Huberman Lab Podcast: Fitness, Endurance, & Strength Training with Dr. Andy Galpin PDF

- 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 Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day, is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. 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 and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain, to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman, and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs, which make it easy to mix up Athletic Greens while you're on the road, plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3. And K2 is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body, and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3 K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Thesis. Thesis makes what are called nootropics, which means smart drugs. Now, to be honest, I am not a fan of the term nootropics. I don't believe in smart drugs in the sense that I don't believe that there's any one substance or collection of substances that can make us smarter. I do believe, based on science however, that there are particular neural circuits and brain functions that allow us to be more focused, more alert, access creativity, be more motivated, et cetera. That's just the way that the brain works. Different neural circuits for different brain states. And so the idea of a nootropic that's just going to make us smarter all around, fails to acknowledge that smarter is many things, right? If you're an artist, you're a musician, you're doing math, you're doing accounting, a different part of the day you need to be creative, these are all different brain processes. Thesis understands this. And as far as I know, they're the first nootropics company to create targeted nootropics for specific outcomes. They only use the highest quality ingredients, which of course is essential. Some of those I've talked about on the podcast, things like DHA, Ginko biloba, phosphatidylserine. They give you the ability to try several different blends over the course of a month, discover which nootropics work best for your unique brain chemistry and genetics and goals, and with that personalization, design a kit of nootropics that's ideal for the different brain and body states you want to access. I've been using Thesis for more than six months now, and I can confidently say that their nootropics have been a total game-changer. My go-to formula is the clarity formula, or sometimes I'll use their energy formula before training. To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit, go online to takethesis.com/huberman, take a three minute quiz, and Thesis will send you four different formulas to try in your first month. That's takethesis.com/huberman, and use the code Huberman at checkout for 10% off your first order. Today's episode is also brought to us by Inside Tracker. Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA, to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done, for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health can only be assessed with a quality blood test. What's unique about Inside Tracker is that while there are a lot of different tests out there for hormones and metabolic factors, et cetera, with Inside Tracker, you get the numbers back in terms of your levels, but they also give you very clear directives in terms of lifestyle, nutrition and supplementation, that can help you bring those values into the ranges that are best for you and your health goals. And that's very different than a lot of the other programs, where you get a lot of information, but you don't really know what to do with that information. Inside Tracker makes that all very easy to understand and very actionable, based on the very easy to use dashboard at Inside Tracker. If you'd like to try Inside Tracker, you can visit insidetracker.com/huberman, to get 20% off any of Inside Tracker's plans. Just use the code Huberman at checkout. 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. - 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. 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. - 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- - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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 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? - 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. S

Huberman Lab Podcast: Fitness, Endurance, & Strength Training with Dr. Andy Galpin PDF

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