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. Galvin 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
And to hear what is essentially a master class 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 also going to learn how to build flexibility, how to hydrate properly for exercise. And we'll also talk about nutrition and supplementation.
Ian, 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 repetitions 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 the 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
A clear and actionable way indeed. Doctor gallopin 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 every day. 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. Doctor Galpin is also an avid,
Decatur of zero cost of consumer information about exercise science. You can find them 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 to 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. Now, 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 human lab.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 in 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.
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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, not only listen, but I modify my protocols and you are among those three or four people. So, first of all, 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 your professor.
You teaching 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 end of one 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.
Ink and principles of let's call it hypertrophy power in 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 at 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. So we can kind of categorize everything like that. And we're going to we can talk about are 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, 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.
To running. This is a simply moving. Mechanically, how you want your body to move. I'm just going to globally call that skill from there were 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 also 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
it's 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 because it could have come from the force Direction either. So there's carryover. So like a lot of things that you would do for development of strength and power. They are somewhat similar, but there's differences, right? So things that you would do correctly for power would really not develop much strength and vice versa. So when we get into all these details later, once you get past strength and the next one kind of down the list is hypertrophy, this is
Sighs 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. In the very first, one is called muscular endurance. 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.
Leti to produce and sustained work and we can get it to a bunch of differentiations with an endurance. But I'll 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 will call your VO2 max. So this is your ability to kind of do the same thing, but more of a Time domain of
3 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 a long-duration endurance. So this is your ability to sustain work. The time domain doesn't matter in terms of how fast going. 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 eye 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 one. So pushing towards one is maybe going to sacrifice something else. So as a as an overall start, that's really what we're looking at with in all those though. They do have similar Concepts and terms of, there's a handful of things you have got to do to make all of those things work, and we can 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 app, if you want to continue to improve, you have to have some method of overload. And as you well know, you've talked about a lot adaptation. Physiologically happens is a byproduct of stress. So you have to push a system. So if you continue to do see the exact same work out 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
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, we'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 their
love to do the Deep dive on each, one of these for several hours. But and 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 ya 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, you're the exercise feels. Yes. Y'all just yeah. Its strength and hypertrophy which at least bear some relationship. Yep, and then maybe separately, we could explore sustained work endurance, this 30 minutes or longer continuously because I think many people trained in that regime. Yeah. And probably something like, VO2.
Anaerobic as well because I know that a number of people now incorporate, so-called hit or high intensity interval training. I think with the hopes of either shortening, their workouts. 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, 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 fancy way of saying if you do this differently than you're going to get a different result. So modifiable variables, the very first one of those is called choice. This is the exercise choice that you select now. One of I'm gonna
Double back here. So I'm kind of doing a little bit of inception. So follow me. Here is, I'm going up a layer to come down a couple layers. I have these fundamental laws of strength conditioning, that, that I'll kind of like a little bit of a joke, but Progressive over those 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
Technique that of course matters, but if you don't execute it in the right fashion, then you're not going to get that out of patience. 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 that updation. 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 one of the Reps were the rest ranges that you're using. That's going to be our primary determinant. Now, some exercises are certainly better for some adaptations. For example, a deadlift is probably not a great exercise to do for a 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 because you're going to do a little repetition. I set range. You could theoretically do.
Bicep curls for power, but probably not your best choice. I single join isolation movement is not the best for developing power. 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 of 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 thank 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 of Obelisk. Also the bar, the load is in front of you if you want to emphasize maybe more.
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. 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 in 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, max, or a percentage of your maximum heart rate or VO2 max.
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, 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 intervals and I want to get 75%. I'm typically referring to 75% of your max heart rate or vo2max or something like that. If I tell you to do squats at 75 percent, that means 75% of the maximum amount of weight, you could lift one time or
close in terms of determining 1, 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. You can just a couple different ways. So there are equations. You can run and you can just Google these anywhere and these are called could
Version charts. And so it says, okay. If I did 75 pounds on my bench, press, I did it eight times. You can just run an estimate to say the, 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. What a really good technique and then look what that number would be. So
conversion safer than doing one repetition maximum
for the General Public.
Who has again? No coaching. It's safer for a professional athlete. He's not any safer. But all right, 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 have done one or two more and then then you kind of have an idea of what that number is 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 and I we're not going to give a specific 95% for one of these exact reasons. It's not that precise for most of them. In fact, some of them like hypertrophy have enormous ranges that you'd 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 is to determine. And some of
You're going to see volume is the true determinant. So intensity, though is a second choice, was the very first on manipulatable variable. Intensity was the second one. The third one is what 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 you totally doing the next one past? That is called rest intervals. So, this is amount of time you're taking in between typically.
I 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 restaurant rules 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.
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 effect. Even the bat 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 at the gym and feel like, I don't really do much like that there has to be there. So if you think about soreness on a scale of 1 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
Is no. And in most cases and secondarily to that. If a particular muscle is sword, 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 sort of like, okay, like in you're moving around a little bit, you like man, this is little bits or you can train if you're like, I can't sit on the couch without
Dying because my glutes are so sore. Like we probably don't need to train again. Right?
Wheels, 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 as actually 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 or the course of a month or six month or even a year.
Do you want to walk a pretty fine line? And for most people I would say hedge a little bit on the side of less, or than more sore 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, are you doing that thing? So those are kind of our Global things that we can play with. So when I'm trying to manipulate and get strength versus hypertrophy or, you know, I
Don't 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 are just kind of want both and that's a lot of the general public. I want to get 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 want to go strength.
And yes, drink and I love that you mentioned the fact that it is possible to increase strength without increasing muscle size. He's 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 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. We can save that come back to it.
Sure, what I'd love to both, what I'd love to know that word.
If we could Define some of these modifiable variables in the context of strength. So let's say I have some, yes, we're somebody who I come to you and I say, and let's just say for sake of balance here because she actually does do some weight training. I bring my sister in. I say me and my sister both want to get stronger. Yeah. What modifiable variable should, how should we modify the
variables? Love it? All right. Great. I'm gonna do Inception on you one more time. So one of my other laws of this will be fast. I promise.
Of strengthen auditioning is in general. The default is all joints through, all range of motion. So this is important because it's going to answer you very first question on this strength category. So in general, the ankle should go through the full range of motion. The ankle, the knee should go through the full range of motion, the knee, the hip the elbow etcetera, etcetera,
right. Across the workout, not in a single movement. Well, right, I would hope unless there's an amazing exercise. I haven't
heard of, 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 range of motions. Other ones, like an 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. 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 a full range of motion.
Now, a couple of quick caveats, 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. Well strength development as well as hyper trees. 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 right up position with your say low back, the spine is very good. One here in general, the spine, should sainsbury neutrals, we call it. So no flexion-extension, especially the lumbar region. So if you need, if you're doing a deadlift and in order to take your knee, through a full range of motion, a deadlift, you have to compromise your back position. That's no bueno. So caveat there aside, don't kill me, like in good
positions. All We Do.
Kill yourselves 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 at 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 you know, 75% like it's
yd. You're not going to feel confident. It's gonna 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 can just express my strength. So exercise choice in generally 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 benchpress, 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 away 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 Will categorize muscles as our movements exercises as pushes and pulls, right. So like a squat is tends to be push because you're pushing away the ground. A deadlift is a pole because you're pulling the
It up to you, but in reality every single exercise is only ever a pull. Because muscle doesn't push things away. Muscle can only contract and pull on itself. And so again, super nerdy thing. They like most people are like, yeah, there was
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, and if that's mysterious to people will become clear before long posterior, chain anterior chain, makes a lot of sense to me because of the way. It's
It in the firing of motor neurons, which is ultimately what controls muscles. So it's also, I think there's all the time, exactly. So it also depends on the lens through which one looks at life and and exercise. Of course. My lens is primarily Neuroscience. So so that. But I realized that the important I like this idea of pushing perpendicular, the body overhead pulling both toward toward the body and from overhead, that just makes really good intuitive sense, especially since a lot of people were just listening to this and not watching it. So in your mind's folks you can think about
Out, pushing away like a punch or overhead like lifting something overhead and then pulling toward your midline or toward your body, rather, and then pulling yourself up like a pull-up and PE class for those. Yeah.
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. We'll call Pole or hinge so deadlift or Romanian deadlift or hamstring curl or something where you're Contracting and calling pulling the thing.
And you can 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 for exercises and you can 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 taking those through a full range of motion, you're in 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 scientist 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 because I'm a muscle guy, but I have to give Hanuman some credit here, right? And I know, you know who that is, Adam in size principal. Yeah, of course, right? So, this is a series of papers I think. And then it goes a nature at least some of them. Yeah. Yeah. In 1954 56 or like something? You can fact check me. I'm sure he will but he basically outline this.
That okay. There is a certain recruitment threshold needed for neurons to fire, and we have muscle fibers in Mobile. Call fast-twitch muscle fibers in the slow twitch muscle fibers. And in general, you're going to activate the slow twitch on this first. Because they tend to be associated with low threshold motor neurons is 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
Thing you can do over and endurance thing, right? Unless it gets really extreme and Big Apples. Um, 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. Our 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 and 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 stayed at this all the beginning as well. One more Inception, then I'll stop when it comes to this level of detail. Lack 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 seeing huge increases in
Also strengthen size which is not a prescription for most people tends. Are you sighs, 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 a side. If you want to be more intentional, more specific to this, the, the goal of strength. You need to produce more for specificity matters, right? So, we have size principle to help understand this and we have our laws of specificity which say
principal 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, max.
If you're moderately trained, maybe 75% will work lowly train 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 enforce you to do a low repetition range. You can't do 12 reps at 95% but then it wouldn't be 95% of your one rep max. So, by Definition, True strength training is really going to be in like, five repetitions per set or less range. That's where most of it's going to occur.
Specificity. So we've covered Choice intensity and repetitions write 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 a go. Thank you. That's a, that's an important distinction. So work your way up. Do some
I'd 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 have any amount of fatigue incur and we have to then use a reduce the Reps or reduce the intensity, we've lost the primary driver of 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. It doesn't mean you have to sit there on your phone like a compact. Please don't like everyone will thank you for not doing that. I promise you can engage other muscle groups. This is what we 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 know, you can kind of move back and forth and this is how you can make strength training. Not 7 our work out. If you're a professional athlete, you're going to take that time.
Because you want to maximize the outcome soup, we've done is actually our lab to supersets will reduce the strength gains. But by a tiny amount and most of us don't care enough relative to its 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 and weightlifting or powerlifting. I don't superset
interesting. Yeah. I think I've found that I don't recover particularly well from strength and I
Your feet training. So like I don't work out or the next 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, maybe 75 past 75. I find that I just start to. That's not it. I have to introduce additional rest days where 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 superset 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 superset it because you can we can eat I think that's just 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 little 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 all, even a 1 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 wraps 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 in between
sets. Yep, of course, yeah.
And Son 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 exercises adaptations. I started the conversation with and on the, 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 it's 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?
Very much. So? Right. That's the primary actor. 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? 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, annotations, because you're doing exactly that, right? You're starting to reduce stress 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.
I can 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. That 95% You're going to take probably five. Maybe seven minutes between each attempt like you better not expect.
Anything like changes in your resting blood pressure. There's no cardiovascular strength. Are you going to put it together in a circuit? We'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 added Advantage. Do you want? What disadvantage do you want? And I can cut like really and to the chase here on one of these things because we'll get this eventually. If you want to know the ones that are going to generally, give you the most physiologic adaptations across the most categories.
You're almost always looking for hypertrophy type of training and then this an aerobic conditioning be so 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. Because 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 get. Make sure their heart is healthy and Etc. This is wonderful, and I think is clarifying.
Sighing, certainly a lot for me. So for strength, let's, I guess training frequent frequency. So what should determine training frequency? And I had the great benefit of long time ago when I was in high school, actually, I paid for a session over the phone with Mike men, sir. Oh really? Mike men, sir show we have to be friends high intensity at the time. I was pretty young and my mother kept saying like why is this like grown man calling the house and he would talk all the time about trying 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 is improved over time. It was not very good. It was remarkable. But of course this was a time when I was, you know, full of the most an important
scene of every sort of on my
own version of anabolics, right? Really had a long Arc of pure.
He said you were untrained. It was mostly untrained. I've been running cross country and skateboarding and playing soccer.
So and doing all the things that are like the antithesis
of greenhouse. It was literally and people will probably say impossible to something like 40 pounds of muscle inside of 12 months. It was crazy. I would believe, you know, but but and so then of course that stopped working overtime. And then you start going down the the the Odyssey of trying to find the thing that's going to work that well and you eventually realized that it was because you were untrained, right? So training, free.
And C is is crucial. Let's say that people are doing these whole body workouts. As you've described them not alternating upper body, lower body because there's so many different splits and we talk doesn't probably doesn't make sense to go into splits in right now, but how often can 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 right 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 asked about how do, you know, if a muscles ready to train again, one of the question is, what are you training for? If you're training for hypertrophy, right muscle size. Also grow, 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 a lot the primary driver of hypertrophy is not the same. Primary driver of strength. We talked about that, right?
It's intensity driven it for volume 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 training tools because you need stimulus their skills skills. Well, right practice that you know that
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 damaged 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. I got a squad every day.
And and is that because the the primary mode of adaptation is recruitment of these high threshold motor units. It's so it's mainly neural
know. So
Wanting to say that it is to where I get all feisty.
Well, I'm not saying that that was actually there was a question mark. Okay. Okay, if we were online putting comments, we there'd be a big question mark. We would have
fought. Yeah, well to blocked you. I just can't that's
already well. Probably twice.
Okay, the early adaptations to exercise especially strength training. Our hedge towards the nervous system. No question about it. People always say central nervous system, but it's probably more peripheral, whatever. Semantics.
We be pedantic, it's nerve if you train today tomorrow morning, you're not going to wake up with a actually increase in contractile proteins in muscle. Your muscle, might be a little bit bigger due to some acute swelling, but you could have it in a pretty acute that persists change them and the nervous system will 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 where we can see that, right? We can actually see changes like in the ultrasound.
Making changes immediately that protein synthesis process is happening like very fast, and it's going to last, it's 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 seeing 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.
All 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 that some signal has to tell the muscle that contract. Okay. So signal is one to its 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, 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. 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 are slower or there's various properties. So the intrinsic fibers themselves, determine a lot of functionality from their 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. Do a muscle that muscle is then surrounded with more connective tissue. That all comes together into a giant tendon.
Tendon attaches to the Bone. It's pulling on those tendon, then actually move the bone the cause human movement. So that's Area, 3 area, one the nervous system area to the muscle contraction or III some sort of connective tissue thing, changes happen at all three of those levels and we're not even now talking with you. When you entered the discussion of biomechanics and you changed say the patient angle of the muscle, which is the angle at which the muscle fibers lay relative to the Bone, right? So this is basic mechanics as it pulling perpendicular to the bone is pulling horizontal to the Bone or some
Out 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 stain fashion, whether this is sarcoplasmic order, 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 powerlifters, even though they have more muscle. But bodybuilders are probably stronger than most people. So, there is a relationship between muscle size and strength is in this. 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 have ma'am, not changed the connective 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 connect 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. 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, that growth response. So I gave you the answer for strength training. The answer for hypertrophy is
Probably less than 3 out of 10 on level of soreness. You can go again in general. You're probably looking at 72 hours is the optimal window. So if you trained, your your shoulders on Monday, you probably wouldn't want to train them again on Tuesday. If I purchase these 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 with the signaling happens instantaneously.
See. Right, within seconds. The gene Cascade is probably in a peaked in the four-hour window like the 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 single go back to Baseline, and then had 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 workout put in the training session. So the stimulus
Stays High and the recovery is there. And you can now continue to grow
muscle.
You mentioned 48 to 72 hours for hypertrophy. What if, for whatever reasons the the training split lifestyle factors, Etc. Somebody say, let's use your example trains shoulders on Monday. Ideally, they would train them again on Thursday, in their particular instance, somewhere Wednesday or Thursday, but they don't, they wait until Saturday or Sunday for whatever reason, Maybe.
More compatible with their work work in other exercise schedule, whatever. The reason are, they actually losing hypertrophy that they gained or they've missed out a window to induce further hypertrophy.
It's probably better to think about it that the ladder, 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 and kind of going back to your hit program. This is the original high intensity training the men sir thing right which
is not hit with one eye, not the high intensity interval training but high intensity training, everyone set to Absolute failure, tone av2 for each muscle group, 20 minute workouts, dividing your body into 3 into a three-way split and then literally training, mashing six times a month, which most people think that is absolutely crazy. There's no way that's going to work and I can tell you it does. If you are untrained.
You you grow like a weed just
if you train hard enough, even if you're trained, look at the people Mike Trend. He put a lot of body builders on really high levels. Now they had the same similar help you had at that time frame way to
be very clear. I was not taking us Jesus and a box. In fact, I will just dodging us was just as good. I probably was, I wasn't measuring my levels there, but I probably would I grew easy and general in general. I tend to grow pretty easily from weight training, but the, but and I should say that to Mike's credit and I think this is an important.
Orton message that he was the one who really said, look unless you're going to make a professional career out of it. Yeah, do not run the health hazards of exoticness hormones. It, you know, it's certainly not at your age. So he deterred me from that which is great because it never entered my mind. It just was one of those things where Mike Mentor 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 I was what was really wild as I was continuing to run across country.
And so there was a, there was a trade-off there at some point, a bit of an inventor. 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 overtraining even at low
volume. Well, yeah. Well, I mean like the whole field on interference effect has changed quite a bit recently, which we can come back to if you want. But just to finish out the the ID here with that last question. If you want to take five days for Six Days, In Between each muscle group, you can do that. In fact, if you look at the
The research it's going to show that frequency is not that important. It will it's not that it's not important, but it's 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.
It's probably okay, right, but it can be there that 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 typical to get that volume, done volume wise.
The more recent meta-analysis are going to say that you're probably looking at around 10 working sets per muscle group per week. Seems to be kind of a 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 ten shoulders, Wednesday and three on from, that's nine. Working sets. If you want to do, is three different shoulder work exercises on Monday and hit your nine sets. It's not really actually be that much different. The problem is 10 is kind of
Animal, you probably want to look for more like 15 to 20. And in fact, well trained folks. 2025 that becomes very challenging in one workout. In fact, if Uncle you're not going to do it, right? And so that is where it's not the frequency. That looks like it kills you is 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 writer 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,
Only remember, if you do those types of training sessions, where you're just going to completely exhaust a muscle.
It's going to be tight. 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 is 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, stimulants and headphones, and all kinds of other things,
might, well, a way that yeah stimulants or not. I don't 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 all sorts of stimulants that the guys in the 70s and 80s, we're doing ourselves or still.
You talked about repetition range has broadly for strength training. So five or less. Yep. You said frequency could be as often as every day. Yeah, rest to 24 minutes, maybe even longer, if you're going for one repetition maximum 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 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 range is or percent of one repetition maximum should people consider when thinking about
hyper 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. I purchased the games, and we can have a really introduced Russian 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. The like was probably minimally viable to 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 do. So. I want to make sure that I wasn't saying you have to train the muscle 85% every single day to get strong too. Is a good. Number three is great, but probably even to is really
effective got it.
This explains, the high frequency of training for strength athletes. That's always mystified me. Yeah, and the very long workouts makes sense because very long never named
train twice a day, even though the squat in the morning, squat in the afternoon every day with their
eating in their sleeping. They probably don't have time for anything
else. That's why they're Pros. So that's a job, right? That's what they do. So yeah. We're I purchase fee strength. Training programming is
Somewhat complicated because of not, it's not the danger but you're gonna have to pay one way or the other, right? The risk is a little bit higher because a low tire and you have to be a little more technically proficient. When it comes to hypertrophy training the way I like to explain it as its kind of idiot proof. The programming is idiot-proof. The work is hard though. So here's your range. Anywhere between, you know, five reps in 30. Can you hit somewhere in there? Perfect. It's all equally effective. You can't screw that up. The only caveat.
Not for hypertrophy is you have to take it to muscular
failure and you need enough rest for the adaptation and protein synthesis occur.
Yep, and if you recover faster, you can maybe do it more frequently. And if you don't, maybe, less recoil him
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 ten. 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 and some people actually will espouse that we know really clearly about the mechanisms of muscle approach. We don't it.
Very much a guessing game. But the three most likely drivers are one metabolic stress to 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 decent proxy, right? Like I'll get a little bit of soreness is good. You don't get so sorts compromising your total volume. All right, mechanical tension is kind of like strength. This is why if you do even set to 5 or 8 and you're kind of close that strength range, you will gain a little bit of muscle not optimal muscle gain, but you're gonna gain some because everything of 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.
AIDS less effective as you get closer to the middle. It's more effective.
Anywhere between eight reps per set, the 30, it's equally effective past 30. It's going to blend out past eight, 25, 24, 23. It's going to blend, you know, Lester there. So, metabolic stress is one. The damage is the other, sorry, mechanical tension is the one that's heavy muscle damage. That the one, the third one is metabolic stress. And this is a get a bit of an area of scientific contention, but something's there. I know, something's there. We just were 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 no mechanical tension. There's very little damage, but somehow it induces a good amount of hypertrophy. Very painful your
boy. I tried this. I've a friend former special operator who was 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
Well, I think you probably did but I might have cried out once or twice. It was unbelievable. Especially the lower body movements now was a humid day. I'll claim a little bit of jelly, but it was brutal. It was really brutal. And I
also best day of your life and it's still
brutal. Okay. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. It was intense and and 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 can actually kill yourself. That way. You 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. Yeah, a question about hypertrophy training that I think many people are wondering about
Training 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 I really easy practical way to think about this. I heard Mike is your till runs coming home, Renaissance period, ization years ago, outline this at a NSC, a talk. And it was beautiful. And I thought this is the most eloquent way to explain the context about training for a Treviso. Only to look for three things in your workout. And let's say that you have any 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 glutes 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 glutes contract. I felt it more. My quads are my back. Okay. Did you feel a big pump afterwards? Now? I don't really feel like pump there. Either words ordering. 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 indication.
Every didn't feel it during the workout. You felt no sort of pump and it didn't get sore. Don't expect much
growth. Did, it has tribute did the work across Mel bunch of muscle groups.
All this likely other muscle groups were too involved, right? Especially if you're like, no Batman, my back got realized. 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 1 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. Attend is not better than 7. You need to feel it but it doesn't have to be like whole 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 nearly get a pump the next day, got really sore. Then you're still, you know, on a good path again, really?
As in like who a little tender. But next day. It's okay. They 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 be willing to throw out a few sort of sets and Reps parameters that could act as broad guidelines from people who want to explore.
A further, I realized that with all these modifiable variables that there's no one-size-fits-all for strength. I love this 5230 for hypertrophy. That's a bottle thing. I don't think I've ever done a 30 reps out of anything. But but now that you've thrown that out there, I see it as a bit of
want to know what's awesome about 30. You're going to get an insane pump. You're gonna burn like crazy, but you won't get super sore because I'm kind of attention to the looked so low, it's so white. So you can you can get away with those things and you it's hard because your mind is going to wander.
You're gonna get it, like, rep, 20. You can make, I'm done. And you're like, no. There's, there's a lot left here to get the 30. We're like I said, a 10 is much easier like you just like, okay, two more two more. So 30 is like, I got 16 more it's awful. But you just the counting is worth its tight terrible, right? And people tend to just kind of like check out. So 30 is possible, but a little bit extreme extreme, but I would recommend him all of them. Like it's a really fun place. You can do different in the same workout too. By the way. Like you could do one set of ten push-ups and then take a little break. And then do a set of
But you can 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 ten days. Wednesday's 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? Yeah, that is pretty sure fire. So
way to just think about a really fast. Answer for power will speed power and strength is what I just called, the 325 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.
As 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, four, 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 whilst
Still being able to move and contort, or 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 percent plus of your max, right? If you want Power. It needs to be a lot lighter because you need to move more towards the velocity and the spectrum because power is strength X speed. So while getting stronger by definition can help. Our 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 the work, everything else. They exercise. The Reps that 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. Yeah, 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 in my trying to quote unquote challenge muscles, in other words. Yeah, if I just try 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 delt. 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 in proper form is going to be the target as well. But
that's 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?
With proper form and safely and to get hypertrophy focus on challenging muscles still with proper form and safely.
It's very fair 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 has 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 percent of the one rep max. It's not going to generate as much speed development, as them, trying to move that bar as fast as I 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 it's a neuroscientist. If I say amazing that nerves matter, what's amazing to me is, what if I understand correctly? What you're saying? Is that even if the bar is moving at the same speed, same way? Yeah, if my internal representation, my thoughts are. I'm trying to move this as fast as possible. Yeah. Versus I'm just trying to get the bar away from me and, and get the wait up. I'm going to get different
outcomes. Yep. This is quality of work, right?
Is did you do enough to just check off the box or did you actually strive for adaptation? Right? Similar concept actually works right. / trophy in terms of there's a handful of very recent studies that have looked at what we 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 your 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
Results in more growth than not.
You just gave authorization for people to look at their muscles Contracting in the gym, please do. Yeah, of course, right is this but the selfie is still ruled out.
I'd rather you look at your muscles and your phone. So I'm fine with it. Those are National. 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 that Community have been saying for a very long time.
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 we'll get on the flexible check and they're literally this is what Arnold did, right. This is if you go back to pumping iron
or college weight rooms, I should say right up for some reason. There's something about that age group. Yeah. There's a lot of checking of biceps in college weight rooms for reasons that
escape me. If you ever interact with my wifey like she will be the first to tell you. I cannot walk past a mirror without like checking something out that you can't. I can't, I can't.
Okay, not hurt me. Like I'm one of cannot walk.
All right. Well, then I'll be careful not to
disparage that has nothing to do with hypertrophy. But I'm just like, I'm a muscle gasps. I'm always like thinking and tinkering, right 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, then 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 gonna like I don't want to work out today. I got all this going on or I'm tired of whatever. I'm just going to do the workout. I know is get through it. Okay, if you can go, you know what the like I'm gonna cut 15 minutes out of this thing. I'm gonna get my head right? I'm gonna go ahead to 20 minutes of quality work done. That's that's your best option by far.
You alluded to the fact that even just looking at a particular muscle, my 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 at cetera muscles that we find that we can contract to the point of almost a slightly painful, contraction seemed to grow more readily than muscles that, we can't recruit very easily. And and there and the reason I mentioned sports that we played earlier is, I've been, you just have to watch the Olympics to see that, you know, swimmers obviously are very good engaging their laps.
You look at the gymnast. They seem to be very good. Engaging everything. Yeah, and they go through a huge number of different Dynamic movements that explains that. So I find that, you know, if people say, oh, you know, I can't get stronger in this or my whatever body part is weak in terms of its inability to engage hypertrophy. I see that often times that can be because of an inability to jet to engage those upper motor neurons, to deliberately isolate those muscles. Are there ways that people can learn too.
Ice engage particular muscle groups more effectively over time for sake of hypertrophy or strength or four cases of trying to overcome injury potential or injury because imbalance or 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 last. That was the rhomboid. So my back muscles for years. I couldn't activate my lats or my rhomboids. This is the muscle groups that connector shoulder blades. So if you try to squeeze your shoulder blades together,
Whether that set of muscles, they're called your rhomboids, your lots, of course, are more vertical and pull. You can up and down and no matter how many lat pull-downs. I did bent Rose 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 to actually get these things on. In fact, if you'd have asked me, even in my college years is a college football player. Hey, flex your lats, like, show me your lats. You would have seen, no, no movement there when I was doing a pull-up and that particular case. The only way I can get the bar to move was be, was by using my biceps. Right? So, it's a synergistic muscle, 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 come coupled with my
Lack of activation in the lats. So you're compensating the same movement actually kind of 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 horizontal angle and you're going to pull the barbell to your belly button. All 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 you're the barbell is going all the way down is coming all the way up to touching my belly and you think you're doing a great back development exercise.
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 any time you were your, you're banging your head against the wall and thinking, like, wow.
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 show,
Older. So keep that same angle on 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 we need to Simply tell them that muscle group right there.
Maybe you give them a tactical prompt. So you touch it or you put something against it. I'm this is actually why sorry, I'm jumping 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.
Section, 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 and 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. 100%. And for those wondering what proprioceptive feedback is probably a seven.
Back 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 that feedback is proprioceptive. I think it literally translates to a knowledge of where one's limbs are and what's happening on those in space. Yeah. I've seen, I don't, I don't have a training partner, but I've seen in gyms where some will be training and someone would tap the muscle of the person who's doing the
I work in order to with this is consensual. Tapping of other people's muscles. Not walking around your knees touching people's muscles, please that to provide that proprioceptive feedback so that the person doing the exercises, it 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. And 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. Mackenzie our mutual.
So, if you take your hands and open them up like you make an L with both your hands, and I'll take those and put them 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. A most people think, or 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.
Um, just outside your belly button. Can you move your fingers by just moving your ab muscles? 90% of people can sit 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 a movement there. Really take your thumb and go right above your PSI is my what PSI is posterior Superior?
Looks fine right now. Can you move?
Most likely, no,
sort of, if I do a mini little back extension.
Don't just with your core. Musculature. Barely. Yeah, maybe a 90% of people can't, if you can't perform that contraction, you can't stabilize your spine. So only way to get stabilization, your spine is then to go through hyperextension. And now there's a compression strategy, you're putting on your spine. It's better than rounding your back like an going forward, but overextension is not great either. So you want to be able to flex the
You're in a cylindrical fashion. So you have control. So if you go back to our very first things and with your hands open and you put them 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, right? 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 good. We don't have control, right? So you have to be able to separate.
Both from brace. So now if I can put my possessed self in a position and Kelly Starrett is 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 10 percent scream, to be able to brace my spine. That's going to be ineffective and wasteful want to be here with 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 in falls down a little bit because it's not on super tight.
If it's on, so dang tight doing the work. And I forget. So we just want a little bit of feedback there. Same thing with your upper back for having a difficult time, activating those rhomboids of those lats. So I'm going to 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, where your pull down, you can touch the lat, you can do this visualization stuff. So just imagine like a 3D rendering.
Of that muscle group in your watching that muscle group contract is very powerful and very effective to do it. So, a touch of visual all this stuff can help get people to activate outside of simple awareness. Typically e Centric overload is a very effective way for Activation of a difficult to Target muscle.
So the lowering of the bar for the lowering of the weight,
the movement of the way away from the body. It's not necessarily as lowering because it kind of depends on what are you sure? Doing, right? Miss Brooke. Yeah.
Um, things like a pull-up. Okay. So if if I'm going to do a pull-up and I have poor lad 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 push-up position and starting from there, and I want you to simply lower it under control. And so you just simply breaking the movement down into smaller pieces. That allow you to to focus on the execution more. It's going to be great.
Centrex are great for strength development, very good for hypertrophy and allow you to focus on control. I am willing to bet a huge percentage of you out there who 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 Eastern trick, only, you'll probably wake up the next day going all gosh.
I feel it there and that's the sign even if you didn't feel it when the workout, but I got a little sore the next day.
Keep down that path and then eventually you'll be able to do a con Centric. Maybe take a break. Maybe do an isometric. We just hold that position and eventually work that into a into progression where you can do the concentric and eccentric and isometric portions and get Activation. So that that may take you six weeks, my 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.
Every or they lead to more soreness than they can track
movement. Yeah. That they typically can, but they're also higher Force output. So very good for strength development, but they're going to lead on average, two more soreness. So more potential for interest, failure. Disruption that is going to be associated with pain. There's, there's not as much as people would like to explain muscle soreness as a result of micro trauma and micro tears in the muscle, 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 micro trauma.
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.
It only movements although I suppose it could be that applies 75% of the time to 75% of people. What I was taught and I'm hoping you're gonna tell me this was wrong because then there might be more benefits that 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, and this conversation goes away. So if you can maintain remain, you can maintain intramuscular intra-abdominal pressure while breathing. Then I don't really care when you breathe, very challenging to do at a very heavy weights.
If we flagged this on two areas of a paradigm Paradigm, one over here, you're going to do a set of 30 and you're gonna do front squats where a barbell is sitting on your throat. If you don't take a breath, this is going to end one way. And one way, only you passing out clearly has to be some breeding 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 the middle, right? So I'm doing some sort of strength training there. Well, number one, make sure.
You're braced and then you can get away with less need to worry about it in general. A decent strategy is to maintain a breath, hold during the lowering or eccentric or most dangerous part of the movement, and then you can exhale on the concentric portion. So if the bench presses are example, if you held in braced, lowered it under control and now started the concentric pushing away force, and then you want to take an expiration.
During the last half, the concentric portion. That's an okay strategy. If you're going to do a single rep. You don't need to worry about it. You can just avoid or omit breathing entirely. You're going to be just fine. If you're doing more than that, especially three to four to five, to seven eight. You're going to have to have some breathing strategy. A very common. One is probably every third breath. I'm going to do like
Excellent, third, reset, rebreathe, something like that. If you feel like you need to breathe after everyone, that's okay, but it's going to get wasteful because you have to take time in between reps of sitting there. If it's a squat that's different forces, a deadlift, if you're resting at the bottom, so there is a little bit of game here. So in general, though, is that 7575 kind of really thrown out. You threw out, breathe in through the lowering and exhale on the ouch. If you have to less Reps, don't worry about more reps, then you need to come.
Some sort of breathing strategy.
How about breathing in between sets and maybe even after the workout? Yeah, this is something. I think a lot of people Overlook like and because that it is the case that recovery has to do both with the specific activation and to muscles and the nervous system. But also the tax on the nervous system can also take place between sets. I mean if you're really geared up between sets and you go to General and you know as high in between sets or close to it as you are.
During your sets. You can imagine that the recovery would take longer or at least that you're not spending adrenaline and most efficient way if there is such a
thing. Yeah. Fair, you're not going to see any athlete that I work with just breathe in between, whether it's in between Innings, or in between rounds. Every single one of them is going to go back, sit on the stool and they're going to immediately be into a breathing routine, a very intentional. When they're a little bit different for every athlete depending on the sport. Even PJ golfer. There's going to be a
Just had our ball. We're moving the next one. We're going to go into a breathing strategy. Everyone admits. It's a huge area of potential benefit and consequence. If you're just ignoring it in general, we want to do any sort of calming breath. We want to restore. It depends on if the depends on where combating. We combating low oxygen or high CO2. So that strategy is going to be a little bit different. But in general, that is a huge time opportunity to get better. In fact,
People can go back and listen to some of your earlier episodes, where you talked about, you have spoken about, I think on this show.
When neuroplasticity works. And if you're losing that opportunity, post-exercise, you're leaving gains on the table if you will. So not only are you going to see everything out fleets that I work with mostly have a Brazen strategy in competition. We're not going to just finish a workout high-five, drink water, and walk out of the gym. There will be a down-regulation strategy that is heavily involved with some sort of light control, as well as breath. Control the individual prescription on that. There's a ton of variation with what you can do.
The easiest thing is do something that calms you down. Most likely that's going to be moved towards as much nasal breathing as you can possibly do and a really easy. Rule of thumb is a double exhale, length relative to inhale. So if you need to take a like for second inhale, double that time and breathe out for eight seconds, a box breathing is fine. So equal inhale equal, hold equal, exhale equal hold. So for S, inhale for s x. Hold, etc, etc. A
Uh, angle is fine to. There's a lot of ways. You can get really complicated like what Brian Mackenzie will do in robbing those guys have. You can get all kinds of systems for inhale, exhale control, and can be optimized, but some strategy of calm. We're going to almost always put you on your back or close and then we're going to cover light, we can do some. We've done actually a number of musical interventions as well.
But you can is just as simple as sit down a locker room, if you have to.
And just breathe for five minutes. That alone is going to be productive.
That's great. If you're breathing in the locker room for five minutes, I suggest closing your eyes, or you get some funny looks and if you'll still get funny looks, but you won't see people looking at. Yeah, exactly. I love this and I started doing this because you and Brian Mackenzie informed me about this and it completely changed the rate of recovery for me. I realized that I was leaving, work out both endurance, workouts and strength hypertrophy workouts, feeling great, but looking at my phone getting right in,
You know, and meetings Rob, not concentrating on my breathing and all I did was to introduce a on your recommendation, a five-minute down-regulation. So, exhale, emphasized, breathing of a bunch of different varieties. Physiological size box, breathing, exhale, emphasized twice, as long as the inhaled component for five minutes, and I noticed two things one. I recovered more quickly workout to workout. No question about it. Yeah. The numbers told me that and the other is that I used to have this dip.
In energy, that would occur three or four hours after a hard workout, and I always thought that had to do with the fact that I generally eaten a meal. At some point post-workout turns out, it wasn't the meal at all. Yeah. It's that that that adrenaline ramp up during the workout. I wasn't clamping that at the end. And so I think eventually it's like crashed and then three or four hours later. I'm having a hard time. Even reading what's on the screen on my computer thinking, maybe it's the screen. Maybe it was what I ate for lunch. Turns out the down regulations allowed me to work through the afternoon.
With no issues whatsoever. Yeah. It's really been quite powerful. And so I'm grateful to you for that. I think this is something that I think 98% of people are not doing and it's only five
minutes. You didn't have to 5. Give me three. If you really have to push a give me three. And you can even do this, you can save time. You can do this in the shower, if you have to. So you're you're done. You're finished drink of water. Whatever has to be in your getting a shower. Getting ready. Just give me three minutes to shower. It's not ideal but
As little as that it can pay huge. Dividends. You need some sort of internal signal that we're safe throttle down here. We're going to move on that has to happen. I could go on and on here, but I think we're making the same point on over again. It's big deal on. Do it.
Yeah, and you're saving energy. I mean the energy here is neural energy. I think Fighters do this, good Fighters learn to do this between rounds. Yeah sprinters loot learn to do this between events. I think human should learn how to do this between any, you know,
It's sort of interval type activity, including work, social engagement. I mean, this is so such a powerful tool. Do this for 1
minute after every important.
Whether it's an individual High, volatile interaction, or if it says you just did a nice 45 minutes, print to work and you're deep into it. Whatever. Fine. Just give me one minute set your alarm, just one minute and that also will pay
dividends. I love it. And as I said, it's beta it out sighs different positive difference on my training but also activities outside my training which is for me. I'm not a professional athlete. I trained for health and because I enjoy it. But when a really hard workout starts to interfere with the ability to do the
Things
in life, that's not a good situation. So this is really terrific. There's a lot more in each of those categories of strength and hypertrophy but you've given us a tremendous amount of valuable information there. Maybe now would be a good time to shift to endurance and of the four types of endurance and maybe you could remind us what those are. What do you think are the two that most people are seeking or pursuing, in terms of health and Aesthetics, right? I'm a realize that we probably have athletes out there.
Out there as well, but I think when I think health and ascetics, I think, okay, the ability to do sustained, endurance, 30 plus minutes of some ongoing activity. How does one maximize that work? What are the modifiable variables? And then maybe you could tell us what the other major category is. Yep. That people ought to have in their
kit. Okay, so starting off with exercise choice.
One thing is soon as we cross into the endurance world, and this is true for all four of those categories.
Exercise Choice needs to be very concerned with eccentric Landing. So you don't need to avoid it but you need to recognize it relative or compare it against those other strength and speed 1s. The volume is low on those ones. So if you have some eccentric absorption, it's okay. But as we sort of talked about five minutes ago, more eccentric means greater chance of muscle damage soreness. So if you take something and magnify it across 30 minutes or even five minutes but of maximal exertion you have a rest.
P for blowing up. You can imagine I haven't run in forever and I've just I've listened to this human Lab podcast and I'm okay. I'm going to get into my zone to training, whatever it is, whatever. And I start jogging I'm gonna do I you know, I remember when I was I used to go to the 25 and you just do a 25 minute jog. The amount of eccentric Landing, that just occurred on every single step because you're never with running. Even slow running. You never have two feet on the ground at the same time. So it is a 1 foot Land, one foot land your entire body mass plus gravity on 21.
Leg at a time repeated. Now hundreds of times that he's eccentric, Landing is going to cause tremendous soreness. Your quads are going to go. You're probably going to get shin splints, which is what this isn't. Those are entirely caused by eccentric landing. And when the tissue is not ready to tolerate that if you're not Landing correctly, this is when knee pain happens. Back pain shoulder neck pain, because movement compensation, anytime we start pressing to fatigue. Let's be very concerned with their. So my initial
Even his start with activities, exercise, Choice y's, that are mostly concentric based. So think about a cycle. So when you're riding on a bike, you're pushing the pedal, but you're never landing and absorbing it. So you could go out and do a 45 minute bike ride, and you're not going to get that sore because there's not a lot of eccentric load swimming similar thing here, right? There's some e Centrex when your hand hits the water but fairly minimal, it's mostly a push. Push. Push push push. No load. Rowing some more thing mostly.
Rick pushing a sled is fantastic going uphill running or even walking hard uphill all good because they're very minimal Landing relative to like running downhill which would be a very very bad idea to start. So when you if your first jumping into these things progress your volume for endurance very slowly. If it involves eccentric Landing a really bad strategy would be to jump in and do say circuit training class that involves a bunch of box jumps.
Right. This is not a good way.
To do your first foray into conditioning, you're going to get incredibly sore because you're jumping in the landing. You're now looking at 3 to 10 X body weight in terms of absorption with a single and even if you're just jumping, so be careful of that in any of those endurance areas of exercise choice. So what to pick pick the one that you are most technically proficient, because you're going to do it a lot. It's going to be a lot of repetitions. Whatever one, you feel the most joy in, if that's rowing great. That's pushing us.
And it doesn't really matter you can do this. Actually, with weights is our preferred way, by the way, with our athletes. So we might do a 30-minute circuit where we do a five-minute Farmers carry with a pretty lightweight. So you just going to carry some weights in your hand. You just going to walk up and down the street from five minutes. I'm going to set that down and then you're going to do, say, a three-minute plank and then going to pick that up and you're going to do bodyweight squats, like slowly and just Tempo and you do a handful of different exercises. So the athletes don't get super bored or a very
simple one. If a 30-minute workout 10 minutes on a treadmill, 10 minutes on a bike, 10 minutes on a row. For those of you that are like, oh my God, I can't do 30 straight minutes, running cool, break it up into three or four different exercises that are all fairly safe. So, that's how I would do that long-duration piece for exercise Choice.
And then, in terms of heart rate during that period, I mean, how much tension should we pay to this? I the done a very broad prescriptive. I've thrown out on this podcast a few times based on my reading, the literature is for most people that are oriented toward Health including
They're working on size and strength, gains hypertrophy and strength, of course that getting 150 to 180 minutes of so-called zone two cardio. Yeah, you know can just have a comp, just barely have a conversation. But if one were to push any harder you wouldn't be able to. That kind of thing is just as a generic recommendation that almost everybody should follow in order to just keep their cardiovascular system healthy, but I know there's a lot of nuance there and some people would like to be able to run continuously for an hour at speed, right?
Yeah, obviously not sprinting but what are some of the finer finer points on? Yeah long-distance endurance. So I how often should want to do
it. Okay. Frequency could do it a daily,
right? Even when strength doing strength and Hyper? No question. Well, I think is an important point for people to hear because a lot of people think that they are going to greatly diminish their strength and hypertrophy games, as it's often called by doing in zone, two cardio
Zone 2. You have almost no ability to block your hypertrophy.
Zone 2. Truly, if it's really within that category, if you're talking about conversational Pace, there is very fact, there is strong reason to think that is not going to influence hypertrophy for the overwhelming majority of
people. It might even help it by increasing blood flow to the various. Absolutely. Does it matter? Let's say someone's doing primarily strength and hypertrophy, their primary goals are strength and hypertrophy and then they're going to do they're going to hit that 150 to 180 minutes his own to cardio per week, assuming they're breaking that up into three or four sections. Does it?
Matter if they do it in the same workout before or after does that matter, I tend to do. Just by way of example, for people certainly. I'm just one one example, I tend to do resistance training one day, then I'll do Zone to cardio the next day. I jog, because that's the thing. I prefer, then I'll do strength, hypertrophy training the next day and then in jog for my zone to cardio. And then I take one full day off a week. I've never actually done the zone to cardio on the same day, but we're I to do it on the same day. Would it matter if I did it before?
After my strength, hypertrophy
training, not really. Okay, you're gonna be just fine interference effects. It's the interference effect is what this is called. So this is all the way back to 1980 about Pikmin stuff. Right? And, and he was actually working in a lab with John halassi, who's one of the fathers of exercise biochemistry. And the sort of The Story Goes, it Hickman came in. He was a strength training, guy, and laws in almost all those initial exercise physiologist were conditioning, folks, right? So it's almost always swimmers and runners.
That's why a bulk of the exercise physiology historically, his is shaped, and that direction. And so those scientists were interested in. So Hickman, was there in the lab in the how much of this is myth or not over the nose. But so The Story Goes that this is sort of chipping back and forth and you know, how from a pi in a postdoc and kind of that rousing works a little bit and eventually was like, you gotta start running with us and he was like you guys are lifting with me and kind of goes back and forth. Well, you know who wins that equation, it's not the postdoc, right? So it's
The pi get since is thickness is okay, fine. So he starts running with a lot of Z and then eventually starts realize I'm getting weak. I'm losing strength, and like I just can't, I think it's his bench. Press specifically was going down, or maybe you squat. I can't remember.
Who knows if it's even real. But point is, so he's going along. And So, eventually that starts to create a little bit of animosity and it's like, actually I was good for me and then blah blah. And so they did what any good scientist would do instead. Well, let's find out, right. So the he run a really famous experiment where he took a group, three groups, one group did a endurance piece, write the steady state cardio. One group did a strength training piece. And then the third group did both of those workouts combined, not like a reduction. So both volume stacked on top of each other.
And the results are fairly predictable in terms of the endurance group. Only have the greatest increases in VO2, max and endurance markers. The strength training group, had the greatest increases in muscle hypertrophy. What were the interesting part was where this whole field started was the combined group. So this is concurrent training is what is generally called. So you're doing concurrent things and typically that means hypertrophy and strength stacked on top of summoned steady-state endurance in the same work, same workout to our block or same like week, it does.
It can be kind of all these. Well, the concurrent group.
Saw the same improvements in vo2max.
As the endurance group.
And he's like, well, okay. So the strength training did not compromise endurance adaptations. However, they saw much lower increases in strength and hypertrophy. And so it was the conclusion was the addition of endurance work.
Compromised, muscle growth and strength development. However, the addition of strength training to your endurance, work will not compromise your endurance gains. Now that second piece has been shown countless more times, right? So if you're an endurance, athlete, adding strength training is almost always going to be massively, beneficial. Very little chance of detriment. For is why every endurance athlete is going to have some sort of strength and power component their training. The controversy though came in the interference effects. So how much endurance training really blocks muscular development.
And for years myself included was we preached hard, you know, don't don't do these two things. At the same time, my friend, my colleague, Kevin mirek has a really nice review article. Jimmy Bagley, those two guys put this thing out, you can go read that where they cover all these things. They've got some nice figures in there, but the general answer here is
interference effect is sort of real but it's probably greatly overblown, it matters. So you're talking about a 20 minute, jog at conversation Pace. That's probably doing very little with the assumption that are you doing an eccentric, based exercise like running. Well, then you're going to have more of interference effect than cycling. That makes a ton of sense if you think about it, right? What's your total energy intake? If you're eating, sufficient calories, you can still be an anabolic state if the addition of extra energy expenditure.
It's all really is Mark the cardio put you in a negative energy State. It's being it's going to become very difficult to go through anabolism. So those things matter if you're talking about doing like running a few laps around the track as a warm-up, like that's not interference effect. What we're really talking about is a big volume performed consistently. Now, after Hickman came out with this pater paper, 1980 people follow that up in the 90s and 2000's with mechanism. And we started to look and see we sort of see. Hey, there's this
So cell signaling pathway that goes down, the called mtor. And that's what leads to muscle growth. And then on the other side of that equation, is the thing called am PK, which is more associated with mitochondrial, biogenesis and endurance. And there's this little molecule in between at the time. Most people would point to TSC to. Well, turns out ampk activation is fine. If you activate, mtor has no bearing on a k, but if you activate ampk, it's going to activate TSC to which
I'm tour. And so it was like we had practical outcome. I eat Hickman. You're going to get weaker. Now we had mechanism. So that story became very, very strong at this interference effect. This is how science should work, right? When you see mechanism match up with practical human outcome. So, strong is what you want. Yeah. He was still wrong. It just took more science, right? And this is why we always have to give science a bit of time and you have to be willing to follow, right? And again, even me in the
Field who has a practitioner background in science. I felt very strongly. This is a big problem. It just didn't turn out to be the case enough studies came out where I'm like, okay, it's probably not that big a deal unless the ascent that movement is heavily eccentric based. The volume is very high. You're trying to maximize muscle growth and energy is not controlled, if that's not all the case, interference effect is probably not something. Most people should worry about when you especially when you compare that.
The well-roundedness that you need for total physiological health.
Probably not a big deal.
Very reassuring for me to hear because I do enjoy lifting weights and I really enjoy running. And I love running outside. I believe I used to experience the interference effect. When I used to do a very long run on Sundays, I would just go out for a, you know, two hours or something like that. I don't know that I ate enough for, who knows. I always feel like I enough for more. I love to eat, but that long Sunday, Run always made it hard for me to make Progressive. Yeah.
Like gains in strength and hypertrophy in the gym, whereas when I cut that to 30 minutes three or four times a week. I don't see any interference effect that all probably very real and I haven't trained specifically for endurance in a very long time. So I don't I haven't experienced the non interference effect, which as you said before most if not, all endurance athletes probably are. At least should be doing some sort of strength work just to keep the undercarriage
strong as I think. Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons. Yeah, but yeah,
so so what are some protocols that?
They could explore for continuous endurance, training. I'm, and I've thrown out this 150 to 180 minutes Zone to cardio, but that's really the, that's really the kind of kindergarten of endurance. Yeah, and there, I'm probably being generous, is probably the nursery school of endurance that everyone should do what sorts of other protocols. I realize that can be very goal-directed. But is it unreasonable? For instance, for somebody to do four hours of zone of continuous endurance, training with intervals in there as well, to get it, kind of all-around heart.
With and the ability to go long distances.
Yeah, I'll answer this too. Is the very first one to tackle the long duration of differences. However part of it you asked earlier about heart rate zones to me, that's almost totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter right? If you're moving you're moving. That's that's the functional piece here. If you want to push it and go at a non conversational Pace that has tremendous health benefits. If you want to do it a little bit slower, fine, if you're at the pace where you can have a conversation to me, I don't even count that as exercise.
That's not too. It's not a pejorative. By the way, that is just general physical movement. It is extraordinarily clear. You need a lot of that. You need a lot more of that than we get. You can do this in a couple of efficient ways. Just taking your phone calls. Moving, if you got a 30-minute call every day or most days of the week and you can do that while moving, you've checked, not that whole box, but a pretty good chunk
of it. And that could even be done inside a hundred percent, swing back and forth. I'm a big Pacer.
The yeah, you me to like you probably saw me, like I'm gonna walk
Up and down all over the place. Most of the time, when I'm in my office working, I come. I'm shadowboxing. Like, I'm doing air squats, not even intentionally. I'm just
like, do you have one of those treadmills under the
dust? I don't, but like every lab I ever came through. Somebody
did we did an episode on work space optimization and the data on those treadmills. Yeah, pretty interesting. They definitely increased alertness, which for obvious reasons that even a little bit of movement is going to generate a little-known, a little bit of adrenaline. So pacing around moving taking calls, moving getting
When you can. And then, in terms of building endurance, let's say somebody wants to quote, unquote, get into better shape. Yep. They already may or may not already have some size and strength that they're happy with and they just want to get in, they want to improve their health. Yep. So I commend does that 150 180 minute this thing tick over into a different protocol.
Yeah. Okay. So I think the way that I can outline on weekly schedule just as a conceptual model here, that long duration stuff is not even counting as I mentioned, right? It's just a this
But you need to do is a human being for, we have an improved, if you're extremely unfit, you may see some changes in cardiovascular health, a for the most part. This is just knocking out the general physical practice. You need to be Iron functioning. So whatever, that time domain is, I don't really care. It's not a huge concern of mine. What I think you need to hit or these nodes. You need to do something once a week that gets you to a maximum heart rate. Now, I don't have to literally mean Max but close. This is means really sucking for really like as high as you can possibly.
Possibly get, you can wear a heart rate monitor. If you want the maximum heart rate that the rough equation we say, is 220 minus your age. So, if you're 40 years old, your maximum heart rate is probably about 180 beats per minute. Now, I can tell you flat out right now. My max heart rate is close to 10, which means I'm 10 years old. So take that number with a grain of salt. I have had a bunch of professional athletes who are in their 20s and their max heart rate 175 and they are way better shape than I am. So,
Maximum heart rate is not a good proxy for physical fitness. It's a rough number and easy way to do it is if you have a heart rate monitor anything like that, do the hardest workout. You can possibly do see what the highest number you get. As is soon. That's close. That's if you want to just start it to 20 - th-that's fine to do something. They'll wear your like Yep. This is death. Like this is really, really challenging how long however long that takes you that can be a 30-second go on an aerodyne or air assault bike. That could be a
do one of those things where you kind of like, Sprint run as hard as you can during the straightaway, on a track. And then walk the corners kind of an old classic backing when you. And I were kids interval training. They don't do that anymore. I guess. I don't know how I really talk about it in
PE class. We had to change and if you didn't bring running shoes, you had to do it
Barefoot. Oh, I love it. And I love your teacher.
Yeah, it wasn't a pretty, our football basketball baseball teams. Weren't that good? But anything like running cross country just because of where I grew up a brutal brutal.
Coaches so that yeah, they'd make the all kids. Do these runs.
Yeah, so we can be in the 30 probably s at a minimum. It's hard to get you to a true heart rate Max and shorter than 30 seconds. You can get the total stock in under 20 seconds, but getting to a true heart rate Max's is probably gonna take more than 30 seconds. So it doesn't really matter what you want to do. It can be again, a Sprint. Uphill. It could be what you're talking, that could be burpees to death, you know, like whatever, whatever you want to do. Just those have an eccentric component.
Yeah, that is really yea, no question about it. But if you did to
actual death, by the way,
if you just did I'm going to do as many burpees as I can for 90 seconds. It probably won't take you much longer than that to get too close to. And is that extra work
out could be. So once a week, get to max heart rate, touch it. I love
it. Touch it. It's not the best but it'll it'll work.
Um, and what are the specific benefits? That that provides?
Okay. So earlier, in our our chat, we we outlined the
Specificity specific, atom, post adaptation to imposed demand. If you're never getting to that high of a paste, your never, it would be like, trying to get stronger, but only going to 60%. So every cardiovascular adaptation that occurs with cardiovascular. Training is to Simply going to get to the topper End by doing this. So if you just start at the heart itself, stroke volume increases amount of blood. That's kicked out / contraction, cardiac output resting, heart rate. If you go to the endothelial function, you're talking about nitric oxide release endothelial
With, in general.
Capillary, mitochondria all the way down. Like you just walked through the whole system pulmonary exchange to the lungs. All of those are going to benefit by being challenged to their
maximum. Also, teach you where your vomit
reflex. Yeah, right. Let's hope. No, um, stress is what causes adaptation, right? So if you push your okay, here's the difference. If you did 25 minutes of steady state, you're not challenging. The same thing as what we just talked about. The way that I explain. This is if you understand the point, the point of physiological failure,
Then you understand the place of adaptation. That's it. So if you and I both go run on a we did it. Both did a VO2 max test. So classic VO2 max test is going to take 8 to 12 minutes and it's going to look something like this. We're going to get on a treadmill and we're going to run and every minute. I'm going to slightly increase, that treadmill either the speed of the grade, most of the time, it's a speed, right? So we get to a high grade say, 10% grade or something, and then we go 5 miles per hour 5.25 .45
We just go until you can't go any longer. Now. Let's say you and I did that and we have the same exact time frame. And so we both went eight minutes. The time that you last is not the thing that we care about, right? It's the volume of oxygen, that you breathe out. Is what determines it. Well, let's say, move the same time domain, and we have the same, VO2 max say they were both 50 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which is like a
Okay number. But that's nothing to be extremely proud about just because we have the same number does not mean. We have the same point of physiological failure and this matters because it's going to answer the what do I do about it? Then question, right? So if you got off and I started asking you a series of questions and you're like I basically said, why'd you quit? You know, why did you jump off the treadmill? Why'd you stop? And you were like, my chest, like I couldn't catch my breath. I thought my heart was going to explode. Okay, great. If you asked me and I said,
Legs are on fire. I was breathing hard, but I couldn't take another step.
This is a very rough indicator of different places of physiological. Disruption. Now what I've seen a lot with my professional athletes, especially like Fighters, they are 10. They're going to generally fail in our legs because they don't often do a lot of strength training in their legs. They don't do a lot of leg work. They're fighting on their back, literally a lot, or on top, or on their knees. So their, their legs tend to give out before their someone who feels in the cardiovascular system, like, say you did a lot of leg training, typically like an endurance athlete, who's that's not going to be the issue.
Is going to be going to reach a heart rate and ventilation threshold. That's they can no longer handle. If I put you on the exact same training protocols. It's not going to be as effective because you're going to always fail at your legs. And they're going to always fail at their cardiovascular system. I need to flip that right. I need to put you in a position to where you can reach a true heart rate or ventilation challenge while your legs are still hanging in there or the opposite. So the training protocol is based on that point of failure.
The adaptation is in the same thing. So if you are failing because of your legs, then you might see a greater increase in capitalization in your legs relative to somebody else who's failing in their cardiovascular system. They may see a greater change in something on that side of the equation so that it matters how you're failing at all
times. What I love about this is that it's it's sounds like it's like a thermometer for where one is weak and needs work but also provides a stimulus to improve the very thing that you
Eat. That's the trick warden.
So to just get it real, brass tacks about it. It would be once a week. Okay? Yeah, but 1990 s near maximum heart rate. I'll make what I do. More. Could I you know, I do five or six of those 90-second
bouts. No question. You can do it. As long as you touch that Max heart rate. I'm good, right? Ideal World. Probably four to eight in that single session ideal. Okay, right. If that takes you 20 seconds or 90 seconds, it's fine. If you want to do 30 on 30 off.
You want to do 20 on 40 off, 40 on 20 off those numbers, don't matter.
And is there, an interference effect of this on the other sorts of training that we've
talked about? He tends to be complementary. There's the, the evidence available suggests that this High interval stuff, is, is more likely to be complementary type, archery training. I'm probably because of lactate and some other cool things which are very beneficial molecules that people don't understand. They think it's bad. It's actually a hugely beneficial thing. It can be interference can provide on your friends if
Calories are not accounted for of rests, not accounted for and other things, but in general, it's probably okay. I wouldn't add it to your equation. If you don't need it for maximizing hypertrophy, but for the person who wants to just get well-rounded physiology. Yeah, I wouldn't hesitate to do these even in the same session or different sessions
terrific. So, and if that's done, once a week and the, yep, 150 to 180 minutes or so of zone, two cardio is done, you know, in the rest of the week, you ever since doing their strength, and hypertrophy training, we would hope
What other sorts of endurance practices? Could one incorporate you mentioned, muscular endurance? Like the ability would like a wall sit or the ability to do a plank. It was that. Is that something? Is that useful for anything?
Yes. He's
doing planks. And wall
sitting? No. No, it's extraordinarily useful. Um, while told on muscular endurance. I want to finish one more thing on this side. So if we're building this week of endurance, once a week, hit that number if you can do repeated balance, and we talked for 28, that's fantastic.
If you can't muscle the, if you can't manage the mental energy every week, do it every other week.
It's still very good, right? Because I get it like, I'm a working person, too. And sometimes you just, like, I cannot like those workouts feel incredible afterwards, but man, they are daunting. If you love the stuff, you could do it four times a week. If you hate it though. It's not realistic to think you're gonna be able to knock this out. You're gonna end up doing 70, 80 percent, which is not going to give you the benefit. So just
don't do it. You really have to hit that
so you gotta get up there close
over someone Chase. I always say, you know, the when doing this this kind of work in my mind, I'm thinking that
Basically being chased by somebody with a syringe full of poison. Yep. And while there are other ways out of the situation and for the benefit of what we're talking about. The one I'm referring to is to just run.
Yeah. My motivation is typically, if you just get this done, we're done in a couple of minutes. Just get it done. Like, don't go here if you're not going to do it, but when you show up check-in and it's over really
quickly breathing down regulation
afterwards, hundred percent. You have to write it so easy, huge key. So if you absolutely can't do it, do it every other week. That's
twice a month.
Give me twice a month can be done on the road could be done at 20 minutes like doing really good thorough, warm up. Don't just jump into those by the way right away. It's not going to be as beneficial really nice. Good sweat broke a really good warm-up and then give me four minutes of hard work and we're done, right? Get out of there. If you want to use like a bath or hot thermal stress, too kind of like a tin that warm up process, find getting a sauna getting a hot bath. Get really hot. Get up there, warm up. Knock it out, whole thing is 20 minutes plus five minutes breathing.
Going to start doing this. It's so about. You got a bike right there.
Yeah, I've got all sorts. Every, every, every room in the studio, 2,000 different piece of equipment. It seems.
So, I want that once a week. Realistically, every week. If I have to, I want that physical activity. Peace, call it whatever you want, long-duration thing. Ideally, you'll do as much of that through your nose only, you're not going to the interval stuff. It knows only event don't even try but if you can go that whole 30 minute time or 20 or 40 minutes, whatever it's going to be that's actually a good way to regulate intensity. So goes
You can while still being able to breathe through your nose only, if you have to open up your mouth a little bit fine, but try to stay there. What you'll see is very quickly. You'll be able to increase your work output while just breathing through your nose, which has a bunch of other Beyond benefits. The other piece I want is this Middle Ground, which is can you sustain hard work for 8 to 12 maybe? As little as four minutes. I'll give you 4 to 12 minutes. This doesn't have to be quite as high as the first one. You don't have to get to her.
Hurry Max, but can you get somewhere in the 80% range? And can you hold that for four minutes? Maybe give me two minutes, two minutes arrest, and do that twice. Something like that. Ideal situation is what a runner would do is, like, will call mile repeats because they're running 45-minute miles, whatever time it takes them to finish their going to rest that. So it's a one-to-one work to rest ratio. So five-minute mile rest, five minutes and go again. That's probably pretty unrealistic for a lot of
Well that well, the five-minute part is unrealistic for most folks for me would be you know, eight minutes. Eight minutes fine. Probably something like
that. When your particular case just do the 800-meter. So do a tour M. Do something that takes two to six minutes of work.
It is a lower intensity than the max stuff but is a much higher workload on that is probably going to give you you might even argue the most cardiovascular benefit because it is sustained work output and that's very critical. The downside of kind of like that conversational Pace its physical activity, its movement. It's blood flow with some phatak drainage. It's not very cardiovascular challenging though. You're just not going to get an optimal.
Health room just walking actively. So to 26 minutes of
hard, work of hard work with than an equivalent amount of rest in between and then repeat, how many
times.
Once, if you have to, if you needs to be one rep, if it needs to be a six-minute thing, and then down-regulate, breathe twice, if you can do that, 6 times 8 times, like, whatever, whatever you can really do, and you can just take that those long of the training session as you want or short, exercise Choice can be whatever you want. So again, you can do slide pushes or it could be a kettlebell circuit or any combination of things where you're just, you're working and you're not giving yourself a break. You have got to be able to hold on at a very high waste product.
Action level as well as a high demand for energy and then
bring it down
and breathing during this, 2 to 6 minutes of hard output is mainly through the nose or combination, nose and mouth. Or is that getting too
technical? Well, it's probably like, I like it, but you tell me if it's too technical. You're going to try to maintain these lonely as much as you can, but you're going to lose it at some point as you can go through there. Brian and Rob's gear system and learn more and then you can sign a kind of see what gear to be in. If you have to go nose and mouth out or something like that, but I don't really care.
Much honestly not range. I'm getting most of my nasal only stuff.
At night and training and everything. So if you have to open up the throttle there, to get the work done. That's okay.
Oh, then we'll actually go to your answer your question, which was muscular endurance. Let's go back to that piece. Muscular endurance is incredibly important for general maintenance of joint health. In other words, you have got
Form follows function, right? That's a very classic sign. See physiology saying, meaning, you've got a couple of different. There's a bunch but to make it easy to different types of muscle fibers, fast, twitch and slow twitch fast-twitch fibers. Tend to be, but they're not always bigger. They contract to the higher velocity. That's why they are called fast twitch, but they tend to be more glycolytic and thus fatigue. Able slow-twitch are tend to be smaller. Well, not always.
They are more packed with mitochondria, that were generally better at burning fat as fuel, but contracted lower velocity. Well, we have these two types so that we can regulate function more. You have some muscle groups that we're going to sort of let me go back up a quick second. Each individual muscle in the human body, has a combination of some amount of fast, and some amount of slow that percentage of fast versus slow, differs from muscle the muscle. So it also differs from person to person. He's example is your calf muscle. There's
Three. But there's two primary muscles in your calves once called the Soleus ones, the gastroc. These the gastroc is the one or if you take your toe and point it towards your face and then Flex, that's the one that pops out on the medial side. The inside the Soleus is what we call an Antigravity muscle and it is generally about 80% or even 90% slow twitch and that's because it's supposed to be contracted lightly.
All-time supposed to be on permanently. It's man to keep it. We call it anti-gravity because it's meant to keep you erect up and moving your spinal Erectors supposed to do this various muscles for postural or are generally slow twitch muscles. So we're supposed to be on all times, not produce fast, not produce Force, but don't get tired. The gastroc is the opposite. It's not activated very often, but when it's activated, it's meant for extreme propulsion. This gives us the ability to reach up and scratch our eyeball and also punch somebody.
We have to be able to regulate Force output, which is going back to Hanuman, right? Controlling what we use when we don't use. While also, not wasting energy, which is the downside of you activating a big threshold motor neuron, is its it requires a ton of energy, some more efficient mode of energy, but the total amount is really, really high. So muscular endurance is going to help those slow twitch muscle fibers and slow twitch predominant muscles. Maintain their working job, so
You lose your muscular endurance, ability in your spinal Erectors or your calf. You can start slumping into bad positions. You're going to be getting putting joints in a movement pattern that they're not going to be the most happy with so it's more than about then being able to just maintain a two-minute wall squat. It's about maintaining joint integrity and allowing that musculature to not fatigue when you ask it to do heavy and fast. So what I mean by that is you've got a whole combination of muscles in your shoulder and we will generally call these like the rotator cuff.
Cuff muscles. Well, let's imagine those slow-twitch postural muscles, get fatigued and they start to lose contractile tension. And then you go to do something heavy or fast or an emergency situation. Those are already pre fatigued. You're going to rely more upon the fast twitch muscle fibers, which are there less for postural integrity. You're likely to get out of position. And this is a whole recipe of like God, why is my shoulder just hurting? Got my back. That's very often a case of
Slow, twitch fibers, the soldiers muscle groups losing muscular endurance. So you need to build that back up so that they can control and hold the joint in the position. So, the fast twitch fibers is because in contract with
Force,
I'm hoping that what I'm going to say next meets. What you said accurately my experience is that getting injured, lifting weights, or even doing, housework or yard work, almost always happens when I'm not paying attention fatigued, that's kind of obvious. But also getting in position to initiate a movement setting down away or lifting weights off the rack or picking up dumbbells. That's almost always. When I seem to activate the
Lower back thing, that happens every you know, six or eight months. And what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that this muscular endurance from wall sits, our planks or things of that sort, maybe give us a few other examples of these can help us because they actually prepare the system to do what we normally think of, as the more intense work. So, it's really the, it sounds like it's really the architecture of the of the body includes nerves and muscles and everything else. Of course that lets the limbs and other kind of action, and
Of the body. Do its best work. Yeah, let it
express its own power and force. Yep. We've actually landed on one of my final laws of strength conditioning which is similar to what I said earlier, right? So I said, exercises do not determine adaptations application. The Germans adaptation. This one sounds similar, but it's quite different. There are no good or bad exercises. There's only good or bad application. Here's a great example of that.
Right, so you do not get hurt deadlifting because dead lips are dangerous. You only get hurt deadlifting because you either got in bad position, you got bad position because you either started in bad position, which is one of the things you just said or you ended up and bad position.
You did too much volume. You did too much intensity, or you did too much complexity those last three things all hurt you because they result in the first one which is out of position or another way to think about. This is It's not like a visible change in position is
Stress got put into a part of the system. That should not absorb that much stress. So, you did too much of it. You get it too heavy, you got fatigued and so you broke position, if you got too heavy so you broke position, you do you made the exercise too complex. You put too many moving Parts in it. You put too many joints in it and you got a position you did that too many times over time. Now we've LED for either an acute injury bam, you know back pops and you fall on the floor or just like man, this thing is hurting over time.
All these are the results of the same thing. So you cannot ever blame the exercise for causing. The problem is always either the user or the coach you programmed way too much here, and I can't handle that position or you yourself went into it too much. So if you're getting these little tweaks and problems going on it, you've made an error in one of those things. So simply back off reduce the complexity right? Give yourself more stability. Less moving parts. Do less volume do less intensity. In fact, if you look at the people from
The physical therapy World in terms of the pain literature. It's very clear. That just stopping the movement is, very rarely going to work. What you want to do is back off all the way down to just below that threshold of, that's what aggravates it and you want to train right there. That's going to allow you to do two things. Number one tissue tolerance and then number two, desensitization a lot of pain stuff and you can probably speak a lot about. This is especially things like low back. Pain is, there's not necessarily often much damage there. It's a lot of hype.
Or sensitization of just pain, signal pain signal.
Omitting the movement. Tireli does not get that signal to go away. You need to train just below that signal and desensitize it. So, you want to make sure that the muscular endurance allows you. You just putting volume right below where you start to get it week and it is beautifully effective for
that. I've experienced this right side, lower back, pain for years. Sometimes shooting down. The hip, the two things that really helped were doing interior tip work. So you have hats off to knees over toes sky and Patrick, who has, you know,
Eat a lot of popularity around. Yeah, tip work, but it
turns out joints full range of motion. You're in a better spot.
Yeah, there's something about stabilizing. The stuff from the knee down, help my back. And then also some Network and friends of mine are always teasing me that my gym is filled with the most bizarre equipment, you know, doesn't look like any other gym, a lot of it is just designed to keep me healthy and still training but I love this idea of getting right at the below the threshold of pain activation and not simply going into complete.
On action or just taking people eat grass because that actually can be detrimental. I'd love to talk about a few items that support training of all kinds and where there is a lot of confusion and indeed, misconception and mystery and just get your take on these and and I just want to acknowledge at the outset that for some of these there's a lot of science for some of them. There's less science, but there certainly is a lot of experience in your camp and and those categories are cold heat and hydration, huh?
Because obviously whether or not you're a runner or whether or not your strength training, if you're a human being, you need to hydrate, but in terms of work output and physical work output, maybe even cognitive work out, but it, we tackle. Hydration. First, I went, there is what, what, I call and what I think is now come to be known as the Galpin equation. Yeah, which you really do deserve credit for because I think that people realize that there are a range of solutions out there, but there is a really
desperate need for straightforward solutions that work for 75% of people 75 percent of the time. So hydration is key. Maybe you could underscore just how how key it is for us. And then what is the Galpin equation has? As I call it and I think others are now referring to
it. Yeah, okay, um benefits of hydration / consequences of Miss hydration, so well, that's dehydration overload. You
Physiology has hermetic curves, might not typically we think about this, in terms of Toxicology. So what this means is at some point giving you a dose of something testosterone is a very easy example, if you're clinically deficient or low in testosterone and I gave you a little bit and it brings you back into a normal range. You generally see an improvement and health and functionality taking you though, from normal to super high doesn't always necessarily provide additional benefit. In fact, if you continue to go, it's going
By detriment, right? So everything has its curve and then some things are hermetic stressors, which means like a small short fast. Insult is actually beneficial because then you come back, bigger, faster stronger. It's that's how an application works. Basic hormesis. Okay, hydration is the same way. So at the end of the curve here, if you are under hydrated, we all know you could die, right? You have to have things. In fact, water is the only thing that is ubiquitous across biology's in terms of every living thing has to have it.
There's no other vitamin mineral nutrient, that is required among all living things with the exception of water. So that should give you a pretty good indication of its importante, right? Like you got to have this thing down here, the bottom, if you're dehydrated, I give you more, it's beneficial effects. However, if you're up the top already and I continue to give you more water past that now, we run into action problems and we can get what's called hyponatremia, which is more common than people realize. The tree me of being actually not referring the water, but the, the sodium concentration.
Into low and you've probably talked about that a length of Y, that's an issue. If sodium potassium, balances inside outside of cell, come off. You heart stops right muscle contraction ends and all these things. I'm so you don't want to be over or under hydrated. So understanding the, this rough equation. I sort of loosely calculated. One day is helpful for that. I think the most context is, is talking about how much water to drink throughout the day and how much water to drink during exercise. So the very easy answer is
Half your body weight in ounces per day is a very loose guideline for total amount of fluid consumption. So if you weigh 200 pounds aim for 100 ounces of water, like a very easy number. If you hit that, you're probably, I'd say 90% of you are good 90% of the time alone. If you then go to exercise, you need to then account for that fluid loss with exercise. And in general, you want to consume 125 percent to 150 percent of the amount of weight. You lost in fluid.
Words, if you worked out and you were 200 pounds, naked, and you, when did you work out and you dried off and you weighed yourself again, and now your 198 pounds, you lost two pounds of water as 32 ounces. You want a drink back about 125 percent of that. So instead of drinking 32 ounces. I want you to drink 40 40 to 45 like something like this, because one of the reasons why is unless you're drinking something that is isotonic, meaning the same exact concentration in your blood that you're in your fluid.
You're just going to go closer that hyponatremia. You're going to get a bunch of bare or factor reflective responses. And you're going to actually think you have too much fluid and you're going to urinate it
out. What if I'm not weighing myself before? And after workouts. And is there a shorthand version of this that you know after training for an hour? I should drink at least extra valances. Yeah. That's assuming it's at kind of taller. You know, I'm not sweating. Super heavily.
Yeah. In that particular case.
You could probably go something like.
If everyone in the world did, I don't know, 12 to 20 ounces.
That's probably like, pretty
decent. And they're probably doing that. Yeah, and what about electrolytes it consuming salt potassium and me,
but but that thing only works though, if you're coming in.
At optimization in. This is the problem. This is why you have to, you have to flag this starting with a good total daily, model water. Because if you're coming in and you're like, oh, I drank two or three glasses of water a day. Then you might need to drink 50 or 60 ounces post-workout because you are way behind so that, like, oh 12 ounces are so works if you're already generally very well
hydrated and if people are drinking, you know, four to six, glasses of water a day, but they're also drinking a lot of caffeine in any form. Then they're going to be excreting, more water is in most cases, right?
Well because caffeine is a
diuretic. Okay, it kind of is, but it kind of isn't either. It's not the diuretic that we used to think about it, as it is still fluid consumption. So it's only a diuretic if it causes you to excrete more fluid than it actually was being in Tech. So if caffeine intake is in a normal range, I don't have to worry about the diuretic effects. If someone is drinking 12 cups of coffee a day, we're going to or they're taking caffeine pills or something. Now.
The excretion is going to out kick the coverage. So now we're now problems, right? Because there's no fluid consumption with the caffeine pill. So in general, things like T sumption, like I'm not super worried about those things. You can count those towards your total fluid intake if you want. So, if you're like, I drink 16 ounces of water, plus 20 ounces of coffee, and then there's a you and add that all up in your going to be totally. Okay. So natural for you, also have problems with synthetic forms of caffeine versus natural forms of caffeine. Natural forms are pretty.
Okay, etcetera. Yeah, all that
still form is where it gets tricky,
always like every always, right? So general, just eat real food and things you can be just fine. I'm the last piece to consider is your diet quality matters, because the fluid content in your food can vary wildly. So something like a bagel might be, you know, five to ten percent water or something like a watermelon is 9.
E 8 percent, 95 percent something in a huge range even meat is very high percentage of fluid intake. Like it's a really high even after you cook it. There still a lot of fluid in there. So if you're eating a whole food, mostly Whole Food based diet, your endogenous hydration is actually pretty high already. Just from your fluid. If you're eating a very highly processed, you hydrated over-salted diet. You've your way low on hydration, just in your food. So, you have to factor all these things. And in fact, one of the things that happens to us constantly.
With folks that go from a highly processed little quality diet to a high-quality one. Is it just there? Just peeing non-stop, like what the hell's going on? I'm like, well, you're actually have brought in 60 additional ounces of water in your diet relative. The what you used to have and you've gone from 10 grams of sodium. There are 24 22, sometimes. One sometimes gets very low because you're not like salt. Are you selling your food? No. Okay. Well, we don't have sodium intake then like we're way down. So everything that we're considering.
Is based on that. So let's assume someone's eating a pretty well balanced diet. They're drinking 60 ounces of water and maybe caffeine coffee and tea things like that. We don't exactly know the optimal amount of sodium one should and take. It is very clear. High sodium concentrations are still associated with a lot of negative Health outcomes, especially in combination with poor physical activity. In combination with low food quality, and other comorbidities. That's a very bad thing. You need to be very careful about those.
Thanks, if everything else is, okay. We're okay. Playing of the little bit higher salt. In fact, you're probably going to feel better. You're going to feel generally pretty good. You just, it seems to be very clear if you are overweight, highly stressed and you don't have a lot of these things took off. And you have known core morbidities. You really need to pay attention to salt intake. It can be very nasty. So that being said, what were generally going to look at folks is, are you at least? Can we categorize you as a low sodium or high sodium sweater?
If so, there's a whole list of electrolytes. You can look that are going to have something like 200 to 400 milligrams per serving. There's a whole list of these things. If you're low, sodium sweater your, I'm probably going to send you after one of those. If you're a high sodium sweater, there's a lot of electrolytes supplements that are closer to six or eight hundred, even even a whole g, a single serving size. So you want to play with that a
very, you know, if you're a low sodium or High, sodium's sweater. We actually have an episode on salt. We put out that
Where is coming out soon? If hasn't come out already, which is, you know, when you look at the hazard ratios, your salt intake. Basically, your probability of really bad things. Happen to you goes way up as you get towards, you know, lot of sodium intake, you know, 10, 12 grams per day. And and this is translate 2 teaspoons of salt, Etc. But also very low sodium intake is a problem. No question about say, it's not a perfect u-shape. It's kind of a j-shaped curve or a kind of hockey stick shape more or less, but
How would I know if I'm a low sodium or high sodium? Sweet? Yeah, so you can get I just kind of like my sweat or have someone else can? Yeah
find a super friend who lick your sweat for you as saying, well,
how no willing volunteers that I'm aware of, but would I be able to tell
ya? You can get sweat. Testing done actually have a number of options, the kind of the original one that most of us use the background for many years was called levelin. They'll send you out a little patch. You can wear that send it in the lab and the whole measure of directly in the lab and sent it back is 100.
Fifty bucks or
they've been you into low medium and high
so they're going to they're going to do that but they're gonna give you very. They're going to tell you exactly the mg. And then I'm going to actually tell you like what products is stuff and that they're exactly matched. Do
you do this with that with
professional athlete have many times yesterday, you can do a more consumer grade version. Gatorade has a patch for 25 bucks. You can get two of them. You can put that cat patch on your left, forearm and download the Gatorade app and you can do a workout, measure it right there and click it over and
I'll tell you exactly, not only higher low. But again, I'll tell you the milligrams of sodium that are in your sweat. And, you know, you can figure out again, kind of high medium or just their do much
better on a slightly higher, sodium intake, most do, but and my carbohydrate. I do eat carbohydrates. I'm one of those that is pretty moderate, but I try and eat clean food. So I noticed and I tend to be slightly low blood pressure. So again to reiterate the, the warning there that if somebody is pre hypertension or has hypertension or obese. You really do need to be careful.
Your sodium intake, but many people seem to find that they feel better when they increase their sodium intake and they're still in that healthy portion of the hazard ratio,
most of the athletes. I would say in general. We're going to go higher and salt when they come right around the stuff. I'm going to add salt. Almost always very few times. Have I got a now. We need to cut this back when the exception, the ones that come in that eat, like, 14 year olds, and I'm like, okay, you're a 15 milligrams or 15 grams a day because you're eating nothing but garbage. So like we're going to come down, you're gonna feel when
way better all this bloating and everything else that's going to happen. Go down, even do that. They're actually more their biosensors that are coming out that are not available yet, but they're coming very soon. In this space. They're going to be able to give you real-time metrics on salt. So you can pay attention to those. I haven't seen one of used one personally, so I don't want to espouse about how good or bad it is, but I know that those are coming from handful of companies, an easy way to do is just look at wear a hat or wear some sort of headband or
Thing and do your workout, take it off. If you see a just huge white band or if it's completely clear and that's going to tell you big white band. You're probably a high-salt sweater completely clear, very little coming out.
That's great. And I can see the posts on Instagram. Now, people showing their, their salt band of from from from sweating. Yeah, I mean, obviously salt is so essential for so many physiological functions. You don't want too high or too low, but if you're losing more make sense, you would need to take in more. So half of my body weight.
In ounces as a just Foundation of fluid intake, coffee. And tea could be included in that, but that should probably mostly water things similar to it. What? And then during exercise the how do I want to think about this again? If let's say I'm a let's say I'm a high-salt output then I'd want to drink maybe 40 ounces of water with or more.
Yeah. Okay, I'll do this easier. Um, let's talk about pre and post right? So what to drink pre if you see if you come
Having hit these rules. You're okay and pre-workout can be as little as like 5 or 6 ounces. Basically a couple sips of water fine. If you come in poorly hydrated, then you maybe need to go more like 12, but here's the deal. If you start off a session in a bad spot. You're not going to catch back up like you just you're in trouble. Let's say you come in. You did you follow directions? 500 mg salt before 500 mg after very easy rule.
Whatever Source you want. That's a couple of sprinkles of table salt. If you want, Himalayan, that's fine. You don't have to Himalayan is actually a fairly low sodium salt. So it's not the best for this purposes. If you're a higher salt or sweat a little bit more if you want to go choose an electrolyte of which there are infinite, you can look on the packet and I'll tell you, you know, 250 milligrams per serving or 400 or 600 or whatever happens. We but around 500 pre. 500 post is a very general rule and then during is thanks to you, my famous Galpin.
Now, that is all over the world. All I did is I took the literature and I said, okay. In general, the research shows. Pretty clearly 2 milligrams per kilogram body weight or 15 minutes. Seems to put you in a pretty good spot. Most people don't think about kilograms or milliliters. So can I just run that over and then turns out it's about your body, weight divided by 30 announces. Like, that's all you have
to body weight in pounds, divided by 30.
Yeah, exactly. Right. So, you weigh 200 pounds divided by 30 and that's the number of ounces. You don't want to go every 15 or 20
minutes. So I'm getting that
That amount every 15 to yep, 20 minutes throughout the training and now in the weight room that's pretty easy to do. Yes, they're rest intervals, but you people will need to do this while running or cycling and that can cause a little bit of gastric distress. If you're not used to it is that right? You can even learn to run with it with some water in your belly.
100% the gut is very trainable and a lot of directions, but in terms of fluid as well as carbohydrate, which is another thing that is going to get people. But that's the a very
It'll be uncomfortable initially, but you'll quickly get into it, the better solution for those folks.
Just comment hydrated, and you might not even any water. You could probably perform just fine. So, the ones that don't have as much of an opportunity, you really have to emphasize walking in. We have this problem with like, a professional golfers, they plenty of time to drink water, but they're so focused on the shot and there's a lot of variables coming up. Once they hit their shot and moving on to the next one. They're thinking about, I'm either going over scorecard of 185 yards away. Can I go a hundred eighty four and a half yards, gonna go 186 yards. What's the slope of that? What's the wind up?
Was went up. There was like, it is just there's a thinking, and they just forget, even though they have four and a half hours. So we have to make sure that they immediately get off. The course we go. Right into recovery as hard as we possibly can and wake up the next morning. There's a good spot. We Crush recovery. And I was like, hey, if you can remember to drink this great, if not, we're still fine.
If it's not a big deal and you have time like in a lifter. Because I deal with that problem, fighters to like I can only drink so much in the middle of a fight, a couple sips over here. We can't go mixing 2 ml fit. So I can, you do a couple sips in yet. Oh shit. I forgot like it's not going to happen. So we have to take more of an emphasis before and after. So start your recovery process immediately and then come in the next day. That's your window. And then whatever you can get in during the workout, that's fine, too. If you're a higher salt sweater said it went 500. 500. Maybe go seven.
2750. If you have a longer about of exercise, especially if it's hot or humid, then you might want to consider some salt in the workout as well and 300 milligrams. During the workout. Totally fine. It's enough. If it is a really long workout and it's really hot. You're going to lose pounds during it. You need a specific strategy. If you're going to lose less than a pound. You don't need to worry about it. You're going to be is not going to be enough of a detriment for you to really care. So that's kind of a
A rough Rule. Now if you're 200-plus pounds, maybe that member moves from one pound two pounds, but really, the number were looking at is what one percent of your body weight. If you're losing more than one percent of your body weight. We need to start caring. If it's less than 1% It's not gonna really pay that much of a difference. Okay, so
for myself because I don't get super technical. I don't wear any devices besides a wristwatch. What? I've watched. Thanks. I'll yeah. Very attached to this Watcher. It's attached to me, I suppose.
My body weight in pounds, divided by 2. That's what I'm going to try and get across the entire day as a kind of Baseline. And then my body weight in pounds, divided by 30. Yeah. During the workout. Yeah, every 15 or 20 minutes that I'm going to try and consume that amount and then I definitely do better when I increase the amount of salt that I'm taking in any. We have five hundred to five hundred milligrams to a gram of salt, several times a day actually, but I'm not eating that often which leads me to my other question. Which
It is I prefer to train fasted or semi fasted, meaning first thing in the morning after or within an hour or two of waking. Well, obviously, I've been fasting while I'm asleep or having not eaten anything for 3 or 4 hours before I just feel lighter and like more more energetic. If that works for me. Is that okay, or should I try, is it better to eat something before one trains personal preference?
Easy. Easy answer. There. It depends on, of course.
How hard you trained? Well, the training was like, what sport you're involved with, how many total calories is cetera, but in general, personal preference for the average person
that probably handles 90% of the yeah, questions about that.
Cold
cold showers ice baths and cold immersion up to the neck. I always preface this by saying there are not a lot of studies, there are some but not a lot of controlled studies looking at cold showers because it's harder to control the variables of where people stand. So I always say
You have access to cold immersion of some sort ice bath or called immersion great. But if you don't coach, ours will be the next best thing. The lower goes that if you do an ice bath or Coldwater immersion after strength, or hypertrophy training that you are short circuiting. Some of that, the lure also goes that cold showers might be okay, and my interpretation of those data and that discussion is that all that is probably true but
I have a hard time imagining that the effects are so robust that it can completely prevent strength gains and hypertrophy such that my stamps for myself, is try and do the cold exposure training away from the strength and hypertrophy training, but if you can't do it any other time, right, afterward, probably isn't going to throw my whole system out of whack and prevent the improvements in my deluding
myself, a couple of caveats. Here. Number one. Obviously, I have a
Vested interest in cold. I've been around this stuff for a long time. Being involved and being an advisor for XP T, and being in the space long time. I'm a big believer in cold, especially cold water. Deliberate cold, exposure hundred percent, right? So that being said, I do think getting into an ice bath immediately after a hypocrite recession.
Is getting pretty close to. You just should have done this session. It is detrimental. Good to know. I wouldn't do it. I guess is the most blunt way to put it on.
If you're like, hey, I'm not super concerned with growing muscle and I want these other things that come with, cold water immersion fine. It's not a zero. It's not zero. It's not taking you back words. How much does it cut you down? I don't know. We don't know that like that, be a difficult number to come up with. Is it 1% reduction? No, it's more than that. Is it 100? Not even close? I don't know where it lands though. It's enough though, for me to go in general best practices. Don't get the ice.
Me
laughter work out. How long should I wait?
Well, in theory the best answer we could give you would be four hours because of what we talked about earlier today of going. Okay, immediately. You've got the signaling Cascade that takes seconds. You've got gene expression that's happening in this rough four-hour window after the genes of gone off and now you're just going to the protein synthesis process. The signals already there, and it's gone back down a baseline. So, then reintroducing are introducing cold here. It's not going to disrupt that signal.
That's a very non scientifically founded because we don't know at this point at all. What is very clear though? Is if you get off your workout, go right into the ice.
It's probably 10% attenuation of growth. I don't know. Maybe more depends on the person. Some people, if you look at the individual data, it's a pretty bad. It's enough to where it's like that, that's a really big deal. The benefits of the ice. I don't think now, outweigh the benefits of hypertrophy
training, what about cold showers?
I don't think cold showers are going to do much you if you've been in both, you know that this is like we're not playing the same game here,
right? An ice bath or a cold water true, Coldwater immersion up to the neck with limbs in if for one to five.
Is a completely different stimulus than in the cold shower,
especially also compared to a similar like, Rio is not even the same same thing here. So in general, I would say don't do those cold shower. I don't really care. Can you work it out? So you don't do them? Same time. That would be my hope, right? I would actually prefer you to call before if you really had to do it.
Certainly will wake you up. Yeah, but adrenaline
burst. No we played with that actually years ago. I'm doing that. There's actually some fun stuff you can do with the endurance piece.
With cold stuff, but it's totally not feasible for most people because you get out of a, you're getting water everywhere. They could jump on your bike and just get shit and it's a giant mess. It's fun. But yeah, I would say walk away from it. If you can, that's actually where I stand based on the data based on my intuition and experience. I don't think it's a good thing to do. Now, having said that, that's mostly concerned with maximizing hypertrophy strength, is not as clear.
There are some data to show it actual block, strength adaptations, but because of what we talked about earlier than mechanisms and the drivers are different. And so I don't think it's as big, a concern for strength development, though. I would still generally say, if you can get away with staying out of the ice immediately after the workout, and you can at least wait a few hours. That's the better approach, less concerned with strength, more concerned, with hypertrophy in terms of interference effect, if you can do it on off days or before or any other time, that's that's the place to land.
That's generally when I tried to do it.
Just kind of throwing out an extreme case because I get asked that question a lot. What about the use of ice bath or Coldwater? Immersion or cold shower, after endurance training?
Okay. So a couple of interesting things here you mentioned, we don't have a tremendous amount of data on Coldwater immersion overall. So a lot of this is moving.
There have been some papers to show the Coldwater immersion can actually enhance. Mitochondrial, biogenesis, and actually even for endurance stuff. It's been shown to cause an improvement endurance adaptations relative to not
It's not enough for me to be truly confident and that statement yet. I would like to see that repeated. Not that I have a problem with the paper the methodology that they use in that particular study, but
Is this is the this is a weird thing. So I want to see this repeated more often. So I have less concerned with doing it immediately post endurance because you could even argue that there may be some benefit. I don't think you need to go out of your way, to try to make sure you get a nice immediately afterwards and thinking you're going to get some massive adaptation. We use ice a decent amount when I can get athletes to do it, but this context is different number one when we're in Camp and we've got a world title fight coming up or something else. We've just pitched in a Major League baseball game.
I am not concerned about hypertrophy. I'm not even concerned with strength development. I am now pushing towards recovery. There's a paradigm that I think is important with all these things to understand, which is are you pushing for optimization or adaptation?
When you're pushing for adaptation, you don't want to block the signal for adaptation. This means less recovery. You're not going to feel as good and you probably should be hedging towards stress when you're pushing for optimization. It's the opposite. So if I'm in season and I had a picture of just throw 125 pitches, I'm not trying to cause a Temptation. I'm trying to recover as quickly as possible because four days from now we got to do this again and I got to do this across 162 games. I've you're going to play a six day 5 days in a PGA golf tournament and you.
Have to do it again. Every week for a bunch of weeks in a row. I need to recovery as fast as I possibly can. So if I'm blending out of station, fine, I'm not actually trying to do something trying to optimize. If you spend all of your time in one of those two areas you're going to have problems. So you need to be judicious about thinking is this a point in my life or training cycle that I want to cause a Temptations or am I trying to optimize you spend too much time in one of the other ones? Again, you're going to have problems. So that's in generally how I will treat.
The ice for all those adaptations. What about heat? Yeah,
when and I'll frame this question differently because I'm sure there are a number of ways in which heat can short-circuit, all sorts of things. I mean, he in excess can kill you. Yeah, it can shut down fertility. It can in Access, right? It can do all sorts of things, but it can also increase growth hormone, increase basal dilation, improve one's ability to sweat, which can be very beneficial in a number of contexts. Yeah, for
Typical for 75% of people, 75% of the time. When do you think heat is most useful? And here I'm referring to dry sauna or wet sauna. I'm not specifically talking about infrared sauna because the data, they're a little unclear to me and I don't even know that my sense with infrared saunas as they don't go hot enough for my particular taste.
You and I have a similar taste there. Okay? Yeah. Crushing 200 past. I'm not interested.
Right? And a my sense about infrared sauna is that maybe haven't seen the data is that but that
A lot of people like it because they like the way they look in the infrared sauna. It feels cool. Feels like you're doing something unusual. Now infrared light are beneficial for other reasons. Actually for mitochondrial Health in the retinas are good, the good data, but infrared sauna to me, they never goes hot enough. So I'm talking about 200 or hot or maybe 180. 220 obviously do what safe folks and heat all the warnings about pregnant people not going in size etcetera.
I assume we're lumping in hot. Water. Immersion is
hot water immersion. So hot baths, hot sauna, when would you like
When you think most people could leverage sauna or hot baths to benefit their training and fitness and
health. Yeah. Okay. I have a handful of things to say about this topic. One of them is you never have a hard time convincing people to get hot. Everyone feels good like yeah can hot bath like, can you take more hot showers? Sure. No problem there. Right. There are a handful of studies that have looked at this immediately post and it seems to even augment hypertrophy.
So after hypertrophy training getting in the sauna
For
20 minutes. Yeah, whatever. Whatever. Needs to be. We don't have a good titration. What's the number minutes wise? We don't have a temperature
titration, hot shower would would be a second. That would be a week second-best.
I would say it's a very weak side hot bath. I think a hot bath is probably a lot closer to what you're looking for. And actually kind of goes back to our initial conversations, theoretically
You're just going to Aidan blood flow. So you're going to put more nutrients and more waste product out, metabolic stress. All that stuff is going through. So, but that's the thought. Anyways, we far from it, sounds plausible. Right? Absolutely possible. I'm something people will do feels good. Let's say with cold and hot. I want to caution you against a couple of things. This is true across all physiology, but you need to be really careful about moving percentages from
There are two outcome, very careful. So for example, it's easy to see a paper that says okay. We put you in a hot bath or something and we saw growth hormone increased 300%. That is not going to result in 300% increase in muscle size. Right? In fact, three hundred percent might result in. Absolutely, no change in physical size, right? So the reason I'm saying this is because there's a lot of people in this space that will misapply the mechanisms and they'll grossly
At what these things can do and what they do do because they'll find something like that. I mean, you know this, you've done enough cellular work to in the lab if I see mtor doubled. I think she didn't work. I need to see a 10x increase before. I know it's even physiologically relevant. So reading that paper reading, someone's Social Media post. You're like, wow, it increased mtor 38%. I'm like, well, I didn't work and you're like, wow, that's huge. But that's not 38% increase in muscle size. So that's a very important point when I make because I'm going to talk about the benefits here a second.
But I do want, I don't want people to be fooled into thinking that this is some crazy Miracle. The same thing with the sauna.
In terms of General health, health outcomes. It is a clearly a beneficial thing. This is a really good idea to get hot a lot. It is not a substitute for exercise. So it's a very important distinction. If the ant if the options are nothing or sauna get in the sauna, really, really good idea. If the exchanges though, I don't need to work out because I did the sauna bad, your this is not a winning solution
you and I so know, some Maniacs that actually work out in the
sun. All we do. Yeah.
Don't necessarily recommend that that actually would probably kill a large number of people, but it can be worked out. It can be worked up to. Yeah, it certainly.
Yeah, so I want Ike every time I talk about that. I flag that because it's just too easy to see that and go. Oh, I think dr. Human said if I just get in the sauna, I don't have to work out. Like know those words have
never told his mother that and I'm definitely not working out in the sun. If I'm in the sonnet. I'm either sitting or I'm lying down and I'm trying to make it through. I tend to do three. Twenty minute bouts. Yeah.
Across the entire week. So I am for 60 minutes per week. Yeah, of heat
exposure I would which is not a ton. If I said I've never worked out in the sauna.
So you're one of those. Yeah people do air squats. He'll bring the airdyne bike in there. I'm I look at this on as kind of a time to get lazy and
sweat totally fine. Um, going back to your question is so potential to a plausible Aid. We need to see more research on that to really get a. Do I need to put this in practice. I think if you try it very little harm, I struggle to see a downside. If you make sure you hydrate.
Some point, right? Because now you got to factor in the fact you just kicked out two or three pounds. If you're, you 200-plus pounds, I assume or roughly. If you're in the sauna for 20 minutes, I would imagine you could do 23 pounds.
Yeah. Usually I'm hover somewhere around like 225. Yeah, I drink, I drink a 32 ounce right there. Its water with the electrolyte Solution, that's pretty high, salt afterwards and sometimes during and sometimes after that, if I do it late in the evening, I'll go to sleep and wake up in the middle of
night. Just
Feeling so parched. It's amazing. How much, well, one loses in the sauna,
like a normal sweat rate for someone to 25, especially in 20 minutes on a sauna. I would absolutely expect you to do three pounds easy without like, I should be really
more, probably even more
water. Yeah, you're probably half the water that you need to
get and you mentioned the possible benefits of doing it after strength, hypertrophy training, which are makes sense for plausible mechanistic reasons on not, no official data there yet. What about after endurance training? Assuming somebody hydrates? Well,
Often, they're not overheated from their endurance work. Yep. Could also be a benefit. Yeah. Wow, so more and more. What I'm thinking, the framework here is in an ideal world one would train and then do sauna. Yep, or heat exposure of some kind endurance training or strength hypertrophy training and they do sauna and then do cold exposure on off days, or at least four hours away from the from any kind of training. Or if you had to do it close to train doing before
training. I love cold in the morning.
We've actually run this experiment on professional. Athletes will be doing have tracking with things like HRV, which is a global metric of overall fatigue. Okay, and you've probably talked about that before but problems with it, but roughly idea overwhelms. You HIV in general higher, the score the better right solo hrvs fatigue, right? Well, if you wake up and take your HIV in the morning and then you get into I. So what's going to happen is you're going to see that number plummet, the second you get out that's going to fall off the Earth, which means roughly you've moved.
Do a sympathetic Place, surprising you get in 30 degree water. You're going to go very sympathetic very quickly. However, if you continue to watch for HRV for 30, 60, 90, and up to two to three hours post, you will generally see a and improve HRV score relative to where you started. So it's back to the traumatic stress or write a really cold. Shocking, exposure will be a net result of you being more relaxed throughout the day in.
General. And we've seen that now very consistently across years without these. So, so, I think it's a great way to start your day. You won't need nearly as much coffee.
After spending three minutes and thirty degree water
30 degrees is pretty good, pre-dawn cold. I was in the ocean this morning for about 3 minutes that I felt I had him bring a thermometer, but it felt like somewhere in the low
50s, but 15 moving is really cold. Yeah, Waters moving. Yeah, that's really cool.
That's right. The thermal layer that surrounds you when you sit still in Coldwater, immersion. I'm encouraging people. Now, if they really, I was a joke that, you know, people like to look real stoic and tough when they're in there. Like, they're just grinding through with no pain at all, but that the
Stillness is actually reducing the yeah, the stimulus. If they sift around a little bit, you break up that thermal layer. That's where the real
action. We've joked about this for years. Like do 50 degrees with a Whirlpool jet on now I'm impressed because that that is hard. You sit in 35-degree for 3 minutes, I guess. But with xbt, I've seen I can't even tell you how many hundreds of people from all walks of life on all age that we've been able to get in 30, some degree water for 3 minutes, 50 degrees with a Whirlpool going. That
Markets, very small yet. If you don't have access to a Whirlpool, this is the should be reassuring to you. Can some people say, oh, you know, I don't have access to ice and ice can actually get pretty expensive. You're doing a 50 dollar I spend every day, so you can fill your bathtub with cool to cold water, get in but just make sure that you keep sifting your limbs and it's chilly. Yeah, and the studies on the very well as step now well-established increases in dopamine and epinephrine that occur in cold water exposure. We're actually done at an hour in 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, and so it
you don't necessarily need it iced cold or an ice bath. But immersion is really better than the cold shower. The cold shower is kind of a, it's the it's kind of the espresso shot. Yeah
version. Yep, you know that's sort of funny because if you look at most of those initial studies and you think man, how did they get people to sign up to spend 45 minutes in, 55 degree water, 55 degrees is cold, even if it's not moving, and they're going to not spend five minutes in a gonna go on our. If you've ever done ice baths at that temperature, you know, like, all right, after a few minutes,
Not that bad, but man that's a
protocol. Yeah, it's kind of an indirect old endurance protocol because one thing to get in for one minute, to three minutes and you know, you're getting out, you could sing a song, you could do anything to distract yourself, but 45 minutes to an hour is intense. Maybe they I don't think they paid the subjects. But anyway that that study was still think of Europe's. I forget where it was done. But anyway, they were Hardy subjects.
I want to talk a bit about overtraining and gauging recovery. Yeah, so there's a couple methods that I've heard about and that I use based on some data that I've seen. But mainly discussions with really informed people like yourself. Brian. Mackenzie, Kelly Starrett and others, the two that I'm aware of for gauging recovery of the nervous system and kind of systemic recovery, our grip strength, especially grip strength on waking in the morning. Yeah.
And the so-called carbon dioxide tolerance test the ability to do a long controlled exhale. After a few rhythmic deep breaths. Just which I'm assuming Taps into both, one's ability to mechanically and control the diaphragm. But also how well one is regulating carbon. Dioxide. First question is is this stuff fiction fact or a combination of kind of anak data as I call it? Are there any
Reviewed published data as your lab working on these things, and my deluding myself using these tools or they
useful.
It's not fiction at all. There are like CO2 tolerance. There's less published data. We've run a study in our lab looking at the association between the CO2 tolerance and what we called straight and state anxiety. And those are in the publication process is what I'll say great. So you can't really talk about that stuff as you know, and until it's out but in general I'd say like there's a reason I'm still doing it. I'll just wait I'll just leave it at
that. Yeah. Well assuming it's not a clinical trial. I mean I think sharing
Preliminary findings fine as long as we highlight them as preliminary. Yeah, I'm not a reviewer, but I look forward to reading the
paper. Yeah, but as, you know, scientific, ethically, like, you need to be careful about saying, telling people results. Before you've gone through that
process, which is why I'm flagging this at these results are not yet. Peer review passed through the peer-review process. So you're hearing about it prior to peer
review. Yeah. Having said that there's enough in that field. I'm not the first one into that field and so it I'm very confident that that's a real thing. I'm in terms of actual tracking recovery.
The big picture is this when we run through a full analysis of when we have an out that go through our bhauma biomolecular athlete program. We're going to run and we're looking at three major categories, category 1 or what we called visible stressors, and then we have hidden stressors and then we have recovery capacity, anytime the total stress load.
Outpaces recovery capacity, you're either going backwards in your physical ability or your reducing adaptability. Now you have levers to pull here. You can reduce stress intake or you can increase recovery capacity. Right? What we want in an ideal situation is to be able to implement the most stress possible because that's the driver of adaptation recover from that. Now, we get the most out of station and adaptation being simply a change. Whatever change you want to be. That's that's our gold standard, right? Spy in the eye. Some people have endogenous.
Is a district of, er, better they don't. There are genetic factors, but let's talk about the ones that are manipulatable.
If we go to the stress side of it, you want the throttle to be pushed as far down on the ones you want stress from. And as far off of the ones, you don't want stress. So that the adaptation comes in the exact area you want and you're not burning gas and something you don't care about because you're just you're taking that total stress bucket. Too. High recovery capacity over there. So here's how you can do that. You can run some analytics and measure what we do with everyone through these very comprehensive breakdowns. To figure out. What's that physiology look like hidden and visible and then
Recovery capacity. Once we have that blueprint, we can now figure out what are the two or three things. We need to track that are these indicators of what we call Performance anchors. So, an anchor is something that kind of drags behind you, or below you, that slows you down.
The analogy being, let's see. We're going down one of these amazing Canyon roads, and I won't say which Canyon were in. So you can stay hidden here and your cars going down at a certain velocity and you want to go faster. Most people's first impulse is to hit the gas accelerator. We want to push. Well, that's fine. But if your foot is on the brake and you push the accelerator, you might go a little bit faster, but number one, you're wasting a lot of literal gas to go a little bit faster and to you're burning your engine. You
You're going to blow the easier solution is just take your foot off the brake. You're going to go faster by just stopping yourself. Then if that's not fast enough, we can hit the accelerator. Everyone wants to just push down right more stimulus. More optimization bing bing, bing bing here. Our first analytics are where these performance anchors. What's dragging, you back? What's happening with putting down the brick? I want to move those two or three things out of the way, and now let's see how far you get. Oh, look at that. Your recovery capacity has gone way up.
Up, your adapt, your adaptations are happening faster now. Well, we can do more work because you're recovering quicker. So we're trying to figure out in those buckets and we have a whole host of things that we measure biomarkers and surveys and everything else that we go through to find out what's there. So after we've done that, now we're just going to track a few of those recovery markers, along the way to figure out what's globally happening. So, that could mean grip strength. I have some folks who are going to test grip strength, daily. All there is we're going to look at HRV or combinations. We may look at performance.
Like a force plate, you're going to do a vertical jump every single day, and we're going to see what that's that. We've used the tap test before, which is how many times you can tap your fingers fast as possible. It's a rough indicator of central nervous
system in in a say, one minute.
Exactly. And this is apps. You can do on this, like, you tap, his fingers fast. You can, it's going to say, hey, you did 60 Taps today, and your average is
75. I like that. Because it Taps into, huh? No pun intended into upper motor neuron capacity because a lot of things like a grip strength. Obviously, I have to send
The deliberate signal to my hand to grip but at some point, the lower motor neurons are going to be taking over the majority of the work. Like the signal is probably one and done whereas the tapping is going to be repetitive sending of signals from upper motor neurons.
Yep. So some of the athletes I work with we track blood everyday, we track urine every day. We track ideally, a combination of subjective and objective measures everything from how did you feel last night to environmental sensors or their bedroom? Full psg's going on running?
Like actual Sleep Diagnostics, not or ring, nothing against or but like full analytics and some of them it's as simple as how do you feel today? And what is your vertical jump? Right. So we're going to put people in a position to succeed. We're going to figure out what's the lever that they need to pull as well as what's their aptitude? What sport are they? And what can we realistically get away with and some of them will take machines with them and we'll do blood every day in urine and all kinds of stuff and some of them it's a lot lower
for myself. I'm not as I mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of devices.
Try to where the worst wristwatch, I tend to go off feel which is not, it's not the ideal objective way to gauge things but part of my reasoning for this as my colleague for in the psychology department. Dr. Aurelia crumb has done some studies where they've given people deliberately giving people false feedback about their sleep. So told people, you didn't sleep very well or they've told people, you slept really well and performance can be driven in the expected Direction based on feedback.
Of how well people slept odinsleep. Now that doesn't mean you can take someone that only slept two hours or was up every 30 seconds, because of apnea and tell them, they slept great and they're going to perform great cognitive tasks, but you can't take someone who slept very well, tell them that their recovery quotient wasn't very good and their their output is going to be worse and that's my concern about a lot of devices out there, not to name specific devices, but it's still unclear to the general public. What the specific algorithms are to generate these recovery scores, right? And so,
Many of the things that reportedly tracks, sleep aren't tracking sleep. They're tracking heart rate and breathing which are car. Lots of sleep depth, but that's different. And again, I'm not knocking those. I think the sleep tracker is if nothing else have provided a forum, whereby. People are very conscious of getting good sleep. It's sort of like knowing the total caloric intake of your food people go. Wow. I'm actually eating a lot more than I thought, calibration or less in some cases, but often the case is that it's more. So I think for the typical person I'm wondering whether or not
Myself because I'm not a competitive athlete or certainly, not a professional athlete provided with myself, I suppose. But no one else.
Morning pulse rate. I tend to take when I on waking if I wake out of a really stressful dream. I might relax a little bit and then just take my pulse rate, kind of get a range and see if it's spiking for whatever reason. I don't tend to measure grip strength. Although I've heard you can just use a classic scale. Yeah, I'm old-fashioned scale with the pineal now old-fashioned or some other more technical devices. Probably there's a low-cost one, the other help, and then the carbon dioxide tolerance test. So we haven't really talked about that in specific ways. My understanding of it is it's four deep.
Slow breaths in, through the nose, out through the nose, and then a big inhale, as Max, exhale, and then time duration of exhale, through the nose and then stopping the stopwatch at the point where lungs are empty. Not necessarily as long as one can hold their breath. Did I get that right? Pretty much? Okay, and I guess we should credit you and Brian Mackenzie. Yeah those guys. Yeah project and and the folks under Brian's umbrella for really establishing this as a really good metric when
And how can I use the carbon dioxide tolerance test to gauge recovery upon waking
post? Training session? Yeah, without be good time. Number one. Answer is whatever you do do be consistent. So do it under the like any good science experiment. Do it under the exact same conditions as you can. That generally means somewhere the morning because that's when you're probably going to have the most control most ability going. So yeah like you would take any HIV or other metric way.
Up. Get under control, get stabilized. Take your metric. Got it gonna be pretty good. Got it.
Sodium bicarb baking, soda rumor has it. And data has it that it can actually be a pretty effective training tool. Very effective. Could you explain a little bit of about how it works and how one might explore using sodium bicarb to enhance training output in a couple of different contexts?
Yeah. So there's a handful of these
Ubiquitously effective supplements for performance sodium bicarbonate, it's one of them. It's a very
Ingenious idea because it's so simple. Effectively muscle contraction happens because enzymatic function occurs within a fairly specific PH range, right? So if it gets extremely acidic, it doesn't like it. And so whether you're running through aerobic glycolysis or anaerobic, or anything else. All of these things require even ATP hydrolysis requires atpase and enzyme has two enzymes, don't function. Well, outside of this fairly special range. So, what happens is generally fatigue,
The sensations of fatigue, or actually caused by some signal that. Hey, we're starting to run out of pH. We're getting in the wrong range. You're not out of gas. Usually, not too low on oxygen. You're not running low on muscle glycogen, yet. You're typically going to see signs or feel signals of fatigue way, prior to, that mostly being pH issues. That being said, what if we could regulate PH better?
Enter bicarbonate, right? So, without going too far in a metabolism, effectively. What happens is you take an inhale and you're mostly breathing in oxygen. O2
You exhale, you're breathing out CO2. So, the difference is you've gained a carbon somehow. Well, all of your carbohydrates in your body, come in the form of long. Carbon chains. In fact, that's what a carbohydrate means, it is a one carbon molecule. That has one water molecule attaches. Its carbon that has been hydrated in the case of like, glucose blood sugar. As I six carbon molecule, right, in terms of fat, which are the only two places you can get, most of your cellular energy carbohydrates and fat, that is also a big long block and chain of
But so, what are you getting your energy from fat or carbohydrate? You're going to split those atoms? So in other words, you've got six, carbons attached to each other, and in this part of chemistry, it's exergonic. So when you break that carbon bonds, so break one of those carbons off from the other that's going to release energy, just like if you had a pencil and here and I snapped it and go bang and Pop, I broke the bonds that were connecting that graphite, the next piece of graphite, and that released energy, because I put energy in a system.
Mm, Etc. Okay, as a result though, we've now had, you know, say five or six carbons chained together. We broke one off the end, which is not how it works, but making the point and now you have one free floating carbon use that energy release. Then go make ATP to then go make your muscles contract, but now you've got carbon floating around.
You can associate free-floating carbon with being at a higher acidic level.
It's not going to happen. The only way they're going to go through this process, is if your body says, do we have an oxygen molecule available that we can bind this to immediately? Yes, we do. That carbon attaches to that oxygen molecule. You can't just put CO2 in the blood because of what we just talked about. So, you're going to bind it through this bicarbonate process. It's going to go through your blood. It's going to go into the lungs. It's going to go back into its carbon dioxide molecule. It's going to translate go through the alveoli in the lungs and you're going to Exhale. So you went from carbon this bicarbonate system.
Back into carbon Excel. So, inhale, do to plants go the opposite, by the way, so they're going to breathe in and CO2 are going to cleave off. That carbon stack, those carbons together and that's how they get larger in your in your blood. Those six carbon chains are called glucose. If we store that in your muscle, we call it glycogen. So we take a bunch of glucose and stack it together and a plant. We call that starch at specifically what it is, right? So you took a bunch of carbon from the atmosphere. Stuck it all together and that's a starch if you want to do in the form of fruit.
Take that starch like from the ground. You put it up through the tree, go all the way up to the top, put it into the flour. Break it up into these big, huge chunks of starch and a little forms called fructose to glucose. That's why fruit has fructose in it. And that's why tubers and stuff have starch in them. Basically starts. You're an animal glycogen - okay, all that to say.
If that's happening, and we know that a byproduct specifically of anaerobic glycolysis, meaning the breakdown of carbohydrates for fuel typically in a very fast pace with low oxygen availability.
The downside of that equation is acid production.
We know that that's a problem because I started a conversation up there intentionally. So what if we could reduce the acid buildup and I'm you know, how pH kind of works. I went and kind of double negatives there, right? You know what too much acid buildup.
Then could we prolong and sustained energy in a more effective place, especially in this anaerobic interval kind of environment. And again, that's important because in those things, failure is not a result of running out of fuel or oxygen. It's a result of fatigue building up way too
quickly. Is it also true for resistance training?
Yeah.
There's maybe more of the, the creatine phosphate
system that can be an issue. It could simply be an issue of force production. You just don't have enough Force. This, you're not out of energy. You just
Can't muster enough Force, you do enough reps. Then it's going to be an issue there. Creatine. Phosphate will be the big winner. Depending so to come back a little bit to the beginning then I'll I'm circling this all together intentionally. All right, well,
The way that we produce energy is going to be in two primary categories. Anaerobic, anaerobic, aerobic, meaning with oxygen anaerobic. Meaning, without in terms of muscle contraction. You're pretty much talking about carbohydrates, or fat now, fat is going to be exclusively aerobic. Meaning I'm going to use fat from the entire body roughly equally. So, you're doing a Sprint up, a hill, and your hamstrings, your glutes, your quads are on fire. You can't, you're not just going to use the fat that's directly in those hamstrings. You're going to lose it from the entire body.
It has to go through light pulses. So it's in the stored form and adipose tissue. Got to get broken down. Put into blunt, Bloods going to have to go through your body. Get taken up in a muscle taken up through muscle into the mitochondria. They're going to have to go through this process called beta oxidation. So remember carbohydrates in glucose especially is a six carbon molecule.
Fat. If it's in the form of a try, glyceride. It is a three-carbon, glycerol backbone and three, you know, try 1, 2 3, fatty acids, three carbon backbone. And those fatty acids are just big long chains of carbon. That's all it is. Right. So we're going to break that thing down, put it in the blood, move it up, move it into our mitochondria. Are you can't walk those things? Across amount of conjuring wall. They're too big. So what you have to do is cleave them off into little chunks and it turns out we break them off in a two-carbon chunks. So we call it beta.
As in to move those into mitochondria, that can go through this little thing called Krebs cycle, or trike, silicic acid cycle, and you kick out a bunch of energy out of that you had two carbons. So as a result of that process, you're going to generate two carbon dioxide's. But remember you can only go to that process. If oxygen is available because you have to be able to place those carbons on to something or acid gets up way too high too fast.
This is one of the reasons why fat is a nice fuel source, but it's very slow. It's takes physical time to move from the back of your shoulder and your blood down your hamstring. Up, take up, take up Tick in addition. Its required oxygen availability. If you need energy faster, you simply don't have the time to bring in the oxygen transport it through. Go through capillaries exchange, through tissue, Etc. Carbohydrate on the other hand is going to be stored locally in the exercising, muscle cell and specifically in the cytoplasm.
As glycogen as glucose as glycogen in the stored there. So what's going to happen initially? Your initial demands for exercise or for fuel are going to come from the glycogen stored within the muscle fiber itself. It's just going to break right there and you're going to be Off to the Races. So you have the six carbon molecule. You're going to break it into two separate three carbon molecules. Okay, boom, that breaking provides you with tiny bit of energy, very small, but some now you're going to take those two 3-carbon molecules and you want to be able to oxidize them because that's your only Next Step, but order to do that. You got to go though.
In a mitochondria, so you got a break one of those molecules off. So then you'll be back to your, to carbon molecule. Just like you did with fat, that's going to go into mitochondria. And then I'm going to go to the exact same Krebs cycle, two carbons Etc, but hold on.
If you don't have sufficient oxygen or sufficient mitochondria availability and you're stuck at that, two, three carbon place. What the do you do?
You have problems right now. We have to say okay. Wait a minute.
We have two 3-carbon molecule and we have a bunch of this acid buildup. Now, I asked it functionally is is hydrogen. That's what PH potential hydrogen is. What PH stands for, right? So, if hydrogen is building up as a byproduct of muscular contraction, and then you're having this three carbon molecule. What it can actually do, is grab one of those hydrogen's, and those three carbon molecules, by the way are called Peru Vader, pyruvic acid, right? If you take approval Cassatt and you grab hydrogen, put it on top of it. We now have a different name for it. It's called
Hydrogen peroxide
lactate, Bingo, right? That's what lactate or lactic acid is, right? So we've now built that up. So
Number one reason, why, lactates, not causing your fatigue is actually preventing it and that it does a bunch of other really cool stuff. But the point is that system calling last. So, so long that gets overwhelmed, very quickly. What are you going to do with the rest of this hydrogen? Well, if you start it off in a normal PH range, you don't have very far to go before you've now gone into that level of too much acidity. If you start off in a more basic and basic, I don't mean simple, I mean chemistry right? And more alkaline then that same amount of increase in
PH is no longer now, just put you back in your physiological rain. So sodium, bicarbonate whether taken as a cream or a powder or baking soda or anything else. Can simply put you in a more alkaline State even acutely. This is something you can take right now before your workout and you're going to delay, what we call delay, the progression of fatigue. And
how would people start to approach? This practice UI? My understanding is you can do this with common. Oh, you know, store-bought baking soda, no question. There's always a concern about gastric.
Stress. That it's a very effective laxative. Sometimes an unwanted laxative effect. But how would one approach this before? Let's say, I'm going to be doing the mile repeats. Yep. Exercise mile repeats protocol that we talked about earlier. I'm doing that for a few months and now, I want to try the sodium bicarb. Yep. Approaching. Well hydrated, hopefully I'm well rested. I'm ready to go.
When am I going to drink this? Sodium bicarb solution? What, how would I make the solution? Let's say I take 10 ounces of water.
Yeah,
how much bicarb do I want to sodium bicarb? Should I put in there? Can we come up with it? Let is it half a teaspoon? Is a
teaspoon. Here's how I'm going to tell you. You will thank me by starting lower. You can always go more later. So a little
pinch. You cannot go backwards. How about I start with a quarter
teaspoon. Fine, half an honestly, half is fine. Half at East,
only fine, dissolve that slug that down. I read.
A study recently that showed that people will hit their Peak benefits of this at different times, but it's somewhere if I if memory serves me correctly, somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes later. So I might want to drink it on the way to the
track. It can it can be as low as 20.
Okay, so maybe as I get to the tracks and someone to do some warm up with some walking
jogging, I say 45 minutes. Okay. That's as I've just a very rough standard. But yeah, you're right. It is, it is individualized and you probably want to play with that a little bit. If not just somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to an hour.
Okay.
Then the perceived and real fatigue. If done correctly, the perceived in real fatigue ought
to be reduced. Yes.
I can do more work without feeling exhausted. Will I feel less of a lactate burn done in air quotes for those listening. I realize that's a very crude way to describe a complex physiological process. Yeah, fantastic can. Sodium bicarb be used repeatedly for longer duration training. Yep, and if I were going to use it with,
Weight training for whatever reason, maybe I'm doing circuit type training or I'm doing the superset typed strength, training that you talked about before Push. Pull Push Pull where it's a little bit more, cardiovascular lead demanding then maybe I'd sip that throughout the workout. Make sure there's a bathroom nearby. It sounds like because I do I am aware that many people gets pretty serious. Gastric distress happen very quickly. Okay, great. Well, it sounds like an amazing training tool. I really appreciate you sharing because I think it's it's one that doesn't get a lot of air time these days because it's been around but
Seems like it has some pretty
impressive. Yeah, you know, sort of funny about that is I mean, I get it, pop culture is what it is. But still to this day, if you want to talk about sort of your most effective General Health / performance supplementation, it's the same three to four to five and everything. That that's because they work really
well without going into the chemistry of each one in the practice, these one because I definitely want to get you back to talk about nutrition and supplementation. Oh, yeah, at some point, but I think we need a full couple of hours to get that right? Yep. At
East.
If you as a teaser, would you mind just listing off the other supplements that you have found her very effective for many people. So sodium, bicarbonate. Baking soda is one. What are some of the other one? Yep,
and we'll go kind of a reverse order beta. Alanine is another very classically effective one similar idea, sodium bicarbonate. So it's going to be a talent. He's going to come in, it's going to be converted and stored as called carnosine in the muscle. And carnosine, is an intracellular buffer. So in other words, it's going to delay the build-up of acid.
I'm so, so petite blocker, if you will. So very effective. Very cheap. Very safe. Well, studied.
The top 10 of all of them by far that has an incredibly strong safety profile. It has, it is a cheap. It is a simple form to get has a important magnitude of effect and is effective across multiple domains of physical health and performance. And it is because of that. It is my crown jewel. It is in my opinion without question, the Michael Jordan of all supplementation, and that's creatine monohydrate affects. So many things, we typically think about it as it's
So far, you've talked kind of you quickly were talking about the creatine phosphate system, but we have to realize the mass majority of research on Creatine. Phosphate is not in sport. Performance and has not been for 20 years. It's in clinical and it has everything from effects on the neurological system to their been associations, to mental health and depression. And to be very clear. I am certainly not saying you can take creatine and cure anything. And I'm not saying it's going to stop you from depression or anything. But I'm saying there's there's a lot of research.
Search in these areas and there's a reason people are doing
it. Yeah, I completely agree. And if you're willing I'd love to have you back for us to do a discussion on Creatine and the brain or creatine in the nervous system. That would be a lot of fun. And maybe we can do a kind of a journal Club in advance of that for those that don't know what Journal Club is, where scientists read a bunch of papers and then argue about them, discuss them and try and extract the kind of agreed upon Center of mass if you will, I think I've long been taking 5 grams of creatine.
Monohydrate per day for mainly for the cognitive effects. I sense an effect. That's obviously Anika data, but there I think there are a lot of data out there is as,
you know, there's enough that you're not, you're not crazy. There's enough there. And in fact, I was enough mechanism. Now, to understand the metabolic needs people think the medicine, I muscled guy, right? So I'm going to think about the metabolism needed to fuel muscle, but we forget cells, immune cells, red blood cells, nerve cells, astrocytes brain, all the stuff requires energy.
And it's all going through metabolism.
Super interesting. We will do the Deep dive on that soon.
I have a final question for you, you're involved in a really interesting. I think, really cutting-edge project that I first learned about from you. I don't know of anyone else doing anything as Forward Thinking, and frankly, as relevant to the general population because of my interest in people getting better, sleep and learning how to do that avoiding stress and learning how to do that. Tell us a little bit about what I believe is called absolute
rest, right? So this is something that we've been playing.
Behind the scenes for a long time. This is typically how high performance stuff works, right? People want exclusivity. And and so this has been built effectively. What happened is a friend of mine. Cody Burkhardt. I don't know if you know Cody, but if I am down in Texas,
yeah. Yeah, NASA NASA guy. Yeah. Do you know Cody, wonderful,
just down the road thinker. Everyone is interested in sleep, right? And for forever, I would cover using with athletes, but everything available tells you how
You're sleeping. Nothing can tell you why, you're sleeping that way. And so we got together in Boulder and then I met some of his former colleagues computer science, folks. Harvard MD and some really impressive Tech folks, and we were just thinking about an idea and we came up with, we started realize the problems where we use first principle thinking. It's one of my favorite approaches. If you've not familiar with that, go Google that like that's just a recipe to solve problems this first principle thinking and we
Start to think about like man, all the sleep Tech is there? It's real. I don't need to convince people that they need sleep. Everyone's done that.
You need high quality sleep, but how can I provide Solutions? And with the people I work with? I can't just tell them. You're testosterones down or your sleeps, down to recover. I need to be able to be like this is down, and here's why and here's our solution that that's how our high performance World works. So enter absolute rest. This is saying okay. What are the actual nodes that go into high effective? High quality, Sleep Number One is psychology. So there has to be some sort of screening diagnostic for, are you not sleeping because of Simply, you can't control yourself and you've done a wonderful job of
In peopletools, if you can't quite your mind before sleep to this, if you wake up and you can't go back to sleep, here A bunch of things, right? So we have some screens that we can do and there's some other stuff we can do in Analyze. This is a psychological issue. Let's say it's not your under control and we have different tricks. We use and stuff to Mac. We've talked about, but it's not that okay. Is it physiology? Which is no number to do? We know what your dopamine levels are like, do we know what your serotonin levels are like, what's melatonin? Look like, what's this? What's adrenaline? What's Court?
Has all cortisol being the primary driver. What is this? Relationship DHEA? Where are these things out. So we're going to measure all that and track that were to measure that during the day prior to sleep in a marriage that next morning and even sometimes throughout sleep. And we're going to figure out is this a physiology problem. If it is, then we have clear Corrections. If not going to go on the next step, which is is this possibly pathology. So you have some sort of sleep disorder. We're going to run full Pete, what's called PSG. So, polysomnography, a full the exact same stuff you would get in a Sleep Clinic.
It's a sensor that's going to go on measuring e, geog and we're going to have muscle activation sensor to Z if your legs are moving and everything else is going on. And we're gonna get a full diagnostic. And if anyone's ever done this, the amount of sleep issues that are happening in people that they don't even, realize is extraordinarily high. So, we're going to figure this out one very quick. Example. We just did this with a professional athlete and he was having like, 280 roughly of these episodes per night. And to be categorized as an episode. You have to meet these four specific.
Tyria, oxygen saturation, ventilation changes, brain changes Etc. And he hit that over 200 times a night. And what this technology allowed us to do is figure out what position did all these things occur in. Well, his particular case. Most of them are happening was on his back. And so we bought a very simple pillow. Basically, they went on his back that kept him from sleeping on his back, and we saw an 85 percent reduction in sleep awake has issues the very first night now. We did that testosterone.
Actually tripled after three months by just improving sleep and all we did is move them onto his left to right side. So huge improvements, just by understanding where the problem occurred and why it occurred there. We didn't have to change hardly anything else. He had the basic hygiene stuff down and temperature and all that stuff. And he had his chili pad and all that to keep the ankle. We couldn't fix it. What years by the way this took us two years of just trying everything. We're like man and it was just like I wish.
Wish we could get you to sleep better. And we I pulled out every trick. I knew and it's just as soon as we built this down. I'm like, oh my God, it's all he's not overweight. By the way. He doesn't have any, he's not iron, deficient isn't have any of these other clone classical symptoms that are associated with bad C, supplementation, everything. We've done a thousand protocols that fix it overnight. So if it's not psychology, it's not physiology and it's not pathology. Then the last one that people don't have any idea about his environment.
And so, what you don't realize is, we have a box, we can sit right next to your bed. You just plug it in. You don't have to do anything, and it's going to run full environmental scans. So it's going to look at the temperature in your room. It's gonna look up the humidity in your room. It's going to look at the volatile organic acids, as you see things that are seeping out from your mattress. It's going to look a particular. It's in the air and possible allergens and things that are floating around that are closing your nose off. So you can't sleep at night and now your mouth breathing and you've talked a lot. I'm sure on the previous episodes about why that's bad. It's going to look at your CO2 Cloud. So we've
Actually, we've already set this one up, right? You're inhaling 02, but then you're exhaling CO2. Well, during the day and when we're conversing, you have a quite a bit of force with that exhalation, right? But at night, it's just barely seeping out of your mouth. So what happens is CO2 sends to Cloud up and build around your face and then you end up rebreathing that CO2 and this can cause a large number of sleep problems because you're simply,
Rebreathing in the Panic whether you fully awake or just kick out of a sleep stage. The CO2 around your face is a big issue. This stuff is all been known by the way with the astronauts for a very long time. It's just hasn't translated into the to the commercial spaces of course content or high performer space. So we can measure that as well and then we can figure out like for the most extreme we can actually come to a bedroom and build an entire sleep, optimization setup and control the entire thing. But for most folks, the minimum we can do is
Run full Diagnostics and check off. Is this environmental related? Is it? Pathology? Is there something else?
So is this a commercial device that people can eventually
access it is now a
so where can people learn more about absolute
rest? Absolute rest, not calm.
Very cool. And just a very full disclosure. I wasn't aware that you had done this prior to today, with you mentioned. I was like to ask people scientists or otherwise, I was in, love to ask you. What are you most excited about lately? And it sounds like an amazing technology
and just to be really clear and it's not like
Then we're working on. That's, that's landed, that's landed. We're ready to go. Great. Well,
and that's one of the things I appreciate about you is that you're, you're willing to sometimes speculate, but you always say it's speculation. But in general, you're you seem like the kind of guy where if you're going to be public-facing about something. If you're going to make a statement, there's got to be quite a bit behind it. You're not going to allude to the in 10 years. We might be able to do this or in five years. You're very data-driven kind of
guy. Yeah. Well, the people I work with. We need answers, right? We don't have that time frame and
We typically have like a, we start the season for weeks. Yeah, so that's just where I'm
at. Well, as I said, I appreciate that about you, but it is, but one of the many things, I appreciate, I think the listeners and I can, well, appreciate on the basis of today's discussion. What a enormous wealth of information. You are how clear, and, and potently you communicate that information, and also, you can take a huge cloud of information and still
Distill it into protocols that ought to work for 75% of people 75 percent of the time, which is an immensely valuable thing to do. So for me and from the listeners, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the several now hours. I lose track of time, which is a reflects All Good Things, several hours, to take a break from teaching, take a break, from research, take a break from the other important commitments of your life and really share with us all this incredible information. I'm
So so grateful,
my pleasure, man. I'm fine. I'm glad we finally got to connect. This has been a long time in the making
it has. And I'm going to, I'm going to bring the breathing protocols to my training. I'm going to start doing more of the endurance, type and interval type training. I'm going to start moving when I do heat. I'm going to start moving when I do cold. I might even start throwing some sodium bicarb into very small amount of sodium bicarb into some water before I train. And listen. Andy Professor, Andy Galpin,
Thank you ever so much. My pleasure. Thank you for joining me today for my discussion with dr. Andy Galpin. If you'd like to learn more about his work and learn further information about exercise science from dr. Galpin. Please find him on Instagram at dr. Andy Galpin. You can also find them on Twitter at the same handle. Dr. Andy Galpin, spelled with one L. And if you're learning from and, or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific, zero cost way to support us, please also subscribe to the podcast on spot.
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