Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Build Strength, Muscle Size & Endurance

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today my guest is Dr Andy Galpin Dr Galpin is a full and tenured professor in the department of kinesiology at California State University in Fullerton he is also a world expert in all things exercise science and Kinesiology today you going to hear what is essentially a master class in how to build Fitness no matter what level of Fitness you happen to have he talks about how to build endurance and the multiple types of endurance he talks about how to build strength and hypertrophy which is the growth of muscle fibers so if you're seeking to get stronger or build bigger muscles or build endurance or all of those things today you're going to learn how you're also going to learn how to build flexibility how to hydrate properly for exercise and we'll also talk about nutrition and supplementation what makes Dr Galpin so unique is his ability to span all levels of exercise science he has the ability to clearly communicate the sets and repetition schemes that one would want to follow for instance to build more strength or to build larger muscles he also clearly describes exactly how to train if you want to build more endurance or enhance cardiovascular function what's highly unique about Dr Galpin and the information he teaches and the way he communicates that information is that he can take specific recommendations of how recreational exercisers or even professional athletes ought to train for their specific goals and Link that to specific mechanisms that is the specific changes that need to occur in the nervous system and in muscle fibers and indeed right down to the genetics of individual cells in your brain and body in order for those exercise adaptations to occur it's truly rare to find somebody that can span so many different levels of analyses and who is able to communicate all those levels of understanding in such a clear and actionable way indeed Dr Galpin is one of just a handful of people to which I and many others look when they want to make sure that the information that they're getting about exercise is gleaned from quality peer-reviewed studies hands-on experience with a wide variety of research subjects meaning Everyday People all the way up to professional athletes in a wide variety of sports so it's no surprise that he's not only one of the most knowledgeable but also the most trusted voices in exercise science Dr Galpin is also an avid Communicator of zero cost to Consumer information about exercise science you can find him on Instagram at Dr Andy Galpin and also on Twitter at Dr Andy Galpin both places he provides terrific information about recent studies both from his laboratory and from other Laboratories more in-depth Protocols of the sort that you'll hear about today so if you're not already following him be sure to do so he provides only the best information he's extremely nuanced and precise and clear in delivering that information I'm I'm certain that by the end of today's conversation you'll come away with a tremendous amount of new knowledge that you can devote to your exercise Pursuits I'm pleased to announce that I'm hosting two Live Events this may the first live event will be hosted in Seattle Washington on May 17th the second live event will be hosted in Portland Oregon on May 18th both are part of a lecture series entitled The Brain body contract during which I will discuss science and science-based tools for mental health physical health and performance I should point out that while some of the material I'll cover will overlap with information covered here on the hubman Lab podcast and on various social media posts most of the information I will cover is going to be distinct from information covered on the podcast or elsewhere so once again it's Seattle on May 17th Portland on May 18th you can access tickets by going to huberman lab.com tour and I hope to see you there before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is athletic greens athletic greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink I've been taking athletic greens since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs it makes up for any deficiencies that I might have in addition it has probiotics which are vital for microbiome Health I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which 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10% off your first order today's episode is also brought To Us by insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be assessed with a quality blood test what's unique about inside tracker is that while there are a lot of different tests out there for hormones and metabolic factors Etc with inside tracker you get the numbers back in terms of your levels but they also give you very clear directives in terms of Lifestyle nutrition and supplementation that can help you bring those values into the ranges that are best for you and your health goals and that's very different than a lot of the other programs where you get a lot of information but you don't really know what to do with that information inside tracker makes that all very easy to understand and very actionable based on the very easy to use dashboard at insid tracker 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 just use the code hubman at checkout and now for my discussion with Dr Andy Galpin welcome Dr Professor Andy Galpin it's been a long time coming we have friends in common but this is actually the first time we've sat down fa face yeah I'm very excited yeah there are only a handful meaning about three or four people who I trust enough in the exercise physiology space that when they speak I not only listen but I modify my protocols and you among those three or four people so first of all a debt of gratitude thank you uh you've greatly shaped the protocols that I use and um I know there's far more for me and for others to learn so you're professor profess you teach in University and you have a tremendous range of levels of exploration muscle biopsy literally images down the microscope all the way to training professional athletes and everything in between so you are truly an N of one and just to start us off I would love to have you share with us what you think most everybody or even everybody should know about principles of strength training principles of endurance training and principles of let's call it hypertrophy power and the other sort of categories of training and this could be very top Contour but what do you think everybody on planet Earth should know about these categories of personal and athletic development well that's a great first question holy cow uh I think I'll start it this way I tend to think about um there's about nine different adaptations you can get from exercise um fat loss is not one of those it is a byproduct but that's not really what I'm getting at um and so we can kind of categorize everything like that and what we're going to we can talk about are what are the concepts that you need to hit within each one and then you can have infinite discussion of the different methodologies right and so that that first thing to hit is the concepts are actually fairly few but the methods are many right people have said that in iterations throughout time um so if you walk from the very beginning the first one to think about is what we'll just call skill so this is improving anything from say a golf swing to a squat sping technique to running and this is just simply moving mechanically how you want your body to move I'm just going to globally call that skill from there we're going to get into speed so this is moving as fast as possible the next one is power and power is a function of speed but it's also a function of the next one which is strength so if you actually multiply strength by speed you get power and the reason I'm making this distinction by the way is some of these are very close and I'm going in a specific order on purpose here for example power is like I just said it's a function of speed and strength so if you improve speed you've also likely improved power but not necessarily right because it could have come from the force Direction either so there's carryover so like a lot of things you would do for the development of strength and power um they are somewhat similar but then there's differences right so things that you would do correctly for power would really not develop much strength and vice versa so we can get into all these details later once you get past strength then the next one kind of down the list is hypertrophy this is muscle size right growing muscle mass is one way to think about it after hypertrophy you get into these categories of the next one is um these are all globally endurance based issues and the very first one is called muscular endurance so this is your ability to do how many push-ups can you do in one minute you know things like that past um muscular endurance you're now into more of an energetic or even cardiovascular fatigue so you've left the local muscle and you're now into the entire physiological system and its ability to produce and sustain work and we can get to a bunch of differentiations within endurance but I'll just to keep it really simple right now the very first one think about this as um I call this Anor robic power right so this is your ability to produce a lot of work for say 30 seconds to maybe 1 minute kind of two minutes like that the next one down then is more closely line to what we'll call your V2 Max so this is your ability to kind of do the same thing but more of a Time domain of say 3 to 12 minutes so this is going to be a maximum heart rate but it's going to be well past just max heart rate then after that we have what I call long duration endurance so this is your ability to sustain work the time domain doesn't matter in terms of how fast going you're going it's how long can you sustain work this is 30 plus minutes of no break like that so as just an high level overview those are the the different things you can Target um and again some of those cross over and some are actually a little bit contrarian to the other ones so pushing towards one is maybe going to sacrifice something else so as a as an overall start that's really what we're looking at within all those though they do have similar Concepts in terms of there is a handful of things you have got to do to make all of those things work and we can talk about as many of those as you want but one of them is functionally called Progressive overload so whichever one you're trying to improve at if you want to continue to improve you have to have some method of over overload and as you well know you've talked about a lot adaptation physiologically happens as a byproduct of stress so you have to push a system so if you continue to do say the exact same workout over time you better not expect much improvement you can keep maintenance but you're not going to be adding additional stress so in general you have to have some sort of progressive overload and we can talk in detail about what that means for each category but this could come from adding more weights this could come from adding more repetitions it could come from doing it more often in the week it could come from adding complexity to the movement so going from say a partial range of motion to a full range of motion or adding other variables so there's a lot of different ways to progress but you have to have some sort of movement forward so if you have this kind of routine where you've built Monday Wednesday and Saturday or something and you just do that infinitely um you're not going to get very far so that's I guess the most high level overview of all the things people can go after and then we can go from whatever Direction you want from there I'd love to do the Deep dive on each one of these for several hours um but uh and I imagine that over time we probably will uh I'd love to chat about a couple of these in a bit more depth so in terms of defining what the progressive overload variables are for these different categories maybe we could hit the um two most common combinations of these nine things the first one being um strength and hypertrophy and maybe we could lump power in there um maybe not you're the you're the exercise phys physiologist but strength and hypertrophy which at least bear some relationship yeah and then maybe separately we could explore um sustained work endurance this 30 minutes or longer continuously because I think many people train in that regime yeah um and probably uh something like uh V2 Max Anor robic as well because I know that a number of people now incorporate um so-called hit or high-intensity interval training I think with the of either shortening their workouts and or um gaining some additional cardiovascular benefit so if we could start with um strength and hypertrophy I know many people want to be stronger they want to grow larger muscles or at least maintain what they have so what are the progressive overload principles um that are most effective over time for strength and hypertrophy yeah okay so I'll actually go a little step back with every one of those categories I talked about you have what we call your modifiable variables so this is a very short list of all the things you can modify the different variables within your workout that can be modified that will change the outcome fancy way of saying if you do this differently then you're going to get a different result um so modifiable variables um the very first one of those is called choice so this is the exercise choice that you select now one of um I'm going to go double back here so I'm kind of doing a little bit of inception so follow me here as I'm going up a layer to come down a couple layers um I have these fundamental laws of strength and conditioning that that I'll they kind of like a little bit of a joke but Progressive over those is one of those laws another one of those laws is your exercises themselves do not determine adaptations so here's what I mean if you're like I want to get stronger you can't select an exercise that doesn't determine you getting strong if you don't do the exercise correctly and I'm not even referring to the technique that of course matters but if you don't execute it in the right fashion then you're not going to get that adaptation so if you choose I want to get stronger I'm going to do a bench press well if you do the wrong set range the wrong repetition range the wrong speed you won't get strength you maybe get muscular endurance and very little strength adaptation so the exercise selection itself is important but it does not determine the outcome adaptation so the very first thing that you need to think about if you're like I want to get stronger or add muscle is not the exercise choice right it is the application of the exercise what are the sets or the Reps or the rest ranges that you're using that's going to be your primary determinant now some exercises are certainly better for some adaptations for example um a deadlift is probably not a great exercise to do for long duration endurance like you could theoretically do 30 straight minutes of deadlifting but it's probably not our best choice right it's probably a pretty good choice for strength development right because you're going to do a low repetition High set range um you could theoretically do bicep curls for power but probably not your best choice right single joint isolation movement is is not the best for developing power you've ever ever done a bicep curls fast fast as you possibly can like that's not going to go well so in theory any exercise can produce any adaptation given the execution is performed properly so now that we've understood that a little bit the exercise itself does not determine the adaptation coming within each one of these categories exercise choice is an important variable because it does lend you to things like what movement pattern you're in so in other words if if you want to get stronger and you're thinking okay what exercise do I do you you need to think think a little bit about what muscle groups do I want to use and that's going to be leading you towards the exercise choice for example I want to use my quads more okay fine maybe you're going to choose more of a front squat type of variation of goblet squat so the bar the load is in front of you if you want to emphasize maybe more of your hamstrings and glutes you're going to maybe put a barbell on your back or do a different one so the exercise choice is important to the prescription because it's going to determine a lot of your success okay another kind of simpler way to think about this if you're a beginner or moderate to intermediate or maybe you don't have a coach you probably want to hedge towards an exercise selection that is a little bit easier technically so you maybe don't want to do a barall back squat it's actually pretty complicated movement maybe you want to do a little bit more of um again a goblet squat or even use some machines or a split squat something that's a little bit simpler because you don't have a coach you're not a professional athlete the likelihood of success is higher and the risk is not now gone lower so the very first variable within all of these is the exercise Choice the second one is the intensity and that refers to in this context not perceived effort like wow that was a really intense workout it is quite literally either a percentage of your one rep at Max or a percentage of your maximum heart rate or V2 Max so for the strength based things you want to think about what's percentage of the maximum weight I could lift one time and that's that's what we're going to call one rep max or it's a percentage of my heart rate right so if I tell you to get on a bike and I want you to do intervals and I want at 75% I'm typically referring to 75% of your max heart rate or V2 Max or you know something like that if I tell you to do squats at 75% that means 75% of the maximum amount of weight you could lift one time or close uh in terms of determining one rep max I confess um I've never actually taken the one rep max for any exercise but I have some internal sense of what that might be or what range it might be is it necessary for people to assess their one rep maximum before going into these sorts of programs no not at all I think a more intuitive way is to take a repetition range you can do this a couple different ways so there are um equations you can run and you can just Google these anywhere and these are called conversion charts and so it says okay if I did 75 pounds on my bench press and I did it eight times you can just run an estimate that say that okay you're probably going to be able to bench about 95 PBS for one rep max or something so that's a very easy conversion chart so just pick a load that you feel comfortable with but it's it's kind of heavy but not like crazy heavy and do as many repetitions as you can with a really good technique and then look what that number would be so converion safer than doing it one one repetition maximum for for the the general public who has again no coaching it's safer for a professional athlete it's not any safer but uh or not even a professional but a trained person with a coach but for most people yeah that's a good way to go about it um you can also just kind of do it with feel in the sense that say you want to do a set of five repetitions and you do the load and you think I could have done one or two more and then then you kind of have an idea of of what that number is going to be um if you think man that last one I had to kind of really really really get after it then maybe just call that that number right um so you don't have to get overly concerned in fact when we start getting into these number ranges you're going to see that they're all ranges we're not going to give a specific 90 5% for one of these exact reasons it's not that precise um for most of them in fact some of them like hypertrophy have enormous ranges that you like almost can't miss so that the intensity in that case doesn't even matter for the most part because that's not the primary determinant um some of these you're going to see intensity is the determinant and some of these you're going to see volume is the true determinant um so intensity though is that second one choice was the very first uh manipulable variable intensity was the second one the the third one is what we call volume and so this is just how many reps and how many sets are you doing right so if you're going to do three sets of 10 that volume would be 30 right five sets of five that volume is 25 it's just a simple equation how much work are you totally doing uh the next one past that is called rest intervals so this is the amount of time you're taking in between typically a set then from there you have progression which is what we started to talk about this Progressive overload are you increasing by weight or reps or restal or complexity or whatever so all of those things um can be changed as a method of progression and so maybe you want to go um progressing from a single joint exercise like a a leg extension on a machine and you want to progress by moving to a whole body movement like a squat that and of itself you don't have to change the load or the Reps or the rest that is a representation of progressive overload and it's probably a pretty good place to start because number one especially for beginners you want to make sure that the movement pattern is correct don't worry about intensity don't worry about rep ranges or any of these things you need to learn to move correctly and you need to give your body some time to develop some tissue tolerance so that you're not getting overtly sore um in general soreness is a terrible proxy for exercise quality it's a really bad way to estimate whether it was a good or a bad workout especially for people in that beginner to Middle to moderate in fact even that for our professional athletes um we do not use sess as a metric of a good workout um it's it's a really bad idea for a bunch of reasons on the same token because stress is required for adaptation you don't want to leave of the gym and feel like I don't really do much like there has to be there so if you think about soreness on a scale of 1 to 10 you probably want to spend most of your time in like the three you mean post exercise yeah in between workouts totally and I I know we'll talk about recovery extensively later but uh if one body part or set of body parts is sore is that an indication that one should stay out of training I would imagine the answer is no in most cases um and secondarily to that if a particular muscle is sore does that mean that muscle is not ready to be trained again yeah the answer to both those is the same um which is no right um You can certainly train a sore muscle you you need to I guess have a little bit of feel on that right so if if you're sore of like okay like and you're moving around a little bit and you're like man this is a little bit sore you can try if you're like I can't sit on the couch without crying because my glutes are so sore like we we probably don't need to train again right does whimpering count as crying yeah uh in that particular case I'd say you've actually gone to the place of detriment because now you're going to have to skip a training session and now you're behind so your actual total volume say across the month is actually going to be lower because you went way too hard in those workouts had to take too many days off in between you're going to see that you're going to cover less distance over the course of a month or 6 month or even a year so you want to walk a pretty fine line and for most people I would say hedge a little bit on the side of less sore than more sore because frequency is very very important for almost all these adaptations a training frequency which is the last modifiable variable right frequency which is how many times per week are you are you doing that thing so those are um kind of our our Global things that we can play with so when I'm trying to manipulate and get strength versus hypertrophy or you know what I want like a little bit of both all those variables are the things that are going through my mind which one do I need to move in which direction so that I can get this outcome and not this outcome over here for example some folks might want to get stronger but not put muscle mass on some folks are just kind of want both and that's a lot of the general public I want to get a little stronger and a little bit more muscle great but there are instances where people for performance reasons or for purely personal preference like I don't want to get any more muscle great but I want to get stronger awesome if you manipulate those variables correctly you can get exactly that very little development of muscle size and a lot of development and strength and this is why we continue to break World Records in sports like powerlifting and weightlifting that have weight classes so there's a top number that we can hit in terms of body size but yet we continue to get stronger and faster so this is very possible if you understand how to manipulate all those variables um so that being said we can start off with you wanted to go strength and strength and I I love that you mentioned the fact that it is possible to increase strength without increasing muscle size at least not dramatically because I think it's not just weight class athletes I know a lot of people who um for aesthetic reasons they'd like to be stronger they're hearing that having strong bones and strong muscles and tendons it's great for longevity and for avoiding injury and so many other features of of life and uh and yet they don't want to fill out progressively larger and larger sizes of clothing um and we can go harder to the mechanisms on that piece if you want or we can save that and come back to it sure uh what i' love to both uh what I'd love to know there was if we could Define some of these modifiable variables in the context of strength so let's say I we're somebody who I come to you and I say um and and let's just say for sake of of of balance here um because she actually does do some weight training I bring my sister in I say me and my sister both want to get stronger yep what modifiable varibles should um how should we modify the variables love it all right great I'm going to do Inception on you one more time so one of my other laws this won't be fast I promise of strength and conditioning is in general the default is all joints through all range of motion so this is important because it's going to answer your very first question on this strength category so in general the ankle should go through the full range of motion the ankle the knee should go through the full range of motion the knee the hip the elbow etc etc right across the workout not in a single movement well right I would hope unless there's an amazing exercise I haven't heard about well there are some exercises that we're going to call more full body think about a full snatch like you're going to take a lot of your muscles a lot of your joints through a lot of Ranger motions um other ones like an isolation we call these single joint exercises so imagine a bicep curl you have one joint in that particular case the elbow moving the shoulder and everything else is pretty much stable and this is how we'll differentiate multi-joint from single joint movements um but yeah so across I would even say it doesn't even have to be the day but maybe throughout the we try to get every joint through full range of motion now a couple of quick caveats to that I am not advocating using full range of motion and allowing really bad exercise technique so when I say full range of motion that's the default that doesn't mean every single person can do that for every single exercise it means that's where we should be striving to and that's our starting point you're going to see a lot less injury and a lot more productivity out of your training sessions in fact the science is fairly clear on this one strength devel El as well as hypert Tre is generally enhanced with a larger range of motion of training um and the mechanisms are like somewhat understood on that um so that being said if you have to get into say a bad r a position with your say low back the spine is a very good one here in general the spine St it's very neutral as what we call it so no no flexion no extension especially in the lumbar region so if you need if you're doing a say a deadlift and in order to take your knee through a full range of motion a deadlift you have to compromise your back position that's no bueno so caveat there aside don't kill me like in good positions always and don't kill yourselves more importantly so why that matters is if we walk through strength the very first thing I'm going to go through is the exercise selection so let's choose an exercise which ideally has a full range of motion or close to it that doesn't induce injury for you that you can still maintain good neck and low back and in position and everything else um you feel comfortable with so you can feel strong but you don't feel like oh my gosh if you've never snatched before having you do a snatch for a maximum even you know 75% like it's a terrible idea you're not going to feel confident it's going to be a train wreck I would rather put you on a machine bench press so you can go I feel stable I feel safe here and I can just express my strength so exercise choice in generally in general full range of motion and you want to kind of balance between the movement areas so this is an upper body press so this is pushing away from you bench press things like that upper body pull pulling an Implement toward you uh bent row pull up um the pressing should be horizontal so perpendicular to your body as well as vertical so this is lifting a weight over top of your head lifting a weight away from you the pull version is pulling horizontally to you and pulling vertically down Pull up things like that um from the lower body we typically call these hinges it's sort of a funny muscle thing that no one's going to laugh at but like maybe me and you here is we'll categorize muscles as or movements exercise as pushes and pulls right so like a squat is tends to be a push because you're pushing away the ground a deadlift is a pull because you're pulling the Implement up to you but in reality every single exercise is only ever a pull because muscle doesn't push things away muscle can only contract and pull on itself and so again super nerdy thing that like most people are like yeah and everyone's like that's so dumb no but I think it's a really important point because it also um speaks to something I think we'll get into later which is that you know posterior chain anterior chain tot um and if that's mysterious to people it'll become clear before long posterior chain anterior chain uh makes a lot of sense to me because of the way it's grounded in the firing of motor neurons which is ultimately what controls muscle so it's also nerves all the time exactly so it also depends on the lens through which one looks at life and and exercise of course my lens is primarily Neuroscience so um but I but I realized that the importance I like this idea of of pushing um perpendicular to the body overhead pulling both toward uh toward the body and from overhead that just makes really good intuitive sense especially since a lot of people were just listening to this and not watching it so in your minds folks you can think about um pushing away like a punch or overhead um like lifting something overhead and then pulling toward uh your midline or toward your body rather and then pulling yourself up like a pull up in PE class for those that so the lower body is the same thing right it's some sort of pushing away like a a squat or a split squat or a lunge or something like that and some sort of again what we'll call Pole or hinge so deadlift or Romanian deadlift or hamstring curl or something where you're Contracting and calling pulling the thing and and you could split these into like a thousand different categories if if you're really in that field you're going to want to add a bunch of other ones but that's just like a rough conception so if you were going to do a single workout you could choose four exercises and you could choose one of each one press upper body press one upper body pull one lower body hinge one lower body press and then that would be like a decently well-rounded exercise um that's your exercise selection and if you're taking those through full range of motion you're in a pretty good spot as close as you can the next one is intensity so if you want to develop strength this comes back to one of my favorite scientists of all time who happens to be a nerve guy actually and generally I like to on nerves as much as I possibly can because I'm a muscle guy but I have to give henan some credit here right and I know you know who that is henan size principal yeah of course right so this is a series of papers I think in the I think it was in nature at least some of them yeah in 1954 56 or like something you can fact check me I'm sure you will um but he basically outlined this idea that okay um there's a certain recruitment threshold needed for neurons to fire and we have muscle fibers in what we call fast twitch muscle fibers and slow twitch muscle fibers and in general you're going to activate the slow twitch ones first because they tend to be associated with low threshold motor neurs it's not exactly that way but it's it's close enough right well the only way that you activate some of these higher threshold neurons is to demand the muscle to produce more force and it's fairly specific to force right it's not something you can do over an endurance thing right unless it gets really extreme and fatigue happens um so in general the only way to use these big chunks of your muscle which are incredibly important for aging by the way one of the major problems we have with aging developing or development of Aging related issues with muscle is the fact that we lose fast switch fibers preferentially and then we have major problems as we go down the line because we've lost a big chunk of our strength and size so you want to make sure these fibers stay alive and intact okay so if that being said the only way to develop strength is then to challenge the muscle to produce more total Force if you are fairly untrained or new I guess I should have stated this all at the beginning as well one more Inception then I'll stop when it comes to this level of detail of exercise prescription a a fairly untrained person is going to respond basically the same to every single thing you do in fact we've done this in the lab many times we've done training studies doing things like 30 minutes of cycling and seeing huge increases in muscle strength and size which is not a prescription for most people to increase size but people that are really untrained if you did petrics or strength training or endurance running they all just get better at everything so that caveat kind of aside if you want to be more intentional more specific to the to the goal of strength you need to produce more Force specificity matters right so we have size principle to help understand this and we have our laws of specificity which say said principle right specific adaptation to imposed demand so the adaptation you get or the result of your training is going to be a reflection of the demand that you imposed so if you want to get stronger you need to impose a demand of strength not repetitions so this has to be the load has to be very high um in general you're probably looking at above 85% of your Winer at Max if you're moderately trained maybe 75% will work lowly trained again everything works but in general we want to be pressing a load that's very high so because the intensity demand is so high that is going to enforce you to do a low repetition range you can't do 12 reps at 95% that then it wouldn't be 95% of your one at Max so by Definition True strength training is really going to be in like five repetitions per set or less range that's where most of it's going to occur for specificity so we've covered Choice intensity and um repetitions right the total amount of sets that you do is is really kind of up to your personal fitness level right um if you did as little as like three sets per exercise that's probably enough work sets totally yeah totally work sets right so get fully warmed up and build up to that 85% don't just walk into the gym and throw 85% on and go thank you that's a that's an important distinction um so work your way up do some like a very classic warm-up thing would be like a set of 10 at 50% a set of eight at 60% a set of maybe eight again at 70% and then maybe like a set of five at 75% so two or three or four sets kind of building intensity and lowering the rep range and then you would go after your two or three working sets um also in terms of rest inies now because we're trying to the primary driver of strength is intensity it's it's not the volume right it's the intensity so in order to maintain that we have to do a low repetition range but in addition we also have to have a high rest interval because if we start to if we have any amount of fatigue in occur and we have to then either reduce the Reps or reduce the intensity we've lost the primary driver we've lost that main signal so the number we're going to throw out typically is like two to four minutes um so imagine you did you know your setup ENT press and you did five repetitions at 85% you want to rest 2 to 4 minutes before coming back to the bench that doesn't mean you have to sit there on your phone like fact please don't like everyone will thank you for not doing that I promise um you can engage other muscle groups this is what we call Super setting so you're doing your bench press and while that two-minute clock is running for your chest to rest you can go over and do your deadlifts and so you know you you can kind of move back and forth and this is how you can make strength training not 7h hour workout if you're a professional that you're going to take that time because you want to maximize the outcome um Su we've done this actually in our lab too super sets will reduce the strength gains but by a tiny amount and most of us don't care enough relative to it's going to Triple the length of your training session it's not worth it so for the average person I will tell them yeah super set for someone who's trying to break a world record in weightlifting or powerlifting I don't superet interesting yeah I think I found that um I don't recover particularly well from strength and hypertrophy training so like in the workout or the next day uh from workout to workout unless I keep the total duration of those workouts I like to say no more than 60 Minutes of work of real work yep yep maybe 75 past 75 I find that I just start to I have to I have to introduce additional rest days or I just get weaker over time so I i' set a kind of a limit at 50 minutes and then um I usually violate that limit and end up doing 60 minutes so I'm um excited to hear that one can super set exercises as long as they work different muscle groups of course right um so I wouldn't want to do like bench press and overhead press super seted because you're going we can E I think that's goes without saying for most people but just to point that out but that I could um do some P Push Pull Push Pull without compromising total intensity that much and I I certainly would be willing to give up a little a rep here or there or a few um pounds here or there um and may I ask whether or not um in doing that one gets any even tiny bit or um more of additional benefit in terms of cardiovascular work because I imagine after even a one rep max which I've never done as I mentioned but let's say I get three reps on the overhead press and then I get um four reps on a weighted pull-up and I'm going back and forth I'm no doubt going to be breathing harder than if I was sitting there texting away on my phone in between set yep of course yeah and so in fact in general one of the things that I'll present in my class is a giant list of in fact on the top is all these different exercise adaptations I started the conversation with and on the the vertical column are as many of the physiological potential adaptations one would get so changes in endogenous pH uh blood pressure lymphatic changes bone density all these things right and just have this giant list and then you can run a matrix and you can start to look at okay if I do speed training am I going to see changes in the ner nervous system well like very much so right that's the primary actual reason those things work very little change in the muscle system it's almost exclusively explained by the central or peripheral nervous system right on that same token are you going to expect many cardiovascular adaptation from speed the answer is no because although we didn't cover it speed is very low intensity very low rep range very high rest well as you go to like strength and then you go to hypertrophy you start seeing more and more increases in cardiovas adaptations because you're doing exactly that right you're starting to reduce rest and you're starting to increase volume but you're going to lose things like bone mineral adaptations because the load starts to go down so you can look at this Matrix and kind of understand if I'm a person who wants to kind of maximize the adaptations I get across my entire physiology for the least amount of work you can choose these different adaptations to go after that are going to kind of land on these things right and and exactly as you mentioned if you're going to take five minutes rest between each rep so let's say the extreme you're going to do three sets of one repetition for strength at 95% you're going to take probably five maybe seven minutes between each attempt like you better not expect many like changes in your resting blood pressure that there's no cardiovascular strain there you're going to put it together in a circuit where you're going to lose some potential strength adaptation but you're going to gain something there so all these things are it's not about good or bad or right or wrong it's always about what ad Advantage do you want what disadvantage do you want and I can cut like really into the chase here on one of these things because we'll get to this eventually if you want to know the ones that are going to generally give you the most physiological adaptations across the most categories you're almost always looking for iery type of training and then this anerobic conditioning piece that we'll get into that's going to hit the most systems at once that's great to know and we should definitely uh go a little bit deeper on those types of uh what the modifiable variables are for those those categories because I think that I'm guessing the vast majority of people want to be a bit stronger maybe add some a little bit of muscle or more um get make sure their heart is healthy and Etc um this is wonderful and and I think it's clarifying certainly a lot for me so for strength let's I guess training frequency frequenc so what should determine training frequency and I had the great uh benefit of a long time ago when I was in high school actually I paid for a a session over the phone with Mike mener oh Lov the Mike mener we got to be friends at the time I was pretty young and my mother kept saying like why is this like grown man calling the house and we would talk all the time about training but he tried to convince me to train once every five to seven days uh very few sets very high intensity um and I must say it worked incredibly well sure it was I think with my recovery um quotient which was not very good I think has improved over time it was not very good it was remarkable but of course this was a time when I was you know full of the most anabis on my own version of of anabolics right it was I was you know really had I had a long Arc of puberty so and you were untrained and I was mostly untrained I've been running cross country and skateboarding and playing soccer so and doing all the things that are like the antithesis of growing muscle it was literally and people will probably say impossible it was something like 40 PBS of muscle inside of 12 months it was crazy I but but and so then of course that stopped working over time and then you start going down the the um the Odyssey of trying to find the thing that's going to work that well and you eventually realize that it was because you were untrained right um so training frequency is is crucial let's say that people are doing these whole body workouts as you've described them not alternating upper body lower body because there's so many different splits so we doesn't probably doesn't make sense to go into um splits in in right now but how often can can and should one train a muscle and how do you know if a muscle is recovered locally and how do you know if your nervous system is recovered systemically okay this is a bunch of really interesting questions I'm not sure exactly what route you want to go so I'll start here um as I mentioned earlier soreness is not a good barometer of exercise quality because some types of training are going to induce more soreness and some are going to induce less that's important to this conversation because when you ask about how do you know if a muscle is ready to train again one of the question is what are you training for if you're training for hypertrophy right muscle size muscle growth we need to hedge towards recovery because what you're trying to do is cause a massive insult there allow then protein synthesis to occur building of new tissue which takes time 48 to 72 hours like kind of at a minimum that process needs to occur if you're doing actually more strength and this is a differentiation between hypertrophy and strength then you didn't induce actually much damage in fact you're generally not going to get very s from True strength training very little unless you get went really heavy you did it a lot the primary driver of hypertrophy is not the same primary driver of strength we talked about that already that's intensity driven for Vol for hypertrophy it's not intensity so because we have different mechanisms we have different outcomes even though they're closely aligned strength is not going to cause a lot of soreness therefore intensity is the driver therefore frequency can be as high as you want so you can train every single day the same exact muscle if speed or power or strength are the primary training training tools because you need stimulus there skill is skill as well right practice that you know that as much as anybody developing a new motor pattern requires a lot of repetitions right you don't need a tremendous amount of rest that's not it's not a damage thing right it's a repatterning issue so strength training in fact if you look at again true strength professional athletes they're going to train the same muscles basically every day wow they're going to squat every day and and is that because the the primary mode of adaptation is recruitment of these high threshold motor units it's so it's mainly neural no so everyone's gonna say that and this is where I get all feisty well I'm not saying that that was actually there was a question mark there okay if if we were online putting comments we there would be a question mark we would have fought I would have blocked you I'm just kidding that's you already blocked no probably twice um okay the early adaptations to exercise especially strength training are hedged towards the nervous system no question about it people always say central nervous system but it's probably more peripheral right whatever semantics probably a bit pedantic it's nervous um if you train today tomorrow morning you're not going to wake up with a actually increase in contractile proteins in muscle your muscle might be a little bit bigger due to some acute swelling but you could have an an pretty acute that persists change in and the nervous system we'll call it that allows you to be stronger like within a couple of days sustained hypertrophy is probably more along the lines of four weeks where we can see that right we can actually see changes like in the ultrasound now you're making changes immediately that protein synthesis process is happening like very fast and it's going to last it just takes us time to measure it in terms of a noticeable change in your whole muscle size so that being said the first four weeks we typically say our primarily um nervous system after that now we're seeing starting to see most of the changes coming from the muscle side of the equation so with strength development It's a combination of three areas in fact all muscle contraction has these same three things it starts off with some signal right from somewhere in the body whether it's all the way up the top or at the level of the spine depending on if this is a reaction or an actual conscious control from there that some signal has to tell the muscle to contract okay so signal is one two it's muscular contraction and there's a lot of variables inside the muscle tissue itself that determin its functionality and so if we took an individual biopsy and took a muscle fiber from you and took one from me and we took those muscles out and put them in a Petri dish and I tied one end to a for transducer the other end to a thing that pulls it and we soaked it in a bath of calcium and a bunch of other stuff even if they were the same size your fibers might contract a lot faster than mine even relative to size um or not or slower or there's various properties so the intrinsic fibers themselves determine a lot of functionality from there muscle fibers don't cause movements muscle fibers simply contract they're all surrounded with connective tissue and that's all surrounded with a bunch of more connected tissue that all surrounds into a muscle that muscle is then surrounded with more connected tissue that all comes together into a giant tendon that tendon attaches to the Bone it's the pulling on those tendon that actually move the bone that cause human movement so that's area three area one the nervous system area two the muscle contraction area three some sort of connective tissue thing changes happen at all three of those levels and we're not even now talking we hav't entered the discussion of biomechanics and you changed say the panti angle of the muscle which is the angle at which the muscle fibers lay relative to the Bone right so this is basic mechanics is it pulling perpendicular to the bone is it pulling horizontal to the Bone or some sort of angle all of these things determine Human Performance so when you're talking about again that strength development you can see tremendous improvements in total Force production by manipulating all of those areas and you have not touched changes in muscle size if you change muscle size in a true sustained fashion whether this is cyop plasmic or contractile proteins you have given yourself more opportunity to produce more force it doesn't guarantee you produce more Force um bodybuilders are not stronger than powerlifters even though they have more muscle but bodybuilders are probably stronger than most people so there is a relationship between muscle size and strength it's this not a one toone guarantee ratio and that's generally because the although the muscle has been aided they may have not changed the biomechanical considerations they have may have not Chang the connected tissue nor the nervous system stuff and so that's why we see this giant relationship that r value is pretty high between strength and hyy but if you really want to get to the ends of it it's not and that matters to your actual question 10 minutes ago because again you can train strength daily on the same muscle but if you want to allow for that process of connect contractile proteins to to add and grow then you're going to have to allow some recovery because if you go back into that muscle too soon you're going to blunt the response you're going to stop it you're going to cut it off you have all kinds of of problems going on in the cell that are going to um just attenuate that that growth response so I gave you the answer for strength training the answer for hypertrophy is probably less than three out of 10 on level of soreness you can go again in general you're probably looking at 72 hours is the optimal window so if you trained your your shoulders on Monday you probably would don't want to train them again on Tuesday if I protop the goal maybe Wednesday maybe Thursday is best so something like an every two to three day window is is probably um and we know a little bit more now about why that is um the gene Cascade the signaling response happens well the signaling happens instantaneously right within seconds the Gan Cascade is probably in the peaked in the 4H hour window like the depending on which Gene you want to look at but it's just kind of a snapshot but the protein synthesis process is 24 to 48 hour thing and so it tends to kind of look like let that thing finish and let that signal go back to Baseline and then hit it again and then hit it again and now as long as you're providing the nutrients the recovery should happen and you should be able to sustain the same work output in the training session so the stimulus stays High and the recover is there and you can now continue to grow muscle you mentioned 48 to 72 hours for hypertrophy what if be for whatever reasons uh the the training split uh lifestyle factors Etc somebody say let's use your example trains uh shoulders on Monday um ideally they would train them again on Thursday yeah in their particular instance somewhere Wednesday or Thursday but they don't they wait until Saturday or Sunday for whatever reason maybe it's more compatible with their work work and other exercise schedule whatever the reason are they actually losing hypertrophy that they gained or they've missed a window to induce further hypertrophy it's probably better to think about it the the ladder it's not that you're you've lost it's just you've just kind of lost an opportunity to to make more progress um I will save you a little bit and kind of going back to your hit program this is the original high-intensity training the Menor thing right which is not the hit with one eye not the high inity interval training but high intensity training like one set to Absolute failure maybe two for each muscle group 20 minute workouts dividing your body into three into a three-way split and then literally training like six times a month which most people think that is absolutely crazy there's no way that's going to work and I can tell you if you are untrained you you grow like a weed if you train hard enough even if you're trained look at the people who Mike trained he put a lot of bodybuilders on really high levels now they had the same similar help you had at that time frame wait to be very clear I was not taking exogenous hand a box in fact I but your endogenous was just as good I probably was I wasn't measuring my levels there but I probably would I grew easy and gen in general I tend to grow pretty easily um from weight training but the but and I should say that to Mike's credit and I think this is an important message that he was the one who really said look un unless you're going to make a professional career out of it do not run the health hazards of exogenous hormones it you know certainly not at your age so he deterred me from that which was great because it never entered my mind it just was one of those things where Mike mener said don't do it and he had clearly done it right and so he's speaking from an informed place it never entered my mind but also I was what was really wild as I was continuing to run cross country um and so there was a there was a um trade-off there at some point bit when you're young you can get many people can get away with totally with what at this age would surely Place me to a state of overtraining even at low volume we'll see yeah well I mean like the the whole field on interference effect has changed quite a bit uh recently which we could come back to if you want um but just to to finish out the the idea here with that last question um if you want to take five days or six days in between each muscle group you can do that in fact if you look at the research it's going to show that frequency is not that important it well it's not that it's un important but it's it can handle changes as long as you get to the same to volume so you can do that you just have to do a lot more work in that one workout if you care about the six week eight-week thing if you're like I'm in this for the next 60 years like it's probably okay right um but it can be there that the challenge with splitting up your training sessions for hypertrophy into smaller numbers like once or twice a week it's just difficult to get that number it's typic difficult to get that volume done um volume wise the more recent meta analyses are going to say that you're probably looking at around 10 working sets per muscle group per week seems to be kind of the minimum threshold that you're going to want to hit so if you did three sets of 10 at your shoulders on Monday three sets of 10 shoulders Wednesday and three on Friday that's nine working sets if you wanted to do three different shoulder work uh exercises on Monday and hit your nine sets it's not really actually going to be that much different the problem is 10 is kind of the minimum you probably want to look for more like 15 to 20 and in fact wellt trained folks 20 25 that becomes very challenging in one workout in fact defunto you're not gonna be able to do it right and so that is where it's not the frequency that looks like it kills you it's just the fact you have got to get because the total driver of strength is intensity but the total driver of hypertrophy is volume assumed you're taking it to fatigue right or muscular failure So It's just tough to get enough done if you can um and if you want to set schedule up that way like you probably remember if you do those types of training sessions where you're just going to completely exhaust a muscle it's going to be tire it's gonna be sore for a while you're you're you're probably not going to come back and that's sore of the logic behind that was let's take this thing to tremendous failure and give it six days to recover um it can work it's just not the best I think is one way to think about it for most people it's also hard to do those workouts without a training partner if you really want to do them correctly and stimulants and headphones and all kinds of of other things well anyway that yeah stimulants are not I don't certainly don't recommend those um maybe a cup of coffee or two if that's your thing but um and maybe some of the safer supplements but certainly not the sorts of stimulants that the guys in the 70s and ' 80s were famous we're still used um you talked about repetition ranges broadly for strength training so five or less y you said frequency could be as often as every day rest 2 to four minutes maybe even longer if you're going for one repetition for hypertrophy what are the repeti ranges that are effective and what are the ones that are most effective if one is trying to maximize some of the other variables like people don't want to spend more than an hour to 75 minutes in the gym because I think that uh while the rep ranges might be quite broad as you alluded to earlier there's the Practical there are the practical constraints yeah so what what repetition ranges or percent of one repetition maximum um should people consider when thinking about hypertrophy right um the quick answer there is anywhere between like five to 30 reps per set that's going to show across the literature pretty much equal hypy gains um and we can have a really inter discussion about why that is but I'm just remembering one thing from a second ago I want to give a better answer for the frequency you can do every single week for strength or every single day for strength if you want though like what's probably minimally viable two twice per week per muscle so hamstrings strength twice per week that that's a good number to get most people really strong okay you can do every single day you don't need to though so I want to make sure that like I wasn't saying you have to train a muscle 85% every single day to get it strong two is a good number three is great but probably even two is really effective got it this explains to the high frequency of of training for strength athletes that's always mystified me um and the very long workouts makes sense because very long they're going to even train twice a day even they squat in the morning squat in the afternoon every day with they're eating and their sleeping they probably don't have time for anything else that's why they're Pros so that's their job right that's what they do um so yeah your hypertrophy um strength training programming is somewhat complicated right because of now it's not the danger but you're going to have to pay one way or the other right the risk is a little bit higher because the load's higher and you have to be a little bit more technically proficient when it comes to hypertrophy training the way I like to explain it is it's kind of idiot proof the programming is idiot proof the work is hard though so here's your range anywhere between you know five reps and 30 like can you hit somewhere in there perfect it's all equally effective you can't screw that up the only caveat for hypertrophy is you have to take it to muscular failure and you need enough rest for the adaptation and protein synthesis occur yep yeah right and if you recover faster you can maybe do it more frequently and if you don't maybe less frequently by that logic should people perhaps experiment and figure out what repetition range allows them to recover um in concert with the training frequency that they can do consistently my recommendation is I think you should actually set your uh use the repetition range as a way to have some variation because most people don't want to go in the gym and do 36 10 they're going to get very bored very quickly and so I I think you should actually intentionally change the rep schemes for simple sake of having more fun it is a very different challenge the mechanisms that are inducing hypertrophy are different but there's only a maximum amount of growth that one can get right and so you have as best we think it now and and some people actually will espouse that we know really clearly about the mechanisms of muscle apprach we don't it's still very much a guessing game but the three most likely drivers are one metabolic stress two mechanical tension and then three muscular damage you don't have to have all three one is sufficient you can have a little bit of one or two and you can kind of so you get it to play here we've already talked about the muscular damage again it's very clear more damage is not better but it is somewhat a decent proxy right like again a little bit of soreness is good you don't get so sorts compromising your total volume right U mechanical tension is kind of like strength this is why if you do even sets of five or eight and you're kind of close to that strength range you will gain a little bit of muscle it's not optimal muscle gain but you're going to gain some because everything in these like physiology is cut off at four reps and then five reps is a different thing right it's it's always a blend so think of it as like a a fading curve as you you get closer to the end it fades less effective as you get closer to the middle it's more effective anywhere between eight reps per set to 30 it's equally effective past 30 it's going to blend out past 8 to five to four to three it's going to blend you know lesser there so metabolic stress is one the damage is the other or sorry mechanical tension is the one that's heavy muscle damage the other one the third one is metabolic stress and this is um get a bit of an area of scientific intention but something's there I know something's there we just we're just kind of fumbling to figure out what exactly it is and this is metabolic stress is the burn right it's there um it's why Blood Flow Restriction Training probably works that's done very light so there's no mechanical tension there's very little damage but somehow it induces a good amount of hypertrophy very painful oh boy I tried this uh I have a friend former special operator who um was out on the east coast and took me through a Blood Flow Restriction um training protocol in a park and I I don't think I I actually cried but um you did but I might have cried out once or twice it was unbelievable especially the lower body movements um now it was a humid day I'll claim a little bit of Jedi but it was brutal it was really brutal and I also do on the best day of your life and it's still brutal okay well that makes me feel a little bit better it was intense and um and and people should know that it it is important to use the proper cuffs for these things I don't have any uh relationship to any of the companies that sell these cuffs but the reason is that you actually need to block particular Avenues of blood flow you can't simply cinch off a muscle you can't turn to get a muscle and train you can actually uh kill yourself that way yeah you can get a blood clot yeah and um so if you're interested in Blood Flow Restriction Training uh I imagine you have some content about this or will at some point but also there there are resources online that people can lock up yeah uh a question about hypertrophy train that I think um many people are wondering about train to failure or don't train to failure assuming good form yeah okay assuming good form great um the answer is both so you want to train to failure but you don't need to go to extreme failure so you don't need to necessarily go to that like a partner has to lift the barbell off my chest but you have to get close you have to drive either heavy stress damage right or or pump and so a really easy practical way to think about this um I heard Mike Isel who runs a company called Rance periodization years ago outlin this at a NCA talk and it was beautiful and I thought this is the most eloquent way to explain the context about trinic hypertrophy so I want to look for three things in your workout and let's say that you have a particular muscle to grow let say you want your glutes to get larger okay when you're doing your glute exercises number one are you feeling the glute contract okay it doesn't have to be there but that's a good sign if it is okay let's say I didn't really feeling my glute contract I felt it more in my quads or my back okay did you feel a big pump afterwards no I didn't really feel a pump there either words it's or during okay great number three next day did you feel a little bit of soreness there at all no I didn't well that's a very good indication you didn't feel it during the workout you felt no sort of pump and it didn't get sore don't expect much growth didn't you distributed the work across a bunch of muscle groups most likely other muscle groups were too involved right especially if you're like no but man my back got really well that's a really good indication of telling you what the hell was moving and so in terms of targets if you were to put again a one to you know 10 scale how much should I feel it burning during anything less than a three okay it's probably not doing much right but it doesn't like seven is not a 10 is not better than seven you need to feel it but it doesn't have to be like oh my gosh I'm dying here sorus same barometer right so if you can get like three three and three you're probably in a pretty good spot five five and five is maybe better but you don't need to go much past that so I want you to feel the muscle group either working or if you're like I didn't feel it much I didn't really get a pump but the next day it got really sore then you're you're still you know you're on a good path um again really sore is in like a little tender but next day it's okay day after that I could I could train no problem that's really what you want to go after and in terms of understanding is this likely to produce some growth or not excellent excellent very clear param ERS and recommendations I know are benefiting me and will benefit a lot of people if you'll be willing to throw out a few sort of sets and rep parameters that could uh act as broad guidelines for people who want to uh explore further uh I realize that with all these modifiable variables that there's no one size fits-all four strength I love this 5 to 30 for hypertrophy that's thing I don't think I've ever done a 30 rep set of anything but but now that you've thrown that out there I see it as a bit of CH awesome about dir you're going to get an insane pump you're going to burn like crazy but you won't get super sore because the mechanical tension is so low it's so light so you can you can get away with those things and you it's hard because your mind is going to wander you're G to get it like rep 20 you're like I'm done and you're like no there's there's a lot left here to get 30 where like a set of 10 is is much easier like you're just like okay two more two more set of 30 is like I got 16 more it's awful but you're the counting is wor it's terrible right and people tend to just kind of like check out so 30 is possible but a little bit extreme extreme um but I would recommend them all of them like it's a really fun play you can do different in the same workout too by the way like you could do one set of 10 uh push-ups and then take a little break and then do a set of 25 you can you can mix and match these things um there's no magic recipe that has to happen for all those or do it different so Mondays are my sets of 10 days Wednesdays are my set of 20 days and Fridays are my set of 30 days and you can have all kinds of fun there and it's hard to screw up great I love that phrase is always reassuring so for strength is there a um sets and Reps protocol that that is um pretty sure fire so a way to to just think about a really fast answer for power well speed power and strength is what I just call the three to five concept all right so pick three to five exercises if you're feeling better that day chooseing the higher end if you're feeling less that day or you have a shorter time frame to train go less so this would be three sets or three exercises rather or five exercises the most so three to five exercises do three to five reps three to five sets take three to five minutes rest in between and do it three to five times a week so that can be as little as three sets of three for three exercises three times a week that's that's a 20-minute workout three times a week it can be as high as five sets of five for five exercises 5 days a week so it's very Broad and allows people to still stay within the domain of strength and power while still being able to move and Contour tour their lifestyle and and soreness and time and all those things the only differentiator to pay attention to between power and strength is intensity so if you want strength this is now 85% plus of your max right if you want Power it needs to be a lot lighter because you need to move more towards the velocity and the spectrum because power is strength multiplied by speed so while getting stronger by definition can Health power you probably want to spend more of your time in the 40% to 70% range like plus or minus so that's it both of them conceptually they'll work everything else the exercise the Reps the the frequency all that can be still in the three to five range just change the intensity depending on which outcome you want the nervous system obviously plays an important role at the level of nerves controlling the contraction of muscle fibers but of course we have these upper motor neurons which are the ones that reside in our brain that control the lower motor neurons that control muscle yeah and this takes us into the realm of where the mind is at during a particular movement and to me this is not an abstract thing I can imagine doing workouts that are mainly focused on strength or mainly focused on hypertrophy and in the case of strength am I trying to move weights and when I'm trying to generate hypertrophy am I trying to quote unquote challenge muscles in other words yeah if I just trying to move a weight away from my body you know push pushing a bench press or an overhead press I don't know that I want my mind thinking about the contraction of my medial delts I think I want my mind in getting the weight overhead with the best proper form best excuse me and proper form and certainly with hypertrophy training best in proper form is going to be the target as well but that simple or I should say subtle mental shift changes the patterns of nerve fiber recruitment so can we say to get stronger focus on moving weights still with proper form and safely and to get hypertrophy focus on challenging muscles still with proper form and safely it's very fair yeah as a as a snapshot answer it is a very fair thing to think about um intentionality matters for both in other words if you look at some interesting science Sy done on power development and speed development the intent to move is actually more important than the actual movement velocity so if if you're doing say something for power or strength and you're doing just enough to get the bar up that will result in less improvements in strength than even if you're moving at the exact same speed but you're intending to move faster and this is one of the reasons why good coaching matters so if you're coaching an athlete through a power workout especially and they're doing enough to just lift 50% of their wi at Max it's not going to generate as much speed development as them trying to move that bar as fast as I can even if the net result is the same bar by velocity turns out nerves matter that's a I mean I I was about to say amazing but as a neuroscientist if I say amazing that nerves matter what's amazing to me is what if I understand correctly what you're saying is that even if the bar is moving at the same speed same weight yeah if my internal representation my thoughts are I'm trying to move this as fast as possible versus I'm just trying to get get the bar away from me and and get the weight up I'm going to get different outcomes Yep this is quality of work right this is did you do enough to just check off the box or did you actually strive for adaptation right s similar concept actually works for hypertrophy in terms of there's a handful of very recent studies that have looked at what we'll call the Mind muscle connection and this is doing things like imagine a bicep curl and you're simply looking at and watching your biceps and you're thinking about Contracting it harder even though you execute the same repetitions at the same exact intensity initial indications are the Mind Body Connection are going to result in more growth than not you just gave um uh authorization for for people to look at their muscles Contracting in the gym please do yeah of course right like does this but the selfie is still ruled out I'd rather you look at your muscles than your phone so I'm fine with it um those are initial we don't have a large depth of research to support that and maybe some stuff will come and counter it but it it does it matches what folks in that Community have been saying for a very long time right there's actually some stuff on simply flexing in between so if you've ever seen a bodybuilder they'll they'll do their set of bicep CRS and then they'll get out and they'll flex and they'll check and they're literally this is what Arnold did right this is if you go back to pumping in iron or college weight rooms I should say for some reason there's something about that age group there's a lot of checking of biceps in college weight rooms for reasons that escape me if you ever interact with my wife like she will be the first to tell you I cannot walk past the mirror without like I'm checking something out that you can't or she can't I can't okay not her me like I'm the one that cannot walk all right well then I'll be careful not to disparage that it has nothing to do with the hypertrophy but I'm just like I'm a muscle guy so I'm always like thinking and tinkering right whatever but yeah it is um I think it's very much worth your time to do a higher quality training session be more intentional be present than just executing the same EX work out I think that's globally very clear to be to your advantage so if you're thinking look I'm going to like I don't want to work out today I got all this going on or I'm tired or whatever I'm just going to do the workout anyways and get through it okay if you can go you know what though like I'm going to cut 15 minutes out of this thing I'm gonna get my head right I'm gonna go get two 20 minutes of quality work done that's that's your best option by far you alluded to the fact that um even just looking at a particular muscle might uh benefit uh in terms of the number fibers you can recruit or it's it's potential for hypertrophy uh I've heard before and I certainly um have experienced that muscles that for whatever reason genetics or sports that one played Etc muscles that uh we find that we can contract to the point of almost a slightly painful contraction seem to grow more readily than muscles that we can't recruit very easily and um and there and the reason I mentioned sports that we played earlier is I mean you just have to watch the Olympics to see that you know swimmers obviously are very good at engaging their lats um you look at the gymnasts they seem to be very good at engaging everything yeah and they go through a huge number of different Dynamic movements that explains that um so I find that you know if people say oh you know I can't get stronger in this or my uh whatever body part is weak in terms of it its inability to engage hyper yeah I see your going that often times that can be because of an inability to to engage those upper motor neurons to deler liely isolate those muscles um are there ways that people can learn to uh is engage particular muscle groups more effectively over time for sake of hypertrophy or strength or for cases of trying to overcome injury potential or injury because imbalances are bad across the board yeah this is actually very common and I think everyone has probably gone through this there's some part that you just can't get going for me that was the lats that was the romboid so my back muscles for years I couldn't activate my lats or my romboid these are the the muscle groups that connect your shoulder blades so if you try to squeeze your shoulder blades together that set of muscles there call your rhomboids um your lats of course are more vertical and pull you kind of up and down and no matter how many lat pull Downs I did bent rows pull-ups I I never see any development there no increase in strength and it took me probably a decade to figure out how the hell to actually get these things on in fact if you would have asked me even in my college years as a college football player hey flex your lats like show your lats you would have seen no no movement there um when I was doing a pull-up in that particular case the only way I could get the bar to move was be was by using my biceps right so it's a synergis muscle it's supposed to be a secondary or tertiary muscle in that movement but for me it was primary because of my over strength in my biceps coupled with my lack of activation in the lats so you're compensating the same movement actually kind of a easy way to think about this is Imagine doing a bent row so imagine you're you're bent over kind of at a 45 degree or horizontal angle and you're going to pull a a barbell to your belly button all right now you can actually do that exact same movement with very little back muscle activation by simply flexing your elbows more and so you think your the barbell is going all the way down it's coming all the way up to touching my belly and you think you're doing a great back development exercise when in fact because of the way that you're executing the movement you're getting very little back development and this is a really good example of why someone has done a specific exercise many many many times but yet failed to see development in a muscle Group which goes back to earlier part of our conversation which is why exercises themselves do not determine the adaptation it's the execution that matters right it's the technique it's the rep range all of those are going to determine your actual result so if anytime you were you're you're banging your head against the wall and thinking like why am I not getting movement here growth or strength or whatever it's almost one of those it's guaranteed to be one of those areas right you're probably not getting um the muscle groups to activate in that particular example just because we're here try um imagine doing that bent row instead of pulling the barbell to your belly squeeze your shoulder blades together first as far as they can possibly go and then bring your elbows up without changing the angle of your elbow so in other words without bringing your hand closer to your shoulder so keep that same angle and come up as high as you possibly can and then finish out the movement that's going to guarantee a a utilization first of the back muscles and a a finishing with the biceps um at the end which is how that movement is supposed to go so how do you coach into that well it can be a number of things whenever I'm diagnosing movement quality I look for a handful of things but very first one is awareness you'd be surprised how many folks um when you just simply tell them that muscle group right there and maybe you give them a tactical prompt so you touch it or you put something against it um this is actually why sorry I'm jumping over the place but this is why uh things like a belt work very well for actually increasing abdominal strength so a a misconception out there is if you wear like a belt when you're lifting then the belt kind of does all the work for you and your abs get weaker that can happen but the exact opposite can happen as well so if you take a belt for example and you and you cinch it down really tight and then you just completely disregard your midsection you will see a loss of strength in your midsection because now the belt is doing the work but if you put the belt on just a little bit kind of tight to where you get some sensor feedback and you think about using that belt as a way to activate the core musculature you will actually see a higher if we look at like EMG activation the core muscles would be activated higher to a greater extent than when the belt is off because of propri receptive feedback 100% And for those that that are wondering what propri acceptive feedback is propriate acceptive feedback is that uh there are nerves uh that extend out to the muscles that control muscle contractions but then there are sensory inputs from the skin and muscle that go back into the nervous system and work in in concert and that that feedback is proceptive I think it it it literally translates to a knowledge of where one's limbs are and what's happening on those Li space y I've um seen I don't you I don't have a training partner but I've seen uh in gyms where someone will be training and someone will tap the muscle of the person who's doing the work in order with this is consensual tapping of other people's muscles not walking around touching people's muscles please um that to provide that propri receptive feedback so that the person doing the exercises becomes more aware of the muscle that they're supposed to be training and it seems that that's probably an effective practice yeah um I'll give you two examples I'll go to the back with that pulling movement and but then I'll I'll stay in the belt really quickly so a very easy example that you can do right now uh listening and I learned this from Brian Mackenzie or mutual friend right so if you take your hands and open them up um like you make an L with both your hands and now take those and put them around your waist just above your hip bones mhm now what I want you to do is press out as hard as you can on your hands with your core and you can feel a lot of core activation and most people think core activation is the front of your stomach right your six-pack what you need to do is create a cylinder around your back so it's the front it's the side and it's the back so if you take your two fingers Point them now put them just outside your belly button can you move your fingers while just moving your ab muscles 90% of people can do yes same exact thing now go to that same position just above what's called your Asis so your anterior Superior ELC spine right up that front of your hipbone right in the front can you now move great 50% of people are not going to get any movement there really take your thumb and go right above your PSIs my what PSIs posterior Superior spine right now can you move most likely no sort of if I do a mini little back extension don't just with your core musculature barely yeah maybe 90% of people can't if you can't perform that contraction you can't stabilize your spine so only way to get stabilization in your spine is then to go through hyperextension and now that's a compression strategy you're putting on your spine it's better than rounding your back like and going forward but overextension is not great either so you want to be able to flex the muskete in a cylindric fashion so you have control so if you go back to very first things and with your hands open and you put them right here and if you're like I can't get activation if you pay attention to your thumb right now just move your thumb and now you see activation back there right boom now if you can imagine turning that on just a little bit and now notice how I can do this by the way at the same time I'm talking if you have to go we don't have control right so you have to be able to separate breath from brace so now if I can put my POS in a position and and Kelly starett has always said 20% give me 20% activation here and now I can squat I can hinge I can jump I don't need to be lock down to 100% scream to be able to brace my spine that's it's going to be INE effective and wasteful I want to be here well the belt provides that Pro receptive feedback where I can put it on 20% and it just is a reminder if I don't press against the belt the belt slides and falls down a little bit because it's not on super tight if it's on so dang tight it's doing the work and I forget so we just want to a little bit of feedback there same thing with your upper back if you're having a difficult time activating those romboid or those lats someone can do a simple thing where they take their finger put it right between your shoulder blades and you just tell them things like hey squeeze my finger squeeze my finger as you're doing your bent row or your pull down you can touch the lat you can do um just visualization stuff so just imagine like a 3D rendering of that muscle group and you're watching that muscle group contract is very powerful and very effective um to do it so a touch um um a visual all this stuff can help get people uh to activate outside of simple awareness um typically Ecentric overload is a very effective way for U activation of a difficult to Target muscle so the lowering of the bar or the lowering of the weight the movement of the weight away from the body it's not necessarily always lowering because that kind of depends on what most group you're doing right I miss book yeah um things like a pull-up okay so if if if I'm going to do a pull-up and I have poor lat activation I can still get the pull-up muscle movement executed by contraction of the biceps and things like that however to make the movement simpler I'm going to go all the way to the top so imagine stepping on a box or something going all the way to that top of that pull-up position and starting from there and I want you to simply lower it under control and so you're just simply breaking the movement down into smaller pieces that allow you to to focus on the execution more it's going to be great Ecentric are great for strength development very good for hypertrophy and allow you to focus on control I I I'm willing to bet a huge percentage of you out there who've like I've never had a sore lat even though I've done a lot of pull-ups and things like that if you do that Ecentric only you'll probably wake up the next day going oh gosh I feel it there and that's a sign even if you didn't feel it during the workout but I got a little sore the next day keep down that path and then eventually you be able to do a concentric maybe take a break maybe do an isometric where you just hold that position and eventually work that into a into a progression where you can do the concentric Ecentric and isometric portions and get Activation so that that may take you six weeks may take you six months but that's generally a pretty good strategy for learning how to activate a muscle group terrific suggestions is it true that Ecentric uh emphasized movements might require a little bit longer recovery or they lead to more soreness than concentric movements yeah they typically can but they're also higher Force output so very good for strength development um but they're going to lead on average to more soreness so more potential for intracellular disruption that is going to be associated with pain there's there's not as much um people will like to explain muscle soreness as a result of microt truma and micro tears in the muscle that can happen but that's not the norm most of the time it is things like disruption of calcium that's going to lead to excessive swelling excessive pressure and that's going to be then translated as extreme pain so that's probably explaining more of muscle soreness than actually microt trauma terrific I was going to get to breathing later but maybe just for now if we can do a uh a brief um little foray into to breathing as it relates to weight training yeah is there a uh prescriptive for how to breathe during resistance training here I'm thinking with weights not necessarily body weight only movements although I suppose it could be that applies 75% of the time to 75% of the people what I was taught and I'm hoping you're going to tell me this was wrong because then there might be more benefits that awaiting me um is that I should exhale on the effort and inhale on the Lesser effort portion of an exercise is that true is there a better way to breathe there is a better way to think about it so number one if you can breathe and Brace then this conversation goes away so if you can main remain uh you can maintain intramuscular intraabdominal pressure while breathing then I don't really care when you breathe very challenging to do at very heavy weights if we flag this on two areas of a paradigm Paradigm one over here you're going to do a set of 30 and you're going to do front squats where a barbell is sitting on your throat if you don't take a breath this is going to end one way and one way only you passing out clearly has to be some breathing strategy the other end of the spectrum is let's say you're going to do a vertical jump you don't need any amount of breath there it's never going to happen right the question is what about in the middle right so I'm doing some sort of strength training there well number one make sure you're braced and then you can get away with less need to worry about it um in general a a decent strategy is to maintain a breath hold during the lowering or Ecentric or most dangerous part of the movement and then you can exhale on the concentric portion so if the bench press is our example if you held in braced lowered it under control and now started the concentric pushing away force and then you wanted to take an expiration during the last half of the concentric portion that's that's an okay strategy if you're going to do a single rep you don't need to worry about it you you can just avoid or omit breathing entirely you're going to be just fine if you're doing more than that especially three to four to five to seven to eight you're going to have to have some breathing strategy a very common one is um probably every third breath I'm going to do like exhale the third reset rebreathe something like that if you feel like you need to breathe after every one that's okay but it's going to get wasteful because you have to take time in between reps of sitting there if it's a squat that's different um versus a deadlift if you're resting at the bottom so there there is a little bit of game here so in general though is as that 75 75 kind of rule you thrown out you threw out breathe in do the lowering and exhale on the outch if you have to less Reps don't worry about it more reps then you need to come up with some sort of breathing strategy how about breathing in between sets um and maybe even after the workout yeah this is something I think a lot of people Overlook like and because the it it is the case that recovery has to do both with the specific activation and um to muscles and the nervous system but also the taxs on the nervous system can also take place between sets I mean if you're really geared up between sets and you got adrenaline you know as high in between sets or close to it as you are during your sets you can imagine that the recovery would take longer or at least that you're not spending adrenaline in the most efficient way if there is such a thing yeah fair you're not going to see any athlete that I work with just breathe in between whether it's in between Innings or in between rounds every single one of them is going to go back sit in the stool and they're going to immediately be into a breathing routine a very intentional one they're a little bit different for every athlete depending on the sport even um PJ golfer there's going to be a we just hit our ball we're moving to the next one we're going to go into a breathing strategy every one of them it's it's a a huge area of potential benefit and consequence if you're just ignoring it um in general we want to do any sort of calming breath we want to restore it depends on if the it depends on what we're combating are we combating low oxygen or highest CO2 so that strategy is going to be a little bit different but in general that is a huge time opportunity to get better in fact um people can go back and listen to some of your earlier episodes where you talked about or you have spoken about I think on this show when uh neuroplasticity works and if you're losing that opportunity post exercise you're leaving gains on the table if you will so not only are you going to see every the athletes that I work with mostly have a breezing strategy in competition we're not going to just finish a workout high five drink water and walk out of the gym there will be a down regulation strategy that is heavily involved with some sort of light control as well as breath control um the individual prescription on that there's a ton of variation with what you can do the easiest thing is do something that calms you down most likely that's going to be moved towards as much nails of breathing as you can possibly do and a a really easy rule of thumb is a double exhale length relative to inhale so if you need to take a like 4 second inhale double that time and breathe out for 8 seconds box breathing is fine so equal inhale equal hold equal exhale equal hold so 4 second inhale four second X hold etc etc a triangle is fine too there's a lot of ways you can get really complicated like what Brian McKenzie will do and Rob those guys have you can get all kinds of systems for inhale exhale control it can be optimized but some strategy of calm um we're going to almost always put you on your back or close and then we're going to cover light um we can do some like we've done actually a number of musical interventions as well but you can as just as simple as sit down in the locker room if you have to and just breathe for 5 minutes that alone is going to be productive that's great if you're breathing in the locker room for five minutes I suggest closing your eyes or you get some funny looks and if uh you'll still get funny looks but you won't see people looking at you yeah exactly uh I love this and I started doing this because you and Brian McKenzie informed me about this and it completely changed the rate of recovery for me I realized that I was leaving workouts both endurance workouts and strength hypertrophy workouts feeling great but looking at my phone getting right into email and meetings not concentrating on my breathing and all I did was to introduce a on your recommendation a five minute down regulation so exhale emphasized breathing of a a bunch of different varieties physiological size box breathing exhale emphasized twice as long as the inhale um component for five minutes and I noticed two things one I recovered more quickly work out to work out no question about it yeah the numbers um told me that and the other is that I used to have this um dip in energy that would occur three or four hours after a hard workout and I always thought that had to do with the fact that I generally eaten a meal at some point post-workout turns out it wasn't the meal at all it's that that that adrenaline um ramp up during the workouts I wasn't clamping that at the end and so I think eventually it just crashed and then three or four hours later I'm I'm having a hard time even reading what's on the screen of my computer thinking maybe it's the screen maybe it was what I ate for lunch turns out the down regulations allowed me to work through the afternoon with no issues whatsoever it's really been quite powerful and so I'm grateful to you for that and I think this is something that I think 98% of people are not doing and it's only five minutes you didn't even have to do five give me three if you really have to push it give me three and you can even do this you can save time you can do this in the shower if you have to so you're you're done you're finished drink of water whatever it has to be and you're getting in a shower get ready just give me 3 minutes in a shower it's not ideal but as little as that it can pay huge dividends um you need some sort of internal signal that we're safe like throttle down here we're going to move on that has to happen um I get going on here but I think we're making the same point kind of and over again it's it's big deal into it yeah and you're saving energy I mean the energy here is neural energy I think Fighters do this good Fighters learn to do this between rounds yeah sprinters learn to do this between events I think humans should learn how to do this between any you know uh sort of interval type activity including work social engagement I mean this is so such a powerful tool do this for one minute after every important whether it's an individual High volatile interaction or if it's say you just did a nice 45 minute Sprint of work and you're deep into it or whatever fine just give me one minute set your alarm just one minute and that also will pay dividends I I love it and as I said it's made a outsize uh different positive difference on my training but also activities outside my training which is for me I'm not a professional athlete I train for health and because I enjoy it but when a really hard workout starts to interfere with the ability to do the other things in life that's not a good situation so this is really terrific there's a lot more in each of th those categories of strength and um hypertrophy but you've given us a a tremendous amount of valuable information there maybe now would be a good time to shift to endurance and of the four types of endurance um and maybe you could remind us what those are what do you think are the two that most people are seeking or pursuing in terms of health and Aesthetics right I realize that we probably have athletes out there as well but I think um when I think health and Aesthetics I think okay the ability to do sustained endurance 30 plus minutes of some ongoing activity how does one maximize that work uh what are the modifiable variables and then maybe you could tell us what the the other major category is that people ought to have in their um kit okay so starting off with exercise Choice one thing as soon as we cross into the endurance world and this is true for all four of those categories exercise Choice needs to be very concerned with Ecentric Landing right so you don't need to avoid it but you need to recognize it relative or compared against those other strength and speed ones the volume is low on low ones so if you have some Ecentric absorption it's okay but as we sort of talked about 5 minutes ago more Ecentric means greater chance of muscle damage soreness so if you take something and magnify it across 30 minutes or even five minutes but a maximal exertion you have a recipe for blowing up you can imagine I haven't run in forever and I've just I've listened to this hberman Lab podcast and I'm okay I'm gonna get into my zone two training whatever whatever and I start jogging I'm going to do I you know I remember when I was I used to be able to do 25 and you just do a 25 minute jog the amount of Ecentric Landing that just occurred on every single step because you're never with running even slow running you never have two feet on the ground at the same time so it is a one foot Land one foot land your entire body mass plus gravity on one leg at a time repeated now hundreds of times that Ecentric Landing is going to cause tremendous soreness your quads are going to go your um probably going to get shin splints which is what this is those are entirely caused by Ecentric Landing um and when the tissue is not ready to tolerate that if you're not Landing correctly this is when knee pain happens back pain shoulder neck pain because of movement compensation so anytime we start pressing to fatigue let's be very concerned with there so my initial um recommendation is start with activities exercise Choice wise that are mostly concentric based so think about a cycle so when you're riding on a bike you're pushing the pedal but you're never landing and absorbing it so you could go out and do a 45-minute bike ride and you're not going to get that sore because there's not a lot of Ecentric load um swimming similar thing here right there's some eccentrics when your hand hits the water but fairly minimal it's mostly a push push push push push no load rowing similar thing mostly concentric um pushing a sled is fantastic going uphill running or even walking hard uphill all good because they're very minimal Landing relative to like running downhill which would be a very very bad idea um to start so when if you're first jumping into these things progress your volume for endurance very slowly if it involves Ecentric Landing a really bad strategy would be to jump in and do say circuit training class that involves a bunch of box jumps right this is not a good way um to do your first FL R into conditioning you're going to get incredibly sore because you're jumping in the landing you're now looking at 3 to 10x body weight in terms of absorption with a single and even if you're just jumping so be careful of that um in any of those endurance areas of exercise choice so what to pick pick the one that you are most technically proficient in because you're going to do it a lot it's going to be a lot of repetitions whatever one you feel the most joy in if that's rowing great if that's pushing a sled it doesn't really matter um you can do this actually with weights this is our preferred way by the way with our athletes so we might do a 30-minute circuit where we do a 5 minute farmer carry with a pretty light weight so you're just going to carry some weights in your hand and you're just going to walk up and down the street for 5 minutes you're going to set that down and then you're going to do say a 3 minute Plank and then you're going to pick that up and you're going to do body weight squats like slowly and just Tempo and you're going to do a handful of different exercises so the athletes don't get super bored or a very simple one if a 30-minute workout 10 minutes on a treadmill 10 minutes on a bike 10 minutes on a RAR and for those of you that are like oh my God I can't do 30 straight minutes of running cool break it up into three or four different exercises that are all fairly safe so that's how I would do that long duration piece got it for exercise Choice and then in terms of heart rate during that that period I mean how much attention should we pay to this I the kind of very broad um prescriptive I've thrown out on this podcast a few times based on my read of the literature is for most people that are oriented toward Health including people that are working on size and strength gains hypertrophy and strength of course um that getting 150 to 180 minutes of so-called Zone 2 cardio um you know can just have a just barely have a conversation but if one were to push any harder you wouldn't be able to that kind of thing it's just a as a of a generic recommendation that almost everybody should follow in order to just keep their cardiovascular system healthy but I know there's a lot of nuance there and some people would like to be able to run continuously for an hour at speed right um obviously not sprinting but what are some of the um finer finer points on long-distance endurance how often should one do it okay uh frequency you could do it is daily right when strength doing strength and hypertrophy well that I think is an important point for people to hear because a lot of people think that they are going to greatly diminish their strength and hypertrophy gains as it's often called um by doing in zone two cardio zone two you have almost no ability to block your hypertrophy zone two TR if it's really within that category if you're talking about conversational Pace um there is very in fact there is strong reason to think that is not going to influence hypertrophy for the overwhelming majority of people and might even help it by increasing blood flow to the various absolutely um does it matter let's say someone's doing primarily strength and hypertrophy there there primary goals are strength and hypertrophy and then they're going to do they're going to hit that 150 to 180 minutes in zone 2 cardio per week assuming they're breaking that up into three or four sessions does it matter if they do it in the same workout before or after does that matter um I tend to do just by way of example for people certainly I'm just one one example I tend to do uh resistance training one day then I'll do zone two cardio the next day I jog because that's the thing I prefer then I'll do strength hypertrophy training on the next day and then and jog for my zone two cardio and then I take one full day off a week I've never actually done the zone two cardio on the same day but were I to do it on the same day would it matter if I did it before or after my my strength hypoy training not really okay you're going to be just fine the interference effects the interference effect is what this is called so this is all the way back to 1980 Bob Hickman's stuff right and and he was actually working in a lab with John halasi who's one of the the fathers of exercise biochemistry and the so The Story Goes that uh Hickman came in he was a strength training guy and and Lai and almost all those initial exercise physiologists were conditioning folks right so it's almost always swimmers and Runners and that's why a bulk of the exercise physiology historically is is shaped in that direction it's what those scientists were interested in so Hickman was there in the lab and the how much of this is myth or not I who really knows but so the story goes um that this is sort of chipping back and forth and you know how from a pi to a postdoc and kind of that razing works a little bit and eventually he was like you got to start running with us and he was like you got to start lifting with me and kind of goes back and forth well you know who wins in that equation it's not the postto right so it's the pi gets in and says Hickman says okay fine so he starts running with Ali and then eventually starts to realize I'm getting weak I'm losing strength and like I just can't I think it was his bench breath specifically was going down or maybe his squat I can't remember who knows if it's even real but point is so he's going along and So eventually like starts to create a little bit of animosity and it's like actually I don't think this is good for me and then blah blah blah and so they did what any good scientist would do and said well let's find out right and so they he run a really famous experiment where he took a group three groups one group did a um endurance piece right the steady state cardio one group did a strength training piece and then the third group did both of those workouts combined not like a reduction so both both volumes stacked on top of each other and the results are fairly predictable in terms of the endurance group only had the greatest increases in V2 Max and endurance markers the strength training group had the greatest increases in muscle hypertrophy but where the interesting part was and where this whole field started was the combined group so this is concurrent training is what it's generally called so you're doing concurrent things and typically that means hypertrophy and strength stacked on top of someon steady state endurance in the same same same workout two hour block or same like we it doesn't really it can be got it kind of all these well the concurrent group saw the same improvements in V2 Max as the endurance group and he's like well okay so the strength training did not compromise the endurance adaptations however they saw much lower increases in strength than hypertrophy and so it was the conclusion was the addition of endurance work compromised muscle growth and strength development however the addition of strength training to your endurance work will not compromise your endurance gains now that second piece has been shown countless more times right so if you're an endurance athlete adding strength training is almost always going to be massively beneficial very little chance of detriment for this is why every endurance athlete is going to have some sort of strength and power component to their training the controversy though came in the interference effect so how much endurance training really blocks muscular development and for years myself included was we preached hard you know do don't do these two things at the same time um my friend my colleague Kevin mck has a really nice review article Jimmy Bagley those two guys put this thing out you can go read that um where they cover all these things and they've got some nice figures in there but the general answer here is interference effect is sort of real but it's probably greatly overblown it matters so you're talking about a 20-minute jog at conversation Pace that's probably doing very little um with the assumption that are you doing an Ecentric based exercise like running well then you're going to have more of an interference effect than cycling that makes a ton of sense if you think about it right what's your total energy intake if you're eating sufficient calories you can still be in an anabolic state if the addition of extra energy expenditure it's all it really is more the cardio put you in a negative energy State it's being it's going to become very difficult to go through anabolism so those things matter um if you're talking about doing like running a few laps around the track as a warm-up like that's not interference effect what we're really talking about is a big volume performed consistently now after Hickman came out with this paper paper in 1980 people followed it up in the 90s and 2000s with mechanism and we started to look and see we start to see hey there's this cell cell signaling pathway that goes down called mtor and that's what leads to muscle growth and then on the other side of that equation there's a thing called ampk which is more associated with mitochondrial biogenesis and endurance and there's this little molecule in between at the time most people would point to tsc2 Well turns out ampk activation is fine if you activate mtor has no bearing on ampk but if you activate amk it's going to activate tsc2 which inhibited Amor and so it was like we had practical outcome I Hickman you're going to get weaker now we had mechanism so that story became very very strong that this interference effect and this is how science should work right when you see mechanism match up with practical human outcome it's a strong what you want y it was still wrong though it it just took more science right and this is why we always have to give science a bit of time and uh you have to be willing to to follow right and again even me in the field who has a practitioner background and science I felt very strongly this is a big problem it just didn't turn out to be the case enough studies came out where I'm like okay it's probably not that big a deal unless the E the movement is heavily Ecentric based the volume is very high you're trying to maximize muscle growth and energy is not controlled if that's not all the case interference effect is probably not something most people should worry about um when you especially when you compare that against the well-roundedness that you need for total physiological Health probably not a big deal very reassuring for me to hear because I do enjoy lifting weights and I really enjoy running and I love running outside I believe I used to experience the interference effect when I I used to do a very long run on Sundays I would just go out for you know two hours or something like that I don't know that I ate enough or who knows I always feel like I eat enough or more U I love to eat but that long Sunday Run always made it hard for me to make Progressive yeah um uh gains in strength and hypertrophy in the gym whereas when I cut that to 30 minutes three or four times a week I don't see any interference effect at all probably very real and I haven't trained specifically for endurance in a very long time so I don't um I haven't experience the non- interference effect which as you said before most if not all endurance athletes probably are or at least should be doing some sort of strength work just to keep the undercarriage strong as I think yeah there's a bunch of reasons yeah but yeah so um so what are some protocols that people could explore for continuous endurance training I mean I've thrown out this 150 to 180 minute Zone 2 cardio but that's really the um that's really the kind of kindergarten of endurance um and there I'm probably being generous it's probably the nursery school of endurance that everyone should do what sorts of other protocols I realize that can be very go directed but is it unreasonable for instance for somebody to do um four hours of Z of continuous endurance training with intervals in there as well to get it kind of all around heart health and the ability to go long distances yeah I'll answer this two ways the very first one to tackle the the long duration endurance is how I heard of it um you asked earlier about heart rate zones um to me that's almost totally irrelevant it it doesn't matter right if you're moving you're moving that's that's the functional piece here um if you want to push it and go at a non-con conversational Pace that has tremendous health benefits if you want to do it a little bit slower fine if you're at the pace where you can have a conversation to me I don't even count that as exercise that's not to that's not a pejorative by the way um that is just general physical movement and it is extraordinarily clear you need need a lot of that you need a lot more of that than we get you can do this in a couple of efficient ways just taking your phone calls moving if you got a 30-minute call every day or most days of the week and you can do that while moving you've checked not that whole box but a pretty good chunk of it and that could even be done inside pacing back and forth I'm a big Pacer the yeah me too like you probably saw me like I'm GNA walk up and down all over the place um most of the time when I'm in my office working like I'm I'm Shadow Boxing like I'm doing air squats not even intentionally I'm just like do you have one of those treadmills under the dust I don't but like every lab I ever came through somebody did we did an episode on workspace optimization and the data on those treadmills are pretty interesting they definitely increase alertness um for which for obvious reasons even a little bit of movement is going to generate a little bit of adrenaline um so pacing around moving taking calls moving getting walks when you can and then in terms of building endurance let's say somebody wants to quote unquote get into better shape y um they already may or may not already have some size and strength that they're happy with and they just want to get in they want to improve their health yep when does that 150 180 M thing tick over into a different protocol yeah okay so I think the way that I can outline a weekly schedule just as a conceptual model here um that long duration stuff is not even counting as I mentioned right it's just a this is what you need to do as a human moving forward we haven't improved if you're extremely unfit you may see some changes in cardiovas Health there but for the most part this is just knocking out the general physical practice you need to be higher functioning so whatever that time domain is I don't really care um it's not a huge concern of mine what I think you need to hit are these nodes you need to do something once a week that gets you to a maximum heart rate now I don't have to literally mean Max but close so this means really sucking for aare really like as high as you can possibly get you can wear a heart rate monitor if you want but maximum heart rate the the rough equation we say is 220 minus your age so if you're 40 years old your maximum heart rate is probably about 180 beats per minute now I can tell you flat out right now um my max heart rate is close to 210 which means I'm 10 years old so take that number with a grain of salt I have had a bunch of professional athletes who are in their 20s and their max heart rate's 175 and they are in way better shape than I am so maximum heart rate is not a good proxy for physical fitness it's a rough number an easy way to do it is if you have a heart rate monitor anything like that do the hardest workout you can possibly do see what the highest number you get as and assume that's close that's if you want to just start at 220 Min age that's fine too um do something though where you're like Yep this is death like this is really really challenging for how long however long that takes you that can be a 30 second go on an aerodine or AER assault bike that could be a um uh do one of those things where you kind of like Sprint run as hard as you can during the straightaway on a track and then walk the corners kind of an old classic back when you and I were kids interval training they don't do that anymore I guess I don't know I don't he talk about it in P class we had to change and if you didn't bring running shoes you had to do it Barefoot oh I love it and uh I love your teacher yeah it wasn't a we our football basketball baseball teams weren't that good but um anything like running cross country just because of where I grew up brutal brutal coaches so yeah they'd make the all kids do these runs y so we can be in the the 30 probably seconds at minimum it's hard to get you to a true heart rate Max in shorter than 30 seconds you can get to Total suck in under 20 seconds but getting to a true heart rate Maxes is probably going to take more than 30 seconds so it doesn't really matter what you want to do it can be again a Sprint uphill it could be what you're talking it could be burpees to death you know like whatever whatever you want to do although those have an eccentric component right they do yeah no question about it um but if you did not to actual death by the way yeah if you just did I'm going to do as many burpees as I can for 90 seconds it probably won't take you much longer than that to get to close to and is that the whole workout could be so once a week get to max heart rate touch it I love it touch it it's not the best but it'll it'll work um and what are the specific benefits that that provides okay so earlier in our in our chat we we outlined the rule of specificity specific adap adaptation to impose demand if you're never getting to that high of a pace you're never it would be like trying to get stronger but only going to 60% so every cardiovascular adaptation that occurs with cardiovascular training is just simply going to get to the topper End by doing this so if you just start at the heart itself stroke volume increase so this is amount of blood that's kicked out per contraction uh cardiac output resting heart rate if you go to the endothelial function you're talking about nitric oxide release endothelial Health in general um capillary mitochondria all the way down like you just walk through the whole system pulmonary exchange the lungs all of those are going to benefit by being challenged to their maximum they also teach you where your vomit reflex is yeah there you go right let's hope not um stress is what causes adaptation right so if you push your okay here's the difference if you did 25 minutes of steady state you're not challenging the same thing as what we just talked about um the way that I explain this is if you understand the point the point of physiological failure then you understand the place of adaptation that's it so if you and I both go run on a we did a both did a V2 Max test so classic V2 Max test is going to take 8 to 12 minutes and it's going to look something like this we're going to get in a treadmill and we're going to run and every minute I'm going to just slightly increase that treadmill either the speed or the grade most of the time it's the speed right so we get to a high grade say 10% grade or something and then we go 5 miles per hour 5.2 5.4 5 and we just go until you can't go any longer now let's say you and I did that and we had the same exact time frame and so we both went 8 minutes um the time that you last is not the thing that we care about right it's the it's the volume of oxygen that you breathe out is what determines it so let's say we went at the same time domain and we had the same V2 Max let say they were both 50 milliliters per kilogram per minute which is like a okay number but that's nothing to be extremely proud about just because we have the same number does not mean we have the same point of physiological failure and this matters because it's going to answer the what do I do about it then question right so if you got off and I and I started asking you a series of questions and you're like and I basically said why'd you quit you know why why did you jump off the treadmill why'd you stop and you were like my chest like I couldn't catch my breath I thought my heart was going to explode okay great if you ask me and I said my legs were on fire like I was breathing hard but I couldn't take another step this is a very rough indicator of different places of physiological disruption now what I've seen a lot with my professional athletes especially like Fighters they are tend they're going to generally fail in their legs because they don't often do a lot of strength training in their legs they don't do a lot of leg work they're fighting on their back literally a lot or on top or on their knees so their their legs tend to give out before there someone who fails in the cardiovascular system like say you did a lot of leg training um typically like an endurance athlete who's that's not going to be their issue it's just going to be they're going to reach a heart rate and ventilation threshold that's they can no longer handle if I put you on the exact same train scen protocols it's not going to be as effective because you're going to always fail at your legs and they're going to always fail at their cardiovascular system I need to flip that right I need to put you in a position to where you can reach a true heart rate or ventilation challenge while your legs are still hanging in there um or the opposite so the training protocol is based on that point of failure um the adaptation is in the same thing so if you are um failing because of your legs you might see a greater increase in capitalization in your legs relative to somebody else who's failing in their um cardiovascular system they may see a greater change in and something on that side of the equation so that it it matters how you're failing at all times what I love about this is that it's it's sounds like it's like a thermometer for where one is weak and needs work but also provides a stimulus to improve the very thing that you need that's support in so uh to just get real brass tax about it it would be once a week okay yeah 90 90 seconds near maximum heart rate could I do more could I you know could I do five or six of those 90 second bouts no question you can do um as long as you touch that Max heart rate I'm good right Ideal World probably four to eight in that single session ideal okay right if that takes you 20 seconds or 90 seconds it's fine um if you want to do 30 on 30 off you want to do 20 on 40 off 40 on 20 off those numbers don't matter and is there an interference effect of this on the other sorts of training that we've it actually tends to be complimentary there there's the the evidence available suggests that this High interval stuff is is more likely to be complimentary to hyper training um probably because of lactate and some other cool things um which are very beneficial molecules that people don't understand they they think it's bad it's actually a hugely beneficial thing um it can be interference it can provide interference if calories are not accounted for if rest is not accounted for and other things but in general it's it's probably okay um I wouldn't add it to your equation if you don't need it for maximizing hypertrophy but for the person who wants to just get well-rounded physiology yeah I wouldn't hesitate um to do these even in the same session or different sessions terrific so and if that's done once a week and the 150 to0 minutes or so of Zone 2 cardio is done you know in the rest of the week person's doing their strength and hypertrophy training we would hope what other sorts of endurance practices could one incorporate you mentioned muscular endurance like the ab would like a wall sit or the ability to do a plank was that is that something is that useful for anything Yes except doing planks and wall sitting no no it's extraordinarily useful um let's hold on muscular endurance I want to finish one more thing on this side so if we're building this week of endurance um once a week hit that number if you can do repeated bouts you know we talked four to eight that's fantastic if you can't muscle the the if you can't manage the mental energy every week do it every other week it's still very good right CU I I get it like I'm a working person too and sometimes you're just like I cannot like those workouts feel incredible afterwards but man they are daunting if you love this stuff you could do it four times a week if you hate it though it's not realistic to think you're going to be able to knock this out you're going to end up doing 70 80% which is not going to get you the benefit so just don't do it you really have to hit that CE you got to get up there close have someone Chase I always say you know the um uh to when doing this this kind of work in in my mind I'm thinking that I'm basically being chased by somebody with a with a syringe full of poison yeah and while there are other ways out of the situation and for the benefit of what we're talking about the one I'm referring to is to just run yeah yeah my motivation is typically if you just get this done we're done in a couple of minutes just get it done like don't go here if you're not going to do it but when you show up check in and it's over really quickly breathing down regulation afterwards 100% you have to right it's it's a huge key so if you absolutely can't do it do it every other week that's twice a month give me twice a month can be done on the road can be done in 20 minutes like do a really good thorough warmup don't just jump into those by the way right away it's not going to be as beneficial really nice good sweat broke a really good warm-up and then give me four minutes of hard work and we're done right get out of there um if you want to use like a bath or hot thermal stress to kind of like Aid in that warm-up process fine get in the sauna get in a hot bath get really hot get up there warm warm up knock it out whole thing is 20 minutes plus 5 minutes breathing you're out of there I'm going to start doing this it's so B you got a bike right there yeah I've got all sort every every every room in this studio has a different piece of equipment it seems so I want that once a week realistically every week if I have to I want that physical activity piece call it whatever you want long duration thing ideally you'll do as much of that through your nose only you're not going to be able to do the interval stuff at nose only don't even try but if you can go that whole 30 minute time or 20 40 minutes whatever it's going to be um that's actually a good way to regulate intensity so go as hard as you can while still being able to breathe through your nose only if you have to open up your mouth a little bit fine but try to stay there what you'll see is very quickly you'll be able to increase your work output while just breathing through your nose which has a bunch of other beyto benefits the other piece I want is this Middle Ground which is can you sustain hard work for eight to 12 maybe as little as four minutes I'll give you four to 12 minutes this doesn't have to be quite as high as the first one you don't have to get to a heart rate Max but can you get somewhere in the 80% range and can you hold that for four minutes maybe give me two minutes two minutes of rest and do that twice something like that I ideal situation is what a runner would do is like what we call mile repeats because they're running four or five minute miles whatever time it takes them to finish they're going to rest that so it's a one to one work to rest ratio so a 5 minute mile rest 5 minutes and go again that's probably pretty unrealistic for a lot of folks well the well the five minute part is unrealistic for most folks for me it would be you know eight minutes eight minutes fine probably something like that well in your particular case just do the 800 meter so do 800 meters do something that takes two to six minutes of work um it is a lower intensity than the max stuff but is a much higher workload um that is probably going to give you you might even argue the most card ofas benefit because it is sustained work output and that's very critical the downside of kind of like that conversational Pace it's physical activity it's movement it's blood flow it's lymphatic drainage it's not very cardiovascularly challenging though you're you're just not going to get an Optimal Health from just walking actively so two to six minutes of of hard work of hard work with then an equivalent amount of rest in between and then repeat how many times once if you have to if it needs to be one rep if it needs to be a six-minute thing and then down regulate breed twice if you can do that six times eight times like whatever whatever you can really do and you can just take that as long of a training session as you want or short um exercise Choice can be whatever you want so again you can do sled pushes or it could be a kettle bell circuit or any combination of things where you're just you're working and you're not giving yourself a break you have got to be able to hold on at a very high waste product production level as well as a high demand for energy and then bring it down and breathing during this two to six minutes of of hard uh output is mainly through the nose or combination nose and mouth or is that getting too technical well it's probably like I like it but you tell me if it's too technical um you're going to try to maintain n lonely as much as you can but you're going to lose it at some point um as you you can go through their Brian and Rob's gear system and learn more and then you can kind of see what gear to be in if you have to go nose in mouth out or something like that um but I don't really care too much honestly in that range um I'm getting most of my nasal only stuff at night and training and everything so if you have to open up the throttle there to get the work done that's okay oh then then we'll actually go to your answer your question which was muscular endurance let's go back to that piece muscular endurance is incredibly important for general maintenance of joint health in other words um you have got form follows function right it's a very classic sciencey physiology saying meaning you've got a couple of different there's a bunch but to make it easy two different types of muscle fibers fast twitch and slow twitch fast twitch fibers tend to be but they're not always bigger they contract with a higher velocity that's why they they're called fast twitch but they tend to be more glycolytic and thus fatigable slow twitch are tend to be smaller they'll not always they are more packed with mitochondria they were generally better at burning fat as fuel but contract with lower velocity well we have these two types so that we can regulate function more you have some muscle groups that we're going to oh sorry let me let me go back up a quick second each individual muscle in a human body has a combination of some amount of fast and some amount of slow that percentage of fast versus slow differs from muscle to muscle so it also differs from person to person easy example is your calf muscle there's there's three but there's two primary muscles in your calf one's called the Solus one's the gastrock the the gastrock is the one where if you take your toe and point it towards your face and then Flex that's the one that pops out you know on on the medial side the inside the Solus is what we call an anti-gravity muscle and it is generally about 80% to even 90% slow twitch and that's because it's supposed to be contracted lightly all time though it's supposed to be on permanently it's it's meant to keep we call it anti-gravity because it's meant to keep you erect up and moving your spinal Erectors is supposed to do this various muscles for are generally slow twitch muscles so we're supposed to be on all times not produce fast not produce Force but don't get tired the gas rock is the opposite it's not activated very often but when it's activated it's meant for extreme propulsion so this gives us the ability to reach up and scratch our eyeball and also punch somebody right we have to be able to regulate Force output which is going back to henan right controlling what we use and what we don't use while also not wasting energy which is the the downside of activating a big threshold motor neuron is it's it requires a ton of energy um it's a more efficient mode of energy but the total amount is really really high so muscular endurance is going to help those slow twitch muscle fibers and slow twitch predominant muscles maintain their working job so if you lose your muscular endurance ability in your spinal Erectors or your calf you're going to start slumping into bad positions you're going to be getting U putting joints in in a movement pattern that they're not going to be the most happy with so it's more than about than being able to just maintain a two-minute wall squat it's about maintaining joint integrity and allowing that musculature to not fatigue when you ask it to do heavy and fast so what I mean by that is you've got a whole combination of muscles in your shoulder and we'll generally call these like the rotator cuff muscles well let's imagine those slow twitch postural muscles get fatigued and they start to lose contractile tension and then you go to do something heavy or fast or in an emergency situation those are already pref fatigued you're going to rely more upon the fast muscle fibers which are there less for postur integrity you're likely to get out of position and this is a whole recipe of like God why is my shoulder just hurting got my back that's very often a case of the SL fibers and the SL muscle groups losing muscular endurance so you need to build that backup so that they can control and hold the joint in the position so the fast fibers can then contact with Force I'm hoping that what I'm going to say next meets uh what you said uh accurately my experience is that getting injured uh lifting weights or even doing housework or yard work almost always happens when I'm not paying attention fatigued that's kind of obvious but also getting in position to initiate a movement setting down a weight or lifting weights off the rack or or picking up dumbbells that's almost always when I seem to activate this lower back thing that happens every you know six or eight months and what you're saying if I understand correctly is that this muscular endurance from walls sits or planks or things of that sort maybe you could give us a few other examples of of of these can help us because they actually prepare the system to do what we normally think of as the more intense work so it's it's really the it sounds like it's really the architecture of the of the body that includes nerves and muscles and everything else of course that lets the Limbs and and other kind of action end of the body do do its best work let it express its own power and force yep we've actually landed on one of my final laws of strength and conditioning which is similar to what I said earlier right so I said exercises do not determine adaptations application determines adaptation this one sounds similar but it's quite different there are no good or bad exercises there's only good or bad application here's a great example of that right so you do not get hurt deadlifting because deadlifts are dangerous you only get hurt deadlifting because you either got in bad position you you got in bad position because you either started in bad position which is one of the things you just said or you ended up in bad position you did too much volume you did too much intensity or you did too much complexity those last three things all hurt you because they result in the first one which is out of position or another way to think about this is if it's not a a visible change in position is stress got put into a part of the system that should not absorb that much stress so you did too much of it you did it too heavy you got fatigued and so you broke position you got too heavy so you broke position you you made the exercise too complex you put too many moving Parts in it you put too many joints in it and you got out of position you did that too many times over time now we've led to either an acute injury bam you know back pops and you fall on the or just like man this thing is hurting over time all these are the result of the same thing so you cannot ever blame the exercise for causing the problem it's always either the user or the coach you programmed way too much here and I can't handle that position or you yourself went into it too much so if you're getting these little tweaks and problems going on you've made an error in one of those things so simply back off reduce the complexity right um give yourself more stability less moving parts do less volume volume do less intensity in fact if you look at the people from the physical therapy World in terms of the pain literature it's very clear that just stopping a movement is very rarely going to work what you want to do is back off all the way down to just below that threshold of that's what aggravates it and you want to train right there that's going to allow you to do two things number one tissue tolerance and then number two desensitization a lot of pain stuff and you can probably speak a lot about this is especially with things like low back pain is there's not necessarily often much damage there it's a lot of hyper sensitization of just pain signal pain signal omitting the movement entirely does not get that signal to go away you need to train just below that signal and desensitize it so you want to make sure that the muscular endurance allows you you're just putting volume right below where you start to get a tweak and it's beautifully effective for that yeah I've experienced this right side lower back pain for years sometimes shooting down the hip the two things that really helped uh were doing anterior TI work so you know hats off to knees over toes guy Ben Patrick who has you know created a lot of popularity around yeah um tib work but I turns out joints full range of motion you're in a better spot yeah the something about stabilizing the stuff from the knee down help my back and then also some some neck work and uh friends of mine are always teasing me that my gym is filled with the most bizarre equipment you know doesn't look like any other a lot of it is just designed to keep me healthy and and still training but um I love this idea aidea of getting right at the below the threshold of pain activation and not simply going into to complete um non-action or just taking complete rest because that actually can be detrimental uh I'd love to talk about a few items that support training of all kinds and where there's a lot of confusion and indeed uh misconception and mystery and just get your take on these and and I just want to acknowledge at the outset that for some of these there's a lot of science for some of them there's less science but there certainly is a lot of um experience in in your camp and and those categories are cold heat and hydration ah because obviously whether or not you're a runner whether or not you're strength training if you're a human being uh you need to hydrate um but in terms of work output and uh physical work output maybe even cognitive work output maybe we tackle hydration first I there is what uh what I call and what I think has now come to be known as the the Galpin equation yeah which um you really do deserve credit for because I think that people um realize that there are a range of solutions out there but there is a really A desperate need for um straightforward solutions that work for 75% of people 75% of the time so hydration is key maybe you could underscore just how how key it is for us and then what is the Galpin equation as as I call it and I think others are now referring to it yeah okay um benefits of hydration SLC consquences of mish hydration so whether that's dehydration or overload you physiology has hormetic curves right now typically we think about this in terms of Toxicology so what this means is at some point giving you a dose of something uh testosterone is a very easy example if you're clinically deficient or low in testosterone and I give you a little bit and it brings you back into a normal range you generally see an improvement in health and functionality taking you though from normal to super high doesn't always necessarily provide additional benefit in fact if you continue to go it's going to provide detriment right so everything has this curve and then some things are hormetic stressors which means like a a small short fast insult is actually beneficial because then you come back bigger faster stronger it's that's how adaptation Works basic hormesis okay hydration is the same way so at the end of the curve here if you are under hydrated we all know you could die right you have to have things in fact um water is the only thing that is ubiquitous across by ologies in terms of every living thing has to have it there's no other vitamin mineral nutrient that is required among all living things with the exception of water so that should give you a pretty good indication of it's import right like you got to have this thing down here at the bottom if you're dehydrated and I give you more its beneficial effects however if you up the top already and I continue to give you more water past that now we run into actual problems and we can get what's called hypon nmia which is more common than people realize um nmia being actually not referring to the water but the the sodium concentration being too low and you've probably talked about that at a length of of why that's an issue um if sodium potassium balances inside outside a Cell come off you heart stops right muscle contraction ends uh and all these things um so you don't want to be over or under hydrated so understanding the this rough equation I sort of loosely calculated one day is helpful for that um I think the most context is is talking about how much water to drink throughout the day and then how much water to drink during exercise so the the very easy answer is half your body weight in ounces per day is a very loose guideline for total amount of fluid consumption so if you weigh 200 pounds aim for 100 ounces of water it's like a very easy number if you hit that you're probably I'd say 90% of you are good 90% of the time alone if you then go to exercise you need to then account for that fluid loss with exercise and in general you want to consume 125% to 150% of the amount of weight you lost in fluid in other words if you worked out and you were 200 lb naked and you went and did your workout and then you dried off and you weighed yourself again and now you're 198 lbs you lost 2 lounds of water that's 32 ounces you want to drink back about 125% of that so instead of drinking 32 ounces I want you to drink 40 42 45 like something like this because one of the reasons why is unless you're drinking something that is isotonic meaning the same exact concentrate in your blood that you're in your fluid you're just going to go closer to that hyponatremia um you're going to get a bunch of barrel reflector reflector responses and you're going to actually think you have too much fluid and you're going to urinate it out what if I'm not weighing myself before and after workouts and um is there a uh shorthand version of this that uh you know after training for an hour I should drink at least X number of ounces assuming it's at at kind of Toler you know I'm not sweating super heavily yeah um in that particular case you could probably go something like if everyone in the world did I don't know 12 to 20 ounces that's probably like pretty decent and they're probably doing that right yeah yeah and what about electrolytes consuming salt potassium and magnes but that thing only works though if you're coming in at optimal hydration and this is the problem this is why you have to you have to flag this starting with a good total daily amount of water because if if you're coming in and you're like oh I drink two or three glasses of water a day then you might need to drink 50 or 60 ounces post-workout because you're way behind so that like oh 12 ounces or so works if you're already generally very well hydrated and if people are drinking you know four to six glasses of water a day but they're also drinking a lot of caffeine in any form then they're going to be excreting more water in most cases right well because caffeine's a diuretic okay it kind of is but it kind of isn't either it's not the diuretic that we used to think about it as um it is still fluid consumption so it's only a diuretic if it causes you to excrete more fluid than it actually was being intake so um if caffeine intake is in a normal range I don't I don't have to worry about the diuretic effects if someone is drinking 12 cups of coffee a day we're we're or they're taking caffeine pills or something now the excretion is going to out kick the coverage so now we're have problems right because there's no fluid consumption with the caffeine pill so in general things like tea consumption like I'm not super worried about those things you can count those towards your to Total fluid intake if you want so if you're like I drink 60 ounces of water plus 20 ounces of coffee and then you know this like you're going to add that all up and you're going to be totally okay so natural for you also have problems with synthetic forms of caffeine versus natural forms of caffeine natural forms are are are pretty okay Etc yeah all that stuff kill form is where it gets tricky always like always right so [Music] just eat real food and things you're going to be just fine um the last piece to consider is your diet quality matters because um the fluid content in your food can vary wildly so something like a bagel um might be you know 5 to 10% water or something like a watermelon is 98% 95% something in a huge range even meat is very high percentage of fluid intake like it's a really high even after you cook it there's still a lot of fluid in there so if you're eating a whole food mostly Whole Food based diet your endogenous hydration is actually pretty high already just from your fluid if you're eating a very highly processed dehydrated overs salted diet you you're way low on hydration just in your food so you have to factor all these things in in fact one of the things that happens to us constantly with folks that go from a like highly processed lowquality diet to a high quality one is they just they're just peeing nonstop I'm like what the hell is going on I'm like well you're actually have brought in 60 additional ounces of water in your diet relative to what you used to have and you've gone from 10 grams of sodium there to four to two sometimes one sometimes it gets very low because you're not like salt are you salting your food no okay well we don't have sodium intake then like we're way down so everything that we're considering is based on that so let's assume someone's eating a a pretty well balanced diet they're drinking 60 ounces of water maybe some caffeine and coffee and tea things like that um we don't exactly know the optimal amount of sodium one should intake it is very clear high sodium concentrations are still associated with a lot of negative Health outcomes especially in combination with poor physical activity in combination with low food quality and other comorbidities that's a very bad thing you need to be very careful about those things um if everything else is okay uh we're okay playing with a little bit of higher salt in fact you're probably going to feel better you're going to feel generally pretty good um you just it needs to be very clear if you are overweight highly stressed and you don't have a lot of these things ticked off and you have known core morbidities you really need to pay attention to salt intake it can be very nasty um so that being said what we're generally going to look at folks is are you at least can we categorize you as a low sodium or high sodium sweater if so there's a whole list of electrolytes you can look on that are going to have something like 200 to 400 milligrams per serving and there's a whole list of these things um if you're a low sodium sweater I'm probably GNA send you after one of those if you're a high sodium sweater there's a lot of electrolyte supplements that are closer to six or 800 even even a whole gram um per single serving size so you want to play with that um a very how do you know if you're a low sodium or high sodium sweater we actually have an episode on salt we put out that um or is coming out soon if hasn't come out already which is uh you know when you look at the hazard ratios for salt intake um basically your probability of really bad things happen to you goes way up as you get towards you know a lot of sodium intake you know 10 12 gram per day and um and this is translated to teaspoons of salt Etc but also very low sodium intake is a problem it's a it's not a perfect u-shape it's kind of a j-shaped curve or a kind of hockey stick shape more or less but um how would I know if I'm a low sodium or high sodium sweat would I just kind of lick my sweat or have someone else do you can yeah find a super friend who will lick your sweat for you that's same with how no no willing volunteers that I'm aware of but would I be able to tell y um you can get sweat testing done actually you have a number of options um the kind of the original one that most of us used in the background for many years was called levelin um they'll send you out a little patch you can wear that send it into the lab and they'll measure it directly in the lab and send it back it's 50 bucks or do they Bend you into low medium and high they're going to give they're going to do that but they're going to give you very they're going to tell you exactly the milligrams and then they're going to actually tell you like what products and stuff and um that they're exactly matched do you do this with with professional athletes we have many times yeah interesting um you can do a more consumer grade version Gatorade has a patch for 25 bucks you can get two of them you can put that c patch on your left forearm and download the Gatorade app and you can do a workout measure it right there and click it over and they'll tell you exactly not only high or low but again they'll tell you the milligrams of sodium that are in your sweat and then you can figure out again kind of how medium or I do much better on a slightly higher sodium intake most do um but and my carbohydrate I do eat carbohydrates I'm one of those that is pretty moderate but I try and eat clean Foods so I uh I noticed and I tend to be slightly low blood pressure so again to reiterate the the warning there that if somebody is prehypertension or has hypertension or obese you really do need to be careful with your sodium intake but many people seem to find that they feel better when they increase their sodium intake and they're still in that healthy portion of the hazard rtio most of the athletes I would say in general we're going to go higher in salt when they come we're going to run their stuff and we're going to add salt almost always very few times have I gone ah we need to cut this back with the exception of the ones that come in that eat like 14-y olds and I'm like okay you're 15 milligrams or 15 grams a day because you're eating nothing but garbage so like we're going to come down you're going to feel way better all this bloating and everything else that's going to happen go down um you can do that there actually more there are biosensors that are coming out um that are not available yet but they're coming very soon in this space they're going to be able to give you real time metrics on um salt so you can pay attention to those uh I haven't seen one and Ed one personally so I don't want to um espouse about how good or bad it is but I know that those are coming from a handful of companies an easy way to do is just look at um wear a hat or wear some sort of headband or something and do your workout take it off if you see a just huge white band or if it's completely clear and that's going to tell you big white band you're probably a high cell sweater completely clear very little coming out that's great and I can see the the post on Instagram now people showing their their salt band from from from sweating yeah I mean obviously salt is so essential for so many physiological functions you don't want too high or too low but if you're losing more it makes sense you would need to take in more so half of my body weight in ounces as a just Foundation of of a fluid intake coffee and tea could be included in that but that should probably most mostly water or things similar to it um what and then during exercise the how do I want to think about this again let's say I'm a let's say I'm a high salt output then I'd want to drink maybe 40 ounces of water with or or more yeah okay I I'll do this easier um let's talk about pre and mid and post right so what to drink pre if you if you come in having hit these rules you're you're okay and pre workout can be as little as like five or six ounces basically a couple sips of water fine um if you come in poorly hydrated then you maybe need to go more like 12 but here's the deal if you start off a session in a bad spot you're not going to C catch back up like you just you're you're in trouble let's say you come and you did you follow Direction 500 milligrams salt before 500 milligrams after very easy rule pick whatever Source you want that's a couple of sprinkles of table salt if you want Himalayan that's fine you don't have to Himalayan is actually a fairly low sodium salt so it's not the best for for this purposes um if you're higher saler sweater a little bit more if you want to go choose an electrolyte of which there are infinite um you can look on the packet and it'll tell you you know 250 milligrams per serving or 400 or 600 or whatever happens to be but around 500 pre 500 post is a very general rule and then during is thanks to you uh my famous Galpin equation now that is is all over the world all I did is I took the literature and I said okay in general the research shows pretty clearly 2 milligrams per per kilogram body weight every 15 minutes seems to put you in a pretty good spot most people don't think about kilograms or milliliters so can I just run that over and then turns out it's about your body weight divided by 30 in ounces like that's that's all you have to body weight in pounds divided by 30 yeah exactly right so you weigh 200 pounds divided by 30 and that's the number of ounces you're going to want to go every 15 or 20 minutes or so I'm getting that amount every 15 to yep 20 minutes throughout the training and now in the weight room that's pretty easy to do cuz they're resting but you people will need to do this while running or cycling um and that can cause a little bit of gastric distress if you're not used to it is that right you can you can learn to run with a with some water in your belly 100% the the gut is very trainable in a lot of directions but in terms of fluid as well as carbohydrate which is another thing that is going to get people um but that's yeah very trainable it'll be uncomfortable initially but you'll you'll quickly get into it the better solution for those folks just in hydrated and you might not even need any water you could probably perform just fine um so the ones that don't have as much of an opportunity you really have to emphasize walking in um we have this problem with like professional golfers they have plenty of time to drink water but they're so focused on the shot and there's a lot of variables coming up once they hit their shot they're moving on to the next one they're thinking about I mean they're going over a scorecard of 185 yards away can I go 184 and2 yards can I go 186 yard what's the slope of that where what's the wind up here what's the wind up there what like just just they're just a thinking and they just forget even though they have four and a half hours so we have to make sure that they immediately get off the course we go right into recovery as hard as we possibly can they wake up the next morning they're in a good spot we Crush recovery and now I was like hey if you can remember to drink this great if not we're still fine if it's not a big deal and you have time like in a a lifter because I deal with that problem with Fighters too like I we can only drink so much in the middle of a fight like sips over here but we we can't go mix and 2 m it's like can you get a couple sips in yeah Oh forgot like it's not going to happen so we have to take morees before and after so start your recovery process immediately and then come in the next day that's your window and then whatever you can get in during the workout that's fine too if you're a higher salt sweater instead of doing 500 500 maybe go 750 750 if you have a longer bout of exercise especially if it's hot um or humid then you might want to consider some salt in the workout as well and 300 milligrams during the workout totally fine um it's enough if it is a really long workout and it's really hot and you're going to lose pounds during it you need a specific strategy if you're going to lose less than a pound you don't need to worry about it you're going to be it's not going to be enough of a detriment for you to really care um so that's kind of a rough Rule now if you're 200 plus pounds maybe that number moves from one pound to 2 pounds but really the number we're looking at is what 1% of your body weight if you're losing more than one % of your body weight we need to start caring if it's less than 1% it's not going to really pay that much of a difference okay so for myself um because I don't get super technical I don't wear any devices besides a wristatch um nice watch thanks I yeah do very attached to this watch or it's attached to me I suppose um my body weight in pounds divided by two that's what I'm going to try and get across the entire day um as a kind of Baseline and then my body weight in pounds divided by 30 yeah during the workout every 15 or 20 minutes that I'm going to try and consume that amount and then I definitely do better when I increase the amount of salt that I'm taking in anywhere from 500 to um a 500 milligrams to a gram of salt um several times a day actually but I'm not eating that often which leads me to my other question which is um I prefer to train fasted or semi- fasted meaning first thing in the morning or within an hour or two of waking where obviously I've been fasting while I'm asleep or having not eaten anything for 3 or 4 hours before I just feel lighter and like more more energetic uh if that works for me is that okay or uh or should I try is it better to eat something before one trains personal preference easy easy answer there um it depends on of course how hard you trained what the training was like what sport you're involved with how many toal Etc but in general personal preference for the average person yeah that probably handles 90% of the um questions about that cold cold showers ice baz and cold immersion up to the neck I I always uh preface this by saying there are not a a lot of studies there are some but not a lot of controlled studies looking at cold showers because it's harder to control the variables of where people stand so I would say if you have access to cold immersion of some sort ice bath or cold immersion great but if you don't cold showers would be the next best thing the lore goes that if you do an ice bath or cold water immersion after strength or hypertrophy training that you are short circuiting some of that the lore also goes that cold showers might be okay and my interpretation of those data and that discussion is that all that is probably true but I have a hard time imagining that the effects are so robust that it can completely prevent strength gains and hypertrophy such that my stance for myself is try and do the cold exposure training away from the strength and hypertrophy training but if you can't do it any other time right afterward probably isn't going to throw my whole system out of whack uh and prevent the improvements am I deluding myself um couple caveats here number one I would say I have a personal vested interest in cold I've been around this stuff for a long time um being involved and being an adviser for xpt and being in this space a long time I'm a big believer in cold especially cold water deliberate cold exposure 100% right so that being said uh I do think getting into an ice bath immediately after a HP session is getting pretty close to you just shouldn't have done the session it is detrimental good to know I wouldn't do it I guess is the most blunt way to put it um if you're like hey like I'm not super concerned with growing muscle and I want these other things that come with cold water immersion fine it's not a zero it's not zero it's not taking you backwards how much does it cut you down I don't know we don't know like that'd be a difficult number to come up with um is it 1% reduction no it's more than that is it 100 not even close I don't know where it lands though it's enough though for me to go in general best practices don't get in the ice immediately after a workout how long should I wait well in theory the best answer we could give you would be 4 hours because of what we talked about earlier today of of going okay immediately you've got this signaling Cascade that takes seconds you've got gene expression that's happening in this rough 4-Hour window after the genes have gone off and now you're just going through the protein synthesis process the signal is already there and it's gone back down to Baseline so then reintroducing or introducing cold here is not going to disrupt that signal that's a very um non-scientific founded because we don't know at this point at all what is very clear though is if you get off your workout go right into the eye it's probably 10% attenuation of growth I don't know maybe more depends on the person some people if you look at the individual data it's a pretty bad it's enough to where it's like that that's a really big deal the benefits of the ice I don't think now outweigh the benefits of of the hypertophy training what about cold showers I don't think cold showers are going to do much um you if you've been on both you know that this is like we're not playing the same game here right an ice bath or cold water a true cold water immersion up to the neck with limbs in for one to 5 minutes is a completely different stimulus than in the cold shower especially also compared to a similar like cryo right it's not even the same same thing here um so in general I would say don't do those cold shower I don't really care can you work it out so you don't do them at the same time that would be my hope right um I would actually prefer you do the cold before if you really had to do it um certainly will wake you up get that adrenaline burst no we've played with that actually years ago um doing that um there's actually some fun stuff you can do with the endurance piece with cold stuff but it's totally not feasible for most people because you get out of you're getting water everywhere they jump on your bike and just get and it's just a giant mess it's fun but yeah I would say walk away from it if you can that's actually that's where I stand based on the data um based on my intuition and experience I don't I don't think it's a good thing to do now having said that that's mostly concerned with maximizing hypertrophy strength is not as clear there are some data to show it actual block strength adaptations but because of what we talked about earlier the mechanisms and the drivers are different and so I don't think it's as big a concern um for strength development though I would still generally say if you can get away with staying out of the ice immediately after the workout and you can at least wait a few hours that's the better approach less concerned with strength more concerned with hypertrophy in terms of interference effect um if you can do it on off days or before or any other time that's that's the place to land that's generally when I try to do it I'm just kind of throwing out an extreme case because I get to asked that question a lot what about the use ice bath or cold water immersion or cold shower after endurance training okay so a couple of interesting things here you mentioned we don't have a tremendous amount of data on cold water immersion overall so a lot of this is moving um there have been some papers to show that cold water immersion can actually enhance mitochondrial biogenesis and actually even for endurance stuff it's been shown to to cause Improvement endurance adaptations relative to not it's not for me to be truly confident in that statement yet I would like to see that repeated not not that I have a problem with the paper the methodology that they use in that particular study but this is this is a weird thing so I want to see this repeated more often so I have less concern with doing it immediately post endurance because you could even argue that there may be some benefit I don't think you need to go out of your way to try to make sure you get into ice immediately afterwards and thinking you're going to get some massive adaptation um we use ice a decent amount when I can get athletes to do it but this context is different number one when we're in Camp and we've got a world title fight coming up or something else um we've just pitched in in a Major League baseball game I am not concerned about hypertrophy I am not even concerned with strength development I am now pushing towards recovery there's a paradigm that I think is important with all of these things to understand which is are you pushing for optimization or adaptation when you're pushing for adaptation you don't want to block the signal for adaptation this means less recovery you're not going to feel as good and you probably should be hedging towards stress when you're pushing for optimization it's the opposite so if I'm in season and I had a picture just throw 125 pitches I'm not trying to cause adaptation I'm trying to recover as quickly as possible because four days from now we got to do this again and I got to do this across 162 games um i' you're going to play six days five days in a PGA golf tournament and you're G to have to do it again every week for a bunch of weeks in a row I need recovery as fast as I possibly can so if I'm blunting adaptation fine I'm not trying to do that I'm trying to optimize if you spend all of your time in one of those two areas you're going to have problems so you need to be judicious about thinking is this a point in my life or training cycle that I want to cause adaptations or am I trying to optimize you spend too much time and and one of the other ones again you're going to have problems so that's in generally how I will treat um the ice for for all those adaptations what about heat yeah when and I'll frame this question differently because I I'm sure there are a number of ways in which heat can short circuit all sorts of things I mean heat can in excess can kill you uh it can shut down fertility it can um in excess right it can do all sorts of things but it can also increase growth hormone increase Bas of dilation improve one's ability to sweat which can be very beneficial in a number of contexts yeah for the typical for 75% of people 75% of the time when do you think heat is most useful and here I'm referring to dry sauna or wet sauna I'm not specifically talking about infrared sauna because the data there are a little unclear to me and I I don't even know that my sense with infrared saas is they don't go hot enough for my particular taste you and I have a similar taste there okay for not crushing 200 past I'm I'm not interested right and and my sense about infrared sauna is that maybe I haven't seen the data is that um but that a lot of people like it because they like the way they look in the infrared son it it feels cool it feels like you're doing something unusual now infrared lights are beneficial for other mitochondrial the retinas good data but infrared sauna to me they never goes hot so I'm talking about 200 or hotter maybe 180 to 220 obviously do what's safe folks and heed all the warnings about pregnant people not going saas Etc I assume you're lumping in hot water immersion is the same hot water immersion so hot bass hot sauna when would you like when do you think most people could leverage sauna or hot baths to benefit their training and fitness and and health yeah okay I have a a handful of things to say about this topic one of them is you never have a hard time convincing people to get hot everyone feels good like yeah getting a hot bath like can you take more hot showers sure like no problem there right um there are a handful of studies that have looked at uh this immediately post and it seems to even augment hypertrophy so after hypertrophy training getting in the sauna for 20 minutes yeah whatever whatever needs to be um we don't have a good titration what's the number minutes wise we don't have a temperature titration hot hour would would be a second that would be a weak second best I would say it's a very weak second take a hot bath I think a hot bath is probably a lot closer to what you're looking for it actually kind of goes back to our initial conversations theoretically you're just going to Aiden blood flow so you're going to put more nutrients in more waste product out metabolic stress all that stuff is going through so that's the thought anyways we we far from sense plausible right absolutely plausible something people will do feels good um let's say with cold and hot I want to caution you against a couple of things this is true across all physiology but you need to be really careful about moving percentages from molecular to outcome very careful so for example it's easy to see a paper um that says okay we put you in a hot bath or something and we saw growth hormone increased 300% that is not going to result in 300% increase in muscle size right in fact 300% might result in absolutely no change in physical size right so the and the reason I'm saying this is because there's a lot of people in this space that will misapply the mechanisms and they'll they'll grossly overestimate what these things can do and what they do do because they'll find something like that um I mean you know this you've done enough cellular work to in the lab if I see mtor doubled um I think it didn't work I need to see a 10x increase before I know it's even physiologically relevant So reading that paper reading someone's Social Media post you're like wow it increased mtor 38% I'm like well it didn't work and you're like wow that's huge I'm like that's not 38% increase in muscle size so that's a very important point I want to make because I'm going to talk about the benefits here in a second but um I do want I don't want people to be fooled into thinking that this is some crazy Miracle um the same thing with the sauna in terms of General health health outcomes it is a clearly a beneficial thing this is a really good idea to get hot a lot it is not a subtitute for exercise though it's a very important distinction if the an if the options are nothing or sauna get in the SAA really really good idea if the The Exchange is though I don't need to work out because I did the sauna bad you this is not a winning solution you and I know some Maniacs that actually work out in the sauna oh we do yeah they're not far I don't necessarily recommend that that actually could would probably kill a large number of people but it can be work it can be worked up to yeah certainly yeah so I want like every time I talk about that I I flag that because it's just too easy to hear that and go oh well I think Dr hubman said if I just get in the sauna I don't have to work out like no no those words have never come Def say that and I'm definitely not working out in the sauna if I'm in the sa I'm either sitting or I'm lying down and I'm trying to make it through I tend to do three 20 minute bouts yeah across the entire week so I aim for 60 minutes per week of heat exposure which is not a ton if I said I've never worked out in the sauna oh so you're of those yeah people will do air squats they'll bring the air dime bike in there I'm I look at the sauna as kind of a time to get lazy and sweat totally fine um going back toal question so potential to Aid plausible Aid we need to see more research on that to really get a you I to put this in practice I think if you try it very little harm I I I struggle to see a downside if you make sure you're hydration some point right because now you got to factor in the fact you just kicked out two or three pounds if you're you at at 200 plus pounds I assume or roughly um if you're in the son for 20 minutes I would imagine you can do two three pounds yeah usually I'm I'm hover somewhere around like 225 and I drink um I drink a 32 ounce right bever it's water with the electrolyte Solution that's pretty high salt afterwards and sometimes during and sometimes after that if I do it late in the evening I'll go to sleep and I'll wake up in the middle of the night just feeling so parched it's amazing how much water one loses in the sauna like a normal sweat rate for summon 225 especially in 20 minutes on a I would absolutely expect you to do 3 lounds easy without I should be drinking more even more water yeah you're probably half the water that you need to get and you mentioned the the possible benefits of doing it after strength hypertrophy training which are make sense for plausible mechanistic reasons um no no official data there yet what about after endurance training assuming somebody hydrates well enough and they're not overheated from their endurance work yep could also be of benefit yeah wow so more and more what I'm thinking the framework here is in an ideal world one would train and then do sauna y or heat exposure of some kind endurance training or strength hyper trvy training and then do sauna and then do cold exposure on off days or at least four hours away from the from any kind of training or if you had to do it close to training doing it before training yeah I love cold in the morning we we've actually run this experiment on professional athletes where we do enough tracking with things like HRV which is a global metric of like overall fatigue okay and you probably talked about that before but problems with it but roughly IDE um HRV in general higher the score the better right so a low HRV is fatigue right well if you wake up and take your HRV in the morning and then you get into ice what's going to happen is you're going to see that number plummet the second you get out that's going to fall off the Earth which means roughly you've moved into a sympathetic um Place surprising you get in 30 degree water you're G to go very sympathetic very quickly however if you continue to watch your HRV for 30 60 90 and up to two to three hours post you will generally see a an improved HRV score relative to where you started so it's it's back to this hormetic stressor right a really cold shocking exposure will be a net result of you being more relaxed throughout the day in general and we've seen that now like very consistently across years with with athletes so so I think it's a great way to start your day um you won't need nearly as much coffee after spending 3 minutes in 30° water 30° is pretty pretty darn cold I was in the ocean this morning for about 3 minutes it felt like I didn't bring a thermometer but it felt like somewhere in the low 50s but 50 and moving is really cold yeah water is moving right that's really cold that's right the thermal layer that that uh surrounds you when you sit still in cold water immersion I'm encouraging people now if they really I was a joke that you know people like to look real stoic and tough when they're in there like they're just grinding through it with no pain at all but the the Stillness is actually reducing the the stimulus if they sift around a little bit you break up that thermal layer that's where the real action is we we've Jed about this for years like do 50 degrees with a Whirlpool jet on now I'm impressed because that that is hard you sit in 35 degree for three minutes like it's but with xbt I've seen I can't even tell you how many hundreds of people from all walks of life on all age that we've been able to get in 30 some degree water for 3 minutes 50° with a WHL poool going that number gets very small yeah and if you don't have access to a Whirlpool this is this should be reassuring to you you can some people say oh you know I don't have access to ice and ice can actually get pretty expensive if you're doing a $50 ice bath every day so you can fill your bathtub with um cool to cold water get in but just make sure that you keep sifting your limbs and it it's chilly yeah um and this the studies on the very well EST now well established increases in dopamine and epinephrine that occur in cold water exposure we're actually done at an hour in 60° fhe yeah and so it you don't necessarily need it ice cold or an ice bath but immersion is really better than the cold shower the cold shower is kind of a it's the um it's it's kind of the espresso shot version yeah yep know that's it's sort of funny because if you look at most of those initial studies and you think man how did they get people to sign up to spend 45 minutes in 55 degree water 55 degrees is cold even if it's not moving and then they're going to not spend 5 minutes in it they're going to go an hour and if you've ever done ice bass at that temperature you know like all right after a few minutes it's not that bad but man that's a protocol yeah it's it's kind of an end a cold endurance protocol because one thing to get in for one minute to three minutes and you know you're getting out you could sing a song you could do anything to distract yourself but 45 minutes to an hour is is intense uh maybe they I don't I don't think they paid the subjects but anyway that that study was done in Europe I forget where it was done but um anyway they were they were Hardy subjects I want to talk a bit about overtraining and gauging recovery yep um so there are a couple methods that um I've heard about and that I use um based on some data that I've seen but mainly discussions with really informed people like yourself Brian McKenzie uh Kelly Starrett and others the two that I'm aware of for gauging recovery of the nervous system and kind of systemic recovery are um grip strength especially uh grip strength on waking in the morning yeah and uh the so-called carbon dioxide tolerance test ability to do a long controlled exhale after a few uh rhythmic deep breaths just which I'm assuming Taps into both um mea uh one's ability to mechanically control the diaphragm but also how well one is regulating carbon dioxide first question is is this stuff um fiction fact or um a combination of kind of anic data as I call it uh are there any peer-reviewed publish data is your lab working on these things and um am I diluting myself using these tools or or are they useful it's not fiction at all there are um with with like CO2 tolerance there's less published data we've run um a study in our lab looking at the associations between the CO2 tolerance and what we call trait and state anxiety um and those are in the publication process is what I'll say um great so you can't really talk about that stuff as you know and until it's out but in general I'd say like there's a reason I'm still doing it I'll just I'll just leave it at that yeah well assuming it's it's not a clinical trial I mean I think sharing um preliminary findings is fine as long as we highlight them as preliminary yeah I'm not a reviewer but I look forward to reading the paper yeah but as you know scientific ethically like you need to be careful about sending telling people results before you've gone through that process right which is why I'm flagging this as these results are not yet peer passed through the peer review process so you're hearing about it prior to peer review yep having said that um there's enough in that field I'm not the first one into that field and so it I'm very confident that that's that's real thing um in terms of actual tracking recovery the big picture is this when we run through a full analysis when we when we have an athlete go through our biom biomolecular athlete program we're going to run and we're look at three major categories okay category one are what we call Visible stressors and then we have hidden stressors and then we have recovery capacity anytime the total stress load outpaces recovery capacity you're either going backwards in your physical ability or you're reducing adaptability now you have levers to pull here you can reduce stress intake or you can increase recovery capacity right what we want in an ideal situation is to be able to implement the most stress possible because that's the driver of adaptation recover from that now we get the most adaptation an adaptation being simply a change whatever change you want it to be that's that's our gold standard right it's pie in the eye some people have endogenous differences they just recover better they don't there are genetic factors but let's talk about the ones that are manipulatable if we go to the stress side of it you want the throttle to be pushed as far down on the ones you want stress from and as far off of the ones you don't want stress so that the adaptation comes in the exact area you want and you're not burning gas in something you don't care about because you're just you're you're taking that total stress bucket too high um recovery capacity over there so here's how you can do that you can run some analytics and measure what we do with everyone through these these very comprehensive breakdowns to figure out what's that physiology look like hidden and visible and then what's the recovery capacity once we have that blueprint we can now figure out what are the two or three things we need to track that are these indicators of what we call Performance anchors so an anchor is something that kind of drags behind you or below you that slows you down the analogy being let's say we're going down one of these amazing Canyon roads and I won't say which Canyon we're in so you can stay hidden here um and your car is going down at a certain velocity and you want to go faster most most people's first impulse is to hit the gas the accelerator we want to push well that's fine but if your foot is on the brake and you push the accelerator you might go a little bit faster but number one you're wasting a lot of literal gas to go a little bit faster and two you're burning your engine you might you're going to blow the easier solution is just take your foot off the brake you're going to go faster by just stopping yourself then if that's not fast enough we can hit the accelerator everyone wants to just push down right right more stimulant more optimization bing bing bing bing here our first analytics are where are these performance anchors what's dragging you back what's hand what's putting down the break I want to move those two or three things out of the way and now let's see how far you get oh look at that your recovery capacity has gone way up your adapt your adaptations are happening faster now or we can do more work because you're recovering quicker so we're trying to figure out in those buckets and we have a whole host of things that we measure biomarkers and surveys and everything else that we go through to find out what's there so after we've done that now we're just going to track a few of these recovery markers along the way to figure out what's globally happening so that could mean grip strength um I have some folks who we're going to test grip strength daily others we're going to look at HRV or combinations we may look at performance metrics like a a force plate so you're going to do a vertical jump every single day and we're going to see where that's at we've used the tap test before which is how many times you can tap your finger as fast as possible it's a rough indicator of central nervous system in in a say one minute interval exactly and there's apps you can do on this like you tap his finger as fast as you can it's G to say hey you did 60 Taps today and your your average is 75 I like that because it Taps into h no pun intended um into upper motor neuron capacity because a lot of things like like grip strength obviously I have to send the deliberate signal to my hand to grip but at some point the lower motor neurons are going to be taking over the majority of the work like the signal is probably one and done whereas the um tapping is going to be uh repetitive um sending of signals from upper motor neurons yep so some of the athletes I work with we track blood every day we track urine every day we track um ideally a combination of subjective and objective measures everything from how did you feel last night to environmental sensors of their bedroom uh full psgs going on running like actual Sleep Diagnostics not Ora running nothing against Ora but like full analytics and some of them it's as simple as how' you feel today and what was your vertical jump right so we're going to put people in a position to succeed we're going to figure out what's the lever that they need to pull as well as what's their aptitude what sport are they in what can we realistically get away with and some of them will take machines with them and we'll do blood every day and urine and and all kinds of stuff and some of them it's it's a lot lower for myself I I'm not as I mentioned before I'm not a big fan of devices I'm trying to wear the wristwatch I tend to go off feel which is not uh it's not the ideal objective way to gauge things but um part of my reasoning for this is my colleague from the psychology department uh uh Dr Aaliyah Chrome has done some studies where they've um given PE deliberately given people false feedback about their sleep so told people you didn't sleep very well or they've told people you slept really well and performance can be driven in the expected Direction based on feedback independent of how well people slept or didn't sleep now that doesn't mean you can take someone that only slept two hours or was up every 30 seconds because of apne and tell them they slept great and they're going to perform great cognitive tasks but you can take someone who slept very very well tell them that their recovery quotient wasn't very good and their their output is going to be worse and that's my concern about a lot of devices out there not to name specific devices but it's still unclear to the general public what the specific algorithms are to generate these recovery scores right and so many of the things that reportedly um track sleep aren't tracking sleep they're tracking heart rate and breathing which are corelates of sleep depth but that's different and again I'm not knocking those I think the Sleep trackers if nothing else have provided a forum whereby people are very conscious of getting good sleep it's sort of like knowing the total caloric intake of your food people go wow I'm actually eating a lot more than I thought calibration or less in some cases but often the case is that it's more so I think for the typical person I'm wondering whether or not like myself um because I'm not a a a competitive athlete or certainly not a professional athlete um competive with myself I suppose but no one else morning pulse rate I tend to take when I waking um if I wake out of a really stressful dream I might relax a little bit and then just take my pulse rate kind of get a range and see if it's spiking for whatever reason I don't tend to measure grip strength although I've heard you can just use a classic uh scale um oldfashioned scale with the the Neil now oldfashioned um or some other more technical device is probably um good if there's a lowc cost one yeah they're all and then the carbon dioxide tolerance test so we haven't really talked about that in in specific ways my understanding of it is it's uh four deep slow breaths in through the nose out through through the nose and then a big inhale as Max exhale and then time duration of exhale through the nose and then stopping the stopwatch at the point where lungs are empty not necessarily as long as one could hold their breath did I get that right pretty much okay and I guess we should credit you and Brian McKenzie yeah those guys yeah and and the folks um under uh Brian's umbrella for uh really establishing this as a really good metric when and how can I use the carbon dioxide tolerance test to gauge recovery uh upon waking um post training session yeah would that be a good time uh number one answer is whatever you do do be consistent so do it under like any good science experiment do it under the exact same conditions as you can that generally means somewhere in the morning because that's when you're probably going to have the most control most stability um going so yeah like you would take any HRV or other metric wake up get under control get stabilize take your metric got it going to be pretty good got it sodium bicarb baking soda um rumor has it and data has it that it can actually be a pretty effective training tool very effective could you explain a little bit of about how it works and how one might explore using sodium bicarb to enhance training output in a couple of different context yeah so there's a handful of these ubiquitously effective supplements for performance sodium bicarbonate is one of them it's a very ingenious idea because it's so simple effectively muscle contraction happens because enzymatic function occurs within a fairly specific PH range right so if it gets extremely acidic it doesn't like it and so whether you're running through aerobic glycolysis or anerobic or anything else all these things require even ATP hydrolysis requires atpa an enzyme has to enzymes don't function well outside of this fairly special range so what happens is generally fatigue this the sensations of fatigue are actually caused by some signal that hey we're starting to run out of pH we're getting in the wrong range you're not out of gas usually you're not too low on oxygen you're not running low on muscle glycogen yet you're typically going to see signs or feel signals of fatigue way prior to that mostly being pH issues that being said what if we could regulate PH better enter bicarbonate right so um without going too far into metabolism effectively what happens is is you take an inhale and you're mostly breathing in oxygen O2 when you exhale you're breathing out CO2 so the difference is you've gained a carbon somehow well all of your carbohydrates in your body come in the form of long carbon chains in fact that's what a carbohydrate means it is a one carbon molecule that has one water molecule attached it's a carbon that has been hydrated in the case of like glucose blood sugar let a six carbon molecule right in terms of of fat which are the only two places you're going get most of your cellular energy carbohydrates and fat that is also a big long block and chain of carbons so whether you're getting your energy from fat or carbohydrate you're going to split those atoms so in other words you've got six carbons attached to each other and in this part of chemistry it's exonic so when you break that carbon Bond so break one of those carbons off from the other that's going to release energy just like if you had a pencil in here and I snapped it it go bang and Pop I broke the bonds that were connecting that graphite the next piece of graphite and that released energy because I put energy into the system Etc okay as a result though we've now had you know say five or six carbons chained together we broke one off the end which is not how it works but making the point and now you have one free floating carbon you use that energy release to then go make ATP to then go make your muscles contract but now you've got carbon floating around you can associate free floating carbon with being at a higher acidic level it's not going to happen the only way that you're going to go through this process is if your body says do we have an oxygen molecule available that we can bind this to immediately yes we do that carbon attaches to that oxygen molecule you can't just put CO2 in the blood because of what we just talked about so you're going to bind it through this bicarbonate process it's going to go through your blood it's going to go into the lungs it's going to go back into its carbon dioxide molecule it's going to trans go through the alveoli into the lungs and you're going to Exhale so you went from carbon to this bicarbonate system back into carbon exhale so inhal O2 plants go the opposite by the way so they're going to breathe in the CO2 they're going to cleave off that carbon stack those carbons together and that's how they get larger um in your in your blood those six carbon chains are called glucose if we store that in your muscle we call it glycogen so we take a bunch of glucose and stack it together in a plant we call that starch that's seally what it is right so you took a bunch of carbon from the atmosphere stuck it all the together and that's a starch um if you want to do it in the form of fruit we take that starch like from the ground you put it up through um the tree go all the way up to the top put it into the flower break it up into these big huge chunks of starch into little forms called fructose or glucose that's why fruit has fructose in it and that's why tubers and stuff have starch in them basically starch in an animal is glycogen us okay all that to say if that's happening and we know that a byproduct specifically of anerobic like colis meaning the breakdown of carbohydrates for fuel typically in a very fast pace with low oxygen availability the downside of that equation is acid production we know that that's a problem because I I started the conversation off there intentionally so what if we could reduce the acid buildup now you know how pH kind of works I went and kind of double negatives there right you don't want too much acid buildup then could we prolong and sustain energy um in a more effective pace of especially in this Anor robic um interval kind of environment and again that's important because in those things failure is not a result of running out of fuel or oxygen it's a result of fatigue building up way too quickly is that also true for resistance training uh there's maybe more of the the phosphate system that can be an issue it could simply be an issue of force production you just don't have enough Force you're not out of energy you just can't muster enough um Force you do enough reps then it's going to be an issue there phosph would be the big winner MH depending um so to come back a little bit to the beginning and then I'll I'm circling this all together intentionally all right well the way that we produce energy is going to be in two primary categories anerobic and aerobic aerobic meaning with oxygen anerobic meaning without in terms of muscle contraction you're pretty much talking about carbohydrates or fat now fat is going to be exclusively aerobic meaning I'm to use fat from the entire body roughly equally so you're doing a Sprint up a hill and your hamstrings or your glutes or your quads are on fire you can't you're not just going to use the fat that's directly in those hamstrings you're going to lose it from the entire body it has to go through lipolysis so it's in this stored form and adapost tissue it's got to get broken down put into blood blood's going to have to go through your body get taken up into muscle taken up through muscle into the mitochondria then we're going to have to go through this process called bet oxidation so remember carbohydrates in glucose especially is a six carbon molecule fat if it's in the form of a tri glyceride it is a three carbon glycerol backbone and three you know try one two three fatty acids three carbon backbone and those fatty acids are just big long chains of carbon that's all it is right so we're going to break that thing down put it in the blood move it up move it into our mitochondria you can't walk those things across the Mond wall they're too big so what you have to do is cleave them off into little chunks and it turns out we break them off into two carbon chunks so we call it beta as in two move those into mitochondria that can go through this little thing called kreb cycle or tricylic acid cycle and you kick out a bunch of energy out of that you had two carbons so as a result of that process you're going to generate two carbon dioxides but remember you can only go through that process if oxygen is available because you have to be able to place those carbons onto something or acid gets up way too high too fast this is one of the reasons why fat is a nice fuel source but it's very slow it's takes physical time to move from the back of your shoulder into your blood down your hamstring uptake uptake uptake in addition it's required oxygen availability if you need energy faster you simply don't have the time to bring in the oxygen transport it through go through capillaries exchange through a tissue Etc carbohydrate on the other hand is going to be stored locally in the exercising muscle cell and specifically in the cytoplasm as glycogen as gluc yeah as glycogen in the stored there so what's going to happen initially your initial demands for exercise for fuel are going to come from the glycogen stored within the muscle fiber itself it's just going to break right there and you're going to be off the races so you have the six carbon molecule you're going to break it into two separate three carbon molecules okay boom that breaking provides you a tiny bit of energy very small but some now you're going to take those two three carbon molecules and you want to be able to oxidize them because that's your only Next Step but in order to do that you got to go those into mitochondria so you got to break one of those molecules off so then you'll be back to your two carbon molecule just like you did with fat that's going to go into mitochondria and then it's going to go through the exact same CB cycle two carbons Etc but hold on if you don't have sufficient oxygen or sufficient mitochondria availability and you're stuck at that two three carbon place what the do you do you have problems right now we have to say okay wait a minute we have two a three carbon molecule and we have a bunch of this acid build up now acid functionally is is hydrogen that that's what PH potential hydrogen is what PH stands for right so if hydrogen is building up as a byproduct of muscular contraction and then you're having this three carbon molecule what it can actually do is grab one of those hydrogens and those three carbon molecules by the way are called perate perovic acid right if you take a perovic acid and you grab hydrogen put it on top of it we now have a different name for it it's called hydrogen peroxide lactate bingo right that's what lactate lactic acid is right so we've now built that up so number one reason why lactate is not causing your fatigue it's actually preventing it and it does a bunch of other really cool stuff but the point is that system can only lasts so so long that gets overwhelmed very quickly what are you going to do with the rest of this hydrogen well if you started off in a normal PH range you you don't have very far to go before you've now gone into that level of too much acidity if you start off at a more basic and and basic I don't mean simple I mean chemistry right and more alkaline then that same amount of increase in pH is no longer now just puts you back in your physiological range so sodium bicarbonate whether taken as a cream or a powder or baking soda or anything else can simply put you in a more alkaline State even acutely so this is something you can take right now before your your workout um you're going to delay what we call delay the progression of fatigue and how would how would people start to approach this practice I my understanding is you can do this with common um you know store-bought baking soda no question um there's always a concern about gastric distress um that it's a very effective laxative um sometimes an unwanted laxative effect but how would one approach this before let's say I'm I'm going to I'm doing the mile repeats yep exercise uh uh mile repeats protocol that we talked about earlier I'm doing that for a few months and now I want to try the sodium bicarb yep approach I'm well hydrated hopefully I'm well rested I'm ready to go when am I going to drink this um sodium bicarb solution what how would I make the solution uh let's say I'm I take 10 ounces of water yeah how much bicarb do I want to sodium bicarb should I put in there can we come up with a is it half a teaspoon is it a teaspoon um here's what I'm going to tell you you will thank me by starting lower you can always go more later so a little pinch you cannot go backwards how about I start with a quarter teaspoon fine half honestly half is fine half a teas to dissolve that slug that down I I read a study recently that showed that people will hit their um the the peak benefits of this at different times but it's somewhere if I if memory serves me correctly somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes later so I might want to drink it on the way to the track it can it can be as low as 20 okay so maybe um as I get to the tracks since I'm going to do some warmup with some walk and jogging I I say 45 minutes okay that's a just a very rough standard but yeah you're right it is it is individualized um and you probably want to play with that a little bit if not just somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to an hour okay and then um the perceived and real fatigue if done correctly the perceived in real fatigue ought to be reduced yes I can do more work without feeling exhausted will I feel less of a lactate burn done in air quotes for those listening I realize that's a very crude way to describe a complex physiological process y um fantastic can sodium bicarb be used repeatedly for longer duration training Y and if I were going to use it with um weight training for whatever reason maybe I'm doing circuit type training or I'm doing the superet type strength training that you talked about before Push Pull Push Pull where it's a little bit more cardiovascularly demanding y um then maybe I'd sip that throughout the workout make sure there's a bathroom nearby it sounds like because I do I am aware that um many people get pretty serious gastric distress it can happen very quickly okay great well it sounds like an amazing training tool um I really appreciate you sharing because I think it's it's one that doesn't get a lot of air time these days cuz it's been around but um sounds like it has some pretty impressive effects you know what's sort of funny about that is I mean I get it pop culture is what it is but still to this day if you want to talk about sort of your most effective General Health performance supplementation it's the same three to four to five and it's because they work really well without going into the chemistry of each one and the practice of each one because I definitely want to get you back to talk about diet nutrition and supplementation oh um at some point but I think we need a full couple of hours to get that right Y at least um if you as a teaser would you mind just listing off the other um supplements that you have found are very effective for for many people so sodium bicarb baking soda is one what are some of the other ones yeah we'll go kind of in reverse order beta alanine is another very classically effective one um similar idea the sodium B carbon so it's it's it's going to bet Allen is going to come in it's going to be converted and stored as what's called car carine in the muscle and carnosine is an intracellular buffer so in other words it's just going to delay the buildup of acid um so fatigue blocker if you will so very effective very cheap very safe um well studied the top one though of all of them by far that has an incredibly strong safety profile it has it is a cheap it is a simple form to get has a important magnitude of effect and is effective across multiple domains of physical health and performance and it is because of that it is my crown jewel it is in my opinion without questioning the Michael Jordan of all supplementation and that's creatine monohydrate it affects so many things we typically think about it as its muscle stuff right you talked kind of you quickly were're talking about the creatin phosphate system but we have to realize um the mass majority of research on Creatine phosphate is not in sport performance and has not been for 20 years it's inclinical and it has everything from effects um on the neurological system to there have been associations to mental health and depression and to be very clear I am certainly not saying you can take creatine and cure anything and I'm not saying it's going to stop you from depression or anything but I'm saying there's there's a lot of research in these areas and there's a reason people are doing it yeah I completely agree and if you're willing I'd love to have you back for us to do a discussion on Creatine and the brain or creatine and the nervous system that would be a lot of fun and maybe we can do a a kind of a journal Club in advance of that for those that don't know a journal Club is where um scientists uh read a bunch of papers and then argue about them discuss them and try and extract the the kind of um uh agreed upon Center of mass uh if you will I I think uh I've long been taking five grams of creatin monohydrate per day for mainly for the cognitive effects it um I sense an effect that's obviously anic data but there I think there are a lot of data out there as you there's enough that you're not you're not crazy there's enough there uh and in fact there's enough mechanism now um to understand the metab needs people think the I'm muscle guy right so I'm going to think about the metabolism needed to fuel muscle but we forget cells immune cells red blood cells nerve cells asites brain all this stuff requires energy and it's all going through metabolism super interesting we we will do the Deep dive on that soon I have a final question for you you're involved in a really interesting I think really cutting edge project that I first learned about from you I don't know of any one else doing anything um as Forward Thinking and frankly as relevant to the general population because of uh my interest in people getting better sleep and learning how to do that avoiding stress and learning how to do that tell us a little bit about what I believe is called absolute rest right so this is something that we've been playing with behind the scenes um for a long time this is typically how high performance stuff works right people want exclusivity and and so this has been built um fact effectively what happened is a friend of mine Cody Burkhart I don't know if you know Cody but down in Texas yeah yeah NASA NASA guy yeah I do know Cody wonderful just down the road thinker um everyone's interested in sleep right and for forever I would God we're using with athletes but everything available tells you how you're sleeping nothing can tell you why you're sleeping that way and so we we got together uh in Boulder and then I met some of his former colle computer science folks um Harvard MD um and some really impressive Tech folks and we were just thinking about an idea and we came up with and we started to realize the problems right we use first principal thinking it's one of my favorite approaches um if you've not familiar with that go go Google that like that's just a recipe to solve problems this first principal thinking and we just started to think about like man all the sleep Tech is is there it's real I don't need to convince people that they need sleep everyone's done that you need high quality sleep but how can I provide Solutions and with the people I work with I can't just tell them your testosterone's down or your sleep's down or your cover I need to be able to be like this is down and here's why and here's our solution that that's how our high performance World works so enter absolute rest this is saying okay what are the actual nodes that go into high effective high quality Sleep Number One is psychology so there has to be some sort of screening diagnostic for are you not sleeping because of Simply you can't control yourself and you've done a wonderful job of giving people tools or if you can't quiet your mind before sleep do this if you wake up and you can't go back to sleep here are a bunch of things right so we have some screens that we can do and there's some other stuff we can do to analyze this this is a psychological issue let's say it's not you're under control and we have different tricks we use and and stuff um I'm hack we talk about but it's not that okay is it physiology which is node number two do we know what your dopamine levels are like do we know what your serotonin levels are like what's melatonin look like what's this what's adrenaline what's cortisol cortisol being the primary driver um what what is this relationship DHEA where are these things at so we're going to measure all that and and track that we're going to measure that during the day prior to sleep we're going to measure that next morning and even sometimes throughout sleep and we're going to figure out is this a physiology problem if it is then we have clear Corrections if not we're going to go on the next step which is is this possibly a pathology so do you have some sort of sleep disorder we're going to run full P what's called PSG so poly stenography a full the exact same stuff you would get in a Sleep Clinic um it's a that's going to go on me measuring EEG and EOG and we're going to have muscle activation sensors to see if your legs are moving and everything else is going on and we're going to get a full diagnostic and if anyone's ever done this the amount of um sleep issues that are happening in people that they don't even realize is extraordinarily high so we're going to figure this out um one very quick example we just did this with a professional athlete and he was having like 280 roughly of these episodes per night and to be categorized as an episodes you have to meet these four specific criteria oxygen saturation ventilation changes brain changes Etc and he hit that over 280 times a night and what this technology allowed us to do is figure out what position did all these things occur in well in his particular case most of them were happening with On's back and so we bought a a very simple like pillow basically that went on his back that kept him from sleeping on his back and we saw an 85% reduction in sleep awakeness issues the very first night now we did that testosterone eventually tripled after three months by just improving sleep and all we did is move him onto his left or right side so huge improvements um just by understanding where the problem occurred and why it occurred there we didn't have to change hardly anything else he had the basic hygiene stuff down and temperature and and all that stuff and he had his chili pad and all that to keep the thing cool we couldn't fix it years by the way this took us two years of just trying everything we're like man and it was just like I I wish I wish we could get you to sleep better and we I pulled out every trick I knew and it's just as soon as we built this D I'm like oh my God it's all he's not overweight by the way he doesn't have any he's not iron deficient doesn't have any of these other classical symptoms that are associated with bad sleep supplementation everything we've done a thousand protocols that fixed it overnight so if it's not psychology and it's not physiology and it's not pathology then the last one that people don't have any idea about is environment and so what you don't realize is we have a box we can sit right next to your bed you just plug it in you don't have to do anything and it's going to run full environmental scans so it's going to look at the temperature in your room it's going to look at the humidity in your room it's going to look at the volatile organic acids these are things that are seeping out from your mattress it's going to look at particulates in the air and possible allergens and things that are floating around that are closing your nose off so you can't sleep at night and now your mouth breathing and you've talked a lot I'm sure on the previous episodes about why that's bad it's going to look at your CO2 Cloud so we've we've talked hey we've already set this point up right you're inhaling O2 but then you're exhaling CO2 well during the day and when we're conversing you have a quite a bit of force with that exhalation right but at night it's just barely seeping out of your mouth so what happens is CO2 sends to Cloud up and build around your face and then you end up rebreathing that CO2 and this can cause a large number of sleep problems because you're simply rebreathing in the Panic whether you fully awake or just kick out of a sleep stage the CO2 around your face is a big issue this stuff has all been known by the way with the astronauts for very very long time it's just it hasn't translated into the to the commercial spaces of course kind our high performer space so we can measure that as well and then we can figure out like for the most extreme we can actually come into a bedroom and build an entire sleep optimization uh set up and control the entire thing but for most folks the minimum we can do is run fold Diagnostics and check off is this environmental related is it pathology is or something else so is this a commercial device that people can eventually access it is now now so where can people learn more about absolute rest Absolut rest.com very cool um and just for full disclosure I wasn't aware that you had done this prior to today what you mentioned I always like to ask people scientists or otherwise I always love to ask you what are you most excited about lately and this sounds like an amazing technology um and just to be really clear that's not like something we're working on that's that's landed that's landed we're ready to go great well and that's one of the things I appreciate about you is that you're you're willing to sometimes speculate but you always say it's speculation but in general you're you seem like the kind of guy where if you're going to be public facing about something if you're going to make a statement there's got to be quite a bit behind it you're not going to allude to that in 10 years we might be able to do this or in five years you're a very data driven kind of guy yeah well the people I work with we need answers right we don't have that time frame and we typically have like hey we start the season in four weeks yeah so that's just where I'm at well as I said I appreciate that about you but it is but one of the many things I appreciate I think uh the listeners and I can well appreciate on the basis of today's discussion what a enormous wealth of information you are how clear and um and potently you communicate that information and also how you can uh take a huge cloud of information and still distill it into um protocols that ought to work for 75% of people 75% of the time which is an immensely valuable um thing to do so for me and from the listeners I just want to say thank you so much for taking the several now hours I lose track of time uh which is a good reflects All Good Things several hours to take a break from teaching take a break from research take a break from the other important commitments of your life and really share with us all this incredible information I'm so so grateful my pleasure man I'm F I'm glad we finally got to connect this has been a long time in the making it has and I'm going to uh I'm going to bring the breathing protocols to my training I'm going to start doing more of the endurance type and interval type training I'm going to start moving when I do heat I'm going to start moving when I do cold I might even start throwing some um sodium bicarb into uh uh very small amount of sodium bicarb into uh some water before I train and listen uh Andy Professor Andy Galpin thank you ever so much my pleasure thank you for joining me today for my discussion with Dr Andy Galpin if you'd like to learn more about his work and learn further information about exercise science from Dr Galpin please find him on Instagram at Dr Andy Galpin you can also find him on Twitter at the same handle Dr Andy Galpin spelled with one L and if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us please also subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on Apple you have the opportunity to leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions or comments about the podcast or you have suggestions about future topics or guests that you'd like to see me interview please put that in the comment section on YouTube we do read all the comments in addition please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning of today's podcast that's the best way to support this podcast we also have a patreon it's patreon.com Andrew huberman and there you can support the podcast at any level that you like during today's conversation and on many previous episodes of The hubman Lab podcast we discuss supplements while supplements aren't necessary for everybody many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like sleep and focus and energy and many other features of our physiology and mental functioning there are some important issues to consider when considering supplements one of those issues is the quality of the ingredients for that reason we've partnered with Thorn t h o r n e because Thorn supplements have the highest possible standards with respect to the quality of the ingredients they include if you'd like to see the supplements that I take you can go to Thorn that's th r ne.com /the letter /h huberman and there you'll see the supplements that I take and you can get 20% off any of those supplements if you navigate further into the thorn site through that website thorne.com huberman you can also get 20% off any of the other supplements that thorn makes if you're not already following hubman lab on Instagram and Twitter please do so there I discuss science and science-based tools some of which overlap with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the information covered on this podcast thank you once again for joining me for my discussion with Dr Andy Galpin and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]