Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimize Your Training Program for Fitness & Longevity | Huberman Lab Guest Series

[Music] welcome to the hubman lab guest Series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine today's episode March the 4th in the sixth episode series on fitness exercise and performance and today's episode is all about optimal Fitness programming that is how to design a fitness and exercise program that can achieve the goals that you want for fitness and for sports performance performance Dr Andy Galpin great to be back in previous episodes you taught us about the various adaptations that occur at the level of cells at the level of organs indeed at the level of the entire body that underly things like improvements in strength and speed hypertrophy AK muscle growth and the various forms of endurance and you laid out beautifully the various protocols that one can do in order to achieve each and every one of those adaptations today I'd love for you to teach us how we can combine different protocols to achieve multiple adaptations in parallel for instance how to improve endurance and strength how to achieve some level of hypertrophy perhaps directed hypertrophy at specific muscle groups while also maintaining endurance and perhaps improving speed for instance and if you would I'd love for you to tell us how we can combine different protocols and Vary those across the week across the month across the year so that we can make regular progress and perhaps even you could give us a window into the ways to make the fastest progress possible yeah I would love to do that you know we've invested a lot of time in the previous episodes covering background and Concepts and detail about the physiology so you understood why you're making the choices you're making and why other choices are less effective in this discussion I would actually like to jump maybe more directly to the answer and right kind of get right into the protocol so and maybe a little bit less background if you're interested that stuff I I suppose you have to go backwards a little bit and watch some of those uh previous episodes but I would love to jump into just some samples um some case studies if you will and kind of walk through different protocols I know that over the course of my uh 11 years as a a college professor and um being in the the public space a little bit probably the most numerous style of question I have gotten is exactly that so I I know the rep range for this or I know the style of training for that adaptation but how do I put them together and I I would just like to spend our time today going through those things and the reason I want to do it is this some people listening at home surely uh just love exercise they're already bought in and they're going to train no matter what and they're interested in just actually being more effective and so the way that you structure and put your plan together will in large part determine getting more progress for for Less effort or actually being able to put the same amount of effort in and getting results faster there's also some folks probably listening who are like okay I exercise I do what I can I'm bought into the benefits and you've talked so elaborately over the the 100 plus episodes you've done about um the various benefits of exercise but you don't like ABS you're kind of doing it because you know it's important but you're not there so for those folks it's sort of like okay how can we actually make this thing more effective so we can make sure you hit the things you have to absolutely have to get for the short and long-term benefits right to make sure that you're looking the way you want to look you're performing physically the way you want to perform and then you can do that across your lifespan so how can we give you all some structure um to where again you don't have to turn into an absolute lover of physical fitness and it doesn't have to take over your life but you can still get more results for your same time restrictions whether that be you have two days a week or 5 days a week or only certain access to equipment or experience whatever the case may be how can we help those folks as well put together a protocol that will get them closer to their goals with less restrictions fantastic and I'm hoping that along the way you'll also point us to how often to take the fitness assessment for each of the adaptations that you referred to in a previous episode we will also link to that fitness assessment segment in the show note captions for this episode because that fitness assessment for different adaptations I think is a really powerful way for people to touch in and see you know how much much long endurance do they have how how much um Anor robic capacity do they have how much strength do they really have and then perhaps you'd also be willing to throw in a couple of additional ways that we can assess our level of fitness and progress in this Arc of a fitness program across the year amazing uh I can't wait to do that I think it is also important before we jump in to acknowledge a lot of folks maybe thinking to themselves I don't really necessarily need a plan why do I have to do that I don't have a certain goal going after I'm not running a race anytime soon I'm not a competitive athlete I just I go to the gym and I work out and that's great well I would like to try to convince you that regardless of where you're at having a plan will achieve those things we just talked about which is more success in a shorter time frame there's actually a significant amount of research to support this those individuals who go on a specific training plan compared to those who do not will receive better results right independent of the effectiveness of the program right so we've talked in previous episodes about tons of different styles and strategies and to reiterate it really doesn't matter which one you pick the fact you have a plan is always more effective than not having a plan and so again even if you're not planning on competing with something if you want to shorten the amount of time you're in the gym get more results from it I would strongly encourage to put something together the two largest reasons why people don't get results with their Fitness training protocol is number one adherence and then number two some sort of progressive overload both of those two things are challenging to accomplish without a plan right so the reason people don't go to the gym one of them and one of the reasons why it takes them so long is because they don't walk in with a very specific plan it's sort of like going to the grocery store and figuring out what you're going to buy versus knowing exactly what you're going to get in your shopping list grabbing those things and getting out you'll notice your time in the grocery store is half the length you're more productive and you didn't waste money on extra things okay so that alone will drive adherance because you're now going to be thinking to yourself oh that 90-minute workout I do is actually really just 60 and so now the next time you go to training you're like man I don't have 90 minutes you realize it's only 60 or 40 or 30 or 20 or whatever it needs to be so that alone will get you there the second part of that which is overload it's very difficult to understand and remember well the last time I did lat raises I used I think five lounds and I think I did like 12 well if you don't have some sort of system of tracking and this can be as simple as a notebook just writing down what you did before and doing a little bit more the next time that is going to almost guarantee you success so having some structure and this structure can be fairly loose we're going to talk about a bunch of different examples um is something I strongly encourage everyone to utilize for their exercise 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 Andy galpin's teaching and research roles at Cal State ferton it is ever part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is momentus momentus makes supplements of the absolute highest quality the huberman Lab podcast is proud to be partnering with momentus for several important reasons first of all as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality second of all their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations if you're going to develop a supplementation protocol you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations with single ingredient formulations you can devise the most logical and effective and costeffective supplementation regimen for your goals in addition moment to supplement ship 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should people be thinking about When developing an overall fitness program a few minutes ago we were talking about how two of the major reasons people don't get as much out of their training programs as they would like is because of one a lack of adherence and two a lack of progressive overload so the solution to that is constructing a plan that lives within your realistic limitations so I would like to walk you through uh my 10-step approach to how I design training programs now before I do that I think it is fair and important for the audience to understand that this is simply my approach I've been doing this a long time I I played college football and I wrote my own training programs back then I have and I'm still working with professional athletes in PGA Tour and the NFL the NBA Major League Baseball as well as a ton of general population folks so this is a combination of the evidence base that we've been talking about in terms of best practices for strength conditioning as well as just my years of experience so there are many many ways one could do this I'm not even suggesting this is the best this is simply how I do it this is exactly how I handle it when a new individual comes to me and how I teach my students so step number one is assessing properly and identifying a training goal now that's actually sort of funny because we hear that a lot but a lot of people actually never take that step not to call anybody in the room out but what's Happening Here is this morning uh Andy Dr Galpin and I were were training together and uh he was providing amazing tips on form and um set rep Cadence and this sort of thing and he said so what's your training goal for uh the next 12 months and I paused and it turned into a very long pause uh because which is an easy nice way of saying he didn't have an answer I didn't have an answer I I of course I don't just want to maintain what I've developed in terms of strength and hyperv and endurance but um I don't have a clear goal so I'm hoping that by the end of today's discussion I will be on track to a clear set of goals to amazing I'm not gonna bore you all here but really I can't stress enough how important that step really truly is to getting results uh the analogy we use here is if you left your house and you were attempting to get to the grocery store um and you just started driving and if you drove every possible rad you would eventually get to a grocery store and so yes that can work a better approach is saying here's where I am is where I want to go what is the optimal route there and that's really what you're doing with go so it is a boring step it is not interesting to hear I don't have any real hacks or tricks for you um but it is Step number one on purpose we have to know exactly where we're going you can do this in two ways way number one is to just pick something arbitrarily decide I'm going to run a 5k or I've done that before and I want to improve it by 10 seconds I want to lose 10 lbs you can just pick one that's great another way is to run through that Fitness testing protocol we described uh a few episodes before and if you do that you can see which of these areas that maybe you have the largest lagging in or what is the most severe performance anchor is how we refer to it and then choose that as your primary goal so either options some people come into to training programs with a very clear goal in mind they want to add more muscle or whatever whatever okay great if you're like I don't really know you know I I just kind of work out then run the F Fitness testing protocol you'll see what score is the lowest in and then you'll maybe make that a priority for the next say three months so the first step is to identify a specific or set of specific training goals a really nice tool for helping you set a goal is a system called smart right now there's a little bit of debate on what those acronyms actually stand for but we'll get close enough right so smart is often specific measurable attainable realistic And Timely so starting off with s specific in general the more specific your goal is the higher likelihood you will have at succeeding in that M being measurable means it needs to be something that you can actually put a metric on so this can be objective or subjective but generally I like to have at least one objective measure so remembering objective is something that is not based on feeling it is not up to you this could be something simple like your body wage it could be how much you can bench press what's your one mile time um any whatever is most important to you it actually doesn't have to be a fitness related goal for example if you're using Fitness as a way to enhance your sleep the main metric you may be interested in is you know amount of hour sleep slept it could be something like efficiency or whatever is most interested it could be work productivity it doesn't really matter so it doesn't have to actually be the the fitness goal but what is the motivation of why you're doing it so that's specific measurable um attainable or or actionable as is often described is something that is within your capability um so attainable a bad example of attainable is something like my goal is to win more games that may not be up to you the team the other team you're playing it could influence it the schedule Etc so attainable should be something that is within your control realistic uh or relevant to you is something that is again something realistic that you can achieve you wouldn't want to make a goal that is you know you want to double your body mass this is not going to happen so think about the constraints how old are you what's your training experience how much time do you really have to invest in this and then pick something that is realistic and then honestly my little twist here is take that in minus 10% because typically when people put together training programs their their goal tends to be quite lofty and they get some small percentage of the way in realize they're never going to get there and then back off we actually ort of reminds me of a a classic deception study that we did in in my lab one time where we took people and we had them do this um maximal front raise basically you held a dumbbell out in front of you for as long as you possibly could and the goal here was actually it's a deception study so we tricking them and so we said okay we want to just get normative values to see how long people can hold this front race and I think we use something like 5% of their body weight uh and so they came in they did it one time and we timed them they didn't get to see the clock they left and then we said we got to come back in repeat it right we got to do a couple of tries here to get a normal value in case this off whatever well the participant were split up into four groups so group one actually was told that their time was 15% lower than that they actually got group two was 5% lower group three was 5% higher and group four was 15% higher so the second time they came in to do it our graduate student quote unquote made a mistake and left the timer in front of them so the first time again they did the exercise they're just holding it they don't have any idea how long they're holding the second time they had a giant iPad set like just a little bit off-centered where they can clearly see it so they watched the time go by and of course what happened was those folks say who did one minute the very first time when they tested they came back in to do the second time and they're holding it and we told them they actually got 45 seconds in reality they had done a minute so they're holding it and holding it and they think they only did 45 seconds by the time they get to like second 40 41 42 they get past 45 they almost all quit like 47 48 seconds because they wanted to beat their previous score but then were like cool I beat it and then they quit early so they were actually not at the failure but they were just happy enough to beat what they thought they'd done and then they quit the other group on the inverse side again say they got a minute we we told them they got a minute and 15 seconds they got to like 45 seconds 50 seconds and started realizing oh man I have 30 more seconds to go and they quit way early because the carrot was way too far out they realized I'm never going to get there so I'm just going to stop now can you guess which group did the best on the post test ones that were just within about 5% of totally so they wanted to improve and so again say they got a minute the first time we told them they got a minute five or sorry they got a minute five the first time we told them they only got a minute they actually exceeded that greatly because they wanted the pr so um making sure that that goal is properly aligned it needs to be a little bit scary a little bit unrealistic you're going to have to work for this if it's too easy you'll quit you won't feel like a challenge if it's too hard though you'll quit early as well so you want to make sure it's that reasonable balance of like ah should I train today or like maybe I'll go through if I do that I'm not going to hit I got I got to get after it but not like oh my God like there's just no chance here so you're going so you're gonna walk away early that's a fantastic study I have to say h it's very simple I think it illustrates a number of important psychological principles about goal setting motivation self-perception but also the dopamine system um you know the the dopamine system is this Universal reward system that meaning it doesn't only work for food or only work for fitness goals or only work for academic goals or relationship goals it it is the universal substrate for all of that and um I actually think there's some real gems of information in um the study design that you describe so uh just cue that for maybe a potential collaboration between our Laboratories because absolutely I think it's very important but it does ceue up another question that uh relevant to Fitness in particular which is what are your thoughts on intermediate goals so let's say my goal is to drop two percentages 2% of body fat from where I am now a year from now so roll into the next year from now about 2% lower on body fat but maintain my lean body mass or maybe even increase it yep how should I assess progress um you know because the dopamine system loves a goal that it loves anticipation of a goal but it responds best to we sort of reup if you will our dopamine anytime we get a signal that we are on the right track to that goal and that signal could be okay I did the workout I just trust that these workouts are going to give me the result I want but of course we know that when people get a glimmer of the idea or some objective feedback that they're on the right path that dopamine system really fires and provides motivation for continuing toward the ultimate goal and uh as we've talked about in the um strength speed and hypertrophy episode resistance training itself has this built into it because of the infusion of blood into the muscles you actually get a a little window into what you might get in terms of an adaptation simply by ver by way of the so-called pump whereas endurance type work generally doesn't have that you don't see yourself get better drop back and then adapt and actually get better but that's actually what you see with weight training so given all of that Contour of the dopamine system what sorts of intermediate goals should I set for myself or should somebody set for themselves and I realize it will probably depend on the ultimate goal yeah but would you say check in um on progress once every week every month three months I I can't I don't know if you can tell the look on my face uh I love this to this question and this topic I spend so much time on on my uh senior and graduate level program design course I I've been fortunate to work with a few athletes where we've had multiple years and if you can really take the time to step back and go it's not about optimizing for the next six weeks uh and in this case it's not the next fight it is the championship fight that we need to get to in three years or it is the Olympics which are on a quad program right you're really optimizing for that four year if you can have that foresight and really think about that and then work backwards you can see some pretty tremendous things the the sort of saying that is like we we tend to overestimate what we can get done in a week and underestimate what can happen in a year that can be extraordinarily powerful however you have to have those metrics called out ahead of time because you will lose motivation in that short term because you won't see that result immediately but if you remember I'm on a path to 4% or 2% or whatever you need to be therefore I only need to be this far right now I need to be that far and then that far it's actually quite clear and so what we would actually in that scenario not to go like so off track here because I I can really go on this stuff is a let let's say it was the year recommendation you're going to actually need to go to the last part of smart which is timely so part of setting this goal is making sure you understand the time domain responsible and it's actually quite great here because not to go Inception on us where we're like list within a list and Rob kills us over here but number one of this program design thing was assessing your goal number two is identifying your Defender what I mean by that is what is stopping you from hitting that goal so you want to lose 2% body fat in the next year okay great what's going to stop us once we can achieve that and we'll go into more of that into a second then you just start walking that 2% backwards so you might have to go something like this look every time I start working out really hard I always get hurt interesting okay great so maybe instead of jumping really hard into an inter high-intensity interval training program knowing we're likely to hurt something or get burnt out or quit or whatever the the defender is for you maybe we invest something right now which is maybe improving your flexibility working on movement technique whatever is going to stop you from getting hurt or maybe we progress slower so we don't get there that will allow us to do the work necessary to hit that goal 12 months from now not two weeks from now not two months from now maybe that's not the case maybe you're like no look hey I move well I feel like I'm in like decent shape I've got enough muscle mass on me um we've talked in previous episodes why having insufficient muscle mass is sometimes detrimental for fat loss so you checked all that boxes I don't get hurt very often right U I got equipment around no problem I've got the time in my schedule and I have enough muscle great well now we maybe just split it up and say look we got 12 months we got 2% it's as simple as doing a half a percent per quarter of the year and now all we're looking at is that number right I don't have to necessarily get all these things done um I can go quarter half percent half percent half percent half percent you're going to get there right the other scenario that I laid out a second ago it maybe needs to look like something like this quarter 1 is going to be 0% like who yeah yeah that's right you may not lose a pound for the next three months we don't care that's not the goal of these three months I know that's the goal this year that's our major macro cycle goal we're going to get there but to get there most effectively we need to invest in you know working more with your chiropractor or whatever the thing is right that will allow us to then go half a percent Quarter Two when we can really start training but we're going to ramp into it quarter three we're going to go another half a percent and now we're halfway there quarter four we've invested so much you're ready to go we're going to go hard we're going to get that last 1% that last score and we're going to get there and you won't be hurt so that makes it very clear and I can also Envision how the precise structure of these intermediate goals would vary depending on what sort of adaptation one is pursuing and I do remember from our previous episodes uh that fat loss itself is not an adaptation is a byproduct of other adaptation so I just want to make sure that you know that I I was paying attention it's it's committed to memory absolutely some goals such as fat loss of qu quantifiable um and yet they might not be linear right it's it's hard to know you know the assumption is if you ingest you know X fewer calories than are required per day then you'll lose x amount of weight some percentage from body fat I think um that cues up the idea that we need to build some flexibility into our our thinking about these intermediate goals in order to just make sure that dopamine system isn't Tethered to exact numbers you know because after all a reduction in 2% body fat for instance is really uh desired to uh achieve a different sort of overall body composition or recomposition um I don't know by the way that that's my exact goal I I think one of my my goals is to be able to run a mile faster um and I'm sort of um haunted by this experience of wanting to run cross country in college and trying to walk on we weren't a division one school but the threshold for being um considered for the team was you had to run a sub 10minute 2 Mile which turns out to be very very fast that's really hard I didn't I did not do that I didn't even come close um but uh and I don't think that I could reasonably do that now um I'm not I'm not interested in committing to the kind of training required the sacrifice isn't meaningful enough for me um Fair honest Cas but lowering one's um mile um time to run a mile by I don't know 10% seems like a reasonable goal um cross 6 months sure great so in the case of a goal like that um clearly there are specific training programs but this raises the issue of what if I have other goals as well um and at what point do people having multiple goals start to set up collisions between goals how do we know whether or not something is reasonable not just on its own but because of the other things that one has um structured into their program so being able to reduce a mile time by 10% in 6 months okay maybe that's doable maybe it's not you can tell me but also being able to you know double the amount that they can um do for uh you know single repetition leg extension for that matter uh at the same time that seems those seem like incompatible goals right so a couple of things number one the more specific and precise you can be with a single goal the faster you will get there generally So in theory if you had one thing you wanted to achieve the best way to go about it is to focus on that give it the most priority that doesn't mean you can't do anything else along the way you can but you would want to focus on that the more additional goals you bring in the more distraction you're creating for that primary goal depending on what those goals are you can actually do them at the same time um some other combinations are less effective think about it like this we went through those nine adaptations and we went through them in a specific order on purpose the closer those adaptations are together in that list the more compatible they are to training each other the further away they become more challenging so just to give a few examples if you wanted to improve your speed and power you could basically train those simultaneously they would not interfere with each other at all in fact since power is speed times force it would be complimentary if you just walk down the line from there to strength hey same thing if you get faster that's going to Aid in strength because force is mass times acceleration so if you improve acceleration you're contributing to strength same thing with power so speed power and strength are generally very complimentary you can absolutely train all three of those goals at the same time and have no issues getting into hypertrophy now we've got a little bit of Distinction if you're going to train strength and hypertrophy as we talked about in that episode at the base those are going to be compc M you add on some muscle you're going to get stronger you start training for strength it's probably going to help you add on some muscle mass as you get to the end of that Spectrum the overlap between the two starts to go away such that if you truly wanted to maximize strength above everything else if you continue to train for hypertropia as well that's going to take too many resources out of your recovery bin and you won't be able to do that the inverse would also be the same right if you're training to maximize strength you wouldn't be able to put enough vol volume on to get sufficient hypertrophy so if you wanted to then combine speed with hypert try you're going farther away from each other which means it's going to be more and more distraction so the hypertrophy training would cause a ton of fatigue you wouldn't be able to go at Max Speed for your speed or power strength so you're going to be compromising those results now speed training won't compromise your hypertrophy training because it's non fatiguing right and so boom here we have a little bit of an ear interference Effect one way but probably not the other let's move down the Spectrum one more time and get into endurance we won't go through all of these things but you're you're getting the idea here oh a little bit of a high intensity intervals okay cool now would that compromise my speed power or strength probably because there's a little bit of residual fatigue if the volume was low enough then you'd be fine all you're worried about there is not necessarily like some sort of cellular mechanism it's just simple it is amount of energy expenditure versus is that compromising my recovery to come back would those first three or four of those speed power strength interfere with your ability to elevate your anerobic capacity probably not almost surely in fact if you look at any of the literature on endurance training you will see that speed power and strength almost always improve endurance right endurance training add on top of strength can be detrimental can have a neutral effect but generally doesn't help one get stronger by adding additional conditioning unless you're so unfit you can't get through the volume needed in the strength training right one more example here so we don't drag this out too far in the case of something like I want to lose fat well hey we don't have to worry about interference it doesn't really matter if you're fatigued for your hypertrophy session not a big deal we're just trying to get some work done if your hypertrophy session fatigues you from your conditioning it's cool because you got the work done so you don't have to worry about it so much um so really kind of depends on the actual goal and what you want to pay attention to is actually what are the chances of overlap which means like what are the the adaptations you get physiologically that cross over from one to the other and then what are the ones that are actually going to start interfering in fact I have in my uh in my class I have this giant Matrix chart of interference effect going from adaptations through a whole bunch of systems everything from like handling pH to lymphatic drainage to Bone mental density Etc you can walk through these whole things and say which ones actually have a positive effect which ones have a massive positive effect and then which ones actually have a little bit of interference and um perhaps if you guys are nice enough we could throw that into a newsletter or something some some PDF or something to I think that would be immensely valuable I think some of that more extensive information when it's laid out in grid form like that useful so um we should do well now we've said it so we I didn't say I would do it I said perhaps I I think it's a great idea um I think it's a terrific idea uh the idea that items closer on to each other on the list of those nine different adaptations are going to be easier to achieve in parallel than items further apart makes perfect sense and what I heard was that there's a a few caveats that might seem minor but that but they're actually quite important such as anything that is relatively low intensity and doesn't impede recovery can probably be included as a parallel goal so um some speed work in conjunction with some long duration cardio work even though we're talking about number two on that list and number nine on that list in that case the long duration endurance even if it's low intensity may actually interfere with the speed if the volume gets too high if you're talking about I went on a 30 minute jog um for most people that that it's totally fine what we're really talking about here is when the miles start piling up and the time really starts getting there in combination with some of the things the factors we've talked about earlier which is exercise choice so more Ecentric Landing based exercise choices running for example is more likely to interfere than cycling right because you're not Landing swimming is low unpack so if you're going to do those things you can hedge your bets a little bit by choosing an exercise choice that is less impactful um again if we're literally because there's often times confusing here with like oh don't do 10 minutes on the treadmill before you lift you're going to cut who whoa like time out warmup is fine we're really talking about probably more than 30 plus minutes at higher than 60% heart rate like random number something like that depends on the person Etc but it has to be a decent chunk um again you can actually fix that by then just consuming calories you can also fix that by making sure everything else in the hidden invisible stressor bucket is improved so this is like one of our tricks that we'll get into when we get into the recovery is you don't necessarily need to H to reduce your training if you just ramp up your recovery 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 20 2 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 will 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 I'm going to take the liberty of assuming that most people fall into one of either three bins in terms of their goals again most people certainly there are going to be people that lie outside these um bins I think if you pulled a 100 people or 100 thousand or a million people as to what their major goal goals were in working out they'd say as you've so nicely listed out before aesthetic changes functionality and Longevity but that one and three really kind of sit higher than most people would like to perhaps even admit they want to look good which usually means they want to lose some fat gain some muscle in specific places I realize there are folks out there who want to gain a lot of muscle just muscle everywhere but I think most people would like to have a little more shape here a little more um muscle there to either balance out their aesthetic or to accentuate certain parts of their physique and they would probably like to shave off some subcutaneous fat although there are those exceptionally lean people out there um and they exist too I think it would be gain muscle in specific places lose fat and do it in a way that also provides some Booth to their health span and Longevity I would say that that might even be 50% of people out there again I'm taking the Liberty of of guesstimating another bin I would venture is interested in getting stronger and putting on more muscle certainly there are a number of people that are interested in doing that and that could even be more muscle all over or more muscle with some um accentuation to certain areas where they happen to be weaker or less less developed as it were and then the third bin be people that really enjoy cardiovascular work oh I should say the second bin probably care about about their longevity also but it's not really foremost like yeah you know I'm feel great now and I'll live to you know I'll live to be whatever but I only want to do it if I get that much muscle right we know these kinds of folks yeah I run a poll in my class every year when I ask like what you guys all lift and of course like I make them put their hand up I'm like you guys are in my class you're going to put your hand up let you lift weights and then I ask them like why do you train and like health is long-term health is like on the list and they all like I'm like any of you that selected Health are liars like you're 20 to 25 you are not exercising for health you are exercising because you want to look a certain way or get stronger once you get past that undergraduate age though the actual desire to live longer and better actually becomes pretty real yeah I think that there are people who want to feel better they they know that exercise and the results from exercise can make them feel better but yeah that second bin tends to be more focused on the aesthetic change it seems or being strong and then the third category I think are people um I know a lot of F like this who really enjoy what are normally considered endurance type activities and here I just want to highlight again what you so beautifully Illustrated in previous episodes that you can gain a lot of endurance even using weights or machines it just depends on how you use them right AB it's not about the the exercise about how you perform them and Etc and you again beautifully provided all those details as to how to create endurance regardless of equipment standards Etc but that third category seem to be people who enjoy running cycling swimming uh hiking dancing um activities that they can do for long periods of time that often will involve some sort of um skill that is based on improving motor pattern so maybe not so much stride but um certainly for people that are really love tennis yeah people that um love a sport like golf right they want to be able to not just walk the you know they want to walk the 18 holes they want they want to have a great golf swing Etc I'm not a golf player so forgive me if my nomenclature is off so they three yeah golf first you don't play golf oh got it you don't play golf you play golf you wouldn't call golf player I played miniature golf a few times um that's about it although Stanford does have a beautiful golf course I'm told I should learn how to play golf I'll come up and play it for you if you want you come up I'll play it I'll tell you how it looks see it from my lab um so category one I think is a significant fraction of people yeah so as we lay out these different um ways to assess goals and as we approach the structure of a of a program as you'll tell us if we could perhaps touch back to those every once in a while I again I'm taking the liberty of assuming that we will we will net about 80 to 90% of people out there again those categories mean people who want to lose some fat maybe build some muscle in specific areas on their body and really want to be healthy they want to feel great and they want to have a long Health span AKA and lifespan you want to live a long time feeling great second category people want to build more muscle and and strength sure they don't want to damage their health but that's not their main focus um their main focus is on building muscle and strength and then that third category of people who really want to do more endurance type work feel great and strong doing it but not because they can um you know carry heavy weights while they're doing it but rather they can feel vital and they can push harder for longer and maybe even translate that to some of the more recreational type activities or sports like tennis and things that are more long duration playing soccer maybe even softball or things of that sort surfing swimming so those three categories maybe we could call those bin a b and c for sake of today's discussion I think um if you're willing to embrace um that I think that will be informative toward our listeners in a way that um simply not assuming what people's uh different goals are um might not be able to accomplish said differently hopefully by doing that um people will derive a lot more from the description of the program that you're going to give us love it now I am certain that I want to let you return to your list of the five things that people need to consider when establishing a exercise program yeah great let's do that I also do want to acknowledge a point you've brought up acutely exercise doesn't mean just lifting weights that's my background that's what I spend my time on so I sort of default to examples in that category but it doesn't have to be that um you've articulated plenty of other ways where you can get amazing forms of exercise that that have nothing to do with lifting weights so for those folks in in in was it b c or three I can't remember we go a is gain muscle lose fat be healthy now and forever right bin B is um get stronger gain muscle don't damage your health but not really focus on Health in the immediate term and then right uh b c is want to play or do endurance type activities and quote unquote feel strong doing it so have more Vigor to be able to do that longer and maybe with more attention to Etc and of course also want to improve their health what you've effectively done is you've given us three different avatars with three different goals right so the next step for each person or group is going to be to identify their Defenders but before we get that we got to close the loop on this smart thing so in each case they have either chosen that goal based on their personal preference or perhaps they did our our fitness testing protocol and and realize they need to gain strength so whether the reason they chose to be in buckets b or a or C was because of our protocol or it's just personal preference it really doesn't matter they still want to go through this process of laying out their goals and making sure again they are specific right so um let's go through benc which is a great one so you want to have more energy and you want to feel stronger when you're doing your kite boarding you want to feel stronger when you finish your round of tennis round of golf game of tennis okay great that's a different strength Absol abolutely see I hear I know what you're saying though amazing so that goal needs to be specific to that right so it would be hard to make a goal like I want to feel better at the end of my round boy what that depends on too many other factors a better goal would be something like this I want to be able to run this TW mile Loop that I do around my neighborhood and I want to do it and have a lower heart rate at the end or I want to be able to get my heart rate back my heart rate recovery back faster amazing that will that will probably align with you feeling quote unquote stronger with it right so I did the same course and either I can do it at the same speed and it's not nearly as hard or I can go faster whichever one it doesn't matter but that would be an example of a specific goal the other buckets you laid out kind of already have specific goals like I want to get stronger well that that's going to be the goal the other one is going to be um you know I want to lose some fat okay that's kind of the goal is sort of implicit in that it's the other people where you're just like I don't really care about that I just want to be able to surf the Great Waves and then not feel exhausted afterwards all right cool well then you still should pick a metric that is not that activity maybe because it won't be within your control depending on the waves and the temperature and all this stuff that you can use as a proxy to say if I were to do something that represented me feeling probably better when I surf what would that be and it's not perfect but it would be still as specific as you could get you still want to make sure it's measurable again this example might be something like you're going to go to the pool and time how long it takes you to swim 800 meters or something right it's attainable and then you'll set a goal that's realistic And Timely I'm going to improve by 5% in the next two months okay cool that probably Falls within the realm and then you're making the assumption that if you did that you'll probably feel better when you go out to do your primary activity which is say surf the reality of it is every time we work with an actual athlete that's what we do athletes don't come to us to lift weights they don't come to us to get stronger they come to us because they want to play better and they want to stay on the field more what we're trying to convince them of is if you do this thing in the gym then that should translate into you being better at your sport recovering faster being less injured but it's still just a proxy and so that's all you're doing with these other non-specific goals especially when they're performance-based goals and we didn't package it that way but that's really what you talked about for Ben C there it is a performance-based goal I want to be able to perform when I'm in the field and my brain that's a sport and your brain it's when you're at yoga class it's the same thing like uh we've said this earlier in our series that if you have a body you're an athlete I want to prepare your body such that it can do exactly what you want it to do you then get to have the choice of what you ask it to do you call it a sport you call it your Saturday hike with your family I don't really care it's the same thing you get control of your body performing the way you want it to perform and that's what this whole thing is about great so now that we've covered I think as much as we need to regarding assessing and choosing a goal I want to get back to this idea of identifying your Defender so you really need to think carefully about what is stopping you from hitting those goals and so you're forecasting a little bit you're also going back into your own personal history right do you have history of knee pain Do you have a history of working too much uh do you have a history of a lot of travel do you have a history of getting sick a lot what are these things that are happening that're going to stop you from hitting your goal um a couple of examples I've already laid out so we don't need to go too much longer here but in the case of somebody who is in maybe a b a right which is want to lose some fat maybe gain a little bit of muscle okay what's stopping you from the strength and conditioning side is it the fact that you can't train consistent enough is it a fact that when you go to train you don't know what to do is it a fact when you go to train you train your ass off and you're not getting results okay great all three of these different scenarios are going to result in different programs because they have different reasons you're failing and that is really critical instead of just going I want a fat loss program and picking one up off the internet it may not actually be addressing the point of failure for you so the sooner you can choose your programs based on why you're failing the sooner you'll start getting results so you have to run a little bit of a critical analysis there and it can be um you know something scientific and it could be a measurement and it also could just be you thinking about you've tried this in the past and why didn't it work I wasn't that interesting okay tell me more about why it wasn't interesting I just I'm not really into machines and that's all I had okay great or I I loved it I love the gym I was at and I was getting results but it was so far away okay interesting why did you stop before why didn't work or if it did work in the past amazing let's go back to something similar but has your life changed at all is there anything different about now than when it worked three years ago yes no if not maybe we run it right back if it is okay we're going to sort of predict those things and you want to work um effectively what I'm saying is throughout this entire 10-step process is going to be you want to make sure that there are the non-negotiables that are in your life that you know are going to be ahead of your fitness program and you want to work with those things not against them right because life will win when it comes to your children when it comes to your job life is going to win you're going to have to give up something it's going to take some hard work but we want to fight the right battles for most people right even for our professional athletes we get this all the time it's just like they have nothing else to do but train right like well hold on now they're getting traded they have agents to deal with they may not have a contract they have families blah I think life will get in the way I promise and so you want to fight the battles that you can win not ones that you're going to lose and so that's really what this game is about so if the battle is hey my job is super hectic okay great we're going to come up with a different strategy that's more flexible maybe I'm still going to hold you to the fire I'm not going to be easier on you but we're just not going to try to set up a situation where you have to do this workout Monday Wednesday Friday and Saturday because you know your job is on the road and you're the provide all the the you know income for your family and your okay whatever the thing is right um that's what we really want to identify so when I say identify your Defenders you need to run a little bit of a critical analysis on this and a little bit of a tool I'll use for this is a modification of another system I stole from Kenny Kane which is what we call the quadrant system so you can imagine everything in your life goes into one of four buckets all right now bucket one I'm just going to call business and this is anything to do with your job income sort of all those things bucket two is relationships so again this could be family or love life like anything that we would call relationships social connection purpose Ben anything right there bucket three is your Fitness and bucket four is your recovery so one of the first steps we take is we walk through this and we say all right you have 10 points total and you get to distribute these 10 points across the four areas so not 10 each you get 10 total and so we walk through and we say right now where are you giving your points and and we could do this right now for you if you'd like or I could make up a a scenario you want to do it sure great so Andrew uh right now in the last month um if you had 10 points total those categories um where would you be Distributing the most points which category and how many points would that be business my work business work job sort of all those things and how many out of 10 which doesn't I should say ever quite feel like work running a laboratory and doing uh the podcast doesn't ever really feel like work in the traditional sense but it's career it's corre it's work it's it involves relationships but it certainly doesn't enhance my fitness um except of my vocal cords and um and recovery so uh so with those um notes there uh I would say um four or four to five you pick uh five five Fair that's the most common number five business five great once again I'm typical which makes me happy you nailed it one of the few ways in which I've been accused of being normal I pick five for business no kidding What's the next highest and what's that score uh um I do invest in relationships I would say uh does it have to be around can it be a a whole integer um two two all right we're seven out of 10 here so would you say it is fair that you spend roughly two and a half% of your it's not necessarily time it's energy time Focus sort of all these things two and a half times as much on your business as you do in your relationships it varies depending on what's going on um that uh feels a little skewed in the direction of business so I might want to adjust to a 43 ratio there maybe but I think I'm going to hold to five two um business relationships and then just for sake of example and because uh you know this is doesn't seem like a a exceedingly precise measure it can have some slop of course okay where would you put Fitness and Recovery I definitely put energy into fitness uh so I'm going to give that also a two yep which leaves one for Recovery great that what you just laid out is again the most quintessential split you could have in fact you run this game on everyone they're going to come up with basically the same answer unless they don't work out or or whatever right okay so a couple of rules here uh recovery must be at minimum half of your Fitness allocation in your case two to one you're fine I think you're say it has to be half it has to be five out of 10 points in which case it doesn't leave much for anything else I would like it to be minimum 20% of the total which means two out of 10h um now and when I say recovery I don't simply mean muscle I mean you need personal time you need meditation you need uh enjoy sleep you need to go to a concert and get out and like whatever the things that you energy back right some folks that's personal time some folks that's social time whatever that means to you right yeah I actually get a lot of energy from my work and so it you know that's why some of these numbers are a little bit you can um kind of uh cloak the the underlying Dynamics so here's what we do from this game we look at that and we say if that's our split Andrew 5 3 2 1 5221 five 5221 I'd love to be able to put three in relationships just because but I need 11 out of uh right so here's the fun game we play you're currently at this and you don't get to add to 11 you have to stay at 10 there your 10 is different than my 10 maybe right but 10 is 10 or just whatever the maximum you can actually do it's you so if we went back to our training goal whatever that goal was for you and we went back to our Defenders we would look at this score now and say is three out of 10 Fitness is three right Fitness is two so it's 5 to two one is two out of 10 sufficient to hit that training goal in that time frame you described and let's say you said I want to hit a new PR in my mile six months from now yeah for for Simplicity sake and also because it's largely to I'm going to put myself in in what I refer to as B A earlier great right um my bat percentage is is okay it's it's in the range that I would like but I would um like to bring it down a little bit probably gain a little bit muscle here in there keep keep or gain some endurance and certainly certainly my immediate and long-term Health are extremely important to me great so then the question and then may answer may be yes that this is the optimal split for you if it is not then we have to make a choice we either alter the goal or the timeline to make it realistic or we alter our quadrant and then if we're going to alter our quadrant the next step is critically important we need a list of very specific life Act that we're going to take that allows that split to happen so if you said for example I want to put three into relationships great what specific life actions are you going to take to pull one from Fitness you can't pull any from recovery or one from business and and then we don't have to actually answer this is you know too personal um I know you don't like making these things about you because right and that's the other reason to do it and um it is a a diabolical trick to make to insist that these be whole integers because I would have done you know like a 4.5 for business and a 2.5 for relationships but obviously you write through rules on this not me so you would just walk through that list okay and then list could be something like um I promise to not work after 7 PM um Thursday through Sunday or or whatever the thing is right I promise I'm I'm gonna make sure that I don't start work before 8 AM or whatever right no more trips just make those things specific and measurable not just like I'm going to work less that's never going to go what is the very specific life action you're going to take there's going to be alarm that goes off Tuesday night at 4 5:00 P p.m and no matter what we at Barbo Shrugged we used to have a little shirt that was like D3 at which is like drop everything and train which means at 3 p.m. in the afternoon no matter what's happening we dropped everything and trained because that was like when you start a business and you're going uh things just run away from you right and it just sort of like man it's not my company but those guys are like we are a strength conditioning company and we're not training so we had to just make this hard Rule and it was just like a little thing that came up and it was easy to say drop everything in train three o'clock there you go I like this uh drop d uh e everything a and and blank like it could be drop everything and correct you know pick your favorite totally drop everything and read pick the relevant read yeah absolutely you know I really miss reading for pleasure I would put that under recovery and po breathe oh and breathe you were saying oh and breathe I was saying read uh I said that too yeah because for me reading is actually is both recovery and relationship um because often times in in my relationships I've um insist not insisted I certainly didn't insist uh uh we've had a format of reading the same book in parallel oh great yeah not necessarily side by side but the same book in parallel and then discussing it it's a wonderful practice or listening to the same Audi book um it works well you can do drop everything in play MH you're just going to go do something fun you're going to play video games you're going to go play with your kid you're going to do what play with your dog like some it doesn't have to actually be play but play it to you could signify personal time right it doesn't really matter um so yeah that's a I really like this drop everything in blank um category that you probably shouldn't have more than what two or three of those overall pretty much like one is the one to two maybe great where you want to go after that so the idea is then to redistribute the numbers on this list but through a very concrete action and I like this drop everything in blank because it um speaks to the non-negotiable aspect of it has to be you it's life will get pushed right it's not a fine time to right correct it's not in next year I'm going to correct I love it yeah yeah when you make when you when you put those things those things you might as well just don't even put on your list right it's not going to happen yeah you're talking to somebody who loves rules um because when they are non-negotiable rules they provide this incredible organizing Force for for the brain yeah it it's really a neuroscience thing in my mind that totally the and actually we did an episode on happiness where you find that once people make a decision if they eliminate the possibility of other decisions like literally the hatches closed that is it burn the the the the rates of subjective happiness immediate long-term happiness over time go way way up yeah and so I'm convinced that the nervous system doesn't like to keep the valves on these dopamine circuits open I actually think it diminishes from the reward component and there actually some data on this anyway I don't want to take us off track but the last part of this what we do then is we take that quadrant and we take that list and then you're going to print it physically and you're going to put it in two places um this could actually be on your phone you don't actually print you can screenshot it be the background of your phone so every time you click on your phone you immediately see that quadrant like it's a very clear reminder of like what are my priorities today right just a simple little picture um I also like to put it in your place of failure so for a lot of people that is like on their laptop or right above their workstation right it's like the thing that's going to lose and beat your Fitness is your job typically right or it's on your TV it's on your Netflix control no sorry Netflix no offense but you know what I mean like it's whatever the thing is that you fail for um I play too many video games great there I work too much okay great and you put it there and you put it also the last component is it has to also be in the hands of somebody who can hold you accountable right wife training partner business partner or whatever is it's like hey Andrew like you promised you were going to do X yourself why are you still here you committed to this you got to get out of here someone who will like be like no no it's drop everything and read it's 8:00 you're supposed to be reading you got to go um you're going to check back in on that check back in every week check back in it doesn't matter every month and then you can adjust it's fine you can always change the system but that has to now change you got to print a new one and now it's a whole new promise you've made to yourself so you've got to be able to hold yourself accountable those things it's got to be flexible enough to where it's realistic it can't be I'm not going to work after 6:00 every day maybe it's just three days a week maybe it's on Saturdays I promise to work for the first two hours so I don't work Saturday night or whatever or the inverse I'm not going to work Saturday you get it you can come up with a million examples here so um that's the system we use to make sure that we have now properly identified where we're going we found a road map to that and now we know exactly how we're going to stay on track I have to take this opportunity to add one more thing to our drop everything list and you gave the example of deer which is maybe drop everything and read or drop everything and relax or uh another example um I have to add a deal which is drop everything and this is for you Lex Love Actually one of the advantages of having a dog or having children is that um the drop everything and love is uh often enforced by the faces of of the of those that you love they just show up in whatever space you happen to be in especially if you work from home I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health and well-being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test one issue with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there however is that you get information back about various levels of lipids and hormones and metabolic factors Etc but you don't know what to do with that information inside tracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy they have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are of course but then also what sorts of Behavioral dos and don'ts what sorts of nutritional changes what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try and insid tracker you can visit insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insider.com huberman to get 20% off let's move on to the next one shall we number three here is going to be what I call calendar or sort of time frame so it's going back a little bit and saying you've decided on this goal and you've identified the Defenders now we need to come up with a realistic time frame for how long it's going to take to accomplish that goal and when you do that you need to look at your life schedule and what I mean by that is do you have important deadlines coming up do you have holiday do you have a trip do you have travel do your children have something coming up um you need to take all that information and I literally lay out a calendar and I write all those dates in a physical calendar first and the reason I'm suggesting this is you want to work your training backwards around that as we've been discussing life will win if you try to plan a training program that is five days a week 90 minutes a day and all of a sudden you look two weeks from now and you realize you've got a grant deadline and then you've got to take two days to go to a it's just foolish you're going to fail and then you're going to quit and you're going to be like man again my training program failed so you need to figure out what are the non-negotiables are in that business quadrant and just not be foolish all right so let's imagine you're going to plot out say a 12we training phase and you want to you've decided on this goal and then you look and in you realize in the middle of this 12we span week five is really hectic and chaotic or you realize that this is a quarter in which something important is due maybe we want to either adjust the goal or what we really do in this step is going on to actually step number four which is choose the number of days per week you can exercise and the length in terms of amount of time you can truly afford to train I would rather you underestimate that then overestimate it so you again you look at the calendar you put all these non-negotiables the deadlines you cannot move in the calendar and then you say look based on this realistically I can conservatively train three days a week for 60 minutes total and that includes the time I walk into the gym my warmup my down regulation breathing at the end and then me getting back either in the shower and back cuz really now it's maybe 90 minutes by the time you traveled you transitioned you picked back up on work you showered you ate Etc that time just runs away from you and all a sudden it was a two and a half hour thing even though it was a 45 minute workout so you really need to figure that thing out if you're a few weeks in and you realize oh actually have a little more time than I thought you can always train more you can do another thing you can add it but what you don't want to do is set up a program that is requiring you to do certain exercises on one days or certain styles of training on another other and then you constantly miss one of those days I thought I could do four days a week but one day a week something's getting pulled out that's just going to keep you off schedule it's going to make you feel like a failure and you're going to run into problems with your training so schedule three if you're sure you can get three and if there's an extra day we can always do other fun stuff right so that's really step three and four figure out your life events over the course of this time how many days a week can you train and then how long in terms of minutes for workout notice we haven't selected a single exercise yet we haven't worried about how heavy rest inter R all those modifiable variables you don't need to pick those later first where are we going second how are we going to get there which is the quadrant in identifying of Defenders and then the third is what are the restrictions I need to place on myself in terms of program design based on how often and how long I can work out that is going to allow you go back to some of the previous epes and go man you gave us all kinds of ideas how do I know which one to choose this is your answer you're going to choose based upon the limitations of time and frequency so if you've already said we're in let's imagine we're in bucket a or bucket SE it doesn't matter and you go look the most I can afford with where I'm at with what's going on in my life is three days a week well we automatically know we're going to have to start training choosing a training style that's limited to three days a week don't even worry about the four or five days stuff those are off the table and now we're we so we've placed restrictions it kind of goes back to that concept of I think it's one of your podcast guest Joo right this is like hey structure gives us actually some Freedom so by creating some restrictions here we're a little more free to go I only actually have to choose between A and B rather than sitting down and going man there's all I'm 20 hours into this exercise podcast thing and there's so many options which TR to pick well you create a little bit of restriction and now it's easier to go oh the only option is a or b and there we go so that's number four that's three and four at that point once we're good there now what you want to do is go to step number five which is actually select your exercises or your movements and this is going to be as simple as selecting like a you know a kettle bell swing or running or swimming it could be your entire exercise mode what you want to do with exercise selection here is make sure that you're balancing those exercises across the whole week not within necessarily every workout so if you have four days a week five days a week you want to look at the exercise selection and say okay I need to have somewhat of a reasonable balance between movement patterns or muscle groups or front and back side to side however you're thinking of it just across that week right so again say we're on a 3-day program and we're in either of the bu ETS any of the buckets really and we say okay great maybe it's not ideal if all I select is cycling every day that's not a lot of balance I don't notice any there's no upper body work there there's no torso work there's no other positions so maybe I'm going to really focus on cycling so I will do only cycling two days a week but that third day I need to pick something for the other movement areas and that's going to make sure you stay in a reasonable balance uh if you have an exercise that you like great if you have exercise you have access to again maybe the gym is a giant pain in the ass and so you can say look it's too far away the closest one is 45 minutes there and back so maybe I'm going to restrict myself to only kettle bell and bands and running because I can do those in my house awesome we've actually created some freedom because we gave ourselves some restriction and now we just have to figure out how am I going to give some movement patterns somewhat balanced across my 3 days so really when it comes to exercise Choice it is selecting the patterns that you know how to execute giving yourself against somewhat of a balance between the muscles and the joints and the movement patterns making sure that you are specifically targeting any muscle group or movement that you want so making sure you you want to improve muscle size in your glutes you better make sure some of the exercises you're doing at least one day a week you feel it in your actual glutes so you can check that box it doesn't have to be every exercise it probably shouldn't it doesn't even have to be every single day but make sure it's checked off somewhere on that list and then the last one is is there a strategy in which you can progress it so if you're like I'm just going to do body weight exercises okay great well how are you going to progress those in the case of like body weight it's really hard to add load maybe you can put a weight vest on or something but then maybe you don't have that or that's an extra thing or that can only go so far so what's my progression strategy going to be well in this case maybe you just increase the complexity by going from two legs like say a body weight squat to a single leg squat or you just increase repetitions or you increase time you're going to hold it what my point is your progression strategy will be based upon the restrictions that you placed um based on availability and things like that the last thing I would recommend here in terms of exercise progression to make sure that you can continue to do these things while lowering your risk of injury both in the short term and long term is to progress your exercise complexity in this this fashion so make sure number one you can do the exercise properly with assistance so let's imagine a scenario where we're going to try to squat so uh give yourself put your hands on a bench or something like that now can you execute that squat perfectly with assistance so you're holding on to something okay great if you can't then don't progress past that don't go now do a barbell back squat if you can't do it correctly when you had assistance but let's assume most people can do that okay great now you can move on to the next step which is can you do it well without assistance so this would be body weight only check cool we're good there okay now you can go ahead and move on can you do it well with an added Ecentric load so in this particular case if I if we're learning to squat we can do it well when I hold on to something that's great okay now I can do it well with just my body weight now if I put a little bit a weight on whether it's a kettle bell in the front like a goblet squad or dumbbells to the side or whatever you want to do can I lower it and go all the way down and stay in perfect position if you can do that great you're allowed to go to the next step which is can you hold it isometrically so can you go all the way down and then hold that bottom position what you don't want to do is start adding load or speed or fatigue if you're going down to the bottom position of the movement and you're out of control we really want to avoid this so I want you to show me you can go down and you can lower the weight under control you can hold it in that position under control if we're clear there now we can add the concentric portion right you can now go ahead you can lower it you can hold that position of most danger and now you can move up at whatever speed we want we are all good there once you can show me those things you can add the last two steps which are now speed if you choose to and the last one which is fatigue right I would really discourage people from doing exercises to fatigue especially with a moderate or high load unless you can promise me you can do these first six steps if you can you can basically go Hog Wild with your training and your chances of injury are are very low again both acute injury as well as long-term injury which is just sort of like my joints ache and all of a sudden my shoulder hurts and you know things like that um that's really what I'm looking for and once you're clear there you can train pretty hard I really like this because recently I was showing somebody how to use a in this case it was a hack squat machine I notic that they were very timid of getting uh into a deep squat position and they cited a previous knee injury which is long since healed right um but even with proper foot placement and everything you just tell they they were getting uh Ginger about it as they they approach that bottom position uh but over time with pauses at the bottom they become very comfortable and now actually are going you know well below 90 degrees angle between uh you know uh femur and lower like so it was clear that it wasn't a something range of motion limited or it was just it was a mental thing but a logical one for them now after what you just said I think a better strategy uh that I could have used would have been to have them get into that position just no weight at all maybe nothing on the sled and then slowly working up from there as opposed to um doing what uh we did in our case which was to uh just convince them that they were much stronger than they they thought they were it we eventually got there but I'm realizing that there was far too much uh mental anguish involved in that process yeah this whole progression by the way this can all happen in one session if you can check the boxes like in that example you may have been fine to jump there it may have just been a hey you're fine here get get through it oh okay this whole progression might take two years I mean this really depends on your background if you actual have injury history your comfort your confidence like all these things so you don't need to worry about rushing through that progression you don't even need to get all the way to the end if you don't want especially with you know speed and things like that but again it can't happen it doesn't have to be like well it's a month of this a month like but no if they feel great and you can go through one to seven in five minutes then you're good to go number six number six now is just order so you know how many days per week you're going to work out you know how long they're going to take you've selected all the exercises you need to get done you've balance that across the week now you just need to put them in order and the easy answer here is generally do what's most important first in the workout there is some minor interference effect or some other things there but re the reality of it is if you do the priority first you're probably going to be okay so whether this priority is a muscle group so in the example you want to make sure your glutes get trained maybe do it first if you're trying to maximize your back squat you may not want to do a bunch of glued exercises to fatigue first but that's not the priority we picked we picked a different one which is buckets a b and c okay great by doing it first you told me the priority was to make sure I do something for my glutes and then I would also like to get my back squat a little bit stronger or whatever okay fine the same thing could be be done for your endurance training you could do your endurance training before your lifting if you understand that that means you might be compromising your lifting quality of the workout a little bit but you might be fine with that if you say the endurance work is more important right now amazing you don't know the answer to that though if you hadn't gone through steps one through four and that's why those things are critical so it makes what we call chaos management which is things happen in the moment I don't know what to do what should I choose that decision becom really clear because you can always go back to the beginning and go my priority was this then therefore that's my choice today so it provides a very simple set of instructions for when the workout gets cut short when your workout has to be in a hotel and any number of things that pop up in real life whether again you're an athlete or a non-athlete either way life will get in the way at some point so you need to have rules and a system that says when this happens I go right back to this and that's my choice done I'm moving on no decision to make here it's already been determined a week ago five weeks ago we're off and rolling so the order again it's pretty simple just put the one that is most important first now I know you like to do legs on Monday that's great I actually love that too I I do the same thing generally because to me that's almost always the most important thing if I miss a bicep workout I'm probably fine but I really don't like missing the big movement pattern so I make sure that those happen on a day that tend to be more stable for me Mondays are generally pretty stable things get chaotic as the week moves along for me others might be the opposite right others might want to go hey I'm actually going to keep Monday as my flexible day or off day because I like to get a lot of my work done get that cleared so I can have okay sure like work it around you some people love to train on Saturdays because it's their most free some people hate it sure you tell me what is the biggest priority and when are you the most fresh Monday Tuesday it doesn't matter depends on your work schedule maybe you work the weekends I don't know right you decide what day of the week are you generally the most consistent the most consistent schedule and the most consistent energy and do the thing that is most important on that day it doesn't matter Monday Tuesday day one day three um we were sort of talking about this earlier but you actually don't even have to do a week schedule our brains tend to like to go year month week but a lot of folks will even just run this thing in terms of like a seven n-day schedule in fact we ran a 9-day training schedule for one of my major league baseball players and he's eight or so years into his career and he's hitting alltime PRS in velocity and he's very very good and it was a nday training cycle and we ran that for the entire um season so it doesn't have to be a 7-Day split but it tends to work for a lot of people because most people have a fairly consistent schedule across the seven days so pick the thing that is most important do it first and do it on the day of the week that is most consistent for you in terms of schedule and energy I really like what you're describing I should just say that one of the reasons I put legs on Monday is because I tend to get enough sleep on the weekends I generally get enough sleep during the middle of the week but oftentimes things will come up I can be pretty sure however that I've quote unquote caught up on my sleep on the weekends this notion of catching up on sleep is a little dicey scientifically but tend to be pretty rested by Monday morning right and actually my week begins on Sunday and Sundays are when I get my long form cardio so those two are really non-negotiable and the reason that long form cardio is on Sunday is that it can take many different forms it can take a hike with a a weighted vest it can take a the form of a jog it can be done with other people it can be family time it can be time with friends and so on and that's pretty hard to do during the middle of the week or pretty hard to ensure at least for me I also find that by bookending the week with some non-negotiable days of training on Sunday Monday then if the week gets busy Tuesday Wednesday or even sometimes Thursday with travel and things like that one can sort of catch up toward the weekend it's not ideal I mean ideally it's spaced out but really this isn't about what I do this is really just to underscore the principle you described which is I have a very clear sense now over you know three decades or so of training and three decades or so of uh being involved in academics and Science and work of when I tend to be most rested when I tend to have some flexibility in my SK schedule and also when I'm trying to combine Fitness with some of my you know social engagements which is actually quite fun I one thing I noted is that um the four boxes that you mentioned before work relationships Fitness and Recovery some of them do have some crossover they all do you know hike with family or friends is both relationship and fitness and so on uh but I love the principle um because anything that can add consistency as you pointed out is going to greatly increase the probability of reaching one's goal that's sort of an obvious one but in an earlier episode you also said something that I wrote down and is really still ringing in my mind especially now which is that consistency always beats intensity correct yeah absolutely we used to do a thing um when I was training NFL players for the combine many years ago where Saturdays were supposed to be the day they came in and we did the most regeneration so this is when they get body work done and we do h cold contrast and sort of all these things and our attendance was like 1% nobody showed up right for a massage nobody showed up wow seems right but remember I love a good massage of course but remember you're 18 years old you're likely to be getting millions of dollars handed to you in the next few weeks or months and he's not referring to me by the way I'm actually quite a bit older than 18 uh and I'm not getting handed millions of dollars each week right so I would think that but those folks like they recover super fast they've never really had that and also like Friday night kind of enticing and so nothing was there and the strategy then was what if we instead of having a important hard Training Day on Saturday we transition and it is only things they want to do so we basically identified what are the things in training you love the most and let's do those Saturdays and it turns out for those folks no surprise here it was what we call the gun show so they would come into the gym and we would literally do nothing but biceps and triceps they'd just get a pump and then the deal was though you come in and literally what come in is we would pick three guys say you you and you you pick your favorite bicep exercise you pick your favorite one you pick your favorite one you three over there you pick your favorite tricep tricep tricep and we just run a big circuit like just just like how many reps I don't know I don't care how many I don't even care just like pump away like I don't even care right we chose small muscle groups not really going to interfere with much we're training them for the NFL combine which is like it's not a it's legs performance basically right so it's like if they smash their biceps and triceps on a Saturday it's not going to influence what we did on on Monday so recovery wasn't an issue once we finish the gun show though now you have to go do your regen stuff so if you need Ciro work you need Physical Therapy whatever you're going to do so we would get them in the building with the low hanging fruit and then we would actually get them to do their work you can do the same thing and I honestly do the same thing I tend to do either um if I'm going to do an upper lower split I'm going to do that stuff either Friday night or Saturday because it's very difficult for me to do a hard long workout Friday night right or even Friday morning for that matter the same thing Saturday I wake up and it's now it's like it's family mode it's kid things I want to do stuff I want man but I can usually convince myself to be like all right just go in there go 20 minutes and get your upper body stuff done all right I can I can walk myself into that mentally it's harder to walk yourself into your five sets of five deadlift it's sort of just like wo I can't get that of me right now my high intensity intervals the max I don't have that right now so I'll either go for my long steady state stuff which is like I'm gonna I'm going on the bike I'm riding down to the beach we're coming back nasal only I can get myself to go for a bike ride like that whatever so I picked the thing that I I'm likely to do on the days where I'm probably going to be my weakest quote unquote not physically but motivation wise um I for for a long time I try to like it just got stuck in a way where my harder stuff was Friday nights and I'm just like why why am I doing this I was having like a 50% success rate just like we were having like a no perent success rate with the NFL guys on Saturday so you have to be a little bit tough you have to grind sometimes you have to you know get some motivation and go after it but you also have to be like well this is just stupid planning right like why put yourself in a position where you're just failing over and over and over when I could move it and go look those sessions are going to be things that are easier they don't require as much Gusto to get up and get them done I get those things done 90% of the time because the worst case I can be like all right we're going to go do a family thing give me 20 minutes I'm just going to run up there and smash upper body and you don't need I need a 20- minute warmup it's like I can just kind of jump into those things if I had to if I feel great then I can still go do something else I could do more I could do a longer session but you you're you're sort of immune to any situation so um I would book in those I guess is what I'm saying what's the day you're going to have the best day and what's the day you generally have the worst and and put the programs around those situations yeah I love the idea of identifying the friction points the high friction and low friction days friction meaning anything that impedes you from training consistently or well and there are so many factors that ratchet into that sleep other social engagements work you know Friday night I also find it tough uh to do any kind of training I do uh cardiovascular training I do interval type training um on Fridays typically but there's a lot of uh cumulative fatigue and stress that happens across the week and usually for a long time gosh more than a decade now I've been telling myself that Saturday is the day that I try to uh reduce my cortisol as much as possible for the week and then Sunday is the day that I enjoy that low qu disol State and that that actually what opened up into the long slow run I like like to think of myself as a bit of a mule during those long runs I actually have a shirt that has a sloth on it that I wear to remind myself to go slowly on those runs not that I ever run that fast but so the whole mindset around it is to be a bit of a of a mule just kind of moving through it and the fatigue factor is more one of um you know at first is just a little bit of boredom but then I've noticed there's a whole different set of mental Scapes that open up under different training types and this is maybe something we get into a little bit in a future episode or discussion you when you train really intensely for short periods of time one way your mind goes into a particular State when you do long duration training you're thinking and and indeed even the way it affects sleep patterns is also very different I think one of the great futures for neuroscience and exercise science in collaboration is to identify how different patterns of physical movement relate to different patterns of thinking and vice versa anyway something maybe to just uh earmark for a future conversation but there's clearly a relationship there yeah yeah well when we certainly know of a pretty clear relationship between uh even what we would classify as zone five exercise and deep sleep so zone five again being uh you're breathing a lot through your mouth because you have to in order to bring in enough oxygen to offset the acidity created by the the carbons exactly yeah this is the high heart rate so so um I mean if you're going to look at it and hit a number um looking for something like 30 plus minutes a week being in uh the top 10% of your heart rate that impacts deep sleep is going to positively Impact deep sleep as long as it's done very far away from deep sleep so you don't want to do that at night so you want in terms of time um so if you hit those numbers earlier in the day often times that will enhance deep sleep yeah I was looking at some papers recently and the number that that um kind of emerged from those papers was that unless it's low intensity exercise trying to exercise about six hours or more away from your sleep time would be ideal now that said for those of you that have to hit the gym or go for a run in the evening and then are trying to fall asleep four to six hours later I wouldn't want that statement to impede your uh regular um your regular exercising yeah there's there's an easy trick to that just finish it with down regulation breathing so that's sort of one of our things that if you because that is a real istic situation right finish work at five or even six and then by the time you're you're training or running or whatever you want to call it it's a 7:38 you're home at 9: you're eating and then every's like you can't eat two hours before bed pretty soon you run into a number of different Collision points that make you wonder whether or not you're doing everything wrong or if it's really worth training at all and I would argue it's better to train than not to train but provided that you can still get to sleep 100% so you have to walk a little bit of a game we run this issue with the NBA players right you're playing games at 6 o00 at night at start Major League Baseball is a 705 710 pitch right and also by the way we're changing time zones every 5 days right UFC fighters and uh such we're usually training twice a day there is no option to train or I mean we are training twice a day always so we have to come up with strategies for that and there's other like non-a the scenarios of course where it's like there is no other option here cool so what we do is a couple of things number one that further away you can make it from sleep the better if possible we do need to train though around the same time you're going to be playing like that has to happen so the harder and longer we go in the training session the harder and longer we go in our down regulation post exercise and that is in my estimation the number one lever you can pull that can help right now if it really does start crushing sleep you're going to have to make a critical decision there um in general it's not a good reason to not exercise but maybe maybe you restricted to to only a couple of days a week you go all the way up in intensity and the rest of the days maybe 70% he stands is kind of a working Zone awesome um maybe it's a longer down regulation maybe there's other strategies you can do but yeah you want to be careful of uh and we've had this situation a number of times where it's sort of just like sleep complaints sleep complaints sleep complaints we run full sleep studies on them in their house we do the whole thing with absolute rest we come in we do the whole thing eye tracking biom markers the whole thing and it's like oh you just need to stop doing intervals at 8:00 p.m. right and I would add to that another incentive for being able to train with or without caffeine is that it's very clear that even if you can fall asleep after ingesting caffeine with the preceding hours that caffeine consumed in the gosh even you know 12 but really you know 8 to 10 hours four hours prior to bedtime really disrupts the architecture of sleep so if you critically rely on caffeine in order to train whatever your training might be and you know that sleep is important for Recovery well then it's pretty obvious where I'm going with this so having that flexibility is vitally important yeah you've probably also covered this but um you can actually measure that directly so by eye tracking patterns you can actually identify the effects that caffeine has on sleep independent of a sleep time or not right there are never positive effects correct uh that said I am a proponent of caffeine early in the day um and caffeine does have a a lot of um well it's uh anti-neurodegenerative as long as you're not getting anxiety it's Pro performance both mental and physical performance but of course if you do not need caffeine if you're one of these mutants that do not need caffeine in order to go about your daily living uh with focus and intensity then by all means uh don't start taking caffeine I'm not the hugest fan I am scientifically 100% on board personally it does I don't do well on it well you seem to ride a little bit more what we would call you know sympathetic tone you know um kind of shifted towards more alert I I tend to be uh naturally a bit more like my Bulldog costell was a little bit more on the Mellow sleepy side and caffeine just puts me right at that alert but calm um place and I I can get away with drinking it a a I wouldn't say ridiculous but a fair amount of caffeine and remain there but I do restrict it until the time right up about 2 p.m at the latest is really when I try and drink caffeine number seven great so number seven and eight are pretty simple this is now choose the intensity and the volume so we've discussed those at length in the previous episodes uh we probably don't have the time to go back over all those details so remember the adaptation you're training for and pick the appropriate rep range total amount of sets as well as the intensity to then get the corresponding adaptation right all you have to do is Select those things in terms of progression through a week uh the rule of thumb we say for intensity is something around 3% per week all right for volume it will depend on what you're doing a little bit but anytime you cross more than 10% per week you're going to start running into problems so I like 5% better it doesn't need to be as low as three you can jump up much more than that 5 to 7% is better so if you are doing uh say running because because the number numbers make it easy and you're doing 10 miles per week total and if you were to go up to 11 miles the next week you great you're right around 10% but what you wouldn't want to do is say I'm running 10 miles this week and I did maybe four Monday three Wednesday three Friday so four three and three you got your 10 then you wouldn't want to add a mile every day so Monday instead of doing four I did five Wednesday instead of doing three I did four Friday instead of doing three I did four what you actually did is you went from 10 to 13 which is a much higher percent jump than the 10% prescribed so the same thing would be true for lifting weights the same thing is actually true for calories and trying to add them Etc so um the body tends to not handle those things as well uh jumping more than 10% per week so keeping with this idea of increasing Progressive overload being 10% more over some period of time am I correct in assuming that I want to identify one maybe two meaningful variables and progressing that or those variables so Progressive overload can come in the form of any of the modifiable variables so you could increase the complexity of the movement you could increase the intensity or the load you can increase the volume by either more sets more reps or more total exercises in a day what about time under attenion you could also manipulate how the the tempo of each repetition you could also manipulate how many times per day you train so you can manipulate frequency you can also manipulate rest intervals so you can progressively load any of these things increase intensity uh run a little bit faster complete the same amount of work slightly faster um put 5% more on the barbell or the load or the handle or whatever you're going to do that's a simple way if you want to think about volume in the case of endurance work is simple mileage time whatever in the case of lifting all you have to do is take the amount of repetitions you're doing per set multiply it by the sets add that all up so if you're doing three sets of 10 that's 30 repetitions if you did three exercises you just did 90 repetitions put that number down for Monday put that number down for Wednesday put that number down for Friday add that total up so say you did 90 90 90 you would look and say my total number of repetitions this week is 270 if I want to go up 5% then I need need to go up another 15 or so total repetitions great that's all we have to do that's the increase you may keep the load exactly the same keep the exercises same chain nothing else but you want to add 15 more total Reps for your week and you may choose to do that by adding one more repetition per set close enough so last week I did three sets of 10 this week I'm going to three sets of 11 it can be as simple as that again it can be complex I walked you through it can be any of the modifi variables but the progression I just laid out is fairly simple and it's honestly the one I recommend for most people just because it will avoid confusion and it will avoid people taking massive leaps and volume so the typical strategy I would recommend here is increasing load or intensity or a little bit of a combination slowly for about six or so weeks and then taking what we generally call A D Lo so back down to maybe 70% whatever that number is you've been doing so you did three sets of 10 and you worked yourself all the way up to three sets of 15 back that down and maybe we'll do two sets of eight for the week and then we'll come back the following week and go back and do the highest we've done now all of a sudden we're going to do four sets of 12 or something like that so if you get these little de loads every depending on what you're doing four to eight weeks or so you should be in a spot where you can continually progress for a very long time without either burning out or overloading and and over stressing an injury pattern so the simple way pick intensity or volume and just go up slightly every week for a short span of time generally around six weeks and then you come back and and change your strategy if You' like because you mentioned sets and repetitions here just wanted to remind folks that in the episode that we did on strength and hypertrophy and that also included speed there was a description of a terrific program for strength which is the 3x5 program or 325 program as it's called which is to select three to five exercises performed for three to five repetitions three to five times per week with three to five minutes rest in between those exercises for three to five sets and if I recall correctly the protocol for generating hypertrophy muscle growth is to perform a minimum of 10 and probably more like 15 to 20 sets per muscle group per week and that can be done in a single session per muscle per week so one could train for instance uh quadriceps one day per week as long as you're getting that volume of sets per week or it could be divided up across two or three different sessions for that individual muscle group of course people are going to Target all their major muscle groups and hopefully some of the minor muscle groups as well and as I recall the number of repetitions that can generate hypertrophy is quite broad anywhere from six repetitions all the way up to 30 repetitions but by the end of the set it should be to failure or close to failure with good form is that correct yeah and we would say close to failure uh is probably most appropriate you can actually reach failure maybe on a few of the sets maybe the end and probably best to choose that with the exercises that are uh safer not that any exercise is particularly unsafe if you do it appropriately but you may not want to go to true failure on every set for the more complex larger um riskier exercises so uh HED pretty close to failure but not all the way and I realize I forgot to mention rest intervals between sets it follows that if a large range of repetitions are performed that a large range of rest intervals are allowed meaning that there could be rest intervals between sets of as low as 30 seconds between sets or as high as two or three minutes depending on the loads that one is using and that of course will scale with the number of repetitions excellent in fact that sort of leads me into uh step number nine of designing your own training program which is you've decided our goal we've worked our calendar out we figured out how many days per week and how long we're going to work out in those sessions we then went and selected our exercises we balanced them across the movement patterns and the muscle groups that we need so we're not causing excessive stress on the same exact joint or muscle group over time we then ordered our exercises based on priority all right because of that we've identified our goal we went back and we selected the volume which is the repetitions per set the total amount of sets and the load perent that matched the goal that we wanted to get or the adaptation now all we have to do is fill in the rest intervals which reflect back again the goal so generally higher rest intervals which means time that you rest between your sets higher somewhere to between 2 to 5 minutes for things like speed power and strength perhaps a little bit lower although as you mentioned it could also stay high for hypertrophy and then for endurance you follow the rest interval that reflects the type of endurance training that you'd like to get that's walked us through 1 through nine we're almost done we've put together a pretty nice little protocol it should be well-rounded it should be effective we've also talked about how to progress it from week to week keeping it within again four to six weeks maybe up to eight before we then take a back off the very last thing we have to do to make sure this training program is customized to you your goal and your situation which is then going to enhance your likelihood of adherence and consistency as well as increase the likelihood of Effectiveness is we just have to do a little bit of what we call chaos management which just take a quick moment to think through this program looks great but if I had to nitpick it where are the possible chances of failure and you just want to sort of think about where are where would I predict things would go wrong and if you anything pops out to you try to come up with your solution at the beginning and this could be a number of things so maybe you've picked an exercise and you realize man I really actually don't like that exercise or maybe you look at the schedule now that it's laid out in front of you you look at your work schedule and you're like uh maybe that's a bit of GP I don't know could be any number of things but it is a useful exercise to just think through everything realistically I typically just like it's the adage I teach my graduate students um before we hit submit we're going to sleep so it's there it's ready we're going to take 12 hours we're going to wake up the next day and look at it again and go are we sure we're good here yep make adjustments if you need if not if you feel confident then hit send and cross your fingers yeah we referring to submitting the manuscript uh it's interesting you say that I have a uh statement that I always make to people in my lab they hit submit and I always say that you realize you're going to wake up tomorrow morning there's going to be an email in your inbox that something was formatted incorrectly and you're going to spend tomorrow reformatting and submitting again so I've also learned that there that every project is actually two projects I'm trying to not die over here and interrupt you true I've done this enough times you know I've done this you know many dozens of times and then there's also another truism of of science which is that you know there's the project there's a scientific question and then the paper is yet another project and I actually think this is an analogy that carries over to other other domains of life I think that anytime we take on something if we want to write a book or we want to get a degree or we want to a fitness program I think it's worth thinking about those decisions as actually two taking on two major things because one is the planning and organization around that thing and the other is the actual performance of the thing and so I say because here what you just described this you know 10 steps to to consider in designing a program I think some people who are real list makers and love um the Precision and the thoroughness and I'm one of these people thinking this is great I just want to do check off each one of these things on the list and figure out the ideal program for me for a given period of time Etc and then other folks might be thinking well that's a lot that's just a lot to do but what I know with certainty is that performing those sorts of let's just call them what they are those tasks of of figuring out what's what where the Defenders are Etc without question makes everything go so much more smoothly once you are into the actual uh performance the action of doing the exercise program or the book or the podcast or whatever it is that you happen to do so I'm I'm grateful that you uh brought up uh both the things that act as conduits for getting good work done and this notion of Defense venders and um and bottlenecks because if we don't consider those I would argue that it's a very low probability that anyone will succeed but when one does consider those even just a few of them I think the probability of success goes way way up immediately that's actually a very good point uh that is a lot of work for a lot of people and I know when I'm consuming information it is helpful to hear structure and systems and design it's also helpful to hear actual real life examples so maybe the next thing we can do here is I can just walk you through an entire setup and a and a program um considering folks that in bucket a b and c and maybe I'll I'll save uh a little bit of the explanation and we'll eliminate maybe some background and I'll just walk you through what this could look like all right so I created a program which should run about a year and the idea here is that this could be an evergreen system so one could check off all the boxes that we've talked about so in general we want to have three primary goals with exercise we want to look a certain way whatever that means to you we want to be able to perform a certain way whether that's for life goals like hiking and energy or sport goals or whatever and then we want to be able to do that across our lifespan okay so a program that gives you all the goals we talked about and a program that covers that Health combine that we referred to way back in some of our earlier discussions which as a little bit of a recap is what are the physical fitness parameters that we know are critical to maintaining both lifespan and wellness span and as a bit of a reminder those are things like your grip strength your leg strength your total amount of muscle mass your actual speed and power so that you can catch yourself from a fall your V2 Max and your physical fitness so I want a program that does a little bit of all that that's similar actually and we're kind of Crossing barriers between our three buckets so I need to be able to control my fat I need to be able to have enough muscle that muscle needs to have enough function and I need to be able to maintain range of motion so that I don't lose flexibility and get hurt and then I need to have a good V2 Max as well as to be able to sustain energy over time so that was the goal of my progress now a couple of other things that we haven't chattered about which are very important you have mentioned I think on a previous podcast about the importance of seeing light is this something you've covered at one point I joke that I'll be uh going into the grave and they'll be shoveling dirt onto me and I'll be telling people what I'll tell you again now which is to get 5 to 30 minutes of sunlight viewing as early in the day as possible uh ideally from sunlight that's why it's called sunlight or from Bright Lights of another kind if you cannot get sunlight and also get that in the evening and then avoid Bright Lights between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. unless you do shift work in which case check out our episode on shift work amazing so we've got a little bit of a juxed position where people are like I need to work out and do all this training but then I'm also supposed to be outside okay how do I blend those two things into my training program cool so I checked that box as well I built that in the last thing here is we've talked about structured exercise and just in this episode we've really opened up and do non-structured exercise hiking Sports things like that well one thing that is is incredibly clear and uh my colleague and friend Tommy wood at the University of Washington published a fantastic paper very recently on the importance of proprioception in maintaining and staving off late onset dementia and Parkinson's maybe just remind people what propri exception is yeah absolutely so there's structured exercise and that's very important but then there's also things like balance and coordination and propri reception meaning you're adjusting to stimuli coming in from the outside world so this stimuli could be sound could be light could be smell or in the physical case the body it is where you are at in space so I'm feeling like I'm falling to the left therefore I need to correct and move back to the right so you don't get this with doing things like a hack squat on a machine you get this typically from being outside so now you're smelling and seeing things and you're also not Landing with your foot in the exact same position on an even platform we get from things like sport now I'm not only exercising but I'm reacting to the outside world the ball is going over here my opponent's going over there so it's very important in my opinion to have at least one session per week of exercise in which you are doing something that challenges proprioception right so how do I fold all of these best practices into one training program that's not 200 hours a week seven days a week that's what I've laid out to you make sense make sense cool let me walk you through it and then uh maybe we'll come back into each individual category and you can ask questions about them so the way that I think is best is to have a goal and have that goal be around 8 to 10 weeks long like we've been talking about so what I gave you is let's start off with quarter number one of the year so perhaps January through March or so and it doesn't have to be this one but just as an example you decide your goal is is going to be to put some muscle mass on so we're going to prioritize adding muscle okay now within that you're going to be bulking up adding some muscle but we're also going to be sleeping more we know we need extra recovery in this session and we need to go up in calories now this happens to work nice for a couple of reasons but in that protocol maybe we're going to do seven days or seven sessions a week of physical activity doesn't means seven days but maybe those sessions are something like I will do one indoor sport uh this could be basketball could be any number of things right so I got my sport ticked off and it's indoors why I'm I'm January to March the weather's probably not great for most of the world so I'm not going to do as much outside activity I'm going to do weights maybe three or four times a week and then maybe two days a week I'll go for a long walk okay again we'll come back and I'll explain to you why I made all these individual choices so you're going to run that for the first quarter at the end of this quarter you're going to take a D Lo week now this could be fully off maybe this is when you schedule vacation maybe this is backing off maybe you just keep your walks in and you spend the extra time on your family or work or whatever else we need to do so we've bulked up a little bit we spent 12 weeks adding some mass now we're going to transition into Corridor two which is where we start to actually get lean this is actually a pretty standard uh bodybuilding template which is you put on some Mass first and then you get lean after that so now we're going to get lean from April to June we're going to bring calories down a little bit so now we're actually going to play in a hypocaloric state somewhat the days tend to get longer so we're going to have more time to spend in the Sun so we're going to shift a little bit from an indoor sport activity like the example I said earlier was basketball to maybe stand up padle boarding or some other thing where you're actually getting your sport done you're reacting you're using Pro reception but now you're getting that sun in there as well because you have a greater opportunity to actually do so and the weather probably is going to cooperate with you more often than it would in say February you're then maybe going to pick a fitness or an exercise class um you know any number of of routines where you're with multiple people and then two days a week in addition to that you're going to maybe lift some weights all right so now we've added some muscle now we've got lean and all of a sudden we're actually looking pretty good for the summertime hm interesting right quarter 3 July to September will transition and we'll try to get into great cardiovascular shape so we'll transition more into some high intensity interval type of stuff more frequently um we're going to maybe stay at maintenance calories now we spent a little bit of time hyper then we went hypo and now we're going to go back to maintenance and and keep along we're going to continue to choose some outdoor sports but maybe you change it up maybe you keep the same one maybe maybe now we switch it out into golf or now we pick a tile ball or we play basketball but now we just do it outside any number of things you can do right um so maybe even we do a couple change it up you do that twice a week you're spending more time in the sun now um you're looking outside and you're seeing this great weather and you're not cooped up in a gym but you're getting your physical fitness in that's also going to be aiding in your high intensity or your interval your conditioning because you're doing more stuff like that rather than lifting in a gym and then maybe you're actually going to do some track workouts maybe we'll do this on a bike or we'll do some Sprints outside any number of things and then we'll do that maybe twice a week and then we'll still lift uh weights twice a week in our gym the last quarter then is going to be October to December and we're going to transition there into more pure cardiovascular fitness okay because we're doing that we're going to be working harder and remember cardiovascular training is generally expelling much more calories than lifting so we're going to actually go up in calories we're going to return to that and that works out kind of well because I don't know if you know or not but people tend to eat a little more calories from the months of say November through December yeah holidays and uh at least in northern hemisphere colder temperatures totally maybe even we play with two workouts a day here we're trying to get really in shape we're trying to improve improve our conditioning and our endurance in multiple areas we're going to actually transition back into an indoor sport so maybe we're going to do some kickboxing or a Jiu-Jitsu class or something like that we're going to maybe hit the cardio machine once or twice now we're hopping on a stair Master a versa climber more maybe getting an assault bitee going something like that maybe hit some machines and do our lifting there maybe we had spent the rest of the earlier part of the year on barbells and dumbbells we'll transition to some machines and then we'll still try to get outside and walk twice a week okay and we that gets us our outside activity but it's not necessarily a structured program so youy we got 15 minutes where the weather's breaking a little bit so let's walk get outside and get a walk in all right so that's the overall structure of everything I would like to actually go back to the beginning now and kind of walk through each one of these things in detail and explain why I chose certain things I I've kind of given some hints already but I think it'd be helpful to walk back to the beginning and start there great I love the overall structure I have just a couple of questions the idea of training mostly for hypertrophy January through March Mar m makes sense followed by a period from April through June focusing primarily on fat loss and then from July to September speed and interval type work and then October to December you put to emphasize endurance type training I thought for a moment that when we got to October December you are going to emphasize strength and I'm wondering whether or not there's any incentive for training for strength October December so that when one arrives at the hypertrophy training January through March we're that much stronger uh the idea being then there's more muscle to hold on to as one then tries to lose fat from April through June and then July through September is the speed work or is July through September the speed SL power phase of the program the July through September would be more like your higher heart rate learning to get all the way up maximum exertion and then recovering and October to December is long form endurance moderate to long form right so it's closer to that aerobic capacity stuff it is closer to longer duration and moving through that Spectrum um you are astute in pointing out that I didn't have pure strength really in there you certainly could fold it in um but quite quite literally if you spent uh 3 months bulking up in January to March that's going to bring some strength along the way so you should be fine there but you absolutely could alter any of these variables um if you wanted to emphasize something more than another one so say you actually felt like you ran through the fitness testing and you identified actually your endurance is pretty good but you're struggling maybe with a little bit of strength and maybe a little bit of lower muscle mass you could substitute quarter three or quarter four and say one of those quarters will be strength and then I'll do all of my conditioning in another quarter and what you've really done is the program progaming is still fairly simple you've just altered the priorities a little bit and therefore you've altered the adaptation across the year and why this is really important this template is meant to be something you can just run back year after year after year and you make a subtle change like that and now over the course of five 10 20 years you're going to be in a fantastic spot at the end so you can make easy adjustments along the way as priorities pop up as goals pop up but you're going to be in a position where everything is there's nothing that's going to be lagging behind you'll be in a good spot most of your bases are covered to be pretty lean have a good amount of muscle and to be in great shape two other questions one just a quick question for sake of uh generating propri acceptive feedback uh during the endurance phase is trail running a a good a good option absolutely great um thinking back to the Days running cross country it's October to December your trail running totally training for endurance okay the ground is not super solid which is even better in this case right so you're making more choices and trying to not fall on your face absolutely and then you mentioned bulking up and I just wanted to highlight that um there are some folks myself included while I'd like to add a little bit of muscle here or there I'm not interested in overeating to the point where I lay down a lot of body fat stores along with then I think a lot of people out there are not necessarily interested in quote unquote bulking up I also uh my understanding of the the literature and tell me if I'm wrong is that well there does need to be some sort of caloric Surplus MH above what is required to maintain body weight in order to build muscle that many people who try and quote unquote bulk up basically just end up expanding the size of their their cheeks and face um along with their limbs and torso uh you know I'm not trying to poke fun at them but the idea of deliberately overeating to the point where a lot of body fat stores come along I would imagine that would just make the April through June phase that much harder correct and I'm not sure it's ever been studied directly but I can't imagine it's all that he excuse me all that healthy to bring along a lot of adapost tissue um in one's pursuit of of hypertrophy you're absolutely correct uh we have not gotten into the nutritional details there but yeah thank you good clarification point a couple of things you're not going to be doing this very long it's 12 weeks right we're not going to be six or mon seen eat number two just since we're here to clarify the literature is ongoing in this area and there's actually a handful of studies that I I know are coming soon but in general when I say hypercaloric here I'm referring to an increasing caloric intake above Baseline by something like 10 to 15% so if you normally eat 2500 calories throughout the day you might add another 250 to 400 I'm not doubling calories I don't want you to be stuffing your face hating food feeling awful all day and then putting on half of your weight is fat and half of your weight is as muscle it is just technically hyper chloric because you're eating more which is an absolute requirement for most people to add muscle right um some folks who have a high percentage of body fat and a low level of Fitness training can actually get away with just being either isocaloric technically or even a little bit lower and still adding some muscle while losing some fat but for most folks that's going to be challenging so you're going to want to be in a hypercaloric state another reason I put it in here is because remember people tend to make these extra calorie choices during this part of the Year anyways and so you're sort of playing into life is why I chose that right it's like hey you can't restrict calories all the time it's really really hard so maybe if we can put it calorie restriction during the phases of the year that's a little bit easier and give you the freedom to have a little bit more calories during the phase of the year when you're probably going to want to do that anyways just make sure you're doing a style of training that supports that so you're going to be trying to add muscle when you know you're going to be adding more calories we're going to be trying to really push the pace on our conditioning when we know we're going to be eating more calories anyways and so that is actually in fact exactly why I chose those goals for those times of the year is because we're we're now playing into life a little bit more but we again certainly do not want to be eating to an excess where where it's um causing some of the problems you mention we just need to be eating a little bit more the last Point here is the next phase April to June we know we're going hypochloric so it's always kind of nice to go yep we're going to go in a little bit of a calorie deficit here but it's really just these few months and it's okay because I spent the last six months where I wasn't restricting that much and then one actually where I got to eat a little bit more and now cool not hard for me to convince somebody that to go we're going to bring the calories down right now in a month and two months and it's this going to be this 12 or 16 week phase or whatever you end up being in there so those were some of the rationale uh that I was thinking of when I decided to do that but thank you that's a very important point in terms of the hyper choric it's it it's not the dirty bulk it's it's not the excess that a lot of folks will do and and uh just a final point for folks uh in the southern hemisphere Australians and South Americans we actually have a a large listenership in the southern hemisphere of course adjust accordingly even though the holiday months are still in you know November December they're of course holidays all your long many of the major holidays are around November December but it's summer down there um just adjust accordingly there's nothing wholly about trying to achieve certain adaptations at certain times of year it's more about trying to eliminate bottlenecks uh Defenders as you mentioned and it's really about the sequence so if we go back to that first quarter we're going to try to add some mass for the reasons I just described right um it's also tends to be pretty motivating you're going to start the year off you're going to want to train and get all excited because of your New Year's resolution and you're going to see results immediately we've talked about this in some of the previous episodes the nice part about hypertophy training is you see your muscles growing right now where the endurance stuff tends to have a little bit more of a delayed gratification so I'm going to give you a win early okay now we're also going to be sleeping more because we know and maybe we'll get into this in a future episode that sleep is absolutely critical to recovery and critical to Growing muscle mass so you're going to emphasize sleep more during this part of the Year also because the sun is very low it's harder to sleep for a lot of folks longer when the sun is out for longer especially if you don't have a perfect blackout curtain and so you're just like trying to play with the restrictions life gives you and optimize your scenario so the sun's probably not out very often and especially depending on where you live if you're anywhere like where I grew up in the Pacific Northwest it's going to be dark and gray and gloomy most of the day so it's not hard to convince you to go to sleep a little bit more often so we'll do that that's also again why I chose an indoor sport that activity you're going to not shoot yourself in the foot um being being in the gym when it's cold and crappy outside is is not that hard to convince yourself to do so you're going to be lifting your weights say four times a week and then again getting some outside time in the form of a walk so that you can do it in the middle of work if you have to or catching 20 minutes here or there whatever it needs to be um the chances of you missing that walk are little and you'll still get some outside time you can you've talked about the importance of getting sunlight in even if it is overcast so can still nail all those boxes uh and be in a pretty good spot at the end of that quarter okay so moving on to quarter two then April to June a lot of people want to look good during the summer months you're more likely to be outside you're more likely to have your shirt off because it's hot because you're either on vacation or going to the beach so let's play into that a little bit let's let people look a little bit better you know if that's what they determin to be looking better during the months when they're more likely to have that you're also more likely to have things like weddings uh over the summertime people don't get married often in the winter and so people want to look good for these events so let's play into what a lot of people already want and let's help you get leaner not a lot of holidays that involve eating during that phase and so you're not going to feel like you're missing out on a ton of life outside of maybe a few smaller holidays in that phase the days are getting longer and so we're going to choose to get in the sun more often we can start getting a tan better we can start getting ready for summer and so this is why we exchanged our Indoor Sport for an outdoor sport surfing hiking uh cycling outside whatever the thing is you want to do there's tons of them kiteboarding like I said skateboarding there you go you out and start skating a little bit uh whatever it needs to be so we'll do that once a week or so and then I actually threw in a fitness class here and there's a couple of reasons one now it's sort of nice to take the pressure of programming off it's also nice to if you've been lifting by yourself to get in there and lift with somebody else it's also nice to now have some social interaction uh the gameification the group the scoring stuff that happens in Fitness classes is very very powerful it tends to be somewhat fleeting so it won't last for a long time for some people others it does and so if you pepper this thing in and you know you're going to you're going to join this activity class even if it's not great and the program design isn't perfect it's fine for 10 weeks in fact you may may really really enjoy it and also again gives you just it gives you something new to think about music is on you're out of your house if you're lifting at your house you're in a different part of the gym the schedule's a little tighter so you can't just go work out whenever you want you got to sort of show up when the class is going and you probably find that you just love it you also get some social interaction right which is something that also very important that we haven't really discussed yet if you're out playing basketball by yourself or whatnot so this is just another thing I'm trying to fold in that still allows you to check off multiple boxes of things that are healthy for you you've had episodes on the importance of social connection interaction we talked about that in the quad breakdown of making sure you have relationship time and things like that so throwing in a fitness class and just doing honestly something quite different H is pretty fun but then still keeping two days a week where you're doing a traditional strength training thing so you have some quality control there lastly you can also then make sure you're hitting any specific movements or muscle groups that are very important to you so you don't get to control that in your Fitness class but now you can at least do the gym and make sure you hit that muscle group that that you have an interest in it so now we're we're feeling pretty good we're rolling into the summer we're pretty lean we're getting out in the sun a lot we're bringing calories down a little bit and we probably are feeling pretty happy we're also not burnt out we've done a lot of fun things uh and we've checked a lot of the boxes off for for long-term development we had a combination of specificity with exercise selection but we also folded in just a little bit of variation so we don't have to worry about overuse injury of doing the same machines the same lift months and months and months after months and slowly wearing down something if our technique isn't perfect okay so now we're going to go into our quarter 3 which is the summer months basically up here at least July to September we'll transition it's been a while since we've done some conditioning all right so we may have lost a little cardiorespiratory Fitness we may have you know not feeling great anymore maybe energy throughout the day stuff is starting to Lake down so we're going to get in shape we're going to push our heart rate high and we're going to bring the the calories back up the summertime um Fourth of July other holidays like this where eating is involved maybe you're going to sporting events and and things like that our sport choice is is you know often going to be uh Outdoors but in fact what you'll notice here is is I've ramped the sport Choice up to twice a week and in fact I would encourage you to do two different types of exercise and one of the primary reasons for that is to spend more time outside a challenge we often see with people with exercise is going man it's so nice outside I can't go sit in the gym for 45 minutes right I don't have that much free time and then Herman's over here telling me I need to get direct sunlight more and like how am I going to fit this in well do your exercise outside enjoy it um now if you live down here like us you take Sunshine for granted but a lot of people I know it's like it's only nice for two and a half months of the year get outside so let's push more of our Fitness training to outdoor activities um these Sports can be intense or not right it could be uh go out there and swim hard get in the ocean you're going to do open ocean swimming instead of swimming in the pool indoors or whatever the case may be so we're going to give ourselves more of a priority of being outside looking we've look pretty good we're a little tan and we're enjoying all the benefits of training outside and the lack of structure still we have structure but not so specific like the machines and the the weights give us maybe even now we're doing some track workouts so now we can do something like Sprint the straightaways walk the corners and we don't have to again do our conditioning on the same stair Master area machine or or whatever we're on so we're going to enjoy some stuff like that we're going to be athletic we're going to run we're going to move we haven't talked about that yet right everything has really been about sort of structured exercise well now we're going to do some Sprint work we're going to get out and see that which is a really important human quality that I think is important to not lose is actually ability to Sprint so we'll do that and then we'll still make sure we lift twice a week for the same reasons as I talked about in the previous phase so we make sure we have some quality control there we maintain some of the muscle that we built in the quarter before we don't lose too much strength there is very good literature to suggest strength maintenance can be done in as little as five sets per week for a very long time really up to eight plus weeks um if you do a little bit so you you're touching it enough to where you're not going to get really really weak but we what you wouldn't want to do is go 12 or 16 weeks where you lifted no weights and maybe you got in great shape but you're going to feel very weak after that so maybe that number could come down to one time a week if you really wanted it to but one to two days a week where you're lifting the big exercises the muscle groups and movements of interest and you're good to go then lastly we roll into our final quarter which is October to December and we're going to really get in great shape the sun is starting to come down we're rolling into the holidays weather's getting worse we may have other outdoor activities we want to do like in my case you're going on a hunting trip you have some travel conferences whatever the case may be and so we're going to an indoor Sport and I I love Combat Sports so I had the example I gave earlier was like Jiu-Jitsu or you know maybe you just transition your basketball to inside or your pickle ball comes inside or whatever it happens to be and you're still going to have that twice a week then maybe instead of the track workout outside you do that same workout indoors now back on some sort of machine or something like that our weights are actually now down to once a week because we're really pushing the pace on cardiovascular we're doing once a week to maintain it to not lose and get too far behind but we're really want to dring bring up our V2 Max we want to bring up our efficiency our cardiac output and everything like that and we're still going to now walk twice a week so that we get something outside and I talked about why again it's nice to have that flexibility of not having to train outside because now you got to warm up and do all those things you just get out and get get a walk in you still get the Outdoor Experience so we run that entire thing and then you just start back the next year ideally again at the end of every quarter you take a week off whether that is a true full week off which I'm fully in support of I mean friends we're only talking about four off weeks a year that's absolutely fine um or it could even be a slight Del Lo week if you wanted it to be so we shouldn't run into too many issues of overuse we have a lot of variety we get a lot of movement patterns in because we're mixing in sport with machines and dumbbells we're mixing in social interaction we're mixing in the sun we're mixing in enjoyment we're mixing in Fat Loss strength hypertrophy some cardiovascular endurance we're mixing in calories in high we're mixing a little bit of calories low and we're trying to hit as many these NOS as possible if you also wanted to cut each one of these a little bit short and repeat your Fitness testing at the end of every quarter you could I would probably recommend doing it at least once a year perhaps doing it maybe the third week of December or so so you run that testing that's your last week of trending then you get to go on your vacation break you come back the beginning of the year you've got new goals new targets and you go if you wanted to repeat it twice a year do the same sort of thing at the end of June it's fine I know I laid these out as quarters which is generally 12 weeks with one back off week but if you wanted to make it nine weeks in a testing week and then a back off or 10 weeks it's fine it's it's close enough so the last little thing I want to say is let's assume you're doing the 12 weeks and you're going to have a backoff week at the end of the 12 weeks I would actually still then recommend having at least one back off week halfway through so it would look like this five weeks hard where you're progressing you're going up up up up up every week you're either increasing volume intensity like we talked about few minutes ago then week six Delo go down to 70% volume intensity come back go hard for five more weeks and now week 12 is your true off week where you again take the whole thing off if you do that you now have four weeks a year where you're totally off you have four weeks a year where you're really backing down and you just have five week segments all year round where you're just going to push it hard for five weeks you're going to a break you're going to reset you're going to transition a little bit now as I started this conversation off with that there are many ways you could structure your training program throughout the year and hit those primary goals we talked about of looking fantastic feeling amazing and being able to do that your entire life all I can tell you though is I know this model works because we've done this a lot with our clients in our rapid Health optimization program and this spans everything from 25-year-old folks who are competing in the Boston Marathon to a lot lot of individuals who have never exercised before who maybe have done a little bit of exercise in fact it's quite literally all three of the buckets you laid out we've had clients in all of those areas both men and women young and old and we've had a tremendous amount of success transforming their lives using a very similar model to what I just laid out I find that overall structure to be immensely informative and I'll tell you why in the context of a number of examples with myself although that's the least important of them frankly um but examples of family members of mine and friends of mine who've undertaken consistent exercise training programs but that haven't varied the program so much and here again I think of the person who really loves to swim they have a low barrier of Entry to the pool or to the ocean they they love being in the water I am not one such person I like being in the water but I don't motivate to drive to the pool or to bike to the pool or to get into the ocean that that often once I do it I enjoy it but for me it's running and lifting weights and it has been for a very long time I have a family member close family member who doesn't really like quote unquote exercise but loves dance and dancing going out dancing yes but dance classes amazing in particular really enjoys it loves to be distracted from the fact that she's doing exercise and just really enjoys it and it actually is a very good dancer despite the fact that she's um related to me and on and on there are many examples I think of of folks that fall into the different bins that we talked about earlier but that also tend to default towards a given structure of training one way and doing that throughout the year I can tell you right now that I'm personally going to modify my schedule according to this um four quarters per year it actually works because I've mostly been on the quarter system in academics for a very long time I was at a university had a semester system once but this quarter system is actually the one that we follow academically so that's one reason why it's a a natural fit for me I confess that I typically don't vary up the uh proportions of endurance to resistance training I tend to keep those about three and three across the week three resistance training sessions three let's call them cardio sessions but each one designed to achieve a different adaptation and I've now um altered those even further based on your uh recommendations in this episode and previous episodes but what I have not done is is to really think about D Lo and to really stick to the structure that I set out to accomplish across the year on the topic of D Lo for me the D Lo has been when I get overwhelmed with work or I've gotten sick I don't tend to get sick that often but every once in a while get knocked back with a cold or a flu once every three or four years I seem to really get hammered with a fever inducing something or other and then I'm beding for a couple days and then I'm back at it and I tend to come back rather slowly and that tends to be my week off uh but I'm beginning to wonder whether or not part of the reason I hit those streaks of you know being overwhelmed by sickness or by stress is that I have not done a D Lo period so one of the the things that I'm going to immediately Implement is a periodic Del Lo according to the the program that you described and I'm also going to start matching my specific goals for each quarter with time of year I don't think I've done that and it's not because I live in California and by the way folks there are temperature variations and amount of light per across the day variations in California as well although they are not as traumatic as they would be near the north for instance right of course someone listeners are at the Equator so they have the opposite issue in any event I'm I'm definitely going to do that I'm going to start incorporating regular D Lo uh periods and I am going to be very uh dedicated very disciplined about sticking to a program for three months devoted mainly to hypertrophy then a three-month program devoted to Fat Loss then a program devoted to um you know aerobic output and then one devoted to endurance although I I must say it's very tempting for me to do a very specific strength dedicated portion sure because I I don't tend to be particularly strong I'm not weak but I'm not particularly strong so I might I might consult with you as to how I could uh vary endurance and strength in any event I love the idea of a macro structure and I love the idea of D loads in anticipation of being able to go further in the long run in terms of results I'm hoping this next year because we're just on the on the cusp of a new year will be the first year in which I don't find myself getting um some buger virus or whatever it happens to be um from time to time and having to uh back off on training for that reason and that prompts a question and it's something that I want to get into in more detail with you when you describe recovery upcoming episode but couple of quick questions maybe there's some short or shortish answers you could provide if I'm not feeling well like I've really had a poor night sleep maybe just two to four hours of sleep for whatever reason train or don't train that's the first question second question is if I'm starting to feel a little bit of a throat tickle um and I'm in that phase of like I don't get sick I'm not getting sick and I would I be better off bundling up some hot liquids getting into bed sleeping a little bit more um Etc and protecting myself against that or would I be better off training and if I've and then the third question is if I've already succumbed to a bug but it's not a severe bug I'm I don't have elevated body temperature so no fever I'm not hacking up not productive cough or anything like that but I'm feeling just kind of not well head cold I you know sort of thing comes to mind and it's not seasonal allergies train or don't train leaving aside the point of whether or not you know I'm in a position to you know get anyone else sick because obviously that's a bad idea okay so uh lack of sleep I would say uh 30 to 40% of one's typical sleep the previous night trainer no train starting to feel like one might be getting ill um and then the third category is um coming back from from being sick okay thanks and sorry for the extended question but I want to make sure there was enough detail there because I think these are three common scenarios we are going to cover that in the recovery conversation that's next uh in detail and I will give you very specific guidelines and we'll have a plenty of time to to go into that the quick answer is it comes back to what phase of training you're in now to walk through each scenario if it is a crummy night of sleep and I am in a phase of training in which we are trying to cause adaptation I have a lot of space in my schedule and I'm really using this time to make progress because I know coming up soon my schedule will change and my time to train will go down I'm still training I might use a bunch of tricks that we have for feeling better instantaneously we call these little hacks these are acute hacks these are not chronic hacks I'm gonna push the pace if it is really close to a D Lo week say it's Wednesday and I start my D Lo next week or this is not one bad night of sleep this has been four bad nights of sleep over the last five days this has been six kind of crummy nights over the course of the last nine and you're starting to see a larger pattern and that's a different answer so the question we're going to ask ourselves is is this acute or is this a tendency or actually a chronic thing if it's acute and we're close we're going to train through it if it's acute and we this is not a phase of training where we're trying to really push then maybe we we back off a little bit if it's the opposite though we need to probably make some changes and give ourselves some recovery this may include anything from a moderate training session maybe I'm going to go in the sauna and sit through that and do some breathing drills and some Mobility stuff all right great maybe I'm going to again go to the gym and and ride the bike at 50% heart rate something restorative like that gives you a little bit energy but doesn't beat you down that's probably where we're learning um if you're feeling sick and you think it's it's coming I'm probably going to do option two as well which is some sort of restorative training so again this tends to be moderate could be weights uh could be any of the stuff maybe you're going to go out for your swim but we're not going to push past probably about 7 % we can absolutely induce immunosuppression with excessive training and so you may want to walk out of that um the last case which was I think uh phase number three you said there which is sort of like I I got a pretty gnarly cold right now am I going to train uh most of the time for most people I'm just going to say just shut it down get out of there right um if you're not going to be able to get productivity done there you may be better off either going and sleeping catching up on work doing other stuff so that the next time we go to train you don't feel behind and we can give a good solid effort for it so I know other people who will train right through it um I tend not to be totally Frank I if I'm feeling kind of junky I'm I'm really not going to train I may actually probably uh do some hot hot water immersion so bath jacuzzi things like that I I I actually like those better than I like sauna if one is ill or you just like them better than sauna generally both actually oh my the first person ever I've ever met or um on this podcast to say you like baz in jacuzzi more than sauna yeah absolutely um I may even do some ice probably not a ton though because you you got to be careful there that's a big stresser and if you're already over the line you may be adding a past there um or I may I may go sleep if I'm very if I'm feeling very very very sleepy and sometimes depending on what kind of a bug you get that can happen I I will just sleep and that might be the best choice you have if that means you kick the cold half a day earlier then that then you just won in the aggregate so um that those are probably it's a little bit of insight of the algorithm that I'm running with those things those are highly informative answers thank you and I look forward to our discussion about recovery so that we can go into even more depth on how to recover the last thing I do want to say here is kind of going back to our quarter system the examples I gave with the bulking up losing fat and then getting into better Fitness and cardiovascular fitness at the end those were just samples friends please don't take that literally if you want to emphasize strength more put in some more strength if you want to emphasize a different one of our nine adaptations great do that too if if you're somebody who is has a lot of body fat to lose then maybe put that for two consecutive sessions or every other you can modify them um we've talked about nine very specific training adaptations as well as in fat loss I only gave you four which is just meant to be a sample that you can roll in or out but use those priorities to adjust that system according to what is important for you now 5 years and then 45 years down the line for whatever that may be so you are absolutely free to modify the order you're absolutely free to modify the primary outcome and then adjust the specifics within each quarter based upon what is needed to do to optimize that outcome I think maybe one more tool we can offer people is maybe giving the individual week a little bit more structure so the system I laid out is sort of like month by month and uh maybe we can lay out say a thre day a week workout program and a 4 day a week program that would still hit some of the same well-rounded adaptations that probably covers maybe not individualized per bucket that we've talked about AB andc but it's going to cover 75 80% of what would need to occur in all three buckets and then you can use that last 25% uh for your individual goal or specialization so maybe we can jump into that next great let's hear it the first one I want to give you is just a basic three-day split um that again same idea it's a well-rounded exercise program I actually wrote this all in an article uh that is on xp's website so perhaps we can link directly to that I will just jump you straight to the answer you can read more about why and details in that article if you'd like but uh this is day one day two day three you could do these days where you split them up actually having say 24 hours in between or you could do these back toback it doesn't necessarily matter in this particular case say day one you would start off and do a little bit of speed and power and then you may finish that with a little bit of hypertrophy now if you want to gain more speed and power you just do more of it if you want to maybe just do a little bit to touch it and you really want to gain some muscle you would do more of an emphasis there so the template can stay the same and you would just increase the amount of either adaptation the speed and power stuff or the hypertrophy based on how high it is in your priority list those are combined together because as we talked about earlier they don't necessarily interfere with each other you would do the speed and power stuff first because it wouldn't hamper the hypertrophy if you did the hypertrophy first in that workout it would probably compromise your speed and power and in that case you would actually not be getting your adaptation so day one you do that and that could be a 20-minute workout total or a 2 and 1 half hour up to you then you would come back maybe the next day or two days later whatever you'd like to do in your second day of exercise you would start off with a a pure strength uh protocol and you would finish that with what I'm calling just a higher heart rate so this could be something like our Anor robic capacity stuff it could be the aerobic capacity something where you're getting up to close to high heart rate it could be those 20 second bursts it could be a 90c burst 5 minute mile repeats anything you like you can just sort of plug and play this in you're getting to a spot now where you've had a little bit of speed a little bit of strength a little bit of hypertrophy and you've touched the high heart rate so we've checked off most of the boxes already in two sessions our last session then would be more of a a steady state long duration endurance and so a three-day week split like that is going to be a pretty nice setup for the average person so this could be a Monday Wednesday Friday Tuesday Thursday Saturday what's happening on the intervening days totally off if you want it to be so I set this up as in the best I can give you Andy is three days okay great if you have more we could certainly improve it but this was my worst case scenario I've got other things in my life the most I can do for exercise is three days a week and given that it's 3 days per week how approximately how long are each of these workouts going to last I would do whole body exercises for almost all that I would do your full body parts and I think you could certainly finish that in 45 minutes of work time little bit of time to warm up some down regulation at the end you could be in and out of that gym in certainly under 60 Minutes the reality of days you could probably be out of there under 50 minutes the total work time could be 30 35 once you get going um so that's three days uh as you pointed out um probably more work per week is going to be better in terms of um maximizing goals of aesthetic goals and uh performance enhancing goals and Longevity goals right I mean the what the numbers that I've heard that is that we should all try to get somewhere between 150 and probably more like 180 to 200 minutes of zone two cardio per week minimum but as I recall you consider Zone 2 cardio so low intensity that uh just walking around in is you know qualifies as Z as really Zone one zone two cardio yeah not to take us too far off track but I think it's actually useful to differentiate what I consider to be exercise and physical activity so physical activity is out for a walk uh it is using a walking treadmill and while you're at work it is you know parking farther in the parking lot and taking more steps these are all important and what's clear you are not going to reach likely Optimal Health by only exercising hard and then sitting around the other 23 and a half hours the day so it's very very important whether you want to do that in the form of Zone one or zone two and hit 30 minutes a day uh various organizations will say things like that you need to have 30 minutes a day of moderate to low intensity exercise I don't really care you you can combine it like that if you want um what you don't want to do is just physical activity only which is almost always going to be like Zone one to maybe zone two you also don't want to go the other end of the Spectrum which is again like I left hard three days a week and then what do you do the rest of the time nothing that's not optimal either and so I guess the system I've I walked you through here or the example rather I walked you through is um you would need to maybe supplant that with being Physically Active if you work say you're a nurse and you're on your feet you're moving up and down you you're probably actually covering a decent amount of your physical activity because you might be at 15,000 steps a day if you sitting in front of your computer and you do the same 3-day split you would probably need to go out of your to make sure you're adding a bunch more steps in so you might need to add several hours of walking to hit that 150 1880 minutes a week of physical activity because the program I laid out is you know if you're doing really 45 minutes 3 days a week maybe 60 Minutes at Best you've hit 180 ter you know 60 Minutes times 3 180 week so you might actually need then and maybe some more specific walks so you could do that in a number of ways could be again actual structured exercise it could be simply I'm going to do a 10-minute walk three times a day it could be the exercise snacks that we talked about in a previous episode so there's lots of ways to engage in more physical activity but to me those are different oftentimes than structured exercise I think many people will appreciate that you put out there for us a three-day a week protocol because many people simply don't have more time to exercise they're putting emphasis on these other um bins in the quadrant and you know frankly those other bins are very important as well so uh wonderful that uh people can uh check off some critical boxes for Aesthetics and performance and Longevity with three days of work or workouts per week I should say what are some other schedules that people can follow if they're willing to dedicate a bit more time toward their Fitness sure if you wanted to do another sample of maybe a 4- day week and again to clarify this this is I'm really happy you said that this is this is a 4-day week of structured exercise this would not account your physical activity moving around which everybody should be doing absolutely maybe this is something like day one you're going to do a strength training session and you'll stay in the five to 10 or so repetition range a little bit of strength a little bit of hypertrophy you've checked off a couple of boxes probably whole body so you get all the body parts covered or close we're looking at generally multi-joint exercises could be a combination of barbells free weights bands machines anything like that would be sort of day one you could come back the very next day or you could wait 24 hours but the second day of your exercise would be maybe your long duration and this is actually sort of similar to how you set it up it's you do a little bit of the inverse but what you're kind of saying is I'm probably going to be a little bit sore from day one and I don't have any free body parts that aren't sore so instead of trying to do another lift or something I'm just going to put in some restorative longer duration stuff same exact principles for long duration we just talked about could be a swim could be any number of things could be your sport could be your out you know ride the bike and go for a jog in the sun whatever you would like to do um if you're feeling better maybe that's a little harder longer if you're feeling pretty beat up from the day before maybe that's a little bit shorter and slower you can modify it then maybe you take the next day off or that's open your third day of exercise is now instead of being that five to 10 repetition range for your lift you do something like 11 to 30 reps range also this could be exchanged for something more like body weight more muscular endurance type of stuff so this is a great day maybe it's yoga Maybe it is uh a gymnastics thing you're working on or any of the many other styles of training that are not you know quote unquote lifting weights but they're not just walking and Hiking so it could be a Pilates or equivalent anything like this where you're going to get some muscular burn in there but it's probably not any additional weight outside of body weight or if it is it's fairly minimal you know 5 10 sort of 15 pounds something like that would be nice could also be done in a circuit so we could hit our high heart rate and we could hit some muscular endurance in there group activity class might be nice here even maybe something like a spin class or a dance class all these things could be great and then maybe you even finish that with 10 minutes of some lightweights to hits the body part you say didn't get so maybe you did the dance class and then you finish and you do 10 minutes of upper body sets of 30 to make sure you get you know a nice pump there because your legs probably got some work during the dance class but your upper body didn't so you balance the system out a little bit so all body parts got a little bit of muscular endurance your heart rate got really high came back down and you sort of checked both of those boxes now it's important to remember the hypertrophy episode doing sets of say 15 plus repetitions per set is as effective as doing sets of 5 to 10 or 12 for hypertrophy gaining muscle it's not effective though for strength gains so you wouldn't want to do this only because you'd really be doing nothing to improve your muscle strength and you want to make sure that that box is ticked at least a little bit then again you could take the day off after this or you could roll right into your fourth exercise day which would be your last exercise session of the week and you would do something more of like a medium intensity so this is a little bit higher intensity than our second day and this could be something like you know Shadow Boxing or hitting a heavy bag it could be a little bit of higher intensity intervals but not all the way up so maybe this is you're going to do a uh a one minute on one minute off on the bike but you're only going to go to like 85 90% heart rate and then instead of going off during that one minute you drop it down to 50% so we would actually look like 30 minutes of straight work but you would have a little bit of rolling intensity as opposed to staying really nice and record restorative it's going to be some work there and you would finish it with something like 5 to 6 minutes total of Max heart rate stuff which lines up perfectly with that number you actually created in our our endurance episode of hitting six minutes total per week of maximum heart rate or close so you could wrap that all up kind of into one session you could do those in the inverse order thorough warm up a few minutes whether you want to do 30 second burst or a minute burst or straight five minutes this is a a protocol I like to use a ton on the assault bike is simply a good warm-up 10 minutes solid warmup recover and then I'm going to go five minutes and cover as much distance as I can in five minutes brutal it is brutal and it's amazing and you like you get a lot done in five minutes 10 minutes on the back of that is a very gradual bring back to Earth there I actually in that case I don't need to do down regulation breathing because I've tense I've spent 10 minutes actually coming way back down and the last 2 minutes or so of that is very deliberate 5-second inhale through the nose 5c exhale through the nose while I'm barely just moving and you end up being in a pretty good spot so that again TimeWise could easily be done in 30 minutes and you'd be rounded off there so the nice part about this 4 day a week split as well as a 3-day awake split is it does give you a little bit of flexibility and so what I mean is Maybe Monday your plan is to do the day one lift and then any number of things popped up in life you shipped it back to Tuesday rather than saying like Monday is leg day and then all of a sudden something happens you miss leg day it's just you're doing these things in order and you would like to get all four done in a 7-Day span but if it doesn't happen fine the next day you get the workout you just go right back into the next workout and it doesn't matter what day they land on exactly um for the 3-day routine that works very nice because the Assumption there is you really only have time for three workouts a week and so that's sort of implicit is there's probably some chaos happening in the schedule a little bit and you don't you don't really have the ability to lock in three days per week if that's not the case you can go but we're trying to listen to the pain points that people have with exercise and see if we can give them some solutions for those several things about this program mer attractive to me uh one of them you just mentioned which is that by not rigidly attaching individual workouts to two specific days of the week one in theory could say okay it was I didn't get that much sleep last night I don't feel I know that a lot of people say what what is feel but I don't feel recovered or like I'm going to get that much out of the the workout tomorrow so I'm um or today so I'm just going to push it forward a day and the the ability to slide workouts forward or back by a day I think is incredibly valuable um if for the consistency sake I also really like this idea of some of the long duration work coming a day after hitting the strength and bit of hypertrophy work so this would be the the day two uh one thing that I've experienced over and over is that if I'm very sore in a given muscle group especially my legs doing some low intensity cardio um whether or not it's a jog or on the bike um typically for me it's a jog or even even skipping rope and then walking SK walking does seem to dissipate the soreness I'm sure there's a mechanism there has there's a mechanism for everything frankly but um I I like that Arrangement and then I also like this idea of um making sure that there's a uh workout for muscular endurance because I feel like unless I've been stuck without a good gym or I've decided to specifically train body weight exercise which I did a few years ago I got really excited about some of Pavo susulan sure work great a um The Naked Warrior um which doesn't involve training naked although I suppose you could if you wanted but it was really about no weights um and involved building up to pistol squats and one-arm push-ups and things of that sort um even doing pull-ups on doors and I discovered that some door frames are much stronger than others in hotels I just accidentally um caused some damage there but um in any case uh muscular endurance I think is a really interesting one that I plan to incorporate into my schedule but that is uh I think is one that's often overlooked unless people really have an aversion to weights and um and to machines you're right it shouldn't be because it's pretty low hanging fruit you don't need a lot of equipment for it typically it doesn't hurt that bad you don't often get that sore out of it and you're going to feel a nice wonderful pump afterwards so it's great mod and as we discussed many times now it is quite effective at hypertrophy yeah I also I don't know if they fit specifically with muscular endurance but if you look at the um the physiques for example on rock climbers I mean they have to me of course they have um uh usually uh the experienced climbers have um pretty uh remarkable um body compositions they tend to be lean and Li and flexible all those things um that many people aspire to the other thing is their development always looks exceedingly balanced you don't really tend to see climbers they're like overdeveloped in the Torso and underdeveloped in the arms or overdeveloped in the arms despite all the climbing and underdeveloped in uh relatively in the other limb limb mov that's true for women and men um it's not a sport that I participate in but um it seems like what they're doing is essentially muscular endurance training yep yeah so there's there's really something there to be valued um uh so that's a 4-day a week schedule with off days or rest days inserted um as needed and then just and continuing for those that are a bit more committed to their Fitness and want to do a uh five or six day a week program would you recommend just um collapsing some of the off days paying more attention to recovery and and cycling through more quickly yeah absolutely you could combine that and just run that either one of those programs so you could run that three-day week program back to back do that get that done in six days uh so day one speed power hypertrophy day two strength uh work with elevated heart rate anerobic capacity and day three endurance and then just and then just cycle through again yeah you take day four off of the week and then you go back again so we'd be having the six days of exercise one day off and you'd be getting every one of those adaptations in multiple times a week that is almost exactly how I would set up a six- day week program great I love the the elegance and the Simplicity of that and the thoroughness of it because it checks off so many if not all of the ma nine major adaptations to exercise that we've been talking about these episodes and I suppose the one thing that I wanted to highlight and and pose this also as a question is that early in our discussions in a previous episode you mentioned that so much of what people think of and apply as it relates to resistance training is borrowed from bodybuilding and hypertrophy training specifically which typically involves getting close to failure or failure sometimes even involving rest pause where you hit failure then set the weight down for a few seconds and repeat these high-intensity techniques you know accentuating the negative so-called Ecentric um Etc in hearing about the Protocols of 3 day a week or 4 day a week six day a week it's very clear to me that if one is not careful to Omit that kind of thinking and suddenly is taking their strength work and speed work to failure or is pushing too hard on muscular endurance to the point where you're just grinding out that very last push-up on every set that the amount of soreness and the amount of recovery that results from these workouts might start to cause progress issues so one thing that's in the back of my mind is as you've described these programs is that even though some of them are very brief or involve a minimum of time commitment in particular three-day week but also the four-day week schedule that there is a a discipline involved in making sure that you stick to the workout that you're supposed to do that day and not um go ham as they say and just throw in a couple extra sets of of bicep curls and tricep pushes because you you wanted to do that and you thought you could maybe you could get away with that but you have to come back pretty quickly and do some serious um meaning devoted speed and power work and or strength work and if you haven't been disciplined about not doing certain forms of exercise I could see how the whole thing could kind of Crash quickly and one could think oh this is just too much work or it's it's it's not for me y so uh this I suppose is now where the question comes which is um what what are some of the key points that people need to keep in mind when they uh Embrace a program how rigidly do they need to stay attached to uh you know today's endurance day I'm just doing endurance today's strength day I'm just doing strength work I'm not going to take things to Absolute failure ya fiter I am absolutely happy with anyone modifying any of the sample programs however they would like to my only recommendation for the question you just posed would be set your program and then if you're going to make a change fine but that is a change to your program in other words don't just make decisions every single day and make changes if you're doing that you might as well not have a program and as we described earlier there is clear evidence that having a program is better than not regardless of the effectiveness of the program and so my general comment to that is okay fine a day or two you made some modifications no problem we're in a situation now where it's like you're basically changing the workout every day as you go then we just need to re write a new program we need to reassess where we're at because we need to have some structure look the reality of it is I changed the programming I'm going to do the day of often because of Any number of situations I just don't feel like it I way overestimated today um we talked a little bit in the previous episode about Auto regulation which is a style of of periodization and program design which you're adjusting based on how you're actually feeling that day but with some specific structures so you're going to take some measurements that day and adjust so Auto regulation is a very very effective tool you just need to make sure that that auto is dialed in other words is it because your body actually needed something different or is it because you're now just getting a little bit lazy now you're just not feeling like it today so there's a little bit of an impossible line to draw there both scenarios are real gray area a lot is real in the moment and so you just need to be a little bit aware of having some reality check listening to your body but then also being like hey no I'm talking to you I'm telling you this is the plan we're going to do this and staying within it it is going to be challenging to progressively overload and therefore get a higher likelihood of success at your training program if you're just making decisions and changing the program right before you work out you're probably not you're probably going for most people you're probably going to choose less or off more so than you choose more now having said that there are more than a few clients that have come through our programs where they choose more always they add a set they add an exercise they add another workout and that can be okay but we're going to track various markers on them and if we see these things consistently going down we're going to identify whether they are which phase of this overtraining thing we'll talk about next they're actually in some phases I'm okay some of them I'm not if we're seeing certain things happen happen physiologically we're going to make a conversation we're also then going to really think carefully about why are you making this Choice do you feel like the training isn't enough okay great let's modify it then are you not making progress or are there some other reasons why you're doing this um obviously I'm not a psychologist or therapist but there are clearly situations in which folks dose themselves with far too much exercise for reasons that are not because it's productive to their training or goals and if such case uh we would probably bring in somebody that specializes in those areas to clear that out and just make sure it's like we're not doing this for anxiety issues or energy things like if it's I just don't think the programs enough okay great let's go back let's look at our metrics let's evaluate our tests and go over there but if there's other reasons then um we may bring in somebody to have that conversation yeah usually when I've seen people deviate from programs it's because they tend to revert to something that they've done for a long time it just feels really comfortable to them and it worked y it and it was giving them decent results so they're skeptical to try something else or there is uh a phenotype of kind of haphazardness sometimes especially people get really caffeinated before workout and just want to throw something in and then there's a third category and this is one that I've had to contend with a lot in my life which is that I really enjoy training with other people when I have the opportunity yeah and a certain day rolls around where you're supposed to do something and not do other things and people say hey do you want to go for a long ocean swim or you want to train and you end up doing some you know uh Kenny Kane this one's for you some ridiculous you know 20 wall ball uh CrossFit type workout and I'm not um acclimated for that sort of thing and then it does tend to throw things off not because no pun intended uh Kenny because there's no there's nothing wrong with a 20 sets of wall balls if you're that's part of your conditioning but if it's not appropriate for where you are in your schedule it really can disrupt what you're trying to do and even as a as a non-competitive athlete like myself um years been since I've competed in in any Athletic program but the as a non-competitive athlete I think there's a a beauty to and a a really strong incentive to being disciplined about the program that one follows um as a mentor and Professor that I worked with years ago used to say i' come into his office all these ideas and things I want to do and he'd say uh let's constrain this walk and then you you know the question you always want to arrive at in a discussion with your student students as you know is what's the experiment exactly and then you go and you do that specific experiment I think I I view it work out the same way that there are multiple what adaptations goals um and things that people are trying to achieve really knowing why you're there each time and really sticking to that even if it means not training with other people or I always say well you can train with me but I'm not going to train with you selfish right so that's one way to do it um but really sticking to a schedule is really what allows the progress to emerge but that doesn't necessarily mean being antisocial you can invite people along in this case I'm telling people to be the host not the guest I have a little bit of a rule here maybe maybe I should answer your question this way I actually like doing things totally different occasionally so I'll do when I'm traveling I tend to do hotel workouts what I mean by that is I will go down to the workout room and I will do a set of 10 to 15 reps of every single machine in the exact order in which they are laid out wow just for the sake of fun like just for the the sake of like it's like the tarot card version of workouts like whatever comes up I'm going to make sense of it and you just move yeah and those are typically things of like I just want to move a little bit for jet lag and other sort of purposes right um that's often like I wasn't going to get to work out today and so now I'm going to do something to feel great I don't travel that much though so it's not really throwing my my things off um also I don't get a lot of free time and so if I am traveling and and I'm seeing someone I haven't seen in many years or for the first time I we got to train together this week for the first time I'm not going to burn that opportunity my rule is this though I'm not going to do something that's going to cost me more than three days so I'm absolutely happy um to to get out there and maybe tomorrow morning or tonight we we we go do something fun that's off my schedule I'm I'm in I'm in 100% I'm just going to downregulate a little bit I'm not going to maybe do as much as you or as hard as you or whatever I'll do more than I should but if it cost me tomorrow uh it was worth the exchange I don't have a world record I'm setting anytime soon I don't have I got many years I'm happy to give up a couple of days of exercise to be a little sore than I need to be for the exchange of a lifetime memory and this stuff is so important to me this stuff lands as like true lifetime memories right I can look back many of my fond memories throughout my life are are training sessions with friends whatever it is like doing Jiu-Jitsu with some somebody who's a world champion you're just like to totally whatever the thing is right you're like that was really really cool absolutely worth missing two days if it's going to be more than three days though where like I'm going to be so wrecked I can't work out for five or six days then I'm probably like all right that's that's kind of nonsense unless it's is like an opportunity where I'm like I absolutely can't pass up you know um so that that's kind of how I think about it that doesn't happen too often with me though maybe once a month and so I'm like okay I'm fine I lost a day reality of it is it's probably more like once a quarter that that happens so I don't really care so you do want to balance joy and life you don't want to be so rigid about your training program that it ruins and Rob's experience physical activity should be fun your Fitness and your training should be something that makes your life better not some task you have to get done so that 75 years from now you've hit some Metric of who knows what just alone in your room with your training logs yeah no you want the in all seriousness I think you point to the richness of life and you know you can draw these boxes like work relationships Fitness recovery but the the boundaries between those boxes are blurry because and I should say I love training with people I greatly enjoyed training with you this morning not just because I was receiving so many useful tips in fact thank you this first time I've PR in a number of things today thanks to your input in the moment that's a Irreplaceable kind of gift but mostly it's the gift of getting to train with a colleague and friend so um I want to underscore highlight and put an explanation mark behind what you just said thank you once again and again for giving us so much interesting clear actionable and at times somewhat counterintuitive information in order to build out an exceptional training program to meet any of and in some cases all of the nine major adaptations that exercise can create toward aesthetic performance related and health span lifespan AKA longevity um goals it's really a a treasure Trove of information there and I look forward to our next discussion about how to best recover from exercise both within the exercise bout and between exercise bouts and in the more macroscopic structure of a week a month a year I can't wait yeah I can't wait either I love that topic and I've got a lot to cover so it'll be fun if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for us or comments or suggestions about topics you'd like us to cover or guests you'd like me to include on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube we do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and during today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast I'd also like to inform you about the hubman Lab podcast free newsletter it's called the neural network newsletter and each month the neural network newsletter is sent out and it contains summaries of podcast episodes specific protocols discussed on the hubman 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 Hub 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]