Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness | Huberman Lab Guest Series

[Music] welcome to the hubman lab guest Series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine today's episode marks the first in a series with Dr Andy Galpin Dr Andy Galpin is a professor of kinesiology at Cal State University Fullerton and one of the foremost World experts on the science and application of methods to increase strength speed and endurance hypertrophy and various other aspects of fitness exercise and sports performance across the six episode series Dr Andy galin pulls from his expertise working with everything from professional athletes to recreational exercisers and teaches us the mechanisms logic and specific protocols for how to achieve any of the number of different exercise adaptations that I mentioned a moment ago ranging from strength to endurance hypertrophy and everything in between we get really far into details but at all times paying attention to the macroscopic issues that is how to create a program for endurance or strength or hypertrophy or speed or one that combines all of those we also talk about supplementation and nutrition and how to maximize recovery for each of the different types of exercise adaptations during today's episode Dr Galpin teaches us how to assess our level of fitness and more generally how to think about Fitness so that we can best achieve our fitness exercise and performance goals Dr Professor Andy Galpin super excited to have you here you're such an immense Treasure Trove of information on physical training and optimizing for specific goals and outcomes with physical exercise I'm curious however so many people have different levels of Fitness some people are professional athletes of course but most people are not many people exercise regularly some people are trying to do that more some people are doing too much of that they're overtraining they're not recovering enough if we were to take a step back and each and every one of us ask how fit are we with the word fit of course being a very broad encompassing word you know could Encompass endurance certainly it does strength the ability to run fast even if for short distances um it might even include hypertrophy or directed hypertrophy trying to balance one's musculature to offset asymmetries recover from injuries Etc how should I or anyone else for that matter think about their level of Fitness you know I know my resting heart rate but what do I do in terms of really assessing whether or not I'm as fit as I could be and should be both for sake of health and performance and here I'm asking you the question not as an athlete but as somebody who's been pretty consistent as an exerciser but if we were to throw our arms around this question of how do we assess our fitness what would be uh sort of the different levels of assessment that we should think about and do when it comes to exercise people generally have two major goals in mind goal number one is achieving some sort of appearance right this is I want to be big or I want to not be too big or I want to be lean something right it doesn't matter what that goal is but there is an aesthetic component to almost everybody they want to look a certain way or not look a certain way the other one is functionality so I want to be able to perform a certain way now again that definition differs per person so I want to be better at strength I want to be better at Mobility I want to be able to um have energy throughout the day whatever it is so there's some sort of appeal to aesthetic and there's some sort of appeal to functionality So within both of those categories we want to be in a position where we can understand where do I need to go with my exercise training so that I can be as fit and as healthy and Achieve these goals that I want now as well as be in a position where I can maintain them for a long period of time so this Blends both immediate goals so say you're just interested in squatting a lot of weight say you're interested in running 5K time the best you want it doesn't matter it Blends that with the ability the the desire to have a long Wellness span to be fit throughout life to achieve all those things for as long as possible so then then the question kind of comes back to saying how do I know which area I need to focus on the most and why am I not achieving these these goals or how can I get there more effectively and if we look at the big picture we have to understand that there are several major components to physical fitness that are going to be required in all of these categories and to achieve that there are a handful of components that have to happen to be able to hit those goals now there are infinite methods so the same we actually use here a lot is the methods are many but the concepts are few so what I'd love to do today is over the course of our discussion is hit exactly what those concepts are and then cover a whole bunch of different methods and we could do that for hours but we'll cover a number of them for various goals so one of the reasons I went into neuroscience and not into exercise science is because of this thing neuroplasticity the nervous systems ability to adapt but the more time I spend with you and the more I learn from you I realize that many if not all of the organ systems of our body have this incredible ability to adapt and when we're talking about physical exercise there are incredible adaptations that of course involve the nervous system but also involve muscle and connective tissue and so many other cell types and tissues that said when we talk about Fitness what are the major types of adaptations that underly this thing that we call Fitness and later I know we're going to get into how different forms of exercise can trigger different types of adaptations but what are the major adaptations that one can create in their body using exercise there there are many reasons why one should exercise and we could perhaps cover that later in our chats but the physiological adaptations can be bucketed really into nine areas so the very first one is what I call skill or technique so just learning to move better more efficiently with a specific position and timing and sequence or whatever that is this could be running more effectively this could be practicing a skill like shooting a a ball or an Implement swinging a golf club anything like that I call that skill development the second one is speed this is simply moving at a higher velocity or with a better rate of acceleration okay that's very similar to the next one which is power and power is speed multiplied by force um the next one then of course on top of that is force or strength those are really synonymous terms right uh how effectively can you move something now this is often confused strength rather as muscular endurance so what I mean by that is strength truly is a marker of how what's the maximum thing you can move or what's the maximum amount of force you can produce one time it's not how many repetitions in a row you can do that's actually another one of our adaptations called muscular endurance all right so that is typically under the order of like say five to 25 maybe 50 repetitions think of a classic how many push-ups can you do in a row how many sit-ups can you do in a minute like things like that are muscular endurance muscular endurance tends to be localized so this is you know specific to just say your triceps and your and your deltoids it's not a overall cardiovascular endurance marker or anything like that so that's strength number four number five is muscle hypertrophy and this is the first time now we're talking about uh an appearance rather than a functional outcome so you know moving better moving faster moving heavier are uh indicators of how well you can move this is the first one that's just simply how big is your muscle and that's muscle hypertrophy or muscle size after that is muscular endurance so this is how many repetitions you can typically do of a movement so think of how many push-ups in a row you can do how many sit-ups in a minute you can do things that are typically in like five to 50 repetition sort of range and it is often or it is almost always local muscle so what I mean by that is uh it is I know a push-up test is is really how many reps that your triceps and pecs and and deltoids can do it is not a cardiovascular endurance it is not a global physiological endurance it's specific to typically one or a few muscle groups at a time this is why you have to do multiple tests for for sort of every group there uh after that now we've moved into number seven which is what I call Anor robic capacity this is more synonymous with maximum heart rate and now we're actually looking at rather than a single movement or muscle group it is a total physiological um limitation so it is uh the maximum amount of work you can do in say 30 to 45 seconds maybe even up to 120 seconds of all out work um think of your classic interval type of stuff here so how much work can you do at a maximum rate where you're going to enter tremendous amounts of global fatigue then next past that is maximal aerobic capacity and this is probably something like in the 8 to 15 minute range where you're going to reach probably both a maximum heart rate as well as a true V2 Max which we'll we'll talk a lot more about what that is later so that is is uh different from the previous one where you can't reach this in a matter of seconds it simply takes multiple minutes to get to a position to where your VO2 max is actually going to be sufficiently challenged or an indicator there and then the last one number nine is what I call long duration and this is just your ability to sustain submaximal work for a long period of time with no breaks no reduction whatsoever this is often called steady state training or a lot of people just think of this when they think of quote unquote cardio but your ability to continue move without any breaks or change or drop uh is the last and final adaptation and for longdistance steady state um I'm guessing it exceeds 15 minutes because uh the previous one was 8 to 15 minutes or so um what sort of uh R time ranges are we talking about in terms terms of this uh long duration well that's actually wonderful you can be anything past 15 minutes so really if you look at a kind of a minimal number there it's generally 20 minutes of what we're looking for but a more typical would be 20 to 60 minutes but anything past that would still be limited by your long duration endurance so your ability to sustain work over time okay so given that there are nine different major adaptations that can be induced with exercise of specific types is there any one global test or assess that people can take or do that allows them to determine what level of ability of Fitness they have in each and every one of these nine different categories there are probably dozens or more tests that you can do for each one of those nine categories and what I would actually like to do is walk you through my favorites for each and giving you both the scientific gold standard so if you had the ability unlimited resources what should you go do as well as some that are are equipment free that are cost free things that anyone can do across the world in addition to that I want to walk you through what those numbers should be how do you identify if you're really poor in something or if you're great and then if you aren't as good maybe in a category and you want to get better at it exactly what to do in terms of protocols uh for how to achieve optimal results in each of those steps so I noticed in your list of the nine different adaptations to exercise that you did not mention fat loss or health promoting benefits which are two reasons that a lot of people exercise was there a specific reason that you did not mention those absolutely it's because those things are actually not specific training Styles they are byproducts of these nine so what I mean by that is if you understand how fat loss occurs which we can certainly talk about you'll realize some of these nine Protocols are effective for fat loss and some are not uh General Health is the same thing when we understand what it actually means to be healthy from a physiological perspective persective then the rationale for what to train for is going to determine itself so what I mean is looking at things like in order to be healthy you have to have sufficient strength you have to have cardiovascular fitness you have to have sufficient muscle and Etc therefore training for one's health is determined by those restrictions so for you Andrew you may need to do more strength training to be healthy where me because I'm strong already way stronger than you I may not need to do as much strength training so our quote unquote health-based Protocols are based on our current status or limitations in physical fitness among these nine areas so what I would like to do today is to cover a brief history of exercise science and the reason is it's going to explain a lot about why people are not getting the goals in their exercise programs that they want as well as giv you very specific Direction about what to do instead I can't wait to hear all the things that I'm doing incorrectly and to have you help me remedy that before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is also separate from Dr galpin's teaching and research roles at Cal State Fullerton it is however part of our 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 we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is momentus momentus makes supplements of the absolute highest quality the huberman Lab podcast is proud to be partnering with momentus for several important reasons first of all as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality second of all their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations if you're going to develop a supplementation protocol you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations with single ingredient formulations you can devise the most logical and effective and costeffective supplementation regimen for your goals in addition moment to supplement ship internationally and this is of course important because we realize that many of the h Lab podcast listeners reside outside the United States if you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned on the huberman Lab podcast in particular supplements for Hormone Health for Sleep optimization for Focus as well as a number of other things including exercise recovery you can go to live momentus spelled o so that's lives.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by element element is an electrolyte drink that contains the exact ratios of the electrolyte sodium magnesium and potassium to optimize cellular functioning for mental and physical performance most people realize that hydration is key we need to ingest enough fluids in order to feel our best and perform our best but what most people do not realize is that the proper functioning of our cells and nerve cells neurons in particular requires that sodium magnesium and potassium be present in the correct ratios now of course people with prehypertension and hypertension need to be careful about their sodium intake but what a lot of people don't realize is that if you drink caffeine if you exercise and in particular if you're following a very clean diet that is not a lot of processed foods which of course is a good thing chances are you're not getting enough sodium potassium and magnesium to optimize mental and physical performance element contains a science spack ratio of 1,000 milligrams that's 1 gram of sodium 200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligram of magnesium and no sugar if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element that's lm.com huberman to get a free element sample pack with your purchase again that's drink element LM nt.com huberman to claim a free sample pack today's episode is also brought To Us by eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've been using an eights Sleep mattress cover for about the last8 months and it has completely transformed my sleep I'm sleeping about the same amount but I'm sleeping far deeper and I'm now getting the proper ratios of so-called rapid eye movement or REM sleep and slow wave sleep and waking up feeling far more recovered mentally and physically the underlying mechanism for all that is very straightforward W I've talked many times before on this podcast and elsewhere about the critical relationship between sleep and body temperature that is in order to fall asleep at night your body needs to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees in terms of core body temperature and waking up involves a 1 to 3 degree increase in core body temperature with eight Sleep mattress covers you can adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment to be one temperature at the start of the night a different temperature the middle of the night and a different temperature as you approach morning Each of which can place you into the optimal stages of sleep and have you waking up feeling more refreshed than ever if you'd like to try Aid sleep you can go to AIDS sleep.com huberman and check out their pod3 cover and save $150 at checkout eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada United Kingdom select countries in the EU and Australia again that's eights sleep.com huberman to save $150 at checkout before we get into how the history of exercise science informs the mistakes that we are all making and how to remedy those mistakes I'm curious as to whether not you have any favorite one or two studies that point to a sort of naturally occurring uh example of how people can become very fit in one area and not another you know I'm familiar with seeing endurance athletes that apparently have terrific endurance but at least to my eye don't look like they are particularly strong I'm also familiar with seeing individuals that are very very strong particular on social media but that don't look like they could walk up a flight of stairs much less run a mile do you have any examples of studies in or outside the laboratory that point to that in a concrete way there's a lot to have to discuss here but I I'll answer it really clear uh if you look across the literature and this is actually back to as early as the mid 1950s in fact it actually goes back to previous to that to the Harvard fatigue lab 1927 to 1947 area people actually were advocating at that point a combination of strength training and endurance in the 1920s way back then in fact actually goes prior to that the late 1880s there's scientific evidence back then um it became more welldeveloped in the mid 1950s and 60s in fact there was um the initial stages of What's called the exercises medicine movement which is the movement now but the initial stages of that actually root back to the 1950s and I could actually go into that whole discussion and the story of how that all came about but that's the health as wealth um Mantra that came from the 1950s um from the scientific Community then all those those data points are going to suggest you need a combination of some sort of broad strength training and Broad endurance thing now if you have a specific goal five months from now you want to compete in a race or hit a certain physique thing that's fine to focus on one area of training certainly if you're an athlete that's different but if you want to maximize health and and overall functionality throughout time it needs to be a combination and to really really highlight this I can actually talk about a couple of studies that I've done um one of them we actually did in Stockholm Sweden so I did this at the Carolin Institute which you probably are aware of um it's actually one of the founding places of all of exercise physiology generally it started there it was called something different back then but really our entire field came out of Stockholm and the Carolin Institute and we worked with a whole bunch of cross country skiers that were in their 80s and 90s and so they were competitive skiers in the 1940s and 50s and they had been skiing competitively for that entire duration so you're talking 50 to 60 consecutive years of competing um so these are 80 to 90 year olds living alone unhealthy and we compared them to a group of individuals uh here in America who are the same age but we're not exercising and what we wanted to do is to see and kind of look at what are these lifelong endurance individuals what do they look like when we brought them into the lab which is by the way amazing to do a V2 Max test on a 92y old um especially in a language that they don't speak and you're in a you can imagine you're doing this in the hospital right and you're running people through this is a cycling test and so for a V2 Max test you have a mask on your face you're hooked up to a metabolic cart so it can collect all the gases that are coming out of your mouth and you're chanting these people on and basically every minute the workload gets harder and harder and harder until you can't complete it and we're doing this in a in a Cardiology Center and the cardiologists are usually waiting for their heart rate to get like slightly elevated and they stop them because they're you know 85 86 years old and not only are we not stopping them but we are screaming in their ears just like go go go in Swedish or English in English right and then the translator but it doesn't take a lot of translation when someone's screaming at your face like go go go um so we ran them through a whole bunch of VO2 max tests and we did the same thing for those folks back um here here in America and what was um incredibly clear from that study was the V2 Max um you can think about these numbers and this is what's called relative so in the relative terms are milliliters per kilogram per minute and so a standard number is about 18 is what we call the line of Independence so if your V2 Max is below 18 milliliters per kilogram per minute it's very hard for you to live by yourself so your Fitness is so low you probably are going to need to have somebody living with you or you'll need to be in some sort of assisted living home so if you are in like VO2 max of 20 or 21 or 22 you're not below that line of Independence but you're on that threshold and so what we found was our folks here in America the group average was right around that number so they were living at home by definition we picked them to be people living by themselves in their 80s and not in a living room but they didn't have any bandwidth so if they got a cold or they had anything pop up where they lost a little bit of Fitness they were going to drop below that line and would probably have to go to some sort of assisted living situation um the folks in Stockholm the the cross country skiers the group average was most closer to like 35 to 38 milliliters per kilogram per minute now that number is about the V2 Max you would find for a normal College male and so these folks that were literally 80 or 90 um if the you know the joke if a saber-tooth tiger ran in the room or or whatever and it chased it down and we all had to run to see who didn't get eaten alive the the college men would probably have gotten eaten before the the 90y olds and in one case we had a 92y old individual and I think his VO2 max was 38 which was in our estimation a world record the highest V2 Max for somebody over the age of 90 ask what what is the typical resting heart rate for somebody uh very fit like these um older Swedish cross country skiers if somebody has a um this let's say their number is 35 milliliters per kilogram in this V2 Max test but since most of us don't have access to that kind of equipment but that we can measure our pulse rate y um what was a typical resting heart rate resting pulse rate sub 60 sub 60 yeah I mean and typically that's a good number to go off of for anybody regardless of age um anytime I see somebody above that I'm I'm going to start asking questions certainly above now you'll see in the literature people will say 60 to 80 is normal and I I don't agree with that at all if you're up if your resting heart rate is 75 BS per minute there's either something going on or you're not fit how much CrossCountry skiing were they doing on average in the previous let's say if we take the previous 20 years since they' been longtime cross country skiers divide that by 20 years yeah uh on average these people cross country skiing 5 hours a day two hours a day an hour a day yeah that's actually a good question I don't remember it's been many years um but they were not doing it every single day and that the volume would not have shocked you it was the consistency over 50 years that got them there now obviously these people were again world champions and Olympic gold medalists in the 1940s and 50s so they were Elite they just continued consistently over time but it wasn't a shocking amount of physical fitness they also didn't go out of their way to train hard they were busy chopping wood they were busy doing number of other things and then they just happened to do some of these races and ski along the way but it wasn't a crazy amount to where you're like oh that's great but I could never hit that number it was something much more reasonable so is the takeaway to be consistent about getting cardiovascular exercise and we can Define yeah what consistent means in terms of days per week a little bit later and I I know we will yeah what are some other examples I love these examples of um from The Real World so here here's the downside though so I only told you about their V2 Max what I didn't tell you about is their leg strength and functionality and that part was no more Superior than it was their counterparts who were not exercisers so what that showed really really clearly and many other Studies have been done since then that look at the classic what we call lifelong endurance exercisers you will see in general their V2 Max their cardiovascular function their resting heart rate their blood pressure it will be markedly healthier than folks who on exercise it is extraordinarily clear that type of exercise is very important for chronic disease management no doubt about it however it is not sufficient for overall Global health because it does almost nothing for leg strength for any other marker of Health which we can talk about what are the things that are actually going to predict mortality more the most so that was a a big a big smashing indication that's like hey this is great however you're leaving things on the table for your overall health now one could argue they're 80 and they they're doing pretty well but they weren't doing as well in these areas and so a study we did later actually as a follow-up was looking at monagas twins so this is actually interesting being a scientist this is a classic example of one of my graduate students who had been in my lab for probably three or four years and she was in our single fiber physiology lab and she's now you imagine she's in she's isolating individual muscle fibers from an athlete one by one with the tweezer and she's going to do several thousand individual cells right so she's you're down there for hours and and things happen down there you kind of lose your mind and she was just kind of going on one day with one of my colleagues just talking and she's like oh yeah my uncle is really really fit and something or other and then oh yeah he's a twin and I was like oh is he monozygous and she's like yeah for those that don't know monozygous are identical twins yeah which is interesting so you basically have what what I'm setting up here is this is the perfect exercise scientific experiment monozygous identical twins mean the they have the exact same DNA so an egg was fertilized split and then two humans grew out of that with the exact same DNA and so now we can start answer the question well yeah okay what about maybe these cross country skiers maybe they were just genetic freaks maybe it didn't matter it's like some people have well genetics are always a component to it but how much well now we have a scenario lining up where it's like wait a minute you have monos like twins so we have a replica of a human being exact same DNA the only differences that we would see in their physiology now would be due to Lifestyle circumstances interesting so mono us to an a dad and an uncle right uhhuh great do they exercise well one of them does he's a lifelong endurance exercise Runner cyclist swimmer Iron Man all these things what about the other one nope he doesn't exercise at all and at that point like I wanted to kill my graduate student cuz I'm like like you've been in my lab for 3 years or more probably and you've never told me that in your household is the perfect scientific experiment for exercise you could ever create and like she's just the look on her face when my colleague and I were staring at her she's just like oh my God so I'm like call them right now they are coming in the lab they fly them in from Chicago I don't care what we have to do like we're getting them in and so I wanted to actually going back to the model that was first developed by the Harvard fatigue lab one thing that's interesting about that Community is they started off with the concept of trying to examine Human Performance through a holistic lens and so it was the antithesis of looking at U either organ by organ so we're going to only look at the cardiovascular system we're only going to look at skeleton muscle and then we're saying we're looking at this entire picture and so that model we wanted to carry through when these twins and I said all right I want to bring them in the lab but I'm not just going to look at one system I want to do everything so we took stool samples we took blood we did vertical jump test we did maximum strength test we did MRIs of muscle mass we did um uh V2 Max test we did efficiency stuff we we did genetic testing we did an IQ test we did psychological battery we wanted to look at everything to figure out of these things what differ between the Twins and if so the second key question there is by how much so can I improve my V2 Max sure everyone knows that but how much can it change by 5% 80% like where is the number and so putting some Quant ification on this was very important and so again we had another example of a classic endurance only training Paradigm compared to a a non so this is a person who's I think he's a truck driver by vocation which is I think actually drove for a potato chip company which was even fun here the the endurance athlete actually was great because like any endurance people he had a he had physical books of all of his training mileage for the last 35 years and we could we just went through them we calculated the total amount of miles he ran his averages his heart rates per time we had this unbelievable thing like what races he was in he had the documentation he was just totally nuts right like something that endurance people are like shaking their head right now going oh yeah I got that too and every else endurance folks are pretty nerdy yeah they're super nerdy right so it was great because now we could validate as close as one could to actually how much you ran and things like that so they had about a 35 year Discord um they both exercised up through high school about 18 they stopped doing it by the time they brought them in the lab they're in their mid-50s so it was about 35 years of difference and when we ran them through the testing if you look at the the measures that were similar to the Sweden study it was almost identical the the the exercising twin was significantly better at things like a lipid panel resting heart rate blood pressure V2 Max any of those markers as predicted were were much better what was very interesting though was the things that were in the middle first of all their total amount of muscle mass was almost identical like to the gr within the margin of error of a dexas scan could possibly ever be the non- exerciser though was a little bit fatter so the difference in actual body weight was explained almost entirely by body fat or non-lean tissue really same sort of deal so okay like no one's surprised there that the exerciser was a little bit leaner even though it didn't change the whole amount of muscle mass at all when we looked at some of the more functional tests and we looked at things like muscle quality so this is a metric you can get from an ultrasound you can kind of think about this as how much fat is inside the tissue which is sometimes an advantage for an endurance athlete to have a little bit more of what are called intramuscular triglycerides because it's a fuel directly in the tissue but in general the exercise or the U the muscle quality was not in favor of the exerciser um if you looked at the performance testing and if you looked at strength it favored the the non-ra and so now again we have the same finding we saw our Sweden study but in identical twins and so it really really highlighted the fact that if you want to move forward with Optimal Health simply picking one Silo is not going to get you there one Silo meaning just running just cycling right does this mean that the twin that did not exercise could jump higher or win an arm wrestling uh competition not that that's a vital thing to be able to do but just in terms of measuring strength you know it's our isometric strength um was the non-exercising twin stronger or at least as strong as their exercising yes particularly in grip strength yep and any of the measures uh like the vertical jump leg extension power and a number of things um they often favored the non- exerciser which you're still a little bit of a chicken and egg you don't know if necessarily the endurance training reduced that other twins strength or it doesn't even really matter per se I think the highlight of it is can you change some of these metrics of V2 Max yeah not even close these things are very responsive regardless of your genetics your genetics will give you a starting Place very clearly um even the non- exerciser was a pretty healthy guy so they were in a good spot his mid-50s doesn't exercise doesn't really pay attention to his diet at all and he was in a pretty good shape however if you want to actually move progress and move forward uh High functionality you have to do something besides just run right just distance run now I could say the same thing for strength training that alone because I don't want to make this seem like I'm saying under exercises it worked in both case both these studies those folks were uh much better off in metrics that are incredibly important to mortality how long you're going to live V2 Max Etc it's just not going to get there in terms of strength we took a look at muscle fiber physiology as well which is very interesting so what I mean is there's generally two types of muscle fibers fast twitch slow twitch and one of the things that is a Hallmark of Aging is a selective reduction in fast twitch fibers and that's because it's difficult to activate them unless you're doing High Force activities um you're going to activate slow twitch fibers doing almost any activity of daily living and so they stay around fast twitch fibers unless you're doing something of high Force are going not be used and they're not going to be kept around and that's a problem because when you look at things like the need for leg strength through aging the ability to catch yourself from a fall these things are incredibly important if you don't have fast fibers you don't have the speed to get your foot out in front of you on time and you don't have the Ecentric strength to stop the fall from happening and so if you look across again the Aging literature they're very clear about the importance of maintaining strength and and fast fibers over time so we know that this is an important distinction here of Ro and people will often talk about okay how much of that um is genetically determined can I change my fiber type and the answer there is is resounding yes and can I change it with exercise and the answer is absolutely you can and the next question is how much so now again we're going to see order of magnitude in general without going too far down an area maybe we could save for for later um each one of your muscles in your body has a different percentage of fast twitch and slow twitch for example your calf um if you look at your Solus which is kind of the smaller one that goes in the back that's generally mostly slow twitch typically 80 % or so slow twitch um the gastrock which is the other one right next to it so if you were to point your toe next to your face and that part that kind of flexes out in the middle pops out that's your gastro that is almost the inverse so it's generally 80% fast twitch maybe 20% slow twitch um generally anything anti-al or postural rather anti-gravity uh spinal Erectors things that are meant to keep you up or moving all day are going to be slow twitch and things like your hamstrings which are for explosion are going to be fast switch well we biopsy the quad in these these individuals and in that muscle it's generally about 50/50 fast twitch slow twitch as is a really broad number well one of the things that we found was in the non- exerciser it was almost textbook what you would predict it was about 50% or so slow twitch a little bit of percentage of fast twitch and then about 20% of what are these called hybrid fibers which are a Hallmark of V activity all right great in the exerciser it was about 95% slow twitch and so it's extremely clear again I don't know if maybe their set point was a little bit higher towards that and the non- exerciser you know devolve down to his place or the other one but it doesn't matter I mean you're going from 40% slow twitch in one case to 95% slow twitch in another case it shows you that the the limits of physiological adaptation are darn near boundless given enough exposure and in this case 35 years of extremely consistent training and his muscle morphology was completely different than his is identical twin with the exact same DNA those are two beautiful examples of people doing endurance work for a number of years and what that gives them in terms of benefits and functionality has the opposite experiment been done or observed where somebody just weight lifted or just sprinted for a number of years uh I don't know that there's a identical twin uh control that's a little I wish we had a third twin too muchow right right triplets okay so triplets out there um if you're exercising in different ways or people who have triplets maybe you assign one kid to be a runner one to be a weightlifter and the other one to be sedentary please don't do experiments like that but the expectation as I understand it would be that the person that Sprints or that does heavy squats explosive work would then have more fast twitch muscle fibers in their quad and their non- exercising counterpart would fewer that that would make sense but what happens if you assess the the endurance level in somebody who's just done strength training or just sprinted y so we don't have those data specifically there's we're actually just starting to have studies come out on lifelong strength trainers and there's actually a very good reason for this U which is a whole story we can get into but the the quick answer is we don't have a lot of people who've been lifting weights for 30 or plus years we have a whole swath of people who've been doing endurance training for that long is that because fewer people have been weight training or the weight trainers all dead you got to go back to the 1953 1954 you had two major things happen that changed the entire course of exercise physiology and exercise science and really exercises we know it it's important to understand the history of our field a lot of the questions I get are based on false assumptions of what exercise can and can't do as an example we questions like momentum should I use momentum or or that's cheating right or it doesn't work uh it compromises my results it's actually totally untrue there are excellent reasons when you should use momentum when you lift there are reasons when you should not it is sometimes very beneficial to go fast with your exercise repetition sometimes very slow and controlled is better any question I get in fact I'm very Infamous for always responding with it depends the reason I say it depends is it depends on the goal when training for Speed or power or muscular endurance the answer to some of these very common question differs what people fail to realize is they think they're asking the right question because they don't understand this history what's being planted in your brain subconsciously is driving that question and it's not necessarily the right one so if we walk through that a little bit you'll see what that field has led you why you think certain things matter when they actually don't or maybe your assumptions are incorrect and then exactly what to do about them I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor athletic greens athletic greens is a vitamin mineral probiotic and adapted in drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs I've been taking athletic greens daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me meet all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it covers my vitamins my minerals and the probiotics are especially important to me athletic greens also contains adaptogens which are critical for recovering from stress from exercise from work or just general life if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athletic greens.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again if you'd like to try athletic greens go to athletic greens.com huberman to claim the special offer so in 1953 1954 you had Roger banister breaking the 4minute mile so sub four-minute file and then you also had sir Edmond Hillary and then his Sherpa Norgate uh Summit Everest in the same basically two-ear span that exact same year after that was a formation of What's called the American College of sports medicine now that is still around today it is the preeminent group for this exercises medicine so if you're interested in things like exercise for obesity prevention for cancer treatment for for things like that it's not really sports medicine it's more for clinical exercise that's the place to go American College of sports medicine so we have this launching of both a ton of people wanting to start doing endurance exercise and start swimming and cycling and running and then you have a launch of people coming off of the back of the Harvard fatigue lab so the fatigue lab actually shut down in 1947 so you have these people interested in physical fitness but nowhere to go well all those people left the harbard fatigue lab and started their own labs and other places so you've launch the careers of people like um Dave costell and and and John halasi and some of these very famous exercise physiologists and they start building Laboratories and we start for the first time ever studying the science of exercise so years go by and these people happen the 1960s the 1970s is what we call the runners boom so people start if in fact if you look at the numbers of people who are doing marathons it explodes through these two decade spans right because it's like the we could do these endurance Feats notice both those feeds were endurance right running shortterm as well as going over there no one has thought anything about strength training and here's why in the late 1880s there was a very famous uh physician named George winchip I think was his name who was a big proponent of strength training well he died like in the age of 50 Something of a heart attack and that terrified people of strength training for 70 years because they're like whoa whoa whoa whoa that stuff will kill you because he was a doctor he was trying he was running around the country doing these exhibitions and Reporting it and then he died it's sort of like Atkins 100% dying although some people say he died of a heart attack other people said he fell through the ice into cold water that's debated but the fact that a a heavy proponent of a given nutrition plan dies suddenly yep not good for business so now the little storm is brewing 1940s and I'm going back a little bit but bear with me for a second there's a guy named um Peter karpovich and he is a a a scientist out of Springfield like the decorated physical education PE like that's a legendary place Springville college and he is anti- strength training for a lot of the same reasons in his entire career he talked about not do this he's the one that launched these ideas that strength training will make you lose flexibility it will be bad for kids like all these things that we know now are clearly not true he's proponent of these things and there's a show that happened um in his at Springfield College and a guy named Bob York and if you York barbell that's still around today is going around the country and and putting on these exhibitions they come to Ringfield and it's sort of like a a new aged um like social media thing where it's like the students know what's about to happen CU kovich shows up to this event and everyone knows he hates strength training and everyone's like waiting for it to end just to see what he's going to say so this whole exhibition goes on and these people are doing now you got to remember back in the time like bodybuilding weightlifting power lifting strength strong man it's like all the same thing there's no differentiation yet and it finishes and kovich stands up and like the crowd goes silent and he just asks one question and he just points to one of the guys and says scratch your back and now he's just assuming and waiting for the guy to be like H and not be able to put his hand behind his head and I think he pointed to John gimmick who's like a famous bodybuilder and he reached back and scratched his back no problem and then they proceeded to grab two dumbbells I think they were 50b dumbbells and do a back flip standing back flip with both in each hand they start doing the splits on stage and they start going performing all kinds of physical function tests and and karpovich is stunned he's like holy she has nothing to say he leaves there and his whole life has changed all these things he was claiming were shown in his face to be false he does a 180 on his career he starts running study after study on strength training and starts finding immediately there are no detriments to strength training in terms of like Global Health right of course you can do it wrong and things like that and in fact here comes a whole bunch of benefits so through the 1950s while this thing's going on with the endurance folks no one's still strength training because there's no there's no record to see there's no American College of sports medicine there's no societies there's no science we're not sure it's safe and meanwell carpit is just hammering study after study after study showing you it's safe it's safe it's safe but it hasn't picked up yet and then everything changed in 1977 thank you Arnold Schwarzenegger he came out with the trifold he hits you with Pumping Iron which I know you know that movie right pumping interesting movie even for those not interested in bodybuilding it's a very interesting movie because it really gives a window into not just him but the way in which weight training started to show up as a regular practice you know when I was growing up the only people weight trained were people preparing for football bodybuilders who basically didn't exist in the town where I grew up and the only people who did yoga were like yogis doing bickram but now you drive through any major American city or European city and there's yoga studios there's gyms with free weights yep Arnold Schwarzenegger is largely responsible I think for for initiating that that shift yep he because he think about it he hit us with Pumping Iron Conan and then the Terminator almost in back to back like very close within years so you've got this whole Cascade of the 70s of people running cycling and swimming now science is starting to come out that it's not dangerous and maybe actually some benefit and then boom not only is it not bad for you it can make you into a real world superhero I mean think about the psychology of of a child growing up watching somebody like Conan think about what Batman looked like in the 1950s and 60s right and then boom I can look like that now not everyone wants to look like Arnold but you see like you see the power that can land in people no one had ever seen or thought you can make your body transform like that you could maybe be born like that but no chance that's within the grass of all of you when I was a kid growing up one of my favorite books was the Guinness book of world's records yeah I live still have images in my mind of the the uh coldest animal you know the the longest lifespan Etc you know and there was a picture in there of Arnold Schwarzenegger and you know what his record was it said perfectly developed man yeah yeah yeah which is as you point out that isn't the physique that most people aspire to but it really I it did Inspire this this shift the other thing about resistance training that I think um has a certain Allure for some people men and women is that it's one of the few forms of exercise that because of the enhanced blood flow to the muscle that occurs during the training the so-called pump y it gives you a transient but somewhat real window into what your results will be% you when you run and you're gasping for air you don't get this you aren't experiencing what it's like to be faster than you are that day that's correct but when you weight train you get an aesthetic picture into how your functionality and aesthetic will change it disappears a few hours later as the the So-Cal pump sub subsides but it's a very um interesting form of exercise in that way it's almost as if you go in to learn a language and during the process of learning for brief moments you're actually fluent and then it gets taken away it sort of puts the dopamine carrot out in front of you this is just me hypothesizing as to why weight training might have taken off the way that it did yeah I mean it's like if you got paid every hour on the hour when you're working and then at the end of the day like they take the money back but you still like as the time clock is going on in your day you're looking up and you're just seeing while you're watching your bank account grow and life like you can see why it's so addicting to those folks so to finish the story here with going back to your actual question to answer it this is happening in the late 70s early 80s and so now Joe weer all these gyms they're exploding because people want to look like that or if they have they realize they have the chance to change how they physically look that had never been a reality before you mostly meant at that point I'm almost exclusively yetep for a large number of reasons cultural acceptance Etc even with endurance and stuff you could get fitter and run faster and that's better but it just wasn't going to change how you looked unless you were losing fat now you can change how you look which is so incredibly addicting in fact there's a a very famous quote um I think it was actually Joe weer who said show me one man who wants to be strong and I'll show you T to want to look strong right it's like that's very very powerful right there's there's a whole like whole there's tons of this history I can go into which is sort of explaining to you but now you now you're in the mid 80s and you have what I call my generation so you have my generation who fall in love with strength training in the 18 in the 1980s and 90s but there's really no scientific field for it it's not really come about yet the science of endurance and exercise physiology is now humming along at a massive rate because these people came up in the 70s and ' 80s and their five 10 15 years in their career they're producing they're gen they're generating graduate students they're starting their own labs and the exercise physiology still to this day is 80% endurance steady state stuff almost exclusively well now my My Generation you love um you love sports you love lifting you love all these things and now what we see happen is the Chicago Bulls Michael Jordan starts picking up strength training oh that's in that's on TV he's on Sports Center in the mid1 1990s lifting weights and we go back actually to the late 1970s and I'm I'm not sure if you're a football fan but any football fan will recognize the Nebraska Corn Huskers in the 1970 and ' 80s changed how football's played well the reason is because they started strength training and they started doing it with a guy named Boyd Epley who is the founder of the NCA so the national strength conditioning Association is formed in the late 1970s as well so just like ACSM was developed the year after those two events happened 1978 the year after Arnold comes out boom NCA is formed and now you have a scientific organization dedicated to strength and conditioning you've got NFL strength conditioning coaches that are starting to come on board you've got scientists that are starting to come into labs and strength conditioning becomes a scientific field well everything swings now from an exercise perspective into bodybuilding and so almost all of the things in fact we were sort of talking before I could run a whole bunch of tricks on you and I could ask you a whole bunch of questions about things that you think are absolute standards or guarantees about training I'm supposed to do this I'm never supposed to do that for instance uh for instance is it okay to train a muscle group on back-to-back days most people are at home thinking no you're not supposed to train a muscle group it needs to recover and that's total nonsense right um other things like body part split training right training one muscle group per day um other things like cardio uh endurance training influencing will it ruin my gains for my lift all of these things are on at a a base of assumptions that come from bodybuilding now that's a fantastic world but because everything started in the late 197s as bodybuilding in terms of basically strength training was that weightlifting and powerlifting were not at all B around right they were but nobody cared again show me someone who wants to be strong I'll show you 10 to want to look strong the physique thing just dominated and we're we're not getting out of that yet we're not all the way out of it we're starting to though because here's why people started to realize this this bodybuilding thing is fantastic I can change my physique I'm getting better but damn these workouts take an hour and a half two hours and I'm going to spend that whole time on one or two body parts which means I'm going to have to live six days a week and I'm going to have to do that consistently right now all a sudden boom two hours on my on my elbow flexors damn my elbow starting to hurt and yet my understanding is that it doesn't really require two hours a day not at all of training in order to get benefits even just for hypertrophy totally but but uh a lot of the times you're going to have to get some amount of time in because you're spending so much isolation so we've gone away from training movement running is a movement cycling is a movement um training my biceps is a muscle or B muscle Group Training my hamstrings are a muscle group that's not a human movement so we've done a 180 in terms of selecting the exercises from movement based prescription to now muscle group Based training so when you're isolating muscle groups that means a whole chunk of your body is really not doing much throughout the day so what happens if you're doing say legs on Monday and you miss Monday because you're on a flight now your legs have to wait a whole another week right that's there's solution to that but so this starts to become problematic people start getting beat ups people start realizing I actually don't feel that great I'm not super fit I'm sweating just walking up the stairs I'm out of breath why because all that training you've done nothing for your cardiovascular fitness you've done nothing to improve um heart rate oxygenation blood flow and so that Paradigm swing way too hard into the exercising especially lifting weights is single joint often machine often slow often High volume isolation stuffff and that left a giant opening of people going well wait a minute what if you could get in the gym I could promise you the same or better results in under 30 minutes and in fact you also feel better you'll lose more weight and that opened up group exercise classes kettle bell stuff CrossFit type of stuff circuit training because you can come in you won't get so beat up because the volume's lower the time is much lower you get multiple adaptations at the same time great the problem with that though fast forward 10 years is it started burying people because you've now deemphasized movement quality and you've overemphasized scores right so this is a classic example if you go and you watch Pumping Iron you'll see or anybody Builder you'll see if they're doing a bicep crew they don't even really pay attention to the rep range they don't really pay attention to the load they are looking at their muscle they're trying to figure out how do I get that thing to fire they're squeezing they're flexing they're posing at the end of every set they're trying to figure out am I getting enough pump it is exclusively founded on exercise quality the rep range the numbers almost irrelevant when you go to the other model exercise technique it doesn't matter just get the most amount of weight up or the amount of reps or the fastest time etc etc high should be CrossFit I've walked past some CrossFit seros I've done two CrossFit I don't want get Su so you said CrossFit I didn't oh I know I I enjoyed them I definitely uh felt like I was working hard I I observed a lot of people in very close proximity um doing Olympic lifts and doing Kipping that's where you kick your legs folks so you know sort of like bucking and um Kipping type pull-ups um no I I enjoyed it uh it wasn't for me for the long term but it did seem that there was um a lot of bullistic movement in close proximity to other people um so the hazard to me seemed more about that than the actual movements well again the the point I'm setting up here is that was actually a really brilliant solution for a lot of the problems the classic body building hypertrophy introduced so it got away from isolation movements and got people doing big movements which are more effective generally better it got people doing things fast and explosive that's more athletic that is more important for longevity it solved a lot of the problems joint health wasn't getting crashed the issue they went with is they just pushed the pace on score rather than quality they pushed the pace on how many people can be in here at the same time so now you're doing higher risk movements higher intensity higher fatigue and with a total not that they don't care about technique but it's not the thing that they're most concerned about it's getting the number and the thing done they solve the time issue though you can get tremendous results in three days a week under 45 minutes each session Etc burn people out though way too much high intensity way too often and the other problem safety concerns all kinds of Orthopedic issues and other stuff can I um interrupt you for a moment and just ask a question as we go through this Arc of the history of why endurance training predominated or strength training or bodybuilding type training or CrossFit type training because I think this is fascinating I know we're about to arrive at where we are today and what the future looks like for for people and what they should focus on and do at what point if any do you think resistance training started to become adopted by women you know there was no equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger there was um Linda Hamilton in The Terminator yeah um there are some impressive uh physiques certainly on female actresses and um athletes um the William sisters you know very impressive U musculature and physiques and of course their tennis playing speaks for itself um has that happened yet I mean what I mean is um do you think since you work with both men and women yeah um do you think that most women understand that weight training um done properly is going going to be extremely beneficial for them maybe even especially for them in terms of um offsetting bone density loss and things of that sort um or are we still waiting for the stim the uh popular uh stimulus for getting you know 80% of of young women thinking I want to lift weights yeah um hard for me to answer because I'm not like I'm not a woman right now I have a daughter she's four so we'll we'll see um what I can say is is I've probably worked with I don't know how many professional athletes in total a lot I've worked with them probably 14 professional sports I've worked with sa young winners MVPs like the whole all all the credentials right I bet 35 40% of the athletes I've worked with are female so I've worked with Olympic gold medalists I've worked with bronze medalists in multiple Sports I've worked with the most decorated powerlifter you know of all time so in a number of these areas Fighters World Championship all these things um for me I I feel like that burst is already happen um my students if you look at my classroom uh I don't know what the numbers are but there is no small number of females in exercise science and exercise physiology um if you look at our Laboratories that's one thing you will see there are very few female exercise scientists there are very few uh female strength conditioning coaches but that number is is is coming down at a at a astronomical rate you have um people that are being hired um in every sport uh you pick the NFL you pick Major League Baseball every every few months we're hearing first female hired for this first female hired for that um the Yankees Rachel Rachel Bel fantastic uh you know yeah Rachel's been out to my lab she's terrific yeah yeah oh yeah that's she's fantastic I mean she's now being hired as the I think she's a hitting coach now actual sport coach she she's going to be a GM right that's is her goal she's a Terminator um so that that's already happening and my students that are coming through our program are getting placed in these roles they haven't gotten through yet a lot in terms of being an actual scientist but they're getting there um sport scientists in the NBA you're being hired females in terms of like big data collection and Sport Science and Tech will'll cover you know um in another discussion but I think it's happening whether or not the the cultural and social I can't speak to that any the equation what I can speak to though is um one of the things I think is is most fun coming forward scientifically is you know a number of years ago NIH came back came through with their mandates of saying it's no longer acceptable to exclude women from scientific research right because we just did that for decades well what happened just to fill this in because I think it's worth noting is that for many years um studies even on rodents yeah were mainly carried out on male rodents because the Assumption and the Assumption turned out to be wrong but the Assumption was that the physiology of female rodents because they don't have a menstrual cycle it's not 28 days they have an estr cycle it's 4 days different type of cycle that that would somehow disrupt the data turns out that's entirely wrong now it's actually required when you sit on a grant study panel U which are the people who evaluate grants you they ask they literally say did they meet the criteria for sex as a biological variable here we're not talking about sex as the verb we're talking about sex as biological sex and um if you don't say yes that's a strong hit against the Grant and if you say yes then it checks off that box so it's now required that both male and female rodents and humans be studied in a given study unless the study is specifically geared toward understanding that only exists in one uh one or the other population such as menopause for instance yeah menstrual cycle um andropause um for instance but um no this is extremely important I'm excited to hear that um so where where I was going to go with that is actually so that was step one which is cool you got to include them where we haven't gotten to yet but I I've seen more and more Grant applications come through for this it's just the funding hasn't hit yet which is it's one thing to in to let women be in the same studies that's great it's another thing though to start performing high performance research specifically for female questions that has not happened yet and that's just like a funding issue right we haven't gotten money yet people aren't aren't supporting that we don't get a lot of financial support for sport Science but we can't track down the money yet of some go me going I want to do a study in female athletes that answers female athlete questions these won't help men these are questions specific to the female that's the next step right that's where we got to get to so we can say maybe we should do things differently um around training or recovery or or we shouldn't or it doesn't matter there there's some there's a handful of not lower quality but like some studies um I don't love them yet there just needs to be a ton of work uh birth control is a very good example right we the the information for women at female athletes or even just like hard exercises you don't have to be a competitive athlete around what is birth control doing what types how should I manage that what conversation should I be having with my doctor almost nothing like women have nothing to go on for high performance stuff so what if I'm trying to compete in an event or or run a race how like all those types of questions should be answered um normative value normative data performance testing like it's just not there on the female so that's an area I think like if somebody really wanted to make a change that the scientists want to do it I know it I've talked to so many in our field that would really love to explore it um because it's getting there the the like I said the coaching side is getting there they're seeing it they're hiring these people I'm seeing it in my students um you know my following is not all men like it's a very large percentage of females and all I do is post about exercise science you like this is all I do so well this podcast is uh very we know very clearly the audience um is 50% women 50% men that's right um which is great so just to jump back in our history discussion and to finish that point of where we're at now and where I think we're going to go or should go so we walk through the bodybuilding kind of running everything and people walking into a gym anytime they lift weights they're they're making all of their choices based on the assumption that maximizing muscle size is the goal and clearly that's not the case there are other adaptations you may be after so we talked about how that had problems then we talked about how some of these other forms of exercise filled those gaps and then what problems those things introduced well I think we're actually at a point where that pendulum is kind of slowly shifting into the middle what I mean by that is if you want to maximize muscle strength we look towards the power lifting Community if you want to maximize muscle power we're going to look to the weightlifting Community if you want to look for muscular endurance or well redness maybe we look into the CrossFit communities and some of these obstacle course races or functionality things so what we can do now is generate protocols that get us the exact adaptations we want and not ones we don't want because we can look back at each of these different styles of training and pick and choose optimal protocols or combinations for them so somebody simply wants to get healthy like we talked about when we listed the nine adaptations and I mentioned Health wasn't one of them that's because what determines your health versus what determines my Optimal Health differs so if I need more hypertrophy I can look towards bodybuilding Concepts but if I have enough or maybe for personal reasons I decide I have too much or I don't want to add any more then I can say hey how can I get stronger without getting bigger and boom I look towards powerlifting Concepts how can I get more powerful how can I get faster but I don't uh you know again want to lose fat okay great or if I want physique changes so we have all these different areas we can pick and choose from uh that have expertise in specific adaptations and develop ourselves perfect protocols based on that information I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor insid tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health and well-being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test one issue with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there however is that you get information back about various levels of lipids and hormones and metabolic factors Etc but you don't know what to do with that information inside tracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy they have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are of course but then also what sorts of Behavioral dos and don'ts what sorts of nutritional changes what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try insid tracker you can visit insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off so with the understanding in mind as to how we all myself included arrived at such lopsided Fitness too much endurance not enough strength too much strength not enough endurance it's really hard to imagine anyone's perfect in this regard can you walk us through the nine different adaptations that you mentioned earlier and give us a way to assess our level of ability or our level of adaptation in each of those nine all right the very first one we want to talk about is is movement skill Now set aside sport specific so I'm not going to give you an assessment for optimal golf technique swing this is really about human movement so that you stay injuryf free and and you can continue to train for as long as possible so what are the minimum requirements now if you can have access to a highly qualified physical therapist or movement specialist That's the best route right go to them have them uh identify all of your movement patterns overhead pressing squatting running all these things that's your gold standard if you want to do it yourself though here is a very simple four-step solution so the way that I teaches is I go joint by joint and so I I think of this just as the major ones your shoulder your elbow um your low back hip knee and Ankle okay now what you can do is do a representative movement for you so if you bench a lot use the bench if you do pull-ups use a pull-up if you squat do that I would recommend doing an upper body press an upper body pull a lower body press and lower body pull an example would be a push-up a pullup or a bent row uh a squat and then a deadlift that would be a very very well-rounded approach what you're going to do is do that movement and and I would record it for yourself and and record a frontal view and a side view uh probably do three to 10 repetitions per angle okay slow and controlled you don't need any body weight what you want to do is move and you want to look for four key things at every joint all right so again imagine I'm doing a squat I'm going to do a squat and I'm going to focus on just my ankle and I'm going to look for these four things of the ankle and then I'm going to go back and watch my knee and look for these same four things of the knee through the hip Etc all right so what are these four things number one is you want to look for symmetry so symmetry is front to back left to right and uh your right Limb and your left limb all right and so what we want to look for are um if they aren't moving perfectly that's fine but you want to see is one moving further ahead than the other one is one uh turning to the side and one's not is one fidgeting and and twitching around differently so you want to look just to check to see and make sure that they're stable that's one number two you want to look for stability so key indicators here are things like if you if you can't through a a squat a controlled squat where your knees don't start shaking like that would be an instability issue so can you do the movement slow can you pause at the bottom maybe three seconds maybe 5 seconds or 10 you should have complete control of that movement at all of these joints um are your hips sliding to one side when you stand up is one elbow closer to your body when you're benching and the other one's more flared out these are the things I'm talking about right I'm not worried about what angle they should be at or not you're simply looking for asymmetries or instabilities all right so again as you're pushing up does one elbow start flipping and twitching and going all over the place the third one is what I call awareness so uh there are a lot of movement technique issues that are simply people don't know and so you'll watch watch them squat I do this in my classes all the time I'll have 100 kids out there squatting and you'll see some horrible squat technique and when you just tell them hey did you realize your heels are supposed to be on the ground all times when you squat they're like oh okay and they can correct it it's not actually a movement flaw it was just simply an awareness I didn't know and then I actually didn't realize that that was happening that position so we want all of our joints to be going through a general full range of motion which is number four so the ankles uh during like a squat your knee should be able to go as far over your toe as possible while maintaining good position your feet flat on the floor your you know three points of contact your whole flat foot and you're not compromising another joint so that's all you're going to look for those four things symmetry stability awareness and range of motion through each joint through each movement it sounds um difficult and timec consuming it's really not right you can generally kind of clear these things in one or two repetitions in a couple of seconds and what you're really going to look for there's lots of scoring schemes you can you know tests that physical therapist sort of you I just look for absolutely terrible like can't do it at all minor flaw or pretty close to good that that's really all I'm looking for so my scoring system is 0 1 three Z is like you're not going to do this exercise because you're at a very high acute risk you might get hurt on rep one tomorrow number one like a score of one is like there's a minor flaw here we can probably do it but we need to be cautious of load and volume the other one is maybe it's perfect maybe it's it's not but go ahead and sort of do it on a reasonable protocol you'll be fine um so that's generally uh what you would need to do is a cost-free method of identifying good movement technique within any of the things that that you would do what about speed I actually don't think this is one most people should test if you're a high performance athlete we can run a 40 yard dash or we can do uh some different things with a velocity transducer on a barbell if you're a weightlifter or something for most people pure speed is really maximum velocity or acceleration or kind of the two ways we break it down it's not just generally not that necessary to test what about number three power which I believe before you told me was speed times Force so the reason why I don't worry too much about speed is because you can infer a lot of it from a power test and a power test is easier to do as well as easier to train for for most people so the the cost free version here is a simple broad jump so this is stand uh with you know normal position jump out as far in front of you as you possibly can and measure the distance between where you started and the back of your heel where it lands a super basic number to look for there is your height so you should be able to broad jump how tall you are if you're 5 foot five you should hit 5' five 6'5 Etc it's not perfect um that's going to ratch it down a little bit about 15% for females they just simply don't have the power in general that men have and so you're going to want to bring that down a little bit but that's a it's a very crude number if if you were to look at like a high performance NFL player if they're 6 feet tall they're going to be jumping like 9 to 10 to 11 feet if you can jump your body height um we're not looking for optimization in this particular test but you are looking for red flags if you can jump your body height you're going to be just fine that's incredibly straightforward and yet I have one question yeah I'm assuming that I can squat down as low as I need to before I jump I can swing my arms from Back to Front as hard with as much momentum um as I can muster and when I land you said I'm going to take the measure from where the back of my heels you want to measure the distance you actually covered so to clarify there's no running approach here there's no um steps into it you're going to stand at a still yeah you can swing bounce as much as you'd like to do you're going to projectile off so you're going to measure the distance from the tip of your toe so basically stand behind the line and then the furthest point back where you land so basically the worst possible score not the best possible uh cuz your feet won't land symmetrically one's probably going to be a little bit farther now technically if you fall backwards and your hand touches the ground we Mark that number but in this case just use the furthest point back of your back heel and go from there I'll be trying it tomorrow morning now if you have access to a little bit more technology or you just really want to know a better number a a classic vertical jump uh is is a good starting place so you can actually do this in a simple costree way you can just measure two of your hands put them together so that both of your uh middle fingers are touching overlap them and put them directly over your head okay and then you kind of want to reach up as high as you can get and you mark that on the wall my brother and I used to do this all the time we would take a a highlighter uh the the yellow ones and color as much as we can on our fingertips touch the wall so that the highlighter would stay in the wall if you actually go back to my house from my childhood you'll see these markers all over our our house I'm sure your parents were thrilled my dad didn't care single he didn't care he's just like whatever you guys do whatever you want so you want to measure that and then of course you're going to jump with those two hands and touch as high as you can up and you're going to measure the distance between your standing reach and the actual height that you jump there um now the reason you're doing it two-handed by the way is because if you do one-handed you can actually reach pretty high by offsetting your shoulders and now you're getting into differences of you know who has more shoulder Mobility who has the ability to kind of get up there a two- foot stand or two-handed standard approach is there uh same thing no running approach here um you can dip you can drive you can and do all those things you can swing your arms but you're going to be a two-handed touch is is a general way to do that um you want to look for a number of something like 24 Ines or higher uh if you're past the age of 50 that number can come down a little bit to closer to 20 and again for females it's going to be ratcheted down about 15% everywhere you want to go if you're a a middle-aged female and you're jumping 20 in you you're in a pretty good spot um you're going to looking really nice there so now if you can do that on a force plate that's even better so these are very uh basically scales that will go out to multiple digits sometimes five to nine digits past zero and you're going to stand on these things you do the exact same test and these are very interesting because they'll tell you not only how high you jump but they'll tell you how much force you put into the ground they can also tell you how long it took you this is called your rate of force development as well as impulse and speed and a bunch of other stuff which are are important to help you understand where on the power Spectrum you need to be so you would do that in addition to using some sort of velocity transducer on a barbell so a very classic thing to do would be um let's say you're going to do a squat and you're going to put this uh device on the Barb and and that's going to measure the speed which the barbell moves and you're going to do that at 40% of your one repetition Max 50% 60% 70 80 90 up to 100 and that allows you to create what's called a force velocity curve and you can start to see at what point when you start loading things heavy do you start slowing down too much and that'll tell you what part of the force velocity curve that you want to train in to optimize your power um why that's important a lot of people will do things like when I'm training for power how heavy should I lift well the general answer people say is 30% of your one rep max but that's actually not true at all what's most optimal for power development which we'll discuss more much later is depending on where your flawed and the force velocity curve so if you have access to technology like that that can give you a lot more insight and information if not do the broad jump test or the highlighter on your fingertips and jump and touch the wall test at Andy galpin's house hey just you know what come along there's already the walls are already messed up just go ahead and come up to Washington and we'll do it fantastic what about strength right so strength is really important you need to measure this in a in multiple areas and we'll start off with grip strength okay so you can do this in two ways um you can buy a hand grip dynamometer now these are anywhere between $ 20 to $100 anywhere um these actually used to be like when I was in school like hundreds of dollars and now you can literally buy them on any website for 25 bucks so my honest recommendation is technically that's not cost free I know your whole thing about the cost free protocols but 25 bucks I'm calling that basically cost free um you can bring that in and test that and that's just a little device where you're going to squeeze and you're going to do and I would do your right hand and your left hand um you want to look for asymmetries there but you want to look for something like typically those are they're going to give you a value in kilograms and uh you want to look for something like a minimum score here of 40 kilog ideally you're up past 60 would be a really good spot to be in um you want to make sure that there's no less than 10% variation between your left and right hand your your non-dominant hand actually shouldn't be that much weaker in this test so what you'll actually see a lot of times is the non-dominant can be often times stronger um because the dominant hand is more for movement Precision writing things like that so you want them to be close um if you a male and you under 40 kilograms on a hand grip dynamometer like we're we're going to need to train that if you're a female it's not that much lower but about 35 kilograms is the cuto off point um if you're above 55 we can add out to your training but I'm not worried about leaving it out of your training if you're a female if it's about 50 that's my sort of CAU off of where we want to go so that's a fairly cheap one another one that you can actually do is just a dead hang so you can hold on to any bar ideally one that is thin enough to where you can wrap your whole hand around it so you don't want to be using a a giant fat grip um you're going to have a false reading here so something like going to the gym and jumping on any pull-up bar or or pull-up rack and you want to hang and this is a simple time test so in general we we should be able to hang for a minimum of 30 seconds is what we're what we're looking for 30 to kind of 50 seconds is my like good but we could probably get better here if you're cruising above 6 60 seconds I'm generally pretty happy um this is actually a good example of when females tend to be better grip strength and women is tends to be strong and they can hang for quite a long time so those those standards don't really change that much uh for women now if you are exceptionally large this thing doesn't scale perfectly you know if you're 240 pounds and even if you're lean it's just hard to hang and hold 240 lb conversely if you're 1405 lbs even if you're unhealthy you're going to be able to hang for a long time it's just not that much weight to carry so just rough numbers as to start off with so that's grip strength what about strength elsewhere in the body the primary ones um you can do an upper body strength test if you would like although it's not technically something we do very often happy to do a One Max PCH press or something like that that's great the more one I'm generally more interested in is a leg extension test and the reason I like this is a back squat is better a barbell back squat is look that's my like that's my jam that's my life right it's just very technically demanding and it it's challenging you need spotters you need comfort um a lot goes into this for so for the average person a leg extension test is fairly standardized you don't have to worry about technique and people can just get into it and go and so what you want to look for there is is uh a couple of Standards you want to hit again a very simple answer here is body weight can you do a leg extension with your body weight how one repetition one repetition uh I can answer that right now can you no you can't no I can hack squat a reasonable amount of weight but um I was on the leg extension this morning and I as a nautilus ma machine and I certainly could not like extension my body weight let me let me clarify were you doing a single leg no so Bilal you can't leg extension your body weight no but I certainly can hamstring curl my body weight oh okay so we maybe have some um deficiencies in our quads that we need to go after but that's a pretty good number you want to be at if you go up and age past age 40 every decade that can come down about 10% and you'll still be in a pretty good slot so if you're 50 years old and you're 170 lbs if you can do 160 you're in a pretty good sort of spot and then you could just again take it down about 10% every decade after 40 but prior to 40 there's really no change in strength um but certainly somebody in their 40s to 50s should be able to leg extension their body weight noted I look forward to our discussion a bit later talking about how to build strength yeah any of these strength tests they don't have to be done to a technical true one rep max you can use what are called repetition uh conversion equation so put on a load that you think is kind of close to your maximum and just do it for as many reps as you can as long as it's under five reps total you can then actually go online and enter that into any number of calculators anywhere and it will tell you okay you did three repetitions at 200 lound your one rep max is probably 215 whatever so there's estimate equations so if you don't want to spend the time or you're not truly comfortable like absolutely going to your true one rep max just get to a number that's fairly close and do as many as you can and then go in line again one rep max estimator equations are everywhere um if you get past five repetitions or so the accuracy of those equations starts going down so don't put on something and go I did 12 reps of it and then try to figure out where your one R Max it'll get close you start moving past that you're just getting worse and worse and worse accuracy so I want to make sure whether you're doing a leg extension test or a front squat test you don't technically have to do it an absolute one R Max um if neither of those are an option another one I like a lot here is simply a front squat or goblet squat hold so you're going to hold a weight in front of your chest whether a kettle bell is is great here a dumbbell is fine here and you want to hold about half of your body weight go all the way to the bottom position and try to hold that for about 45 seconds so it's it's a pretty good indicator of um number one your position it's hard to be in a bad position for that long at that load as well as core strength and low back stability so it's a very different indicator um than say the leg extension test but it's it's a really nice one so it doesn't require many moving Parts it's more difficult than the leg extension but it's it's quite a bit more functional and it's going to give you insight into a lot more areas than just the quadriceps so 45 seconds down at the bottom of the squat yep and then returning to a standing position yep and if you can't do the return actually I'm not that worried but as long as you can hold that good position without a technical breakdown in that 45 seconds that's a really good spot um as an intro I want a third of your body weight for 30 seconds terrific I plan to attempt all of those strength tests very soon what about hypertrophy sure um actually before we get into that I want to jump back really quickly it's important to add a couple of caveats to the strength training stuff so there's two that I want to do number one these are assuming you are technically proficient so I don't want you to do any exercise to exhaustion or to maximum strength if you're not comfortable with your Technique so adjust these accordingly if you're not comfortable with the front squat do the leg extension if you're not even comfortable with that do something different so we never want to utilize maximum testing if it's going to come with the consequence of of serious secut injury so that's the most important flag the second one is your warmup protocol will have a huge effect on your actual results and so whenever you do these tests especially if you're going to do a test and then I test again down the line you want to make sure that that warm-up protocol is standardized now again the nsca and I can we can I can give you resources has specific guides for exactly what to do for your warm-up protocol prior to one rep max testing so we can go there and you can look that stuff up we can add that to show notes or something yeah and I think um when we get into a deeper discussion about strength and hypertrophy and resistance training in general if we could touch into the the best warm-up protocol I know I have mine and I'm I'm certain it's going to be suboptimal based on everything uh based on every conversation we've ever had where I learn all the things I'm doing incorrectly but I do make changes on the basis of what you tell me it's not incorrectly so much as it is like suboptimal that's a very kind way of telling me it's incorrect thank you uh what about hypertrophy so the thing you want to pay attention to here is you have the aesthetic uh portion of hypertrophy that's entirely up to you there is no rationale you can decide what you feel like looks good or doesn't look good that's irrelevant there is a sufficient amount you need to have where below that is detrimental to your health regardless of your outcomes and so the best way to do this is a couple of ways um any sort of body composition test can do this so whether this is a um a scan through like a dexa scan which is a gold standard or other uh ways of biological U bioelectrical impedance or other way so there's a ton of different tests you can get that are pretty close Okay so what you want to pay attention to when you get like a dexa scan is a number called ffmi and so that stands for fat-free mass index so you can look at again any number of online calculators these are all standard so it doesn't actually matter where you pull them up you don't have to worry about looking it up and whether or not it's right or not or something and so that's going to actually tell you if you have sufficient muscle math and so a number you want to look for in general is something like if you're if you're a man your ffmi should be something like 20 or higher uh if you're a woman you want to look for something like 18 so that those are the targets if you get past like 24 25 for a man that's a lot of muscle mass assuming you're reasonably lean now if you're ffmi is like 24 25 but your body fat is like 40% you're actually just a very very large individual you're not like you're not in a great spot so when we say these sort of numbers it's the assumption that you're probably sub 30% body fat um for a man and sub35 for a woman so those are the numbers um there are online calculators all you really need to know is your total body weight your body fat percentage and then your height you can enter those three numbers and then they'll tell you your ffmi score and it'll correct for an adjusted value and most of those will actually tell you the grading rubric in them so good average bad Etc but those are the numbers we look at if you are as a man sub 17 as a woman sub 15 now we're in an area of of pretty severe physiological detriment for insufficient muscle and some of our later discussions we'll talk about why that matters so that's not um sub 17% body fat this is specifically the ffmi that's correct yeah what about muscular endurance is this where you're going to tell me I need to do walls sits so this is really nice you can do any number of tests here a a standard plank is a good Testament of of muscular endurance so can you hold a front plank for 60 seconds can you hold a side plank for 45 seconds pretty easy if you're able to do a push-up so if you can't that sort of tells you alone it's actually interesting if you can't do a single push-up that's not a muscular endurance issue that's actually now a strength issue because that's a one at Max problem um so we want to be able to do for again for a general male we should have no problem doing 25 plus consecutive push-ups I apologize for interrupting you but as long as we're talking about push-ups you just di menion form are we talking chest touching the ground uh elbows breaking right angles what is a proper push-up according to your laboratory unless you have a very specific reason to limit range of motion I want all my testing done through a full joint range of motion uh this is different for the person so it's individualized to them but in general for a push-up this would be a full complete lock out of the elbows on the top and a full chest touch or close to it at the ground you can do it different it doesn't really matter but just keep it standard from your preest to your post test if you're trying to Mark progress okay but for US unless we have a very specific reason we're going full range of motion for all of these tests okay so 25 push-ups 25 push-ups for a male is is a standard and even something like 10 is a number we're looking for again as kind of minimum categories uh for an upper body muscular endurance and not to get too down in the weeds but uh I have observed other people of course never myself no I'm kidding but observed other people positive at um maybe at repetition 15 catching their breath and then continuing or you um continue like a like a like a piston that would be a fail test so no pauses correct just up down up down and trying to hit at least 10 but ideally 25 or I learned this lesson in one of our studies uh probably nine years ago where we didn't clarify that and so we actually had an individual he wasn't there was he wasn't being nefarious he just figured out if I do a couple take a quick break and do a couple he like quadrupled his post test results from his pre-test result because he figured out that little hack there so you want to standardize it it's not that I'm against or have some sort of strong belief it's just trying to keep protocol standardized and which means any break failed test so 10 to 25 push-ups minimum for males what about for females I'll clarify uh if it's sub 10 for a man that's again in you're like very severe red flag problem um we really really like to see a number above 25 okay that that's where we're anchoring any between between 10 and 25 is like uh yeah but not severe it means they have work to do we have work to do and for and for females for a female you're going to scale that sort of back so a female the answer could be as little as zero right so you're going to see that can you do a full um position if they're in that position we're generally not going to do a muscular endurance test from the knees we already know the answer is years zero we'll actually default to another test which I'll talk about in a second here so for those those folks any that's going to scale down a little bit right so basically you're looking at 15 is that marker like 25 was for the maale where I want to see above 15 and if I do we're good anything between five to 15 is the number of like okay um if you're sub five like we we generally have some problems and if that is different between one and zero then like now we zero is is is a problem so we should be able to do that so if a female cannot do 10 full push-ups yeah 10 full push-ups is hard for a female depending on size okay let's say a female can't do five full push-ups you said rather than go to a Knees Down Version Y what would you do to assess their muscular endurance and would you then also encourage them to work on their strength well absolutely so again if they can't do they can do anything less than three uh you're going to be strength in fact if you want to look at muscular endurance in general so this is a bit of a off topic but I'll promise I'll keep it short and I'll come right back when I was a doctoral student I had uh two lab mates one of them was a runner female uh 120 PBS something like that small the other one was a male and he was basically like a straight bro like he lifts weights doesn't do any other sort of training does like a very classic not training program but kind of training and they were sort of bantering back and forth for a while and basically she was saying you're so unfit you can't run it all and he's saying you're so weak you can't do a pull-up and so they challenged each other to a competition they said at the end of the year the girl is going to do 26 pull-ups and the guy had to run a marathon so 26 miles so that was the thing and then there was some sort of consequence for whoever sort of failed it so the guy quickly tried to figure out how the hell am I going to run 26 miles when I have not run a mile in like many many many years so he just started running you know three miles four miles whatever she well of course they both of them ran immediately to me right and then she was like how the hell I can't do a pullup and I was like great and I gave her a very specific maximal strength protocol and she was like whoa I want to go to the assisted pull-up machine and work on doing like sets of 25 cuz I've got to get my muscular endurance up and I tried to explain to her your muscular endurance is irrelevant if you can't do one it's never going to matter she did the muscular endurance protocol for the entire thing didn't listen to me the end of the year came she still produced exactly zero pullups so point is if you look at muscular endurance where is it uh strength and where is it actually muscular endurance the general sort of number that you're looking for is under like 80% right that's going to tell you is this a muscular endurance problem or is this an absolute strength problem under 80% of a one repetition maximum okay yep so what I mean by that is this in fact this actually leads into into your question the other way to assess muscular endurance is take the exact strength test you did from the the talk five minutes ago what which one did you do load that to 75% and then do that for as many repetitions as you can and that is a tremendous barometer uh of muscular endurance so if you are able to do 200 lbs on your leg extension test put 75% on that and do that as many repts as you can you want to look for more than eight repetitions if you are below eight repetitions then we have a muscular endurance problem right if it if it is higher than that if you got 15 or 20 then we know we have probably some problems in your Peak strength or the test itself so that is a good 8 to 12 sort of number I is where you want to be looking at um for there what about anerobic capacity this one's more challenging you either have to go to a laboratory and do something like a Windgate test so this is a 30 second maximal um test where you're going to see how much work can you possibly do um in that 30 seconds if you don't have a access to a laboratory you can you can do this on any any protocol you want this could be sprinting this can be on a uh like an airbike this could be on a rower anything like that anything where you can exert maximal effort and you don't have to worry about technical problems so I generally don't like to do things like a kettle bell swing or something like that there's just too many other variables you need to be able to go as hard as you possibly can knowing you're going to get to a place of tremendous fatigue now in the lab we often use what's called a Bosco protocol and you're going to stand on a force plate you're going to do as many vertical jumps as fast as you can as high as you can for 60 seconds and you're absolutely destroyed by like second 45 so we either use that Windgate protocol or that Bosco protocol if you want though again take any of those other places 30 seconds or so up to 45 seconds up to a minute if you want it doesn't really matter and you just mark down the distance you cover that's all you're we don't really have standards for these things because it's going to be different how far you can travel in 30 seconds on a treadmill is just going to be so different than sprinting in the field or on the assault bike or whatever so um what you really want to worry about there is can you complete it and then how awful do you feel afterwards so what what you really want to think about here is not those protocols but this you want to think about can you get close to your predicted maximum heart rate so the the number we throw out is 220 minus your age so if you're 50 years old 220 minus 50 you should be able to get to a maximum heart rate of around 170 beats per minute now that number is extremely generic if you don't get there that doesn't have any indication of your Fitness if you get higher that doesn't mean you're any more fit it's just a rough number so here's what I'm what I want you to do in this case your heart rate recovery is the better metric so I want you to get up to a maximum heart rate and then test your heart rate recovery and what you should be looking for there is about half a beat uh recovery per second so you're going to get up to a place where you reach like absolute terrible exhaustion right maximum fatigue test your heart rate and then count right have a timer going within 60 seconds you should have again that half a beat per second you should have a heart rate recovery of 30 beats per minute within the next uh the next minute so two minute recovery it should be half that so 60 beats those are rough numbers to go by and your three minute recovery is again half of that again so that is the closest way if your heart rate recovery is worse than that then we know we have a problem in your anerobic capacity or your cardiovascular capacity I love it what about number eight maximal heart rate because what you just described sounds a lot like maximal heart rate so this is your VO2 max so the goal standard here is to actually go into a laboratory and get this thing done so we can actually run a a VO2 max test where you put a mask on collect all your gases and run you to there and there's a very specific protocol for uh completion of a a true maximum test and any the scientists will know that if you don't have access to that you can do a couple of tests one of them is called a 12-minute Cooper test so this is simply time you're going to run for 12 minutes as far as you can and you're going to record the distance you covered again you can go online to any uh any number of of calculators enter that distance in and that will tell you your proximal your estimated V2 Max so that's a 12 minute Sprint 12 minute Sprint maximum distance you can cover in 12 minutes keeping a steady Pace the whole time or going do whatever you want the goal is to get maximum distance covered in 12 minutes so that's anywhere between a mile to two plus miles depending on how fit you are but you just do that Cooper 12 minute test got it I told you all right so if you remember aerobic capacity is 8 to 12 sort of minutes where you're going to see a real true test of that V2 Max you simply can't get that um in under a few minutes so it is a is a that if you want you can do a little gentler version of that um so there are a number of submaximal tests there in fact there is a one M walk test you can do so again all you're going to do is in this case you have to have some sort of either a stopwatch or ideally a heart rate monitor and all you have to do is this is a Rockport one mile submaximal test so you're going to walk a mile record the time record your heart rate at the end enter those in and those will give you again estimates of your V Max so that's the the like oh my gosh I can't run for 12 minutes as hard as I possibly can or I don't want to do it or uh we have a lot of these um in our executive program it's like my knee hurts too bad I've got back pain when I run or whatever can I okay and you do the walk test and it's pretty accurate if you do it correctly so technically all you have to actually do is measure your heart rate on your you know that can count 60 seconds but it's just easier to work with everyone's watches and stuff now just wear the heart rate monitor plug in those numbers um and again those are all standard calculations so any anywhere you find those um you don't have to worry about the source so you just enter your stuff in and they're going to be running off the same equation I like the idea of the 12 minute run I'm gonna give it a shot we did for for years we did a one mile version of this and um there's just a lot more science on the Cooper 12min coer test so we did that it's pretty good uh and it is not even remotely close to fun it sounds like fun for other reasons yeah yeah well it is it it fun in the sense that it reveals a lot yep powerful potent super there's no hiding you can hide with a leg extension test it doesn't hurt that Pat but you you cannot feel anything but the 12-minute run as far as you can test so these are really actually psych psychiatric diagnostic test they they are of sorts number nine long duration steady state y exercise I think of this as AKA endurance but as you mentioned before there are other forms of endurance so long duration steady state exercise yep so you really want to think about this as not a standard number this is you should maintain consistent work output for over 20 plus minutes okay and this one I want you to just pick something that it was in your lifestyle so is there a loop around your house that you can do is there some protocol that you you like to use for and you're simply going to test your ability can you maintain work without stopping that's all it needs to be now ideally I personally like to throw a little twist in here which is can you do this with nasal breathing only that's when I feel really good if you can go 30 straight minutes without needing to take a break um walking doesn't really cut it unless you're very very unfit in which case if walking 30 minutes without a break is a challenge okay like there but if you can I want you moving at a non walking pace I don't care what zone this is 2 3 4 5 I don't care show me you can maintain minimum of 20 minutes of work with no breaks no intervals no downtime uh and again ideally breathing through your nose only I love this list but it worries me a bit not because any one of these tests is necessarily that overwhelming but because I'm unclear about how to arrange performance of these different tests yeah for instance do I separate them so I'm doing one test like long duration output on one day and I'm doing strength on another day those seem pretty obvious to me but are there ones that one can combine on different days how much time should one give oneself in between these tests and how often should one do an assessment just as we don't want to necessarily evaluate body weight changes by getting on the scale three times a day maybe once a day at the same time each day is more practical how often should we be assessing our fitness for each and every one of these well the way that I was say this is you want to pick the one that is the worst and do that more frequently so if for example you do the upper body strength test and you are fantastic if you can bench press double your body weight I don't need to test your bench very often for the average person you're not a powerlifter like maybe once a year or so maybe not even that we just don't need to get there however if we then test your your V2 Max and in your 12 minutes you cover a total of a half a mile then like we might want to test that every month right and so we're going to let our priorities emphasize which one we're going to do more often I would recommend doing this full battery once a year full battery mean the entire list on one day the entire no not on one day but within a week so you could take a week now you could do these technically all in two days uh three-day split here is probably best so if you were to just say hey this is like testing week I actually love this for beginning of the year or whenever it is that you sort of change your training but I think once a year just like once a year you should probably go to a physician and get full blood work um a full you know heart scan and everything like that um and then if maybe you had a heart issue they would come back in and test you more frequently whatever the case is right you should probably run through this and you're going to be thinking yeah but I don't want to like give up on my exercise routine that week well I promise you you're not going to finish this week and think I didn't do very much work this week it's it's going to feel great and then you're going to have a very nice barometer of exactly where you need to change and and prioritize your training for the next quarter half a year or wherever you want to go if you want to actually do this every six months mon that's really we end up actually doing this quite honestly like more like every six months as a general um test that's a really good way to do but if if minimum of if you're arguing with me give me once a year you want to do this so which order to do them in the non-fatiguing test you can do whenever so this is the the body composition scan the ffmi the body fat composition all this stuff can be done whever I generally like to do that though as your very first activity the reason is we know that acute exercise can heavily influence things like body composition measurements because of INF inflammation water storage Etc so it's easiest to just sort of get that off of a 48 hour rest you want to make sure you don't do any Hard Exercise the day before a body composition test and probably 48 hours before that so just start yourself off of that your movement test can be the same thing um you don't want to try to do a assessment of how well you're squatting if you're incredibly sore from your your brutal squatting test so tend to do those things when you're the most fresh then what you want to do is any skill or maximum strength or power goes at the very beginning of the day and any fatiguing thing happens at the end and so you could easily do this all right I'm going to do my power test my broad jump great you're not going to be fatigued at all from that and on the same day since I'm already pretty warmed up now I'm going to roll right into my leg strength test and since I'm really warmed up I'm going to do my leg muscular endurance test right there so this is a very common strategy we use we do our one rep max leg extension 5 minutes 7 Minutes whatever we need to do come back load up to 75% do as many reps as you can boom you could roll right into then your upper body test or your grip strength test or anything else that you want to do there um is there a little bit of influence yeah but really for most people it's not that bad um what influence I mean if you do a leg strength test coming back and doing an upper body strength test afterwards it's not that big a deal give you yourself 15 give yourself 20 minutes give you plenty of time so you can knock out your strength testing and muscular endurance testing all in one day that could be you could do your performance um your skill diagnostic your power jump test your strength and your musk endurance and all that stuff is knocked out you're going to have to come back on a separate day and do your Anor robic tests this is 30 seconds maximal endurance things like that you could though if you wanted do that after your long duration test your long duration test is again is just going to function as like a a big warm-up or you could flip those things or you can do them on separate days you're going to have to do your VO2 max test on its own day for the most part unless you wanted to do again your movement or your body composition sort of before those things um so you really have the ability to kind of mix and match ideally this most realistically probably takes three days if you want to separate them into four or five the more separation you do the better data you're going to get it's just a question of like how how pedantic are you really trying to get here and are you willing to lose 5% to then save a whole day then you can do sort of these things in multiple Stacks so that's that's how I would break it up so what I'm hearing is better to do it than to not do it most definitely and be rational don't um don't try and do your strength output late in the day when you're fatigued you know if you're going to combine some of the um steady state endurance and um maximal heart rate fine understand there might be a slight deficit there but but test it the same way each time and what you're really looking for is Improvement yep and you could also do the heart rate recovery under any of the modalities so you could do the heart rate recovery um after your V2 Max as well so you finish that thing and then just you know again do the same test for up to three minutes these are Fantastic Tools I'm almost tempted to say that I'm willing to post my numbers but that actually violates the S of core principle that I think we're getting at here which is that it's highly unlikely that anybody is going to be phenomenal across the board I mean certainly there will be individuals that are but based on everything we talked about earlier specificity of training and um how extensively somebody's been training a certain way will without question lops side them if you will yeah toward being better in some of these assessments and less good in others and that's just simply the way that these adaptations work yep and it's not you don't need to be optimal in all these areas to be quote unquote Optimal Health from this perspective you just want want to make sure again there's no severe performance anchors this is what we call them right we don't want any of these severe constraints cuz you're going to get limited by that thing and so what you want to do is move that up to just sufficient or concerning right and get it away from that if you do that that thing's not going to catch you you're going to be able to continue to pursue pursue optimization any any of the one things that you have a specific passion for which is generally what moves people right you you train um so that you feel better you train because you know there are all these benefits to it and and gez this audience probably could list hundreds of them but you also train because you generally like to get better at something a lot of us like have something and so you want to make sure that you're not going hey I know you're good at endurance but you really shouldn't train anymore we don't want that message not at all I want you to love your training we just want to make sure that you're not loving that so much that you're not taking some blinders off and missing another area which would actually um again you pull that performance anchor this whole Ship Sails faster with less effort and less friction what I love about this is also that as you've described it it's not just for athletes or people that are super into fitness it's also for people that just want to be healthy and want aesthetic changes and that's why they're exercising which I think accounts for a fairly large percentage of people out there yeah so so I think um what you described is it incredibly well structured incredibly clear and Incredibly actionable so so I I want to thank you for that uh I'm serious about my willingness to do this and uh at least share those numbers with you and I think for most people that are seeking what you listed off before aesthetic changes functionality and Longevity it's clear that all nine of these are going to be important yeah in some regard or another so before we close out I want to go back and finish off uh the metrics for v2 Max because I don't actually think I gave you numbers on that so in general for men a minimum number we want to look at here is 35 milliliters per kilogram per minute and for women that'd be about 30 so we we can actually push uh a lot higher on those things in reality I want to see men above 50 if I could just interrupt you for a second when you say 40 milliliters per kilogram milliliters of what specifically yeah so what actually those metrics mean is uh the first one milliliters is oxygen so it's amount of oxygen kilograms is body weight so it's how much oxygen can you bring in per kilogram of body weight per minute so it is a volume of oxygen per your size in a Time duration in fact the way that you calculate it uh is you multiply your cardiac output by what's called your avo2 difference your cardiac output is your heart rate times your stroke volume so how much uh blood you're pumping out per pump is your stroke volume how many times you're pumping or you're beating you multiply that by your avo2 difference your av2 difference is artery minus vein difference so it's the amount of oxygen in your arteries minus the amount of oxygen in your vein which is going to tell you how much you took up in your capillaries in your muscle so you take those two factors multiply them together and there's your V2 Max you know as you were describing that I imagine you getting to an fmri machine and seeing that equation lighting up in your brain because clearly it's committed to memory very well thank you for that clear description yeah so to finish those numbers um I really truly want to see some a man above 50 uh and I'm not really stoked until I get above 55 in fact it's sort of funny Dave costell whose lab I did my PhD and he was retired by the time but he he's again one of these legendary figures in exercise physiology started in the 70s he would always say there's no human excuse to be below 60 which I was always like damn like that's really actually pretty hard to get to was he was he 60 he's still actually setting World Records like in these last couple of years and his like all the Master's records for swimming and and cycling and stuff so he was a super super fit guy um so he was always above 60 he's probably like 50 something now even though he's you know 80 or whatever 80 years old yeah with a V2 Max of 50 he's probably really not 50 he's probably but he's probably going to remember that earlier in the we talked about how I had the 92y old the V2 Max of 38 Dave's probably gonna break that record when he gets there I'm sure I'm sure I in fact I guarantee you he has that number in his brain I haven't talked to him in 15 years but I guarantee you that number is in his brain and he's probably training for it I love it and I love it because it proves that exercise pays off oh it's one of the few things in life where there's a direct relationship between work and outcome yeah that's as Henry Rollins described in his wonderful essay if you're familiar with that oh my gosh you're a punk rock guy you know Henry I'm sure I mean I certainly know who he is and I know his his work an incredible onepage uh paper sort of something to do with the iron uh and he basically describes that is like this is the one thing where it's truth like it is the most true thing you'll ever do uh which is I love for that um it's almost like a principle of nature 100% yeah so with with the women I really want to see the women uh if I want to see men above 55 I really want to see women above 50 um as the Target and if be like you're there I'm pretty good so you can do the math on then the middle ground of what's like okay but we need to work on it in fact if you look across the literature at different athletes you're going to see like the the really high level endurance folks um you know they may pass 70 or 80 in fact um there was talk a few years ago of a guy breaking a 100 as like an 18 or 19 year old but I actually don't think it was ever fully confirmed or repeated but certainly you'll see plenty of people like 95 um in those extremes if you look at other sports like football or basketball they're probably going to be in the 5565 sort of range so if you as an average person are 55 um that that's a real really good marker to be and if you get even close to that you're in a good spot I'm sorry if I let you down Dave I just love how as you're describing this average person you're look at me with Just a Little Bit of Sympathy like like if you if you reach the standard of average Andrew um listen you're giving me prompts all over the place to try and uh improve my metrics whatever they happen to be and I think that's one of the great values of getting objective numbers even if they have to be measured by some of these back of the envelope techniques that um you know I guess we always teach people in the laboratory right that a tool can be um not extremely precise but as long as it's reliable of course there is still value there I mean of course you'd love to have the most precise and most reliable tool but if you can't then at least go for a reliable tool and measure for consistency yeah for the real world reliability beats validity as as much as we can for a lot of things we're talking about especially for using it as a metric of did I get better as long as that tool is reliable um body composition does all these things have inherent error in them some of them are smaller some of them are larger but as you mentioned having standardization within the testing protocol um is going to allow you to measure progress and that's going to tell you sort of where you're at um now that we've sort of covered all the these areas of adaptation we walk through the history and we walk through a bunch of the explanations for why people are maybe not getting the results that they want to get through their training the way I would like to go with the rest of our conversations would be to just go through each of those adaptations step by step and make sure I cover very specific protocols for if you have run through this testing and identified an area of weakness so maybe you've sort of been lifting a lot because you like lifting and you maybe realize that your cardiovascular fitness or your heart rate recovery is not where it really should be or the opposite like we've talked about maybe you're doing a lot of that type of work and your strength isn't there your movement quality is not there so you've identified a problem how do I specifically solve it what are the evidence-based um and most effective protocol calls that I could put myself in for each one of these categories and I think that would uh give people a lot of take-home value um but it's going to take us some time to cover so it's it's going to have to come across over multiple conversations uh between you and I great well I'm looking forward to each and all of those conversations and um I want to add just one more metric to our discussion today uh which is really just my way of saying thank you because if there were a metric for amount of useful information per sentence spoke you would be at the upper level of that metric you have this amazing ability to provide so much knowledge in a clear and concise and today listed out format that is both interesting grounded in science and actionable so on behalf of everyone listening and certainly for myself as well I just want to say thank you well I appreciate the compliments and I'm looking forward to the next conversation uh jumping right into speed strength and hyy training and what of the evidence-based and best practices for protocols in those areas if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for us or comments or suggestions about topics you'd like us to cover or guests you'd like me to include on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube we do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and during today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast I'd also like to inform you about the hubman Lab podcast free newsletter it's called the neural network newsletter and each month the neural network newsletter is sent out and it contains summaries of podcast episodes specific protocols discussed on the human Lab podcast all in Fairly concise format and all completely zero cost you can sign up for the neural network newsletter by going to hubman lab.com go to the menu and click on newsletter you provide us your email we do not share it with anybody and as I mentioned before it's completely zero cost by going to hubman lab.com you can also go into the menu tab and go to newsletter and see some example newsletters from months past thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercise and performance with Dr Andy Galpin and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]