier technically.
So you maybe don't want to
do a barbell back squat.
It's actually a pretty
complicated movement.
Maybe you want to do a
little bit more of, again,
a goblet squat, or even use
some machines, or a split squat,
something that's a little bit simpler
because you don't have a coach,
you're not a professional athlete.
The likelihood of success is higher,
and the risk is now gone lower.
So the very first variable
within all of these
is the exercise choice.
The second one is the
intensity, and that refers to,
in this context, not perceived effort,
like, wow, that was a
really intense workout.
It is quite literally either a percentage
of your one rep at max,
or a percentage of your
maximum heart rate or VO2 max.
So for the strength-based things,
you want to think about
what's the percentage
of the maximum weight
I could lift one time,
and that's what we're
going to call one rep max.
Or it's a percentage of
my heart rate, right?
So if I tell you to get on a bike
and I want you to do intervals,
and I want you to get 75%,
I'm typically referring to
75% of your max heart rate,
or VO2 max, or something like that.
If I tell you to do squats at 75%,
that means 75% of the
maximum amount of weight
you could lift one time, or close.
- In terms of determining one rep max,
I confess I've never actually
taken the one rep max
for any exercise.
But I have some internal sense
of what that might be or
what range it might be.
Is it necessary for people to assess
their one repetition maximum,
before going into these sorts of programs?
- No, not at all.
I think a more intuitive way
is to take a repetition range.
Well, you can do this a
couple of different ways.
So there are equations you can run,
and you can just Google these anywhere,
and these are called conversion charts.
And so it says okay, if I did
75 pounds on my bench press
and I did it eight times,
you can just run an estimate to say, okay,
you're probably going to be able to bench
about 95 pounds for one
rep max or something.
So that's a very easy conversion chart.
So just pick a load that
you feel comfortable with,
but it's kind of heavy
but not like crazy heavy,
and do as many repetitions as you can
with a really good technique.
And then look what that number would be.
So conversion charts.
- Probably safer than doing it
one repetition maximum.
- For the general public who has, again,
no coaching, it's safer.
For a professional athlete,
it's not any safer, but,
or not even a professional athlete,
but a trained person with a coach.
But for most people, yeah,
that's a good way to go about it.
You can also just kind of do it with feel,
in the sense that say you want to do
a set of five repetitions,
and you do the load,
and you think I could've
done one or two more.
And then you kind of have an idea of
what that number's going to be.
If you think, man, that
last one I had to kind of
really, really, really get after it,
then maybe just call
that that number, right?
So you don't have to get overly concerned.
In fact, when we start getting
into these number ranges,
you're going to see
that they're all ranges.
We're not going to give a specific 95%,
for one of these exact reasons.
It's not that precise for most of 'em.
In fact, some of 'em like hypertrophy
have enormous ranges that
you like almost can't miss.
So the intensity in that case
doesn't even matter for the most part,
because that's not the
primary determinant.
Some of these you're going to
see intensity as a determinant,
and some of these you're
going to see volume
is the true determinant.
So intensity though is that second one,
choice was the very first
one, manipulable variable.
Intensity was the second one.
The third one is what we call volume.
And so this is just how many reps
and how many sets are you doing, right?
So if you're going to do three sets of 10,
that volume would be 30, right?
Five sets of five, that volume is 25.
It's just a simple equation.
How much work are you totally doing?
The next one past that
is called rest intervals.
So this is the amount
of time you're taking
in between typically a set.
Then from there, you have progression,
which is what we started to talk about,
this progressive overload,
are you increasing by weight, or reps,
or rest intervals, or
complexity, or whatever.
So all of those things can be changed
as a method of progression.
And so maybe you want to go progressing
from a single joint exercise,
like a leg extension on a machine,
and you want to progress
by moving to a whole body
movement like a squat.
That in of itself,
you don't have to change the
load, or the reps, or the rest.
That is a representation
of progressive overload.
And it's probably a pretty
good place to start,
because number one,
especially for beginners,
you want to make sure that the
movement pattern is correct.
Don't worry about intensity.
Don't worry about rep ranges
or any of these things.
You need to learn to move correctly,
and you need to give your
body some time to develop
some tissue tolerance.
So that you're not getting overtly sore.
In general, soreness is a terrible proxy
for exercise quality.
It's a really bad way to estimate
whether it was a good or a bad workout,
especially for people in that
beginner to middle to moderate.
In fact, even for our
professional athletes,
we do not use soreness as
a metric of a good workout.
It's a really bad idea
for a bunch of reasons.
On the same token,
because stress is required for adaptation,
you don't want to leave
the gym and feel like
I didn't really do much.
There has to be there.
So if you think about soreness
on a scale of one to 10,
you probably want to
spend most of your time
in like the three.
- You mean post-exercise?
- Yeah.
- In between workouts.
- [Andy] Totally.
- And I know we'll talk about
recovery extensively later,
but if one body part or
set of body parts is sore,
is that an indication that one
should stay out of training?
I would imagine the answer is no.
- Right.
- In most cases.
And secondarily to that, if
a particular muscle is sore,
does that mean that muscle is
not ready to be trained again?
- Yeah, the answer to both
those is the same, which is no.
Right?
You can certainly train a sore muscle.
You need to, I guess,
have a little bit of feel on that, right?
So if you're sore of like, okay,
and you're moving around a
little bit and you're like, man,
this is a little bit sore, you can train.
If you're like, I can't sit
on the couch without crying
because my glutes are so sore,
like we probably don't
need to train again, right.
- Does whimpering count as crying?
- Yeah, in that particular case I'd say
you've actually gone to
a place of detriment,
because now you're going to
have to skip a training session.
And now you're behind,
so your actual total
volume say across the month
is actually going to be lower
because you went way too
hard in those workouts,
had to take too many days off in between.
You're going to see that you're
going to cover less distance
over the course of a month,
or six month, or even a year.
So you want to walk a pretty fine line,
and for most people I would
say hedge a little bit
on the side of less sore than more so.
Because frequency is very, very important
for almost all these adaptations.
- Training frequency.
- Which is the last
modifiable variable, right?
Frequency.
Which is how many times per
week are you doing that thing?
So those are, kind of are global things
that we can play with.
So when I'm trying to manipulate,
and you can get strength
versus hypertrophy,
or, you know, I want like
a little bit of both,
all those variables are the things
that are going through my mind.
Which one do I need to
move in which direction,
so that I can get this outcome
and not this outcome over here?
For example, some folks
might want to get stronger,
but not put muscle mass on.
Some folks just kind of want both.
And that's a lot of the general public.
I want to get a little stronger
and a little bit more muscle.
Great.
But there are instances where people,
for performance reasons or for
purely personal preference,
like I don't want to get
any more muscle, great,
but I want to get stronger.
Awesome.
If you manipulate those
variables correctly,
you can get exactly that.
Very little development of muscle size,
and a lot of development in strength.
And this is why we continue to
break world records in sports
like power lifting and weightlifting,
that have weight classes.
So there's a top number that we can hit
in terms of body size,
but yet we continue to
get stronger and faster.
So this is very possible,
if you understand how to
manipulate all those variables.
So that being said, we can start off with,
you wanted to go strength and-
- Yeah strength, and I love
that you mention the fact that
it is possible to increase strength
without increasing muscle size,
at least not dramatically,
because think it's not
just weight class athletes.
I know a lot of people
who, for aesthetic reasons,
they'd like to be stronger,
they're hearing that having strong bones
and strong muscles and tendons,
it's great for longevity
and for avoiding injury,
and so many other features of life.
And yet they don't want to fill out
progressively larger and
larger sizes of clothing.
- And we can go harder to
the mechanisms on that piece
if you want, or we can save
that and come back to it.
- Sure.
What I'd love to, both,
what I'd love to know was
if we could define some of
these modifiable variables,
- Yeah.
- in the context of strength.
So let's say I-
- Oh okay, yes.
- was somebody who,
I come to you and I say,
and let's just say for
sake of balance here,
'cause she actually does
do some weight training.
I bring my sister in,
and I say, me and my sister
both want to get stronger.
What modifiable variables should,
how should we modify the variables?
- Love it, all right, great.
I'm going to do inception
on you one more time.
So one of my other laws, this
one will be fast, I promise,
of strength and
conditioning, is in general,
the default is all joints
through all range of motion.
So this is important
because it's going to answer
your very first question
on this strength category.
So in general, the ankle should go through
the full range of motion in the ankle.
The knee should go through
the full range of motion
in the knee.
The hip, the elbow, et
cetera, et cetera, right?
- Across the workout,
not in a single movement.
- Well, right.
- I would hope.
Unless there's an amazing
exercise I haven't heard about.
- Well there are some exercises
that we're going to call
more full body.
Think about a full snatch.
Like you're going to take
a lot of your muscles,
a lot of your joints through
a lot of the range of motions.
Other ones like in isolation,
we call these single joint exercises.
So imagine a bicep curl.
You have one joint in
that particular case,
the elbow moving.
The shoulder and everything
else is pretty much stable.
And this is how we'll differentiate
multi-joint from single joint movements.
But yeah, so across,
I would even say it doesn't
even have to be the day,
but maybe throughout the week,
try to get every joint
through full range of motion.
Now, a couple of quick caveats to that.
I am not advocating using
full range of motion,
and allowing really
bad exercise technique.
So when I say full range of
motion, that's the default.
That doesn't mean every
single person can do that
for every single exercise.
It means that's where we
should be striving to,
and that's our starting point.
You're going to see a lot less injury
and a lot more productivity
out of your training sessions.
In fact, the science is
fairly clear on this one.
Strength development
as well as hypertrophy
is generally enhanced
with a larger range of motion of training.
And the mechanisms are like
somewhat understood on that.
So that being said,
if you have to get into say a bad position
with your say lower back,
the spine is a very good one.
In general, the spine should stay,
it's very neutral is what we call it.
So no flexion, no extension,
especially in the lumbar region.
So if you're doing a, say a deadlift,
and in order to take your knee through
a full range of motion or deadlift,
you have to compromise your back position,
that's no [speaking in foreign language].
So, caveats there aside, don't kill me,
like in good positions
always.
- And don't kill yourselves.
- Yes.
- More importantly.
- So why that matters is if
we walk through strength,
the very first thing
I'm going to go through
is the exercise selection.
So let's choose an
exercise which ideally has
a full range of motion or close to it,
that doesn't induce injury for you,
that you can still maintain
good neck and low back
and position and everything else.
You feel comfortable with,
so you can feel strong
but you don't feel like, oh my gosh,
if you've never snatched before,
having you do a snatch
for a maximum, even 75%,
like it's a terrible idea.
You're not going to feel confident,
it's going to be a train wreck.
I would rather put you
on a machine bench press,
so you can go I feel
stable, I feel safe here,
and I could just express my strength.
So exercise choice in
general, full range of motion,
and you want to kind of balance
between the movement areas.
So this is an upper body press,
so this is pushing away from you.
Bench press, things like that.
Upper body pull, pulling
an implement towards you.
Bent row, pull up.
The pressing should be horizontal.
So perpendicular to your
body, as well as vertical.
So this is lifting a weight
over top of your head,
lifting a weight away from you.
The pull version is
pulling horizontally to you
and pulling vertically down.
Pull up, things like that.
From the lower body, we
typically call these hinges.
It's sort of a funny muscle thing
that no one's going to laugh at,
but like maybe me and you here,
is we'll categorize muscles
as, or movements, exercises,
as pushes and pulls, right?
So like a squat tends to be a push,
'cause you're pushing away the ground.
A deadlift is a pull,
'cause you're pulling
the implement up to you.
But in reality, every single
exercise is only ever a pull,
'cause muscle doesn't push things away,
muscle can only contract
and pull on itself.
And so again, super nerdy thing that like
most people are like, yeah,
and everyone's like, that's so dumb.
- No, but I think it's
a really important point
because it also speaks to something
I think we'll get into later,
which is that, you know,
posterior chain, anterior chain.
- [Andy] Totally.
- And if that's mysterious to people,
it'll become clear before long.
Posterior chain, anterior chain,
makes a lot of sense to me
because of the way it's grounded
in the firing of motor neurons,
which is ultimately what controls muscle.
So it's also I think-
- You and your nerves
all the time.
- Exactly, so it also depends
on the lens through which one
looks at life and exercise.
Of course my lens is
primarily neuroscience.
But I realized that the
importance, I like this idea
of pushing perpendicular
the body overhead,
pulling both toward the
body and from overhead.
That just makes really
good, intuitive sense,
especially since a lot of people
are just listening to this
and not watching it.
So in your minds, folks, you
can think about pushing away
like a punch or overhead, like
lifting something overhead,
and then pulling toward your midline
or towards your body rather,
and then pulling yourself up
like a pull up in PE class,
for those of.
- Yeah.
- That experienced-
- So the lower body's
the same thing, right?
It's some sort of pushing away
like a squat, or a
split squat, or a lunge,
or something like that.
And then some sort of, again,
what we'll call pull or hinge.
So a deadlift or Romanian
deadlift, or a hamstring curl,
or something where you're
contracting and pulling the thing.
And you could split these into
like a thousand different categories.
If you're really in that field,
you're going to want to
add a bunch of other ones.
But that's just like a rough conception,
so if you're going to do a single workout,
you could choose four exercises,
and you could choose one of each.
One press, upper body
press, one upper body pull,
one lower body hinge,
one lower body press.
And then that would be like
a decently well-rounded exercise.
That's your exercise selection.
And if you're taking those
through a full range of motion,
you're at a pretty good spot.
As close as you can.
The next one is intensity.
So if you want to develop strength,
this comes back to one
of my favorite scientists
of all time who happens to
be a nerve guy actually.
And generally, I like to shit on nerves
as much as I possibly can,
'cause I'm a muscle guy.
But I have to give Henneman
some credit here, right.
And I know you know who that is.
- Henneman size principle.
- Yeah, of course, right?
So this is a series of
papers, I think in the,
I think it was in nature.
- At least some of them, yeah.
- Yeah, in 1954, '56, or like something.
You can fact check me, I'm sure you will.
But he basically outlined
this idea that, okay,
there's a certain
recruitment threshold needed
for neurons to fire.
And we have muscle
fibers in what we'll call
fast twitch muscle fibers and
slow twitch muscle fibers.
And in general,
you're going to activate
the slow twitch ones first
because they tend to be associated with
low threshold motor neurons.
It's not exactly that way,
but it's close enough, right?
Well, the only way that you activate
some of these higher threshold neurons
is to demand the muscle
to produce more force,
and it's fairly specific to force, right?
It's not something you can do
over an endurance thing, right,
unless it gets really
extreme and fatigue happens.
So in general, the only way to use
these big chunks of your muscle,
which are incredibly important
for aging by the way,
one of the major problems we
have with aging developing
or development of aging-related
issues with muscle,
is the fact that we lose fast
twitch fibers preferentially.
And then we have major problems
as we go down the line,
because we've lost a big
chunk of our strength in size.
So you want to make sure these
fibers stay alive and intact.
Okay, so if that being said,
the only way to develop strength
is then to challenge the muscle
to produce more total force.
If you are fairly untrained or new,
I guess I should have stated this
all at the beginning as well,
one more inception then I'll stop.
When it comes to this level of detail
of exercise prescription,
a fairly untrained person
is going to respond
basically the same to
every single thing you do.
In fact, we've done this
in the lab many times,
we've done training
studies doing things like
30 minutes of cycling,
and seen huge increases in
muscle strength and size,
which is not a prescription
for most people
to increase size, but people
that are really untrained,
if you did plyometrics
or strength training
or endurance running,
they all just get better at everything.
So that caveat kind of aside,
if you want to be more
intentional and more specific
to the goal of strength, you
need to produce more force.
Specificity matters, right?
So we have size principle
to help understand this.
And we have our laws of specificity
which say SAID principle, right?
Specific adaptation to imposed demand.
So the adaptation you get, or
the result of your training,
is going to be a reflection of
the demand that you imposed.
So if you want to get stronger,
you need to impose a demand
of strength, not repetitions.
So this has to be, the
load has to be very high.
In general, you're probably looking at
above 85% of your one rep at max.
If you're moderately
trained, maybe 75% will work.
Lowly trained, again, everything works.
But in general, we want
to be pressing a load
that's very high.
So because the intensity
demand is so high,
that is going to force you
to do a low repetition range.
You can't do 12 reps at 95%.
Then it wouldn't be 95%
of your one rep at max.
So by definition,
true strength training is
really going to be in the like
five repetitions per set or less range.
That's where most of it's going to occur.
With specificity.
So we've covered choice,
intensity, and repetitions, right?
The total amount of sets that you do
is really kind of up to your
personal fitness level, right?
If you did as little as like
three sets per exercise,
that's probably enough.
- Work sets.
- Totally, yeah, totally work sets, right.
So get fully warmed up
and build up to that 85%.
Don't just walk into
the gym and throw 85% on
and go thank you, that's
an important distinction.
So work your way up.
Do some, like a very classic
warm up thing would be
like a set of 10 at 50%.
A set of eight at 60%.
A set of maybe eight again at 70%.
And then maybe like a set of five at 75%.
So two or three or four sets
kind of building intensity
and lowering rep range.
And then you would go after
your two or three working sets.
Also, in terms of rest intervals,
now, because we're trying to,
the primary driver of
strength is intensity.
It's not the volume,
right, it's the intensity.
So in order to maintain that
we have to do a low repetition range.
But in addition, we also have
to have a high rest interval.
Because if we start to,
if we have any amount of fatiguing occur,
and we have to then either reduce the reps
or reduce the intensity,
we've lost the primary driver.
We've lost that main signal.
So the number we're going
to throw out typically
is like two to four minutes.
So imagine you did your set of bench press
and you did five repetitions at 85%.
You probably want to
rest two to four minutes
before coming back to the bench.
That doesn't mean you have
to sit there on your phone.
In fact, please don't.
Everyone will thank you for
not doing that, I promise.
You can engage other muscle groups.
This is what we would call super setting.
So you're doing your bench press,
and while that two minute clock
is running for your chest,
to rest, you can go over
and do your deadlifts.
And so you can kind of
move back and forth,
and this is how you can
make strength training
not a seven hour workout.
If you're a professional athlete,
you're going to take that time,
because you want to maximize the outcome.
We've done this actually in our lab too,
super sets will reduce the strength gains,
but by a tiny amount, and
most of us don't care enough,
relative to it's going
to triple the length
of your training session.
It's not worth it.
So for the average person I
will tell them, yeah, super set.
For someone who's trying
to break a world record
in weightlifting or power
lifting, don't super set.
- Interesting.
Yeah, I think, I've found
that I don't recover
particularly well from strength
and hypertrophy training.
So-
- Like in the workout or the next day?
- From workout to workout,
unless I keep the total
duration of those workouts,
I like to say no more than 60
minutes of work, of real work.
- Yep, yep.
- Maybe 75.
Past 75. I find that I just start to-
- [Andy] That's a lot.
- I have to introduce
additional rest days,
or I just get weaker over time.
So I'd set a kind of a limit at 50 minutes
and then I usually violate that limit
and end up doing 60 minutes.
So I'm excited to hear that
one can super set exercises,
as long as they work different
muscle groups, of course.
- Yeah.
- Right.
So I wouldn't want to do like
bench press and overhead press,
super set it,
'cause you're going to weaken-
- Yeah.
- I think that goes without
saying for most people,
but just to point that out.
But that I could do some
push, pull, push, pull,
without compromising
total intensity that much.
And I certainly would
be willing to give up
a rep here or there, or a
few pounds here or there.
And may I ask whether
or not in doing that,
one gets any even tiny bit,
or more of additional benefit
in terms of cardiovascular work?
Because I imagine after a,
even a one rep max which I've
never done as I mentioned,
but let's say I get three
reps on the overhead press
and then I get four reps
on a weighted pull up,
and I'm going back and forth.
I'm no doubt going to be breathing harder
than if I was sitting there
texting away on my phone.
- Yeah.
- In between sets.
- Yep, of course.
Yeah, and so in fact in general,
one of the things that
I'll present in my class
is a giant list of, in fact on the top
is all these different
exercise adaptations
I started the conversation with.
And on the vertical
column are as many of the
physiological potential
adaptations one would get.
So changes in endogenous pH.
Blood pressure.
Lymphatic changes.
Bone density.
All these things, right, and
just have this giant list.
And then you can run a matrix
and you can start to look at,
okay, if I do speed training,
am I going to see changes
in the nervous system?
Well, like very much so, right?
That's the primary, actual
reason those things work.
Very little change in the muscle system.
It's almost exclusively explained by
the central or peripheral
nervous system, right?
On that same token,
are you going to expect
many cardiovascular adaptation from speed?
And the answer is no, because
although we didn't cover it,
speed is very low intensity,
very low rep range,
very high rest.
Well, as you go to like strength
and then you go to hypertrophy,
you start seeing more and more increases
in cardiovascular adaptations
because you're doing exactly that, right?
You're starting to reduce rest,
and you're starting to increase volume.
But you're going to lose things
like bone mineral adaptations,
because the load starts to go down.
So you can look at this
matrix and kind of understand
if I'm a person who wants to kind of
maximize the adaptations I get
across my entire physiology
for the least amount of work,
you can choose these different
adaptations to go after
that are going to kind of
land on these things, right?
And exactly as you mentioned,
if you're going to take five
minutes rest between each rep.
So let's say the extreme,
you're going to do three sets
of one repetition for strength
at 95%, you're going
to take probably five,
maybe seven minutes between each attempt.
Like you better not
expect many like changes
in your resting blood pressure.
That there's no
cardiovascular strain there.
You're going to put it
together in a circuit
where you're going to lose some
potential strength adaptation,
but you're going to gain something there.
So all these things are,
it's not about good or
bad or right or wrong.
It's always about what
advantage do you want
and what disadvantage do you want?
And I can cut like really
in to the chase here
on one of these things, 'cause
we'll get to this eventually.
If you want to know the
ones that are going to
generally give you the most
physiological adaptations
across the most categories,
you're almost always looking for
hypertrophy type of training.
And then this anaerobic conditioning piece
that we'll get into.
That's going to hit the
most systems at once.
- That's great to know,
and we should definitely
go a little bit deeper
on those types of what the
modifiable variables are
for those categories.
'Cause I think that,
I'm guessing the vast majority of people
want to be a bit stronger, maybe add some,
a little bit of muscle, or more,
make sure their heart is
healthy and et cetera.
This is wonderful, and
I think is clarifying
certainly a lot for me.
So for strength, let's, I
guess training frequency.
- Frequency, cool.
- So what should determine
training frequency?
And I had the great
benefit of a long time ago
when I was in high school actually,
I paid for a session over
the phone with Mike Mentzer.
- Oh, lovely!
- Yeah, the Mike Mentzer.
- Sure.
- And we got to be friends,
over time.
- High intensity training!
- At the time I was pretty
young and my mother kept saying
like, why is this like
grown man calling the house?
And then we would talk all
the time about training,
but he tried to convince me to train
once every five to seven
days, very few sets,
very high intensity.
And I must say, it worked incredibly well.
- Sure.
- It was,
I think with my recovery
quotient, which was not very good,
I think has improved over
time but was not very good,
it was remarkable.
But of course this was a
time when I was, you know.
- Full of the most animalism
- I was 14.
- you've ever had.
- On my own version of anabolics, right.
I had a long arc of puberty, so.
- And you were untrained.
- And I was mostly untrained.
I'd been running cross
country and skateboarding,
and playing soccer.
So.
- And doing all the things that are like
the antithesis of growing muscle.
- Yeah, it was literally,
and people would probably say impossible.
It was something like 40 pounds of muscle
inside of 12 months.
It was crazy.
- [Andy] I would believe that.
- And so, then of course that
stopped working over time.
- Sure.
- And then you start
going down the odyssey of
trying to find the thing
that's going to work that well.
And you eventually realize that it was
because you were untrained, right?
So training frequency is crucial.
Let's say that people are
doing these whole body workouts
as you've described them,
not alternating upper body, lower body,
'cause there's so many
different splits that we talk,
probably doesn't make sense
to go into splits right now.
But how often can and
should one train a muscle?
And how do you know if a
muscle is recovered locally?
And how do you know
if your nervous system is
recovered systemically?
- Okay, this is a bunch of
really interesting questions.
I'm not sure exactly what
route you want to go,
so I'll start here.
As I mentioned earlier,
soreness is not a good barometer
of exercise quality, because
some types of training
are going to induce more soreness
and some are going to induce less.
That's important to this
conversation because
when you ask about how do you know
if a muscle is ready to train again,
one of the question is, well
what are you training for?
If you're training for hypertrophy, right,
muscle size, muscle growth,
we need to hedge towards recovery.
Because what you're trying to do is cause
a massive insult there,
allow then protein synthesis to occur,
building of new tissue which
takes time, 48 to 72 hours,
like kind of at a minimum,
that process needs to occur.
If you're doing actually more strength,
and this is a differentiation
between hypertrophy and strength,
then you didn't induce
actually much damage.
In fact, you're generally
not going to get very sore
from true strength training.
Very little, unless you get
really heavy, you did it a lot.
The primary driver of hypertrophy
is not the same primary
driver of strength.
We talked about that already.
That's intensity driven.
For hypertrophy it's not intensity.
So because we have different mechanisms,
we have different outcomes,
even though they're closely aligned,
strength is not going to
cause a lot of soreness.
Therefore intensity is the driver.
Therefore frequency can
be as high as you want.
So you can train every single
day the same exact muscle,
if speed or power or strength
are the primary training tools,
because you need stimulus,
there's skill as well, right?
Practice.
You know that as much as anybody.
Developing a new motor pattern requires
a lot of repetitions, right?
You don't need a
tremendous amount of rest.
That's not, it's not
a damage thing, right,
it's a re-patterning issue.
So strength training, in
fact, if you look at again,
true strength professional athletes,
they're going to train the same
muscles basically every day.
- Wow.
- [Andy] They're going to squat every day.
- And is that because the
primary mode of adaptation
is recruitment of these
high threshold motor units?
So it's mainly neural.
- No.
So everyone's going to say that.
And this is where I get all feisty.
- Well, I'm not saying that.
That was actually, there
was a question mark there.
- [Andy] Okay, okay.
- If we were online putting comments,
there'd be a question mark.
- We would've fought.
I would've blocked you.
I'm just kidding.
- You already blocked me.
No.
- Probably twice!
Okay.
The early adaptations to exercise,
especially strength training,
are hedged towards the nervous system.
No question about it.
People always say central nervous system,
but it's probably more peripheral, right?
Whatever, semantics
probably, but pedantic.
It's nerve, if you train today,
tomorrow morning you're
not going to wake up
with a actually increase in
contractile proteins and muscle.
Your muscle might be a little bit bigger
due to some acute swelling,
but you could have a
pretty acute that persists,
change in the nervous
system we'll call it,
that allows you to be stronger,
like within a couple of days.
Sustained hypertrophy is probably more
along the lines of four weeks.
We can see that right?
We can actually see changes
like in the ultrasound.
Now you're making changes immediately,
that protein synthesis process
is happening like very fast
and it's going to last.
It just takes us time to
measure it in terms of
a noticeable change in
your whole muscle size.
So that being said, the first
four weeks we typically say
are primarily nervous system.
After that, now we're starting
to see most of the changes
coming from the muscle
side of the equation.
So with strength development,
it's a combination of three areas.
In fact, all muscle contraction
has these same three things.
It starts off with some signal, right,
from somewhere in the body,
whether it's all the way up the top
or at the level of the spine,
depending on if this is a reaction
or an actual conscious control.
From there, some signal has to
tell the muscle to contract.
Okay.
So signal is one.
Two it's muscular contraction.
And there's a lot of variables
inside the muscle tissue itself
that determine its functionality.
And so if we took an individual biopsy
and took a muscle fiber from
you and took one from me
and we took those muscles out
and put them in a Petri dish,
and I tied one end to a force transducer
and the other end to
a thing that pulls it,
and we soaked it in a bath of calcium
and a bunch of other stuff,
even if they were the same size,
your fibers might contract
a lot faster than mine,
even relative to size.
Or not, or slower, or
there's various properties.
So the intrinsic fibers themselves
determine a lot of functionality.
From there, muscle fibers
don't cause movements.
Muscle fibers simply contract.
They're all surrounded
with connective tissue.
And that's all surrounded with
a bunch of more connective tissue.
That all surrounds into a muscle.
That muscle is then surrounded
with more connective tissue.
That all comes together
into a giant tendon.
That tendon attaches to the bone.
It's the pulling on those tendon
that actually move the bone
that cause human movement.
So that's area three.
Area one, the nervous system,
area two, the muscle contraction,
area three, some sort of
connective tissue thing.
Changes happen at all
three of those levels.
And we're not even now talking,
when you entered the
discussion of biomechanics,
and you changed say the
pennation angle of the muscle,
which is the angle at
which the muscle fibers
lay relative to the bone, right?
So this is basic mechanics.
Is it pulling perpendicular to the bone?
Is it pulling horizontal to the
bone, or some sort of angle?
All of these things
determine human performance.
So when you're talking about again,
that strength development,
you can see tremendous improvements
in total force production
by manipulating all of those areas,
and you have not touched
changes in muscle size.
If you change muscle size
in a true sustained fashion,
whether this is sarcoplasmic
or contractile proteins,
you have given yourself more opportunity
to produce more force.
It doesn't guarantee
you produce more force.
Bodybuilders are not
stronger than power lifters,
even though they have more muscle.
But bodybuilders are probably
stronger than most people.
So there is a relationship
between muscle size and strength.
It's just not a one-to-one
guaranteed ratio.
And that's generally because the,
although the muscle has been aided,
they may have not changed the
biomechanical considerations.
They may have not changed
the connected tissue
nor the nervous system stuff.
And so that's why we see
this giant relationship
that our value is pretty high
between strength and hypertrophy,
but if you really want to get
to the ends of it, it's not.
And that matters to your
actual question 10 minutes ago,
because again, you can
train strength daily
on the same muscle,
but if you want to allow
for that process of
contractile proteins to add and grow,
then you're going to have
to allow some recovery.
Because if you go back
into that muscle too soon,
you're going to blunt the response.
You're going to stop it.
You're going to cut it off.
You have all kinds of
problems going on in the cell
that are going to just
attenuate that growth response.
So I gave you the answer
for strength training.
The answer for hypertrophy
is probably less than
three out of 10, on level of
soreness, so you can go again.
In general, you're probably
looking at 72 hours
is the optimal window.
So if you trained your
shoulders on Monday,
you probably don't want to
train 'em again on Tuesday.
If hypertrophy's the goal.
Maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday's best.
So something like an every
two to three day window
is probably, and we know
a little bit more now
about why that is.
The gene cascade, the
signaling and response happens,
well the signaling
happens instantaneously,
right, within seconds.
The gene cascade is probably in the,
peaked in the four hour window,
like depending on which
gene you want to look at.
But it's just kind of a snapshot.
But the protein synthesis
process is 24 to 48 hour thing,
and so it tends to kind of
look like let that thing finish
and let that signal go back to baseline,
and then hit it again.
And then hit it again.
And now as long as you're
providing the nutrients,
the recovery should happen and
you should be able to sustain
the same work output in
the training session.
So the stimulus stays high
and the recovery's there,
and you can now continue to grow muscle.
- You mentioned 48 to 72
hours for hypertrophy.
What if, for whatever reasons,
the training split,
lifestyle factors, et cetera,
somebody say, let's use your example,
trains shoulders on Monday,
ideally they would train
them again on Thursday,
in their particular instance.
Wednesday or Thursday.
But they don't.
They wait until Saturday or
Sunday, for whatever reason.
Maybe it's more compatible with their work
and other exercise schedule.
Whatever the reason.
Are they actually losing
hypertrophy that they gained,
or they've missed a window to
induce further hypertrophy?
- It's probably better to
think about it as the latter.
It's not that you've lost, it's just,
you've just kind of lost an opportunity
to make more progress.
I will save you a little bit,
kind of going back to your HIIT program.
This is the original
high intensity training,
the Mentzer thing, right?
Which is not.
- The HIT with one I
not the high intensity interval training,
but high intensity training.
- Correct.
- Like one set
to absolute failure.
- Totally.
- Maybe two.
For each muscle group.
- 20 minute workouts.
- [Andrew] Dividing your
body into a three-way split,
and then literally training like
- Smashing.
- six times a month.
Which most people think
that is absolutely crazy.
- Yeah.
- There's no way
that's going to work.
And I can tell you this.
- It does.
- If you are untrained,
you grow like a weed.
If you train hard enough.
- Even if you're trained, look
at the people Mike trained.
He put a lot of bodybuilders
on really high levels.
Now they had the same similar help you had
at that timeframe.
- Wait, to be very clear,
I was not taking exogenous anabolics.
In fact I-
- But your endogenous was just as good.
- It probably was.
I wasn't measuring my levels
there, but I probably would.
I grew easy and, in general,
I tend to grow pretty
easily from weight training.
And I should say that, to Mike's credit,
and I think this is an important message,
that he was the one who really said look,
unless you're going to make a
professional career out of it,
do not run the health hazards
of exogenous hormones.
And certainly not at your age.
So he deterred me from that,
which was great because
it never entered my mind.
It just was one of those things where
Mike Mentzer said don't do it.
And he had clearly done it, right?
And so he's speaking
from an informed place.
It never entered my mind.
But also what was really wild is
I was continuing to run cross country.
And so there was a trade-off
there at some point.
- A bit of an interference.
- But when you're young,
you can get, many people
can get away with,
- Totally.
- with what at this age
would surely place me
into a state of over-training,
even at low volume.
We'll see.
- Yeah, well I mean like,
the whole field on interference effect
has changed quite a bit recently,
which we could come back to if you want.
But just to finish out the idea here
with that last question.
If you want to take five days or six days
in between each muscle
group, you can do that.
In fact, if you look at the research,
it's going to show that
frequency is not that important.
It's not that it's unimportant,
but it can handle changes,
as long as you get to
the same total volume.
So you can do that.
You just have to do a lot
more work in that one workout.
If you care about the six
week, eight week thing,
if you're like I'm in this
for the next 60 years,
like it's probably okay, right?
But it can be there, the
challenge with splitting up
your training sessions for
hypertrophy into smaller numbers,
like once or twice a week,
it's just difficult to get that number.
It's difficult to get that volume done.
Volume-wise, the more recent
meta analyses are going to say
that you're probably looking
at around 10 working sets
per muscle group per week.
Seems to be kind of the minimum threshold
that you're going to want to hit.
So if you did three sets of 10
at your shoulders on Monday,
three sets of 10 shoulders
Wednesday, and three on Friday,
that's nine working sets.
If you wanted to do three
different shoulder work exercises
on Monday and hit your nine sets,
it's not really actually going
to be that much different.
The problem is 10 is kind of the minimum.
You probably want to look
for more like 15 to 20,
and in fact, well-trained folks, 20, 25.
That becomes very
challenging in one workout.
In fact de functo, you're not
going to be able to do it, right?
And so that is where,
it's not the frequency that
looks like it kills you,
it's just the fact you have got to get,
because the total driver
of strength is intensity,
but the total driver of
hypertrophy is volume.
Assume you're taking it to fatigue, right,
or muscular failure.
So it's just tough to get enough done.
If you can, and if you want to
set your schedule up that way,
like you probably remember,
if you do those types of training sessions
where you're just going to
completely exhaust a muscle,
it's going to be sore for a while.
You're probably not going to come back,
and that's sort of the
logic behind that was
let's take this thing
to tremendous failure
and give it six days to recover.
It can work, it's just not the best,
I think is one way to think about it.
For most people.
- It's also hard to do those workouts
without a training partner,
if you really want to do them correctly.
- And stimulants and headphones
and all kinds of other things, right?
- Well, anyway, yeah stimulants are not,
I certainly don't recommend those.
It may be a cup of coffee or
two, if that's your thing, but,
and maybe some of the safer supplements,
but certainly not the sorts of stimulants
that the guys in the '70s and '80s
were famous for taking.
- No way, or still use.
- Or still use.
You talked about repetition ranges,
broadly for strength
training, so five or less.
You said frequency could
be as often as every day.
Rest two to four minutes,
maybe even longer
if you're going for
one repetition maximum.
- Yep.
- [Andrew] For hypertrophy.
- Sure.
- What are the repetition
ranges that are effective,
and what are the ones
that are most effective,
if one is trying to maximize
some of the other variables?
Like people don't want to
spend more than an hour
to 75 minutes
- Realistic.
- in the gym.
Because I think that while the rep ranges
might be quite broad, as
you alluded to earlier,
there's the practical, there
are the practical constraints.
- [Andy] Yeah.
- So what repetition ranges or percent
of one repetition maximum
should people consider
when thinking about hypertrophy?
- Right.
The quick answer there is
anywhere between like
five to 30 reps per set.
That's going to show across the literature
pretty much equal hypertrophy gains.
And we can have a really
interesting discussion
about why that is.
But I'm just remembering
one thing from a second ago.
I want to give a better
answer for the frequency.
You can do every single week for strength,
or every single day for strength.
If you want though
like what's probably
minimally viable, two,
twice per week per muscle.
So hamstrings strength, twice per week.
That's a good number to get
most people really strong.
- Okay.
- You can do every single day.
You don't need to though.
So I want to make sure that,
like I wasn't saying you
have to train a muscle
85% every single day to get it strong.
Two is a good number, three is great,
but probably even two is really effective.
- Got it.
And this explains the
high frequency of training
for strength athletes
that's always mystified me.
- Yeah.
- And the very long workouts
make sense, because very long-
- They're going to even train twice a day.
Even they'll just squat,
in the morning squat and
the afternoon, every day.
- With their eating and their sleeping,
they probably don't have
time for anything else.
- Well, that's why they're pros.
So it's their job, right?
That's what they do.
So yeah, your hypertrophy.
Strength training programming
is somewhat complicated,
right, because of,
it's not the danger,
but you're going to have to pay,
one way or the other, right?
The risk is a little bit
higher 'cause the load's higher
and you have to be a little bit
more technically proficient.
When it comes to hypertrophy training,
the way I like to explain it
is it's kind of idiot-proof.
The programming is idiot-proof,
the work is hard though.
So here's your range.
Anywhere between five reps and 30.
Can you hit somewhere in there, perfect,
it's all equally effective,
you can't screw that up.
The only caveat for hypertrophy is
you have to take it to muscular failure.
- And you need enough
rest for the adaptation
and protein synthesis to occur.
- Yep.
- Yeah.
- And if you recover faster,
you can maybe do it more frequently.
And if you don't, maybe less frequently.
- By that logic, should
people perhaps experiment
and figure out what repetition
range allows them to recover,
in concert with the training frequency
that they can do consistently.
- My recommendation is I think
you should actually set your,
use the repetition range as
a way to have some variation,
because most people don't
want to go in the gym
to do three sets of 10.
They're going to get
very bored very quickly.
And so I think you should
actually intentionally
change the rep schemes for
simple sake of having more fun.
It is a very different challenge.
The mechanisms that are inducing
hypertrophy are different,
but there's only a
maximum amount of growth
that one can get, right?
And so you have, as best we think it now,
and some people actually
will espouse that we know
really clearly about the
mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy,
which we don't.
It's still very much a guessing game,
but the three most likely drivers
are one, metabolic stress,
two, mechanical tension, and
then three, muscular damage.
You don't have to have all three.
One is sufficient.
You can have a little bit of
one or two, and you can cut it,
so you get it to play here.
We've already talked
about the muscular damage.
Again, it's very clear,
more damage is not better.
But it is somewhat a decent proxy, right?
Like again, a little
bit of soreness is good.
Just don't get so sore
it's compromising your
total volume, right?
Mechanical tension is
kind of like strength.
And this is why if you do
even sets of five or eight,
and you're kind of close
to that strength range,
you will gain a little bit of muscle.
It's not optimal muscle gain,
but you're going to gain some
because everything in these,
like physiology didn't
cut off at four reps
and then five reps is a
different thing, right?
It's always a blend, so think
of it as like a fading curve.
As you get closer to the
end, it fades less effective.
As you get closer to the
middle, it's more effective.
Anywhere between eight reps per set to 30,
it's equally effective.
Past 30, it's going to blend out.
Past eight to five to four to
three, it's going to blend,
you know, lesser there.
So metabolic stress is one,
the damage is the other,
or sorry, mechanical tension
is the one that's heavy.
Muscle damage is the other one.
The third one is metabolic stress.
And this is, again, a bit of an area
of scientific contention,
but something's there.
I know something's there.
We're just kind of fumbling to figure out
what exactly it is.
And this is, metabolic
stress is the burn, right?
It's there.
It's why blood flow restriction
training probably works.
That's done very light, so
there's no mechanical tension,
there's very little damage,
but somehow it induces a
good amount of hypertrophy.
- [Andrew] Very painful.
- Oh boy.
- I tried this.
I have a friend, former special operator
who lives out on the East
Coast and took me through
a blood flow restriction
training protocol in a park.
And I don't think I actually cried, but.
- You probably did.
- But I might've cried out once or twice.
It was unbelievable, especially
the lower body movements.
Now it was a humid day,
I'll claim a little bit of jet lag, but
- No, no.
- it was brutal.
It was really brutal.
And I also-
- Do it on the best day of your
life, and it's still brutal.
- Okay, well,
- Still brutal.
- that makes me feel
a little bit better.
It was intense, and people
should know that it is important
to use the proper cuffs for these things.
I don't have any relationship
to any of the companies
that sell these cuffs.
But the reason is that
you actually need to block
particular avenues of blood flow.
You can't simply cinch off a muscle.
You can't tourniquet a muscle and train.
- Not a good idea.
- You can actually
kill yourself that way.
- Yeah, you can get a blood clot.
- Yeah.
And so if you're interested in
blood flow restriction training,
I imagine you have some
content about this,
or will at some point,
but also there are resources
online that people can look up.
A question about hypertrophy
training I think.
Many people are wondering
about train to failure,
or don't train to failure.
Assuming good form.
- Yeah, okay, assuming good form, great.
The answer is both.
So you want to train to failure,
but you don't need to
go to extreme failure.
So you don't need to
necessarily go to that like,
a partner has to lift
the barbell off my chest.
But you have to get close.
You have to drive either
heavy, stress damage, right, or pump.
And so a really easy practical
way to think about this.
I heard Mike Israetel,
who runs a company called
Renaissance Periodization,
years ago, outlined this at a NSCA talk.
And it was beautiful, and I thought
this is the most eloquent
way to explain the context
about training for hypertrophy.
So I want you to look for
three things in your workout,
and let's say that you want
a particular muscle to grow.
Let's say you want your
glutes to get larger.
Okay.
When you're doing your
glute exercises, number one,
are you feeling the glute contract?
Okay, it doesn't have to be there,
but that's a good sign if it is.
Okay, let's say I didn't
really feel my glute contract.
I felt it more in my quads or my back.
Okay.
Did you feel a big pump afterwards?
No, I didn't really feel a pump there
either wards or during.
Okay, great.
Number three.
Next day, did you feel a little bit of
soreness there at all?
No, I didn't.
Well, that's a very good indicator,
you didn't feel it during the workout,
you felt no sort of pump,
and it didn't get sore.
Don't expect much growth.
Didn't happen.
- You distributed the work
across a bunch of muscle groups.
- Most likely other muscle
groups were too involved, right,
especially if you're like, no,
but man, my back got really.
Well that's a really good
indication of telling you
what the hell was moving.
And so in terms of targets,
if you were to put,
again, a one to 10 scale,
how much should I feel it burning during?
Anything less than a three, okay,
it's probably not doing much, right?
But it doesn't, like seven is not,
a 10 is not better than seven.
You need to feel it, but
it doesn't have to be like,
oh my gosh, I'm dying here.
Soreness, same barometer, right?
So if you can get like
three, three and three,
you're probably in a pretty good spot.
Five, five, and five is maybe better,
but you don't need to go much past that.
So I want you to feel the
muscle group either working,
or if you're like I didn't feel it much,
I didn't really get a pump
but the next day it got really sore,
well then you're still on a good path.
Again, really sore isn't
like ooh, a little tender,
but next day it's okay.
Day after that, I could train, no problem.
That's really what you want to go after.
And in terms of understanding,
is this likely to produce
some growth or not?
- Excellent, excellent.
Very clear parameters and recommendations
I know are benefiting me, and
will benefit a lot of people.
If you'd be willing to
throw out a few sort of
sets and rep parameters that
could act as broad guidelines
for people who want to explore further.
I realize that with all
these modifiable variables,
that there's no one size
fits all for strength.
I love this five to 30 for hypertrophy,
that's a pretty vital thing.
I don't think I've ever done
a 30 rep set of anything.
But now that you've thrown that out there,
I see it as a bit of a challenge.
- You want to know
what's awesome about 30?
You're going to get an insane pump.
You're going to burn like crazy.
But you won't get super sore.
Because the mechanical tension's so low.
It's so light.
So you can get away with
those things and you,
it's hard because your
mind is going to wander.
You're going to get it like rep 20,
and you're going to be like
I'm done, and you're like no,
there's a lot left here to get to 30.
Where like a set of 10 is much easier,
you're just like, okay,
two more, two more.
Set of 30's like, I got 16 more.
It's awful, but you're not-
- Just the counting is work.
- It's terrible, right,
and people tend to just
kind of like check out.
So 30 is possible, but
a little bit extreme.
But I would recommend all of 'em.
Like it's a really fun
play, you can do different,
in the same workout too, by the way.
Like you could do one set of 10 pushups
and then take a little break
and then do a set of 25.
You can mix and match these things.
There's no magic recipe that
has to happen for all those,
or do it different.
So Mondays are my sets of 10 days.
Wednesdays are my set of 20 days.
And Fridays are my set of 30 days.
And you can have all kinds of fun there,
and it's hard to screw up.
- Great.
I love, that phrase is always reassuring.
So for strength, is there
a sets and reps protocol
that is pretty surefire?
- So a way to just think
about a really fast answer
for power, well speed, power and strength,
is what I just call the
three to five concept.
All right?
So pick three to five exercises.
If you're feeling better that
day, choose on the higher end.
If you're feeling less that day,
or you have a shorter
timeframe to train, go less.
So this would be three sets,
or three exercises rather,
or five exercises the most.
So three to five exercises.
Do three to five reps, three to five sets,
take three to five
minutes rest in between,
and do it three to five times a week.
So that can be as little
as three sets of three,
for three exercises, three times a week.
That's a 20 minute workout,
three times a week.
It can be as high as five sets
of five for five exercises,
five days a week.
So it's very broad and allows
people to still stay within
the domains of strength and power,
while still being able to move
and contour towards their lifestyle
and soreness and time
and all those things.
The only differentiator
to pay attention to
between power and strength, is intensity.
So if you want strength,
this is now 85% plus of your max, right?
And if you want power, it
needs to be a lot lighter,
'cause you need to move more towards
the velocity end of the spectrum,
because power is strength
multiplied by speed.
So while getting stronger by
definition can help power,
you probably want to
spend more of your time
in the 40% to 70% range,
like plus or minus.
So that's it.
Both of them, conceptually
they'll work, everything else,
the exercise, the reps, the frequency,
all that can be still in
the three to five range.
Just change the intensity,
depending on which outcome you want.
- The nervous system obviously plays
an important role at the level of
nerves controlling the
contraction of muscle fibers.
But of course, we have
these upper motor neurons,
which are the ones that
reside in our brain,
that control the lower motor
neurons, that control muscle.
And this takes us into the realm of
where the mind is at during
a particular movement.
And to me, this is not an abstract thing.
I can imagine doing workouts
that are mainly focused on strength,
or mainly focused on hypertrophy,
and in the case of strength,
am I trying to move weights,
and when I'm trying to
generate hypertrophy,
am I trying to, quote
unquote, challenge muscles?
In other words, if I'm just
trying to move a weight
away from my body, you
know, pushing a bench press
or an overhead press,
I don't know that I want
my mind thinking about
the contraction of my medial delts.
I think I want my mind in
getting the weight overhead
with the best proper form.
Best, excuse me, and proper form.
And certainly with hypertrophy training,
best and proper form is going
to be the target as well.
But that simple, or I should
say subtle mental shift,
changes the patterns of
nerve fiber recruitment.
So can we say to get stronger
focus on moving weights,
still with proper form and safely,
and to get hypertrophy focused
on challenging muscles,
still with proper form and safely.
- It's very fair.
Yeah, as a snapshot answer,
it is a very fair thing to think about.
Intentionality matters for both.
In other words, if you look
at some interesting science
that's been done on power
development and speed development,
the intent to move is
actually more important
than the actual movement velocity.
So if you're doing say
something for power or strength,
and you're doing just
enough to get the bar up,
that will result in less
improvements in strength
than even if you're moving
at the exact same speed,
but you're intending to move faster.
And this is one of the reasons
why good coaching matters.
So if you're coaching an athlete
through a power workout especially,
and they're doing enough to just lift 50%
of their one rep at max,
it's not going to generate
as much speed development
as them trying to move that
bar as fast as they can,
even if the net result is
the same barbell velocity.
Turns out nerves matter.
- That's a, I mean I was
about to say amazing,
but as a neuroscientist,
if I say amazing that nerves matter.
What's amazing to me is,
if I understand correctly,
what you're saying is that
even if the bar is moving
at the same speed, same weight,
if my internal representation,
my thoughts are,
I'm trying to move this
as fast as possible,
versus I'm just trying to
get the bar away from me,
and get the weight up, I'm
going to get different outcomes.
- Yep, this is quality of work, right?
This is, did you do enough
to just check off a box
or did you actually strive
for adaptation, right?
Similar concept actually
works for hypertrophy,
in terms of there is a
handful of very recent studies
that have looked at what we'll call
the mind muscle connection.
And this is doing things
like imagine a bicep curl,
and you're simply looking
at and watching your biceps,
and you're thinking about
contracting it harder.
Even though you execute
the same repetitions
at the same exact intensity,
initial indications are
the mind body connection
are going to result in
more growth than not.
- You just gave authorization for people
to look at their muscles
- Please do.
- contracting in the gym.
- Please do.
- Oh my.
- Yeah, of course, right?
- But the selfie is still ruled out.
- I'd rather you look at
your muscles in your phone.
So I'm fine with it.
Those are initial.
We don't have a large depth
of research to support that.
And maybe some stuff
will come and counter it.
But it does, it matches
what folks in that community
have been saying for a
very long time, right?
There's actually some stuff
on simply flexing in between.
So if you've ever seen a body builder,
they'll do their set of bicep curls
and then they'll get out and
they'll flex and they'll check.
And they're literally, this
is what Arnold did, right?
This is, if you go back
to pumping in iron.
- Or college weight rooms, I should say.
- Right.
- And for some reason
there's something about that age group.
- Yeah.
- That there's a lot of
checking of biceps in
college weight rooms,
for reasons that escape me.
- If you ever interact with my wife,
like she will be the first to tell you,
I cannot walk past the
mirror without like,
I'm checking something out.
- That you can't,
- I can't.
- or that she can't?
- I can't.
- Okay.
- Not her me.
- Got it.
- [Andy] Like I'm the one
that cannot walk past.
- All right, well then I'll be careful
not to disparage-
- It has nothing to do with the
hypertrophy, but I just like
I'm a muscle guy, so
I'm always like thinking
and tinkering, or whatever.
But yeah, it is, I think it's
very much worth your time
to do a higher quality training session.
Be more intentional, be present,
than just executing
the same exact workout.
I think that's globally very
clear to be to your advantage.
So if you're thinking like, I'm going to,
like, I don't want to work out today.
I got all this going on,
or I'm tired or whatever,
I'm just going to do the workout
I know and get through it.
Okay.
If you can go, you know what though,
like, I'm going to cut 15
minutes out of this thing.
I'm going to get my head right.
I'm going to go get two 20
minutes of quality work done,
that's your best option by far.
- You alluded to the fact that
even just looking at a particular muscle
might benefit in terms
of the number of fibers
you can recruit, or its
potential for hypertrophy.
I've heard before, and I
certainly have experienced that
muscles that for whatever reason,
genetics or sports that
one played, et cetera,
muscles that we find that we can contract
to the point of almost a
slightly painful contraction,
seem to grow more readily
than muscles that we
can't recruit very easily.
- [Andy] Yeah.
- And the reason I mentioned
sports that we played earlier
is, I mean, you just have to
watch the Olympics to see that,
swimmers obviously are very
good at engaging their lats.
You look at the gymnasts,
they seem to be very good
at engaging everything.
- Yeah.
- And they go through
a huge number of different
dynamic movements,
so that explains that.
So I find that, you
know, if people say, oh
I can't get stronger in this,
or my whatever body part is weak,
in terms of its inability
to engage hypertrophy.
- Yeah, I see where you're going.
- That oftentimes that can
be because of an inability
to engage those upper motor neurons,
to deliberately isolate those muscles.
Are there ways that
people can learn to engage
particular muscle groups
more effectively over time,
for sake of hypertrophy or strength,
or for cases of trying to overcome
injury potential or injury,
because imbalances are
bad across the board.
- Yeah, this is actually very common,
and I think everyone has
probably gone through this.
There's some part that
you just can't get going,
for me, that was the lats.
That was the rhomboids.
So my back muscles.
For years, I couldn't activate
my lats or my rhomboids.
These are the muscle groups that connect
your shoulder blades.
So if you try to squeeze your
shoulder blades together,
that set of muscles there
are called your rhomboids.
Your lats of course are more vertical
and pull you kind of up and down.
And no matter how many lat
pull downs I did, bent rows,
pull ups, I could never
see any development there.
No increase in strength.
And it took me probably
a decade to figure out
how the hell do I actually
get these things on.
In fact, if you'd have asked me,
even in my college years as
a college football player,
hey flex your lats,
like show me your lats,
you would've seen no movement there.
When I was doing a pull up,
in that particular case,
the only way I could get the bar to move
was by using my biceps, right?
So it's a synergist muscle,
it's supposed to be a
secondary or tertiary muscle
in that movement, but
for me it was primer,
because of my over strength in my biceps
coupled with my lack of
activation in the lats.
So you're compensating the same movement.
Actually kind of an easy
way to think about this is
imagine doing a bent row.
So imagine you're bent
over kind of at a 45 degree
or a horizontal angle,
and you're going to pull a barbell
to your belly button, right?
Now you can actually do
that exact same movement
with very little back muscle activation,
by simply flexing your elbows more.
And so you think the barbell's
going all the way down,
it's coming all the way
up to touching my belly.
And you think you're doing
a great back development exercise.
When in fact,
because of the way that
you're executing the movement,
you're getting very
little back development.
And this is a really good example
of why someone has done
a specific exercise
many, many, many times,
but yet failed to see
development in a muscle group.
Which goes back to earlier
part of our conversation,
which is why exercises themselves
do not determine the adaptation.
It's the execution that matters, right?
It's the technique, it's the rep range,
all of those are going to
determine your actual result.
So if anytime you're banging
your head against the wall
and thinking like why am I
not getting movement here,
growth or strength or whatever,
it's almost one of those,
it's guaranteed to be one
of those areas, right?
You're probably not getting
the muscle groups to activate.
In that particular example,
just because we're here,
try imagine doing that bent row.
Instead of pulling the
barbell to your belly,
squeeze your shoulder
blades together first,
as far as they can possibly go,
and then bring your elbows up
without changing the angle of your elbow.
So in other words,
without bringing your hand
closer to your shoulder.
So keep that same angle
and come up as high as you possibly can,
and then finish out the movement.
That's going to guarantee a utilization
first of the back muscles
and a finishing with
the biceps at the end,
which is how that movement
is supposed to go.
So how do you coach into that?
Well, it can be a number of things.
Whenever I'm diagnosing movement quality,
I look for a handful of things,
but very first one is awareness.
You'd be surprised how many folks,
when you just simply tell them
that muscle group right there,
and maybe you give 'em a tactical prompt,
so you touch it, or you
put something against it.
This is actually why, sorry
I'm jumping all over the place,
but this is why things
like a belt work very well
for actually increasing
abdominal strength.
So a misconception out there is
if you wear like a belt
when you're lifting,
then the belt kind of
does all the work for you
and your abs get weaker.
That can happen, but the exact
opposite can happen as well.
So if you take a belt, for example,
and you cinch it down really tight,
and then you just completely
disregard your midsection,
you will see a loss of
strength in your midsection
because now the belt is doing the work.
But if you put the belt on just
a little bit, kind of tight,
to where you get some sensory feedback,
and you think about
using that belt as a way
to activate the core musculature,
you will actually see a higher,
if we look at like EMG activation,
the core muscles would
be activated higher,
to a greater extent, than
when the belt is off.
- [Andrew] Because of
proprioceptive feedback.
- Hundred percent.
- And for those that are wondering
what proprioceptive feedback is.
Proprioceptive feedback is that
there are nerves that
extend out to the muscles
that control muscle contractions,
but then there are sensory
inputs from the skin and muscle
that go back into the nervous system,
and those work in concert,
and that feedback is proprioceptive.
I think it literally
translates to a knowledge of
where one's limbs are,
and what's happening
on those limbs.
- In space, yeah.
- I've seen, I don't
have a training partner,
but I've seen in gyms where
someone will be training
and someone will tap the muscle
of the person who's
doing the work, in order,
this is consensual tapping
of other people's muscles,
not walking around
- Please.
- touching people's
muscles, please.
That to provide that
proprioceptive feedback,
so that the person doing the
exercises becomes more aware
of the muscle that they're
supposed to be training.
And it seems that that's
probably an effective practice.
- Yeah.
I'll give you two examples.
I'll go to the back with
that pulling movement,
but then I'll stay in
the belt really quickly.
So a very easy example that you
can do right now, listening,
and I learned this from Brian McKenzie,
our mutual friend, right?
So if you take your hands and open 'em up,
like you make an L with both your hands,
and now take those and
put 'em around your waist,
just above your hip bones.
Now what I want you to do is
press out as hard as you can
on your hands with your core.
And you can feel a lot of core activation.
And most people think core activation
is the front of your stomach, right?
Your six pack.
What you need to do is create
a cylinder around your back.
So it's the front, it's the
side, and it's the back.
So if you take your two
fingers, point them.
Now put them just outside
your belly button.
Can you move your fingers by
just moving your ab muscles?
90% of people can do yes.
Same exact thing.
Now go to that same position,
just above what's called your ASIS,
so your anterior superior iliac spine,
right up that front of your
hip bone, right in the front.
Can you now move?
Great, 50% of people are not
going to get any movement there.
- Really?
- Take your thumb and go
right above your PSIS.
- My what?
- PSIS.
Posterior superior
iliac spine.
- Okay.
- Right, now can you move?
Most likely no.
- Sort of if I do a
mini low back extension.
- Don't.
Just with your core musculature.
- Barely.
- [Andy] Yeah.
- Maybe-
- 90% of people can't.
If you can't perform that contraction,
you can't stabilize your spine.
So only way to get
stabilization in your spine
is then to go through hyper-extension.
And now that's a compression strategy
you're putting on your spine.
It's better than rounding your back,
like in going forward,
but over-extension is not great either.
So you want to be able
to flex the musculature
in a cylindric fashion,
so you have control.
So if you go back to our very first thing,
and with your hands open,
and you put 'em right here,
and if you're like I can't get activation,
if you pay attention to your thumb, right?
Now, just move your thumb.
And now you see activation
back there, fight?
- Mm-hmm.
- Boom.
Now if you can imagine turning
that on just a little bit,
and now notice how I
can do this, by the way,
at the same time I'm talking.
If you have to go [gasping]
we don't have control, right?
So you have to be able to
separate breath from brace.
So now, if I can put myself in a position,
and Kelly Starrett has always said 20%.
Give me 20% activation
here, and now I can squat,
I can hinge, I can jump.
I don't need to be locked down
to a hundred percent scream
to be able to brace my spine.
It's going to be ineffective and wasteful.
I want to be here.
Well, a belt provides that
proprioceptive feedback
where I can put it on 20%,
and it just is a reminder,
if I don't press against the belt,
the belt slides and
falls down a little bit,
'cause it's not on super tight.
If it's on so dang tight, it's
doing the work, and I forget.
So we just want a little
bit of feedback there.
Same thing with your upper back.
If you're having a
difficult time activating
those rhomboids or those lats,
someone can do a simple thing
where they take their finger,
put it right between your shoulder blades,
and you just tell them things
like hey, squeeze my finger.
Squeeze my finger.
As you're doing your bent
row, or your pull down,
you can touch the lat.
You can do just visualization stuff.
So just imagine like a 3D
rendering of that muscle group,
and you're watching that
muscle group contract.
It's very powerful, and
very effective to do it.
So a touch, a visual,
all this stuff can help,
get people to activate.
Outside of simple awareness,
typically eccentric overload
is a very effective way
for activation of a
difficult to target muscle.
- So the lowering of the bar,
or the lowering of the weight.
- The movement of the
weight away from the body.
It's not necessarily was lowering.
'Cause that kind of depends
on what muscle group
- Right, sure.
- you're doing, right?
- [Andrew] I misspoke, yeah.
- Things like a pull up.
Okay, so if I'm going to do a pull up
and I have poor lat activation,
I can still get the pull
up muscle movement executed
by contraction of the
biceps and things like that.
However, to make the movement simpler,
I'm going to go all the way to the top.
So imagine stepping on a box or something
going all the way to that
top of that pull up position.
And starting from there,
and I want you to simply
lower it under control.
And so you're just simply
breaking the movement down
into smaller pieces,
that allow you to focus
on the execution more.
It's going to be great,
eccentrics are great for
strength development,
very good for hypertrophy,
and allow you to focus on control.
I'm willing to bet a huge
percentage of you out there
who're like I've never had a sore lat,
you know, I've done a lot of
pull ups and things like that,
if you do that eccentric only
you'll probably wake up the
next day going, oh gosh,
I feel it there.
And that's a sign,
even if you didn't feel it in the workout,
but it got a little sore the
next day, keep down that path.
And then eventually you'd
be able to do a concentric,
maybe take a break.
Maybe do an isometric, where
you just hold that position.
And eventually work
that into a progression
where you can do the
concentric, eccentric,
and isometric portions,
and get activation.
So that might take you six weeks.
May take you six months.
But that's generally a pretty
good strategy for learning
how to activate a muscle group.
- Terrific suggestions.
Is it true that eccentric
emphasized movements
might require a little
bit longer recovery,
or they lead to more soreness than
- They can.
- concentric movements?
- Yeah, they typically can,
but they're also higher force output.
So very good for strength development.
But they're going to lead
on average to more soreness.
So more potential for
intracellular disruption
that is going to be associated with pain.
There's not as much, people
like to explain muscle soreness
as a result of microtrauma
and micro tears in the muscle.
And that can happen,
but that's not the norm.
Most of the time, it is things
like disruption of calcium
that's going to lead to excessive
swelling, excessive pressure,
and that's going to be then
translated as extreme pain.
So that's probably explaining
more muscle soreness
than actually microtrauma.
- Terrific.
I was going to get to breathing
later, but maybe just for now,
if we can do a brief little
foray into breathing,
as it relates to weight training.
Is there a prescriptive for how to breathe
during resistance training?
Here I'm thinking with weights,
not necessarily body
weight, only movements,
although I suppose it could be,
that applies 75% of the
time to 75% of the people.
What I was taught, and I'm
hoping you're going to tell me
this was wrong, 'cause then there might be
more benefits awaiting me,
is that I should exhale on the effort
and inhale on the lesser
effort portion of an exercise.
Is that true?
Is there a better way to breathe?
- There is a better way to think about it.
So number one, if you
can breathe and brace,
then this conversation goes away.
So if you can maintain intramuscular,
intra-abdominal pressure while breathing,
then I don't really care when you breathe.
Very challenging to do
at very heavy weights.
If we flag this on two
areas of a paradigm.
Paradigm one over here, you're
going to do a set of 30,
and you're going to do front squats
where a barbell is sitting on your throat.
If you don't take a breath,
like this is going to end
one way and one way only.
You passing out.
Clearly has to be some breathing strategy.
The other end of the spectrum is
let's say you're going
to do a vertical jump.
You don't need any amount of breath there,
it's never going to happen, right?
The question is, what about in the middle?
Right?
So I'm doing some sort of
strength training there.
Well, number one, make sure you're braced
and then you can get away with
less need to worry about it.
In general, a decent strategy
is to maintain a breath hold
during the lowering, or eccentric,
or most dangerous part of the movement,
and then you can exhale
on the concentric portion.
So if the bench presses are
example, if you held in, braced,
lowered it under control,
and now started the
concentric pushing away force,
and then you wanted to take an expiration,
during the last half of
the concentric portion,
that's an okay strategy.
If you're going to do a single rep,
you don't need to worry about it.
You can just avoid or
omit breathing entirely.
You're going to be just fine.
If you're doing more than that,
especially three to four
to five to seven, eight,
you're going to have to have
some breathing strategy.
A very common one is
probably every third breath
I'm going to do like [gasping],
exhale on the third.
Reset and re-breathe.
Something like that.
If you feel like you need
to breathe after every one,
that's okay, but it's
going to get wasteful,
'cause you have to take
time in between reps
of sitting there.
If it's a squat, that's
different, versus a deadlift,
if you're resting at the bottom.
So there is a little bit of game here.
So in general though, is that 75,
75 kind of really thrown
out, you threw out.
Breathe in, do the lowering,
and exhale on the out.
If you have to less reps,
don't worry about it.
More reps, then you need to come up with
some sort of breathing strategy.
- How about breathing in between sets,
and maybe even after the workout?
- Yeah.
- This is something I think
a lot of people overlook,
like and because the,
it is the case that
recovery has to do both with
the specific activation and to muscles,
and the nervous system,
but also the attacks on the nervous system
can also take place between sets.
I mean, if you're really
geared up between sets
and you get adrenaline, you know,
as high in between sets or close to it
as you are during your sets,
you can imagine that the
recovery would take longer.
Or at least that you're
not spending adrenaline
in the most efficient way,
if there is such a thing.
- Yeah, fair.
You're not going to see any
athlete that I work with
just breathe in between.
Whether it's in between
innings or in between rounds,
every single one of them's going
to go back, sit in the stool,
and they're going to immediately
be into a breathing routine.
A very intentional one.
They're a little bit
different for every athlete,
depending on the sport.
Even a PGA golfer, there's going
to be a, we just hit our ball,
we're moving to the next one,
we're going to go into
our breathing strategy.
Every one of 'em.
It's a huge area of potential
benefit and consequence,
if you're just ignoring it.
In general, we want to do
any sort of calming breath,
we want to restore.
It depends on what we're combating.
Are we combating low oxygen or high CO2?
So that strategy is going to
be a little bit different.
But in general, that is
a huge time opportunity
to get better.
In fact, people can go back and listen to
some of your earlier episodes
where you talked about,
well you have spoken about,
I think, on this show,
when neuroplasticity works,
and if you're losing that
opportunity, post-exercise,
you're leaving gains on
the table if you will.
So not only are you going to see
the athletes that I work with
mostly have a breathing
strategy in competition.
We're not going to just
finish a workout, high five,
drink water, and walk out of the gym.
There will be a down regulation strategy
that is heavily involved with
some sort of light control,
as well as breath control.
The individual prescription on that,
there's a ton of variation
with what you can do.
The easiest thing is do
something that calms you down.
Most likely that's going
to be moved towards
as much nasal breathing
as you can possibly do.
And a really easy rule of
thumb is a double exhale length
relative to inhale.
So if you need to take a
like four second inhale,
double that time and breathe
out for eight seconds.
Box breathing is fine.
So equal inhale, equal hold,
equal exhale, equal hold.
So four second inhale, four second hold,
et cetera, et cetera.
A triangle is fine too.
There's a lot of ways, you
can get really complicated,
like what Brian McKenzie will do, and Rob,
and those guys have, you
can get all kinds of systems
for inhale exhale control
and it can be optimized.
But some strategy of calm.
We're going to almost always
put you on your back or close,
and then we're going to cover light.
We can do some, like we've
done actually a number of
musical interventions as well,
but you can just as simple
as sit down in a locker room
if you have to, and just
breathe for five minutes.
That alone is going to be productive.
- That's great.
If you're breathing in the
locker room for five minutes,
I suggest closing your eyes,
or you get some funny looks,
and if, you'll still get funny looks,
but you won't see people looking at you.
- Yeah, exactly.
- I love this, and I started doing this
because you and Brian McKenzie
informed me about this,
and it completely changed
the rate of recovery for me.
I realized that I was leaving workouts,
both endurance workouts and
strength hypertrophy workouts
feeling great, but looking at my phone,
getting right into email and meetings.
- Ooh, ooh, rough,
- Not concentrating
on my breathing.
And all I did was to introduce
a, on your recommendation,
a five minute down regulation.
So exhale emphasized breathing,
a bunch of different varieties,
physiological size, box breathing,
exhale emphasized, twice as
long as the inhale component
for five minutes.
And I noticed two things.
One, I recovered more
quickly, workout to workout,
no question about it.
- [Andy] Yeah.
- The numbers told me that.
And the other is that I used
to have this dip in energy
that would occur three or four
hours after a hard workout.
And I always thought that
had to do with the fact that
I'd generally eaten a meal
at some point post-workout.
Turns out it wasn't the meal at all.
- Yeah.
- It's that adrenaline ramp
up during the workouts,
I wasn't clamping that at the end.
And so I think eventually it's crashed,
and then three or four hours later
I'm having a hard time even
reading what's on the screen
on my computer, thinking
maybe it's the screen.
Maybe it was what I ate for lunch.
Turns out, the down regulations allowed me
to work through the afternoon
with no issues whatsoever.
It's really been quite powerful,
and so I'm grateful to you for that.
And I think this is something
that I think 98% of people
are not doing, and it's only five minutes.
- You don't even have to do five.
Give me three.
If you really have to
push it, give me three.
And you can even do
this, you can save time.
You can do this in the
shower if you have to.
So you're done, you're finished.
Drink of water, whatever has to be,
and you're getting in a
shower, you're getting ready.
Just give me three minutes in the shower.
It's not ideal, but as little as that,
it can pay huge dividends.
You need some sort of internal
signal that we're safe.
Like throttle down here,
we're going to move on.
That has to happen.
I could go on and on here,
but I think we're making the same point
kind of over and over again.
It's a big deal and do it.
- Yeah, and you're saving energy.
I mean, the energy here is neural energy.
I think fighters do this,
good fighters learn to
do this between rounds.
Sprinters learn to do this between events.
I think humans should learn
how to do this between any,
you know, sort of interval type activity,
including work, social engagement.
- Yeah, I was going to say-
- I mean, this is
such a powerful tool.
- Do this for one minute,
after every important,
whether it's an individual
high volatile interaction,
or if it's a, you just did a
nice 45 minute sprint to work
and you're deep into it or whatever, fine.
Just gimme one minute.
Set your alarm, just one minute,
and that also will pay dividends.
- I love it, and as I said,
it's made a outsize different,
positive difference on my training,
but also activities outside my training.
Which is, for me, I'm not
a professional athlete,
I train for health and 'cause I enjoy it,
but when a really hard
workout starts to interfere
with the ability to do
the other things in life,
- Of course.
- that's not
a good situation.
So this is really terrific.
There's a lot more in
each of those categories
of strength and hypertrophy,
but you've given us a tremendous amount
of valuable information there.
Maybe now would be a good
time to shift to endurance,
and of the four types of endurance,
and maybe you could
remind us what those are,
what do you think are the two
that most people are seeking
or pursuing in terms of
health and aesthetics, right?
I realize that we probably
have athletes out there
as well, but when I think
health and aesthetics,
I think, okay, the ability
to do sustained endurance,
30 plus minutes of some ongoing activity,
how does one maximize that work?
What are the modifiable variables?
And then maybe you could tell us
what the other major category is,
that people ought to have in their kit.
- Okay.
So starting off with exercise choice.
One thing, as soon as we cross
into the endurance world,
and this is true for all
four of those categories,
exercise choice needs to be very concerned
with eccentric landing, right?
So you don't need to avoid it,
but you need to recognize it,
relative or compare it against
those other strength and speed ones.
The volume is low on those ones.
So if you have some eccentric
absorption it's okay.
But as we sort of talked
about five minutes ago,
more eccentric means greater chance
of muscle damage soreness.
So if you take something and
magnify it across 30 minutes,
or even five minutes,
but of maximum exertion,
you have a recipe for blowing up.
You can imagine I haven't run in forever,
and I've just, I've listened
to this "Huberman Lab Podcast"
and I'm okay,
I'm going to get into my
zone two training, whatever.
And I start jogging, I'm
going to do, you know,
I remember when I was, I
used to be able to do 25,
and you just do a 25 minute jog.
The amount of eccentric
landing that just occurred
on every single step, because
you're never, with running,
even slow running,
you never have two feet on
the ground at the same time.
So it is a one foot land, one foot land,
your entire body mass plus
gravity onto one leg at a time,
repeated now hundreds of times.
That eccentric landing is going
to cause tremendous soreness.
Your quads are going to go.
You're probably going to get
shin splints, which is what,
this isn't, those are entirely
caused by eccentric landing,
and when the tissue is not
ready to tolerate that.
If you're not landing correctly,
this is when knee pain happens, back pain,
shoulder, neck pain, 'cause
of movement compensation.
So anytime we start pressing to fatigue,
let's be very concerned with there.
So my initial recommendation is,
start with activities exercise choice-wise
that are mostly concentric based.
So think about a cycle.
So when you're riding on a
bike, you're pushing the pedal,
but you're never landing and absorbing it.
So you could go out and
do a 45 minute bike ride,
and you're not going to get that sore
because there's not a
lot of eccentric load.
Swimming, similar thing here, right?
There's some eccentrics when
your hand hits the water,
but fairly minimal.
It's mostly a push push,
push, push, push, no load.
Rowing, similar thing.
Mostly concentric.
Pushing a sled is fantastic.
Going uphill, running or
even walking hard uphill,
all good, 'cause they're
very minimal landing
relative to like running downhill,
which would be a very,
very bad idea to start.
So if you're first
jumping into these things,
progress your volume for
endurance very slowly,
if it involves eccentric landing.
A really bad strategy
would be to jump in and do
say circuit training class
that involves a bunch of box jumps, right?
This is not a good way
to do your first foray into conditioning.
You're going to get incredibly sore
because you're jumping and landing.
You're now looking at
three to 10 X body weight
in terms of absorption,
with a single land,
even if you're just jumping.
So be careful of that,
in any of those endurance
areas of exercise choice.
So what to pick.
Pick the one that you are most
technically proficient in,
because you're going to do it a lot.
It's going to be a lot of repetitions.
Whatever one you feel the most joy in.
If that's rowing, great.
If that's pushing a sled,
it doesn't really matter.
You can do this actually with weights.
This is our preferred way, by
the way, with our athletes.
So we might do a 30 minute circuit
where we do a five minute farmer's carry
with a pretty light weight.
So you're just going to carry
some weights in your hand,
and you're just going to
walk up and down the street
for five minutes.
You're going to set that down
and then you're going to do
say a three minute plank,
and then you're going to pick that up
and you're going to do body weight squats.
Like slowly and just tempo.
And you're going to do a
handful of different exercises,
so the athletes don't get super bored.
Or a very simple one,
if a 30 minute workout,
10 minutes on a treadmill,
10 minutes on a bike,
10 minutes on a rower.
But for those of you
that are like oh my God,
I can't do 30 straight
minutes running, cool,
break it up into three or
four different exercises
that are all fairly safe.
So that's how I would do
that long duration piece.
- Got it.
- For exercise choice.
- And then in terms of heart
rate during that period,
I mean how much attention
should we pay to this?
The kind of very broad
prescriptive I've thrown out
on this podcast a few times,
based on my read of the literature,
is for most people that
are oriented toward health,
including people that are working on
size and strength gains,
hypertrophy and strength of course,
that getting 150 to 180 minutes
of so-called zone two cardio,
- Yeah.
- can just barely have a conversation,
but if one were to push any harder,
you wouldn't be able
to, that kind of thing.
It's just as a kind of
a generic recommendation
that almost everybody should follow,
in order to just keep their
cardiovascular system healthy.
But I know there's a lot of nuance there,
and some people would like to
be able to run continuously
for an hour at speed, right?
- Yeah.
- Obviously not sprinting.
But what are some of the finer points
on long distance endurance?
And how often should one do it?
- Okay.
Frequency, you could
do it as daily, right?
- [Andrew] Even when doing
strength and hypertrophy?
- No question.
- Well that, I think,
is an important point
for people to hear,
'cause a lot of people
think that they are going to
greatly diminish their
strength and hypertrophy gains,
as it's often called, by
doing zone two cardio.
- Zone two, you have almost no ability
to block your hypertrophy.
Zone two, truly, if it's
really within that category,
if you're talking about
conversational pace, there is very,
in fact there is strong reason to think
that is not going to influence hypertrophy
for the overwhelming majority of people.
- It might even help it
by increasing blood flow
to the various-
- Absolutely.
- Does it matter?
Let's say someone's doing primarily
strength and hypertrophy.
Their primary goals are
strength and hypertrophy.
And then they're going to do,
they're going to hit
that 150 to 180 minutes
of zone two cardio per week.
Assuming they're breaking that up
into three or four sessions.
Does it matter if they
do it in the same workout
before or after?
Does that matter?
I tend to do, just by way
of example for people,
certainly I'm just one example.
I tend to do resistance training one day,
then I'll do zone two cardio the next day,
I jog 'cause that's the thing I prefer.
Then I'll do strength hypertrophy
training the next day,
and then, and jog for my zone two cardio.
And then I take one full day off a week.
I've never actually
done the zone two cardio
on the same day, but were
I to do it on the same day,
would it matter if I
did it before or after
my strength hypertrophy training?
- Not really.
- Okay.
- You're going to be just fine.
The interference effect
is what this is called.
So this is all the way back to 1980,
Bob Hickman's stuff, right,
and he was actually working
in a lab with John Holloszy,
who's one of the fathers
of exercise biochemistry.
And sort of the story
goes that Hickman came in,
he was the strength training guy,
and Holloszy and almost all of those
initial exercise physiologists
were conditioning folks, right?
So it's almost always
swimmers and runners.
And that's why a bulk of
the exercise physiology,
historically, is shaped in that direction.
That's what those scientists
were interested in.
So Hickman was there in the lab,
and then how much of this is
myth or not who really knows,
but so the story goes,
that this is sort of
chipping back and forth,
and you know how from a PI to a postdoc,
and kind of that razzing
works a little bit.
And eventually he was like you
got to start running with us,
and he was like you got
to start lifting with me,
and kind of goes back and forth.
Well, you know who wins in that equation?
It's not the postdoc, right?
So it's, the PI gets in and
says, Hickman says, okay fine.
So he starts running with Holloszy
and then eventually starts
to realize I'm getting weak.
I'm losing strength
and like, I just can't.
I think it was his bench press
specifically was going down,
or maybe his squat.
I can't remember.
Who knows if it's even real.
But point is, so he's going along
and so eventually that starts to create
a little bit of animosity,
and he's like actually I don't
think this is good for me,
and then blah, blah, blah.
And so they did what any good
scientists would do and said,
well, let's find out, right?
And so he run a really famous experiment
where he took a group, three groups.
One group did a endurance piece, right,
the steady state cardio.
One group did a strength training piece.
And then the third group did
both of those workouts combined.
Not like a reduction,
so both volumes stacked
on top of each other.
And the results are fairly predictable.
In terms of the endurance group only
had the greatest increases in
VO2 max and endurance markers.
The strength training group
had the greatest increases
in muscle hypertrophy.
But where the interesting part was,
and where this whole field
started, was the combined group.
So this is concurrent training
is what it's generally called.
So you're doing concurrent things.
And typically that means
hypertrophy and strength
stacked on top of some
steady state endurance.
- In the same timeframe.
- Same workout.
- Same two hour block.
- [Andy] Or same like week.
It doesn't really, it can be,
- Got it.
- kind of all these.
Well, the concurrent group
saw the same improvements
in VO2 max as the endurance group.
And he is like, well, okay.
So the strength training
did not compromise the
endurance adaptations.
However, they saw much lower
increases in strength than hypertrophy.
And so it was, the conclusion was,
the addition of endurance work
compromised muscle growth
and strength development.
However, the addition of strength training
to your endurance work
will not compromise your endurance gains.
Now that second piece has been shown
countless more times, right?
So if you're an endurance athlete,
adding strength training
is almost always going to
be massively beneficial.
Very little chance of detriment.
This is why every endurance athlete
is going to have some sort of
strength and power component
to their training.
The controversy though came
in the interference effect.
So how much endurance training
really blocks muscular development.
And for years, myself included,
was we preached hard.
Don't do these two
things at the same time.
My friend, my colleague, Kevin Murach
has a really nice review
article with Jimmy Bagley.
Those two guys put this thing
out, you can go read that,
where they cover all these things,
and they've got some
nice figures in there.
But the general answer here is
interference effect is sort of real,
but it's probably greatly overblown.
It matters, so are you
talking about a 20 minute jog
at conversation pace?
That's probably doing very little.
With the assumption that
are you doing an eccentric-based
exercise like running?
Well, then you're going to have
more of an interference
effect than cycling.
That makes a ton of sense,
if you think about it, right?
What's your total energy intake?
If you're eating sufficient calories,
you can still be in an anabolic state.
If the addition of extra
energy expenditure,
it's all it really is, the cardio,
put you in a negative energy state,
it's going to become very
difficult to go through anabolism.
So those things matter.
If you're talking about
doing like running a few laps
around the track as a warmup,
like that's not interference effect.
What we're really talking about
is a big volume performed consistently.
Now after Hickman came out
with this paper in 1980,
people followed it up in the
'90s and 2000s with mechanism.
And we started to look and see,
and we started to see, hey,
there's this cell-signaling pathway
that goes down called mTOR,
and that's what leads to muscle growth.
And then on the other
side of that equation,
there's a thing called AMPK,
which is more associated with
mitochondrial biogenesis and endurance.
And there's this little
molecule in between at the time,
most people would point to TSC2.
Well, turns out AMPK activation is fine.
If you activate mTOR,
has no bearing on AMPK,
but if you activate AMPK,
it's going to activate
TSC2, which inhibit mTOR.
And so it was like we had
practical outcome, i.e. Hickman.
You're going to get weaker.
Now we had mechanism.
So that story became very, very strong
that this interference effect,
and this is how science
should work, right.
When you see mechanism match up
with practical human outcome.
It's a strong-
- That's what you want.
Yeah.
- It was still wrong though.
It just took more science, right?
And this is why we always
have to give science
a bit of time,
and you have to be
willing to follow, right.
And again, even me in the field
who has a practitioner
background and science,
I felt very strongly,
this is a big problem.
It just didn't turn out to be the case.
Enough studies came out
where I'm like, okay,
it's probably not that big a deal.
Unless the movement is
heavily eccentric-based,
the volume is very high.
You're trying to maximize muscle growth,
and energy's not controlled.
If that's not all the case,
interference effect is
probably not something
most people should worry about.
Especially when you compare that
against the well-roundedness
that you need for total
physiological health.
Probably not a big deal.
- Very reassuring for me to hear,
because I do enjoy lifting weights
and I really enjoy running.
And I love running outside.
I believe I used to experience
the interference effect
when I used to do a very
long run on Sundays.
I would just go out for two
hours or something like that.
I don't know that I ate
enough, or who knows.
I always feel like I eat enough or more.
I love to eat.
But that long Sunday run
always made it hard for me
to make progressive gains in strength
and hypertrophy in the gym.
Whereas when I cut that to 30 minutes,
three or four times a week,
I don't see any
interference effect at all.
- Probably very real.
- And I haven't trained
specifically for endurance
in a very long time, so I don't,
I haven't experienced the
non-interference effect,
which as you said before,
most, if not all endurance
athletes probably are,
or at least should be doing
some sort of strength work,
just to keep the undercarriage
strong as I think-
- Yeah, there's a bunch
of reasons, but yeah.
- So what are some protocols
that people could explore
for continuous endurance training?
I mean, I've thrown out this
150 to 180 minute zone two cardio,
but that's really the kind
of kindergarten of endurance.
- Yeah.
- And there, I'm probably being generous.
It's probably the nursery
school of endurance
that everyone should do.
What sorts of other protocols,
I realize that can be very goal-directed,
but is it unreasonable, for instance,
for somebody to do four hours of
continuous endurance training
with intervals in there as well,
to get it kind of all around heart health
and the ability to go long distances?
- Yeah, I'll answer this two ways.
The very first one.
To tackle the long duration endurance is,
how I refer to it.
You asked earlier about heart rate zones.
To me, that's almost totally irrelevant.
It doesn't matter, right?
If you're moving, you're moving.
That's the functional piece here.
If you want to push it and go
at a non-conversational pace,
that has tremendous health benefits.
If you want to do it a
little bit slower, fine.
If you're at the pace where
you can have a conversation
to me, I don't even
count that as exercise.
That's not a pejorative, by the way.
That is just general physical movement.
And it is extraordinarily
clear, you need a lot of that.
You need a lot more of that than we get.
You can do this in a
couple of efficient ways.
Just taking your phone calls moving.
If you've got a 30 minute call every day,
or most days of the week, and
you can do that while moving,
you've checked not that whole box,
but a pretty good chunk of it.
- And that could even be done inside,
- 100%.
- if you're
pacing back and forth.
I'm a big pacer.
- The, yeah, me too.
Like you probably saw me, like
I'm going to walk up and down
all over the place.
Most of the time, when
I'm in my office working,
like I'm shadow boxing,
like I'm doing air squats,
not even intentionally, I'm just like.
- Do you have one of those
treadmills under the desk?
- I don't.
But like every lab I ever
came through, somebody did.
- We did an episode on
workspace optimization,
and the data on those treadmills
are pretty interesting.
They definitely increase alertness,
which for obvious reasons,
even a little bit of
movement is going to generate
- No doubt.
- a little bit of adrenaline.
So pacing around, moving,
taking calls moving,
getting walks when you can.
And then in terms of building endurance,
let's say somebody wants to quote unquote,
get into better shape.
- Yeah.
- They already, may or
may not already have
some size and strength
that they're happy with.
And they just want to get, they
want to improve their health.
- Yeah.
So I can-
- When does that 150,
180 thing tick over into
a different protocol?
- Yeah, okay, so I think
the way that I can outline
a weekly schedule, just as
a conceptual model here.
That long duration stuff
is not even counting,
as I mentioned, right?
It's just a, this is what you need to do
as a human, moving forward.
We haven't improved.
If you're extremely unfit,
you may see some changes in
cardiovascular health there,
but for the most part,
this is just knocking out the
general physical practice,
you need to be higher functioning.
So whatever that time domain
is, I don't really care.
It's not a huge concern of mine.
What I think you need
to hit are these nodes.
You need to do something once a week,
that gets you to a maximum heart rate.
Now I don't have to
literally mean max but close.
- So this means really sucking for air.
- Really, like as high
as you can possibly get.
You can wear a heart
rate monitor if you want.
But maximum heart rate,
the rough equation we say
is 220 minus your age.
So if you're 40 years old,
your maximum heart rate is probably about
180 beats per minute.
Now I can tell you flat out right now,
my max heart rate is close to 210,
which means I'm 10-years-old.
So take that number with a grain of salt.
I have had a bunch of
professional athletes
who are in their 20s, and
their max heart rate's 175.
And they are in way
better shape than I am.
So maximum heart rate
is not a good proxy for physical fitness.
It's a rough number.
An easy way to do it is if
you have a heart rate monitor
or anything like that,
do the hardest workout
you can possibly do,
see what the highest number you get is,
and assume that's close.
If you want to just start
at 220 minus your age,
that's fine too.
Do something though where
you're like, yep, this is death.
Like this is really, really challenging.
- For how long?
- However long that takes you.
That can be a 30 second go on an Airdyne
or Air Assault bike.
That could be a, do one of those things
where you kind of like sprint,
run as hard as you can during
the straightaway on a track,
and then walk the corners.
Kind of an old classic,
when you and I were
kids, interval training.
- They don't do that anymore.
- I guess, I don't know, I don't
hear anybody talk about it.
- In PE class we had to change,
and if you didn't bring running shoes,
you had to do it barefoot.
- Oh, I love it!
I love your teacher.
- Yeah, it wasn't a, our
football, basketball,
baseball teams weren't that good,
but anything like running cross country,
just 'cause of where I grew up.
- Oh yeah.
- We had brutal coaches.
So yeah, they'd make
all kids do these runs.
- Yeah, so it can be in
the 30 probably seconds
at a minimum.
It's hard to get you to
a true heart rate max
in shorter than 30 seconds.
You can get to total
suck in under 20 seconds,
but getting to a true heart rate max
is probably going to take
more than 30 seconds.
So it doesn't really
matter what you want to do.
It can be, again, a sprint uphill.
It could be, we were talking,
it could be burpees to death.
You know like, whatever
you want to do, just-
- Although those have an
eccentric component, right?
- Yeah, they do.
No question about it.
But if you did-
- Not to actual death, by the way.
- If you just did I'm going
to do as many burpees as I can
for 90 seconds,
it probably won't take
you much longer than that
to get close to
max workout.
- And is that
the whole workout?
- [Andy] Could be.
- So once a week, get to max heart rate.
- Touch it.
- I love it.
- Touch it.
It's not the best, but it'll work.
- And what are the specific
benefits that that provides?
- Okay, so earlier in our chat,
we outlined the rule of specificity.
Specific adaptation to impose to man.
If you're never getting
to that high of a pace,
you're never, it would be
like trying to get stronger,
but only going to 60%
So every cardiovascular
adaptation that occurs
with cardiovascular training,
is just simply going to get
to the top end by doing this.
So if you just start at the heart itself.
Stroke volume increases.
So this is the amount of blood
that's kicked out per contraction.
Cardiac output.
Resting heart rate.
If you go to the endothelial function,
you're talking about nitric oxide release.
Endothelial health in general.
Capillary, mitochondria, all the way down.
Like you just walk
through the whole system.
Pulmonary exchange to the lungs.
All of those are going to benefit
by being challenged to their maximum.
- They also teach you
where your vomit reflex is.
- Yeah, there you go.
Right.
- Let's hope not.
- Stress is what causes adaptation, right?
So if you push your, okay,
here's the difference.
If you did 25 minutes of steady state,
you're not challenging the same thing
as what we just talked about.
The way that I explain this is
if you understand the point
of physiological failure,
then you understand the
place of adaptation.
That's it.
So if you and I both go run on a,
we both did a VO2 max test.
So a classic VO2 max test is going to take
eight to 12 minutes,
and it's going to look
something like this.
We're going to get on a
treadmill, and we're going to run.
And every minute
I'm going to just slightly
increase that treadmill,
either the speed or the grade.
Most of the time, it's the speed, right?
So we get to a high grade,
say 10% grade or something,
and then we go five miles
per hour, 5.2, 5.4, 5.,
and we just go until
you can't go any longer.
Now let's say you and I did that,
and we had the same exact timeframe,
and so we both went eight minutes.
The time that you last
is not the thing that
we care about, right?
It's the volume of oxygen
that you breathe out
is what determines it.
So let's say we had the same time domain
and we had the same VO2 max.
Let's say they were both
50 milliliters per kilogram per minute,
which is like a okay number,
but that's nothing to be
extremely proud about.
Just because we have the same number
does not mean we have the same point
of physiological failure.
And this matters because
it's going to answer the
what do I do about it
then question, right?
So if you got off and I started asking you
a series of questions, and you're like,
and I basically said why'd you quit?
Why did you jump off the
treadmill, why'd you stop?
And you were like my chest,
like I couldn't catch my breath.
I thought my heart was going to explode.
Okay, great.
If you ask me and I said
my legs were on fire,
like I was breathing hard but
I couldn't take another step,
this is a very rough
indicator of different places
of physiological disruption.
Now what I've seen a lot with
my professional athletes,
especially like fighters.
They're going to generally
fail on their legs,
because they don't often do
a lot of strength training
in their legs.
They don't do a lot of leg work.
They're fighting on their
back, literally, a lot,
or on top, or on their knees.
So their legs tend to
give out before there.
Someone who fails in the
cardiovascular system,
like say you did a lot of leg training,
typically like an endurance athlete who's,
that's not going to be their issue.
It's just going to be they're
going to reach a heart rate
and ventilation threshold that
they can no longer handle.
If I put you on the exact
same training protocols,
it's not going to be as effective
because you're going to
always fail at your legs
and they're going to always fail
at their cardiovascular system.
I need to flip that, right?
I need to put you in a position
to where you can reach a true heart rate
or ventilation challenge,
while your legs are
still hanging in there.
Or the opposite.
So the training protocol is
based on that point of failure.
The adaptation is in the same thing.
So if you are failing
because of your legs,
then you might see a greater
increase in capillarization
in your legs,
relative to somebody else who's failing in
their cardiovascular system.
They may see a greater change in something
on that side of the equation.
So it matters how you're
failing, at all times.
- What I love about this is that it's,
it sounds like it's like a thermometer
for where one is weak and needs work,
but also provides a stimulus
to improve the very thing that you need.
- That's the trick, right?
- That you need support in.
So to just get real brass tacks about it,
it would be once a week.
- Okay, yeah.
- 90 seconds near maximum heart rate.
- I'll make it easier.
- Could I do more?
Could I, you know?
- Oh yeah.
- Could I do five or six
of those 90 second bouts?
- No question.
You can do, as long as you
touch that max heart rate,
I'm good, right?
Ideal world, probably four to eight.
- In that single session.
- Ideal.
- Okay.
- Right.
If that takes you 20 seconds
or 90 seconds, it's fine.
If you want to do 30 on, 30 off.
You want to do 20 on 40 off, 40 on 20 off,
those numbers don't matter.
- And is there an
interference effect of this
on the other sorts of training
that we've talked about?
- It actually tends to be complementary.
The evidence available suggests that
this high interval stuff is
more likely to be complementary
to hypertrophy training,
probably because of lactate,
and some other cool things,
which are very beneficial molecules
that people don't understand.
They think it's bad,
it's actually a hugely beneficial thing.
It can be interference.
It can provide an interference
if calories are not accounted for,
if rest is not accounted
for, and other things.
But in general, it's probably okay.
I wouldn't add it to your
equation if you don't need it,
for maximizing hypertrophy.
But for the person who wants to just get
well rounded physiology,
yeah I wouldn't hesitate to do these,
even in the same session
or different sessions.
- Terrific.
And if that's done once a week,
and the 150 to 180 minutes or
so of zone two cardio is done,
you know, in the rest of the week,
person's doing their strength
and hypertrophy training
we would hope, what other
sorts of endurance practices
could one incorporate.
You mentioned muscular
endurance, like the ability,
would like a wall sit or
the ability to do a plank.
Is that something, is
that useful for anything?
- Yes.
- Be doing planks and wall sitting?
- No no, it's extraordinarily useful.
Let's hold on muscular endurance.
I want to finish one
more thing on this side.
So if we're building
this week of endurance,
once a week hit that number,
if you can do repeated bouts,
we talked four to eight, that's fantastic.
If you can't manage the
mental energy every week,
do it every other week.
It's still very good, right?
'Cause I get it.
Like I'm a working person too,
and sometimes you're just like, I cannot.
Those workouts feel incredible
afterwards, but man,
they are daunting.
If you love this stuff, you
could do it four times a week.
If you hate it though,
it's not realistic to think
you're going to be able to knock this out.
You're going to end up doing 70, 80%,
which is not going to get you the benefit.
So just don't do it.
- You really have to hit that ceiling.
- [Andy] You've got to get up there.
Close.
- Have someone chase,
I always say, you know,
when doing this kind of work,
in my mind I'm thinking that
I'm basically being chased by somebody
with a syringe full of poison.
- Yep.
- And while there are other
ways out of the situation,
and for the benefit of
what we're talking about,
the one I'm referring to is to just run.
- Yep.
- Yeah.
- My motivation is typically,
if you just get this done,
we're done in a couple of minutes.
Just get it done.
Like don't go here if
you're not going to do it,
but when you show up, check in,
and it's over really quickly.
- Breathing down regulation afterwards.
- Hundred percent.
You have to, right.
It's a huge key.
So if you absolutely can't do
it, do it every other week.
That's twice a month.
Give me twice a month.
Can be done on the road,
can be done in 20 minutes.
Like do a really good thorough warmup.
Don't just jump into those,
by the way, right away.
It's not going to be as beneficial.
Really nice, good sweat broke.
A really good warmup.
And then give me four minutes of hard work
and we're done, right?
Get out of there.
If you want to use like a
bath or hot thermal stress
to kind of like aid in
that warmup process, fine.
Get in the sauna, get in a
hot bath, get really hot,
get up there, warm up, knock it out.
Whole thing is 20 minutes,
plus five minutes breathing.
You're out of there.
- I'm going to start doing this.
- It's so better, you
got a bike right there.
- Yeah, I've got all,
every room in this studio
has a different piece
of equipment, it seems.
- So, I want that once a week,
realistically every
other week if I have to.
I want that physical activity piece,
call it whatever you
want, long duration thing.
Ideally you'll do as much of
that through your nose only.
You're not going to be able
to do the interval stuff
at nose only.
Don't even try.
But if you can go that
whole 30 minute time,
or 20 or 40 minutes or
whatever it's going to be,
that's actually a good
way to regulate intensity.
So go as hard as you can,
while still being able to
breathe through your nose only.
If you have to open up your
mouth a little bit, fine,
but try to stay there.
What you'll see is very quickly,
you'll be able to
increase your work output
while just breathing through your nose,
which has a bunch of
other beyond benefits.
The other piece I want is
this middle ground, which is,
can you sustain hard work for eight to 12,
maybe as little as four minutes?
I'll give you four to 12 minutes.
This doesn't have to be quite
as high as the first one.
You don't have to get to a heart end max,
but can you get somewhere
in the 80% range,
and can you hold that for four minutes?
Maybe gimme two minutes,
two minutes of rest,
and do that twice.
Something like that.
Ideal situation is what
a runner would do is like
what we'll call mile repeats,
'cause they're running
four or five minute miles.
Whatever time it takes them to finish,
they're going to rest that.
So it's a one-to-one work to rest ratio.
So a five minute mile, rest
five minutes, and go again.
That's probably pretty
unrealistic for a lot of folks.
- Well the five minute part
is unrealistic for most folks.
For me it would be eight
minutes, eight minutes.
- Fine.
- [Andrew] Probably
something like that now.
- Well in your particular
case, just do the 800 meter.
So do 800 meters.
Do something that takes
two to six minutes of work.
It is a lower intensity
than the max stuff,
but is a much higher workload.
That is probably going to give you,
you might even argue the
most cardiovascular benefit,
because it is sustained work output.
And that's very critical.
The downside of kind of like
that conversational pace.
It's physical activity, it's
movement, it's blood flow,
it's lymphatic drainage,
it's not very cardiovascularly
challenging though.
You're just not going
to get an optimal health
from just walking actively.
- So two to six minutes of-
- Hard work.
- of hard work,
with then an equivalent
amount of rest in between,
and then repeat how many times.
- Once, if you have to.
If it needs to be one rep,
if it needs to be a six minute thing,
and then down regulate breathe.
Twice, if you can do that,
six times, eight times,
like whatever you can really do.
And you can just take that
as long of the training
session as you want, or short.
Exercise choice could
be whatever you want.
So again, you can do sled pushes,
or it could be a kettlebell circuit,
or any combination of
things where you're just,
you're working and you're
not giving yourself a break.
You have got to be able to hold on
at a very high waste
product production level,
as well as a high demand for
energy, and then bring it down.
- And breathing during
this two to six minutes
of hard output is mainly through the nose,
or combination nose and mouth,
or is that getting too technical?
- Well, it's probably, like I like it,
but you tell me if it's too technical.
You're going to try to maintain
nasal only as much as you can,
but you're going to lose it at some point.
You can go through their,
Brian and Rob's gear system,
and learn more, and
then you can kind of see
what gear to be in,
if you have to go nose in mouth
out, or something like that.
But I don't really care too
much, honestly, in that range.
I'm getting most of my
nasal only stuff at night,
and training and everything.
So if you have to open
up the throttle there
to get the work done, that's okay.
Oh, then we'll actually go to
your, answer your question,
which was muscular endurance.
Let's go back to that piece.
Muscular endurance is incredibly important
for general maintenance of joint health.
In other words, you have got,
form follows function, right?
That's a very classic
science-y physiology saying,
meaning you've got a couple
of different, there's a bunch,
but to make it easy, two
different types of muscle fibers,
fast twitch and slow twitch.
Fast twitch fibers tend to be,
but they're not always, bigger.
They contract with a higher velocity,
that's why they are called fast twitch.
But they tend to be more
glycolytic and less fatigable.
Slow twitch tend to be
smaller, though not always.
They are more packed with mitochondria,
they are generally better
at burning fat as fuel,
but contract at lower velocity.
Well we have these two types
so that we can regulate function more.
You have some muscle groups
that were going, oh, sorry,
let me go back up a quick second.
Each individual muscle in a human body
has a combination of some amount of fast
and some amount of slow.
That percentage of fast versus slow
differs from muscle to muscle.
So it also differs from person to person.
Easy example is your calf muscle.
There's three, but there's two
primary muscles in your calf.
One's called the soleus
and one's the gastroc.
The gastroc is the one
where if you take your toe
and point it towards
your face, and then flex,
that's the one that pops out
on the medial side, the inside.
The soleus is what we call
an anti-gravity muscle.
And it is generally about
80% to even 90% slow twitch.
And that's because it's supposed
to be contracted lightly,
all time though.
It's supposed to be on permanently.
It's meant to keep, we
call it anti-gravity,
'cause it's meant to keep
you erect, up and moving.
Your spinal erectors
are supposed to do this,
various muscles for postural
are generally slow twitch muscles.
So they're supposed to be on
at all times, not produce fast,
not produce force, but don't get tired.
The gastroc is the opposite.
It's not activated very often,
but when it's activated,
it's meant for extreme propulsion.
So this gives us the ability
to reach up and scratch our eyeball,
and also punch somebody, right?
We have to be able to
regulate force output,
which is going back to Henneman right?
Controlling what we
use, what we don't use,
while also not wasting energy,
which is the downside of activating
a big threshold motor neuron
is it requires a ton of energy.
So a more efficient mode of energy,
but the total amount
is really, really high.
So muscular endurance
is going to help those
slow twitch muscle fibers
and slow twitch predominant muscles
maintain their working job.
So if you lose your
muscular endurance ability
in your spinal erectors or your calf,
you're going to start
slumping into bad positions.
You're going to be getting,
putting joints in a movement pattern
that they're not going to
be the most happy with.
So it's more than about then
being able to just maintain
a two minute wall squat.
It's about maintaining joint integrity,
and allowing that
musculature to not fatigue
when you ask it to do heavy and fast.
So what I mean by that is,
you've got a whole combination
of muscles in your shoulder,
and we will generally call these like
the rotator cuff muscles.
Well, let's imagine those
slow twitch postural muscles
get fatigued, and they start
to lose contractile tension.
And then you go to do
something heavy or fast,
or in an emergency situation.
Those are already pretty fatigued.
You're going to rely more upon
the fast twitch muscle fibers,
which are there less
for postural integrity.
You're likely to get out of position.
And this is a whole recipe of like, God,
why is my shoulder just hurting?
God, my back.
That's very often a case
of the slow twitch fibers
and the slow twitch muscle
groups losing muscular endurance.
So you need to build that back up,
so that they can control and
hold the joint in the position,
so the fast twitch fibers
can then contract with force.
- I'm hoping that what
I'm going to say next
meets what you said accurately.
My experience is that getting
injured lifting weights,
or even doing house work or yard work,
almost always happens when
I'm not paying attention,
fatigued, that's kind of obvious,
but also getting in position
to initiate a movement.
Setting down a weight or
lifting weights off the rack,
or picking up dumbbells.
That's almost always
when I seem to activate
this lower back thing that happens
every six or eight months.
And what you're saying,
if I understand correctly,
is that this muscular endurance
from wall sits or planks,
or things of that sort,
maybe you could give us a
few other examples of these,
can help us because they
actually prepare the system
to do what we normally think of
as the more intense work.
So it's really the, it
sounds like it's really
the architecture of the body,
includes nerves and muscles
and everything else of course,
that lets the limbs and other
kind of action end of the body
do its best work.
Is that a good way-
- Yeah, let it express
its own power and force.
Yep.
We've actually landed
on one of my final laws
of strength and conditioning,
which is, similar to what
I said earlier, right?
So I said, exercises do
not determine adaptations.
Application determines adaptation.
This one sounds similar,
but it's quite different.
There are no good or bad exercises.
There's only good or bad application.
Here's a great example of that, right?
So you do not get hurt dead-lifting
because deadlifts are dangerous.
You only get hurt dead-lifting
because you either got in a bad position.
You got in a bad position
because you either
started in a bad position,
which is one of the things you just said,
or you ended up in a bad position.
You did too much volume.
You did too much intensity.
Or you did too much complexity.
Those last three things all hurt you
because they result in the first one,
which is out of position.
Or another way to think about this is
if it's not a visible change in position,
is stress got put into
a part of the system
that should not absorb that much stress.
So you did too much of it.
You did it too heavy.
You got fatigued.
And so you broke position.
You got too heavy, so you broke position.
You made the exercise too complex,
you put too many moving parts in it,
you put too many joints in it,
and you got out of position.
You did that too many times, over time.
Now we've led to either
an acute injury, bam,
back pops and you fall on the floor.
Or just like, man, this
thing is hurting over time.
All these are result of the same thing.
So you cannot ever blame the exercise
for causing the problem.
It's always either the user or the coach.
You programmed way too much here,
and I can't handle that position.
Or you yourself went into it too much.
So if you're getting these little tweaks
and problems going on,
you've made an error
in one of those things.
So simply back off.
Reduce the complexity, right?
Give yourself more
stability, less moving parts.
Do less volume.
Do less intensity.
In fact, if you look at the people
from the physical therapy world,
in terms of the pain literature,
it's very clear that
just stopping a movement
is very rarely going to work.
What you want to do is
back off all the way down
to just below that threshold
of that's what aggravates it,
and you want to train right there.
That's going to allow
you to do two things.
Number one, tissue tolerance.
And then number two, desensitization.
A lot of pain stuff,
and you can probably speak
a lot about this, is,
especially with things like low back pain,
is there's not necessarily
often much damage there.
It's a lot of hypersensitization
of just pain signal, pain signal.
Omitting the movement entirely
does not get that signal to go away.
You need to train just below
that signal and desensitize it.
So you want to make sure that
the muscular endurance allows you,
you're just putting volume right below
where you start to get a tweak.
And it is beautifully effective for that.
- Yeah, I've experienced this
right side lower back pain
for years, sometimes
shooting down the hip.
The two things that
really helped were doing
anterior tib work.
So hats off to Knees Over
Toes Guy, Ben Patrick,
who has created a lot of
popularity around tib work.
But-
- Turns out joints, full range of motion,
you're in a better spot.
- Yeah, something about
stabilizing the stuff
from the knee down helped my back.
And then also some neck work.
And friends of mine are always teasing me
that my gym is filled with
the most bizarre equipment.
It doesn't look like any other gym.
A lot of it's just
designed to keep me healthy
and still training, but.
I love this idea of getting right at the,
below the threshold of pain activation,
and not simply going
into complete non-action,
or just taking complete rest,
'cause that actually can be detrimental.
I'd love to talk about a few items
that support training of all kinds,
and where there's a lot of confusion
and indeed misconception and mystery.
And just get your take on these.
And I just want to
acknowledge at the outset
that for some of these,
there's a lot of science,
for some of them there's less science,
but there certainly is a lot
of experience in your camp.
And those categories are
cold, heat and hydration.
- Ah!
- Because obviously whether
or not you're a runner,
whether or not you're strength training,
if you're a human being,
you need to hydrate.
But in terms of work output
and physical work output,
maybe even cognitive work output,
maybe tackle hydration first,
There is what I call,
and what I think has
now come to be known as
the Galpin Equation, which you
really do deserve credit for.
Because I think that people realize
that there are a range
of solutions out there,
but there is a really,
a desperate need for
straightforward solutions
that work for 75% of
people 75% of the time.
So hydration is key.
Maybe you could underscore
just how key it is for us.
And then what is the Galpin
Equation, as I call it,
and I think others are
now referring to it.
- Yeah, okay.
Benefits of hydration slash
consequences of mis-hydration.
So whether that's dehydration or overload.
Physiology has hormetic curves.
Right, now typically we think about this
in terms of toxicology.
So what this means is at some point
giving you a dose of something,
testosterone's a very easy example.
If you're clinically deficient
or low in testosterone,
and I give you a little bit,
and it brings you back
into a normal range,
you generally see an improvement
in health and functionality.
Taking you though from
normal to super high,
doesn't always necessarily
provide additional benefit.
In fact, if you continue to go,
it's going to provide detriment, right?
So everything has this curve.
And then some things
are hormetic stressors,
which means like a
small, short, fast insult
is actually beneficial
because then you come back
bigger, faster, stronger.
That's how adaptation works.
Basic hormesis, okay.
Hydration's the same way.
So at the end of the curve
here, if you are under-hydrated,
we all know you could die, right?
You have to have things, in
fact water is the only thing
that is ubiquitous across biologies,
in terms of every living
thing has to have it.
There's no other vitamin,
mineral, nutrient
that is required among all living things,
with the exception of water.
So that should give you
a pretty good indication
of it's [speaking in
foreign language], right?
Like you got to have this thing.
Down here at the bottom,
if you're dehydrated and I give you more,
it's beneficial effects.
However, if you are up the top already
and I continue to give
you more water past that,
now we run into actual problems,
and we can get what's called hyponatremia,
which is more common than people realize.
Nitremia being, actually
not referring to the water,
but the sodium
concentration being too low.
And you've probably talked
about that at length
of why that's an issue.
If sodium potassium balances
inside, outside of cell,
come off, heart stops, right?
Muscle contraction ends,
and all these things.
So you don't want to be
over or under-hydrated.
So understanding this rough equation
I sort of loosely calculated
one day, is helpful for that.
I think the most context is talking about
how much water to drink
throughout the day,
and then how much water
to drink during exercise.
So the very easy answer is
half your body weight in ounces per day,
is a very loose guideline
for total amount of fluid consumption.
So if you weigh 200 pounds,
aim for a hundred ounces of water.
It's like a very easy number.
If you hit that, you're probably, I'd say,
90% of you are good.
90% of the time alone.
If you then go to exercise,
you need to then account for
that fluid loss with exercise.
And in general, you want
to consume 125% to 150%
of the amount of weight you lost in fluid.
In other words, if you worked out
and you were 200 pounds naked,
and you went and did your
workout, and then you dried off,
and you weighed yourself again,
and now you're 198 pounds,
you lost two pounds of water.
That's 32 ounces.
You want to drink back about 125% of that.
So instead of drinking 32 ounces,
I want you to drink 40, 42,
45, like something like this.
'Cause one of the reasons why is,
unless you're drinking
something that is isotonic,
meaning the same exact
concentration in your blood,
and that you're in your fluid,
you're just going to go
closer to that hyponatremia.
You're going to get a bunch
of baroreflextor responses,
and you're going to actually
think you have too much fluid
and you're going to urinate it out.
- What if I'm not weighing
myself before and after workouts?
And is there a shorthand
version of this that,
after training for an hour,
I should drink at least
X number of ounces.
- Yeah that-
- Assuming it's at kind of,
I'm not sweating super heavily.
- Yeah.
In that particular case,
you could probably go something like,
if everyone in the world did,
I don't know, 12 to 20 ounces,
that's probably like pretty decent.
- And they're probably doing that, right?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
And what about electrolytes,
consuming salt, potassium, and magnesium?
- But that thing only works though,
if you're coming in at optimal hydration.
And this is the problem,
this is why you have to,
you have to flag this
starting with a good total
daily amount of water.
Because if you're coming
in and you're like
oh I drank two or three
glasses of water a day,
then you might need to drink
50 or 60 ounces post-workout,
'cause you are way behind.
So that like oh 12 ounces or so works,
if you're already generally
very well hydrated.
- And if people are drinking
four to six glasses of water a day,
but they're also drinking a
lot of caffeine in any form,
then they're going to
be excreting more water,
in most cases, right?
- Well-
- because caffeine's
a diuretic.
- Okay.
It kind of is, but it
kind of isn't either.
It's not the diuretic that
we used to think about it as.
It is still fluid consumption.
So it's only a diuretic if it causes you
to excrete more fluid than
actually was being intake.
So if caffeine intake
is in a normal range,
I don't have to worry
about the diuretic effects.
If someone is drinking
12 cups of coffee a day,
we're going to, or they're taking
caffeine pills or something,
now the excretion is going
to out-kick the coverage.
So now we're going to
have problems, right?
'Cause there's no fluid
consumption with the caffeine pill.
So in general, things
like tea consumption,
like I'm not super worried
about those things.
You can count those towards
your total fluid intake
if you want.
So if you're like, I
drink 60 ounces of water
plus 20 ounces of coffee, and then this,
like you're going to add that all up
and you're going to be totally okay.
So natural, you also have problems with
synthetic forms of caffeine
versus natural forms of caffeine.
Natural forms are pretty okay.
They'll be just fine.
- So coffee, tea, et cetera.
- Yeah.
All that stuff.
- Pill form
is where it gets tricky.
- Always.
Like always, right.
So general, just eat real food and things.
You're going to be just fine.
The last piece to consider is
your diet quality matters.
Because the fluid content in
your food can vary wildly.
So something like a bagel
might be five to 10% water,
or something like a
watermelon is 98%, 95%,
something in a huge range.
Even meat is very high
percentage of fluid intake.
Like it's really high.
Even after you cook it,
there's still a lot of fluid in there.
So if you're eating a wholefood,
mostly wholefood-based diet,
your endogenous hydration is
actually pretty high already
just from your fluid.
If you're eating a very
highly processed, dehydrated,
over-salted diet, you're
way low on hydration,
just in your food.
So you have to factor all these things in,
in fact, one of the things
that happens to us constantly
with folks that go from
a like highly processed,
low quality diet, to a high quality one,
is they're just peeing nonstop.
Like what the hell's going on.
I'm like, well you
actually have brought in
60 additional ounces
of water in your diet,
relative to what you used to have.
And you've gone from 10 grams
of sodium there to four,
to two, sometimes one.
Sometimes it gets very low
'cause you're not like salt,
are you salting your food?
No.
Okay.
Well we don't have sodium intake then.
Like we're way down.
So everything that we're
considering is based on that.
So let's assume someone's eating
a pretty well balanced diet.
They're drinking 16 ounces of
water and maybe some caffeine
in coffee and tea, things like that.
We don't exactly know the
optimal amount of sodium
one should intake.
It is very clear, high
sodium concentrations
are still associated with a lot
of negative health outcomes,
especially in combination
with poor physical activity,
in combination with low food quality
and other comorbidities.
That's a very bad thing.
You need to be very
careful about those things.
If everything else is okay,
we're okay playing with a
little bit of higher salt.
In fact, you're probably
going to feel better.
You're going to feel
generally pretty good.
You just, it needs to be very clear.
If you are overweight, highly stressed,
and you don't have a lot
of these things ticked off
and you have known comorbidities,
you really need to pay
attention to salt intake.
It can be very nasty.
So that being said,
what we're generally going
to look at in folks is,
are you at least, can we
categorize you as a low sodium
or high sodium sweater?
If so, there's a whole list
of electrolytes you can look,
that are going to have something like
200 to 400 milligrams per serving.
And there's a whole list of these things.
If you're a low sodium sweater,
I'm probably going to send
you after one of those.
If you're a high sodium sweater,
there's a lot of electrolytes supplements
that are closer to six or 800,
even a whole gram per single serving size.
So you want to play with that.
A very-
- How do you know
if you're a low sodium
or high sodium sweater?
We actually have an episode
on salt we put out that,
or is coming out soon if
it hasn't come out already,
which is when you look at the
hazard ratios for salt intake,
basically your probability of
really bad things happen to you
goes way up as you get towards
a lot of sodium intake,
10, 12 grams per day.
- Totally.
- And this is translated to
teaspoons of salt, et cetera.
But also very low sodium
intake is a problem.
- No question about it.
- So it's a,
it's not a perfect U shape.
It's kind of a J shaped curve,
or a kind of hockey
stick shape more or less.
But how would I know if I'm a low sodium
or a high sodium sweater?
- Yeah, so you can get-
- Would I just kind of lick
my sweat or have someone else
do it?
- Well you can.
Find a super friend who'll
lick your sweat for you.
Same how-
- No willing volunteers that I'm aware of,
but would I be able to tell?
- Yep.
You can get sweat testing done.
Actually you have a number of options.
The kind of, the original one
that most of us used in the
background for many years
is called Levelen.
They'll send you out a little
patch, you can wear that,
send it in the lab,
and they'll measure it directly
in the lab and send it back.
It's 150 bucks or-
- Did they bin you into low,
medium, and high sodium?
- They're going to do that, but
they're going to give you very,
they're going to tell you
exactly the milligrams.
And they're going to actually tell you
like what products and stuff
that are exactly matched.
- Do you do this with
professional athletes?
- [Andy] We have many times.
Yeah.
- Interesting.
- You can do a more
consumer grade version.
Gatorade has a patch.
For 25 bucks you can get two of them.
You can put that patch
on your left forearm
and download the Gatorade
app, and you can do a workout,
measure it right there and click it over,
and they'll tell you exactly,
not only high or low,
but again, they'll tell you
the milligrams of sodium
that are in your sweat, and
then you can figure out, again,
kind of high, medium, or low.
- Interesting.
I do much better on a
slightly higher sodium intake.
- [Andy] Most do.
- But in my carbohydrate,
I do eat carbohydrates,
I'm one of those that
it is pretty moderate,
but I try and eat clean foods.
So I'd notice, and I tend to
be slightly low blood pressure.
So again, to reiterate the warning there
that if somebody is pre-hypertension
or has hypertension or obese,
you really do need to be
careful with your sodium intake.
But many people seem to
find that they feel better
when they increase their sodium intake,
and they're still in that healthy portion
of the hazard ratio.
- Most of the athletes,
I would say in general,
are going to go higher in salt.
When they come, we're
going to run their stuff
and we're going to add salt.
Almost always.
Very few times have I gone
ow, we need to cut this back.
One of the exceptions
are the ones that come in
that eat like 14-year-olds.
And I'm like, okay,
you're at 15 milligrams,
or 15 grams a day, 'cause
you're eating nothing but.
- Garbage.
- So we're like, we're going to come down,
you're going to feel way better.
All this bloating and everything
else that's going to happen.
Go down.
You can do that, there are actually more,
there are biosensors that are coming out
that are not available yet,
but they're coming very
soon in this space,
that are going to give you
real-time metrics on salt.
So you can pay attention to those.
I haven't seen one and
used one personally,
so I don't want to espouse
about how good or bad it is,
but I know that those are coming
from a handful of companies.
An easy way to do is
just look at, wear a hat,
or wear some sort of headband or something
and do your workout.
Take it off.
If you see a just huge white band,
or if it's completely clear,
then that's going to tell you.
Big white band, you're
probably a high salt sweater.
Completely clear, very little coming out.
- That's great, and I can see
the posts on Instagram now,
people showing their
salt band from sweating.
- Yeah.
- And obviously salt is so essential
for so many physiological functions.
You don't want too high or too low,
but if you're losing more,
it makes sense you would
need to take in more.
- Yep.
- So half of my body weight
in ounces, as a just
foundation of a fluid intake.
Coffee and tea could be included in that,
but that should probably be mostly water
or things similar to it.
And then during exercise the,
how do I want to think about this again?
Let's say I'm a high salt output,
then I'd want to drink maybe
40 ounces water with or more.
- Yeah, okay.
I'll do this easier.
Let's talk about pre
and mid and post, right?
So what to drink pre,
if you come in having hit
these rules, you're okay.
And pre workout can be as little
as like five or six ounces.
Basically a couple sips of water.
Fine.
If you come in poorly hydrated,
then you maybe need to go more
like 12, but here's the deal.
If you start off a session in a bad spot,
you're not going to catch back up.
Like you just, you're in trouble.
Let's say you come and
you follow direction.
500 milligrams salt before,
500 milligrams after.
A very easy rule.
Pick whatever source you want,
that's a couple of
sprinkles of table salt.
If you want Himalayan, that's
fine, you don't have to.
Himalayan's actually a
fairly low sodium salt,
so it's not the best for this purposes.
If you're a higher salt
sweater, a little bit more.
If you want to go choose an electrolyte,
of which there are infinite,
you can look on the
packet and it'll tell you,
250 milligrams per
serving, or 400, or 600,
or whatever happens,
but around 500, pre 500,
post is a very general rule.
And then during is, thanks to you,
my famous Galpin Equation now,
that is all over the world.
All I did is I took the
literature and I said, okay,
in general, the research
shows pretty clearly
two milligrams per kilogram body weight
over 15 minutes seems to put
you in a pretty good spot.
Most people don't think about
kilograms or milliliters.
So can I just run that
over, and then turns out
it's about your body weight
divided by 30 in ounces.
Like that's all you have-
- Body weight in pounds divided by 30.
- Yeah, exactly, right.
So you weigh 200 pounds, divided by 30,
and that's the number of ounces.
You're going to want to go
every 15 or 20 minutes or so.
- So I'm getting that amount
every 15 to 20 minutes
throughout the training.
And now in the weight room,
that's pretty easy to do.
'Cause there are rest intervals.
But people will need to do
this while running or cycling,
and that can cause a little
bit of gastric distress,
if you're not used to it, is that right?
You can learn to run with
some water in your belly.
- A hundred percent.
The gut is very trainable
in a lot of directions,
but in terms of fluid,
as well as carbohydrate,
which is another thing that
is going to get people,
but that's yeah, very trainable.
It'll be uncomfortable initially,
but you'll quickly get into it.
The better solution for those
folks, just come in hydrated.
And you might not even need any water.
You could probably perform just fine.
So the ones that don't have
as much of an opportunity,
you really have to emphasize walking in.
We have this problem with
like professional golfers.
They have plenty of time to drink water,
but they're so focused on the shot
and there's a lot of variables coming up,
once they hit their shot
and they're moving on to the next one,
they're thinking about,
I mean, they're going over a
scorecard of 185 yards away.
Can I go 184 1/2 yards, can I go 186 yard,
what's the slope of that,
what's the wind up here,
what's the wind up there?
Like they're just thinking,
and they just forget,
even though they have 4 1/2 hours,
so we have to make sure
that they immediately get off the course.
We go right into recovery,
as hard as we possibly can.
They wake up the next morning,
they're in a good spot,
we crush recovery.
And now it's like, hey,
if you can remember to drink this, great.
If not, we're still fine.
If it's not a big deal,
and you have time like in a lifter,
because I deal with that
problem with fighters too.
Like we can only drink so
much in the middle of a fight.
A couple sips over there.
But we can't go mix and.
Two mills.
It's like, can you get
a couple sips in, yeah,
oh shit, forgot like,
it's not going to happen.
So we have to take more of
an emphasis before and after.
So start your recovery
process immediately,
and then come in the next
day, that's your window.
And then whatever you can
get in during the workout,
that's fine too.
If you're a higher salt sweater,
instead of going 500,
500, maybe go 750, 750.
If you have a longer about of exercise,
especially if it's hot or humid,
then you might want to consider
some salt in the workout as well.
And 300 milligrams during
the workout, totally fine.
It's enough.
If it is a really long
workout, and it's really hot,
and you're going to lose pounds during it,
you need a specific strategy.
If you're going to lose less than a pound,
you don't need to worry about it.
It's not going to be enough of a detriment
for you to really care.
So that's kind of a rough rule.
Now, if you're 200 plus pounds,
maybe that number moves from
one pound to two pounds.
But really the number we're looking at
is 1% of your body weight.
If you're losing more than
1% of your body weight,
we need to start caring.
If it's less than 1%,
it's not going to really pay
that much of a difference.
- Okay, so for myself, because
I don't get super technical,
I don't wear any devices
besides a wristwatch.
- It's a nice watch too.
- Thanks.
Yeah I do, very attached to this watch,
or it's attached to me, I suppose.
My body weight in pounds divided by two,
that's what I'm going to try
and get across the entire day
as a kind of baseline.
And then my body weight-
- Oh yeah.
- in pounds divided by 30
during the workout,
every 15 or 20 minutes,
that I'm going to try
and consume that amount.
And then I definitely do better
when I increase the amount of salt
that I'm taking in anywhere from 500 to,
500 milligrams to a gram of salt,
several times a day, actually.
But I'm not eating that often,
which leads me to my
other question, which is,
I prefer to train fasted or semi-fasted,
meaning first thing in the morning
or within an hour or two of waking.
Obviously I've been
fasting while I'm asleep.
Or having not eaten anything
for three or four hours before.
I just feel lighter and
like more energetic.
If that works for me, is
that okay, or should I try,
is it better to eat
something before one trains?
- Personal preference.
Easy, easy answer there.
- Great.
- It depends on of course
how hard you trained, what
the training was like,
what sport you're involved
with, how many total calories,
et cetera, but in general,
personal preference
for the average person.
- Yeah, that probably handles 90% of the
questions about that.
Cold.
Cold showers, ice baths, and
cold immersion up to the neck.
I always preface this by saying
there are not a lot of studies.
There are some, but not a
lot of controlled studies
looking at cold showers,
'cause it's harder to
control the variables
of where people stand.
So I would say if you have access to
a cold immersion of some sort,
ice bath or cold immersion,
great, but if you don't,
cold showers would be the next best thing.
The lore goes that if you do an ice bath
or cold water immersion
after strength or hypertrophy training,
that you are short
circuiting some of that.
The lore also goes that
cold showers might be okay.
And my interpretation of
those data and that discussion
is that all that is probably true,
but I have a hard time
imagining that the effects
are so robust that it
can completely prevent
strength gains and hypertrophy,
such that my stance for myself is
try and do the cold exposure training
away from the strength
and hypertrophy training.
But if you can't do it any other time,
right afterward probably isn't
going to throw my whole system
out of whack and prevent the improvements.
Am I deluding myself?
- A couple of caveats here.
Number one, obviously I have
a personal vested interest in cold.
I've been around this
stuff for a long time,
being involved and being
an advisor for XPT,
and being in this space a long time,
I'm a big believer in cold.
Especially cold water.
- Deliberate cold exposure.
- Hundred percent, right?
So that being said, I do
think getting into an ice bath
immediately after a hypertrophy session
is getting pretty close to
you just shouldn't have done the session.
It is detrimental.
- [Andrew] Good to know.
- I wouldn't do it, I guess is
the most blunt way to put it.
If you're like hey,
like I'm not super concerned
with growing muscle,
and I want these other
things that come with
cold water immersion, fine.
It's not zero, it's not
taking you backwards.
How much does it cut you down?
I don't know.
We don't know, like that'd
be a difficult number
to come up with.
Is it 1% reduction?
No, it's more than that.
Is it a hundred?
Not even close.
I don't know where it lands though.
It's enough though for me to
go in general, best practices,
don't get in the ice
immediately after a workout.
- How long should I wait?
- Well, in theory, the best
answer we could give you
would be four hours,
because of what we talked about
earlier today of going okay.
Immediately, you've got
the signaling cascade
that takes seconds.
You've got gene expression
that's happening
in this rough four hour window.
After the genes have gone off
and now you're just going through
the protein synthesis process,
the signal's already there
and it's gone back down to baseline.
So then reintroducing,
or introducing cold here
is not going to disrupt that signal.
That's a very non-scientifically founded
because we don't know,
at this point at all.
What is very clear though is
if you get off your workout,
go right into the ice,
it's probably 10% attenuation of growth.
I don't know, maybe more,
depends on the person.
Some people, if you look
at the individual data,
it's pretty bad.
It's enough to where it's
like that's a really big deal.
The benefits of the ice, I don't think now
outweigh the benefits of
the hypertrophy training.
- What about cold showers?
- I don't think cold showers
are going to do much.
if you've been in both,
you know that this is like,
we're not playing the same game here.
- Right, an ice bath or
true cold water immersion
up to the neck with limbs
in, for one to five minutes,
is a completely different
stimulus than in the cold shower.
- Especially also compared to
a similar like cryo, right?
It is not even the same thing here.
So in general, I would say,
don't do those cold shower,
I don't really care.
Can you work it out so that you
don't do them the same time?
That would be my hope, right?
I would actually prefer
you do the cold before.
If you really had to do it.
- Certainly will wake you up.
- Oh yeah.
- Get that adrenaline burst.
- No we've played with that
actually years ago, doing that.
There's actually some fun stuff you can do
with the endurance piece, with cold stuff.
But it's totally not
feasible for most people,
'cause you're getting water everywhere,
then you're going to jump on
your bike and just get shit,
and it's just a giant mess.
It's fun, but yeah, I
would say walk away from it
if you can.
That's actually, that's where
I stand based on the data.
Based on my intuition and experience,
I don't think it's a good thing to do.
Now having said that,
that's mostly concerned
with maximizing hypertrophy.
Strength, it's not as clear.
There are some data to show
what actual block strength adaptations,
but because of what we
talked about earlier,
the mechanisms and the
drivers are different.
And so I don't think it's as big a concern
for strength development,
though I would still generally say,
if you can get away with
staying out of the ice
immediately after the workout,
and you can at least wait a few hours,
that's the better approach.
Less concerned with strength,
more concerned with hypertrophy,
in terms of interference effect.
If you can do it on off days,
or before, any other time,
that's the place to land.
- That's generally when I try to do it.
- Yeah.
- I was just kind of
throwing out an extreme case,
'cause I get asked that question a lot.
What about the use of ice
bath or cold water immersion,
or cold shower after endurance training?
- Okay, so a couple of
interesting things here.
You mentioned we don't have
a tremendous amount of data
on cold water immersion overall.
So a lot of this is moving.
There have been some papers to show
that cold water immersion
can actually enhance
mitochondrial biogenesis.
And actually, even for
endurance stuff it's been shown
to cause improvement in
endurance adaptations,
relative to not.
It's not enough for me
to be truly confident
in that statement yet.
I would like to see that repeated,
not that I have a problem with the paper,
the methodology that they
use in that particular study,
but it's just, like this is a weird thing.
So I want to see this repeated more often.
So I have less concern
with doing it immediately
post-endurance, 'cause
you could even argue that
there may be some benefit.
I don't think you need
to go out of your way
to try to make sure you get
into ice immediately afterwards
and thinking you're going to
get some massive adaptation.
We use ice a decent amount,
when I can get athletes to do it.
But this context is different.
Number one, when we're in camp
and we've got a world
title fight coming up,
or something else,
we've just pitched in a
major league baseball game,
I am not concerned about hypertrophy.
I am not even concerned
with strength development.
I am now pushing towards recovery.
There's a paradigm that
I think is important
with all of these things to understand,
which is, are you pushing for
optimization or adaptation?
When you're pushing for adaptation,
you don't want to block
the signal for adaptation.
This means less recovery.
You're not going to feel as good.
And you probably should
be hedging towards stress.
When you're pushing for
optimization, it's the opposite.
So if I'm in season
and I had a pitcher
just throw 125 pitches,
I'm not trying to cause adaptation.
I'm trying to recover
as quickly as possible
because four days from now
we got to do this again.
And I got to do this across 162 games.
You're going to play five
days in a PGA golf tournament,
and you're going to have
to do it again every week
for a bunch of weeks in a row.
I need recovery as fast as I possibly can.
So if I'm blunting adaptation fine,
I'm not actually trying to do something,
I'm trying to optimize.
If you spend all of your time
in one of those two areas,
you're going to have problems.
So you need to be judicious about thinking
is this a point in my
life, or a training cycle,
that I want to cause adaptations?
Or am I trying to optimize?
You spend too much time
in one of the other ones,
again, you're going to have problems.
So that's in generally
how I will treat the ice
for all those adaptations.
- What about heat?
- [Andy] Yeah.
- When, and I'll frame
this question differently
because I'm sure there
are a number of ways
in which heat can short
circuit all sorts of things.
I mean, heat in excess can kill you.
It can shut down fertility.
It can, in excess, right?
It can do all sorts of things,
but it can also increase growth hormone,
increase vasodilation, improve
one's ability to sweat,
which can be very beneficial
in a number of contexts.
- Yep.
- For the typical, for 75%
of people, 75% of the time,
when do you think heat is most useful?
And here I'm referring to
dry sauna or wet sauna.
I'm not specifically
talking about infrared sauna
because the data there are
a little unclear to me.
And I don't even know that,
my sense with infrared saunas
is they don't go hot enough
for my particular taste.
- You and I have a similar taste there.
- Okay, yeah.
- If we're not crushing
200 past I'm not interested.
- Right, and my sense about
infrared sauna is that,
maybe I haven't seen the data, is that,
but that a lot of people like it
'cause they like the way they
look in the infrared sauna.
It feels cool, it feels like
you're doing something unusual.
Now infrared lights are
beneficial for other reasons,
actually for mitochondrial
health and the retinas,
the good data, but infrared sauna to me
it never goes hot enough.
So I'm talking about 200 or
hotter, maybe 180 to 220.
Obviously do what's safe folks,
and heed all the warnings
about pregnant people
not going in saunas, et cetera.
- I assume you're lumping
in hot water immersion-
- Hot water immersion,
so hot baths, hot sauna.
When do you think most
people could leverage sauna
or hot baths to benefit their training
and fitness and health?
- Yeah, okay, I have a
handful of things to say
about this topic.
One of 'em is, you never have
a hard time convincing people
to get hot.
Everyone feels good.
Like yeah, get in a hot bath,
like, can you take more hot showers?
Sure.
Like no problem there, right.
There are a handful of studies
that have looked at this
immediately post, and it seems
to even augment hypertrophy.
- So after hypertrophy training,
getting in the sauna for 20 minutes.
- Yeah, whatever, whatever it needs to be.
We don't have a good titration.
What's the number minutes wise.
We don't have a temperature titration.
- Hot shower would be a second,
would be a weak second best.
- I would say it's a very weak-
- [Andrew] To the hot bath.
- I think a hot bath is
probably a lot closer
to what you're looking for.
It actually kind of goes back
to our initial conversations.
Theoretically, you're just
going to aiding blood flow.
So you're going to put more nutrients in,
more waste product out, metabolic stress,
all that stuff is going through.
So that's the thought anyways,
we're far from knowing,
- Makes sense.
- Plausible, right.
Absolutely plausible.
Something people will do.
Feels good.
Let's say, with cold and hot,
I want to caution you
against a couple of things.
This is true across all physiology,
but you need to be really
careful about moving percentages
from molecular to outcome.
Very careful.
So for example, it's easy to
see a paper that says, okay,
we put you in a hot bath or something,
and we saw a growth hormone increase 300%.
That is not going to
result in 300% increase
in muscle size, right?
In fact, 300% might result
in absolutely no change
in a physical size, right?
And the reason I'm saying this is
because there's a lot
of people in this space
that will misapply the mechanisms.
And they'll grossly overestimate
what these things can do
and what they do do,
because they'll find something like that.
I mean you know this, you've
done enough cellular work too.
In the lab, if I see mTOR
doubled, I think shit,
it didn't work.
I need to see a 10 X
increase before I know
it's even physiologically relevant.
So reading that paper, reading
someone's social media post,
you're like wow, it increased mTOR 38%.
I'm like, well, that didn't work.
And you're like, wow, that's huge.
I'm like, that's not 38%
increase in muscle size.
So that's a very important
point I want to make,
because I'm going to talk about
the benefits here in a second.
But I don't want people
to be fooled into thinking
that this is some crazy miracle.
The same thing with the sauna.
In terms of general health outcomes,
it is clearly a beneficial thing.
This is a really good
idea to get hot a lot.
It is not a substitute
for exercise though.
It's a very important distinction.
If the options are nothing
or sauna, get in the sauna.
Really, really good idea.
If the exchange is though,
I don't need to work out
because I did the sauna, bad.
This is not a winning solution.
- You and I know some maniacs
that actually work out in the sauna.
- Oh, we do.
Yeah, kind of not far away.
- I don't necessarily recommend that.
That actually would probably
kill a large number of people.
But it can be worked-
- Yeah, if they die, they die.
- It can be worked up to.
- [Andy] Yeah.
- Certainly.
- Yeah.
So I want, like every time I
talk about that I flag that,
because it's just too easy
to hear that and go, oh,
well I think Dr. Huberman said,
if I just get in the sauna,
I don't have to work out.
Like no, no, those words have never
come out of his mouth.
- He definitely didn't
say that.
And I'm definitely not
working out in the sauna.
If I'm in the sauna, I'm either
sitting or I'm lying down,
and I'm trying to make it through.
I tend to do three 20 minute
bouts, across the entire week.
So I aim for 60 minutes
per week of heat exposure.
- I would be lying,
- Which is not a ton.
- if I said I've never
worked out in the sauna.
- Oh, so you're one of those.
Yeah, people will do air squats,
they'll bring the Airdyne bike in there.
I look at the sauna as kind of
a time to get lazy and sweat.
- Totally fine.
Going back to your original question.
So potential the plausible aid,
we need to see more research on that
to really get a, do I need
to put this in practice.
I think if you try it, very little harm.
I struggle to see a downside.
If you make sure your
hydration's on point, right,
'cause now you got to factor in the fact
you just kicked out two or three pounds.
If you at 200 plus pounds,
I assume, or roughly,
if you're in the sauna for 20 minutes,
I would imagine you can
do two or three pounds.
- Yeah, I usually, I hover
somewhere around like 225.
And I drink a 32 ounce,
it's water with a electrolyte solution
that's pretty high salt afterwards.
And sometimes during.
And sometimes after that, if
I do it late in the evening,
I'll go to sleep
and I'll wake up in
the middle of the night
just feeling so parched.
It's amazing how much water
one loses in the sauna.
- Like a normal sweat
rate for someone 225,
especially in 20 minutes in a sauna,
I would absolutely expect
you to do three pounds easy,
without like-
- So I should be drinking more?
- Probably.
- Even more water.
- Yeah, you're probably half
the water that you need to get.
- And you mentioned the
possible benefits of doing it
after strength hypertrophy training,
which makes sense for
plausible mechanistic reasons,
no official data there yet.
What about after endurance training?
Assuming somebody hydrates well enough
and they're not overheated
from their endurance work.
- Yeah.
- [Andrew] Could also be of benefit.
- Yeah.
- Wow, so more and more what I'm thinking
the framework here is
in an ideal world, one would
train and then do sauna,
or heat exposure of some kind.
Endurance training or
strength hypertrophy training,
and then do sauna, and then
do cold exposure on off days,
or at least four hours away
from any kind of training,
or if you had to do it close to training,
doing it before training.
- Yeah, I love cold in the morning.
We've actually run this experiment
on professional athletes,
where we do enough tracking
with things like HRV,
which is a global metric of
like overall fatigue, okay.
And you've probably talked
about that before but,
problems with it, but roughly
idea of overall fatigue.
HRV in general, higher the
score the better, right?
So a low HRV is fatigue, right?
Well, if you wake up and
take your HRV in the morning,
and then you get into ice,
what's going to happen is you're
going to see that number plummet.
The second you get out, that's
going to fall off the Earth,
which means roughly you've
moved into a sympathetic place.
Surprising, you get in 30 degree water,
you're going to go very
sympathetic very quickly.
However, if you continue to
watch your HRV for 30, 60, 90,
and up to two to three hours post,
you will generally see
an improved HRV score
relative to where you started.
So it's back to this
hormetic stressor, right?
A really cold, shocking exposure
will be a net result of
you being more relaxed
throughout the day.
In general.
And we've seen that now
like very consistently
across years, with athletes.
So I think it's a great
way to start your day.
You won't need nearly as much coffee
after spending three
minutes in 30 degree water.
- 30 degrees is pretty darn cold.
I was in the ocean this morning
for about three minutes.
It felt, I didn't bring a thermometer,
but it felt like somewhere in the low 50s.
- But 50 and moving is really cold.
- Yeah.
- Water's moving.
- Yeah.
- Right.
That's really cold
- That's right.
The thermal layer that
surrounds you when you sit still
in cold water immersion,
I'm encouraging people now,
if they really, I was, joked that
people like to look real stoic and tough
when they're in there.
Like they're just grinding
through it with no pain at all.
But the stillness is actually
reducing the stimulus.
If they sift around a little bit,
you break up that thermal layer.
That's where the real action is.
- We've joked about this for years.
Like do 50 degrees with
a whirlpool jet on,
now I'm impressed.
'Cause that is hard.
You sit in 35 degree for
three minutes, I guess.
But with XPT I've seen,
I can't even tell you
how many hundreds of people
from all walks of life,
on all age, that we've been able to get
in 30-something degree
water for three minutes.
50 degrees with a whirlpool going,
that number gets very small.
- Yeah, and if you don't
have access to a whirlpool,
this should be reassuring to you, you can,
some people say oh, you know,
I don't have access to ice,
and ice can actually get pretty expensive,
if you're doing a $50 ice bath
- Yeah, it's-
- every day.
So you can fill your bathtub
with cool to cold water,
get in, but just make sure that
you keep sifting your limbs
and it's chilly.
- Yeah.
- And the studies on the very well,
now well established increases
in dopamine and epinephrine
that occur in cold water exposure,
were actually done at an hour
in 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Yeah.
- And so it, you don't
necessarily need it ice cold
or an ice bath.
But immersion is really
better than the cold shower.
The cold shower is kind of a, it's the,
it's kind of the espresso shot version.
- Yep, no it's sort of funny,
'cause if you look at most
of those initial studies
and you think, man, how do
they get people to sign up
to spend 45 minutes in 55 degree water.
55 degrees is cold.
Even if it's not moving
and then they're going to not
spend five minutes in 'em,
they're going to go an hour.
And if you've ever done ice
baths at that temperature,
you know like all right
after a few minutes,
it's not that bad.
But man, that's a protocol.
- Yeah, it's kind of a
cold endurance protocol.
'Cause it's one thing to get in
for one minute to three minutes,
and you know you're getting out.
You could sing a song,
you could do anything
to distract yourself.
But 45 minutes to an hour is intense.
Maybe they, I don't know.
I don't think they paid the subjects.
But anyway, that study was done
- Yeah, you think-
- in Europe,
I forget where it was done.
But anyway, they were hardy subjects.
I want to talk a bit about
over-training and gauging recovery.
So there are a couple methods
that I've heard about,
and that I use, based on
some data that I've seen,
but mainly discussions
with really informed people
like yourself, Brian McKenzie,
Kelly Starrett and others.
The two that I'm aware
of for gauging recovery
of the nervous system and
kind of systemic recovery,
are grip strength,
especially grip strength
on waking in the morning.
And the so-called carbon
dioxide tolerance test.
The ability to do a long controlled exhale
after a few rhythmic deep breaths.
Which I'm assuming taps
into both one's ability
to mechanically control the diaphragm,
but also how well one is
regulating carbon dioxide.
First question is, is
this stuff fiction, fact,
or a combination of kind
of anecdata, as I call it.
Are there any peer-reviewed
published data?
Is your lab working on these things?
And am I deluding myself,
using these tools,
or are they useful?
- It's not fiction at all.
There are, with like CO2 tolerance,
there's less published data.
We've run a study in our lab,
looking at the associations
between the CO2 tolerance
and what we call trait and state anxiety.
And those are in the publication
process, is what I'll say.
- [Andrew] Great.
- So you can't really talk
about that stuff as you know,
until it's out.
But in general I'd say like
there's a reason I'm still doing it.
- Great.
- I'll just leave it at that.
- Yeah, well assuming
it's not a clinical trial,
I mean, I think sharing
preliminary findings is fine,
as long as we highlight
them as preliminary.
- Yeah.
- I'm not a reviewer,
but I look forward to reading the paper.
- Yeah, but, as you know,
scientific ethically,
like you need to be careful
about telling people results
before you've gone through that process.
- Right, which is why I'm flagging this as
these results are not yet passed through
the peer review process.
So you're hearing about
it prior to peer review.
- Yep.
Having said that, there's
enough in that field,
I'm not the first one into that field.
And so I'm very confident
that that's a real thing.
In terms of actual tracking recovery,
the big picture is this.
When we run through a full analysis,
when we have an athlete go through our
biomolecular athlete
program, we're going to run
and we're going to look at
three major categories, okay.
Category one are what we
call visible stressors.
And then we have hidden stressors.
And then we have recovery capacity.
Any time the total stress load
outpaces recovery capacity,
you're either going backwards
in your physical ability,
or you're reducing adaptability.
Now you have levers to pull here.
You can reduce stress intake,
or you can increase recovery capacity.
Right?
What we want in an ideal situation
is to be able to implement
the most stress possible
'cause that's the driver of adaptation.
Recover from that.
Now we get the most adaptation,
and adaptation being simply a change.
Whatever change you want it to be.
That's our gold standard, right?
It's pie in the eye.
Some people have endogenous differences,
they just recover better.
They don't.
There are genetic factors.
But let's talk about the
ones that are manipulatable.
If we go to the stress side of it,
you want the throttle
to be pushed as far down
on the ones you want stress from,
and as far off of the ones
you don't want stress,
so that the adaptation comes
in the exact area you want.
And you're not burning gas
in something you don't care about.
Because you're just,
you're taking that total
stress bucket too high.
Recovery capacity over there.
So here's how you can do that.
You can run some analytics
and measure what we do with everyone,
through these very
comprehensive breakdowns,
to figure out what's
that physiology look like
hidden and visible, and then
what's the recovery capacity.
Once we have that blueprint,
we can now figure out what
are the two or three things
we need to track, that
are these indicators
of what we call performance anchors.
So an anchor is something
that kind of drags behind you
or below you, that slows you down.
The analogy being, let's
say we're going down
one of these amazing canyon roads,
and I won't say which canyon we're in,
so you can stay hidden here.
And your car's going down
at a certain velocity
and you want to go faster.
Most people's first impulse
is to hit the gas, the accelerator.
We want to push.
Well, that's fine, but if
your foot is on the brake
and you push the accelerator,
you might go a little bit faster.
But number one, you're
wasting a lot of literal gas
to go a little bit faster.
And two, you're burning your engine.
You might, you're going to blow.
The easier solution is just
take your foot off the brake.
You're going to go faster
by just stopping yourself.
Then if that's not fast enough,
we can hit the accelerator.
Everyone wants to just push down, right?
More stimulus, more optimization.
Bing, bing, bing, bing, here.
Our first analytics are,
where are these performance anchors?
What's dragging you back?
What's putting down the brake?
I want to move those two or
three things out of the way,
and now let's see how far you get.
Oh, look at that.
Your recovery capacity has gone way up.
Your adaptations are happening faster now.
And we can do more work because
you're recovering quicker.
So we're trying to figure
out in those buckets,
and we have a whole host
of things that we measure,
biomarkers and surveys,
and everything else that we go through,
to find out what's there.
So after we've done that,
now we're just going to track
a few of these recovery
markers along the way
to figure out what's globally happening.
So that could mean grip strength.
I have some folks who are going
to test grip strength daily.
Others, we're going to look
at HRV or combinations.
We may look at performance
metrics like a force plate.
So you're going to do a
vertical jump every single day.
And we're going to see where that's at.
We've used the tap test before,
which is how many times
you can tap your finger
as fast as possible.
It's a rough indicator of
central nervous system.
- In a say one minute interval.
- Exactly.
And this is apps you can do on,
this is like you tap this
finger as fast as you can.
It's going to say hey,
you did 60 taps today
and your average is 75.
- I like that 'cause it taps
into, ha, no pun intended,
into upper motor neuron capacity.
- Hundred percent.
- Because a lot of
things like, like grip strength obviously,
I have to send the deliberate
signal to my hand to grip.
But at some point the lower motor neurons
are going to be taking over
the majority of the work.
Like the signal is probably one and done.
Whereas the tapping is going to be
repetitive sending of signals
from upper motor neurons.
- Yep.
So some of the athletes I work with,
we track blood every day,
we track urine every day,
we track ideally a combination of
subjective and objective measures.
Everything from how
did you feel last night
to environmental sensors of their bedroom.
Full PSGs going on, running
like actual sleep diagnostics,
not an Oura ring, nothing against Oura,
but like full analytics,
and some of 'em it's as
simple as how'd you feel today
and what was your vertical jump, right?
So we're going to put people
in a position to succeed.
We're going to figure out
what's the lever that they need to pull,
as well as what's their aptitude?
What sport are they in?
What can we realistically get away with?
And some of them will
take machines with them
and will do blood every day and urine
and all kinds of stuff,
and some of them it's a lot lower.
- For myself, I'm not,
as I mentioned before,
I'm not a big fan of devices.
I'm trying to wear the wristwatch.
I tend to go off feel, which is not,
it's not the ideal objective
way to gauge things.
But part of my reasoning for this is
my colleague from the psychology
department, Dr. Alia Crum,
has done some studies where they've given,
deliberately given people false
feedback about their sleep.
So told people you didn't sleep very well,
or they've told people
you slept really well,
and performance can be driven
in the expected direction,
based on feedback,
independent of how well
people slept or didn't sleep.
Now that doesn't mean you can take someone
that only slept two hours,
or was up every 30 seconds
'cause of apnea, and tell
them they slept great,
and they're going to perform
great cognitive tasks.
But you can take someone
who slept very well,
tell them that their recovery
quotient wasn't very good,
and their output is going to be worse.
And that's my concern about
a lot of devices out there,
not to name specific devices.
But it's still unclear
to the general public,
what the specific algorithms are
to generate these recovery scores, right?
And so many of the things
that reportedly track sleep,
aren't tracking sleep,
- Not even close.
- they're tracking
heart rate and breathing,
which are correlates of sleep
depth, but that's different.
And again, I'm not knocking those,
I think the sleep
trackers, if nothing else,
have provided a forum whereby
people are very conscious
of getting good sleep.
It's sort of like knowing
the total chloric intake of
your food, people go wow,
I'm actually eating a
lot more than I thought.
- It's calibration.
- Or less, in some cases.
But often the case is that it's more.
So I think for the typical person,
I'm wondering whether or not, like myself,
'cause I'm not a competitive athlete
or certainly not a professional athlete,
competitive with myself I
suppose, but no one else.
Morning pulse rate I
tend to take on waking.
If I wake out of a really stressful dream,
I might relax a little bit and
then just take my pulse rate,
kind of get a range,
and see if it's spiking
for whatever reason.
I don't tend to measure grip strength,
although I've heard you can
just use a classic scale.
- Yeah.
- [Andrew] Old fashioned scale with the-
- Sure.
- Old fashioned.
Or some other more technical
device is probably good,
if there's a low cost one.
- Yeah, they're all low cost.
- And then the carbon dioxide
tolerance test.
- Yeah.
- So we haven't really talked
about that in specific ways.
My understanding of it is
it's four deep slow breaths,
in through the nose, out through the nose,
and then a big inhale, that's max exhale,
and then time duration of
exhale through the nose,
and then stopping the
stopwatch at the point
where lungs are empty.
Not necessarily as long as
one could hold their breath.
Did I get that right?
- Pretty much.
- Okay, and I guess we should
credit you and Brian McKenzie.
- Yeah, those guys.
- Yeah.
- For sure.
- And the folks under Brian's umbrella
for really establishing this
as a really good metric.
When and how can I use the
carbon dioxide tolerance test
to gauge recovery upon
waking, post-training session?
- Yeah.
- Would that be a good time?
- Number one answer is,
whatever you do be consistent.
So do it under the, like
any good science experiment,
do it under the exact same
conditions as you can.
That generally means
somewhere in the morning,
'cause that's when you're
probably going to have
the most control, most stability.
So yeah, like you would take
any HRV or other metric,
wake up, get under
control, get stabilized,
take your metric.
- [Andrew] Got it.
- Going to be pretty good.
- Got it.
Sodium bicarb.
- Yeah.
- Baking soda.
Rumor has it, and data has it,
that it can actually be a
pretty effective training tool.
- Very effective.
- Could you explain a little
bit of about how it works,
and how one might explore
using sodium bicarb
to enhance training output,
in a couple of different contexts?
- Yeah.
So there's a handful of these
ubiquitously effective
supplements for performance.
Sodium bicarbonate's one of them,
and it's a very ingenious
idea 'cause it's so simple.
Effectively, muscle contraction happens
because enzymatic function occurs
within a fairly specific pH range, right?
So if it gets extremely
acidic, it doesn't like it.
And so whether you're running
through aerobic glycolysis
or anaerobic, or anything
else, all these things require,
even ATP hydrolysis requires ATPases.
Enzymes don't function well
outside of this fairly special range.
So what happens is generally fatigue,
the sensations of fatigue
are actually caused by
some signal that hey, we're
starting to run out of pH.
Or we're getting in the wrong range.
You're not out of gas usually,
you're not too low on oxygen.
You're not running low
on muscle glycogen yet.
You're typically going to see signs,
or feel signals of
fatigue way prior to that,
mostly being pH issues.
That being said, what if we
could regulate pH better?
Enter bicarbonate, right?
So without going too far into metabolism,
effectively what happens
is you take an inhale,
and you're mostly breathing in oxygen, O2.
When you exhale your breathing out CO2.
So the difference is you've
gained a carbon somehow.
Well, all of your
carbohydrates in your body
come in the form of long carbon chains.
In fact, that's what a carbohydrate means.
It is a one carbon molecule
that has one water molecule attached.
It's a carbon that has been hydrated.
In the case of like glucose, blood sugar,
let's say six carbon molecule, right?
In terms of fat, which
are the only two places
you're going to get most
of your cellular energy
carbohydrates into fat,
that is also a big long
block in chain of carbons.
So whether you're getting your energy
from fat or carbohydrate, you're
going to split those atoms.
So in other words,
you've got six carbons
attached to each other,
and in this part of
chemistry it's exergonic.
So when you break that carbon bond,
so break one of those
carbons off from the other,
that's going to release energy.
Just like if you had a pencil in here,
and I snapped it and
it'd go bang, and pop.
I broke the bonds that were
connecting that graphite
to the next piece of graphite,
and that released energy.
'Cause I put energy into
the system, et cetera.
Okay.
As a result though, we've now had
say five or six carbons chained together.
We broke one off the end,
which is not how it works,
but making the point.
And now you have one free-floating carbon
used that energy release
to then go make ATP,
to then go make your muscles contract.
But now you've got carbon floating around.
You can associate free-floating carbon
with being at a higher acidic level.
It's not going to happen.
The only way that you're going
to go through this process
is if your body says do we have
an oxygen molecule available
that we can bind this to immediately?
Yes we do.
That carbon attaches to
that oxygen molecule.
You can't just put CO2 in the blood
because of what we just talked about.
So you're going to bind it
through this bicarbonate process.
It's going to go through your blood.
It's going to go into the lungs.
It's going to go back into
its carbon dioxide molecule.
It's going to trans, go through
the alveoli into the lungs
and you're going to exhale.
So you went from carbon to
this bicarbonate system,
back into carbon, exhale.
So inhaled, O2 plants go
the opposite by the way.
So they're going to breathe in the CO2,
they're going to cleave off that carbon,
stack those carbons together,
and that's how they get larger.
In your blood, those six carbon
chains are called glucose.
If we store that in your
muscle, we call it glycogen.
So we take a bunch of glucose
and stack it together.
In a plant, we call that starch.
That's effectively what it is, right?
So you take a bunch of
carbon from the atmosphere,
stuck it all together,
and that's a starch.
If you want to do it in the form of fruit,
we take that starch like from the ground,
you put it up through the tree,
go all the way up to the
top, put it into the flower,
break it up into these
big huge chunks of starch,
into little forms called
fructose or glucose.
That's why fruit has fructose in it,
and that's why tubers and
stuff have starch in them.
Basically starch in an
animal is glycogenesis.
Okay.
All that to say,
if that's happening and
we know that a byproduct
specifically of anaerobic glycolysis
meaning the breakdown of
carbohydrates for fuel,
typically in a very fast pace
with low oxygen availability,
the downside of that
equation is acid production.
We know that that's a problem,
'cause I started the conversation
off there intentionally.
So what if we could
reduce the acid buildup?
Now you know how pH kind of works,
I went and kind of double
negatives there, right?
You don't want too much acid buildup.
Then could we prolong and sustain energy
in a more effective pace,
especially in this anaerobic
interval kind of environment?
And again, that's important
because in those things,
failure is not a result of
running out of fuel or oxygen.
It's a result of fatigue
building up way too quickly.
- Is that also true for
resistance training?
- Uh, depends.
- There's maybe more of
the creatine phosphate system.
- That can be an issue.
It could simply be an
issue of force production.
You just don't have enough force,
least you're not out of energy.
You just can't muster enough force.
You do enough reps, then it's
going to be an issue there.
Creatine phosphate though
would be the big winner, depending.
So to come back a little
bit to the beginning,
and then I'll, I'm circling
this all together intentionally.
All right.
Well, the way that we produce energy
is going to be in two primary categories,
anaerobic and aerobic.
Aerobic meaning with oxygen,
anaerobic meaning without.
In terms of muscle contraction,
you're pretty much talking
about carbohydrates or fat.
Now fat is going to be
exclusively aerobic,
meaning I'm going to use fat
from the entire body, roughly equally.
So you're doing a sprint up a hill,
and your hamstrings or
your glutes or your quads
are on fire.
You're not just going to use the fat
that's directly in those hamstrings.
You're going to lose it
from the entire body.
It has to go through lipolysis,
so it's in this stored
form in adipose tissue.
It's got to get broken
down, put into blood.
Blood's going to have
to go through your body,
get taken up into muscle,
taken up through muscle
into the mitochondria.
Then we're going to have
to go through this process
called beta-oxidation.
So remember, carbohydrates
and glucose especially
is a six carbon molecule.
Fat, if it's in the
form of a triglyceride,
it is a three carbon
glycerol backbone, and three,
tri, one, two, three, fatty acids.
Three carbon backbone,
and those fatty acids are just
big, long chains of carbon.
That's all it is, right?
So we're going to break that
thing down, put it in the blood,
move it up, move it into our mitochondria.
You can't walk those things
across the mitochondria wall.
They're too big.
So what you have to do is
cleave them off into little chunks,
and it turns out we break 'em
off into two carbon chunks,
so we call it beta, as in two,
move those into mitochondria.
That can go through this little
thing called Krebs cycle,
or tricyclic acid cycle,
and you kick out a bunch
of energy out of that.
You add two carbons, so as
a result of that process,
you're going to generate
two carbon dioxides.
But remember, you can only
go through that process
if oxygen is available,
because you have to be able to place
those carbons onto something.
Or acid gets up way too high, too fast.
This is one of the reasons
why fat is a nice fuel source,
but it's very slow.
It takes physical time
to move from the back of your
shoulder, into your blood,
down your hamstring
uptake, uptake, uptake.
In addition, it's required
oxygen availability.
If you need energy faster,
you simply don't have the time
to bring in the oxygen,
transport it through,
go through capillaries,
exchange through a tissue, et cetera.
Carbohydrate, on the other hand,
is going to be stored locally
in the exercising muscle cell,
and specifically in the cytoplasm.
- As glycogen.
- As glycogen in the store there.
So what's going to happen initially,
your initial demands for
exercise, or for fuel,
are going to come from the glycogen stored
within the muscle fiber itself.
It's just going to break right there,
and you're going to be off the races.
So you have the six carbon molecules,
you're going to break it into two separate
three carbon molecules.
Okay, boom, that breaking
provides you a tiny bit of energy,
very small but some.
Now you're going to take those
two three carbon molecules,
and you want to be able to oxidize them,
'cause that's your only next step.
But in order to do that,
you got to go those into mitochondria.
So you got to break one
of those molecules off.
So then you'll be back to
your two carbon molecule,
just like you did with fat.
That's going to go into mitochondria,
and then it's going to go through
the exact same Krebs cycle,
two carbons, et cetera.
But hold on.
If you don't have sufficient oxygen,
or sufficient mitochondria availability,
and you're stuck at that
two three carbon place,
what the do you do?
You have problems, right?
Now we have to say, okay, wait a minute.
We have three carbon molecule,
and we have a bunch of this acid buildup.
Now acid functionally is hydrogen.
That's what pH, potential hydrogen
is what pH stands for, right?
So if hydrogen is
building up as a byproduct
of muscular contraction,
and then you're having
this three carbon molecule,
what it can actually do is
grab one of those hydrogens.
And those three carbon
molecules, by the way,
are called pyruvic, pyruvic acid, right?
If you take a pyruvic acid
and you grab a hydrogen,
put it on top of it, we now
have a different name for it.
It's called?
- [Andrew] Hydrogen peroxide.
- Lactate.
Bingo, right?
That's what lactate, or
lactic acid is, right?
So we've now built that up.
So number one reason why lactate's
not causing your fatigue,
it's actually preventing it
and that it does a bunch
of other really cool stuff.
But the point is, that
system can only last so long.
That gets overwhelmed very quickly.
What are you going to do with
the rest of this hydrogen?
Well, if you started off
in a normal pH range,
you don't have very far to go
before you've now gone into
that level of too much acidity.
If you start off in a more basic,
and basic I don't mean simple,
I mean chemistry, right,
and more alkaline, then that
same amount of increase in pH
is no longer, now it just puts you back
in your physiological range.
So sodium bicarbonate,
whether taken as a cream,
or a powder, or baking
soda, or anything else,
can simply put you in a more
alkaline state, even acutely.
So this is something
you can take right now,
before your workout.
You're going to delay,
what we call delay the
progression of fatigue.
- And how would people start
to approach this practice?
My understanding is you
can do this with common
store bought baking soda.
- [Andy] No question.
- There's always a concern
about gastric distress.
- Oh boy.
- That it's a very effective laxative,
sometimes an unwanted laxative effect.
But how would one approach this before?
Let's say I'm going to, I'm
doing the mile repeats exercise.
Mile repeats protocol that
we talked about earlier.
I'm doing that for a few months,
and now I want to try the
sodium bicarb approach.
I'm well hydrated,
hopefully I'm well rested.
I'm ready to go.
When am I going to drink
this sodium bicarb solution?
How would I make the solution?
Let's say I take 10 ounces of water.
- [Andy] Yeah.
- How much bicarb do I want to,
sodium bicarb should I put in there?
Can we come up with a,
is it half a teaspoon?
Is it a teaspoon?
- Here's how I'm going to tell you.
You will thank me by starting lower.
You can always go more later.
- So a little pinch.
- [Andy] You cannot go backwards.
- How about I start
with a quarter teaspoon?
- Fine.
Half, honestly, half is fine.
- Half a teaspoon.
- It's totally fine.
- Dissolve that.
Slug that down.
I read a study recently that showed
that people will hit the
peak benefits of this
at different times, but it's somewhere,
if memory serves me correctly,
somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes later.
So I might want to drink
it on the way to the track.
- It can, it can be as low as 20.
- Okay.
So maybe as I get to the tracks,
and so I'm going to do some
warmup with some walk and jogging.
- I say 45 minutes.
- [Andrew] Okay.
- That's just a very rough standard.
But yeah, you're right,
it is individualized.
And you probably want to
play with that a little bit.
If not, just somewhere in the
neighborhood of 20 to an hour.
- Okay.
And then the perceived and real
fatigue, if done correctly,
the perceived and real
fatigue ought to be reduced.
- Yes.
- I can do more work
without feeling exhausted.
Will I feel less of a lactate burn?
- Yep.
- Done in air quotes
for those listening,
I realize that's a very
crude way to describe
a complex physiological process.
Fantastic.
Can sodium bicarb be used repeatedly
for longer duration training?
- Yep.
- And if I were going to
use it with weight training,
for whatever reason,
maybe I'm doing circuit type training
or I'm doing the super
set type strength training
that you talked about before,
push, pull, push, pull,
where it's a little bit more
cardiovascularly demanding.
Then maybe I'd sip that
throughout the workout,
make sure there's a bathroom
nearby, it sounds like,
'cause I do, I am aware
that many people get
pretty serious gastric distress.
- It can happen very quickly.
- Okay.
Great, well it sounds like
an amazing training tool.
I really appreciate you
sharing it 'cause I think it's,
it's one that doesn't get a
lot of air time these days
'cause it's been around,
but sounds like it has some
pretty impressive effects.
- Yeah, you know what's
sort of funny about that is,
I mean, I get it, pop
culture is what it is.
But still to this day,
if you want to talk about
sort of your most effective general health
slash performance supplementation,
it's the same three to four to five.
And it's because they work really well.
- Without going into the
chemistry of each one
in the practice, each one,
'cause I definitely want to
get you back to talk about
nutrition and supplementation.
- Oh yeah.
- At some point.
But I think we need a full couple of hours
to get that, right.
- Yep.
- At least.
If, as a teaser, would
you mind just listing off
the other supplements that you
have found are very effective
for many people?
So sodium bicarb, or baking soda is one.
What are some of the other ones?
- Yep, we'll go kind of in reverse order.
Beta alanine is another very
classically effective one.
Similar idea to sodium
bicarbonate, so it's going to,
beta alanine's going to come in,
it's going to be converted and stored as
what's called carnosine in the muscle.
And carnosine is an intracellular buffer.
So in other words,
it's just going to delay
the buildup of acid.
So fatigue blocker, if you will.
So very effective, very cheap, very safe.
Well studied.
The top one though, of all of them by far
that has an incredibly
strong safety profile.
It has, it is a cheap, it
is a simple form to get,
has a important magnitude of effect,
and is effective across multiple domains
of physical health and performance.
And it is because of that
it is my crown jewel.
It is in my opinion, without question,
the Michael Jordan of all supplementation.
And that's creatine monohydrate.
It affects so many things.
We typically think about it
as it's muscle stuff, right?
You've talked kind of, you
quickly were talking about
the creatine phosphate system.
But we have to realize the
vast majority of research
on creatine phosphate is
not in sport performance,
and has not been for 20 years.
It's in clinical.
And it has everything from
effects on the neurological system,
to there have been associations
to mental health and depression.
And to be very clear,
I am certainly not saying
you can take creatine
and cure anything.
And I'm not saying it's going to stop you
from depression or anything.
But I'm saying there's a lot
of research in these areas
and there's a reason people are doing it.
- Yeah, I completely agree.
And if you're willing, I'd
love to have you back for us
to do a discussion on
creatine in the brain,
or creatine in the nervous system.
- Yeah.
- That would be a lot of fun,
and maybe we can do a
kind of a journal club
in advance of that.
- Yeah.
- For those that don't know,
a journal club is where
scientists read a bunch of papers
and then argue about them, discuss them,
and try and extract the kind
of agreed upon center of mass,
if you will.
I think, I've long been taking five grams
of creatine monohydrate per day,
mainly for the cognitive effects.
- [Andy] Yeah.
- I sense an effect,
that's obviously anecdata,
but I think there are a
lot of data out there,
as you alluded to.
- There's enough.
You're not crazy.
There's enough there.
And in fact, there's enough mechanism now
to understand the metabolic needs.
People think, I'm a muscle guy, right,
so I'm going to think
about the metabolism needed
to fuel muscle.
But we forget cells, immune
cells, red blood cells,
nerve cells, astrocytes, brain,
all this stuff requires energy,
and it's all going through metabolism.
- Super interesting.
We'll do the deep dive on that soon.
I have a final question for you.
You're involved in a really interesting,
I think really cutting edge project,
that I first learned about from you.
I don't know of anyone else doing anything
as forward thinking,
and frankly as relevant
to the general population,
because of my interest in
people getting better sleep
and learning how to do that,
avoiding stress and
learning how to do that.
Tell us a little bit about
what I believe is called absolute rest.
- Right.
So this is something that
we've been playing with
behind the scenes for a long time.
And this is typically how
high performance stuff works, right?
People want exclusivity
and so this has been built.
Effectively, what happened
is a friend of mine,
Cody Burkhart, I don't know
if you know Cody, but a-
- Down in Texas.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- NASA.
- NASA guy.
Yeah I do know Cody.
- Wonderful, just down the road thinker.
Everyone's interested in sleep, right?
And for forever I would say,
we're using with athletes,
but everything available
tells you how you're sleeping.
Nothing can tell you why
you're sleeping that way.
And so we got together in Boulder
and then I met some of
his former colleagues,
computer science folks, Harvard MD,
and some really impressive tech folks.
And we were just thinking about an idea.
And we came up with,
and we started to realize
the problems, right?
We used first principle thinking,
it's one of my favorite approaches.
If you're not familiar
with that, go Google that.
Like that's just a
recipe to solve problems,
is first principle thinking.
And we just started to
think about like, man,
all the sleep tech is there, it's real,
I don't need to convince
people that they need sleep.
Everyone's done that.
You need high quality sleep,
but how can I provide solutions?
And with the people I work with,
I can't just tell them
your testosterone's down
or your sleep's down, or recovery.
I need to be able to be like,
this is down, and here's why,
and here's our solution.
That's how our high
performance world works.
So enter absolute rest.
This is saying, okay, what are
the actual nodes that go into
high effective, high quality sleep?
Number one is psychology.
So there has to be some sort
of screening diagnostic for,
are you not sleeping because of simply
you can't control yourself?
And you've done a wonderful
job of giving people tools.
Or if you can't quiet your
mind before sleep do this,
if you wake up and you
can't go back to sleep,
here are a bunch of things, right?
So we have some screens that we can do,
and there's some other
stuff we can do to analyze.
This is a psychological issue.
Let's say it's not, right?
You're under control.
And we have different
tricks we use and stuff,
which I'm happy to talk about.
But it's not that.
Okay, is it physiology?
Which is node number two.
Do we know what your
dopamine levels are like?
Do we know what your
serotonin levels are like?
What's melatonin look like?
What's adrenaline, what's cortisol,
cortisol being the primary driver?
What is this relationship DHEA,
where are these things at?
So we're going to measure
all that and track that.
We're going to measure that
during the day, prior to sleep,
we're going to measure that next morning,
and even sometimes throughout sleep.
And we're going to figure out,
is this a physiology problem?
If it is, then we have clear corrections.
If not, we're going to go
on the next step, which is,
is this possibly a pathology?
So you have some sort of sleep disorder.
We're going to run full
P, what's called PSG.
So polysomnography.
The exact same stuff you
would get in a sleep clinic.
It's a sensor that's going to go on there
measuring EEG and EOG,
and we're going to have
muscle activation sensor
to see if your legs are moving,
and everything else is going on.
And we're going to get a full diagnostic.
And if anyone's ever done this,
the amount of sleep issues
that are happening in people
that they don't even realize
is extraordinarily high.
So we're going to figure this out.
One very quick example,
we just did this with
a professional athlete,
and he was having like 280 roughly
of these episodes per night.
And to be categorized as an episode,
you have to meet these
four specific criteria.
Oxygen saturation, ventilation
changes, brain changes,
et cetera, and he hit that
over 280 times a night.
And what this technology
allowed us to do is figure out
what position did all
these things occur in.
Well, in his particular case,
most of them were happening,
he was on his back.
And so he bought a very
simple like pillow basically
that went on his back,
that kept him from sleeping on his back.
And we saw an 85% reduction
in sleep awakeness issues,
the very first night.
Now we did that.
Testosterone eventually tripled
after three months by
just improving sleep.
And all we did is move him
onto his left or right side.
So huge improvements,
just by understanding
where the problem occurred,
and why it occurred there.
We didn't have to change
hardly anything else.
He had the basic hygiene
stuff down and temperature
and all that stuff.
And he had his ChiliPad and all that
to keep the thing cool.
We couldn't fix it.
Years, by the way, this took us two years
of just trying everything.
We're like, man.
And it was just like, I wish,
I wish we could get you to sleep better.
And we, I pulled out every
trick I knew, and it just was,
as soon as we built this [indistinct]
I'm like oh my God, it's all.
He's not overweight by the
way, he doesn't have any,
he's not iron deficient,
doesn't have any of these
other classical symptoms
that are associated with bad sleep.
Supplementation, everything we've done,
a thousand protocols.
That fixed it overnight.
So if it's not psychology,
and it's not physiology,
and it's not pathology, then the last one
that people don't have any
idea about is environment.
And so what you don't
realize is we have a box.
We can sit right next to your bed.
You just plug it in, you
don't have to do anything.
And it's going to run
full environmental scans.
So it's going to look at the
temperature in your room.
It's going to look at the
humidity in your room.
It's going to look at the
volatile organic acid.
These are things that are
seeping out from your mattress.
It's going to look at
particulates in the air,
and possible allergens and
things that are floating around
that are closing your nose off,
so you can't sleep at night
and now you're mouth breathing,
and you've talked a lot,
I'm sure, on the previous
episodes about why that's bad.
It's going to look at your CO2 cloud.
So we've talked, we've already
set this point up, right?
You're inhaling O2, but
then you're exhaling CO2.
Well during the day, and
when we're conversing,
you have quite a bit of force
with that exhalation, right?
But at night, it's just barely
seeping out of your mouth.
So what happens is, CO2 tends to cloud up
and build around your face,
and then you end up re-breathing that CO2.
And this can cause a large
number of sleep problems
because you're simply
re-breathing in the panic.
Whether you're fully awake
or just kick out of a sleep stage,
the CO2 around your face is a big issue.
This stuff has all been known, by the way,
with the astronauts for a very long time.
It just hasn't translated into the,
to the commercial spaces.
Of course, gone to our
high performer space.
So we can measure that as well.
And then we can figure out
like for the most extreme,
we can actually come into a bedroom
and build an entire sleep
optimization set up,
and control the entire thing.
But for most folks, the
minimum we can do is
run full diagnostics and check off
is this environmental
related, is it pathology,
is there something else?
- So is this a commercial device
that people can eventually access?
- It is now.
- So where can people learn
more about absolute rest?
- Absoluterest.com.
- Very cool.
And just for our full disclosure,
I wasn't aware that you had
done this prior to today,
what you'd mentioned.
I always like to ask people,
scientists or otherwise,
I always love to ask what are
you most excited about lately?
And this sounds like
an amazing technology.
- And just to be really clear,
that's not like something
we're working on.
That's landed.
- That's landed.
- We're ready to go.
- Great.
Well, and that's one of the
things I appreciate about you
is that you're willing
to sometimes speculate,
but you always say it's speculation.
But in general, you seem
like the kind of guy
where if you're going to be
public facing about something,
if you're going to make a statement,
there's got to be quite a bit behind it.
You're not going to allude
to the, in 10 years,
we might be able to do this.
Or in five years.
You're a very data-driven kind of guy.
- Yeah, well, the people I work with,
we need answers, right?
We don't have that timeframe.
And we typically have like,
hey, we start the season in four weeks.
- Yeah.
- So that's just where I'm at.
- Well, as I said, I
appreciate that about you,
but it is but one of the
many things I appreciate.
I think the listeners
and I can well appreciate
on the basis of today's discussion,
what a enormous wealth
of information you are.
How clear and potently you
communicate that information.
And also how you can take
a huge cloud of information
and still distill it into protocols
that ought to work for 75%
of people, 75% of the time,
which is an immensely
valuable thing to do.
So for me and from the
listeners, I just want to say,
thank you so much for taking
the, several now hours,
I lose track of time, which
reflects all good things.
Several hours to take
a break from teaching,
take a break from research,
take a break from the
other important commitments
of your life, and really share with us
all this incredible information.
I'm so, so grateful.
- My pleasure, man.
I'm glad we finally got to connect.
This has been a long time in the making.
- It has, and I'm going to
bring the breathing protocols
to my training.
I'm going to start doing
more of the endurance type
and interval type training.
I'm going to start moving when I do heat,
I'm going to start moving when I do cold.
I might even start throwing
some sodium bicarb into,
very small amount of sodium
bicarb into some water
before I train.
And listen, Andy, Professor Andy Galpin,
thank you ever so much.
- My pleasure.
- Thank you for joining
me today for my discussion
with Dr. Andy Galpin.
If you'd like to learn
more about his work,
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