Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Protocols to Build Strength & Grow Muscles | Huberman Lab Guest Series

[Music] welcome to the hubman lab guest Series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm our professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today marks the second episode in the sixth episode series with Dr Andy Galpin a professor of kinesiology at Cal State University Fullerton and one of the foremost world's experts on the science and applications of methods to increase strength hypertrophy and endurance today's episode is all about how to increase strength speed and hypertrophy of muscles Professor Dr Andy Galpin great to be back last episode you told us about the nine specific adaptations that exercise can induce everything from strength and hypertrophy to endurance muscular endurance so on and so forth and you gave us this incredible toolkit of fit tests for each of those adaptations so that people can assess them for themselves and then of course improve on each and every one of them if they choose by the way people can access that information simply by going to the first episode in this series with you and it's all there in time stamped and I highly recommend people do that today we're talking about strength and hypertrophy and so right out the gate I just want to ask you why should people think about and train for strength and hypertrophy and that question is of course directed towards those that are trying to get stronger and grow bigger muscles but I know that many people out there perhaps have not thought about the benefits of strength and hypertrophy training and how beneficial it can be not just for people that want to get bigger biceps Etc but that have other goals longevity goals and health goals unrelated to what most people associate with hypertrophy so what are the benefits of training for strength and hypertrophy for the everyday person for the athlete for the recreational exerciser and so on there's a wonderful saying um I think it was Bill bman the founder one of the founders of Nike and he always saidif you have a body you're an athlete and and I think that's very important for people to understand because one of the major disservices we've done in this field is convince people that things like strength training are for athletes or for growing bigger muscles and cardiovascular training are for things like fat loss and heart health and that is a tremendous disservice because it puts a lot of unnecessary barriers and leads to a lot of false assumptions and therefore poor actions uh classic examples of this are people who are resistant to strength training because they don't want to put on too much muscle um people who only perform one type of exercise because they want say fat loss or they're in it for longevity and health and they don't worry they're not worried about you know being an athlete and so right out the gates we can actually draw back a little bit to what we were our previous conversation when I walked you through the history of of exercise science and the reason I did that is to help you understand these are the railroads that you're running down and you don't even realize it in terms of everyone thinks of strength training and they immediately default to our principles to optimize muscle growth and that's not the only adaptation one should be after with strength training when we think of endurance training we immediately default to things like again cardiovascular health or fat loss or things like that what I really want to do across this entire um series and conversations is to to just break that immediately talk about all the other things that you can do with your with your training uh and so that people can be comfortable and confident in doing an optimal training program for whatever goal they have whether that be specific like growing muscle or non-specific like just feeling better having more energy um being more prepared for life and and Longevity and so to directly answer your question I could really we could do a 100 episodes on the benefits of exercise and we could run all the way from mood and focus um cognitive tasks to a better immune function you'll get less colds you'll be you'll fight them off more effectively um to mortality right so some of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you will live or exercise however there are independent benefits that come from just endurance training and there are independent benefits that come from strength training and so to just give you one categorically the way that you want to think about this is resistance exercise and strength training is the number one tool to combat neuromuscular aging you cannot get that through any other form of exercise besides heavy overload strength training and we and we can walk through in detail what that is but that is reason number one in general human movement is is a function of number one some sort of neuromuscular Activation so nerves have to turn on the second part is muscles have to contract and the third part is those muscles have to move a bone all right if you want to be alive and you want to live by yourself you have to be able to engage in human movement if you have any dysfunction in the neuromuscular system there then you're not going to be able to do that and again as I mentioned the only way to preserve that or fight that loss of Aging is to strength train so people will tend to hear numbers like you lose about 1% of muscle size per year after age about 40 and that's true however what they don't realize is you lose about 2 to 4% of your strength per year so the loss of strength is almost double that the loss of muscle mass with aging muscle power is more like 8 to 10% per year and so we can very clearly see the problem you're going to have with aging is not going to be preservation of muscle although that is incredibly important it's going to be very specifically preservation of muscle power and strength and why that really matters is your ability to again stand up and move your ability to catch yourself from a fall your ability to feel confident doing a movement um that is the function of muscle power more than it is muscle size and so functionality is really what we want to be right you want to be able to do whatever you want to be do physically and feel confident in doing that as you age that's going to only be obtained through strength training so is it appropriate to say that training for strength and hypertrophy is also a way to keep your nervous system healthy and young yeah absolutely it is the only exercise route we have for that uh if you look at just basic numbers like motor units you're going to see that older individuals have like a 30 to 40% production in total motor units So when you say older approximately what ages are you referring to because I know many people out there such as myself are 40 and older but I know many of our listeners are in their 20s maybe even in their teens and I can imagine that people that start doing strength and hypertrophy training younger will afford themselves an advantage over time but that everybody should be doing strength and hypertrophy training for as much of their lifespan as possible that's really the message that I'm getting um so if somebody is for instance 45 would that fall into the bin of older you're going to start seeing decrements past again around that age of 40 or so now there's a lot of genetic variation there and a lot of other things go into that equation like your sleep and your nutrition but that's a fair number to sort of think about um one actually response is it's actually sort of counterintuitive the wonderful thing about strength training is you don't actually have to start at a young age uh you can actually in fact I was reading a paper this morning because of our previous conversation it was in over age 90 so these are folks 90 plus and they saw improvements like 30 to 170% in things like muscle size and hypertrophy over a very short period of time I think it was 12 weeks so you don't actually have to start there are some adaptations that you're going to need for health that you God you really need to start in your 20s the reason I like to mention that is because if you are listening and you are 50 and you're like oh [ __ ] I I haven't been strength training you're not toast like you should absolutely start now but you you're going to be able to get to a a fantastic spot very quickly similarly though if you are 20 or 25 and 30 and you aren't lifting there are still many reasons why you should do that now and I I I'd like to point that out because a lot of folks will be like oh my gosh they said I have to do it when I'm 20 or 25 or you know I'll be sort of screwed and that's not the case at all there's really no age limit on this in fact there's actually interesting data that just came out showing um this reduction in muscle strength and hypertrophy that I sort of talked about is basically amiliar with a preservation of activity in other words you don't lose these functionalities because of Aging you lose these because of a loss of training to state that again you don't lose these because of some innate physiological thing that happens with genes become less sensitive or you lose functionality you pretty much can describe the loss of function of strength and muscle in aging as exclusively because of a loss of training in nutrition and and anabolic resistance and some other things so you can do a lot more than you think um when it comes to maintaining high quality muscle and that's really important to point out I'm reminded of the words of the great sharington he won the Nobel Prize a physiologist uh I guess the neuroscientist try and claim him as a neuroscientist because he worked on the nervous system the physiologist claim as a as a physiologist he is 100% a physiologist I would call him a neuroscientist maybe we can argue about this later um we will but I think one of the key things that sharington pointed out was that and I believe the quote was that movement is the final common path and what he was referring to was the fact that a significant fraction of the brain itself is devoted to our ability to move and our ability to engage in resistance type movements and that resistance type movements and the continuation of movement throughout the lifespan is what keeps the brain Young and healthy and vital and there are so much data now to support that but I'm so grateful that you brought up early this fact that there's a neuromuscular link because I think a lot of people think about muscoskeletal they forget that the nervous system is really in charge of the um strength of of the muscle contractions and the types of muscle contractions that occur I'm certain we're going to get into that in a lot of depth today you're close there we're not totally right but we're close Okay well I I look forward to being corrected um and to achieving the Precision that you're known for uh around that discussion so if we are to step back and say strength training and hypertrophy training is critical for people of all ages yeah for developing and maintaining the neuromuscular system and for our ability to function in the world yeah not just offset injury but the ability to pick things up and move Etc what are some of the other things that strength and hypertrophy training um can provide I know a lot of people use strength and hypertrophy training for changing their Aesthetics yeah what is your sense about its potency for changing Aesthetics as compared to say cardiovascular exercise yeah the the Mantra I always like is the reason you want to exercise is three-fold right you want to look good feel good played that that's really that comes from sport um comes from football specifically we always say that and what that means really is you want to look good people want to look the way they want to look whatever that means to them and there are any versions of what you feel to be a i al pleasing and that's totally irrelevant but people want to look the way they want to look um number two you want to be able to feel good what's that mean you want to be injury-free you want to have energy throughout the day you want to be able to execute anything you want to so whether you want to go surf in the morning you want to play ret ball or you want to hike or you want to do all three of those in one day you should have the ability to do that and then you want to play good which means you should be able to execute um any again activities uh that you want to execute whatever that means all right so backing all up what's that got to do with your question um um one of the major benefits of strength training is the responses tend to happen extremely fast so you can see noticeable changes in muscle size certainly within a month absolutely within six weeks and so we have this wonderful feedback loop that sort of tells you am I doing this incorrectly oh my gosh yes I am also it's very addicting the feedback the response the physical changes whether this is actually point two or three look good or feel good play good or it's even just part one you're starting to see that when you compare compare that to things like fat loss that Journey tends to be longer it's more difficult it's more relying upon other factors like nutrition Etc strength training is really about like there's some very minimal nutrition requirements outside that it comes down of the training and the feedback is immediate that's powerful because if you look across uh the literature on exercise adherence you'll see that that is in fact the number one predictor of effectiveness of any training program so what that means is if you were to put any variable possible and figure out what is going to determine whether or not this program works um this is what we typically called the methods are many and the concepts are few so the methods of exercise the methods of strength training the method methods of hypertrophy training which we'll talk about are are infinite however there are only a handful of key Concepts that you have to achieve in order for that program to work adherence is one of them and again is often the top one so you need to do something you need to do something consistently when you are getting that feedback and you're seeing results in your appearance immediately and you see that every single day every time you take off your shirt or every time you um look in the mirror you see that result that tends to drive adherence um really powerfully so it's important to give people wins especially people who are not maybe like you and I who are like I'm going to lift weights and I'm going to exercise like no matter what the rest of my life because I just love it not everyone's like that and so giving them a little bit of carrot of success and if you can achieve that in you know say three to four to five weeks already um it's very powerful tool before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is also separate from Dr galpin's teaching and research roles at Cal State Fullerton it is however part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is momentus momentus makes supplements of the absolute highest quality the huberman Lab podcast is is proud to be partnering with momentus for several important reasons first of all as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality second of all their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations if you're going to develop a supplementation protocol you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations with single ingredient formulations you can devise the most logical and effective and costeffective supplementation 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8sleep.com huberman to save $150 at checkout today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and activities affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your blood glucose using a continuous glucose monitor many people are aware that their blood sugar that is their blood glucose level is critical for everything from Fat Loss to muscle gain to healthy cognition and indeed aging of the brain and body most people do not know however how different foods and different activities including exercise or different temperatured environments impact their blood glucose levels and yet blood glucose is exquisitely sensitive to all of those things I first started using levels about a year ago as a way to understand how different foods exercise and timing of food relative to exercise and quality of sleep at night impact my blood glucose levels and I've learned a tremendous amount from using levels it's taught me when best to eat what best to eat when best to exercise how best to exercise and how to modulate my entire schedule from work to exercise and even my sleep so if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself go to levels. link huberman that's levels. linkhub let's talk about strength and hypertrophy if you would please remind us what strength and hypertrophy are in terms of the specific adaptation they represent what I mean by that is when somebody is training for strength what are they really training for obviously it means the ability to move more weight but I know that it includes a number of other things as well and when one is training for hypertrophy for the growth of muscle fibers what does that represent because I think if people understand that they will far better understand the methods and protocols that are going to be best for strength and hypertrophy at its core you you've basically described it when we talk about strength we're talking about an actual function so can you create more Force across a muscle or muscle groups or or total movement and when we talk about hypertrophy now we're specifically referring to just an increase in size there's no actual mention of function so a muscle can grow larger without actually technically being stronger for a number of reasons um however there is a strong relationship between strength and hypertrophy so a lot of the times in the general public in the lay conversations we sort of those two things in it's the same thing and so we have to recognize people who are new to training or people even are intermediately trained there is a huge overlap between strength and hypertrophy once you get past that though they become disentangled and a good example of it is this if you look at these strongest people in the world this would be people who compete in the sport of powerlifting right that's a true test of maximum strength so it is a deadlift a bench press and a back squat and you're going to do a one repetition Max in all three of those and so whoever wins is the person who lifted the most amount of weight one time that's it it's not like World's Strongest Man where it is how many reps can you do in a row or your time right is a true maximal strength test and you compare those to say bodybuilders now both of those individuals are strong and both of those individuals have a lot of muscle however it is extremely clear the powerlifters will be significantly stronger than the bodybuilders on average right there are individual exceptions but we're just talking Collective averages and the bodybuilders will have more muscle than the other ones in addition whether you look at Olympic weightlifting or powerlifting or world's strongest man for that matter there are weight classes and the reason is as you go up in weight classes you will always see the world records go higher and higher and higher right so you can clearly get stronger without adding any muscle however there's a point right where you simp simply have to add more mass to get a higher number and that's why we have weight classes in those Sports and in Combat Sports and lots of other things so we have there's a lot of confusion right because people think man either these are the same thing or if I want to get stronger I have to get bigger which is not the case at all another misnomer here is I can't get stronger unless I add muscle that's not true either right this a similar idea so what what I'm saying is you have the ability to do whatever you'd like if you'd like like to get stronger and add muscle great if you add muscle you're probably going to bring some strength along for the ride however if you want to get stronger and you don't want to add muscle for any reason personal preference on Aesthetics whether you're in a weight class and you simply can't afford it it is quite easy to get stronger and not add much muscle math either and so differentiating these two things is one of them is simply a measure of size and the other one is a measure of force and when we talk about strength what we're really talking about are two unique components component one is what I call the physiology so what what is the ability of the neuromuscular system what is the ability of the muscle fibers to contract and produce Force the other one is what we call mechanics mechanics is simply things like it's minutia down to how long your femurs are relative to your tibia or or other things like this is biomechanics this is also technique this is skill this is how smooth you feel this is are you firing the right muscle group in the right sequence and Order and all of these things play into strength so somebody who maybe has U more Force capability in their muscle fibers but their technique and the movement is worse may lose in a competition or somebody again who's um like if you go into the world of speed and power especially you'll hear a lot of people talk about like the Rhythm and there's just a certain Rhythm that has to happen if you want to jump as high as possible or run as F fast as possible but that's all mechanics at this fundamental level so when we look at hypertrophy it's just still simply about how big the muscle is so those are the really the the the similarities and distinctions between strength and hypertrophy when strength improves and when hypertrophy increases is there also involvement in the ligaments and tendons that is of course the ligaments and tendons are involved in the movements and but do ligaments and tendons themselves grow Andor get stronger this field is really difficult because uh connective tissue is not vascular and so their plasticity is significantly lower than skeletal muscle in fact if you look across all the organs skeletal muscle is one of if not the most plastic meaning it's the most pliable the most responsive um the one that's going to adjust it's basically it's paying attention to everything that's being said in the body um you cannot change blood pressure or pH or um macronutrients floating around without muscle knowing about it it is uh in fact this is why we call muscle an organ people don't tend to think about this if you were ever on like Jeopardy and they ask you that question of like what's the biggest organ system in the body people tend to say the skin muscle is actually the correct answer all right well I'm going to cite you when I get it you probably get wrong je Jeopardy I don't have any immediate plans to go on Jeopardy but who knows oh there you go Celebrity Jeopardy hry huberman wait uh I don't know about the celebrity part but Jeopardy would be fun um but I will say the muscle and I'll I'll if you get a phone call on Jeopardy I don't know I haven't seen that show a very long time yeah U maybe ever then I'll I'll call you but that makes sense um that muscles would be the largest organ system in the body the reason I saying that is so muscle is both listening and talking it is controlling uh the immune system a lot it's controlling blood glucose regulation it is it is the central Depot for uh amino acids which are needed to things like regulate the immune system build um any new red blood cells a lot of this stuff is coming from skeleton muscles so when we say organ by the way that's actually like a physiological definition so something that's communicating uh to either another organ itself or uh throughout the system so it's listening and it's talking connective tissue is not the same way and so we do see adaptations with strength training um in connective tissue it's just much lower it's difficult to measure um effectively what we know now is you're going to have a combination um of adaptations throughout the connected tissue it is beneficial uh this is probably one of the major reasons that's that strength training reduces injury risk which is very very important because people who tend to want to pick up an exercise routine after say 10 years um the the classic cliche is like I played all these things in high school then I went to college got a job now I'm 25 or 35 or whatever and you sort of want to jump back into what you did when you're were 20 well there's no tissue tolerance left and what we almost always mean by that is connective tissue the tolerance in there is is not ready for the load you're about to handle and so you go through some movement and then boom sprains tears um you know even like the more significant ones are on ailles tear which is going to really sideline you so those are some of the problems and we know strength training has a a large role in injury reduction for stress and strain and overuse injuries and that's specifically coming for the connected tissue adaptations again the difficult part here is it's very hard to assess we actually uh when I was a doctoral student we played around with Patel attendant biopsies so I actually had one this is like a there's a little piece of your Patel attendant missing yeah because your own own lab so now I've probably had I don't know how many hundreds of biopsies I've performed on people um probably well over a thousand certainly well over a thousand I've probably had 35 or 40 done them myself um there's no problem here I have no Scar Tissue I have no loss of function and I've stuck needles in every leg like all over myself right quads uh my Solus gastrock like all up and down taking tissue out yeah you go with the needle looks like a pen basically and you you know you're live and you go in and grab a chunk and you pull it out and can I come to your lab and get biopsy absolutely yeah you're probably looking under the microscope it'll just look like the molecule caffeine there's a there's a a mutual friend of ours who came down and did that he's a big big big gentleman big in the lifting very into strength training uh and he he went through that experience and he was like oh my God it was not what he was hoping to get he actually had unbelievable muscle morphology his fibers were um the diameter of muscle fibers is extremely large it's one of the biggest cells by volume in all the biology skeleton muscle and human how large can't help myself um millimeters well you so you have length and then you have width right so lengthwise they can be extraordinarily long you can be the classic example is like your Sartorius which is like the front of your hip to the inside of your kneecap theoretically those cells can run the entire length which would be one muscle fiber running that thing um if if I were to do a biopsy on you and I and I pull that tissue out I could actually pull an individual fiber out with tweezers and hold it up and you could see that whole muscle cell yeah I'm definitely not going to be allowed to get biopsy um you'd be stunned how big they are anyways his was the size of a rhino so the diameter of his now he has a a well documented assistance in the area of muscle growth we'll say MH um but yeah those can be large so what were we even talking about there well I was asking about tendons and ligaments because I'd like to understand the various tissues and organ systems that adapt when one gets stronger when muscle tissue grows and I I I do want to ask about bone yeah um and here I'm not referring to Bone mineral density what I was going to ask is whether or not bone itself can grow and get stronger and the reason I'm asking is there's a favorite result of mine I have about 3,800 favorite results 3,000 pet peeves and 3,800 plus uh favorite results um but one of my favorite results is from Eric kendell's Lab at Columbia Eric won the Nobel Prize for learning and memory and his laboratory got really into the effects of exercise on learning and memory yeah and they had this incredible result which is that loadbearing exercise yeah stimulates the bones to release something called Al osteocalcin excuse me and then osteocalcin acts as a more or less a hormone travels to the brain and enhances the memory systems in the brain by enhancing neuron Health that's the basic Crux of of the studies there were several of these and The Moment I Saw the first of those studies I thought well here's another reason to do resistance type exercise and not just aerobic exercise and then it brings to mind whether or not bones themselves get stronger when we do resistance training I don't know the answer to that yeah that's very clearly demonstrated and we've known that for for many decades um you have a diminishing ability to do so with age uh particularly you need to do this in your teens and 20s this is where you're going to have the largest ability to enhance um bone mineral density and it's particularly responsive to axial loading now I'm a muscle guy I'm not a bone specialist so we would have to consult somebody that can give you more Precision here but that's you explain axial loading it's it's up and down it's vertical okay so it's almost like a like a cylinder putting weight of the on the small end of the cylinder on both small end of the cylinders if someone doesn't do this in their 20s or teens however can we assume that some degree of positive change will occur if they do resistance training even if it's a small fraction the answer is yes it is small um we have worked with a number of women in our um our rapid health program that come in and they are in their 20s and they're in their 30s and they have significant bone Minal density problems and eight months later we can see noticeable changes that are outside of the measurement error of of a dexa positive changes positive changes correct and if you worked with the there are many Physicians that specialize in this area you you're going to need a Nutri nutrition here um strength TR loone is probably not going to get you there particularly with women because you have to figure out why and and there's a lot going on with the physiology and biochemistry so you probably like almost surely need to have some blood chemistry done with that um you have to figure out what's going on menstrual cycle wise in fact like oftentimes what we'll do for our women very specifically is we use a thing called The Rhythm plus a 30-day test so you can actually do a salivary test across the entire menstrual cycle and you can take uh samples it's about every other day so you'll get 15 or 16 samples and you get a really beautiful picture of what's Happening hormonally across the entire menstrual cycle and that's really really important because typically for women uh if you get a single sample or simple time Point whether it's salivary urine or blood you can have um well like a order of magnitude difference in in any number of metrics because of what phase are in this is one of the many reasons why it's been such a challenge to do a lot of physiology research with females um some metrics change throughout the menstrual cycle others don't like strength is a very good example I can strength train and I can do a one rep max test on a woman at any point I don't have to do that at a certain phase of their menstrual cycle because it's it's the evidence I think is pretty clear at this point that number won't change so I have no qualms including females in any of my studies where strength is an absolute is an important dependent variable because I don't have to adjust around menstrual cycle other factors like anything in in blood anything hormone related you're going to have to automatically account for it so what I would say is those folks should absolutely work with a qualified physician um and and you you're going to have to get some nutrition supplementation potentially uh and then maybe even some other stuff going on to make that even more complicated if you're on any form of birth control or not that's going to change the entire equation especially if it's a hormone based birth control so it just gets really really complicated um to answer it though you can see adaptations they are significantly diminished U relative to if you would have started in your teens and 20s but there is hope you just need to work with somebody who specializes in that area so for both men and women boys and girls what are the major adaptations that occur to underly improvements in strength and if you would if you could just provide a bullet point list of that and then we can dive into each of those in detail for instance our nerves getting more efficient at firing our bones enjoying adaptations in different yeah bone connective tissue relationships that that underly strength I have to imagine all of these things are happening but what are the the major changes that are occurring in those organs and organ systems that reflect someone's ability to on one day lift you know 100 pounds and then a week later to lift uh 105 pounds now I I'll try to keep this condensed again this could be an entire University of course um I will also try to give you a little bit of Bones here so normally as a muscle guy I only I take all the credit in muscle turns out the nervous system gets a little bit of credit too here thank you so as we walk through it just in as as a big picture if we think about again what causes human movement basically everything along that chain will improve a strength training and I'm not really being using too much hyperbole there it's quite impressive so just going from the nervous system the equation what has to happen for human movement is a nerve has to send a signal through a motor unit now a motor unit uh is comes down and inates multiple muscle fibers so if you think about your actual muscle it's not a thing it is a component of many individual muscle fibers so you've got millions if not more um think of it like a ponytail so we collectively say ponytail and you think of it as like one thing but really a ponytail is a combination of tons of individual hairs okay muscles the same way so this motor unit comes in and innovates a lot of different muscle fibers now every one of the fibers in a motor unit is generally of the same fiber type so fast twitch or slow twitch and they are not laid out next to each other in the muscle they are spread out across uh horizontally vertically as well as um closer to the Bone and further to the surface so they're they're moved throughout the entire way and this is what allows you to have smoother contractions and you don't have specificity and things like that so we see improvements from the neuromuscular side like firing rate we see synchronization improvements um that that are coming in you all also see um improvements in things like acetylcholine release from the presynaptic neuron um so you're getting it faster we see calcium recycling is improved back uh to their so in in order for without walking into too much of the biochemistry in order for a signal to go from nerve to muscle there's a little bit of a gap there's a physical space that happens and what happens is you release this molecule called AC cocoline this goes into the postoptic CFT and then that actually binds to a receptor that receptor actually opens up a door that lets sodium in that's really what's happening so it's not theine well that aceto cooline then sits on that receptor site it's broken down put back in and recycled back up in the preoptic nerve site the faster you can do that the faster you can recycle that signal and so almost everything that I described in that entire system improves and has been shown to to to increase with training so that alone is given to give you benefits we haven't even walked into getting from an electrical signal now into an act potential which is going to cause a muscle contraction so getting from nerve into the muscle we see everything from improvements in way call contractility which means the muscle fiber themselves can produce more force or more velocity independent of muscle size changes so this is another component when we ask like well how is that I got stronger without getting bigger well in the muscle fiber itself its ability to contract Force increases and this because we have everything like the sarcoplasm reticulum which is the Place stores and releases the calcium which is what's needed for this entire crossbridge interaction from the meas and an actin um to happen I know a lot of I just lost a lot of people but you can go look at some of these images the Saras matrium gets uh gets activated more it gets more sense it is better at releasing calcium bringing it back in and doing it again um the bond between the crossbridge the mein and actin gets stronger um the calcium Affinity is the phrase that we use there um increases so we we're literally walking through almost the entire process of skeletal muscle contraction here and every step along the way we we see Improvement so that net result is we see again more Force production independent of any change in size independent of any increase in contractile units we didn't add anything to the equation we didn't change size we did nothing but improve efficiency uh effectively independent of that now we can actually start talking about changing muscle fiber type so we can change our fibers from a slow twitch fiber to a fast Twi Swit fiber that alone is going to give you more Force production again independent of size fast switch fibers tend to be larger than Soul fibers but not always especially in the presence of endurance training so if you do a lot of consistent endurance training it's very common for us to find solo fibers that are as similar size if not larger often very often larger than the fast TCH fibers if you big slow fibers big slow very metabolically effective fibers so extremely fatigue resistant so it's not a bad thing to call them slow it's like we tend to say fast and slow and SL slow has this negative connotation but it's a quite healthy like fiber type to have um outside of that now we haven't even gotten into things like pen angle so this is the angle at which your muscle fibers interact with your bone so we tend to think about this as like a muscle fiber is pulling on a muscle well some of these are oriented at almost a 90 Dee so a fiber runs perpendicular into the bone and some of them are closer to like a 45° and some of them are closer to almost parallel and that confers a lot of unique mechanical benefits so in one area it's actually going to increase Force production you go the other direction increases velocity and so we have all kinds of changes in the angle at which the muscle inserts into the bone now we're already in the mechanic side of it right so we've we've influenced how effectively it pulls um and with any of these things it's always a give and take so you're going to give up in the case of pation angle you're going to give up strength but you're going to increase Vel shortening velocity or if you want to increase the velocity you're going to give up sort of the strength right um we haven't gotten to any of the energetics at all so we haven't talked about increasing storage of phosphocreatine which is the energy uh system needed to power that muscle contraction at the fastest possible rate so we could continue to go as long as you want here but uh hopefully you're getting the point of a little bit of the of the adaptations that occur um the reason I want to actually why I think that stuff is important to bring it back maybe for some listers I know I took you on a journey there and you're just like what the hell just happened that matters because again this is the specific specific explanation for how is it possible that I got stronger but I didn't get bigger and this is also why strength and hypertrophy are intertwined and are heavily overlapped but are not necessarily the same thing so for example we can increase muscle size and actually reduce strength because of what's called lattice spacing so what happens is um you have to kind of remember your muscle fibers are these long cylinders and the way that they contract requires an optimal space and so what happens is you this molecule called actin and you have this molecule called um mein myosin sits in the middle and there are six actin that surround each individual mein um in a three-dimensional Circle here so you got a A mein in the middle that has all these globular heads and they can reach up and grab an actin and again there's six sort of around them right um well one of the things that can occur is if those those actin are too close together so imagine my hands um I'm I'm reaching out and doing a giant te right so I'm horizontal out there well if my fingertips are the tips of the mein and I'm trying to reach up and grab an actin and I want to pull those actin closer to my face well those actin stack on top of each other and that's what actually makes your muscles grow up like if I flex my bicep it actually you know grows up three or four inches because you're stacking these these ccle mirrors or what they're called on top of each other all right great well if I'm reaching out to grab them and the muscle is stretched too far I can't actually make that strong of a connection it would be like if I reached out grab something but I can only reach my longest fingertip on it when I go to contract I can't make that strong of a contraction because my grip is weak my grip's going to break before I reach my strength limit if I'm too close there's nowhere to go I'm already as close so if you actually disrupt that L of spacing too much you can actually lose a little bit of strength um so it's not that getting bigger will ever make you weaker it's simply that you're not optimizing for strength You're simply optimizing um for size and so that can that can explain a little bit of the of the discontinuity between growing and performance I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor athletic greens athletic greens is a vitamin mineral probiotic and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs I've been taking athletic greens daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me meet all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it covers my vitamins my minerals and the probiotics are especially important to me athletic greens also contains adaptogens which are critical for recovering from stress from exercise from work or just general life if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athletic greens.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again if you'd like to try athletic greens go to athletic greens.com huberman to claim the special offer what are a few of the main major changes that occur in muscle nerve Etc when we experience hypertrophy I've heard of protein synthesis yeah changes I'm assuming that's true maybe you can tell us a bit more about that changes in blood flow yep perhaps changes in neural inovation uh who knows maybe even changes in fascia I I'm not aware of any specifically but um I have to imagine that they're somehow involved sure so the when we talk about hypertrophy a lot of the adaptations are going to be similar because the the mode of training is close enough um so your nerves probably aren't smart enough to differentiate between a set of five reps or a set of eight repetitions they're smart enough to differentiate anything like they know everything that's going on U but it's going to be a huge overlap the primary difference with hypertrophy is a couple of things so if you think about the muscle micro structure um I I have a whole series of videos on YouTube if you want to see the visual behind this in fact in there I include the specific diameter size of muscle fibers that I was failed to give you a few minutes ago okay we will provide an an active link to this great so um what happens is this when we talk about and you hear this classic Buzz phrase of muscle protein synthesis generally what we're talking about there is is contractile units and so when we say contractile units we're talking about the meas and and actin and so what we're really trying to do is say okay there's some amount of protein turnover where um we're coming in we're trying to add more proteins to the equation and so what has to happen there is a series of steps so step number one is there has to be some sort of signal from the external World um this could actually often times it's things like stretching of the cell wall which is what happens with exercise right so you're Contracting you're shortening you get this big stretch of the cell wall it can come from as simple things like an amino acid infusion this is just eating protein this is why protein ingestion alone is anabolic right it will help you grow muscle independent of even moving so just eating protein will grow your muscles yeah certainly uh and those those data are are very clear um of course like anything there's a saturation Point uh in terms of total amount you need to get to and and things like that but yeah if you were to walk into a laboratory fasted overnight and I gave you 30 grams of protein we would see a very immeasurable increase in protein synthesis um quite clearly for several hours probably four to five plus hours um we could maybe bring us some people that would know those data better but many hours later with no weight training correct I embedding that most people are not aware of that fact you know what's actually interesting about it is um if you do the exact same study again and you just did strength training you would also see an improvement in protein synthesis right but those factors are independent and the mechanisms are independent such that if you do them both together they stack on top of each other which is really wonderful and if you were to add carbohydrate into that mix now you're actually adding fuel for the the entire M muscle protein synthesis process uh and now you're going to see even added benefits and this is why for so many years uh this is what bore the whole like post exorcize anabolic window thing which is like you got to get carbs and protein in post xraze to maximize um mostly P now that turned out to be like not totally true in terms of the window turned out to not be as strict as people initially uh asserted as I recall but still I think that's super interesting these are parallel Pathways for for protein synthesis simply eating protein um or training each independently increases protein synthesis uh I can't help but ask is the same true if one does end endurance type exercise if I go out for a 45-minute jog um where I can nasal breathe the whole time but if I were to go any faster I would have to kick over into mouth breathing as well so- called Zone 2ish cardio uh will I see an increase in protein synthesis as simply as a consequence of that jog no this is one of uh the unique factors of strength training you're not going to see that in fact you would it's difficult to measure protein breakdown that's been as extraordinarily challenging to do in the laborat but you're not going to see those benefits in fact you're going to see quite the opposite it's it's an entire molecular Cascade um so this is kind of how it works so you have to have some sort of signal on the outside and this can be an energetic signal um so this could be glucose uptake it could be protein intake uh it could be a physical stretch um what happens is on the cell wall there is some sort of it could be testosterone right testosterone combine to Beta adrenic receptors and this activates a whole series of Cascades of signaling proteins and these proteins basic play a game of telephone so one tells the next one they tells the next one and they sort of walk through this entire way well that molecular Cascade is fundamentally the same thing whether regardless of the insult but they're different Pathways and so the pathway from strength training or protein ingestion is going to go to the same nucleus it's going to activate a whole set of Gene Cascades that are going to tell you to to go through this entire process of protein synthesis which I'll walk through without that is in a second if you do endurance training it's a different pathway and so instead of activating this entire thing of like mtor and akt and this this anabolic signaling Cascade it's going to do a different one um which you can think of more of like as amk um and energy signaling things so there's a crossover Point here in fact what one of the things you'll notice is mtor and akt don't really influence mpk but there is some literature that years ago showed mpk will activate another protein called um tsc2 and that will actually inhibit mtor and that was the first molecular explanation for the quote unquote interference effect of endurance training on hypertrophy could you just highlight for people what this is because as you describe these signaling Pathways I just want to um maybe just put a a top Contour explanation the mour pathway is synonymous with cell growth yeah both during development as organisms humans included mature and cells get larger mtor is abundant in the system just to put it quite simply and then the amk pathway and some of the metabolic signaling that you're referring to is more Anonymous with cardiovascular exercise in this at least in the context of this discussion and fuel utilization Y and what you described as a crossover point where certain forms of exercise can tap into both of these yeah but at least for sake of this conversation we're we're largely separating them yeah because the the byproduct is the thing that that matters here so the result of um mtor and akt getting into the nucleus is going to be increased in protein synthesis the result of ampk running down to the m is going to be result in increasing mitochondrial biogenesis so the net outcome is different now I I do want to flag it very quickly this is an extraordinarily complicated thing and um in fact in our laboratory we were able to to be one of the first that figured out how to measure all the different subunits ofk in individual muscles by fiber type so that's because you're ripping people's muscles out of their knees and their patellar tendons uh so just teasing they they're gently removing with under IRB protocol of course um so even when we say something like amk it's not one thing and we say things like mtor it's not one thing either it is you have the total amount that matters you have the activation the activation sites are many of them so it's not as simple um as what I'm laying it out I just want to get a big concept of kind of what's Happening Here to to actually kind of answer your question which is okay so how is the muscle actually grown what you have to understand is is a little bit of how um protein synthesis occurs so what I'm generally meaning is you have a whole bunch of amino acids and this actually goes back to maybe like middle school biology class right so if you take a bunch of amino acids and you combine them together we get these things called a peptide right and if anyone who's ever heard of like peptides that's all it really means you put a bunch of those together you have a poly peptide you put a bunch of those together and we now have a protein so any protein I want to make is going to go through the ex exact same system exact same steps it doesn't matter if that protein is going to be a red blood cell it doesn't matter if that's going to be a hair follicle doesn't matter if it's going to be skeletal muscle that's basically protein synthesis so when we tend to think of protein synthesis we we just paint this picture of growing more muscle and that's not the only thing and so when we talk about the benefits of having highquality muscle is being this place that's going to regulate most of your protein synthesis we tend to lose some people because they're thinking oh I don't need to gain muscle and that's not what we're talking about we're talking about regulating the immune system we're regul we're talking about regulating any protein turnover so any Protein that's degradated or needs to be broken down in your in your system at all autophagy this is the like this is such an important buzzword um that's just protein breakdown of of an unneeded or or damaged protein right that whole thing is going to go through protein synthesis to be able to come back and replace the things the only reason you go through autophagy is so you can clean that garbage out and then come back and build in a more properly functioning protein so it's not just about growing more muscle mass it's why you want these systems to be operating well so the protein ingestion is going to just activate that Cascade because it's basically saying oh hey look we have an abundance of Supply here why don't we make something out of it because we don't know the next time this thing is going to be around um carbohydrates and fat are very easy to store protein is very challenging it's more transient and so you can store some of it and keep it around but most of it you're going to lose and so when it's a available your your body wants to act very quickly it doesn't necessarily care if you have extra fat floating around in your system it's all right let's just package it up and store we can easily bring this back out but if you got protein around you're going to want to use it and so that's why it alone will activate and increase protein synthesis um independent of exercise so those effects are additive like I said because that signaling process is independent and once you hit a rate limiting phase then it you are you're there but at its onset those things will work independently okay so that being said what is skeletal muscle hypertrophy in general we think about it as this increas in contracti protein so those myosin and actin eff effectively get thicker okay now what happens is since they are thicker and as I talked about a second ago that influences and actually hurts the L of spacing and so what your body does as a result is say hey let's increase the diameter of the entire cell so that we can maintain our spacing between these things right it's effectively like if if you know the two of us were sitting in this room and you doubled in size and I was like whoa you're in my personal space like and I doubl in size now we're in each other space the at some point we just have to make the room larger and that's exactly what's happening in the cell and so as you can continue to increase muscle size you're going to muscle my fi accretion you're going to continue to increase muscle fiber size for years there was this other comment about um nonfunctional hypertrophy and this is often called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy now this is not sarop particul this is a fancy way of saying my muscle is larger but it has no function and the question would be well how the hell is that possible if I have more contractile units and I can make more of these cross Bridges perform more of these power strokes this is what these contractions are called how could I possibly be losing function well that was challenged for that was broscience for a very very long time in fact where it really came down to was are there different types of hypertrophy training some that induce contracti protein hypertrophy and some that induce the sarcoplasmic hypy and that was significantly challenged and tell recently Mike Roberts did at Auburn did a series of wonderful studies that showed quite clearly that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is probably happening um and in fact there's probably a pretty easy explanation in general what happens is it is it is a increase in fluid uh in the muscle fiber and so this would allow for the diameter to be larger but since there's no addition of contractile units no more Force production happen happens and so he actually has a wonderful review paper I believe it's open access where you can go look and he created a wonderful graph um I think that's in in my hypertophy videos on YouTube as well and you can actually see that it's likely happening in phasic changes throughout your training experience so at the beginning of your training but as as the years and year or weeks rather than months and then eventually years go by in your training we have a change in the hypertrophy that's coming from uh contractile units versus ccop plastic um so I think that is it's an important note because again people are wondering like well how the hell is it even possible for me to get larger muscle and somehow I'm not stronger well if it came from Simply fluid retention and this is not bloating this is not there's no negative really to this it is simply um holding of of more hydration in the cell the Amor gets larger and then everything works that way what you just described calls to mind something similar in the nervous system which is neuroplasticity which of course is the nervous system's ability to change in response to learning and experience and damage for that matter yep and we think about it as one term but there are many different forms of neuroplasticity yeah uh a discussion that we don't need to get into now but there Spike timing dependent plasticy and ltp and long-term depression which has nothing to do with psychological depression and on and impaired pulse facilitation and on and on and on and short-term plasticity and so what I'm starting to understand is that there are many paths to what we call strength increase and there are many paths to what we think of as hypertrophy many of these are going to operate in parallel it's going to be rare that any one of them is going to be active alone Y in order to create hypertrophy or strength changes and that certain forms of exercise and certain ways of doing exercises in terms of sets and repetition schemes and rest intervals between sets and between training sessions are going to tap into different mechanisms but also overlapping sets of mechanisms which is why if I understand correctly you mentioned at the beginning that often not always often strength increases are associated with some hypertrophy changes and hypertrophy increases are often not always associated with strength increases do I have that right correct and the beauty of this whole thing is while we don't yet know the mechanisms specifically and there's a lot of Confusion And there's a lot of changes that happen there's a we actually just submitted a paper a few days ago um myself uh Jimmy baggley at San Francisco and Kevin mck at one has a wonderful muscle physiology Lab at Arkansas and we we we actually this is a very lay article actually it's incredibly easy to read um we describe the the role of my nucleation in uh muscle hyper and there's actually a lot of interesting stuff we can get into there but um we we're learning more and more about it uh as a quick example so skeleton muscle is unique in the fact that it is so large in diameter it's also unique in the fact it's multinucleated what that means is um typically in biology you see like a cell has one nucleus that's the place that houses and holds the DNA and it's a control center does it to grow shrink die repair that whole thing well skeletal muscle in human is awesome because it has thousands if not more of those nuclei which gives it that plasticity and so a normal cell has one place it has to go to for any time it wants to up regulate down regulate do whatever the thing is your muscle fibers have these little control centers all throughout them and for years we were like okay great the amount of hypertrophy that you can experience is probably limited by the amount of nuclei you have because you're not going to exceed a certain size of muscle fiber if that's going to mean you lose control and so we're like okay great we found and identified a limiting factor to what will determine how much a muscle can actually grow and then the next question was and then where are these things coming from and and this is where satellite cells came in and so was very clear a satellite cell that's lying dormant sort of on the outside the periphery of the fiber will then go in um into the into the Fibber will turn into a my nuclei and then it can actually you know increase your diameter like that and so then actually it was like hey hey you're actually limited by the amount of these satellite cells you can get in and turn into nuclei and then what the evidence came out that showed hey what if you detrain so what if I used to lift weights like a long time ago and I got big but now I've lost a lot of my muscle if I train again you actually get that muscle back faster than it took you the very first time to build it like that's what we call muscle memory like in our now on your side of the equation muscle memory is something different right it's a neur when people talk about muscle memory um like the ability to ride a bicycle after so many years of not having tried to ride one that's actually largely independent of the muscle it has something to do with the muscle it's it's basically a nervous system phenomenon so muscle memory uh has been co-opted uh by different communities to mean different things on our side muscle memory is going to mean that ability to remember that muscle size right that Hy because as you explained the motor control thing is it's a totally a nerve thing this is the one I'll give you this one you guys the nerve people can have this one well it seems to me that there are a tremendous number of parallels between strength and hypertrophy changes and neuroplasticity this is coming up again and again in this conversation um because we know for instance that if you are exposed to a couple of different languages early on in life you will learn any number of different languages far more easily later in life and that's because there's some crossover between different languages especially Latin based languages that allows for that there's a substrate for it it's similar to the the ability to hop on a bicycle again phenomenon or play an instrument phenomenon but it's broader than that and again I think this speaks to the huge number of different adaptive changes that are occurring in the cells and in the nerves that inate these cells when one experiences increases in strength and hypertrophy so to to round that out um and to go back to what I was saying there what we're actually learning now is that nucleation thing and by the way this entire trajectory of story is probably over the last like 8 years like this is how fast we've changed our understanding of how muscle grows uh the copos culum thing five years ago was was broscience now it's it's pretty well established the M nucleation thing was 8 to 10 years ago it's changing every week this paper we just submitted this week showed actually um why we had generally thought a few years ago and in fact you can find me on podcasts and probably in some of my videos talking about this and I'm going to tell you right now those things are wrong like we've just had new things come out in these last couple years where that draining effect we thought was a reason of well what happens is if you had the muscle before and you brought in these nuclei and they differentiated and turned into into a nuclei and then the muscle got small again you preserved those nuclei and that's why when you go to train again they were already around so the muscle grows faster the second time than it did the first time well now that looks like that's actually not the case in fact it's actually probably H what's happening is it's a it's a epigenetic change um in the nuclei's ability to access the DNA needed to grow muscle it's effectively the analogy we used it's the nuclei are remembering how to ride a bike so it's quite funny that you said that because it's not really necessarily that they're being preserved over time they have learned the sequence it takes to grow the protein there and it goes it happens faster the second time and we've also learned that there are specific nuclei we've known this for actually a while we found this in our lab we didn't Discover it we just we saw this in in our sum of our HS but there are different shapes the nuclei some are more oval some are more elongated and the shape determines a lot of the function some of them are hanging out more towards the periphery and some of them are hanging out right around the nucleus well it looks like there's actually probably different types of nuclei um a lot of them that are specific to the mitochondria in fact you can see like on some of the Imaging we have we just like they're just packed around the the the m Andria and there are some that are probably specific to injury repair and so this is probably explaining a lot of the the individual variation I mean I know you've You' said previously like you're just a very you're very slow at recovering there's a lot of things that go into that and I would I would love to walk through sort of all the buckets uh maybe later into recovery but one of the inherent genetic variations is could be simply that you maybe have more or less of the nuclei responsible for tissue repair um that's something that's been happening the last like handful of months that's been coming coming out we'll see if that holds up is true or not um so as we're learning more and more almost every day about muscle physiology what's super fun and interesting and I think the most exciting what to do inms in terms of like how to train and how to eat and how to do everything else to get these adaptations has been pretty well established for a long long long time we're just figuring out how like what's happening in the muscle now but we know what to do so from a practical standpoint putting together protocols um for any outcome that you want or don't want for any modality you don't have a gym you have uh weights you have dumbbells only you only have kettle bells you don't want to you only use body weight we can you only have three days a week you have seven days a week you want to maximize muscle growth you want to get a Little Bit Stronger any of these variables you want to throw at me um we have a large evidence base for exactly how to get those adaptations and not others so um while we have a lot to learn about the mechanisms the physiology um we have pretty good legs to stand on in terms of what to do to get whatever adaptations you want so what are the essential components of an effective strength and hypertrophy protocol okay so what I would like to actually do is is walk you through both of those because as we mentioned before they overlap uh but the training needs to be differentiated so that you can optimize either strength hypertrophy or if you actually want you can get a combination of both this allows you to then get the adaptation you want avoid ones you don't want and then get it even a combination if that's the preference so a lot of people will talk about I want to get a little stronger I want to add some muscle that's a different answer than someone who wants to truly maximize muscle which is a different answer from somebody who maximizes wants to maximize strength which is a different answer from somebody who wants to maximize strength but not actually gain muscle so we have all these combinations what's important to understand before we get into the details is a couple of things number one we we've been teasing this concept so far of the concepts are few but the methods are many and so I want to hit those Concepts right now these are um as you as you say these are the non-negotiables that have to happen in any training program and I'm going to referring to these in the strength and hypy conversation but these are true of power development speed development muscular endurance uh endurance any other thing these are things that just have to happen for any training program to work I mentioned one uh a little bit earlier which was adherence and so that my um frequent collaborator Dan Garner will constantly say consistency Beats intensity um again in fact the literature will show you very clearly in herin um is the number one predictor of physical fitness outcome so we want to do something that you will engage in will you'll put effort into and you'll be able to repeat consistently over time so that's number one the second one is and this is a major reason that people don't hit their fitness goals in fact I would argue outside of not doing it the number one mistake they make is Progressive overload so I'm going to walk you through through exactly how much you should be increasing um your sets and Reps and weight Etc per week per month later but that's the biggest thing you have got to have some sort of overload the body works as an adaptation mechanism right so in fact um we we talked previously about the harvor fatigue lab and one of the things actually people don't realize is the concept of homeostasis is actually comes from research at the harbard fatigue lab it was um work that they did on an endurance Runner I forget name and they sort of realized that after a long period of time working out this is an acute exercise spout the body actually comes back to some stable place despite the fact he was continuing to work and that's exactly what bore the phrase steady state uh and that actually then they launched off they said wow there's this state that the body wants to be in and we'll call this homeostasis so that those all Concepts came out of exercise physiology which is really really cool right um we don't get a lot of love a lot of times scientifically but that's a good one that we took so why that all matters is we have got to achieve some sort of overload without uh going excess so we'll cover that later of exactly what to do and we'll get potentially get into overtraining and monitoring and maning things like that but you have to have some sort of consistent predictable overload that's what's going to cause adaptation to continue to cause stress if you don't do that you can still do things like burn calories you can still get some of the other benefits of exercise like improved mood cognitive function Etc ET flexibility increased es all those can happen without a progressive overload but if you want to see these gains in strength and hypertrophy you really need to progressively overload so that's concept number two the third one here um is is going to be individualization and this is when we can get into things like personal preference you know equipment availability you have kettle bells or dumbbells or you only have bands or you have none of that um these are all smaller details but that's an important component to it the last one I really want to get into is picking the appropriate Target and we went through this when we talked about the fitness protocol and and if you run through something like that and you run some testing and figure out where your biggest limitations are that's going to help you identify where you need to go um so if you can do all those things you're going to be in a good spot to balance specificity and variation all right so if you want to make sure you grow your biceps you better make sure your biceps are working having said that if you over rely on specificity you're going to increase the likelihood of overuse injuries which is going to come back and actually hamper consistency over time all right so this is when hedging towards specificity is important but too much can cause a problem if you go the other direction and you go too much variation so imagine you're just sort of doing all kinds of different exercises every time you you work out that's actually not enough stimuli directly on the muscle or muscle groups or movement pattern if you're wanting to learn a new movement um to get you very far and so this is a classic problem of I'm doing a lot of work but I don't have a very clear Direction I lack specificity so I'm working but I'm not seeing a lot of improvements and this is like in the business worlds Etc this is like doing a whole bunch of different things means you get nothing really done so that's the game we're going to play here right how do we overload this stuff how do we make sure we're balancing specificity and variation how do we make sure I want to do this and then how do I individualize it for my needs and circumstances and and movement restrictions and time availability and my calendar and desires and all these things so those are the concepts we absolutely have to hit the methods that we choose run across a handful of variables and we call these things modifiable variables because as you modify them or you make different choices within these variables you get different outcomes or adaptations this is exactly what determines the nine adaptations that we've been talking about so the way that I like to say this is extra exercises do not determine adaptation so you can't simply go I want to get stronger therefore I'm going to choose these exercises that's not how it works what determines adaptation is the execution of the exercises so a deadlift is my favorite example a deadlift is a common um example that people think of when they want to choose a lower body strength exercise but a deadlift will not increase your strength unless you're executing it in the proper fashion I'm not only talking about technique here I'm talking about these modifiable variables the same thing for power exercises we'll commonly see mistakes of doing uh activities like a box jump which is great people think oh I'm going to get improve my power which we know is extremely highly correlated to um activities of daily living and particularly living unassisted as you age right is reduction of power so they'll do an activity like a box jump what they're failing to realize is unless you do it powerfully you won't actually increase power um if you don't move fast you won't get faster so the the the way that we manipulate these variables is everything to determining the adaptation you get or again don't get so with that Foundation I think we can kind of run right into these things uh and we can start off with perhaps speed and power and what what I would like to do is walk you through all those modifiable variables uh what to do with them and then hit you with as many different methodologies as as we really have time for uh and then we'll move on to strength and hypertrophy and kind of round the entire thing out and then maybe at the end we can talk some other variables like what happens if uh I have a training protocol and I'm halfway through it and I can't finish my workout what should I do reduce my weight or reduce my duration or things like that so there's lots of what if scenarios that we can go through that potentially uh a lot of people listening have questions about so sound like a plan sounds like a plan I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health and well-being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test one issue with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there however is that you get information back about various levels of lipids and hormones and metabolic factors Etc but you don't know what to do with that information inside tracker makes no what to do with all that information exceedingly easy they have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are of course but then also what sorts of Behavioral dos and don'ts what sorts of nutritional changes what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try insid tracker you can visit insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insidetracker comom huberman to get 20% off so just to interrupt briefly and make sure that I and everybody else have in mind the proper nine adaptations that we've been referring to and that were discussed in detail in episode one I have listed number one skill and technique number two speed number three power which is speed times Force number four strength number five hypertrophy number six muscular endurance number seven anerobic capacity number eight maximal aerobic capacity and number nine long duration steady state exercise yep you nailed it thank you for for that it was probably important clarification for everybody um so that being said let's jump right into to speed and power now I'll do these a little bit simultaneously uh they are different if you're a high performance athlete you really need to separate these two things for the most people though we can probably think about them is is the same thing there's not a lot of pure speed training that the general public is is interested in um if you want to actually further breakdown speed there are multiple components there's acceleration there's top end velocity there's change of direction or agility things like that so we'll just kind of call All That speed and power for now now at the onset there's this three to five concept that that we talked about uh many times where this is really fairly true for speed power or strength now I I didn't develop the 3 to five it's just an easy way to help help you remember one concept that will run true across all these things so 3 to five refers to three to five days per week uh pick three to five exercises and you're going to do three to five repetitions per set you'll do three to five sets and you'll rest three to five minutes U between each set if you do that and you execute any of the exercises that you choose at a high intent and that part is critical you don't get faster by moving kind of fast you can't improve Power by moving like eh powerfully you have to be trying regardless of whether you're actually moving faster or not anytime you're talking about speed or power you're by definition using sub maximal weights so you're going to be able to lift it that's not the question the question is how fast can you lift that Implement and so intention is incredibly important so if you do that the same for strength by the way so if you land on that that allows you to run the gamut from as little as three days a week you're doing a three exercises you're do three sets of three which is a very very low volume it's a a very low amount of days easy to handle all the way to five sets of five of five exercises five days a week so it it's again it's just one sample that's something easy to remember and is quite effective for a very long time and this has been um tested quite extensively in in both the coaching Realms as well as the scientific Realms to be um quite productive and and easy to follow and grasp if you do that all you need to do is slightly increase the load um or the volume but mostly the load over time and the number we want to look for there is something like a 3 to 5% increase per week uh so an example would be if you're going to do an exercise at 100 lb you can't necessarily just add 5 PBS every week that's going to catch up to you pretty quickly and so you may have to run some a smaller increment uh if you're doing like a lower body exercise where you might have a couple of hundred pounds on the weight you can probably get away with adding five pounds because it's still a a low percentage of the total load so um that's roughly uh the guide that we want to get to for speed power and strength so that sounds incredibly simple and effective yet I have a number of questions sure first off if somebody is using the 3 to5 approach does that mean they should not be doing any any other weight training of any kind in those workouts or at all no you you can certainly do that in combination with anything else you would like especially if you think about speed and power those are very nonfatiguing and so if you could imagine uh you're going to go to the beach and you're going to take a 10 lb to 20 lb medicine ball with you and you're going to do you know four different exercises where you're throwing the medicine ball as high as you can in the air four times in a row taking a break and you do two or three HS that you do maybe three or four different types of throws um that's very good for improving power extremely good but it's not very fatiguing so you could certainly finish that workout in 20 minutes and then run on and then do any number of other things so you could do um some high-intensity anerobic capacity work you could do steady state stuff you could you could even do hypertrophy on top of that so there's a there's um two major categories of what we call periodization there's there's many many many of them but the two that have the most scientific literature are what's called linear periodization and another is called undulating or often daily undulating periodization and I'm flagging these two again despite the fact there are many many many more because they represent two different concepts what you actually just touched upon so linear periodization is a hallmarked by basically saying we're going to train one adaptation at a time so imagine going say six to eight weeks and you're only doing strength or you're only doing hypertrophy or endurance for that matter so in that particular case you you would not do anything else in combination if you contrast that to undulating periodization you would actually be doing multiple different styles of training e with either within the same day or just different days so it could be Monday is power Wednesday is strength Friday is hypertrophy whatever or it could be a little bit of strength every single day a little bit of hypertrophy every day a little bit of power every day and you would just change the amount of each that you do within the day to alter the emphasis all right now if you look at the studies and there have been many uh rcts on this the result of both of these training programs is generally basically the same thing they are equally effective here's the major difference though one if your goal is very specific to one outcome you want to hedge towards specificity so if you're like hey I'm trying to maximize the amount of muscle I can build in the next 8 weeks then you don't really anything else else besides that is just distraction and potential interference does it really matter or not doesn't matter but it's not helping anything else so linear periodization is is fundamental at providing focus and therefore the the adaptations tend to be um oftentimes larger in that specific area the downside is you now go six to 8 to 10 weeks of doing nothing else and so you are losing those other adaptations at a great at a faster rate uh and you can imagine doing something like speed work only again speed work by definition is non- fatiguing so when often times we think of speed work it's like oh I did ladder drills and I did all these things and like I threw up at the end but that's not speed work you just did a different type of endurance training okay which is great and important so true speed work is very high rest very low fatigue and actually truly trying to reach a new level of speed or velocity so non- fatiguing if you did that exclusively for 10 weeks you would be pretty unfit by the end of it because you did you would also lose a decent amount of muscle mass not because there's an interference effect but simply because of the fact you have not stimulated muscle growth for 8 to 10 weeks and so neither one of these is better than the other we're going to see this classically across all uh program design or periodization strategies is it's just a it's a given tick there are tons of different systems and and perhaps at the end we can talk about some of the more advanced periodization Styles um these ones are are both effective um you could do these with beginners you could do these with Advanced athletes you can do them any of the spectrum but they're they're some of the the more well documented ones it's just a pro and con game right it's what are you willing to give up the way that you solve that problem is going back to that fitness assessment and your analysis and really truly understanding what your goal is uh is your goal to do a little bit of strength and a little about okay great maybe undulated periodization is an approach if your goal is really to maximize strength and maybe you can wait on putting some muscle mass on maybe linear periodization is a better approach or another style of periodization that's optimal for strength gain so it's just simply about addressing your things one of the major problems folks have in addition to lacking Progressive overload is they don't have any foresight past the next day of the training right and so it's really important that you set off um blocks that are anywhere between six to 12 weeks long where you're going to have a specific plan ideally you have an idea for the whole year I actually have like a structure I could walk you through uh for that but even if you don't have that really think about what you want the next 12 weeks and then maybe the next 12 weeks after that and that's going to give you a lot of guidance about what to do and what to focus on terrific what about warming up I was taught that one should do higher repetition movements with lighter weights in order to warm up and then one of the things that did make a big positive difference for me in terms of strength and hypertrophy training was to do um a moderate repetition warm-up with a fairly lightweight but then to actually keep the number of warmup repetitions fairly low and work progressively toward the first so-called work set when you say three to five that's three to five work sets correct yep are you also going to tell me three to five warm-ups no are you also going to tell me it has to be done between 300 and 5:00 p.m. uh so in terms of friends in all seriousness what does a good warm-up look like and I realize this will vary depending on how cool your training environment is time of day Etc but as a kind of umbrella for a good warmup okay what should people do the you've already sort of jumped the gun with with my answer it it is honestly very dependent upon the person so some folks respond very well to a minimum more others I've had lots of actually um professional fighters I've worked with where the I actually have a major league baseball player right now he's one of the best P pitchers in the game probably the best and the longer we warm up the better his numbers get we actually did a vertical jump test with him he's going to kill me cuz he got so mad uh I wanted to see how long it sort of took him to reach a peak vertical jump and most times this takes people something like five to 10 sort of reps um and I said take it up all the way to a maximum vertical jump and then what I want you to do is continue to Jumping until you have three consecutive jumps where you're down lower than 90% And so I what we're trying to look at is sort of when is he going to break because in baseball he's going to throw like a 100 pitches or so and we're trying to figure out when is his Peak velocity on his fast as while going to drop and sort of Bas his conditioning on that so it's a different style of conditioning it's power endurance is really what it is um he called me in the middle of it I'm like oh done whatever and he's just like no like how many of these am I supposed to do and I was like what are you talking about he's like I'm on rep 130 or something and I was like what and I'm like what rep did you peek on he peaked on rep 70 something like that 69 I think technically because he's goofy um so he's a classic example I've worked him for many many years we have a ton of on him a ton of biological data a ton of um neuromuscular stuff like all kinds of stuff and it just the more he warms up an absurd amount of warm-up the better he gets and the better he gets in power production and the better he gets in speed and velocity so his warmup prior to games is it's totally absurd uh and just the more volume we throw at him the better he does I have other folks you get past like two or three reps and fatigue starts to set in and now you're actually like reducing power production so there is a ton of variation that goes in that I can give you some guidelines though you need to differentiate if you're training for speed power strength or a pery here's why if we understand a little bit about what's causing the adaptation that's going to tell you what you need to do or avoid for example volume is the primary driver in hypertrophy intensity is the primary driver in speed power and strength all right what so what that means is you need to preserve intensity for the first three you need to preserve volume and the second one at most so if your warmup is so ex extensive in the hypertrophy training that it compromises your training volume because of fatigue even if it compromises the last set of the last exercise then you're actually probably walking yourself backwards by doing that extensive you would have been better off starting your first working set slightly suboptimal right because it's not really you're just trying to acove volume at that point strength and power is the opposite until you're moving very very fast or power you're not really causing the adaptation so there's no pony starting your working set until you're really basically at 100% so the warm-up should be as long as it takes you to get to where your Mobility is in the right spot like your joints feel good you feel fresh you feel activated and you really feel Peak power anything before that is a warm up set in the sport of Olympic weightlifting um a lot of times the coaches will measure barbell velocity Travis Mash has done a fantastic job with this he's got a lot of data on what's called velocity based training Brian man at Missouri and and Miami tons of work here and generally those communities are not going to count any repetition as a working set until you exceed 70% of your one rep max where that's changed because of a lot of people doing the velocity based stuff is now they're basing that simply on an achieved velocity and so really the warm-up is irrelevant they don't even P it's sort of just like do whatever you want and we're going to measure the barbell until you actually hit an outcome and now you're at where a working set um so different ways to think about it um depending on what you're training for that'll give you a little bit of a guideline if you're training for anything past hypertrophy then really and especially even hypertrophy it just comes down to are you feeling um ready to work are you cold are you moving through the correct positions and if all those things are fine I don't care if you start a little bit early and save some gas the end of especially if you're a person like you who may be a bit more inclined to fatigue quickly uh relative to Trevor who's just has no response to fatigue whatsoever is it useful to do more warmup at the beginning of a workout say before the first exercise and then once one has achieved both local and systemic warmup in air quotes um then perhaps on the second or third exercise fourth exercise Etc one or maybe even zero warm-ups yeah fair point we generally think about warm-ups in a couple of ways this is a really actually this is a very clever question you want to have some sort of General Global warm-up scheme U we tend to prefer Dynamic warm-ups so this is whole body movements rather than like sitting and stretching uh static stretching things like that so so something that involves momentum yeah momentum or movement right so this is like um think about this in like old gym class it's like your high knees and and your butt kickers and just different things like that where you're moving in different planes um you're moving joints through through tons of range of motion you're you're getting a lot of movement there so you're getting the local warmup you're also getting the the total systemic activation everything else is going on there so that is what we consider to be a general warmup five minutes is a very sufficient number perhaps 10 if you're a slow goer achy and some things like that and you really got to get the ankle warmed up if you're doing lower body stuff really make sure that that's moving correctly the hips and knees will follow um upper body stuff really get the shoulder blades and the neck like making sure you're going there and the elbows will follow after that um so five to seven minutes of a general warmup a lot of the times like classic exercise science it will even just put you on a bike cycling for five minutes I don't like that personally um Dynamic movement is more preferred if you really just move for 5 to seven minutes you'll be fine there now specificity within each movement it's very important that your first exercise of the day is generally the thing youve prioritize that's often times the most important you're going to do for it often times is also the most complex and the most moving parts so it tends to be multi-joint it tends therefore you need to have um movement precision and skill dialed right you don't typically start your workouts off with a forearm curl right like that's you don't need a tremendous amount of warm-up to get going on that you're going to start off with medicine ball throws or a snatch or some agility work you you need to have the whole system going because multiple joints are moving position matters technique there's just a lot of skill requirement Etc so the individualized workout um or the specific workout for the specific movement for that very first one my general rule of thumb is like whatever it takes to move perfect in that first exercise past that you don't necessarily need to do individualized warm-ups for your next movements unless it is a movement you're trying to learn or just even get a little bit better at like drop the load a little bit work on some uh acre some practice reps fantastic or it's another dissimilar complex movement so let's say your first exercise was a front squat and you got loaded for that and now you're going to move into a pull-up but your mechanics aren't the best there and so you really need to change and do some maybe more specific activation warm-ups for that or something else or it's running or or something totally different so yeah you don't need to rewarm up for every single exercise as you go generally once you're good to go um the same muscles that you're going to use in the next exercise are warm same joints then you're good to go you talked about intent within the movement what about specific cadences for repetitions yeah I was taught that one should lower the weight slowly the so-called Ecentric portion of the movement and then to try and explode the weight through the concentric phase and then also make sure that one is using full range of motion and perfect form yeah as it were now of course that is one tiny slice of the possible rep cadences yeah and ways to approach resistance training although I think it's a pretty good one yeah what are the general parameter sets that one needs to consider you could imagine lifting you know 4 seconds concentric pause for one pause for two Ecentric I realize there's an infinite number of variations here yeah but is there a way to use rep Cadence repetition Cadence that is as a way to work through weak points um and to be strong in every position of the movement yeah a lovely question I think the the way I would like to answer this is maybe going back just a touch to get directly to that so I think if we walk through Power strength and hypertrophy and I hit you with the concepts that are specific to each one that's going to lay out your answer because the most true answer there is it's depends on the goal um the answer for what is optimal for strength is diametrically opposed for potentially what's optimized for pery the same exact thing can be said for momentum so we've classically heard things like this um you know don't bounce at the bottom um you're cheating right so if you're doing a lap pull down or something you know you don't you don't bounce and rebound you don't um you know you stop at the bottom slow down all these things are thought to be truisms of strength conditioning but guess what those are all true isms assuming we're trying to grow muscle and that's that actually goes back to our conversation and in episode one about a lot of the things we think are just fundamental truths about strength training are just fundamental truths that came from the bodybuilding world and they're not wrong they're good ideas but there are other adaptations one needs to get from strength training that are not just maximizing muscle growth so what I will lay out to you is a case for which you should bounce a case for when you should go fast as case for when you should be under control um all these things are are different variables we can modify and get different adaptations for it is there a way that you could lay out for us optimal repetition cadences for strength specifically versus hypertrophy specifically just to sort of bookend the conversation and then migrate toward the middle in terms of rep cadences that would satisfy the desire to have a bit of both we can get pretty close yeah so when you're talking about strength versus hypertrophy remember strength is movement hypertrophy is muscle size that's that's the key to your answer here so when you're trying to get stronger what you're effectively trying to do is get better at producing a certain amount of force the movement okay now force is mass times acceleration so what's the mass in the bar multiplied by how well I can accelerate it intentionally going slower is only reducing acceleration right so it's hard to argue that going slower is going to improve strength because you're simply reducing acceleration so you need to practice lifting heavier at a faster rate now does that mean if you're trying to get stronger there are no phases of your training in which you'll slow down or POS no of course not there are certain rules in different organizations where you have to the bottom of a like there there's all kinds of little things like there but in general we want to think about what are we trying to do here we're trying to get better at moving a heavier mass at a faster rate of acceleration that is more force that is more strength hypertrophy is not that the goal here is not a functional outcome it is what is needed to cause the most amount of hypertrophy and when you get to hyper then your optimal Cadence is up to you you can do any combination in fact you could do it the same exact Cadence that you did your strength training with and get the same adaptations as hyper if you modify the other variables appropriately or you could go slower or you could do pauses or you could do a a thing that is uh called triphasic training where you spend the first phase several weeks of your training where you do Ecentric only so you're just lowering the bar you're basically stopping you can then do the next phase of your training which is isometrics you're just holding at that bottom position and then the next phase you're training you're focusing on the concentric portion of it right triphasic 1 two 3 Ecentric isometric concentric so that's a fantastic way of of developing actually strength a little bit of hypertrophy but you're manipulating the variables in terms of how you execute the repetition range you can actually induce a lot of hypertrophy moving the weight fast as you mentioned even down slow into control now one thing one will never Advocate is moving any sort of weight or load uncontrolled the Assumption here what I'm saying go fast is you're always in control I never want you bouncing and crushing your sternum with a barbell Off Your Dust but you you can move at a lot of rates you can um the isometric I mentioned because this is when things like body weight training come into play absolutely you can gain strength and even a little bit of hypertrophy especially in the upper body doing isometrics is much harder to do this with the lower body um you just you just you outrun that coverage really quickly you need load um but there's a lot of ways this is also probably why people have done things like gone to yoga only or Pilates or some of these things that are body weight based and there's no external load and they've actually increased muscle size so I'm getting the picture there are a ton of options in terms of rep cadences however can we say that one should pick a given rep Cadence within an exercise rather than changing it from set to set within an exercise or that one should perhaps even pick a certain rep Cadence for an entire workout I'm suspecting that your answer is going to be it depends yeah it is but if you know I'm not going to use the if you had a gun to your head kind of situation but if you had a gun to your head what would be the rep Cadence that you would prescribe yeah for strictly strength or as much strength with as little hypertrophy as possible and in picking that rep Cadence then it therefore has to thread throughout the entire yeah exercise bout so you're actually right you can because of that undulating periodization stuff I talked about you can actually do this in a lot always so you could do one exercise at the beginning where you have a set Cadence say a 311 is like a very one so that's cons so that's Lifting for three pause for one lower for one uh generally the opposite okay so the first number is always the Ecentric generally okay soow lowering the the weight for a count of three pause for one it totally depends on the exercise like a deadlift starts concentric and finishes Ecentric but a bench press starts the opposite so it start to finish start to finish is better way to think about it yeah so in I'll clarify actually when we say 311 we're generally talking about almost always the Ecentric is the slower portion regardless if it's the first or the last right so whether you're doing a bench press where the Ecentric is lowering the bar to your chest that's the first part of the movement one two three pause one one up which means accelerate as hard as you can on the way up that's what you describe right as opposed to say a row a row which is actually going to be starting off off concentric so you're going to be pulling that thing to your chest as fast as you can under control not slamming off your chest holding for one second and then taking 3 seconds to lower it back on the rack or on the ground or whatever so the reason we do that is is somewhat intuitive but it is again to make sure you're not advancing a bar or an Implement onto your physical body at an extremely fast rate that that's very difficult to to deal with so a 311 is a very standard um strength protocol that is something you can just run with if if that's all you ever wanted to do it'd be absolutely fine lower the bar for a count of three it actually ends up being approximately three because hardly anybody is counting off seconds precisely I mean it's I suppose it's doable but then pausing briefly yep and that brief is almost uh that pause is almost um unmeasurable it is simply are you under control before you transition from the Ecentric to concentric conent each it's just a safety thing so once you feel down you've reached complete range of motion you're ready to transition then just go you don't really need to go like thousand one and then go up it's just making sure again we don't slam weights off of body parts and that final one in the 311 is the execution of the usually concentric portion of of the exercise yep as fast as you possibly can okay so that would be for the majority of the outcome being strength yep okay and of course we should acknowledge again there are a ton of variations that one could Implement there but that that would be a good starting place on the opposite side for somebody who's mainly interested in hypertrophy Y what would be the rep Cadence that um if you had a gun to your head that you would prescribe I would probably do the exact same thing but I would like I would make the last number two so 3 one two you could also just keep 311 it is still very fine um even exploding on the Contra is still highly effective for training hypertrophy so if you wanted to keep it super simple and just make rep Cadence not a variable that you play with because you have other ones to move that's great if you want to add a little bit of time to the concentric phase fine it's not going to do it's not going to make enough of a difference for most people for you to really worry about I guess that's sort of the point I really want to make this is we're classically this is a classic example of we're deep into a method right if you long as you hit the concepts I talked about earlier whether you want to do 311 323 333 triphasic things this is just a method choice that doesn't mean they're irrelevant they are there are subtle changes within them it's just 8020 rule right so 80% of the benefit is going to be from the concept 20% is this small thing if you're super into this field or you actually want to work with a qualified certified coach or something they there's lots of reasons to play with this if you're just on your own here and running this thing 311 is fine 312 totally fine anything like that um you really just want to make sure that in the strength side of the equation you're under control and you can add enough load to stimulate strength and not get hurt with an acute trauma right on the hypertrophy side you're just wanting to load enough to where you can hit volume because you got to put a lot on there so if you want to go lighter if you want to go slower fine you if you go slower in your repetition so maybe even like a five SEC second Ecentric a 2cond pause a 3second rise that's great you can actually then stimulate the same amount of hypertrophy and either do it with less weight or do it with less repetitions so it's a variable you can play with if you're like hey I don't have enough weights at my house or I only have a kettlebell or a dumbbell how am I going to stimulate hypertrophy your only option is really doing more reps well eventually that that train runs pretty shallow okay here's the thing you can play with maybe just add time under tension is what we're calling right um just you know do slower repetitions go longer ones and hold this so it's a variable that we use to individualize programs rather than something that you should really be focused on as like a core aspect that's going to be driving whether or not your program works it's just a tool we can play with in the what if scenarios um I will use this stuff a lot when I'm traveling you can do a tremendous workout in your hotel room just doing like a 10-second Ecentric a 10-second hold a 10- Centric concentric yeah I've had some decent hotel room workouts they're not my preference but um by simply doing things like um 10c lowering uh handstand push-up against the door totally um obviously assisted for me I don't I can't do a free hand stand push-up um I I just don't have the skill or the strength or both um you can do some sort of configure dips between the beds or chairs and this kind of thing um elevated split squats are great to do in hotels put your back foot up on a on a bed and get a an amazing split squat workout done yeah glute Bridges lots of stuff you can do there yeah and with a jump rope if you ever heard someone jumping in the in the morning uh yeah um it may or may not have been me it could be any number of things but I am known to skip R uh in hotel rooms um not to get overly detailed but I think there are going to be a number of people wondering about how to breathe during repetitions and how to breathe in between sets so I'd like to just briefly touch on this and this is something that I know we're going to return to again when we have our discussion about recovery yeah but is there a general rule of thumb for how to breathe during repetitions during work y for strength maybe even strength versus hypertrophy in in a way that maximizes oxygen input to the system you know keeps you uh alert and conscious but that also protects the body by creating some rigidity in the system right because certainly being def with all your air exhaled the body is a very different beast in terms of stability than with the body full of air versus you know breathing during the repetition movement there's a a maneuver that has long been uh labeled the Vol Salva technique so what that really means is you're trying to use air to create intraabdominal pressure and what you're really trying to do is create a cylinder around your spine the real issue you have to to play here is regulation of blood pressure and spinal stability now you should be able to breathe and Brace what I mean by that is you should be able to create total intraabdominal pressure regulate uh spine control while breathing it's just very hard for a lot of people to do it's it's a skill you should absolutely work on um you can actually you can do this and you can go around like I do this trick in class and students can come and like push any part um of my entire abdomen is super tight and I can talk now it's going to be a little bit labored you can hear a little bit of a difference but you should be able to do that if you have to like hunch down and you can't even muster a breath and it takes that to create pressure you're not actually um you don't really understand the abdominal control necessary to create that stability so step number one is that's the goal now with the blood pressure thing we have to be careful because a standard blood pressure uh ideally if we sat around right now is probably something like 120 over 80 systolic versus diastolic that's a normal number right high blood pressure is something over that well with an acute bout of exercise you can see that number reaches high as like 450 over 350 which effectively means you have total blood occlusion right your blood pressure is so high blood blood is not moving anywhere and so in the middle of a very heavy set especially complex movements especially when they're loaded on your body um this could be in overhead press or or squat variations anything like that blood pressure is going to be a problem and reason why that matters is that's what's going to make you pass out it's not the fact that you ran out of oxygen in 3 seconds it's the fact that blood pressure got so high you blacked out and so we want to have we're going to have to play this game of releasing a little bit of the pressure so we can actually get blood to move a little bit making sure that we don't lose spinal stability um so we can finish our workout that's really the question you asked right how do I play this game of oh I have several hundred pounds on my back or my chest and I don't want to Exhale right so that I don't lose spinal stability but at the same time I don't want to pass out right which is a which is a problem so kind of a couple of rules of thumb if you're going to be doing something in which you can complete the entire exercise without a breath and it is of a maximal or close to load that's probably your best strategy so in that particular case you'll see a lot of breathing techniques um where you're going to take a very large inhale ideally this is done through the abdomen not the shoulders so we shouldn't seeing clavicles Rising during this thing you'll see a common mistake of of the bars on their back and you see people do this like big inhale thing and all they do is Elevate their clavicles that's not necessarily going to increase pressure through the abdomen which is what you're looking for so you want to be thinking about belly moving out in all four areas in front of you to your left and right and to your back that's that quadrant sort of idea of stabilizing your spine you can do that in independent of your clavicles moving like your shoulders don't need to rise for that you don't really need the oxygen for metabolic purposes you're just using the air for a brace that's really all you're after so you're trying to visualize your torso as more or less a cylinder yep and you're trying to fill it with air the logic being that if I were to push down onto a say a a full unopen can of soda yep water for all you sugar phobes out there soda water uh and then push as hard as I could it's going to be hard for me to crush that can but if the can were empty or if it were a little bit kinked in the middle correct then I could likely Crush that can yeah what you're really doing is you have your spinal Erectors in the back right and then a whole series of abdominal excises and you actually have some neural control symatic control of Contracting those but the you don't have muscles on the inside that you can do so you're basically bringing in air and saying I'll use air to push from the inside out and I'll use muscles to push from the outside in to create this brace and I don't want overcompression with the muscles this is a like if you if you see people that have just enormous spinal Erectors sometimes that's an indicator of of actually a poor breathing or bracing strategy because they're using spinal rectors create all their compression and not actually using the inside of enough it's not always the case but sort of like a thing to think about so overcompression through the spinal Erectors is not necessarily ideal um if you wanted the best scenario is a little bit of a brace a both so we use some air to push this side we use some musculature to press that way and then that that spine is just nicely held in position um again not in a position where I've locked down my diaphragm and I can't get any air out I should be able to get that brace pattern um and then be able to speak in fact like I'm doing it right now and you'll see like a little bit of a if you're really paying attention to my voice you can hear a little bit of a subtle difference but I should be able to do this for quite a long time right like I I I could take a maximum rep right here in this position whether I'm overhead pressing doing some sort of row like anything and feel fairy braced in in the entire quadrant this is very helpful I I'm going to work on it but can we say that a an effective way to start off in terms of breathing during repetitions would be to take a gulp of air during the lowering phase the Ecentric phase and then to Exhale during the Y concentric exertion phase I asked that because that's what I've been doing for a while and it makes me feel safe I don't know if I am and it allows me to Exhale as I exert the the U hardest portion of the exercise yeah and perhaps I also borrowed that from martial arts where one tends most often is trained to Exhale on the on the strike yep if you're going to be doing again the number of repetitions can be completed without a breath a lot of the times you're better off saving that exhalation until you complete wow but but for a reasonably heavy set of hack squats or even leg extensions and given that I already can't leg extension my body weight we establish maybe this is why um the idea of holding my breath for an entire compound set so again brings to mind um you know like where is my insurance card who's going to drive me to the hospital this kind of thing um in all seriousness what if I want to breathe during the set yeah so I'll clarify I'm generally meaning if you're doing like a one rep max or something like that okay well certainly could hold my breath for a one repetition maximum that you know maybe like a double or something like that depending on what you're doing like maybe a triple a bench breath you can probably do three and get away with it a squat it gets harder deadlift so it kind of depends on the exercise um you want to take that be breath though prior to the Ecentric portion not during so ler breathe in lock we're set and now start our movement pattern wherever it's going to be um exhaling on the concentric portion during it it is fine it's no problem um especially if you're not extremely heavy and what's your what are your thoughts on grunting and screaming yeah fine I don't care okay I don't tend to do that I'm occasionally known to squeal or whimper um but I do it person but I do it very quietly I think of you and I think squeal whimper absolutely thanks um if you're going to be doing multiple repetitions uh what we actually do for the NFL combine is we teach them a very specific Excel strategy so there's one test that they do uh which is they bench press 225 pounds for as many reps as possible a lot of these people people will get 25 to 40 repetitions so we have a very specific breathing pattern it would be something like if we think that they're going to do around 25 reps say that's like our goal we might say okay do the first 10 without without a breath and then exhale reset and then do five breath and then you might do five breath three breath two breath and then one breath per rep until we can't get any more um so we'll have very specific strategies for them um so what I would say is is think about how many you're going to complete and and then breathe according uh to that and it tends to increase in frequency as the number gets closer to failure because you're going to want that that error a little bit but you just want to make sure that when you're re when you're breathing back in you're in a safe spot so you don't want to be catching that like rebreath when the weight's on you you want to be in a locked out position or away from you when you're standing um so it tends to be like at the end of the exercise not in the middle of it um which is is going to be a recipe for problems if you take your breath then one of the reasons I'm so happy to have you here having this discussion is we can really get into the weeds but also hit a number of questions that I hear a lot Y how does one contend with the first attempt at a lift not working out it too heavy something goes wrong hopefully not injury promoting wrong but something goes wrong do you count that do you reset the workout and then the counterpart to that question is what do you do if it's too easy when wrong wrong because you didn't put enough weight on the bar didn't pick up a heavy enough set of dumbbells do you abandon the set and and replace it with another and I guess this is really a question of how much margin for error is there in volume yep when doing this 3x5 program sure uh two things that I'd like to start with number one is I talked about linear periodization and undulating periodization there's actually a new model newish model called Auto regulation which basically says you're going to go in today and depending on any number of biomarkers performance markers or your performance you will adjust your training based on how you're feeling that day and so 70% is that maybe for example not necessarily 70% of your one repetition Max highest ever is 70% of what you can actually do that day and so it actually allows you to Auto regulate your training based on actually what's happening and so you don't have to have as much long-term planning in your program design um because it'll sort of figure itself out as you're going you can use velocity to determine this Auto regulation you can use actually it's like taking it up to close to a Max for the day and then basing all your percentages on that daily Max or a lot of different ways so that is actually one very effective strategy and there's a lot of research coming out on auto regulation there's a lot of different ways to do it so that's one thing to say another thing to say is this three to five okay um it depends on if we're going for speed power or strength because while all those other variables are the same for three to five the core difference between whether that is a power workout or a strength workout is the load right so if you are at a moderate load say 30% of your one repetition Max up to about 70% that's going to be a power-based adaptation assuming you're going with high intent can you sorry I I have to interrupt maybe just clarify what intent is yeah you're attempting to move the implement or go through the movement pattern as fast as you can great thank you if you're trying to go for strength and you're below 70% you're not really going to be improving strength because the total mass is not heavy enough and so really when we say strength we're assuming you're at at least generally 70% or higher now if you're new to training totally different thing right but if you're moderately trained to highly trained you're going to be well north of 70% so anything below that we don't really count anyways um that's those are warm-up sets basically all right so one thing to actually give you some very specific numbers here and I don't have all of these memorized we can perhaps um provide a chart later or send out something to them but there's a chart that you can look up called a pilipin chart how do you spell that uh p r i l i p i nin pipin and there's actually been a a few studies on it it's it's a it's it's been old it's been around for a very long time it's sort of in the coaching realm and then a handful of studies out of New Zealand came out verifying and validating a lot of it but what it effectively does is say if strength is the goal and this comes from the powerlifting weightlifting sort of communities optimizing for strength then how much time do I need to spend at each intensity range so 70% 80% 90% Etc because specificity is going to say this if you want to get better neuromuscular guy at shooting a basketball the most important thing you could ever do is shoot a basketball under the exact circumstances that you're going to do it right specificity always wins if you want to get better at strength the most important thing you need to do is that exact movement at that load and in this case if you wanted to get better at you know bench press lifting at 100% of your max on a bench press is the most specific thing you could ever do the more you can do that the faster you will increase your bench press Max however that's very hard to do without getting hurt it's also not addressing what I call your Defender so if the reason you can't bench press higher than whatever you're benching now it may not be your pure strength it may be any number of things like you don't have enough muscle or technique or these things okay great so specificity over here um variation on the other side and so we're playing this game we've talked about of of how do I make sure that I can have enough specificity in my training without leading to uh overuse injury all how do I maximize or how do I reduce my chance of injury while getting enough speci specificity and so we have a classic Paradigm over here one actually training protocol you can look up is called the Bulgarian method and the bulgarians were un amazing um at the sport of Olympic weightlifting um probably in fact the the uh the the patriarch of this entire thing recently passed away Ian IV uh neams L monog Glo pocket Hercules one of the greatest weightlifters of all time came out of the system and they do a lot of things but one example in the Bulgarian system is you're going to do a one repetition maximum snatch you're going to take a little bit of a break you'll do a one repetition maximum cleaning jerk take a little bit of a break do a one repetition maximum front squat take a little bit of a break and you're going to repeat that two to three times a day every day that's specificity right those people get extraordinarily strong now they don't do that all year round they don't do that with all their lifters but this is when we're trying to Peak for a major competition like the Olympics we are going so far into specificity and that was very counter to the Russian system with a which is much more of our classic periodization sort of approach okay specificity is is tremendous but in doing that the bulgarians just brutalize a lot of athletes right because it's very difficult to handle something like that and you can't really do that that long without getting wrecked and there the goal is to win medals the goal is it's a totally different thing than longevity out of here right like we're trying to push the boundaries of or aesthetic changes unless someone has a naturally balanced Physique in general if people do one sort of movement I find that they tend to resemble the equipment that they did that movement with over time right that was a joke against kettle bells of course of course of course I got it so we know specificity is technically optimal but it's not realistic not for that kind of a you know extreme situation so how do we balance these things well it turns out this pilipin chart gives you guidelines for how much time and by time I mean how many repetitions to stand um in each of these rep ranges so that you get kind of the best of this world you're going to find the same thing by way when we get into endurance training there's only so much training you can do at 95% of your heart rate before it starts becoming like quite detrimental you need to actually spend a lot of time at those lower intensities so the prant chart walks you through how many sets and it gives you a range like like the I think that the bottom of it is like um how much time do you spend at like 60 to 70% every one at Max and it says like you know a minimum of this set to a maximum of this set but the ideal number of reps per set per week is like 18 and then it walks you through and so there's there's four CR IIA on it um I think it's 55 to 65% again how many reps there it's like 3 to six reps per set um 18 to 30 reps total and I think the ideal rep range is like 24 something like that so it g takes you have 55 to 65 70 to 80 80 to 90 and the 90 plus percent what you'll see is the 90 plus perc number is more like 1 to two reps per set for a total of about seven total repetitions if you start cruising past that um other bad things start to creep up in there so that's a really effective chart what it really highlights though is even somebody who's trying to maximize strength you're going to spend something like 35 or so perc of your training time between this like 55 to 65% range so you're asking early like well do I even count that one the the answer is yeah you know in that range if it's below 55 60% you probably don't count it now again some coaches don't count it unless it's even above 70 fine it's not a major distinction but you're going to spend the bulk of your time you know accumulating some some technique basically and skill and tissue tolerance very important um The Next Step Up is like 28% I think is is sort of the cut off of how much time you spend um between 70 and 80% of re one or Max and then it jumps down to like 23% and then all the way to to 70% so you can walk yourself through that and that gives you an extremely good guideline and you'll notice all of these are still in three range it's just really you're manipulating it by total sets or total exercises so that can give you some structure to play with we will provide a link to the pipin Chart yeah in the show note captions training to failure when the goal is strength yeah should one do it should one avoid it or does it depend well yeah it always depends um the way that I'll generally say it is because of what we just outlined in the Brin chart you don't have to go to failure to see strength gains especially early or even moderate and I'm talking maybe five plus years in your lifting career would you um call beginner zero to five years of training intermediate five to 20 years of training yeah something like that and then Advanced would be people that really put the time and energy into fine-tuning their program the vast majority of people who think they're Advanced are really what we would call intermediate in all domains of life Fair even as a scientist it's quite rare to reach that number of advance so um I actually don't have any problem going to failure quite often um I'm also fine with people who don't want to go all the way there you can get most of what you need getting what we call technical failure so this is like okay that was really challenging uh boy you started to have some breakdowns of technique we're going to call that good The Only Exception here I I want to point out is people who are either novice or beginners they really have no concept of what 100% means and so I think it's actually very fruitful to take them to 100% just to give them a guideline of where it's at now of course do this on exercises that they are comfortable with or close and then you may maybe maybe this is on a machine maybe this is um single joint movements or whatever it takes for them to have confidence but I actually I don't think you should be scared of these they're not really um that much more dangerous than anything else there's I mean think about it if you're going to do a front squat or any exercise and and your one rep max is 200 lb is it really that much more dangerous to do one try at 205 lb than it is to do five tries at 190 pounds like is it really that much more no like it's not so you can do like we talked about in the the first episode you can do a a repetition Max estimate where you get to like 85 to 95% of where you think you are and then instead of adding load you just do as many reps as you can Google that number and then it'll tell you the conversion and estimate of what your one RX is that's fine but I also I have absolutely no issue uh in fact I generally encourage it to take people up to that level um certainly not day one or or anywhere close to that but at some point let's see what you actually got I'm just I'm just going to cut it off early what I'm going to consider to be one at Max um anything more than a minor technical breakdown is is for that crew we're going to stop and and call that good and ideally with a spotter especially um you know bench pressing don't bench press alone in your basement kind of thing a few people die each year from bench pressing alone in their basement or use dumbbells if you're going to do that hard harder to to die using dumbbells I suppose you could um drop them on your head or something but not get stuck under them um exercise selection and frequency of exercise implementation across the week so I can imagine with this 3x5 routine done three to five times per week you could imagine changing up the exercises every workout MH although considering that most of these 3x5 routines are going to be done with compound movements generally that sooner or later one runs out of movements if the goal is to hit major all the major muscle groups yeah however Let me Give an example and ask if it's okay to for instance do the 3x5 routine where one of the exercises for back is say a bent over row uh you do that on Monday Wednesday and Friday okay you know I can imagine one could do that and still recover and improve over time but 5 days a week bend over Rose 5 days a week is that okay I mean can one still progress um and there I could imagine it's a strong answer of Depends because some people recover more slowly and others I'm very comfortable doing hitting muscle groups once directly per week and once indirectly that's worked for me far better than two or three times per week you know I get you know looks of sympathy when when I say this but it's actually is just how my physiology Works um kind of yeah well and maybe I'm not optimizing a number of different features but the point being that some people really do seem to be able to train a muscle every day and still make progress other people seem to have trouble when they train a muscle every day so how does one establish exercise selection when the goal is to make progress um and this brings up something very important and we're going to have an whole episode about this but local versus systemic recovery y that you know is the whole nervous system becoming fatigued and is the muscle group and the related muscular skeletal systems becoming fatigued we're going to go back to thinking about when you make these comments about it takes you three to five days and you've got better results in there the assumption that you're probably running under is your training style is more reflecting that recovery time than it is your physiology it's not you it's you're training so if you look at again all the Olympic weightlifters that are competing they're going to be squatting or some variation of squatting every day that's going to happen like a lot of the times they're training multiple times a day and they will be doing some basically barbell full squat multiple times a day every day six days a week you know something like that they're the best in the world at getting powerful they're tremendously good at getting strong you can do it right it comes down um to what does your volume look like what type of movements are you doing um what rep range uh what overall volume are you hitting and how are you doing it if you look at athletes they train their legs every day when they're running around they're doing Speed and Agility training every single day they don't need you know three days to recover can you imagine a basketball player trying to ask for like three days to recover between practice right well to be fair as you as you chuckle at me I'm doing other things on the intervening days yeah so I'll train a muscle group like legs and then I'll give it 4 days before I do an indirect yeah um uh what I call an indirect exercise for legs which for me would be sprinting then it get two days and then I'm training them again but nonetheless an athlete has to do that every day right right so the ABS the answer is you absolutely can train any of these muscles every single day it really comes down to volume right and it comes down to movement type um and how are you getting so with in the case of of weightlifters and and athletes what we tend to see happen is there's not a um there's two things there is a long period of conditioning and I don't mean endurance what I mean is is tissue tolerance and conditioning so they're not going to start off their career at that pace right their career might start start off at five days a week but maybe every other of those days is a PVC pipe only and you're just training the movement patterns you're working on technique Etc and then eventually maybe after 6 months or a year those PVC pipe days turn into barbell only days and so now you went from you know a pound to 45 pounds and then eventually as your years go on that that ratches up so it depends on the style in general speed and power stuff is so light it almost require because it's non- fatiguing it requires almost no no recovery so if you were truly doing say like um you know your when you say it's funny because when you say I do legs on Mondays you don't even realize it but an athlete does legs every day right but you're saying legs and what you're really saying is I do hypertrophy legs Monday pretty much that I don't want to get into what I do specifically because it's less important than what other people choose to implement but the repetition ranges anywhere from four to 12 correct soy you're smack dead in the peak sorus longest recovery range volume is relatively low intensity is very very high workouts are very very short so if you were to switch that and you were to stay under four repetitions higher quality uh higher rest in between them I would be willing to bet a a large amount of money that you'd be fine the next day certainly 40 hours and if you were to actually go way lower and keep you know 3 to five and keep it very very light and train for Speed you would have absolutely no issue the next day so it really comes down to a function of of training you're right in that hypertrophy Zone which is something that you probably need 48 hours at minimum to recover from because What You Won't See are bodybuilders training the same muscle group on multiple days like very often at most it would be indirect but generally they're not going to do that every single day for the same reason so you're training in that style that's what it's going to take to recover if you trained in a different style then it wouldn't take that long to recover so for the person starting out would you recommend they pick three to five exercises and stick with those so that they can get their skill and movement and positioning and breathing all that really dialed in and then start to experiment by varying one or two of those exercises over time that's great if you look at the the conjugate model so these are the the strongest powerlifters as a collective group group that ever existed what they're very good at is they keep almost the exact same weekly structure but they make a very small change in exercise variation so for example say say Wednesday is bench day right they're going to always bench on Wednesdays but maybe this week they're going to do close grip bench and then maybe next week it's going to be maybe a a special type of barbell and then maybe the week after that it's um you know maybe they'll change the range of motion a little bit so it's actually the exact same exercise where they're making a very small variation and that change alone allows them to do enough specificity but also gives them enough variation to where it's not the exact same stimuli in the exact same spot over and over and over and that's what allows that group plus lots of other assistants but it's what allows that group to train very very very heavy very consistently and not have to worry about too much planning for periodization and other stuff like that they get their back off by making small variations and exercise I will say a major mistake folks do make is they change your exercises entirely way too often um if I were to have to pick one or the other I would say don't change anything on your exercises for 6 weeks probably realistic maybe even 10 to 12 weeks and then you can make some changes um you should not be changing every single week um the general you're just you're not going to see progress it's going to be very difficult to do that so um it's going to take you three weeks generally to figure out the groove of the exercise to figure out how well you can load it what's too much to where you woke up unbelievably sore that was a train wreck um how much do I load it at how what position how long is this going to take it's going to take you three or so weeks and then you can really start pushing there so changing it before that or in that time frame is is you're not going to be able to progressively overload because you're just not going to know exactly where you're at on all the exercises so it's very important to create standardization within them and then see some progress in a movement or a muscle Group whatever you're going for and then make some changes so before we dive into our discussion about hypertrophy can we just get a brief recap of the general parameters for an excellent power and strength training program okay let me hit you with these rapid fire and then you can maybe come and ask questions along that remember those modifiable variables okay so let's go through them in order and then what they mean specifically for power versus strength so modifiable variable number one is called choice so which exercises do I select for strength in general for power or speed or strength we want to select compound movements you don't often see people doing maximum strength work for like a tricep Kickback right it's typically multiple joint movements and typically complex um movements in selecting these compound movements we generally want to actually think about exercise selection of movements rather than muscle groups so this is an important distinction because we'll see this is a different answer when we get hypertrophy what I mean by that is when we think about again strength training we tend to think about bodybuilding Concepts we go to the gym and we do things like I got to make sure I get my chest today and I got to make sure I get my hamstring strs and now you're selecting exercises based on a muscle you want to work for strength development and power we want to think about movements rather than individual muscle groups so there should be like things like I need to train explosive hip extension which is like a a a vertical jump or something like that I I want to train pushing or pulling movements or I want to attain rot I want to train rotation which is a whole area we haven't gotten into which is very important for overall health and wellness longevity so we want to select big movements by the muscle the movement patterns that we want to introduce and we just want to select a reasonable balance between these I don't care what the exact ratio is you just don't want to go an entire six months without doing anything in this rotational area or an entire you know 8 to 10 weeks without doing something um uh that's a lower body hinge right so any number of examples there so just think about the rough movement patterns upper and lower push and pull and then some sort of rotation that puts you in a pretty good spot if you're using 3x five method and you're going to pick as little as three exercises just pick one from each one of those group pick a rotation pick a a push and pick a pull I can easily think of a push and a pull um so for example um bench press or shoulder press sure um row or chin for pull and then squat or deadlift for hinge yep what would be a good example of a quality rotational movement y so anytime um you can can use a cable machine like at the gym and you can do it's kind of hard to describe this exercise but basically you're going to stand facing the cable and you're going to pull it toward yourself and then rotate like you're pivoting like you're um either swinging a golf club or hitting a baseball bat so you're facing One Direction I'm facing you right now I'm pulling the cable towards myself and then I'm going to spin do a 180 degree pivot and face exactly away from you when I finish and then return it back to that same spot so that's a rotation great we will provide a link to an example of that that you consider a quity example a medicine ball throw any number of things like this are a great rotational exercise all right so we select our exercises based on that we generally then the ca because of that as the case we don't worry about things like Ecentric versus concentric because you're dly doing a whole body athletic movement right which the Ecentric concentric portion is going to be folded into that you really can't separate them out all right so that's exercise Choice our first variable the next one is exercise order so because that everything driving power and strength is quality based you want to do these at the beginning of your workout you would not want to do anything fatiguing before this so no cardiovascular training no other uh repetition to failure stuff if you do those before and now you're slower all you've done is practice getting slower and and so these need to be done when you're fresh you also need to do them when you're very fresh because they are the most neurologically demanding they're complicated they tend to have multiple steps and they're often in multiple planes and coordination is a difficult thing and if you're trying to do all that at maximum speed your nervous system needs to be tremendously fresh and so any amount of fatigue here is only going to compromise results um to kind of recap that uh one of the major mistakes when training for strength and especially power is people worry way too much about fatigue those things should not be part of the equation in fact if they are that's a very good sign you're not doing this correctly right these are non- fatiguing movements especially speed and power so Choice order is next um the next one after that is volume and we sort of hit volume and intensity which is the other one um we we talked about that the volume is basically identical between power and strength um the the general number we're going to look at here is something like three to 20 sets total per workout per workout um but that would be like 20 would be a little bit of a special case three to five is what I told you earlier right I'm just saying like sometimes you can actually go quite higher in cases but that's the general range and once somebody finishes the 3x5 workout for power or strength if they decide they want to throw in some calf raises and curls and totally a forearm work or a little bit of uh joggy on the treadmill or something that's okay absolutely that there is you have very little risk of interference for things like speed and power strength you have a little a little bit of a risk only because now you're introducing fatigue which if you're really pushing strength that might compromise your recovery ah I could imagine doing the three to five routine for strength or for power and then somebody finishing up with um 10 or 15 minutes of hypert try arm workor and then being very seriously compromised if they try and come in the next day or even the next day correct and do those big compound movements for Speed and power that's right not just because they're sore but the muscles may actually still be damaged and I know later we're going to talk about the um somewhat tenuous relationship between soreness and Recovery yeah yep so that that's a that's a really nice uh heuristic to pay attention to is you can but just be careful Energy starts to matter at that point um if you're really truly trying to maximize strength you would do nothing at all outside of that training um if you're just like I kind of want to get stronger and some other things and you're willing to lose strength you know 5% of your strength gains then you're you're to fine um the same can be said by the way for super setting so super setting is an idea that says like wait a minute you're telling me dude I got to take five minutes in between each set well that's not so much a problem nowadays with phone with um smartphones because people are filling their interet intervals with social media and texting correct you you don't really have to go that long in fact there was actually a study that came out in the last month that showed you know like really 2 minutes is probably sufficient for most people having said that if you really are trying to push maximum strength adaptations like 3 to five is very very reasonable um you're those training sessions are long because you have to take you're spending more time not doing anything than you aren't doing something but you're trying to maximize quality so that's just sort of like part and parcel um if you're not super worried about it you can actually do super setting which is let's imagine again you're going to do some some lunges and while your legs are resting doing their three to five minutes you can go over and do an upper body row or pull and when your upper body's resting you're going back to legs so that really Cuts your time in half is it ideal no we actually ran a study uh maybe 10 years ago in our lab and we looked at that specifically and we did see a reduction in strength performance in the super setting group relative to the group who did not superet the question then it becomes like is it enough for you to care so if you were if I were to say hey I can cut an hour off of your workout time but you will lose 5% of your strength gain almost everyone would take that exchange with the exception of people who are getting close to competition or really trying to set a new lifetime PR or something then you might say no I don't want any interference there that last little margin is what I care about give me the extra rest great so it's not a does it work does it not work it's always a what are you willing to give up uh versus get the practicalities of super setting or staggering Push Pull Push Pull uh in my mind are real because you have to take over large segments of the gym which oftentimes leads to a situation where your rest times are too long or highly variable because people are working in or you can't finish your set because now someone jumped into the machine totally screw you lose three to five of your friends because it's obnoxious when you're taking over all the equipment but in all seriousness I think um it's wonderful if you have the space and the and the format to do it but at least in my experience and observation um these people know who they are uh it's not practical to do on a regular basis if you train in an open commercial gym yeah tough to pull off so um we've covered Choice order volume and intensity to a sufficient level the last one is frequency and we've already sort of indirectly talked about that where frequency can be as high as you'd like in this area it really depends on your recovery if you're really truly pushing maximum strength you probably do need a few days to recover although that's dependent upon you but speed and power can be done multiple times a day almost every day basically um the one exception would be maximum sprinting speed you need to be careful there for things like hamstring uh injury especially if you're pretty fast so you want to be a little bit cautious of that but if you're doing easier movements um like medicine ball throws or kettle bell swings or something you could do those quite often as long as the volume is is staying pretty low last little piece here is progression how do I progress over time so I mentioned this earlier but just wanted to fill this Gap right back in before we head over to hypertree which is 3 to 5% increase per week of intensity in general um and you can do upwards of about 5% increase in volume per week over time and I generally recommend running that for uh at longest 8 weeks but probably most realistically you want to go about five weeks or so and then have some sort of a D Lo or back off week if you do that you're you're generally going to be a pretty good spot um so those are like the Core Concepts now there's a whole bunch of fun methods you can play with within all these categories and and I I would like to actually cover just a couple of them um if we've got a little more space for that sure I'd love to hear about those I'd like to also just ceue up one which is while I joked about people texting and doing social media between sets and I that's not a joke I well I confess I stopped bringing my phone into the gym yeah um because of the urge to you know take my mind off of the workout and I just started enjoying my workouts a lot more yeah and the workouts go far better that way and they're they're just much more efficient it for me I I realize that some people their careers take place in the gym so for I don't um look down upon anyone using their phone at the gym but that really tends to help um me but I do wonder whether not there's an optimal Behavior or mindset in between sets M um I've heard before that pacing around can actually help diffuse some of the lactate and other metabolic uh byproducts of of work and exertion yeah that can lead to better performance I've also heard that um you know shaking the muscles out I mean there's all sorts of Jim lore um about this but maybe there's also some decent science I'm just curious uh if you have any specific recommendations that people could play with or try yep so for for Speed and power um you want to walk this balance of stiff but fresh and so if you were to literally finish a repetition sit on a bench for five minutes you would stand up after that fairly stiff and you wouldn't feel sort of smooth this is all SC this is all non-science this is all practical application right anic data anic data there you go strength is a little bit different but it's the same concept you're walking that line um in general a lot of the times if you see powerlifters and weightlifters in between sets they're going to sit down and not move for hypertrophy can be a little bit different because you're getting towards fatigue and so the factors you mentioned like clearing lactate well first of all lactate is not actually causing fatigue that's that's a giant myth that we which is why I teed it up no I'm just kidding um but in the case of again speed and power you're not going to fatigue so fatigue management is not really issue you want to make sure that you're getting complete neurological recovery which is a little bit slower than muscle energetically you're not out of any gas whatsoever right um You are not a lack of fuel you know doing three repetitions of a vertical jump Y no close plenty of glycogen totally what about stretching between sets yeah you probably don't want to do that either um there are very clear examples of pre-exercise stretching static stretching being quite detrimental for maximum power production the same thing for Speed uh and strength and that's been shown actually a number of times in a number of Laboratories which is like a a classic Hallmark any scientist looks for of like really jumping on board with an idea if it's shown not only multiple times but in multiple Laboratories from multiple scientists and they're all seeing the same thing you you start to get a lot of confidence that that's a real finding and that's been shown um we've done that in our Center for sport performance not myself but one of my colleagues has done a lot of stretching research and he's seen that a lot on everything from vertical jump um to ISO kinetic dynamometers and and force velocity curves and there's um we we've seen this in sprinting we've seen this in speed we've seen this in loaded stuff so um you don't want to spend a ton of time stretching statically stretching a muscle prior if you do that and you have to do that say say for example you finish that you're just like feeling really tight yeah go ahead like you need to get in the right position especially for most people where are you willing to sacrifice 10% of power to make sure you don't get hurt yes that answer is almost always yes outside of some very specific athlete scenarios so if you're not in the right position I actually remember having this conversation with Kelly Kelly started a long time ago was just like yeah fine I'll lose 5% that means I'm not going to get in a bad position and hurt my back I and I totally totally agree so if you got to open up a hip or an ankle or something to get there get in the right position number one we'll live with the 5% reduction in power and if you do just reactivate so before you go do your working set go do something fast again a vertical jump a short Sprint an acceleration and sort of get that system cleared back up um if you didn't stretch it for long long enough and you didn't hold it for long enough you should be able to be just fine so um when it comes to hypertrophy yeah you can really stretch all you want because we're not it's not driven by intensity or outcome it's being driven by an insult into the tissue and so if you're pre- fatigued for hypertrophy it doesn't matter if you're pre-stretched that doesn't matter we're not going for quality of outcome we're going for quality of internal signal which is not going to be um Changed by your Force output so it doesn't really matter you mentioned a few other things that one might consider in light of uh the list that you provided of choice order volume frequency and progression right so starting off with power uh I just wanted to hand the the listeners here with a whole bunch of different methods to go play with right so as long as you hit those Concepts the repetition range for power 30 to 70% of your one repetition Max depending on the exercise and your training status um you're going to get the power as long as you're attempting to go fast this going to be great a lot of things you can try ply metric are a great example um of things that are effective for um for power development we we've mentioned medicine ball throws uh short Sprints you can even do Sprints uh on like an airbike which is a great super safe activity you can do them from Like a Rolling start where you kind of like get going a little bit and then you explode for 5 seconds to see how fast you can get or a dead start like both of those are very very acceptable um weightlifting movement so snatches and cleaning jerks are tremendously effective in fact they are pound-for-pound by far the most effective uh exercise choice for power development like without question um so those are good ones clapping push-ups speed squats these are a whole host of different things that you can do for Speed and power development I'm depending on your kettle bell swings another great one um all these can be done depending on your preference exercise availability what's at your gym or not gym any of those things if somebody is more focused on strength as opposed to power what are the additional variables they should consider again within the context of this overarching theme of choice order volume frequency and progression absolutely it's almost identical with a couple of small exceptions number one you probably can't do as many working sets per week for strength because now you're introducing a heavier load and that's going to represent some sort of fatigue um load on the tissue all those things so you could probably get away with doing 20 sets of two of a vertical jump four or five times a week you probably couldn't do that at a 90% on squat right so the total amount of sets and the total amount of weekly load you can get to just needs to be lower and then the intensity right so we talked about that needs to be generally higher than 70% with you know some portion of that being working sets and some portion of that really truly being at 90% plus everything else is is pretty identical you still want to emphasize maximum speed despite the fact you may actually not be moving faster because you've introduced load you still need to be attempting that but you're going to be picking complex exercises you're generally going to be hedging more towards barbells in machines so this is a case where um body weight training can be effective again particularly for the upper body but at some point you're really going to have to move past that because there's just a certain amount of load you can't put on the lower body with just your body weight you get limited by how much you weigh or I mean there's a couple of things you can do but you're going to run out past that pretty quickly and so in when it comes to strength they tend to be less athletic movements because um you know we have to have a barbell on us we have to have a we have to be on a machine or something like that and so that's a subtle difference in exercise choice we need to also be careful about the Ecentric portion and things like that we don't have as much risk in like a speed or power one so um some of the different things you can play with there we've talked about doing things like pushes and pulls I also love carries so a farmer's carry uh pushing a sled dragging a sled all kinds of things a Yol walk all kinds of of carry modalities that are very very effective for strength um there's Ecentric overload training which we really haven't gotten into but it's a really Advanced technique where you can actually load at greater than 100% of your one repetition Max but you're only going to do the Ecentric portion of it um so physiologically you are much stronger eccentrically than you are concentrically um for a variety of of of muscle tissue reasons actually and so imagine if you can do a bench press at 200 lb and what you might actually do is load it to 220 and you would have a spotter and and maybe even use it in a rack and you would lower it Down Under Control all the way to the bottom and then stop your friends would lift it back up the top and you just practice that Ecentric portion you would actually be able to lower say 220 pounds effectively despite the fact that you wouldn't have been able to lift it back up um you don't need to start there but that is a very effective method for incre in fact argue one of my um one of my doctors stud right now is is doing a project on this at USC and he uh like he's focusing directly on this and it's it's quite clear this oftentimes more effective at strength development than anything else because you can actually just like in the speed example where you want to actually practice moving faster so instead of practicing at 100% of your one or maxtra strength you actually practice at higher than that to get better at it um so that's that's another um much more advanced tool please don't let me get sued by saying all that like folks be careful make sure you're doing the proper exercise and you're positioning and and like caveat caveat caveat okay um but outside of that it can be it's it's totally fine and safe yeah with it when people get injured they can't train you can't train you don't progress you you lose progress so uh certainly that that's worth highlighting so two more um little more advanced techniques that that I want to throw out there and one of them is called cluster sets so cluster sets are there's a bunch of ways to do it but imagine taking a mini break in between every single repetition so say you're going to do five repetitions in a row what you're actually going to do is do one repetition set it down pause for 5 to 10 seconds and then do the next one pause do the next one pause pause pause pause pause so you can imagine doing like a squat and you're going to go down explode up you're going to stand there you're going to Rack it out you're going to kind of like shake back out catch your breath walk back in do another one rack it out and you're going to repeat that until you've executed your three or four or five repetitions and then you take your 3 to 5 minute break before your next set that is an incredibly effective way for both strength power and actually even hypertrophy because you can keep the quality the force output the power output very very very high because you're getting these little Min breaks and you're not getting fatigue setting in by the time you hit your say third or fourth or fifth repetition in that set um after repetition one you start to see very small subtle reductions in power up but because you start to see a little bit fatigue you you take those 5 to 10 seconds off even up to 20 seconds you can actually do it um you don't see any drop and and force output over the course of the five and so what you really have done is you've gotten five in this example first repetitions which is the way we kind of say it right so all five of those had the same quality as rep number one which is again as we're talking that's the driver and strength and so that's the one we want to preserve so um it takes a little bit longer um for some exercises it's not very good um it's great for like a deadlift because you set it back down shake it back out regrip hard to do with the bench you got to Rack it back in then rerack it back out that's it's like kind of a pain in the ass um so there's some exercises it doesn't work well with and some that it does but cluster sets and a lot of research on those um very effective would you recommend if somebody's doing cluster sets that they do them for every session within that week or just this is an occasional thing you could do it this could be your training strategy yeah absolutely so you can really take it that serious um in fact like if you look at again the weightlifters they will do cluster sets by default not even trying so say they'll do like a clean and then they'll drop the weight back out they're supposed to be doing say a set of three but almost always they're going to like Shake It Out regrip and then pull it again and sometimes their set of three takes like a minute and then like you hear it's funny because it's like like I set a tri a triple PR you're like no you did three singles like what's the difference between doing three singles and a set of three when you took a minute between each rep um I love that community so yeah I mean it give be your strategy like it could be like hey for this five we block this is all my training especially for your compound movements if you're going to go to start doing some of the smaller movements maybe you give up on that um it could also just be something you do for your one primary exercise for the day so do that thing that is the most important first and just do it for that one and then the rest of them you can kind of ditch it if you need to save a little bit of that time um it can also be something you do by feel so you know you're your two reps in and you go God like I'm not feeling like poppy here like rack it catch my breath for a quick second and do it so it doesn't happen have to be ultra planned um I guess what I'm doing is is I'm giving you an excuse to make sure you're super fresh for every rep it matters the last one I want to talk about here is what's called Dynamic variable resistance so Dynamic variable resistance is uh fixing the problem we have with What's called the human strength curve so theory of constraints again you are only as strong as you are in your weakest point of the movement so depending on the the movement you do this happens at a different range of motion well the deadlift is the easiest example um it's also because we've done like research in my lab using this stuff on the deadlift so I can speak to it very directly when you go to pull it off the ground some people are going to fail right at the bottom meaning they won't get the weight off the ground at all some people will fail just below the knees that's like kind of like the hardest transition period and then some people will fa right at the top just before they can lock out okay great so what that means is at some point of that lift you're going to only be limited by your strength in the weakest area all right so if you have a constant load on the bar in those other two parts of the range of motion where you are not the weakest they're never truly being tested for their maximum strength because they're always being limited by the previous one this is the same argument that we would get into if people ask about should what what do you think about using straps right um You strapping your hand to a bar for deadlift things like that there's pros and cons here there are times when you want to use a strap and there are times when it's a bad idea so what dynamic variable resistance is is either using things like a heavy band or a or chains on the bar if you've ever seen people do that um so in my lab we actually have a force plate on the ground and then we have um built-in basically hooks uh in the front and the back so we can actually set a a barbell on top of the force plate where you stand on it and then run bands from the back to the front running over top of the weights and so when you stand up as you're going up vertically the band are getting Tighter and Tighter and pulling the weight towards the ground so the weight is getting heavier and heavier as you stand up so as you start to gain mechanical advantage in your positioning you start to increase load because the bands are getting Tighter and Tighter and Tighter so this allows you to train that full part of the strength curve and to challenge um your stronger areas with heavier weight and your weaker areas with lower weight um you can do the same thing with a bench press you can do it with a a squat and any other exercise variation and dynamic variable resistance um is incredibly effective for a number of things um you're going to give up a little bit um because the total load you can put on the barbell is lower because you're going to be adding you know in large cases several hundred pounds of band tension and so it pros and cons it's always a game it changes the curve but it's it's a it's a very good technique um that that people it's fairly easy to implement it's fun and in fact if you try this on on a bench or a squat you're going to be the first time you give it a go you're like oh my God cuz the bands are pulling you all over the place um so you have to get very stable very quick um been shown a number of times a handful of studies out of many Laboratories to be a very effective training technique a little bit more advanced but I wanted to throw that in there for the folks that are maybe just tired of sort of doing the same barbells and dumbles and machines and you want to try something different a very effective technique sounds like fun yeah it's great with your permission I'm going to read back my summary list of training for power and training for strength according to your description and you can tell me where I'm right and where I'm wrong yeah I'm going to pick three to five exercises and these should be compound exercises so multi-joint movements I'm going to perform those exercises for three to five repetitions each I'm going to do three to five movements total per workout and I'm going to rest three to five minutes between STS okay if I'm training for power the weight load on the work set so not the warm-up sets but the work sets are going to fall somewhere in the range of 30 to 70% of my one repetition maximum yep and the larger the movement the higher that number goes so on a squat you're okay getting 50 or 60% on a bench you would not want to go that high uh you would want to stay close to that 30 to 40% range so the way you scale that up and down is dependent upon um the difficulty of the movement great if training for strength I'm going to have my work sets be 70% or more of my one repetition maximum yep and the only thing to add there is in the case of actually all of them um it's okay to go less than three reps per set so a single or a double you know one or two rep time is also fantastic so uh we use three to five as the concept but less is okay going more than that is generally not a good idea so less is okay more is generally not okay and then you listed off a number of really valuable I don't even want to call them fine points but important points to keep in mind within each in both of these programs one that really stands out in my mind is this idea of if I perform this 3x5 program but I'm also including some hypertrophy work for arms or calves or muscle groups that might not be hit as directly as one might like during the 3x5 component that's okay but do that after the 3x5 training and keep in mind that that additional work can potentially compromise recovery for the 3x5 power promoting or strength promoting program the example being for instance if one does arm work on the first workout of the week or even the you know the third workout of the week or the fifth workout of the week and that arm work is higher repetition hypertrophy directed work it's reasonable to assume that it might impede some of the 3x5 power promoting or strength promoting training in the subsequent workout so just to be mindful of that and perhaps throttle back on the intensity or the volume or if my goal is strictly power or strictly strength probably best to leave out other forms of training yep love it one last little thing I don't think we did Justice is intention and the reason I want to go back to this now is because we've talked a lot about specific loads you have to hit and that's generally the case but if intention is there you can fudge those numbers in terms of how much load goes on the bar in fact you can get as low as no load on the bar a great example here is like a plank exercise so you can do a plank in which you get in a position and you simply contract the least amount necessary to hold the position also you could contract as hard as possible pulling your scapula down and back squeezing your core squeezing your quads squeezing your glutes that is actually going to still help strength production because you're attempting to contract very very hard even though quote unquote the load is the same that thing extends to weight on the bar so you could theoretically see large improvements in strength at 50% of your One max if you're Contracting as hard as possible and so there's a lot lots and lots of different ways you can train for strength that are outside of this weightlifting weight training spectrum and and if if people if you hear things like this and you're like wow I know I read this book or I saw this other coach who you know was like I got so much stronger that way well if intention is there those are absolutely possible this could be anything from body weight style of training it could be very low load Implement stuff so a kettle bell a light kettle bell or a ball it could be single leg training like all kinds of different methods they will only work for strength though when you're past your first you know handful of months of training if intention is there and if it is then these specific numbers and protocols don't matter as much so don't get too caught up in them if you're not worrying about exercise quality and this is very very important because you mentioned earlier about how you stop taking your phone into the gym with you um one of our former students U Ramsey ninjam is a the head strength conditioning coach at the University of Kansas and he made he made a great post a couple of days ago where he he gave sort of a tip of how do I improve training quality and one of his tips is set your playlist before you go to the gym and the reason is people send spend so much time in between sets just finding the next song that they like it makes their workout so long and so unproductive so that is one strategy or do what you do which is Ditch the music entirely when you don't have music or a phone to look at you only have one job you only have one thing to pay attention to and what you'll find is the quality of the training will go up exponential ually um you will feel kind of quote unquote bored but that's just means you'll go back to training and you'll get a lot more done because you have one thing to focus on so you can get a lot more done when you avoid those distractions and when you're doing strength and especially power work since it's not fatiguing uh strength will be a little bit but Power won't be people tend to get very bored they're used to either feeling a a pump or a burn or a sweat or and that's their like perception of my quality of workout these exercises will not hit that for you so there has to be another metric you're looking at which is I'm going to try to move as well as I can as hard as I can that's going to produce your results if you can't do that then you might as well just not do these workouts go do something else you're just going to be wasting time you're going to be burning a very low amount of calories you'll have wasted an hour and you're going to go right back to the place you were so be very intentional um there are actually some some studies showing that music can enhance performance we've done some of these in our lab so what's that mean it's not about the music per it's about the focus and intent and do whatever it takes to be very focused and intent and you can actually get in and out very quickly and get a lot of work done and see a lot of results love it okay let's talk about hypertrophy the topic that occupies the minds of so many youth young men but also a lot of women I think one of the really interesting progressions that's taken place in the last decade or so is that far more men and women are using resistance training in in order to evoke hypertrophy growth of muscles for aesthetic reasons and for all sorts of reasons what are the ways that people can induce hypertrophy so not to correct you or insult you but probably a a better way to think about that question is really what stimuli do I need to give the muscle to induce hypertrophy now there are um hormonal factors that are important there are nutritional factors but just to stick with the context of training um this is really going to frame a lot of our answers and as you'll see it's one of the reasons why I call hypertree training kind of idiot proof in terms of programming now the work is hard difficult and all that but the Precision needed is a lot less than what we saw in power and strength and so if you note there like it's very important that you do it in this style with this intent and with with these Within These parameters and if you're outside these parameters it's not going to be it hypertrophy has a very Broad range um in terms of your actual applications and this is why you have and will continue to see countless styles of training that all work I mean I know you uh were mentored earlier in life by one of my favorite people in this entire field Mike mener like just an absolute character his style was completely different than what you would see in a classic textbook um or or any UN number of different influencers or coaches or individuals and and if you've ever s thought to yourself like why is it all these programs work and people love to jum to things like well that's the steroids like just get that out of the equation for now independent of that or that's not even part of the equation you're still going to see results and the question is like why well that's because what's driving changes in strength and power are the adaptations of specificity what's driving changes in hypertrophy is much more well-rounded and so you have options to get there remember you're training a movement and now you're training a response and a muscle that causes to growth that's very very different so if we look at like the classic Dogma we have to basically challenge the muscle to need to come back in this case specifically bigger and the nutrients need to be there to support that growth okay the nutrients aside perhaps we can come in a few more minutes and talk about that so all we really have to do is going back to our our dogma of activation of some on the cell wall we've talked about this earlier that's got to induce that signaling Cascade that's got to be strong enough to cause the nucleus to react to it to go to the ribosomes to initiate this entire Cascade of protein synthesis okay so that signal has to be one of a couple of things either has to be strong enough one time it has to be frequent enough or it has to be a combination of these things all right so I can get there with a lot of frequency and a moderate signal I can get there with very low frequency and a large signal like more akin to what you did with with Mike back in the day I'm sure and still train that way still train each muscle group mainly once a week directly and once a week indirectly so all you can all you have to do there to not fail is to make sure the training is hard enough and it's going to work if you choose the frequency path then you actually have to make sure you're not training too hard to where you can actually maintain the frequency the only wrong combination here is infrequent and low in it and low volume that's it as long as one of those three variables is high you're going to get there because the mechanisms that are needed to activate that signal in Cascade are wide ranging and this is why when we even see things like Blood Flow Restriction Training right this is when you put like a cuff on your arm or your leg and you block blood flow and you use no load or as low as say 30% of your maximum and you take it to fatigue failure that actually is an equally effective way of inducing hypertrophy despite the fact that you know you're using three 5 10 maybe most 20 to 30% of your One Max why because you went through through the route of of metabolic disturbance okay other ways say a higher load maybe uh as heavy as you can for say eight repetitions is going to get through through what's called mechanical tension and so there's there's these different paths that we can get to the same spot now eventually these things have a saturation point so you don't need all three of these mechanisms the third one of course being muscle damage or breakdown and I and and I know we want to chat a little bit about that but none of these three are absolutely required you can have multiple of them in a session um you don't have to have breakdown at all that is a complete uh well really it's a flat out lie that you have to break a muscle down to cause it to grow that that's just not needed at all you have to have one of these three things though and so again this allows you a lot of flexibility which is why crafting your program which is best for you is actually fairly simple when it comes to hypert you just have to make sure you do the work um and you want to make sure you have a few standards in place with the exercise choice and some other things that will um we hit just a second but that's really the fundamental way of getting to it um making sure either that signal is loud enough or frequent enough to give the nuclei a convincing enough reason to spend the resources because you have to remember two things in order to grow new skeletal muscle you need amino acids which are your supply and then you need primarily carb hydrates as the energy source to power that synthesis process you remember basic chemistry it says if you're going to take two atoms and you're going to pull them apart or put them together right that's going to take energy typically and in most of actually metabolism uh when you split a bond you're going to get it's called exonic you're going to get energy from that but when you put them together that's going to take energy this is why we call that protein synthesis right so you have to convince your nucleus that one invest those resources in energy primarily carbohydrate but number two and more importantly invest that Supply there's a ton of possible ways to get energy but there's a very low amount of amino acids available and you need them for many more things than just taking your biceps from 17 in to 18 in right it's not going to do that if you're in a position to where again you can't sustain immune function if if red blood cell turnover needs to be higher or any the other main like tons of things that you need proteins for so you have to be able to say like are you sure you really want to spend these resources and build it into muscle because once we do that it's very difficult to go backwards break them back down bring the amino acids back into that to that availability pool so we can use them for either another function entirely or even another muscle group um that's called protein redistribution by the way when you say um maybe you you don't do um a lot of upper body work in your training and you're not eating enough protein or a minimal amount and you're doing a lot of lifting in your legs you'll you notice your leg will get larger but that's actually a lot of times you're pulling the protein from say your upper body in this case and redistributing it back down um to the quad so that's the way you that's what you have to get to and in terms of application what numbers to hit we can go through each one of our modifiable variables um just like we did with speed and and strength and power and walk through some of our best practices in each category yes so I'd love to talk about those modifiable variables as they relate to choice of movements order of movements volume so sets and repetitions and frequency of training and I'm particularly interested in frequency of training because that relates to the so-called split where typically one is not training their whole body every workout although there are I'm sure hypertrophy workouts that um are whole body workouts but where people are dividing on their body parts on onto different days so uh would love to go through this list one by one starting with exercise Choice cool great so in the previous section we pretty much said exclusively choose your exercises by the movement patterns and you want to balance between pushing and pulling and rotation and things like that in this particular case you have the option to do either here's my recommendation most people default almost exclusively to Choosing by body parts here right I'm going to do calfs and shoulders today and chest and back whatever combinations of things they want that is clearly effective strategy however uh many Studies have actually been done where you choose by movement patterns and that is actually equally effective now one little caveat I actually should have said a few minutes ago when we talk about the research on muscle hypertrophy it is important to distinguish the fact that the vast majority of This research is coming from a novice to moderately trained individuals there's actually more and more research coming out on trained individuals but that's still moderately trained right even those ones so what happens and those people that are actually way past that point we we don't know scientifically it's very difficult to do research there so that's an important caveat I will acknowledge when I say hey you don't need to do this or you have to do this you assuming a training status of of moderate to to low um may or may not be true past that we don't know scientifically I have certain thoughts personally but the science will only take us that far so that being said you can actually choose by muscle um or by movement pattern here whichever is is your personal preference and this is actually where you can act just become a good coach whether you're coaching somebody else through this fitness journey or it's yourself and give them a little bit of autonomy so maybe you select the first three exercises and then let them select one every day and so if they uh especially want to make sure that one muscle group grows let them Target that muscle and maybe the rest of the day you've actually split it up as Push Pull or something else like that um all those strategies are effective personal preference as long as the total amount of volume on the working muscle is equated throughout the week which we'll get to those numbers in a second then you're going to be in the exact same spot no problem I would actually generally encourage people to choose exercises um in a variety of Fashions I actually think that it's important that you do some um number of combination of what we call bilateral and unilateral exercises so bilateral being think about it like a squat where by meaning two lateral you have two feet on the ground moving you know in sequence here unilateral is one so this could be something as simple as a um rear foot elevated split squat it could be a single leg leg press or single leg curl it could be a pistol squat something where the the individual limb is moving one at a time you need to have a combination of bilateral and unilateral training that's good to do for strength as well probably not super important for power but I'm also very important for making sure for I pury sake you're not getting any imbalances um as you progress especially through months and years of training so make sure you're doing a little bit of a combination whether you want to pick specific implements that's really a methods question and a preference question then it is Concepts so dumbbell great kettle bell fine barbell awesome ban doesn't matter body weight none of these things are as important because all you're trying to do is create a certain insult in the tissue and the Implement is just whichever one you feel best doing it and this is where actually machines come into play a lot machines are greatly underappreciated they are a fantastic resource especially somebody um who's either early in their fitness journey or somebody who really is having a hard time targeting a muscle group with a bigger compound movement so when you're choosing exercises for AER trophy you're going to want to start with those bigger compound movements that's going to be drive a lot of the adaptation you can get to these single joint movements like a little bit later but having said that because of of the way that people move differently their bom or their anthropometrics and and their bom mechanics and even their technique the same exact exercise will not necessarily work the same exact muscle groups for multiple people so if you and I both went and did a back squat um if you did a little bit more of what we call a high bar squat so this is the bar is literally setting up higher up on your neck you're keeping your back more vertical and because in order to do that you shift your knees much further past your toes keeping a of course your whole foot on the ground in good position okay that's going to generally put more of an emphasis on the knee joint right and so that's not a bad thing um you tend to see a little bit more work in the quads there a little bit less work in the spinal erectus and back because you're actually not supporting the weight horizontally which is a diff it's a much more difficult position it's it's vertically stacked okay if I were to do it in the classic low bar squat which is again lowering the bar down my further down my back towards uh L like my shoulder blades I probably take a little bit of a wider stance and when I squat I drive my glutes back further away from the midline in as in fact as a general rule if you take the midline of your body the thing that moves the farthest away from that midline is likely to be the thing that's activating the most so in the case of the of the front squat um you're not generally going to be using your glutes as much if you're in that are not even front squat just that high bar squat where you're very very vertical your knees are going to be moving very far over your toes which is fantastic therefore a little bit more knee dominant as kind we say it the other version here you keep keep your shins really close to Vertical you move your butt backwards you're going to have to then lean forward with your torso which means it'll be more low back more glutes and a little bit less knee now that's a general statement it's not necessarily always true but as a guideline there that is one exact exercise where you may be going man I'm trying to improve this clear weakness I have in my quads I can't even leg extension my body weight I have a significant problem there so maybe in your particular case if I'm hammering you or you're hammering yourself in a squad exercise and you're wondering why your quads aren't getting any stronger or aren't growing in any size it may be because of the style of the movement so I may need to go Andrew all right look squats in general if you look at the research are an excellent exercise for Quad development but for you they're not because of the way you stand or just because of you know neural activation it doesn't matter so I need to take you to a machine and isolate that muscle group so we can make sure we see development in that so if you're trying to grow a specific body part uh area individual muscle it's very important that you're actually seeing progress there and don't worry about well in the textbook the bench press is supposed to be good for your PEC because if you're not actually moving the right position or it depends on the angle in which your sternum actually sits in your body a a bench press may actually be doing very little for your PEC and you may need to adjust to say an incline bench or a decline bench or a peck fly so machines can be fantastic at letting you isolate without having to worry about things like stab ability um your low back position getting hurt where's your neck at you can really concentrate on just the movement concentrate on the muscle and let everything else kind of go away and ensure you're getting training in that specific area those are excellent recommendations one thing I want to ask about is prioritizing specific body parts and therefore specific exercises and here I'm not necessarily referring to trying to bring up a so-called weak body part you know a area that tends to be either genetically deficient cuz in some cases I learned for instance having seen a lot of um competitive track and field championships I love watching track and field as a spectator up to Hayward Field in Oregon whenever there's a meat and sure really love that the sprinters are amazing um they have some of the highest calves in the world that I've ever seen I mean like little like little micro calves but they're fast as hell they're right behind the knee and they have a very long distance between that calf and their foot which makes it propulsion excellent right they wouldn't stand a chance as a competitive bodybuilder nope but because something different is being selected for in bodybuilding but obviously they're they're um magnificent for sprinting most people of course reside somewhere between the extreme of you know very long muscle bellies from you know origin to insertion um or very very short muscles usually people have one or two body parts that they want to emphasize for whatever reason you know these days it seems to be um people are really uh what are they saying now like glutes are the new biceps or biceps or the new glutes or I don't know anyway you see this stuff I love them both by the way I am so Pro curls in the squat rack there you go love it right there you go so nobody kill me so everyone has their thing but the that they would like to emphasize but I have a question because we're specifically talking about hypertrophy which is should people give themselves permission to not train a body part if their goal is balanced hypertrophy I I'll give a couple of examples one of the reasons why for instance not done a lot of free weight squatting is because despite my quadriceps being rather weak according to you um they tend to grow rather easily relative to other muscle groups and the goal for me has always been balance development Y and so I emphasize hamstring work and I emphasize you know calf work and hamstring work um it's not that I don't train my quads at all but I do far less for them and I avoid the big compound movements for them I occasionally do them and what again this is not about what I do or don't do but I think that in the context of a conversation about hypertrophy is it appropriate to give people permission to say listen if you're just genetically H uh you know strong large lats doing a lot of chin-ups and rows might actually be the worst thing for you if your goal is balance development and I um I ask because I don't often hear um anyone any you know credential people give people permission to completely avoid training a given body part if their goal is balanced development and yet I think most people who are resistance training are seeking balanced development I don't know anybody that actively wants to have big upper body small legs I think that comes from neglect and laziness in most cases sometimes it's injury related or other things but um I think this is an important point to raise that any good program for hypertrophy I would think would have to take into account people's genetic and natural variation um sport based variation in which muscle groups just tend to grow easily for them and which ones require a lot more focus and work yeah absolutely you first of all you have permission to do or not do anything you'd like to do in terms of of hypy training uh I generally would not recommend disregarding a muscle group entirely I know that's not what you actually suggested but just to make sure that people didn't hear it that way um what I would do is in this example is I would continue to do those big movements I would just keep the volume low so I might do two sets or something uh twice a week um there's a whole bunch of reasons you want to make sure that those motor patterns are there um you want to make sure that the the especially the benefit of these compound movements is you get to work so many complimentary muscle movements at the same time so in the case of like loaded squat you're not only working stability in the hip um as well as the knee but you're also working upper body uh your your rhomboids are keeping you in position your neck has to stay in position your toes everything is working and so it's really difficult to get those things when you take uh that move movement out and you replace it with say a a machine hamstring curl that whole element of balance neurological control is very very important to maintain over time and that just gets removed with if you go to machines only so um I I would keep some of those things in maybe even not all year round but maybe one quarter of the year two quarters every other rotate it something like that um as long as it's getting you're not if the reason you weren't doing say those squats was uh because you're like ah it hurts my back or okay great then leave it out but if it's just simply you don't why your quads grow too much I would just keep that volume low and do something just to kind of touch it keep it activated uh and to maintain all those other things like um flexibility range of motion I would bet anything your adductors are probably underdeveloped right now you can get those by doing your squats because you're not really doing I'm sure much adduction training and so there's things like that that just get lost when you're only thinking all big muscle groups um that that come inherent in doing the larger movements and so you don't have to worry about them or train them separately I appreciate that and in reality I do two to three really hard work sets of hack hack machine squats per week yeah which is plenty for me to maintain and even get a Little Bit Stronger but per our earlier discussion about a year ago I shifted to doing very low repetition ranges to main strength in that movement but I am actively avoiding hypertrophy in that muscle group yeah or another solution would actually be do something like one set to failure a week not even extremely long just you know do something in the 8 to 15 repetition range um at the end of all that strength set and just get a little bit of pump there and then and then just just so just so that those muscles can touch that level of fatigue touch that level of strain and mechanical tension Walk Away Great thank you for that what about exercise order amazing so implicit in this exercise Choice thing it it's what you're going to notice is these modifiable variables interact with each other right and you can clearly see how when we talked about volume And to clarify volume is the repetitions multiplied by the sets that's typically how we express volume well that's going to be directly influenced by intensity the heavier load you put on the barbell the less repetitions you can do and the inverse right uh rest intervals the shorter you keep your rest intervals then either the lower the weight has to go the intensity or the lower the rep range has to go order is the same thing choice is the same thing so all of these things modify each other they play a little bit of a hand in in what everything else does so with the exercise Choice thing rolling into exercise order you get to play a couple of games here when we talked about strength and power I basically said stick to the big movements most complicated compound movements first you don't have to do that with hypertrophy you can do this in a couple of ways you can do the thing you're just simply most interested in first you can do this thing called pre fatigue so say you're you're going to do a back day you could go in and do nothing but isolated biceps as your very first exercise and then roll into uh your your pulling movements because what you'll see is during most pulling activities the biceps are a secondary or tertiary muscle group but you've pref fatigued them you've guaranteed that muscle of most interest got its its most training in and everything else is secondary so you can start if you want with single joint movements you can start with isolation stuff or you can start with compound stuff um either way it just really comes down to preference and what you're specifically trying to develop now this also goes back to the exercise Choice question right because it's it's sort of the same thing right like which one am I choosing and where I want the capus was the exercise splits and and so you sort of talked about am I doing body part splits and I know a question I get a lot here is well which ones should I package together I'm not really concerned with it what you all you should worry about is how many times per week and in fact total volume you achieve on a muscle group per week and I don't doesn't really matter how those things are folded in it's really a personal preference issue um one mistake that we see here commonly is grossly under appre apprting that the legs are not a muscle group right so the legs have a whole bunch of muscle groups in them so we see a classic split like I'll Do shoulders and chest Monday and then I'll do you know biceps and forearms Tuesday and then legs Wednesday or whatever and then back to upper body and then I was like you're like wait a minute you have four days dedicated to the upper body and one for quote unquote legs well like you hopefully you can see the imbalance what's that's going to happen there over time is you're going to do do far more upper body than you are lower body and that's not appropriate so you just want to think about your lower body like you would do if you're going to do body part splits then include those things as well and don't just chunk everything in as legs once a week if you want to do that that's actually okay but that day has to be very very challenging and you probably should do quite a bit of volume U there because you're you're almost surely not going to hit the total weekly volume needed to optimize muscle growth if you're literally only doing one once a week of your quote unquote legs so along those lines Let's Talk Volume yep how much volume does each muscle group need per week in order to generate and for that matter maintain hypertrophy right so the the kind of minimum number we're going to look for here is 10 working sets per week correct per muscle group correct and um just to make sure that everyone's on the same page if I do a chin up or a pullup I'm going to mainly be training my back muscles my lats if I'm doing it correctly lats and rids and biceps right and if so but they'll be indirect targeting of the biceps so would you include indirect targeting so for instance if I you said 10 sets per week let's just use biceps because it seems that that's the go-to uh generic muscle for what why is that by the way that when people ask somebody to you know Flex their muscle they always Flex their bicep they don't flex their calf or their quad or their glutes or something I guess there's some um you know public decency issues I can tell you uh with my children that's the very first muscle I taught them to flex they're glutes no they're they're B I was gonna say good um good uh healthy parenting advice from Dr Andy yelpin so if it's 10 sets per week for biceps in order to maintain or further grow the biceps but does that mean if somebody does 10 sets of chinups or 10 sets of chin-ups in rows that are checking off any of the boxes for biceps assuming that they're doing the movement properly yeah and targeting the major muscle group that a given movement is supposed to Target which in my mind when you're doing a chin up you're supposed to mainly be using your back muscles and then there are secondary muscles or secondary activation of other muscles but of course some people their arms grow like crazy when they do chin ups and their bag doesn't grow at all so this is where we're back to the kind of um genetic preloading of the system yep um if you will so how how does one meet this 10 sets per week minimum when dividing different body parts and thinking about this direct and indirect Activation so two things there's no specific exact rule here and this is why these set ranges are ranges right and this is why why we don't say like 10 is so 10 would be sort of the minimum number you want to get to the more realistic number that most people especially if you're Advanced or even intermediate is more like 15 to 20 working sets per week week okay now if you're very well trained you probably want to even push more towards like 25 and in fact um past that there's just not a lot of research so the optimal number may be 30 we don't we don't really know it's just hard to get that much work in um it may actually even be detrimental and here we're referring to Natural athletes that is people who for whatever reason either because they're not taking any prescription drugs or maybe if they are whose levels of steroid hormones mainly the andrens like testosterone Etc do not exceed the normal reference range values either because that's what they are naturally or that's what they're replacing through pharmacology whereas when we think of technically someone could be taking exogenous hormones to replace a deficiency and then they're still in normal range okay but I just want to um clarify because you work with athletes a number of different sports where drugs are and are not tolerated Etc and the general population that what we are talking about here is for the general population not for steroid using athletes correct okay yeah great so um so 10 was sort of that like absolute minimum number to maintain which is actually pretty cool if you think about it this way uh if you went in and you did three sets of 10 it's a very stand three sets of 10 repetitions correct you're already at three you did that three days a week you're at your nine that's almost 10 if you also just went to the gym one day a week you did three sets of 10 and you did three exercises you're at nine working sets you're BAS basically done so achieving 10 sets per week per muscle group and now we're not even talking about indirect activation of a secondary so you're you're going to hit 10 fairly easy um extension to that hitting 20 is actually still not that hard because of what's actually going to happen there so in your example if you're doing your chinups um well would the biceps count there's no exact rule there because uh there could be technique issues it could be hand position so you mentioned chin up very specifically a chin up is actually to put your hands in in this position where your palms are facing up right this is superation and pronation so you're going to be there well that's actually quite different than a pull-up or your hands are are in the opposite direction so um a chin up actually is going to be pretty good activator of your biceps for most people um so you would expect actually to probably count that because it's going to be very difficult to not see some fatigue in your biceps depending on your mechanics depending on and by that I mean just the the segment lengths of your bones right that's where your muscles or originate and insert there's nothing you can do about it's not even a technique or a focus issue it's just simple fact the matter of that's how you pull best in that area um the position in which your hands are um on the Barra wider grip more narrow grip it's going to change muscle use so we talked about um earlier I think in the previous episode that exercises do not determine adaptations applications to but exercises do determine things like the movement plane The Joint you use and typically the Ecentric concentric sort of ratio as well as often times the muscle groups involved so there's just not a lot of things you can do depending on how you are built of you know some exercises activating a secondary group and you don't want it so it's not always a technique issue it may just be that's how you're built right and the same could be true for a squat um the high bar versus low bar sort of example we talked about earlier it's you know you you can see plenty of of evidence on um muscle activation studies where people even doing the vertical back squat style have tremendous glute activation and folks doing the the low bar have tremendous quad Activation so a lot of it depends on personal mechanics so what I counted is the question really you just have to ask yourself number one do you really care that much you know you have a range to get to if you were anywhere between 10 to 25 working sets you know you're fine so if you count it or don't count it it's just going to change the difference between whether you did 17 working sets or 23 and either way you're fine so I don't really care number two are you actually feeling anything there so if you're doing your chin-ups and your biceps are blowing up I'm counting that right if you're doing it and you're like no I don't feel any fatigue there it's all my then I'd probably say okay we're not going to count that as as towards so um you can just let that guide you a little bit towards your account yeah I've always noticed that there are certain muscle groups that are very easy to isolate yeah when underload and those are almost always the same muscle groups that are easy to contract very hard without any load whatsoever Bingo you know that's actually really insightful so um you can kind of use this Uris stic of of like if you can contract your lats just standing here you're probably going to contract them very well when you lift if you can't you can probably assume about the same thing's going to happen so uh yeah you'll know um this actually the ls are actually really interesting um because they tend to be one of the more difficult muscle groups to learn how to activate so if you're in your Journey you're just like I have no idea and um you can look up like a lat pose so how do you like how do you pop your lats out how do you show it and if you do that and you're like wow there's no movement here just recognize that's extremely common and that it's probably going to take you many many many months of trying before you start to see some movements and probably even a few years before you really start to see Activation so you're you're not some sort of like specific like special genetic anomaly it's very very common it's uncommon to not be able to activate your biceps right that everyone can do that but if you're just like man I can't get this here I'm just going to stop doing it do not do that just keep at it and just keep concentrating and thinking about that muscle group it will take some time it's very common to to have challenges activating lats yeah I've noticed that many of the muscle groups that were responsible for a large fraction of the work in the various sports that I played as a young child are muscles that are very easy for me to selectively isolate and induce hypertrophy in um I suppose I'm one of those mutants where my lats happen to be one such of those muscle groups I think that's because I swam a lot when I was a kid was literally going to ask you a swimmer that's like a Telltale sign yeah everyone every kid in my town swam and played soccer there go and then later I you know I skateboarded and did some you generally hear that answer you either were a swimmer or you a wrestler so it's like that pulling and pull toward you is is thousands of repetitions allowed you to get very good at Contracting MH but because um I also played soccer and skateboarding but I didn't do any baseball basketball or football muscle groups like deltoids are very challenging to activate and isolate so I do think that early development is superimposed on a genetic template that sort of predicts which muscle groups are going to be easier or harder to isolate and and train it's also a very good case for why it's important to do as many different athletic activities as you can in your youth yeah and if you do skateboard definitely learn to ride switch because every every skateboarder I know has one leg that's larger than the other and one calf that's larger than the other and actually for that matter um people that do martial arts that don't learn to um if they're not Southpaw if they don't learn to switch up and do their uh their work Southpaw you see the same thing I mean you're building an asymmetry into the system and it's not just muscular it's neural strongly neural um so yeah kids um parents get your kids doing a bunch of different things I suppose gymnastics would would probably be the best sport all around in terms of um movement in multiple planes and activating all the different muscle groups uh yes and no um there's a lot of benefit no question about it there's a lot of other things though that it that has limited ability so um almost everything in not like gymnastic is great but almost everything in that is pre-planned which is a major downfall right so the joy of skating is there's so much proceptive input that you have to make decisions very quickly um in in small Windows now you have a little bit of that when you're flipping in the air you have to land but you gymnastics gymnasts tend to have a very specific routine that they're working on and they work on that routine for years soing for me was Transportation it was freedom and it didn't require any coaches or parental oversight yeah yeah Ball Sports have the beauty of of reaction and things like that so all of them are wonderful um yeah good to do a lot of them you've established that 10 really to 20 sets per week yeah is the kind of bounds for um maintaining and and iting hypertrophy yep if I were to like flag one of them I would say 15 to 20 is the sets that you want to get working now it gets complicated when you ask well how many reps per set do I have to get to okay well we also can complicate that by repetition type and Tempo just sort of let all that go for now and just think if you're getting close to that range you're in the spot and all you have to do now is balance two things recovery and continued training okay so if you're somewhere in this 10 to 20 working sets range and you're in a position where you can continue to do that you're not so sore and so damaged and beat up that you can't maintain that volume for you know eight weeks at a time or at least six weeks at a time then I'd probably say either the style of repetitions the amount of repetitions per set you're doing are too much the volume is getting to you however if you're not seeing adaptations then I'd say maybe the repetitions aren't enough and so that's like that's the kind of game you're running now there could be plenty of other factors intensity of course yeah intensity um intent and then of course the other things sleep nutrition Etc all these other things that that go into our visible stressor category that we always analyze this is sort of brings up this idea of responders and non-responders so we get this one a ton so why is it some people uh my my gym buddy my roommate we go to sleep the same time we're on the same nutrition plan we work out together uh she triples in muscle size and I don't have like no gain whatsoever well there's a lot of um work that we're trying to do to identify the molecular mechanisms behind responders and non-responders because they clearly exist in fact this is one of the reasons why uh every paper I basically will ever publish again if I you know if I do always reports individual person data so rather than group averages you get to see you know if there's 10 subjects in it you get to see how each of the 10 responded because the group average can get confusing what you really want to see is how many actually people got better how many got worse um how many maybe changed and if so um so we'll always report those individual data cuz when you go to train you're you're you you're not the group average that's very important to know right so if you do that you can see a beautiful line of these hyperresponders the bell curve in the middle of the normal responders and those folks who like through any training study just won't get any better um if you can tease out which you can't but let's say in science you could tease out all the extra factors total stress load hydration sleep Etc what you often see is non-responders a lot of the time it's not that they have a physiological inability it's just that they they need a different protocol and a lot of times it's they just need more volume so if they can handle that and they're not excessively beat up just give them more volume and they tend to see a lot of breakthroughs um you see the same thing with plateaus um so typically sort of just like okay the routine you're on you've been on it for too long we need to either go to the other end of the hypertrophy Spectrum for intensity which means like if you've been in the like six 60 to 70% of your one repetition max range maybe we actually need to go heavier take our repetitions down maybe even our total volume down and go heavier try that a great way to break through plateaus of of grand if all the other boxes are checked um the other one is is do the opposite which is like okay we're going to go higher we're going to go set to 20 set to 25 High very high repetition range and really get after it um not do as much damage because you don't tend to get as sore from those really high repetition ranges you'll get more sore from the lower repetition higher intensity range than you will typically the other ones and and see if we can blst bust through some plate there so it just generally means you need to do something a little bit different than your your training partner so we've talked about exercise choice and we've talked about the number of sets that one needs in order to induce hypertrophy per week what about repetition ranges you've mentioned some pretty broad repetition ranges how many repetitions per set is required in order to induce hyper yep so there are two caveats here before I give well the number is somewhere between like four to 30 reps 30 repetitions absolutely in fact I think you can go much higher the first 20 have to be feel exceedingly light correct and during those first 20 or so repetitions is the goal still to contract the muscle as hard as possible on each repetition so this is the caveats here so caveat number one is there is an assumption that by the end of the set you're getting somewhat close to failure and so you don't have to go to Absolute failure um to to induce mostly py but you you also have to get kind of close so if you're going to do a set of 25 and you finish it and you're like oo yeah like that was kind of starting to get hard at the end that's not going to be enough if you're going to do a set of five or six and the same sort of expression comes out of your mouth it's not going to be so in that case it doesn't matter your rep range if you're not getting somewhat close to failure again it doesn't need to be complete failure um a good number to think about is like minus two which is what we call reps in reserve which is sort of like I got within two or so reps of failure and then I stopped and can we Define failure at least for sake of this portion of the conversation as the point at which you can no longer move the resistance could be your body could be a weight machine Etc that you can no longer move the resistance and more in the concentric phase of the exercise movement in good form correct that's a really ni momentary muscular failure is is how we typically Define it there's a wonderful review I think it's open access uh that just came out in the last handful of months Eric Helm's team out of New Zealand Eric is a is a great scientist uh and a very experienced physique coach and a competitor himself so he knows a lot about this area um and that paper rent through all the exact definitions in detail all the caveats that we not going to have time to get into today so I would recommend folks like check that out if they want more information but I'll I'll try to get to the highlights of it right here so what they basically showed is going all the way to failure in the defining failure like you just did right so momentary muscular failure you can't complete another repetition through complete range of motion through whatever range of motion you determined prior to as well as with good technique so other body parts aren't being compromised sort of Etc um and doesn't need to be total failure that minus too failure is still needed in caveat 2 which is again very very highly trained individuals you won't see people who are like Eric or other folks who are six to 8 to 10 years into very serious training um who don't have to go to failure probably a little bit more than what I just said so the the the layout that they brought in their paper was very nice and they basically said okay here's a couple of scenarios in which going to failure is maybe the best way to do it um number one you probably should do it on a little bit of the safer exercises so maybe taking your back squat on a Barb to complete failure and doing that as like a standard protocol multiple times a week it's maybe not the best choice so maybe if you're going to do barall back squats you take that to your you know your your one or two reps in reserve stop there it's a lot of work at actually going back to our discussion of the prpp and chart it's a similar idea right where you're going to spend most of your time in these working sets 70 to 90 sort of percent and then you're going to take that failure to maybe the hack squat machine or maybe even the like extension machine so a little bit of a safer exercise they also can tend to be single joint exercises don't have to be but they're just ones that are not as complicated and you're not likely to injure other body parts when you're doing it all right um so that's one one way to go about it another way to go about it is simply doing it on like the last movement of the day right and so again you're not going to do it on your first three or four exercises but whatever your last finisher is you'll hit total failure on that one and that kind of keeps you in a range of yeah you hit some failure you got a lot of overall work done so that's a lot of stimulus that's a lot of noise going to that nucleus that says grow grow grow grow grow but you didn't totally obliterate yourself um especially if you don't have the assistance of anabolic steroids right that's very very important if you have those you can push this a lot harder because your recovery would be significantly enhanced if not um you kind of want to walk away from that I have to assume that you know 99% of people listening to this do not and um and and yet among those who are not taking anything um in terms of anabolics there I think there a large range of recovery quotients out there some people just tend to recover better some people I think also are far more diligent about what I would call the um necessary but not sufficient variables of yeah adequate sleep yep uh proper nutrition um limiting stress and and so on yeah I can't wait to break all that stuff down we got a whole got a very long discussion for all those things we will get into it in all its practical realities and actionables um before long what about rest between sets great this is the interplay now so one actually thing we said for a long time is you want to stick between 30 to 90 seconds of rest between sets for hypertrophy and that's because you're trying to um activate this metabolic disturbance or disruption um you need a little a little bit of a burn a little bit of a pump to go there more recent research a lot of this out of Brad Shen feld's lab and others have shown that that's just doesn't seem to be the case again for moderate uh to to newly trained individuals whether that's the case for the highly trained folks I don't necessarily no um I don't think there's any difference here um so you can take up to three to five minutes of rest in between sets and be fine the caveat here though is this if you're going to rest longer that means the metabolic challenge is lower so you need to then increase the challenge in either mechanical tension which think about is weight load or muscle breakdown so you can't lower one of the variables keep everything else the same and expect the same result so if you're going to have more rest then you need to either preserve um the load on your bar or the volume one of the two has to happen so this gives people a lot of opportunity I generally tell people if you're going to train for hypertrophy it's probably best to stay in the 2-minute range at most you can go longer but a lot of people have a hard time actually coming back and then executing that next set with enough intent to get there and or it's going to make your workouts tremendously long so you can stick to the shorter one um you don't have as much mechanical tension but that's okay you can still get there but in reality of it is you can do whatever you would like tell me if this is a reasonable structure given what you've told us three exercises per muscle group first exercise slightly heavier loads so repetition ranges somewhere between let's say five and eight with perhaps hitting failure close to it on the last set rest periods of somewhere between two or let's let's get wild and say five minutes okay so it's a little bit more of a strength type workout at that point but then moving to a second exercise of three or four sets where the repetition range is now 8 to 15 shortening the rest periods to 90 seconds or so and then on the third exercise repetition ranges of 12 to 30 this number 30 kind of makes me wide eyed I I I can't remember last time I did it said of 30 thinking it was for hypertrophy but what you're saying makes absolute sense is is research back so very short rest intervals maybe 30 seconds between uh between sets would that allow somebody to Target all three forms of major adaptation um I mean my in my mind it works you know you're talking about mechanical loads you're talking about stress and damage and you're talking about metabolic stress is that better than to for instance do all the high repetition work in one workout per week um and then higher loads in the other workout it does it matter if you divide them up or combine them it it would not matter I would say it matters in the sense of your personal practical situation well long rest for me I love training heavier with longer rest right but I'm hearing that there's real value to doing these higher repetition ranges yeah so the formula you set up there in a second is great if you want to do it the other way that's fine you really it's kind of idiot proof you can set this up however you'd like you could actually do the inverse theoretically you could do the sets of 30 first and then move to your sets of 80 it doesn't really matter um because we're try trying to just get to a certain total stimuli and you're going to hit it eventually so you have a lot of room to play here you also have a lot of room to adapt based on your circumstances God I'm short on time today typically my workout takes me 60 Minutes for this plan I have I've only got 35 today what do I do well if you're training for strength that's a different answer than if you're training for hypertrophy if you're training for hyper Fey you need to make sure you hit that total volume so in this particular case lower the load lower the rest intervals and just get to the burn and get going as much as you can if you're training for strength I would rather you cut your volume in half get those few repetitions done at that high load and just don't do very many sets today that's a better result so the goal that you're going after is going to determine what we call chaos management which is that thing like that um running out of time today my time is short or you didn't even think my time was short something got cut off I'm not feeling it today I'm in a hotel etc etc etc which which is life right that's going to be 10 to 50% of your workouts it's going to be chaos management well how you make those decisions is going to go back to understanding number one what goal you're going after and then number two what are the physiological consequences we call these physiological limiters for each one and that's going to tell you what to select and prioritize the volume the intensity or whatever else I'd like to ask about frequency but I'd like to frame it a little bit differently um than that I'd like to ask about total workout duration which dovetails with frequency because if one is hitting the appropriate number of sets per week and one is combining different muscle groups on the same days well then workouts are going to be a very different duration than if one is doing a different body part each day for instance and so I feel like any discussion about frequency has to be within the context of workout duration and vice versa yeah if you are a a lifting junkie and you're very consistent in your schedule I'm actually okay with body parts but most people are not that and so the concern there is if you say are isolating and waiting to do your glutes on one day of the week and something happens on that day you might go another 13 days now before training it you know between workouts and that's really difficult to maintain the frequency won't be high enough unless the load and volume on that one day is astronomically High it's just not going to happen so while if you look at the research um frequency in terms of how many days per week doesn't matter that much as long as the total load and failure are equivalent practically it's a challenge so it's it's hard because life gets in the way for most people especially if you have kids and a job and and all these things over there so I actually prefer doing something more like 3 days a week of total body and if something happens you've just missed that body part for 48s hours 72 hours I like that a little better for most people not because it's more effective but just because it it's a little bit more resilient to life and you can get there um if you wanted to actually do a little bit of a combination so if you wanted to do like two days a week of whole body and then two days a week of a little bit of a body part split then you're actually sort of hedging against all risks there um as long as you get to that total number there now there is actually some evidence in a couple of ways that maybe a little bit more frequently is a little bit better but the difficult is now we're going back to the practicality question of like how many people really can train just their strength training six days a week and that doesn't count any of their long duration stuff it isn't their high heart rate their flexibility their okay it's just really really really hard to get all that stuff in so it is it tends to be easier on folks in terms of execution and long-term adherence in my opinion um to get that volume accomplished in in um a little bit more frequent patterns but not once a week so I I like to kind of have it right there for most people um not again not because it is technically quotequote more effective but because you're less likely to fail to progress because of skipping a workout something popping up your power going out and your you know garage door being locked on you or whatever imagine that that happened to me this morning folks couldn't get out of my driveway because a gate electronic gate was uh down because the power was down anyway solve that problem yeah the way you describe it my sense is that workouts will last somewhere between 1 and two hours of real work is that about right it doesn't have to be nearly that long I mean you could certainly get enough to work done in 30 minutes if you even a whole body workout yeah yeah absolutely so if if you're doing that three days a week so remember the numbers we're trying to hit here let's say we're trying to hit 15 working sets per muscle group per week that's five working sets per day per muscle group so if you did one exercise for that day let's say you did squats you did five sets you did that three days a week you're done there's your 15 but there are other muscle groups to hit on that same day you're doing squats if you're doing a whole whole body corre yeah so you've gotten them all already and so like all the leg muscles in that example are taken care of ah so you would not do separate hamstring work necessar you need to now I hamstrings is actually a little bit of a cave like that's a good example of an exercise or a muscle group that's probably really good to make sure you isolate it's challenging to get with your standard uh dead lift and and squat um it it's one of the probably ones that's most important to go Target outside of that but in the theoretically though outside of that you would get most of your leg muscles done with even a single exercise and even if you wanted to change it up so you said all right Monday I'm going to do a squat variation uh Wednesday the next day LIF I'm going to do some sort of deadlift hinging variation and then maybe Friday my third day I'm going to do some sort of unilateral uh maybe rear FL elevated split squat or something like that all right maybe even a lateral lunge maybe a different plane okay you're in a pretty good spot you're going to hit most of those muscles um to your 15 working sets especially if you take sort of that last set each day a pretty close to failure that's going to get some serious work done but you're not going to be so fatigued you can't come back and train it a couple of days later and you'll be fine so you could even split that up into two days a week and now all you really have to do is hit something like seven working sets so maybe that's two exercises per day maybe some sort of a leg press and a leg hinge you know three to four sets each you're going get six to eight sets that day you did that 3 days a week now all a sudden you're at that 20 24 sets about being a bit boom same thing with the upper body I just gave lower body examples because you know I like the lower body more so it's not that challenging to get to those numbers and split and those workouts can be extremely short so if you're if you were doing that three days a week um you know you're you're doing that one exercise upper body one exercise lower body that certainly shouldn't take more than 40 minutes I'm happy to hear that not because I don't like training yeah please please excuse the double negative but I found that resistance training workouts that extend longer than one hour of work and certainly longer than 75 minutes of work leave me very fatigued oh sure and fatigued to the point where concentrating on cognitive work throughout the day um can be challenging need a longer nap in the afternoon I'm a big proponent of naps in the afternoon in any case but requiring longer naps in the afternoon ETA so at least for me restricting the resistance training workouts to about 505 0 to 60 Minutes of real work yeah for me three or four times per week has helped tremendously so it's a case where doing higher intensity work in a shorter period of time and actually hitting muscle groups less frequently for me that's again once directly once indirectly y has worked really well and as you mentioned earlier this could very well be explained by not my recovery quotient as some sort of uh genetic or physiological variable but the way that I'm training and indeed I like do a few four straps and go to failure on too many sets and you know weaned in the in that um genre of training it's also fun like to just train hard it is it is I think that um I've learned a lot by training to quote unquote to failure um I think there's a lot of learning in there um provided it's done safely but what you're describing actually inspires me to at least give a try to these other sorts of splits and and ways of training for hypertrophy and strength because this notion of not necessarily having to go to failure and still being able to evoke strength and hypertrophy um adaptations is a really intriguing one uh dare I even say a seductive one and that leads me to a question that is based on findings that I've heard discussed on social media which means very little if anything unless it's in the context of people who really um know exercise science and um you're one such person and that's this idea that because resistance training can evoke a protein synthesis adaptation response but that adaptation response is lasts about 48 hours before it starts to taper off that the ideal in quotes frequency for training a given muscle group for hypertrophy is about every 48 hours is that true yes and no so a couple of things there remember in order to grow a muscle there's multiple steps here so you have the signaling response which actually happens within seconds of exercise and can last depending on the marker you know up to an hour or two hours step number two then is gene expression and we see that that's typically peaked around 2 to 6 hours post exercise and then you have following that protein synthesis and that's that longer time frame somewhere between 12 hours there it's certainly not peaked for 48 hours it may be still there 48 hours from now but it is is absolutely coming down at that point depending on sort of a number factors so that that part of is sort of TR so that this is a combination of like some half truths and some like maybe just pedantic things that aren't really that important to differentiate the real question I think is is like okay is it okay to train sooner slash is it better to train sooner or actually is it better to wait longer there's no real reason to think that you need to train if the goal is hypertrophy any sooner than 48 hours afterwards I can't think of an advantage that that would confer I also can't think of any practical applications athletes physique bodybuilders coaches that ever found tremendous success doing that so I would be very skeptical that that is any way better now could you do it in some instances of say you know you've got travel coming up like that so that you just yeah course you want to preload the system by destroying the musle no problem and then waiting seven days or 14 days I've known people have done that before Vacations or layoffs I every time like every single time to annihilate themselves and then take a two we layoff yeah and it's like there's no benefit there other than psychological like I just love it like it feels great to be super sore I feel less crappy not training for those couple days cuz I'm like I'm super sore anyways you need the extended rest yeah of course and it's just like it's just a crappy justification in my brain that like I excuse to do something really wild and that I totally don't need and get way sore than I should get Dr Andy Galvin suggestions of what not to do but that he does yeah 100% do as I say not as I do the famous words of every research Professor yeah I think 48 hours is a reasonable time uh to wait can't think of any advantage of going sooner than that there's really not a tremendous amount of advantage of waiting much longer than that certainly 72 hours is fine um as long as you're hitting these Concepts we've talked about you can let really life determine that um I mean there's situations too with with like particularly our athletes where we have to kind of break that because of schedule obligations they're playing every fifth day every third day or something like that you're just going to have to lift on back toback days you're just going to have to get it done um but yeah I can't think of why I would go out of my way to do that the second part of that question is let's say somebody trains a muscle they train it properly they hit it in the appropriate rep ranges and appropriate rest Etc that the stimulus is there the adaptation is set in motion they're getting somewhere somewhere at 48 hours or so a protein synthesis Peak that's going to taper off yeah but they don't train it 48 hours later or 72 hours later they train it five or six days later not because they're lazy not because they um they don't care but because they have other priorities that are woven in with getting hypertrophy in this muscle right there are people who exist only to get hypertrophy in a given muscle group but let's be fair most people would like to grow that muscle group but then does it necessarily mean that the muscle starts to revert to its prehypertrophic state that is does it atrophy and get smaller again because if it doesn't I could see a lot of reasons for hitting a muscle group once every five 5 days or seven days provided you hold on to the hypertrophy that you initiated 5 or seven days ago yeah there's no reason to think you would lose anything in that sort of a Time domain five to seven days the only challenge with training that infrequently is can you actually get enough total volume done so if you're going to train a muscle once a week you either have to go to real failure real damage and soreness or you have to figure out a way to hit 20 sets that day in that muscle not at all impossible especially if you're thinking well actually all I have to hit is and I'm going to do five sets of three exercises that's not outrageous not at all so so like absolutely possible if you're wanting to go more towards 20 or getting closer to that 25 like now it starts to get pretty challenging so um scientifically the research will suggest it's going to be equally effective practically it's challenging for people to hit sufficient volume without just being so demoralized afterwards because they're in so much pain they can't get out of their car cuz their legs are so trash they can't sit on the toilet get back up without crying um from pain so that's not good no that's not good I say that cuz those are actual examples that have happened in my life yeah I I realizing as we're having this conversation about ways to stimulate hypertrophy that I've sort of defaulted to more intensity as opposed to volume because of the time factor I have a lot of other things going on in my life and So within that hour I Can't Get Enough sets in across all the muscle groups I need to hit and I'm only going to do it about once a week and so it's at least for me more advantageous to just train extremely hard I actually use the pre-exhaustion technique that you mentioned before yep or pref fatigue as you referred to it of hitting something really strong with an isolation exercise then doing compound exercises I'm starting to think based on what you've told me that pre fatigue and then a compound exercise in some ways it's not really two sets because if you're going to failure for straps you're kind of pushing past failure then you're doing a compound exercise and you're doing that two or three times well that sounds like four to six sets but the force repetitions are almost like an additional set right and so it's not 20 sets but it's four to six really really hard sets that go beyond what we normally think of as a set totally okay it's sort of the difference between running on concrete and running on Sand when I go for a sand run it's a very different experience totally yep and this is why uh I should have mentioned this at the very very beginning of our our chat today but all of these numbers that I'll give you for any exercise adaptation you you you cannot think of them as hard lines they are gradients and so when we think about the number for hypert trvy in terms of repetitions I said four to 30 what do you think happens at three do you think hyper just stops right in fact the number you'll see in the literature is more like six to 30 I actually slide it down to four though like personal preference because of that but it just Fades away what do you think happens at rep 31 35 there's it just Fades gradually over over time so you actually sort of brought this up one of your earlier questions and I'm not sure if you were even thinking about this or maybe you were I just babbled on about something else but if strength happens between this like one to five repetition range and hypertrophy typically happens in this like eight to 30 range what happens if I were to do to sets of six or God forbid seven like seven and nine are these numbers you just absolutely don't do in strength training right just like set of 1 2 3 4 5 6 got 8 10 12 like do not program a set of 13 when I'm training sets of seven to nine yeah it's great right uh we'll use sets of seven a lot um with weightlifters because you can actually count numbers more effectively B but what happens in seven to n rep so this is actually wonderful area of these like five to eight repetitions where you're going to get a nice combination of a lot of strength gains and a lot of hypertrophy so someone who's coming in going man I want to get stronger and I want to add muscle what do I do here well that's actually a really nice answer train pretty hard in that like four to eight repetition range and you're going to get a lot stronger and you'll still induce a lot of hypertrophy if you want to really maximize hypertrophy I would probably spend most of your time in the 8 to 15 repetition per set range you can go up to 30 admittedly though I don't think it's optimal to spend most of your time at more than 15 reps per set it's very challenging to maintain the focus required at rep 27 to actually get sufficient failure by rep you just you just give up way too early it's hard to do the same thing at the bottom end of that Spectrum in terms of of really heavy to get there so I really honestly think 8 to 15 is still it's cliche it's that textbook number but it's a reason that's a textbook it is tried and true and very very very effective if for instance you want to get stronger though and not invoke a lot of hypertrophy you have a couple of tricks you can pull number one stay south of that five repetition range you do sets of one sets of two go as heavy as you can um with all appropriate considerations and stick within maybe even up to three reps per set you start getting to four to five to six now you're going to start itching towards that that hypertrophy range so stay down there do a lot more total sets so do a classic example would be something like eight sets of three right you're going to get a lot of practice you're going to get 24 very high quality reps with a lot of rest in between okay you go from there you go to managing caloric intake making sure your protein is still on point you want to recover but if your total calories aren't um you know greater than 10 to 15% above your maintenance needs then you're not going to be able to put on a whole bunch of muscle mass because you just don't have the fuel for it you can also then space your workouts out so that stimulus isn't coming uh extremely often so if you do that thing a couple of times a week it's not enough frequency in that signal so remember that signal has to be frequent or loud you didn't make it super loud and now you're not making it super frequent you can can get very very very strong like that and and put on very low amounts of hyper if that's sort of the choice so you told us a lot about volume and frequency and how that relates to protein synthesis and Recovery to evoke the hypertrophy adaptation response how should people think about systemic damage and Recovery because obviously the nervous system and the way it interacts with the neuromuscular system is the sight of all the action here or at least a lot of the action and the nervous system can in fact become fatigued it's you know that has a great capacity but the whole system that we're talking about can be worked to the extent that even if a muscle group like the biceps or the back is being allowed to rest while you're training legs and other muscle groups that your whole neuromuscular system needs rest how does one determine whether or not your entire body needs complete rest or or low-level active rest or exercise of a different kind yeah yeah sure so I want to actually tackle this because we're on the topic of hypertrophy I'm assuming that that's the goal in mind here yes here I'm asking specifically within the context of hypertrophy I realized that for other training goals the answer to this question could be quite different yeah okay so we actually do this in a couple of different ways let's start local and work back to systemic right because um number one what you're really concerned about is at the local muscle level is am I going to create excessive damage uh and I don't necessarily mean muscle damage here I mean injury right so um the kind of rule thumb we use is is like three out of 10 in terms of soreness if you're more than three out of 10 in terms of soreness we're going to start asking questions if you're higher than six out of 10 we're probably not training this is subjective measure total subjective measure right and you'll you'll know very quickly right if you're like if you can barely graze your PEC with your fingertip and then you're like ah I don't care what you score that we're not training there's just no damage if you're three out of 10 if you're just like oh I'm kind of like a little bit stiff here but once you get warmed up you you start feeling okay you're probably okay to proceed this so that is is a very easy way to just think about soreness you're going to be a little bit tight depending on your training frequency now zooming out to systemic we use a whole host of things so we actually have a a whole host of bow markers we use you can get a lot of these from blood so you can look at things like creatin kise that's the very common one marker of muscle damage um we'll actually look at um LDH we'll look at myog globulin um that's just like if you think about hemoglobin is the um is the molecule that carries oxygen throughout your blood the myoglobin is the the part of that that's actually in muscle so when muscle gets broken down that gets leaked out and put in your blood so that's one of the markers actually that's going to be associated with things like rabdo which is a like you're going to see your urine is purple it's extremely dark because you've got so much muscle breakdown that that happens and kidneys get have a problem and you put a bunch of stuff in there so we use those biomarkers we'll actually also look at probably a couple things you're familiar with alt and a um these are excellent biomarkers of muscle breakdown so if we are actually suspecting that this is a chronic problem um we're going to actually to go and and pull some blood um if it's just like I'm super sore today we're going to use that subjective marker but if we're seeing this as constant like man are we really pushing you way too much is there some sort of systemic problem um we're going to blood and we're going to look at all those different things now as to alt is is really specific and I don't want to take us too far off track here but the ratio to those things is actually very important as well so um if you look at the as to alt ratio typically the number we'll look at as like 1.67 as that ratio is like higher than that you have a pretty high risk of muscle damage but really between you know me and you and a few of these listeners anytime we start seeing a outkick alt we're immediately thinking as in the ratio being higher than one um we're immediately thinking like there's something happening muscle damage wise so um that's actually a sneaky good indicator of just total muscle mass um because the vast majority of that's going to be in muscle so um those are actually some markers that we like a lot if muscle damage is uh the thing we're concerned with if we are more concerned with things like total training volume systemic overload then may turn to something more like sleep there's a lot of information we can actually get glean from changes in sleep um behavior and function um you could also look at things like HRV heart rate variability which is a very classic marker and much more sensitive to changes with training than something like a resting heart rate um which is which is one thing you can actually do that's totally cost free just look at your changes uh and any elevation resting heart rate over time especially more than three to five consecutive days is an indicator but HRV is much more sensitive um to things like training induced overload so that's a a quick version of stuff that we're going to pay attention to the last one I would add there is simply motivation so if if you're really training hard and you like training hard and you just like cannot force yourself to go anymore that in of itself can be a good indication of it's maybe not the day maybe not the week um with all of these things you want to be careful about overreacting to a single day measure again we look we need to look at at least a trend of more than 3 days honestly I'm looking at more than 5 days um I'm going to pull back from that and think about what phase of training we're in what part of the Year we're in typically other athletes we inseason pre-season postseason offseason Etc to make our decisions about what we're going to do about it are we canning the entire workout are we doing a modified lower version lower intensity um my default generally if hypertrophy is the goal remember volume is the driver there so if I can like can we get in can we go real light let's go to six out of 10 rpe so relative perceived exertion um maybe we'll reduce the range of motion maybe we'll make it a little bit easier maybe go to machines or instead of going a squat we'll just do you know a leg extension something like that but I want to still get enough volume in there that will keep you on Target and and again even going at 50% not not to high repetition you know 50% for a set of 10 three sets just get a nice blood flow in there get it in get it out Aid and recovery and then move on and come back the next day that's probably what I would do rather than canning the entire ire session how do other forms of exercise combine with hypertrophy training for instance can I do cardiovascular training for two or three days per week provided that cardiovascular training is of low enough intensity and not disrupt hypertrophy progression and can I do that cardiovascular exercise before or after the hypertrophy training or does it need to be separated out the answer to this is really what we call the crossover interference effect okay it's really an energy management issue so the only time endurance seor starts to interfere or block or hinder attenuate hypertrophy is in one of two broad categories number one total energy intake or your balance is off so you can amarate this by just eating more if you do that then the interference effect generally goes away the second one is you want to make sure you avoid exercise forms for your endurance training that are the same working group and specifically the Ecentric portion so for example we see much more interference with running on leg hypertrophy than we do cycling right less Ecentric pounding and loading less damage less things to recover from the tissue seems to be totally fine the only other thing you need to worry about here is total volume of your endurance work so if you're doing a a moderate intensity for a moderate duration say 70% of your maximum heart rate for 25 minutes it's unlikely to do much damage in terms of blocking hypertrophy you're totally fine do you can you do it before or after your workout it's probably not going to matter that much right so prefatigue is okay for hypertrophy so if your prefatigue is coming from endurance then you're totally fine not a big deal afterwards cool you want to break it up into multiple sessions that's probably better right so if you do your endurance work on a separate day that's probably best case scenario if you can't do that but you can break it up into two workouts say you lift in the morning and then you do your you quote unquote cardio at night maybe that's second best third best is doing it at the end of your lift and finishing it that's fine just make sure that you're maximizing your recovery on all the other tricks we'll talk about later make sure the calories are there make sure you're not doing a lot of Ecentric landing and that endurance stuff and you'll be just fine and where does higher intensity cardio fit into a hypertrophy program so high higher intensity cardio uh for instance in my mind is getting on the assault bike and doing um you know eight intervals of 20 second Sprints and 10c rest in between or perhaps going to a field and doing some bounds and Sprints and things of that sort not going all out not you know running for one's life but getting up to about you know 85 90% of of running for one's life sure so we have a lot less information on the potential interference or not of high intensity stuff um the stuff we do have suggested it may actually Aid in hypertrophy and that's because if you think about it one of the potential paths to activation of muscle growth is this metabolic disturbance you're going to get that a lot with the the high intensity interval thing so it's not a terrible thing to do I wouldn't do it to the level that it compromises your ability to come back and do your primary training so if you're so fatigued your legs are super heavy they're depleted you now have to ingest extra carbohydrates to replenish muscle glycogen to be able to handle both recovery and continue training Etc that could then lead to a problem but in general U really don't see any reason why that is going to completely block or or make it such that your training was quote unquote wasted or it didn't work in a fact actually um a very recent uh study came out where they uh had individuals perform six weeks of purely aerobic endurance steady state long duration endurance for six weeks I think prior to starting a hypertrophy phase compared that to individuals who did not do that and those folks that did these six weeks of just I think it was cycling actually just endurance work had more muscle growth at the end of their hypertrophy training than those folks that did not so this shows you very clearly there are a lot of advantages that come with being physically fit to Growing muscle so folks that also um have actually hit plateaus a lot one of the things you may actually see some benefit from is actually doing a little bit more endurance work whether it's a steady state stuff maybe it's the higher intensity stuff um certainly if you're starting a training phase it's a pretty good idea to do that and there's a number of of physiological reasons of why that's potentially occurring but the the lowest hanging fruit here is we sort of joke you know like if you're so unfit that you're tying your shoes and your warmup and you're already breaking a sweat you probably don't have enough F Fitness to do enough training to get enough hyper so that is in fact your limiting factor you're not recovering you're super fatigued and damaged and sore because you're so unfit so get fit first and then you can actually get more gains a week later so you have to kind of Kick the Can down the road for a few weeks but 10 weeks later you'll be in a better spot than you were by investing a little bit in your conditioning so as you pointed out before and I can only assume you were referring to me uh hypertrophy training is idiot proof uh meaning there's a lot of leeway in the variables but not so much leeway that people can do anything it it's bounded by these general principles so with your permission I'm going to do a brief overview of my notes based on your description of the modifiable variables that will direct somebody towards hypertrophy keeping in mind this backdrop of exercise Choice exercise order selecting appropriate volume that sets and Reps training frequency and needing some Metric or way to have progression yeah either by adding more weight or by more tension or more metabolic stress and so on in terms of exercise Choice it sounds like the choice of exercises is not super critical in terms of specificity yeah but that the ideal circumstance is that people are targeting all the major and frankly secondary and minor muscle groups if you can even call them that yeah across their exercise choices that they're picking exercises that they can perform safely and that they can generate enough intensity so that they're getting close to failure without placing themselves into danger right so um for some people that might mean including large compound free weight exercises like wats and deadlifts and bent over barbell rows as well as isolation exercises and for some people there might be a bias toward more isolation exercises and machines but of course machines don't necessarily mean that you can't use heavy loads in fact plate loaded machines like Hammer Strength machines it will allow for quite substantial loads so picking two or three or more movements per muscle group can be valuable but that overall consistency is going to outshine variation in the sense that you don't need to hit muscles with a different exercise every workout coming back to the same things has a benefit and we heard about this in our discussion around strength and power as well okay in terms of order of exercises there too it sounds like there's a lot of flexibility one could do the large compound exercise for let's say um quadriceps and hamstrings and glutes first like a a squat or a front squat or could deadlift for that matter but then if one deadlifted and primarily hit the glutes and hamstrings then you might want to Target the quadriceps more directly with leg extensions or if one squatted and was loading the squat bar carrying the squat bar in a way that was predominantly quadricep yeah and lesso glute and hamstring then leg curls would be a good choice Etc okay and train your calves folks very important unless you're a genetic freak of course it's actually a good opportunity to say unless you're a genetic freak or you just have a genetic PR position yeah or you've done Sports and and you have a genetic predisposition that gives you you know very large calvs that don't require any training at all I I know people like this they're they're somewhat rare but they're out there yeah and those folks sometimes want to stay away from or minimize their training you told me that even if you have a muscle group that's a hyper responder in terms of hypertrophy getting at least one or two good hard sets per week is good because you want to keep functionality in that neuromuscular system love it okay in terms of volume again we have a large amount of variation is what I'm hearing that the total number of sets per week is a strong driving force of program design and selection that ideally you're performing 10 to 20 and probably more like 15 to 20 sets per week and that could be divided up across multiple workouts or done in one workout but that's 10 to 20 sets per week per muscle group not really taking into account indirect activation so that would be 10 to 20 sets for biceps your back work is going to hit your biceps a little bit maybe a bit more depending on the exercise selection but it's really 10 to 20 and given that hypertrophy can still occur and maybe even occurs better with more volume y then don't include the indirect work unless something about the architecture of your body and the inability to engage certain muscle groups like makes the a pull-up really an arm exercise for you do I have that right the way that I would maybe planet is typically with movements we consider to be there to be primary movers secondary movers and then tertiary movers right if it is a primary or secondary I'm probably counting it if it's tertiary or less I'm probably not counting it got it so going back to our example of a pull-up so an example of a pull-up I probably wouldn't count the biceps in a pull-up but I would probably count the biceps during a chin-up would you count the rear deltoid in a pull-up probably not may maybe like uh it just depends um probably not though okay train the rear delts also that's only honestly the reason I answered that is because most people don't do anything for the real delts anyways but they should right absolutely that's why I didn't want to count it I wanted you to go out of your way to make sure you did something specifically for the real rear delts for Aesthetics and for functionality for health and and balance across the shoulder totally neck uh shoulder all of it I'm so happy to hear you say this I'm a huge fan of people doing rear deltoid work for all the reasons you described and neck work for that matter I think people forget that the neck is the upper part of your spine yeah and for postural reasons and for stabilization and safety reasons it's really critical but I think most people aren't familiar with how best to train the rear deltoids and neck and I know a number of people are afraid of getting a big neck which for reasons that are still uh unclear to me is referred to as no neck but let's leave out that no neck comment for the moment what are some good exercises for targeting the rear deltoids and neck safely that people can perform for stabilization and for hypertrophy yeah I would recommend people check out Eric Cressy he's a a wonderful uh strength conditioning coach he actually is I think the director of pitching for the New York Yankees now is that spelled c SS i e c r s y I believe and he's got a facility in uh I believe Boston as well as in Florida so he's very very involved in pitching as well as hockey and things like that so um he has so many free videos and resources on a on so much of the shoulder girdle mostly because he he's dealt with overhead and throwing athletes and so the Precision required there is tremendous so you want to be very careful when you start playing in this area because the wrong positioning of your scapula can cause a whole bunch of problems in your neck and low back and so he would be a great resource to go take a look at that um depending on how your your scapula are gliding and sliding and the way that you want your rotator cups firing ing um your rhomboids there's it gets like very complicated very quickly so you want to learn more go there as a very very quick couple of answers um one of my favorite exercises is is lying on a bench or or putting some bench and then just doing a reverse fly basically um the reason I like stabilizing the rest of the body is so you can make sure you can focus on just using those rear doids and putting your scapula in the right position now there's a there's a specific set of queuing that you want the scapula to move down and back for again check out uh or any number of folks in that area to do it but that that's a very simple way the reverse fly to get there great and then in terms of neck exercises I was told to avoid Bridges because they can cause damage to the discs I will probably never do a bridge ever uh the rest of my life so um isometrics are are a great exercise for that because if you think about what uh what you're asking muscle groups to do in the neck you mostly want it to be able to do a certain type of rotation a little bit of flex and extension um and some some other movements but in general it should be being stable um so you want to walk through these joints asking kind of what they do are they a moving joint or they a stability joint in this case you want to do there so isometrics are going to put you in a much better position there's some actually pretty cool devices that you can wear and you can put them on your head and you can do all kinds of movement um and get some great training there those are great starts but if you don't have any of that just basic isometrics are a great way to go about it um neck Bridges would not be on that list for me no neck Bridges folks in terms terms of sets and repetitions we briefly touched on this but anywhere from probably six repetitions all the way up to 30 repetitions but probably more in the 8 to 15 repetition range for hypertrophy most of the time yeah and I'll just throw in there because I I love this idea that if you want to get a relatively balanced adaptation related to strength and hypertrophy that 7 to n range that the No Man's uh or and no woman's uh land of of training repetitions I always joke in class I'm like okay we we go through the whole thing right you're like 1 to five strength 8 to 12 you know hypert Tre and they're like great and then I'm like okay so six to N means nothing will happen at all and the kids are just like writing it down like right good way to for everybody to remember that there are adaptations triggered in the six to9 rep range and it's a balance of strength and height you'll just get thrown out of any gym that I'm a part of fantastic if you do that uh so but the important point is to get close to failure and occasionally hit failure maybe occasionally throw in a force repetition or a rest pause where you rest and then do a few more something like that but those intensity increasing Maneuvers will uh require a little bit more attention to recovery either time or or attention in some other way and here's a little bit of carot all throut people because people generally don't like to be told to not go to failure that often right so so there's a handful of like half the folks are like sweet I don't have to train that hard to get there and those folks it's like well yes but I also said you just can't like do a half workout you have to get pretty darn close to failure and most people don't really know a failure means so for that group it's actually it's still probably harder than you think you want to train for the other group though that like wants to completely blow themselves out every single time dragging them back is is more the key now for those folks here's what I can say if you make sure that your hidden stressors invisible stressors are completely taken care of you can go to failure a lot more often and so you need to dial those things in and then now you can go hammer yourself because you'll recover so much quicker and we see this very commonly um in all of our programs with with our athletes and and our non-athletes that when we get that the rest of the Hidden invisible stressors taken care of their training volume goes up so much because they'll just start coming back and they're just like oh my God I'm not sore anymore oh my God I'm not nearly as sore I did this exact workout you know countless times before and now I'm doing it and I'm not sore at all anymore what the hell like we didn't do anything different with the programming or really the nutrition but we got the rest of that allostatic load under control and boom things take off it's a lot like drivers so many people seem to be riding the brake and so many people seem to be heavy on the accelerator yeah that's actually one of the ways we describe it is like you want to go faster people's inclination step one is to hit the gas our our step number one is making sure your left foot's not on the brake you'll go faster with less resistance which means you'll actually wear down the system a lot slower by just taking your foot off the brake first if you're then not going fast enough enough now we can push the accelerator but I'm not pushing that accelerator while your foot's still on the brake you're going to go a little bit faster but not as fast as you should be going with that much work and you're going to start wearing down brake pedals and things like that so I like that analogy so so hitting that 10 to 20 sets per week repetition range is pretty broad provided you get close to failure hit failure every once in a while could be the final set of each exercise or maybe do one workout where you hit failure on everything but then you don't do it for a few more again there there sounds like there a lot of play in the system here rest ranges anywhere from 30 seconds all the way up to 3 or 4 minutes depending on how heavy you're training and how close to failure or to failure maybe even quote unquote Beyond failure if there is such a thing you're training um throwing in negatives and things like that we didn't get into really high-intensity techniques but people again vary in the extent to which they're they're pushing the system but there does seem to be some value to mixing up the rest between set range across exercises and across workouts but you could combine them all in the same workout is what I heard yep and then in terms of progression it sounds to me like the goal in hypertrophy training is not necessarily to add more weight to the bar although that's one way one could do it but that the progression actually can arrive through this really extensive kit of changing the speed of movement changing um the number of sets adding some volume um maybe changing the split so that you go from a 3-day Week full body workout to more of of a um body parts one or two body parts per day every other day or two on one off at any number of different variations that are out there sounds like all of these can and will work provided that people are obeying the general principles of this uh hypertrophy adaptation inducing protocol that you described and that they are meeting the necessary but not sufficient variables as well such as sleep yeah nutrition and managing the stress in the rest of their life do I have that correctly yeah that's really really good uh one more thing I'd like to add is this is a situation for hypertrophy in which there are some exercises that I actually don't think are good ideas so I want to make sure we we included those in the conversation um that's not necessarily a case for strength you can really do kind of whatever when you want and that is specifically Plyometrics although in fact if you look at um there's a a recent review paper came out showing that like plan metrics are effective as well right sounds like one can do almost anything as long as it falls within this parameter set the concepts are few and the methods are many and the methods for hypertrophy are many many in general though Plyometrics are not my first second or even like 100th Choice um for hypertrophy they if they're a part of a total training program and you get some herper as a result cool you're lucky not the first place I'm going the other major category are weight lifting variations so then when I'm saying weightlifting I mean specifically Olympic weightlifting as in Snatch clean and jerk and their variations those are just not a good exercise Choice it's not that they don't work it's just the risk the benefit ratio starts to fall pretty fast in a in the negative favor and so it's just not worth doing sets of 10 of a snatch unless you're in a sport where that's like the competition or whatever but if the goal is simply hypertrophy um choose different exercises than that great now I realized that we are going to do entire episodes related to nutrition supplementation recovery Etc but I'd like to just touch on two or three specific topics and questions that come up a lot around the question of hypertrophy specifically and that probably also relate to strength training and training for Speed so I'm going to ask these in um not rapid fire but I'll give you shorter answers so that way so I will ask these questions now but with the caveat that we will get into these Topics in much more depth yeah very soon the first question is about the use of cold showers and Ice baths and cold water exposure which I know many people use for resilience training to increase their dopamine which it does and for recovery but there's also this issue of when one should use cold that is deliberate cold exposure relative to hypertrophy training specifically and that's because I've heard that if Del CBC cold exposure is done too soon after a hypertrophy adaptation inducing workout yeah right all the sorts of things we've been talking about that the hypertrophy response can be blunted reduced or eliminated is that true and if so when could people do deliberate cold exposure while still also including hypertrophy training in their program and still get hypertrophy great so you know I'm a lover of the cold I I still have a deep freezer uh in my house that is filled with water at times that I plugged in and and is a frozen chamber I still do the old school style of it please unplug it before you get in it each time oh yes absolutely and then don't do it by yourself so that the lid can close on top of you and then we don't see you sort of ever again Han the Han Solo effect it's time for me to upgrade and get one of these new fancy ones but I've been using this for so many years so I love it um obviously I've been involved with xpt and and Gabby and lar and and Brian McKenzie and these folks so I've been doing this stuff for a long time I've but I don't even know how many hundreds of folks into the ice and done for a lot of reasons so there are a lot of benefits and we can talk about those later however that that being said it is very very true you do not want to get in the ice post hypertrophy training you wouldn't want to do that immediately after the workout you probably don't want to do it before the workout and you probably don't even want to do it that same day um it it's just not worth it it will blunt hypertrophy and specifically we've talked earlier about what's driving muscle growth is that signaling Cascade uh through that gene expression through that muscle proten synthesis cold exposure blocks that signal remember adaptation comes from stress you've put in a stressin now you've blocked that stress you've literally block the signal that tells your body come back and grow larger size so not a good idea to do it if you're training for some other purposes maybe strength maybe there's an argument there although maybe not um for Speed and power maybe you can get away with it endurance maybe a separate conversation if you're in season I have no problem using it immediately after a game the goal is entirely different even if we did a hypertrophy type of training program we're not doing it try to try to maximize growth in that particular case our priority for Recovery is higher than our priority for muscle growth so we choose optimization in that category you can only make those choices though when you truly understand what is the goal for the day the week the month the phase of training and really what part of the year you're in we have that all plotted out for for all the people we work with so I know when we want to choose one over the other it's not a this is the choice you always make sit generation that's just not how we operate we need more Precision than that so that being said we're generally not going to do it if we want to do a lot of icing during a phase in which we're um using a lot of hypertrophy we're going to do a couple of things number one we may just not use it so there are phases in our training where I don't want to maximize recovery I'm not going to give you any tricks here I'm not going to do ice or any of the other methods we're going to talk about why because the whole point is to cause overload that's what's going to be the stimuli to cause adaptation if all I'm doing is blocking that stuff attenuating it smashing it back down I'm undercutting myself I'm choosing to feel a little bit better to have a little bit better performance right now knowing that's going to compromise the results I'm going to get 6 8 10 12 weeks from now right so I'm not going to choose it at all in the reality of it is if I really am trying to maximize hypertrophy I'm probably not doing any ice work during that whole phase maybe like my off day I know that's similar to a setup you have like one day a week when I'm not training we'll jump in some ice maybe even do some hot cold contrast um I I love the xpt protocol it's you know you've probably talked about it before that's a great setup um or or just not do it at all right it's just not something we need when we move into another phase of training where we're trying to maximize adaptation or maximize the result and and get the benefit of that training now we're going to hedge more towards recovery and we're going to bring in some of these strategies and techniques and not worry about causing the most stimuli there because we're trying to a CU we're trying to actualize the work we did 6 8 10 12 weeks before what about cold showers do those have the same hypertrophy blunting effect as in general no in general you can do cold showers that's not going to be a problem you're not going to be in there very long and you're not going to get nearly as cold um as you will submerge in 30° ice water for like that the way that we do it nonetheless so um I have no problem standing in the shower for a couple of minutes um using it for other reasons if if you want to that's no issue I'd like to talk a little a little bit about nutrition and supplementation as it relates to hypertrophy Dr Lane Norton who's been a guest on the hubman Lab podcast and we both know throughout a number range related to protein intake on the backdrop of how much protein synthesis can occur by meal across the day Etc a lot of lot of research done there and some important work by him in particular and then the value that he threw out was 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight being the lower end of the range up to I believe is it was as high as 2.4 maybe even as high as 2.7 yep grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day that's a pretty broad range but it's on the higher end of what I think most people think of in terms of protein intake and then again some people might already be right there or maybe even above that value of course this all depends on whether or not people are omnivore vegan uh meat-based Etc we won't even go there but assuming people are getting enough protein per day so somewhere in that range and they are spreading out that protein intake to accommodate the fact that the body can only assimilate a certain amount of protein in any given sitting what do you like to see people ingest at some point post hypertrophy inducing workout in order to get the protein synthesis Advantage if you will yeah that is stimulated by that workout earlier you mentioned the you know the post trining feeding window that you know in the 90s and probably earlier people were talking about oh you know within the first 90 minutes you have to get amount oh was it 30 minutes of uh excuse me a certain number of grams of carbohydrate and protein Etc I think now the understanding is that that window is much broader MH um and uh how broad and Etc is is still a matter of debate but when somebody is trained specifically for hypertrophy assuming they are getting enough protein from quality sources in their other meals and assuming that their overall macronutrient intake and caloric intake is high enough that is they have enough of a caloric Surplus that they have the the raw materials for for hypertrophy what do you like to see people ingest at some point post-workout in order to facilitate muscle protein synthesis and recovery and this could include nutrition and supplementation if you want to divide those answers out um feel free to do so of course yeah okay great so a ton of work came out of Don Layman's La was actually Lan's Mentor as well as Stu Phillips at McMaster so a ton of work there and we can answer a number of things here so Lane's numbers that he recommended uh also known as about a gram of protein per pound of body weight it's a great start now once you slide below that's per pound right one gr per pound right and earlier we just to make sure because we're changing units here uh it was 1.6 gr per kilogram of body weight all the way up to I think it was 2.4 but maybe as high as 2.7 yeah um grams of protein per kilogram of body weight so 2.2 in that unit would be the same thing so 2.2 grams per kilogram is the same as one gram per pound right so depending on which where you're listening at to this at one of those may be easier than the other for you um if you start getting below that number now you do start running into questions of protein quality protein type and protein timing this is one of the reasons why I fully agree with Lane is just get that number higher than you think and then all those other variables don't matter if that number is low then you need to start paying attention to a bunch of other stuff you've added now complexity to your program things you got to pay attention to just stay high and it it doesn't matter and so you can just leave a lot of those things off the table that seems to be fairly clear in in the work of some of those gentlemen I just mentioned that as long as you get to that total number the question about timing and um types and quality it seems to matter a lot less in fact uh ste's recent work in non-animal-based proteins it really showed that to be fairly clear that those are quite effective assuming total protein intake is high enough um the amount of Lucine and other amino acids in those actual proteins matter less if the total threshold is just super high so just do that and you're fine um now the other caveat we have to say here is timing of macronutrients is seems to be somewhat Irrelevant for protein but that is not the case for carbohydrates so that timing does matter replenishment of muscle glycogen is very specific and you want to make sure that that is around a lot if you're doing either maintaining training quality or you're sliding into endurance type of work and so nutrient timing does matter with carbohydrates maybe less so with protein and certainly less so with protein if the total protein ingestion is high enough so um it depends on what we're going after in terms of a training goal um and where we want to get with all these things in general the way that we like to think about this is if you're doing a strength type of work where you're truly targeting that then a one: one post exercise protein to carbohydrate ratio is generally what we're going to go after so this would be something like 35 grams of protein 35 grams of carbohydrate it doesn't have to be post it can be pre or my favorite is actually mid um or post but somewhere in that range especially if you're training in the morning and you have not consumed anything prior to your workout and that's not necessarily eating in the middle of the workout that's drinking calories yeah it's going to be I yet to see someone eating a sandwich on uh in the although I'm sure it's happened yeah so one to one is that like sort of standard number here um if you're going to do sort of more of a really hard conditioning workout that number slides up to something like three or even four to one which would be carbohydrate to protein ratio so if we want to stay at 35 grams of protein we're going to go maybe as high as like 100 or 140 grams of carbohydrate again depending on what type of of training we're sorted doing if you're going to do a little bit of a combination then you like a little bit of strength a little a little bit of conditioning and kind of a standard workout which is probably something that a lot of people will do then you maybe want to go to something like 2 to one so you know 35 grams of protein 60 70 grams of carbohydrate and those are kind of just like rough numbers that you can go by and for Pure hypertrophy training would you like to see people ingest some carbohydrate post training for Pure hypertrophy training I want to see that as many of those nutrients around the training as generally possible now again I may change my mind when our fasting study comes out but as it stands now there is no advantage to not fueling around the training and there are some known and some other potential advantages to fueling so I just see no reason to not do it um in fact most people are generally going to do better now this is not science this is just my coaching experience um and this is with our athletes and all of our non-athletes that we've worked with and do work with they're just going to be better spreading those meals out generally throughout the day and and they're going to be better if they have those nutrients either pre mid or post and so they're going to get even for hypertrophy they're going to get something like that one 3 to one ratio of carbs to protein personal preference some people don't like to eat before they train some people have to eat before they train some people can't you know put in food in their belly immediately after work around that you can you can play based on personal preference but we want that fueling in there um because we want to maximize the potential growth and we want to just get a jump start on recovery because we're going to be training again pretty soon supplementation is a huge topic and one that we will go into in great depth in a soon to occur episode but if you had to pick one supplement that can benefit most everybody if not everybody yeah for their training directed toward strength power and hypertrophy what would that supplement be and how would you like to see people use it meaning how much should they take and when should they take it sure if you don't count protein and carbohydrates as supplements they technically are but we'll just walk out of that right sorry I I should be more specific I'm not referring to uh nonfood form um protein and carbohydrate so powdered protein and pow powdered carbohydrate Etc um technically are supplements they're highly processed but they're um but I'm not including that I'm I'm referring to um non- macronutrient type supplements yeah does testosterone count um well in the context of this discussion it's testosterone that people are manufacturing themselves ah okay the cheating kind the endogenous kind no um I mean [ __ ] is the answer here without question it is the most well studied it is the most effective and its uh benefits are robust meaning they're going to confer positive adaptations across multiple physiological domains so we could certainly have a very long chat about some of the interesting things that people in fact we just had um Darren kandal um on on our barble shrug podcast and he went into extensive detail about all the benefits of creatin that people have no idea about including things like bone mineral density you asked about that earlier creatin is actually fairly effective for that um let alone the thing uh the benefit in things like cognitive function decision- making memory um the work that there being done there for neurological disorders um depression a whole host of things that that creatine is being studied for some uh of those studies show a lot of benefit some of it show maybe a little bit some none but there's just a lot of things creatine can do um so when we could talk about Muscle Recovery or muscle hypertrophy um that's where the bulk of the research is and and it and it's very effective um in terms of type creatin monohydrate is still the best one and that's just because it has the largest evidence base um you can maybe make some arguments for some other types but you're really going to reach saturation pretty quickly within a matter of weeks and there um at a dosage of anywhere between like 3 to six grams per day um now five grams is the very standard number we give reality is I change that number based on size that's just the honest truth um if you're 225 PBS you're not going to get the same dosage of creatin as 125 pound girl that's just just like this is not what we're going to do so we may slide that number down a little bit closer to three for the the smaller girl boy doesn't matter it's just Fe physical size if you're one of our 275 or 330 lb offensive right tackles in the NFL you're not going to get the same same dosage as everybody else so that number is going to go up to seven 8 n maybe even 10 grams a day there so that's just kind of the scale in general if you wanted an easy answer for five grams is the standard taken after training the timing doesn't matter totally irrelevant take it in the morning breakfast take it at night take it anytime you want take it pre um we tend to put it in a lot of people's um workout um shakes just to make sure they get it in throughout the day but the timing is irrelevant great well thank you for that very informative answer and I look forward to much more discussion about nutrition and supplementation and recovery and all the rest in the episodes to come this was incredibly informative thank you so very much I appreciate the opportunity uh I had a great time doing that I I love talking about these things I also really like talking about uh what we're going to get into in our next conversation which is the physiology of endurance metabolism and fat loss if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please pleas subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a festar review if you have questions for us or comments or suggestions about topics you'd like us to cover or guests you'd like me to include on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube we do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and during today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast I'd also like to inform you about the hubman Lab podcast free newsletter it's called the neural network newsletter and each month the neural Network newsletter is sent out and it contains summaries of podcast episodes specific protocols discussed on the human Lab podcast all in Fairly concise format and all completely zero cost you can sign up for the neural network newsletter by going to hubman lab.com go to the menu and click on newsletter you provide us your email we do not share it with anybody and as I mentioned before it's completely zero cost by going to hubman lab.com you can also go into the menu tab and go to newsletter and see some example newsletters from months past thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercise and performance with Dr Andy Galpin and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]