back to indexDr. Andy Galpin: How to Build Strength, Muscle Size & Endurance | Huberman Lab Podcast #65
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman,
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and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
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at Stanford School of Medicine.
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Today, my guest is Dr. Andy Galpin.
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Dr. Galpin is a full and tenured professor
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in the Department of Kinesiology
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at California State University in Fullerton.
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He is also a world expert
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in all things exercise science and kinesiology.
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Today, you are going to hear
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what is essentially a masterclass in how to build fitness,
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no matter what level of fitness you happen to have.
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He talks about how to build endurance
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and the multiple types of endurance.
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He talks about how to build strength and hypertrophy,
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which is the growth of muscle fibers.
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So if you're seeking to get stronger
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or build bigger muscles or build endurance
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or all of those things, today, you're going to learn how.
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You're also going to learn how to build flexibility,
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how to hydrate properly for exercise.
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And we'll also talk about nutrition and supplementation.
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What makes Dr. Galpin so unique is his ability
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to span all levels of exercise science.
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He has the ability to clearly communicate the sets
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and repetition schemes that one would want to follow,
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for instance, to build more strength
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or to build larger muscles.
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He also clearly describes exactly how to train
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if you want to build more endurance
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or enhance cardiovascular function.
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What's highly unique about Dr. Galpin
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and the information he teaches
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and the way he communicates that information
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is that he can take specific recommendations
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of how recreational exercisers
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or even professional athletes ought to train
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for their specific goals and link that
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to specific mechanisms.
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That is the specific changes that need to occur
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in the nervous system and in muscle fibers
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and indeed right down to the genetics of individual cells
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in your brain and body
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in order for those exercise adaptations to occur.
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It's truly rare to find somebody that can span
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so many different levels of analysis
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and who is able to communicate all those levels
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of understanding in such a clear and actionable way.
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Indeed, Dr. Galpin is one of just a handful of people
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to which I and many others look when they want to make sure
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that the information that they're getting about exercise
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is gleaned from quality peer-reviewed studies,
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hands-on experience with a wide variety
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of research subjects, meaning everyday people,
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all the way up to professional athletes
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in a wide variety of sports.
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So it's no surprise that he's not only one
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of the most knowledgeable,
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but also the most trusted voices in exercise science.
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Dr. Galpin is also an avid communicator
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of zero cost to consumer information about exercise science.
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You can find him on Instagram at Dr. Andy Galpin
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and also on Twitter at Dr. Andy Galpin.
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Both places he provides terrific information
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about recent studies, both from his laboratory
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and from other laboratories,
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more in-depth protocols of the sort
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that you'll hear about today.
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So if you're not already following him,
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He provides only the best information.
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He's extremely nuanced and precise and clear
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in delivering that information.
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I'm certain that by the end of today's conversation,
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you'll come away with a tremendous amount of new knowledge
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that you can devote to your exercise pursuits.
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I'm pleased to announce
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that I'm hosting two live events this May.
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The first live event will be hosted
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in Seattle, Washington on May 17th.
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The second live event will be hosted
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in Portland, Oregon on May 18th.
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Both are part of a lecture series entitled
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The Brain Body Contract,
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during which I will discuss science
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and science-based tools for mental health,
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physical health, and performance.
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And I should point out that while some
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of the material I'll cover will overlap
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with information covered here on the Huberman Lab Podcast
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and on various social media posts,
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most of the information I will cover is going to be distinct
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from information covered on the podcast or elsewhere.
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So once again, it's Seattle on May 17th,
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Portland on May 18th.
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You can access tickets by going to hubermanlab.com slash tour
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and I hope to see you there.
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Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize
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that this podcast is separate
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from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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It is, however, part of my desire
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and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information
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about science and science-related tools
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to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens.
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Athletic Greens is an all-in-one
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vitamin mineral probiotic drink.
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I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012,
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so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.
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The reason I started taking Athletic Greens
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and the reason I still take Athletic Greens
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once or twice a day is that it helps me cover
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all of my basic nutritional needs.
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It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have.
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In addition, it has probiotics,
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which are vital for microbiome health.
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I've done a couple of episodes now
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on the so-called gut microbiome
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and the ways in which the microbiome interacts
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with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood,
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and essentially with every biological system
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relevant to health throughout your brain and body.
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With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need,
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the minerals I need,
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and the probiotics to support my microbiome.
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If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,
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you can go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
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and claim a special offer.
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They'll give you five free travel packs,
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which make it easy to mix up Athletic Greens
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while you're on the road,
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plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2.
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There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3
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Many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3,
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calcium in the body, and so on.
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Again, go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
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to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs
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and the year's supply of vitamin D3K2.
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Thesis.
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Thesis makes what are called nootropics,
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which means smart drugs.
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Now, to be honest, I am not a fan of the term nootropics.
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I don't believe in smart drugs in the sense that
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Inside Tracker.
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Just use the code Huberman at checkout.
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And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin.
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Welcome, Dr. Professor Andy Galpin.
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It's been a long time coming.
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We have friends in common,
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but this is actually the first time
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we've sat down face to face.
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Yeah, I'm very excited.
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Yeah, there are only a handful,
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meaning about three or four people who I trust enough
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in the exercise physiology space that when they speak,
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I not only listen, but I modify my protocols.
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And you are among those three or four people.
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So first of all, a debt of gratitude.
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You've greatly shaped the protocols that I use.
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And I know there's far more for me and for others to learn.
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So you're a professor, you teach in university,
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and you have a tremendous range of levels of exploration.
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Muscle biopsy, literally images down the microscope,
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all the way to training professional athletes
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and everything in between.
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So you are truly an N of one.
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And just to start us off,
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I would love to have you share with us
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what you think most everybody,
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or even everybody should know
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about principles of strength training,
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principles of endurance training,
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and principles of let's call it hypertrophy power
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and the other sort of categories of training.
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And this could be very top contour,
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but what do you think everybody on planet earth
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should know about these categories
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of personal and athletic development?
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Well, that's a great first question.
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Holy cow, I think I'll start it this way.
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I tend to think about,
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there's about nine different adaptations
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you can get from exercise.
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Fat loss is not one of those.
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It is a by-product,
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but that's not really what I'm getting at.
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And so we can kind of categorize everything like that.
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And what we can talk about
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are what are the concepts
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that you need to hit within each one.
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And then you could have infinite discussion
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of the different methodologies, right?
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And so that first thing to hit
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is the concepts are actually fairly few,
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but the methods are many, right?
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People have said that in iterations throughout time.
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So if you walk from the very beginning,
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the first one to think about
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is what we'll just call skill.
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So this is improving anything from say a golf swing
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to a squatting technique to running.
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And this is just simply moving mechanically
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how you want your body to move.
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I'm just gonna globally call that skill.
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From there, we're gonna get into speed.
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So this is moving as fast as possible.
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The next one is power.
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And power is a function of speed,
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but it's also a function of the next one, which is strength.
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So if you actually multiply strength by speed,
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And the reason I'm making this distinction, by the way,
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is some of these are very close
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and I'm going in a specific order on purpose here.
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For example, power is, like I just said,
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it's a function of speed and strength.
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So if you improve speed, you've also likely improved power,
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but not necessarily, right?
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Cause it could have come from the force direction either.
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So there's carry over.
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So like a lot of things that you would do
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for the development of strength and power,
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they are somewhat similar, but then there's differences,
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So things that you would do correctly for power
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would really not develop much strength and vice versa.
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So we can get into all these details later.
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Once you get past strength,
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and the next one kind of down the list is hypertrophy.
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This is muscle size, right?
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Growing muscle mass is one way to think about it.
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After hypertrophy, you get into these categories
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of the next one is,
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these are all globally endurance based issues.
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And the very first one is called muscular endurance.
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So this is your ability to do,
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how many pushups can you do in one minute?
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You know, things like that.
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Past muscular endurance,
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you're now into more of an energetic
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or even cardiovascular fatigue.
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So you've left the local muscle
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and you're now into the entire physiological system
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and its ability to produce and sustain work.
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And we can get into a bunch of differentiations
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with an endurance,
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but just to keep it really simple right now,
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the very first one, think about this as,
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I call this anaerobic power, right?
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So this is your ability to produce a lot of work
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for say 30 seconds to maybe one minute,
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kind of two minutes like that.
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The next one down then is more closely aligned
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to what we'll call your VO2 max.
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So this is your ability to kind of do the same thing,
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but more of a time domain of say three to 12 minutes.
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So this is gonna be a maximum heart rate,
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but it's gonna be well past just max heart rate.
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we have what I call long duration endurance.
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So this is your ability to sustain work.
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The time domain doesn't matter
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in terms of how fast you're going.
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It's how long can you sustain work?
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This is 30 plus minutes of no break like that.
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So as just an high level overview,
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those are the different things you can target.
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And again, some of those cross over
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and some are actually a little bit
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contrary to the other ones.
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So pushing towards one
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is maybe gonna sacrifice something else.
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So as an overall start,
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that's really what we're looking at.
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Within all of those though,
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they do have similar concepts in terms of,
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there's a handful of things you have got to do
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to make all of those things work.
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And we could talk about as many of those as you want,
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but one of them is functionally called progressive overload.
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So whichever one you're trying to improve at,
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if you want to continue to improve,
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you have to have some method of overload.
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And as you well know, you've talked about a lot,
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adaptation physiologically happens
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as a by-product of stress.
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So you have to push a system.
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So if you continue to do,
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say the exact same workout over time,
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you better not expect much improvement.
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You can keep maintenance,
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but you're not going to be adding additional stress.
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you have to have some sort of progressive overload.
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And we can talk in detail
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about what that means for each category,
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but this could come from adding more weights.
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This could come from adding more repetitions.
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It could come from doing it more often in a week.
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It could come from adding complexity to the movement.
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So going from say a partial range of motion
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to a full range of motion or adding other variables.
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So there's a lot of different ways to progress,
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but you have to have some sort of movement forward.
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So if you have this kind of routine
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where you've built Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday
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or something, and you just do that infinitely,
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you're not going to get very far.
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So that's, I guess, the most high level overview
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of all the things people can go after.
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And then we can go from whatever direction
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you want from there.
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Well, I'd love to do the deep dive
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on each one of these for several hours.
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But, and I imagine that over time we probably will.
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I'd love to chat about a couple of these
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in a bit more depth.
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So in terms of defining
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what the progressive overload variables are
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for these different categories,
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maybe we could hit the two most common combinations
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of these nine things.
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The first one being strength and hypertrophy.
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And maybe we could lump power in there.
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Maybe not, you're the exercise physiologist.
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But strength and hypertrophy,
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which at least bear some relationship.
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And then maybe separately,
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we could explore sustained work endurance,
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this 30 minutes or longer continuously,
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because I think many people train in that regime.
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And probably something like the VO2 max anaerobic as well,
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because I know that a number of people now
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incorporate so-called hit
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or high intensity interval training.
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I think with the hopes of either shortening their workouts
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and or gaining some additional cardiovascular benefit.
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So if we could start with strength and hypertrophy,
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I know many people want to be stronger.
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They want to grow larger muscles
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or at least maintain what they have.
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So what are the progressive overload principles
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that are most effective over time
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for strength and hypertrophy?
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Yeah, okay, so I'll actually go a little step back.
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With every one of those categories I talked about,
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you have what we call your modifiable variables.
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So this is a very short list
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of all the things you can modify,
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the different variables within your workout
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that can be modified that will change the outcome.
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Fancy way of saying, if you do this differently,
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then you're gonna get a different result.
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So modifiable variables.
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The very first one of those is called choice.
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So this is the exercise choice that you select.
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Now, one of, I'm gonna go double back here.
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So I'm kind of doing a little bit of inception.
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So follow me here as I'm going up a layer
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to come down a couple layers.
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I have these fundamental laws of strength and conditioning
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that are kind of like a little bit of a joke,
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but progressive overload is one of those laws.
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Another one of those laws is your exercises themselves
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do not determine adaptations.
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So here's what I mean.
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If you're like, I want to get stronger,
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you can't select an exercise.
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That doesn't determine you getting strong.
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If you don't do the exercise correctly,
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and I'm not even referring to the technique,
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that of course matters,
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but if you don't execute it in the right fashion,
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then you're not going to get that adaptation.
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So if you choose, I want to get stronger,
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I'm gonna do a bench press.
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Well, if you do the wrong set range,
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the wrong repetition range, the wrong speed,
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you won't get strength.
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You maybe get muscular endurance
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and very little strength adaptation.
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So the exercise selection itself is important,
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but it does not determine the outcome adaptation.
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So the very first thing that you need to think about
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if you're like, I want to get stronger or add muscle
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is not the exercise choice, right?
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It is the application of the exercise.
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What are the sets?
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What are the reps?
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What are the rest ranges that you're using?
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That's gonna be your primary determinant.
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Now, some exercises are certainly better
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for some adaptations.
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For example, a deadlift is probably not a great exercise
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to do for long duration endurance.
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Like you could theoretically do 30 straight minutes
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of deadlifting, but it's probably not our best choice, right?
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It's probably a pretty good choice for strength development,
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right, because you're gonna do a low repetition
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You could theoretically do bicep curls for power,
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but probably not your best choice, right?
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Single joint isolation movement is not the best
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for developing power.
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If you've ever done a bicep curl as fast
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as you possibly can, like that's not gonna go well.
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So in theory, any exercise can produce any adaptation
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given the execution is performed properly.
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So now that we've understood that a little bit,
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the exercise itself does not determine the adaptation.
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Coming within each one of these categories,
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exercise choice is an important variable
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because it does lend you to things
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like what movement pattern you're in.
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So in other words, if you wanna get stronger
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and you're thinking, okay, what exercise do I do?
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You need to think a little bit about
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what muscle groups do I wanna use?
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And that's gonna be leading you towards the exercise choice.
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For example, I wanna use my quads more.
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Maybe you're gonna choose more of a front squat
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type of variation, a goblet squat.
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So the bar, the load is in front of you.
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If you wanna emphasize maybe more of your hamstrings
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and glutes, you're gonna maybe put a barbell on your back
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or do a different one.
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So the exercise choice is important to the prescription
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because it's gonna determine a lot of your success.
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Okay, another kind of simpler way to think about this.
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If you're a beginner or moderate to intermediate,
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or maybe you don't have a coach,
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you probably wanna hedge towards an exercise selection
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that is a little bit easier technically.
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So you maybe don't wanna do a barbell back squat.
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It's actually a pretty complicated movement.
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Maybe you wanna do a little bit more of,
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again, a goblet squat or even use some machines
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or a split squat, something that's a little bit simpler
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because you don't have a coach,
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you're not a professional athlete.
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The likelihood of success is higher
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and the risk has now gone lower.
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So the very first variable within all of these
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is the exercise choice.
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The second one is the intensity.
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And that refers to, in this context, not perceived effort.
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Like, wow, that was a really intense workout.
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It is quite literally either a percentage
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of your one rep at max
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or a percentage of your maximum heart rate or VO2 max.
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So for the strength-based things,
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you wanna think about what's the percentage
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of the maximum weight I could lift one time.
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And that's what we're gonna call one rep max.
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Or it's a percentage of my heart rate, right?
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So if I tell you to get on a bike
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and I want you to do intervals and I want you at 75%,
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I'm typically referring to 75% of your max heart rate
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or VO2 max or something like that.
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If I tell you to do squats at 75%,
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that means 75% of the maximum amount of weight
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you could lift one time or close.
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In terms of determining one rep max,
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I confess I've never actually taken the one rep max
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but I have some internal sense of what that might be
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or what range it might be.
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Is it necessary for people to assess
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their one repetition maximum
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before going into these sorts of programs?
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I think a more intuitive way is to take a repetition range.
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Well, you can do this a couple of different ways.
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So there are equations you can run
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and you can just Google these anywhere.
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And these are called conversion charts.
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And so it says, okay,
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if I did 75 pounds on my bench press
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and I did it eight times,
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you can just run an estimate to say,
link |
okay, you're probably going to be able to bench
link |
about 95 pounds for one rep max or something.
link |
So that's a very easy conversion chart.
link |
So just pick a load that you feel comfortable with,
link |
but it's kind of heavy, but not like crazy heavy.
link |
And do as many repetitions as you can.
link |
What a really good technique.
link |
And then look what that number would be.
link |
So conversion charts-
link |
Are they safer than doing one repetition maximum?
link |
For the general public who has, again, no coaching,
link |
For a professional athlete, it's not any safer,
link |
but, or not even a professional athlete,
link |
but a trained person with a coach.
link |
But for most people, yeah,
link |
that's a good way to go about it.
link |
You can also just kind of do it with feel
link |
in the sense that,
link |
say you want to do a set of five repetitions
link |
and you do the load and you think,
link |
I could have done one or two more.
link |
And then you kind of have an idea
link |
of what that number is going to be.
link |
If you think, man, that last one,
link |
I had to kind of really, really, really get after it,
link |
then maybe just call that that number, right?
link |
So you don't have to get overly concerned.
link |
In fact, when we start getting into these number ranges,
link |
you're going to see that they're all ranges.
link |
We're not going to give a specific 95%
link |
for one of these exact reasons.
link |
It's not that precise for most of them.
link |
In fact, some of them, like hypertrophy,
link |
have enormous ranges that you almost can't miss.
link |
So the intensity in that case doesn't even matter
link |
for the most part,
link |
because that's not the primary determinant.
link |
Some of these you're going to see intensity
link |
is the determinant,
link |
and some of these you're going to see volume
link |
is the true determinant.
link |
So intensity though is the second one.
link |
Choice was the very first one,
link |
manipulatable variable.
link |
Intensity was the second one.
link |
The third one is what we call volume.
link |
And so this is just how many reps
link |
and how many sets are you doing, right?
link |
So if you're going to do three sets of 10,
link |
that volume would be 30, right?
link |
Five sets of five, that volume is 25.
link |
It's just a simple equation.
link |
How much work are you totally doing?
link |
The next one past that is called rest intervals.
link |
So this is the amount of time you're taking
link |
in between typically a set.
link |
Then from there, you have progression,
link |
which is what we started to talk about,
link |
this progressive overload.
link |
Are you increasing by weight or reps
link |
or rest intervals or complexity or whatever?
link |
So all of those things can be changed
link |
as a method of progression.
link |
And so maybe you want to go progressing
link |
from a single joint exercise,
link |
like a leg extension on a machine,
link |
and you want to progress by moving
link |
to a whole body movement like a squat.
link |
That in and of itself, you don't have to change the load
link |
or the reps or the rest.
link |
That is a representation of progressive overload.
link |
And it's probably a pretty good place to start
link |
because number one, especially for beginners,
link |
you want to make sure that the movement pattern is correct.
link |
Don't worry about intensity.
link |
Don't worry about rep ranges or any of these things.
link |
You need to learn to move correctly
link |
and you need to give your body some time
link |
to develop some tissue tolerance
link |
so that you're not getting overtly sore.
link |
In general, soreness is a terrible proxy
link |
for exercise quality.
link |
It's a really bad way to estimate
link |
whether it was a good or a bad workout,
link |
especially for people in that beginner to middle
link |
In fact, even for our professional athletes,
link |
we do not use soreness as a metric of a good workout.
link |
It's a really bad idea for a bunch of reasons.
link |
On the same token, because stress is required
link |
for adaptation, you don't want to leave at the gym
link |
and feel like, I don't really do much.
link |
There has to be there.
link |
So if you think about soreness on a scale of one to 10,
link |
you probably want to spend most of your time
link |
in like the three.
link |
You mean post-exercise, in between workouts.
link |
And I know we'll talk about recovery extensively later,
link |
but if one body part or set of body parts is sore,
link |
is that an indication that one should stay out of training?
link |
I would imagine the answer is no in most cases.
link |
And secondarily to that, if a particular muscle is sore,
link |
does that mean that muscle is not ready
link |
to be trained again?
link |
Yeah, the answer to both of those is the same,
link |
which is no, right?
link |
You can certainly train a sore muscle.
link |
You need to, I guess, have a little bit of feel on that.
link |
So if you're a sore of like,
link |
okay, and you're moving around a little bit
link |
and you're like, man, this is a little bit sore,
link |
If you're like, I can't sit on the couch without crying
link |
because my glutes are so sore,
link |
like we probably don't need to train again, right?
link |
Does whimpering count as crying?
link |
Yeah, in that particular case, I'd say,
link |
you've actually gone to a place of detriment
link |
because now you're going to have to skip a training session
link |
and now you're behind.
link |
So your actual total volume, say across the month,
link |
is actually gonna be lower because you went way too hard
link |
in those workouts,
link |
had to take too many days off in between.
link |
You're going to see that you're going to cover less distance
link |
over the course of a month or six months or even a year.
link |
So you want to walk a pretty fine line.
link |
And for most people, I would say hedge a little bit
link |
on the side of less sore than more sore
link |
because frequency is very, very important
link |
for almost all these adaptations.
link |
At training frequency.
link |
Which is the last modifiable variable, right?
link |
Frequency, which is how many times per week are you,
link |
are you doing that thing?
link |
So those are kind of our global things
link |
that we can play with.
link |
So when I'm trying to manipulate
link |
and get strength versus hypertrophy,
link |
or you know what, I want like a little bit of both,
link |
all those variables are the things
link |
that are going through my mind.
link |
Which one do I need to move in which direction
link |
so that I can get this outcome
link |
and not this outcome over here?
link |
For example, some folks might want to get stronger,
link |
but not put muscle mass on.
link |
Some folks are just kind of want both.
link |
And that's a lot of the general public.
link |
I want to get a little stronger and a little bit more muscle.
link |
But there are instances where people
link |
for performance reasons or for purely personal preference,
link |
like I don't want to get any more muscle, great,
link |
but I want to get stronger.
link |
If you manipulate those variables correctly,
link |
you can get exactly that.
link |
Very little development in muscle size
link |
and a lot of development in strength.
link |
And this is why we continue to break world records
link |
in sports like powerlifting and weightlifting
link |
that have weight classes.
link |
So there's a top number that we can hit
link |
in terms of body size,
link |
but yet we continue to get stronger and faster.
link |
So this is very possible if you understand
link |
how to manipulate all those variables.
link |
So that being said, we can start off with,
link |
you wanted to go strength and-
link |
And I love that you mentioned the fact
link |
that it is possible to increase strength
link |
without increasing muscle size,
link |
at least not dramatically,
link |
because I think it's not just weight class athletes.
link |
I know a lot of people who, for aesthetic reasons,
link |
they'd like to be stronger.
link |
They're hearing that having strong bones
link |
and strong muscles and tendons,
link |
it's great for longevity and for avoiding injury
link |
and so many other features of life.
link |
And yet they don't want to fill out progressively larger
link |
and larger sizes of clothing.
link |
And we can go harder to the mechanisms
link |
on that piece if you want,
link |
and we can save that and come back to it.
link |
What I'd love to, both,
link |
what I'd love to know,
link |
if we could define some of these modifiable variables
link |
in the context of strength.
link |
So let's say I were somebody who,
link |
I come to you and I say,
link |
and let's just say for sake of balance here,
link |
because she actually does do some weight training.
link |
I bring my sister in and I say,
link |
me and my sister both want to get stronger.
link |
What modifiable variables should,
link |
how should we modify the variables?
link |
Love it. All right, great.
link |
I'm going to do inception on you one more time.
link |
So one of my other laws,
link |
oh, this won't be fast, I promise,
link |
of strength and conditioning,
link |
is in general, the default is all joints
link |
through all range of motion.
link |
So this is important because it's going to answer
link |
your very first question on this strength category.
link |
So in general, the ankle should go
link |
through the full range of motion of the ankle.
link |
The knee should go through the full range of motion,
link |
the knee, the hip, the elbow, et cetera, et cetera, right?
link |
Across the workout, not in a single movement.
link |
I would hope, unless there's an amazing exercise
link |
I haven't heard about.
link |
Well, there are some exercises
link |
that we're going to call more full body.
link |
Think about a full snatch.
link |
Like you're going to take a lot of your muscles,
link |
a lot of your joints through a lot of range of motions.
link |
Other ones, like an isolation,
link |
we call these single joint exercises.
link |
So imagine a bicep curl.
link |
You have one joint in that particular case,
link |
the elbow moving, the shoulder,
link |
and everything else is pretty much stable.
link |
And this is how we'll differentiate multi-joint
link |
from single joint movements.
link |
But yeah, so across, I would even say
link |
it doesn't even have to be the day,
link |
but maybe throughout the week.
link |
Try to get every joint through full range of motion.
link |
Now, a couple of quick caveats to that.
link |
I am not advocating using full range of motion
link |
and allowing really bad exercise technique.
link |
So when I say full range of motion, that's the default.
link |
That doesn't mean every single person
link |
can do that for every single exercise.
link |
It means that's where we should be striving to,
link |
and that's our starting point.
link |
You're going to see a lot less injury
link |
and a lot more productivity out of your training sessions.
link |
In fact, the science is fairly clear on this one.
link |
Strength development, as well as hypertrophy,
link |
is generally enhanced
link |
with a larger range of motion of training.
link |
And the mechanisms are like somewhat understood on that.
link |
So that being said,
link |
if you have to get into, say, a bad position
link |
with your, say, low back, the spine is a very good one.
link |
In general, the spine should stay very neutral,
link |
is what we call it.
link |
So no flexion, no extension, especially in the lumbar region.
link |
So if you're doing, say, a deadlift,
link |
and in order to take your knee
link |
through a full range of motion on a deadlift,
link |
you have to compromise your back position.
link |
So caveats there aside, don't kill me.
link |
In good positions, always.
link |
And don't kill yourselves, more importantly.
link |
So why that matters is if we walk through strength,
link |
the very first thing I'm gonna go through
link |
is the exercise selection.
link |
So let's choose an exercise
link |
which ideally has a full range of motion or close to it
link |
that doesn't induce injury for you,
link |
that you can still maintain good neck and low back
link |
and position and everything else,
link |
you feel comfortable with, so you can feel strong,
link |
but you don't feel like, oh my gosh,
link |
if you've never snatched before,
link |
having you do a snatch for a maximum, even 75%,
link |
like it's a terrible idea.
link |
You're not gonna feel confident it's gonna be a train wreck.
link |
I would rather put you on a machine bench press.
link |
So you can go, I feel stable, I feel safe here,
link |
and I can just express my strength.
link |
So exercise choice in general, full range of motion,
link |
and you wanna kind of balance between the movement areas.
link |
So this is an upper body press.
link |
So this is pushing away from you, bench press,
link |
Upper body pull, pulling an implement towards you,
link |
bent row, pull up.
link |
The pressing should be horizontal,
link |
so perpendicular to your body, as well as vertical.
link |
So this is lifting a weight over top of your head,
link |
lifting away from you.
link |
The pull version is pulling horizontally to you
link |
and pulling vertically down, pull up, things like that.
link |
From the lower body, we typically call these hinges.
link |
It's sort of a funny muscle thing
link |
that no one's gonna laugh at,
link |
but like maybe me and you here,
link |
is we'll categorize muscles as, or movements, exercises,
link |
as pushes and pulls, right?
link |
So like a squat tends to be a push,
link |
because you're pushing away the ground.
link |
A deadlift is a pull,
link |
because you're pulling the implement up to you.
link |
But in reality, every single exercise is only ever a pull,
link |
because muscle doesn't push things away.
link |
Muscle can only contract and pull on itself.
link |
And so, again, super nerdy thing
link |
that like most people are like, yeah.
link |
And everyone's like, that's so dumb.
link |
No, but I think it's a really important point,
link |
because it also speaks to something
link |
I think we'll get into later,
link |
which is that, you know, posterior chain, anterior chain.
link |
And if that's mysterious to people,
link |
it'll become clear before long.
link |
Posterior chain, anterior chain makes a lot of sense to me
link |
because of the way it's grounded
link |
and the firing of motor neurons,
link |
which is ultimately what controls muscle.
link |
So it's also, I think-
link |
Feel your nerves all the time.
link |
So it also depends on the lens
link |
through which one looks at life and exercise.
link |
Of course, my lens is primarily neuroscience.
link |
So, but I realized that the importance,
link |
I like this idea of pushing perpendicular to the body,
link |
overhead, pulling both toward the body and from overhead.
link |
That just makes really good intuitive sense,
link |
especially since a lot of people
link |
were just listening to this and not watching it.
link |
So in your minds, folks,
link |
you can think about pushing away like a punch or overhead,
link |
like lifting something overhead
link |
and then pulling toward your midline
link |
or toward your body rather,
link |
and then pulling yourself up like a pull-up in PE class
link |
for those of you that-
link |
So the lower body's the same thing, right?
link |
It's some sort of pushing away like a squat
link |
or a split squat or a lunge or something like that.
link |
And then some sort of, again, what we'll call pull or hinge.
link |
So a deadlift or a Romanian deadlift or a hamstring curl
link |
or something where you're contracting
link |
and pulling the thing in there.
link |
And you could split these
link |
into like a thousand different categories.
link |
If you're really in that field,
link |
you're gonna wanna add a bunch of other ones,
link |
but that's just like a rough conception.
link |
So if you were going to do a single workout,
link |
you could choose four exercises
link |
and you could choose one of each,
link |
one press, upper body press, one upper body pull,
link |
one lower body hinge, one lower body press.
link |
And then that would be like a decently well-rounded exercise.
link |
That's your exercise selection.
link |
And if you're taking those through a full range of motion,
link |
you're in a pretty good spot, as close as you can.
link |
The next one is intensity.
link |
So if you wanna develop strength,
link |
this comes back to one of my favorite scientists
link |
of all time, who happens to be a nerve guy, actually.
link |
And generally I like to shit on nerves
link |
as much as I possibly can, because I'm a muscle guy,
link |
but I have to give Henneman some credit here, right?
link |
And I know you know who that is.
link |
Henneman's size principle.
link |
Yeah, of course, right?
link |
So this is a series of papers.
link |
I think it was in nature.
link |
At least some of them, yeah.
link |
Yeah, in 1954, 56 or like something,
link |
you can fact check me, I'm sure you will.
link |
But he basically outlined this idea that,
link |
okay, there's a certain recruitment threshold needed
link |
for neurons to fire.
link |
And we have muscle fibers in what we call
link |
fast twitch muscle fibers and slow twitch muscle fibers.
link |
And in general, you're going to activate
link |
the slow twitch ones first, because they tend to be
link |
associated with low threshold motor neurons.
link |
It's not exactly that way, but it's close enough, right?
link |
Well, the only way that you activate
link |
some of these higher threshold neurons
link |
is to demand the muscle to produce more force.
link |
And it's fairly specific to force, right?
link |
It's not something you can do over an endurance thing,
link |
right, unless it gets really extreme and particularly happens.
link |
So in general, the only way to use these big chunks
link |
of your muscle, which are incredibly important
link |
for aging, by the way, one of the major problems we have
link |
with aging developing or development of aging related issues
link |
with muscle is the fact that we lose
link |
fast twitch fibers preferentially.
link |
And then we have major problems as we go down the line,
link |
because we've lost a big chunk of our strength and size.
link |
So you want to make sure these fibers stay alive and intact.
link |
Okay, so that being said, the only way to develop strength
link |
is then to challenge the muscle to produce more total force.
link |
If you are fairly untrained or new,
link |
I guess I should have stated this all
link |
at the beginning as well.
link |
One more inception, then I'll stop.
link |
When it comes to this level of detail
link |
of exercise prescription, a fairly untrained person
link |
is going to respond basically the same
link |
to every single thing you do.
link |
In fact, we've done this in the lab many times.
link |
We've done training studies doing things
link |
like 30 minutes of cycling and seen huge increases
link |
in muscle strength and size, which is not a prescription
link |
for most people to increase size,
link |
but people that are really untrained,
link |
if you did plyometrics or strength training
link |
or endurance running, they all just get better at everything.
link |
So that caveat kind of aside, if you want to be
link |
more intentional and more specific to the goal of strength,
link |
you need to produce more force, specificity matters.
link |
So we have size principle to help understand this,
link |
and we have our laws of specificity,
link |
which say said principle, specific adaptation
link |
to imposed demand.
link |
So the adaptation you get or the result of your training
link |
is going to be a reflection of the demand that you imposed.
link |
So if you want to get stronger,
link |
you need to impose a demand of strength, not repetitions.
link |
So this has to be, the load has to be very high.
link |
In general, you're probably looking at above 85%
link |
of your one rep max.
link |
If you're moderately trained, maybe 75% will work,
link |
lowly trained again, everything works.
link |
But in general, we want to be pressing a load
link |
So because the intensity demand is so high,
link |
that is going to enforce you to do a low repetition range.
link |
You can't do 12 reps at 95%,
link |
then it wouldn't be 95% of your one rep max.
link |
So by definition, true strength training
link |
is really going to be in like five repetitions per set
link |
That's where most of it's going to occur for specificity.
link |
So we've covered choice, intensity and repetitions, right?
link |
The total amount of sets that you do
link |
is really kind of up to your personal fitness level, right?
link |
If you did as little as like three sets per exercise,
link |
that's probably enough.
link |
Totally, yeah, totally work sets, right.
link |
So get fully warmed up and build up to that 85%.
link |
Don't just walk into the gym and throw 85% on and go,
link |
thank you, that's an important distinction.
link |
So work your way up, do some,
link |
like a very classic warmup thing would be
link |
like a set of 10 at 50%, a set of eight at 60%,
link |
a set of maybe eight again at 70%,
link |
and then maybe like a set of five at 75%.
link |
So two or three or four sets kind of building intensity
link |
and lowering the rep range.
link |
And then you would go after your two or three working sets.
link |
Also, in terms of rest intervals.
link |
Now, because we're trying to,
link |
the primary driver of strength is intensity.
link |
It's not the volume, right?
link |
It's the intensity.
link |
So in order to maintain that,
link |
we have to do a low repetition range.
link |
But in addition, we also have to have a high rest interval
link |
because if we start to,
link |
if we have any amount of fatigue can occur
link |
and we have to then either reduce the reps
link |
or reduce the intensity, we've lost the primary driver.
link |
We've lost that main signal.
link |
So the number we're gonna throw out typically
link |
is like two to four minutes.
link |
So imagine you did, you know, your set of bench press
link |
and you did five repetitions at 85%,
link |
you probably wanna rest two to four minutes
link |
before coming back to the bench.
link |
That doesn't mean you have to sit there on your phone.
link |
Like, in fact, please don't.
link |
Everyone will thank you for not doing that, I promise.
link |
You can engage other muscle groups.
link |
This is what we call supersetting.
link |
So you're doing your bench press
link |
and while that two minute clock is running for your chest
link |
to rest, you can go over and do your deadlifts.
link |
And so, you know, you can kind of move back and forth
link |
and this is how you can make strength training
link |
not seven hour workout.
link |
If you're a professional athlete,
link |
you're gonna take that time
link |
because you wanna maximize the outcome.
link |
We've done this actually in our lab too.
link |
Supersets will reduce the strength gains
link |
but by a tiny amount.
link |
And most of us don't care enough
link |
relative to it's going to triple
link |
the length of your training session.
link |
It's not worth it.
link |
So for the average person, I will tell them,
link |
For someone who's trying to break a world record
link |
in weightlifting or powerlifting, I don't superset.
link |
Yeah, I think I've found that I don't recover
link |
particularly well from strength and hypertrophy training.
link |
Like in the workout or the next day?
link |
From workout to workout.
link |
Unless I keep the total duration of those workouts,
link |
I like to say no more than 60 minutes of work, of real work.
link |
Maybe 75, past 75, I find that I just start to,
link |
I have to introduce additional rest days
link |
or I just get weaker over time.
link |
So I'd set a kind of a limit at 50 minutes
link |
and then I usually violate that limit
link |
and end up doing 60 minutes.
link |
So I'm excited to hear that one can superset exercises
link |
as long as they work different muscle groups, of course.
link |
So I wouldn't want to do like bench press
link |
and overhead press superset it
link |
because I think that goes without saying for most people,
link |
but just to point that out.
link |
But that I could do some push, pull, push, pull
link |
without compromising total intensity that much.
link |
And I certainly would be willing to give up a rep here
link |
or there or a few pounds here or there.
link |
And may I ask whether or not in doing that,
link |
one gets any even tiny bit or more of additional benefit
link |
in terms of cardiovascular work.
link |
Because I imagine after all, even a one rep max,
link |
which I've never done, as I mentioned,
link |
but let's say I get three reps on the overhead press
link |
and then I get four reps on a weighted pull up
link |
and I'm going back and forth.
link |
I'm no doubt going to be breathing harder
link |
than if I was sitting there texting away on my phone
link |
Yeah, and so in fact, in general,
link |
one of the things that I'll present in my class
link |
is a giant list of, in fact, on the top
link |
is all of these different exercise adaptations
link |
I started the conversation with.
link |
And on the vertical column are as many
link |
of the physiological potential adaptations one would get.
link |
So changes in endogenous pH, blood pressure,
link |
lymphatic changes, bone density, all these things, right?
link |
And you just have this giant list.
link |
And then you can run a matrix and you can start to look at,
link |
okay, if I do speed training,
link |
am I going to see changes in the nervous system?
link |
Well, like very much so, right?
link |
That's the primary actual reason those things work.
link |
Very little change in the muscle system.
link |
It's almost exclusively explained
link |
by the central or peripheral nervous system, right?
link |
On that same token,
link |
are you going to expect many cardiovascular adaptations
link |
And the answer is no,
link |
because although we didn't cover it,
link |
speed is very low intensity, very low rep range,
link |
Well, as you go to like strength
link |
and then you go to hypertrophy,
link |
you start seeing more and more increases
link |
in cardiovascular adaptations
link |
because you're doing exactly that, right?
link |
You're starting to reduce stress
link |
and you're starting to increase volume.
link |
But you're going to lose things like
link |
bone mineral adaptations
link |
because the load starts to go down.
link |
So you can look at this matrix
link |
and kind of understand if I'm a person
link |
who wants to kind of maximize the adaptations
link |
I get across my entire physiology
link |
for the least amount of work,
link |
you can choose these different adaptations to go after
link |
that are going to kind of land on these things, right?
link |
And exactly as you mentioned,
link |
if you're going to take five minutes rest between each rep,
link |
so let's say the extreme,
link |
you're going to do three sets of one repetition
link |
for strength at 95%,
link |
you're going to take probably five,
link |
maybe seven minutes between each attempt.
link |
Like you better not expect many like changes
link |
in your resting blood pressure,
link |
that there's no cardiovascular strain there.
link |
You're going to put it together in a circuit
link |
where you're going to lose some potential strength adaptation
link |
but you're going to gain something there.
link |
So all these things are,
link |
it's not about good or bad or right or wrong,
link |
it's always about what advantage do you want
link |
and what disadvantage do you want?
link |
And I can cut like really into the chase here
link |
on one of these things,
link |
because we'll get to this eventually.
link |
If you want to know the ones that are going to generally
link |
give you the most physiological adaptations
link |
across the most categories,
link |
you're almost always looking
link |
for hypertrophy type of training
link |
and then this anaerobic conditioning piece
link |
that we're going to do,
link |
that's going to hit the most systems at once.
link |
That's great to know
link |
and we should definitely go a little bit deeper
link |
on those types of what the modifiable variables are
link |
for those categories,
link |
because I think that I'm guessing the vast majority
link |
of people want to be a bit stronger,
link |
maybe add a little bit of muscle or more,
link |
make sure their heart is healthy and et cetera.
link |
and I think it's clarifying certainly a lot for me.
link |
So for strength, I guess training frequency.
link |
So what should determine training frequency?
link |
And I had the great benefit of a long time ago
link |
when I was in high school actually,
link |
I paid for a session over the phone with Mike Mentzer.
link |
We got to be friends.
link |
High intensity training.
link |
At the time I was pretty young
link |
and my mother kept saying like,
link |
why is this like grown man calling the house?
link |
And we would talk all the time about training,
link |
but he tried to convince me
link |
to train once every five to seven days,
link |
very few sets, very high intensity.
link |
And I must say it worked incredibly well.
link |
And I think with my recovery quotient,
link |
which was not very good,
link |
I think has improved over time, but was not very good.
link |
It was remarkable.
link |
But of course this was a time when I was-
link |
Full of the most animalism you've ever had in your life.
link |
I was 14 on my own version of anabolics.
link |
I had a long arc of puberty.
link |
And you were untrained.
link |
And I was mostly untrained.
link |
I've been running cross country
link |
and skateboarding and playing soccer.
link |
And doing all the things
link |
that are like the antithesis of growing muscle.
link |
It was literally, and people will probably say impossible.
link |
It was something like 40 pounds of muscle
link |
inside of 12 months.
link |
I wouldn't believe that.
link |
And so then of course that stopped working over time.
link |
And then you start going down the odyssey
link |
of trying to find the thing that's going to work that well.
link |
And you eventually realized
link |
that it was because you were untrained, right?
link |
So training frequency is crucial.
link |
Let's say that people are doing these whole body workouts
link |
as you've described them.
link |
Not alternating upper body, lower body.
link |
Cause there's so many different splits
link |
so it probably doesn't make sense
link |
to go into splits right now.
link |
But how often can and should one train a muscle?
link |
And how do you know if a muscle is recovered locally?
link |
And how do you know if your nervous system
link |
is recovered systemically?
link |
Okay, this is a bunch of really interesting questions.
link |
I'm not sure exactly what route you want to go.
link |
So I'll start here.
link |
As I mentioned earlier,
link |
soreness is not a good barometer of exercise quality
link |
because some types of training
link |
are going to induce more soreness
link |
and some are going to induce less.
link |
That's important to this conversation
link |
because when you ask about how do you know
link |
if a muscle is ready to train again,
link |
one of the question is, what are you training for?
link |
If you're training for hypertrophy, right?
link |
Muscle size, muscle growth.
link |
We need to hedge towards recovery
link |
because what you're trying to do
link |
is cause a massive insult there.
link |
Allow then protein synthesis to occur,
link |
building of new tissue, which takes time,
link |
48 to 72 hours, like kind of at a minimum,
link |
that process needs to occur.
link |
If you're doing actually more strength,
link |
and this is a differentiation
link |
between hypertrophy and strength,
link |
then you didn't induce actually much damage.
link |
In fact, you're generally not going to get very sore
link |
from true strength training, very little,
link |
unless you get really heavy, you did a lot.
link |
The primary driver of hypertrophy
link |
is not the same primary driver of strength.
link |
We talked about that already.
link |
That's intensity driven.
link |
For hypertrophy, it's not intensity.
link |
So because we have different mechanisms,
link |
we have different outcomes,
link |
even though they're closely aligned,
link |
strength is not going to cause a lot of soreness.
link |
Therefore, intensity is the driver.
link |
Therefore, frequency can be as high as you want.
link |
So you can train every single day,
link |
the same exact muscle, if speed or power or strength
link |
are the primary training tools,
link |
because you need stimulus there, skill as well, right?
link |
Practice, you know that as much as anybody.
link |
Developing a new motor pattern
link |
requires a lot of repetitions, right?
link |
You don't need a tremendous amount of rest.
link |
That's not a damage thing, right?
link |
It's a repatterning issue.
link |
So strength training, in fact, if you look at,
link |
again, true strength professional athletes,
link |
they're going to train the same muscles basically every day.
link |
They're going to squat every day.
link |
And is that because the primary mode of adaptation
link |
is recruitment of these high threshold motor units?
link |
So it's mainly neural.
link |
So everyone's going to say that?
link |
And this is where I get all feisty?
link |
Well, I'm not saying that.
link |
That was actually, there was a question mark there.
link |
If we were online putting comments,
link |
there'd be a question mark.
link |
We would have fought.
link |
I think I blocked you.
link |
I was just kidding.
link |
I think you already blocked me.
link |
The early adaptations to exercise,
link |
especially strength training,
link |
are hedged towards the nervous system.
link |
No question about it.
link |
People always say central nervous system,
link |
but it's probably more peripheral, right?
link |
Whatever, semantics probably, but pedantic.
link |
If you train today, tomorrow morning,
link |
you're not going to wake up with a actually increase
link |
in contractile proteins in muscle.
link |
Your muscle might be a little bit bigger
link |
due to some acute swelling,
link |
but you could have a pretty acute that persists change
link |
in the nervous system, we'll call it,
link |
that allows you to be stronger within a couple of days.
link |
Sustained hypertrophy is probably more along the lines
link |
of four weeks, where we can see that, right?
link |
We can actually see changes like in the ultrasound.
link |
Now you're making changes immediately.
link |
That protein synthesis process is happening very fast,
link |
and it's going to last.
link |
It just takes us time to measure it
link |
in terms of a noticeable change in your whole muscle size.
link |
So that being said, the first four weeks,
link |
we typically say are primarily nervous system.
link |
After that, now we're starting to see most of the changes
link |
coming from the muscle side of the equation.
link |
So with strength development,
link |
it's a combination of three areas.
link |
In fact, all muscle contraction has these same three things.
link |
It starts off with some signal, right?
link |
From somewhere in the body,
link |
whether it's all the way up the top
link |
or at the level of the spine,
link |
depending on if this is a reaction
link |
or an actual conscious control.
link |
From there, some signal has to tell the muscle to contract.
link |
Okay, so signal is one.
link |
Two, it's muscular contraction.
link |
And there's a lot of variables inside the muscle tissue
link |
itself that determine its functionality.
link |
And so if we took an individual biopsy
link |
and took a muscle fiber from you and took one from me,
link |
and we took those muscles out and put them in a Petri dish,
link |
and I tied one end to a force transducer,
link |
the other end to a thing that pulls it,
link |
and we soaked it in a bath of calcium
link |
and a bunch of other stuff,
link |
even if they were the same size,
link |
your fibers might contract a lot faster than mine,
link |
even relative to size, or not, or slower,
link |
or there's various properties.
link |
So the intrinsic fibers themselves
link |
determine a lot of functionality.
link |
From there, muscle fibers don't cause movements.
link |
Muscle fibers simply contract.
link |
They're all surrounded with connective tissue,
link |
and that's all surrounded
link |
with a bunch of more connective tissue,
link |
and that all surrounds into a muscle.
link |
That muscle is then surrounded with more connective tissue.
link |
That all comes together into a giant tendon.
link |
That tendon attaches to the bone.
link |
It's pulling on those tendon
link |
that actually move the bone that cause human movement.
link |
So that's area three.
link |
Area one, the nervous system, area two,
link |
the muscle contraction, area three,
link |
some sort of connective tissue thing.
link |
Changes happen at all three of those levels,
link |
and we're not even now talking,
link |
we even entered the discussion of biomechanics,
link |
and you changed, say, the panation angle of the muscle,
link |
which is the angle at which the muscle fibers lay
link |
relative to the bone, right?
link |
So this is basic mechanics.
link |
Is it pulling perpendicular to the bone?
link |
Is it pulling horizontal to the bone,
link |
or some sort of angle?
link |
All of these things determine human performance.
link |
So when you're talking about, again,
link |
that strength development,
link |
you can see tremendous improvements
link |
in total force production
link |
by manipulating all of those areas,
link |
and you have not touched changes in muscle size.
link |
If you change muscle size in a true sustained fashion,
link |
whether this is sarcoplasmic or contractile proteins,
link |
you have given yourself more opportunity
link |
to produce more force.
link |
It doesn't guarantee you produce more force.
link |
Bodybuilders are not stronger than power lifters,
link |
even though they have more muscle,
link |
but bodybuilders are probably stronger than most people.
link |
So there is a relationship between muscle size and strength.
link |
It's just not a one-to-one guaranteed ratio,
link |
and that's generally because,
link |
although the muscle has been aided,
link |
they may have not changed the biomechanical considerations,
link |
they may have not changed the connective tissue,
link |
nor the nervous system stuff.
link |
And so that's why we see this giant relationship,
link |
that R-value is pretty high between strength and hypertrophy,
link |
but if you really wanna get to the ends of it, it's not,
link |
and that matters to your actual question 10 minutes ago,
link |
because again, you can train strength daily
link |
on the same muscle,
link |
but if you want to allow for that process
link |
of contractile proteins to add and grow,
link |
then you're gonna have to allow some recovery,
link |
because if you go back into that muscle too soon,
link |
you're gonna blunt the response, you're gonna stop it,
link |
you're gonna cut it off.
link |
You have all kinds of problems going on in the cell
link |
that are gonna just attenuate that growth response.
link |
So I gave you the answer for strength training.
link |
The answer for hypertrophy is probably less than three
link |
out of 10 on level of soreness, so you can go again.
link |
In general, you're probably looking at 72 hours
link |
is the optimal window.
link |
So if you trained your shoulders on Monday,
link |
you probably would don't wanna train them again on Tuesday.
link |
If hypertrophy is the goal, maybe Wednesday,
link |
maybe Thursday is best.
link |
So something like an every two to three day window
link |
is probably, and we know a little bit more now
link |
about why that is.
link |
The gene cascade, the signaling response happens,
link |
well, the signaling happens instantaneously, right,
link |
The gene cascade is probably in the,
link |
peaked in the four hour window,
link |
like depending on which gene you wanna look at,
link |
but it's just kind of a snapshot.
link |
But the protein synthesis process is 24 to 48 hours
link |
thing, and so it tends to kind of look like,
link |
let that thing finish and let that signal go back
link |
to baseline, and then hit it again, and then hit it again.
link |
And now as long as you're providing the nutrients,
link |
the recovery should happen, and you should be able
link |
to sustain the same work output in the training session
link |
so the stimulus stays high and the recovery's there,
link |
and you can now continue to grow muscle.
link |
You mentioned 48 to 72 hours for hypertrophy.
link |
What if, for whatever reasons,
link |
the training split, lifestyle factors, et cetera,
link |
somebody say, let's use your example,
link |
trains shoulders on Monday.
link |
Ideally, they would train them again on Thursday
link |
in their particular instance, somewhere Wednesday
link |
or Thursday, but they don't.
link |
They wait until Saturday or Sunday for whatever reason.
link |
Maybe it's more compatible with their work,
link |
work another exercise schedule, whatever the reason.
link |
Are they actually losing hypertrophy that they gained
link |
or they've missed a window to induce further hypertrophy?
link |
It's probably better to think about it the latter.
link |
It's not that you've lost, it's just you've just kind
link |
of lost an opportunity to make more progress.
link |
I will save you a little bit, and kind of going back
link |
to your HIIT program, this is the original high-intensity
link |
training, the menstrual thing, right, which is not.
link |
The HIIT with one eye, not the high-intensity interval
link |
training, but high-intensity training,
link |
like one set to absolute failure, maybe two
link |
for each muscle group.
link |
20-minute workouts.
link |
Dividing your body into a three-way split,
link |
and then literally training like six times a month,
link |
which most people think that is absolutely crazy.
link |
There's no way that's going to work.
link |
And I can tell you, if you are untrained,
link |
you grow like a weed, if you train hard enough.
link |
Even if you're trained, look at the people Mike trained.
link |
He put a lot of bodybuilders on really high levels.
link |
Now, they had the same similar help you had
link |
at that timeframe.
link |
Wait, to be very clear, I was not
link |
taking exogenous antibiotics.
link |
No, but your endogenous was just as good.
link |
I wasn't measuring my levels there, but I probably would.
link |
And in general, I tend to grow pretty easily
link |
from weight training, but the, but,
link |
and I should say that to Mike's credit,
link |
and I think this is an important message,
link |
that he was the one who really said,
link |
look, unless you're going to make a professional career
link |
out of it, do not run the health hazards
link |
of exogenous hormones.
link |
You know, it's certainly not at your age.
link |
So he deterred me from that, which was great,
link |
because it never entered my mind.
link |
It just was one of those things where Mike Mentzer
link |
said, don't do it.
link |
And he had clearly done it, right?
link |
And so he's speaking from an informed place.
link |
It never entered my mind, but also I was,
link |
what was really wild is I was continuing
link |
to run cross country.
link |
And so there was a, there was a trade off there
link |
But when you're young, you can get,
link |
many people can get away with what at this age
link |
would surely place me into a state of over-training,
link |
even at low volume.
link |
Yeah, well, I mean like the whole field
link |
on interference effects has changed quite a bit recently,
link |
which we can come back to if you want.
link |
But just to finish out the idea here
link |
with that last question,
link |
if you want to take five days or six days
link |
in between each muscle group, you can do that.
link |
In fact, if you look at the research,
link |
it's going to show that frequency is not that important.
link |
It will, it's not that it's unimportant,
link |
but it's, it can handle changes
link |
as long as you get to the same total volume.
link |
So you can do that.
link |
You just have to do a lot more work in that one workout.
link |
If you care about the six week, eight week thing,
link |
if you're like, I'm in this for the next 60 years,
link |
like it's probably okay, right?
link |
But it can be there that the challenge with splitting up
link |
your training sessions for hypertrophy
link |
into smaller numbers, like once or twice a week,
link |
it's just difficult to get that number.
link |
It's typical to get that volume done.
link |
Volume wise, the more recent meta-analyses are going to say
link |
that you're probably looking at around 10 working sets
link |
per muscle group per week.
link |
Seems to be kind of the minimum threshold
link |
that you're going to want to hit.
link |
So if you did three sets of 10 at your shoulders on Monday,
link |
three sets of 10 shoulders Wednesday and three on Friday,
link |
that's nine working sets.
link |
If you wanted to do three different shoulder work,
link |
exercises on Monday and hit your nine sets,
link |
it's not really actually going to be that much different.
link |
The problem is 10 is kind of a minimum.
link |
You probably want to look for more like 15 to 20.
link |
And in fact, well-trained folks, 20, 25.
link |
That becomes very challenging in one workout.
link |
In fact, defunct though,
link |
you're not going to be able to do it, right?
link |
And so that is where it's not the frequency
link |
that looks like it kills you.
link |
It's just the fact you have got to get,
link |
because the total driver of strength is intensity,
link |
but the total driver of hypertrophy is volume.
link |
Assume you're taking it to fatigue, right?
link |
Or muscular failure.
link |
So it's just tough to get enough done.
link |
If you can, and if you want to set your schedule up
link |
that way, like you probably remember,
link |
if you do those types of training sessions
link |
where you're just going to completely exhaust a muscle,
link |
it's going to be sore for a while.
link |
You're probably not going to come back.
link |
And that's sort of the logic behind that was
link |
let's take this thing to tremendous failure
link |
and give it six days to recover.
link |
It can work, it's just not the best,
link |
I think is one way to think about it.
link |
It's also hard to do those workouts
link |
without a training partner,
link |
if you really want to do them correctly.
link |
And stimulants and headphones
link |
and all kinds of other things, right?
link |
Well, anyway, yeah, stimulants are not,
link |
I certainly don't recommend those.
link |
It may be a cup of coffee or two, if that's your thing.
link |
And maybe some of the safer supplements,
link |
but certainly not the sorts of stimulants
link |
that the guys in the seventies and eighties
link |
were famous for taking.
link |
You talked about repetition ranges
link |
broadly for strength training, so five or less.
link |
You said frequency could be as often as every day.
link |
Rest, two to four minutes.
link |
Maybe even longer if you're going
link |
for one repetition maximum.
link |
For hypertrophy, what are the repetition ranges
link |
that are effective?
link |
And what are the ones that are most effective
link |
if one is trying to maximize some of the other variables?
link |
Like people don't want to spend more than an hour
link |
to 75 minutes in the gym.
link |
Because I think that while the rep ranges
link |
might be quite broad, as you alluded to earlier,
link |
there's the practical, there are the practical constraints.
link |
So what repetition ranges or percent
link |
of one repetition maximum should people consider
link |
when thinking about hypertrophy?
link |
The quick answer there is anywhere between
link |
like five to 30 reps per set.
link |
That's going to show across the literature
link |
pretty much equal hypertrophy gains.
link |
And we could have a really interesting discussion
link |
about why that is, but I'm just remembering one thing
link |
from a second ago.
link |
I want to give a better answer for the frequency.
link |
You can do every single week for strength
link |
or every single day for strength.
link |
If you want though, like what's probably minimally viable,
link |
two, twice per week per muscle.
link |
So hamstrings, strength twice per week.
link |
That's a good number to get most people really strong.
link |
You can do every single day.
link |
You don't need to though.
link |
So I want to make sure that, like I wasn't saying
link |
you have to train a muscle 85% every single day
link |
Two is a good number.
link |
Three is great, but probably even two is really effective.
link |
And this explains the high frequency
link |
of training for strength athletes.
link |
That's always mystified me.
link |
And the very long workouts make sense because very long-
link |
They're going to even train twice a day.
link |
Like even though it's a squat,
link |
in the morning squat in the afternoon, every day.
link |
With their eating and their sleeping,
link |
they probably don't have time for anything else.
link |
That's why they're pros.
link |
So that's their job, right?
link |
That's what they do.
link |
So yeah, hypertrophy.
link |
Strength training programming is somewhat complicated, right?
link |
Because of, that's not the danger,
link |
but you're going to have to pay one way or the other, right?
link |
The risk is a little bit higher because the load's higher
link |
and you have to be a little bit more technically proficient.
link |
When it comes to hypertrophy training,
link |
the way I like to explain it is it's kind of idiot proof.
link |
The programming is idiot proof.
link |
The work is hard though.
link |
So here's your range.
link |
Anywhere between five reps and 30.
link |
Can you hit somewhere in there?
link |
It's all equally effective.
link |
You can't screw that up.
link |
The only caveat for hypertrophy
link |
is you have to take it to muscular failure.
link |
And you need enough rest for the adaptation
link |
and protein synthesis to occur?
link |
All right, and if you recover faster,
link |
you can maybe do it more frequently.
link |
And if you don't, maybe less frequently.
link |
By that logic, should people perhaps experiment
link |
and figure out what repetition range
link |
allows them to recover in concert
link |
with the training frequency that they can do consistently?
link |
My recommendation is I think you should actually
link |
set your, use the repetition range
link |
as a way to have some variation.
link |
Because most people don't want to go in the gym
link |
and do three sets of 10.
link |
They're going to get very bored very quickly.
link |
And so I think you should actually intentionally change
link |
the rep schemes for simple sake of having more fun.
link |
It is a very different challenge.
link |
The mechanisms that are inducing hypertrophy are different,
link |
but there's only a maximum amount of growth
link |
that one can get, right?
link |
And so you have, as best we think it now,
link |
and some people actually will espouse
link |
that we know really clearly about the mechanisms
link |
of muscle hypertrophy, we don't.
link |
It's still very much a guessing game.
link |
But the three most likely drivers are one,
link |
metabolic stress, two, mechanical tension,
link |
and then three, muscular damage.
link |
You don't have to have all three.
link |
One is sufficient.
link |
You can have a little bit of one or two,
link |
and you can kind of, so you get it to play here.
link |
We've already talked about the muscular damage.
link |
Again, it's very clear, more damage is not better.
link |
But it is somewhat a decent proxy, right?
link |
Like again, a little bit of soreness is good.
link |
Just don't get so sore,
link |
it's compromising your total volume, all right?
link |
Mechanical tension is kind of like strength.
link |
And this is why if you do even set to five or eight,
link |
and you're kind of close to that strength range,
link |
you will gain a little bit of muscle.
link |
Not optimal muscle gain, but you're gonna gain some
link |
because everything in these,
link |
like physiology didn't cut off at four reps,
link |
and then five reps is a different thing, right?
link |
It's always a blend.
link |
So think of it as like a fading curve.
link |
As you get closer to the end, it fades less effective.
link |
As you get closer to the middle, it's more effective.
link |
Anywhere between eight reps per set to 30,
link |
it's equally effective.
link |
Past 30, it's gonna blend out.
link |
Past eight to five to four to three,
link |
it's gonna blend lesser there.
link |
So metabolic stress is one.
link |
The damage is the other, or sorry,
link |
mechanical tension is the one that's heavy.
link |
Muscle damage is the other one.
link |
The third one is metabolic stress.
link |
And this is, I get a bit of an area of scientific contention
link |
but something's there.
link |
I know something's there.
link |
We're just kind of fumbling to figure out what exactly it is
link |
and this is, metabolic stress is the burn, right?
link |
It's why blood flow restriction training probably works.
link |
That's done very light.
link |
So there's no mechanical tension.
link |
There's very little damage,
link |
but somehow it induces a good amount of hypertrophy.
link |
I tried this, I have a friend, former special operator
link |
who was on the East coast and took me
link |
through a blood flow restriction training protocol
link |
And I don't think I actually cried, but-
link |
I might've cried out once or twice.
link |
It was unbelievable, especially the lower body movements.
link |
Now it was a humid day.
link |
I'll claim a little bit of jet lag, but it was brutal.
link |
It was really brutal.
link |
Do it on the best day of your life and it's still brutal.
link |
Okay, well, that makes me feel a little bit better.
link |
And people should know that it is important
link |
to use the proper cuffs for these things.
link |
I don't have any relationship to any of the companies
link |
that sell these cuffs, but the reason is
link |
that you actually need to block particular avenues
link |
You can't simply cinch off a muscle.
link |
You can't tourniquet a muscle and train.
link |
You can actually kill yourself that way.
link |
Yeah, you can get a blood clot.
link |
And so if you're interested
link |
in blood flow restriction training,
link |
I imagine you have some content about this
link |
or will at some point, but also there are resources online
link |
that people can look up.
link |
A question about hypertrophy training
link |
that I think many people are wondering about.
link |
Train to failure or don't train to failure?
link |
Assuming good form.
link |
Yeah, okay, assuming good form, great.
link |
The answer is both.
link |
So you wanna train to failure,
link |
but you don't need to go to extreme failure.
link |
So you don't need to necessarily go to that,
link |
like a partner has to lift the barbell off my chest,
link |
but you have to get close.
link |
You have to drive either heavy, stress, damage, right,
link |
And so a really easy practical way to think about this,
link |
I heard Mike Isratil who runs a company
link |
called Renaissance Periodization years ago
link |
outlined this at a NSCA talk, and it was beautiful.
link |
And I thought this is the most eloquent way
link |
to explain the context about training hypertrophy.
link |
So only to look for three things in your workout.
link |
And let's say that you have a particular muscle to grow.
link |
Let's say you want your glutes to get larger.
link |
Okay, when you're doing your glute exercises,
link |
number one, are you feeling the glute contract?
link |
Okay, it doesn't have to be there,
link |
but that's a good sign if it is.
link |
Okay, let's say I didn't really feel my glute contract.
link |
I felt it more in my quads or my back.
link |
Did you feel a big pump afterwards?
link |
No, I didn't really feel a pump there either, or during.
link |
Number three, next day,
link |
did you feel a little bit of soreness there at all?
link |
Well, that's a very good indication.
link |
You didn't feel it during the workout.
link |
You felt no sort of pump and it didn't get sore.
link |
Don't expect much growth.
link |
You distributed the work across a bunch of muscle groups.
link |
Most likely other muscle groups were too involved, right?
link |
Especially if you're like,
link |
no, but man, my back got really,
link |
well, that's a really good indication
link |
of telling you what the hell was moving.
link |
And so in terms of targets,
link |
if you were to put, again, a one to 10 scale,
link |
how much should I feel it burning during?
link |
Anything less than a three,
link |
okay, it's probably not doing much, right?
link |
But it doesn't, like seven is not,
link |
a 10 is not better than seven.
link |
You need to feel it, but it doesn't have to be like,
link |
oh my gosh, I'm dying here.
link |
Soreness, same barometer, right?
link |
So if you can get like three, three and three,
link |
you're probably in a pretty good spot.
link |
Five, five and five is maybe better,
link |
but you don't need to go much past that.
link |
So I want you to feel the muscle group either working
link |
or if you're like, oh, I didn't feel it much.
link |
I didn't really get a pump,
link |
but the next day it got really sore.
link |
Well, then you're still, you know, you're on a good path.
link |
Again, really sore as in like,
link |
oh, a little tender, but next day it's okay.
link |
Day after that, I could train, no problem.
link |
That's really what you want to go after.
link |
And in terms of understanding,
link |
is this likely to produce some growth or not?
link |
Excellent, excellent, very clear parameters
link |
and recommendations I know are benefiting me
link |
and will benefit a lot of people.
link |
If you'd be willing to throw out a few sort of sets
link |
and rep parameters that could act as broad guidelines
link |
for people who want to explore further,
link |
I realized that with all these modifiable variables
link |
that there's no one size fits all, four strength.
link |
I love this five to 30 for hypertrophy.
link |
That's the prebital thing.
link |
I don't think I've ever done a 30 rep set of anything,
link |
but now that you've thrown that out there,
link |
I see it as a bit of a challenge.
link |
You want to know what's awesome about 30?
link |
You're going to get an insane pump.
link |
You're going to burn like crazy,
link |
but you won't get super sore
link |
because the mechanical tension is so low.
link |
So you can get away with those things and you,
link |
it's hard because your mind is going to wander.
link |
You're going to get it like rep 20
link |
and you're going to be like, I'm done.
link |
And you're like, no, there's a lot left here to get to 30.
link |
Where like a set of 10 is much easier.
link |
Like you're just like, okay, two more, two more.
link |
Set of 30 is like, I got 16 more.
link |
It's awful, but you're not going to get this.
link |
It's terrible, right?
link |
And people tend to just kind of like check out.
link |
So 30 is possible, but a little bit extreme, extreme.
link |
But I would recommend all of them.
link |
Like it's a really fun play.
link |
You can do different in the same workout too, by the way.
link |
Like you could do one set of 10 pushups
link |
and then take a little break and then do a set of 25.
link |
You can mix and match these things.
link |
There's no magic recipe that has to happen for all those
link |
or do it different.
link |
So Mondays are my sets of 10 days.
link |
Wednesdays are my set of 20 days
link |
and Fridays are my set of 30 days.
link |
And you can have all kinds of fun there
link |
and it's hard to screw up.
link |
Great, I love that phrase is always reassuring.
link |
So for strength, is there a sets and reps protocol
link |
that is pretty surefire?
link |
So a way to just think about a really fast answer
link |
for power, well, speed, power and strength
link |
is what I just call the three to five concept, right?
link |
So pick three to five exercises.
link |
If you're feeling better that day, choose on the higher end.
link |
If you're feeling less that day
link |
or you have a shorter timeframe to train, go less.
link |
So this would be three sets or three exercises rather
link |
or five exercises the most.
link |
So three to five exercises, do three to five reps,
link |
three to five sets, take three to five minutes rest
link |
in between and do it three to five times a week.
link |
So that can be as little as three sets of three
link |
for three exercises, three times a week.
link |
That's a 20 minute workout three times a week.
link |
It can be as high as five sets of five for five exercises,
link |
So it's very broad and allows people to still stay
link |
within the domains of strength and power
link |
while still being able to move and contour toward
link |
their lifestyle and soreness and time and all those things.
link |
The only differentiator to pay attention to
link |
between power and strength is intensity.
link |
So if you want strength,
link |
this is now 85% plus of your max, right?
link |
If you want power, it needs to be a lot lighter
link |
because you need to move more towards the velocity
link |
into the spectrum because power is strength
link |
multiplied by speed.
link |
So while getting stronger by definition can help power,
link |
you probably want to spend more of your time
link |
in the 40% to 70% range, like plus or minus.
link |
Both of them conceptually they'll work everything else.
link |
The exercise, the reps, the frequency,
link |
all that can be still in the three to five range.
link |
Just change the intensity depending
link |
on which outcome you want.
link |
So the nervous system obviously plays an important role
link |
at the level of nerves controlling
link |
the contraction of muscle fibers.
link |
But of course we have these upper motor neurons,
link |
which are the ones that reside in our brain
link |
that control the lower motor neurons that control muscle.
link |
And this takes us into the realm of where the mind is at
link |
during a particular movement.
link |
And to me, this is not an abstract thing.
link |
I can imagine doing workouts that are mainly focused
link |
on strength or mainly focused on hypertrophy.
link |
And in the case of strength, am I trying to move weights?
link |
And when I'm trying to generate hypertrophy,
link |
am I trying to quote unquote, challenge muscles?
link |
In other words, if I'm just trying to move a weight
link |
away from my body, pushing a bench press
link |
or an overhead press, I don't know that I want my mind
link |
thinking about the contraction of my medial delts.
link |
I think I want my mind in getting the weight overhead
link |
with the best proper form, best, excuse me, and proper form.
link |
And certainly with hypertrophy training,
link |
best improper form is going to be the target as well.
link |
But that simple, or I should say subtle mental shift
link |
changes the patterns of nerve fiber recruitment.
link |
So can we say to get stronger, focus on moving weights,
link |
still with proper form and safely,
link |
and to get hypertrophy, focus on challenging muscles,
link |
still with proper form and safely?
link |
Yeah, as a snapshot answer,
link |
it is a very fair thing to think about.
link |
Intentionality matters for both.
link |
In other words, if you look at some interesting science
link |
that's been done on power development and speed development,
link |
the intent to move is actually more important
link |
than the actual movement velocity.
link |
So if you're doing say something for power or strength,
link |
and you're doing just enough to get the bar up,
link |
that will result in less improvements in strength
link |
than even if you're moving at the exact same speed,
link |
but you're intending to move faster.
link |
And this is one of the reasons why good coaching matters.
link |
So if you're coaching an athlete
link |
through a power workout especially,
link |
and they're doing enough to just lift 50%
link |
of their one rep max,
link |
it's not going to generate as much speed development
link |
as them trying to move that bar as fast as they can,
link |
even if the net result is the same bar by velocity.
link |
Turns out nerves matter.
link |
That's a, I mean, I was about to say amazing,
link |
but as a neuroscientist,
link |
if I say amazing that nerves matter.
link |
What's amazing to me is what, if I understand correctly,
link |
what you're saying is that even if the bar is moving
link |
at the same speed, same weight,
link |
if my internal representation, my thoughts are,
link |
I'm trying to move this as fast as possible
link |
versus I'm just trying to get the bar away from me
link |
and get the weight up, I'm going to get different outcomes.
link |
Yep, this is quality of work, right?
link |
This is, did you do enough to just check off the box
link |
or did you actually strive for adaptation, right?
link |
Similar concept actually works for hypertrophy
link |
in terms of there is a handful of very recent studies
link |
that have looked at what we'll call
link |
the mind-muscle connection,
link |
and this is doing things like imagine a bicep curl,
link |
and you're simply looking at and watching your biceps
link |
and you're thinking about contracting it harder.
link |
Even though you execute the same repetitions
link |
at the same exact intensity,
link |
initial indications are the mind-body connection
link |
are going to result in more growth than not.
link |
You just gave authorization for people
link |
to look at their muscles contracting in the gym.
link |
Please do, yeah, of course, right?
link |
But the selfie is still ruled out.
link |
I'd rather you look at your muscles than your phone,
link |
so I'm fine with it.
link |
Those are initial, we don't have a large depth of research
link |
to support that and maybe some stuff will come encounter it,
link |
but it does, it matches what folks in that community
link |
have been saying for a very long time, right?
link |
There's actually some stuff on simply flexing in between.
link |
So if you've ever seen a bodybuilder,
link |
they'll do their set of bicep curls
link |
and then they'll get out and they'll flex and they'll check,
link |
and they're literally, this is what Arnold did, right?
link |
This is, if you go back to pumping an iron.
link |
Or college weight rooms, I should say.
link |
For some reason, there's something about that age group.
link |
There's a lot of checking of biceps in college weight rooms
link |
for reasons that escape me.
link |
If you ever interact with my wife,
link |
she will be the first to tell you,
link |
I cannot walk past a mirror without like,
link |
I'm checking something out.
link |
Or that she can't?
link |
Like I'm the one that cannot walk past.
link |
Well then I'll be careful not to disparage that.
link |
It has nothing to do with the hypertrophy,
link |
but I'm just like, I'm a muscle guy.
link |
So I'm always like thinking and tinkering or whatever.
link |
But yeah, it is, I think it's very much worth your time
link |
to do a higher quality training session,
link |
be more intentional, be present,
link |
than just executing the same exact workout.
link |
I think that's globally very clear to be to your advantage.
link |
So if you're thinking, look, I'm gonna,
link |
like I don't wanna work out today.
link |
I got all this going on or I'm tired or whatever.
link |
I'm just gonna do the workout anyways and get through it.
link |
If you can go, you know what though?
link |
Like I'm gonna cut 15 minutes out of this thing.
link |
I'm gonna get my head right.
link |
I'm gonna go get 20 minutes of quality work done.
link |
That's your best option by far.
link |
You alluded to the fact that even just looking
link |
at a particular muscle might benefit
link |
in terms of the number of fibers you can recruit
link |
or its potential for hypertrophy.
link |
I've heard before and I certainly have experienced
link |
that muscles that for whatever reason,
link |
genetics or sports that one played, et cetera,
link |
muscles that we find that we can contract
link |
to the point of almost a slightly painful contraction
link |
seem to grow more readily than muscles
link |
that we can't recruit very easily.
link |
And the reason I mentioned sports that we played earlier
link |
is you just have to watch the Olympics
link |
to see that swimmers obviously
link |
are very good at engaging their lats.
link |
You look at the gymnasts,
link |
they seem to be very good at engaging everything.
link |
And they go through a huge number
link |
of different dynamic movements that explains that.
link |
So I find that if people say,
link |
oh, I can't get stronger in this
link |
or my whatever body part is weak
link |
in terms of its inability to engage hypertrophy,
link |
that oftentimes that can be because of an inability
link |
to engage those upper motor neurons
link |
to deliberately isolate those muscles.
link |
Are there ways that people can learn
link |
to engage particular muscle groups more effectively
link |
over time for sake of hypertrophy or strength
link |
or for cases of trying to overcome injury potential
link |
or injury because imbalances are bad across the board?
link |
Yeah, this is actually very common
link |
and I think everyone has probably gone through this.
link |
There's some part that you just can't get going.
link |
For me, that was the lats.
link |
That was the rhomboids, so my back muscles.
link |
For years, I couldn't activate my lats or my rhomboids.
link |
These are the muscle groups
link |
that connect your shoulder blades.
link |
So if you try to squeeze your shoulder blades together,
link |
that set of muscles there are called your rhomboids.
link |
Your lats, of course, are more vertical
link |
and pull you kind of up and down.
link |
No matter how many lat pull-downs I did,
link |
bent rows, pull-ups, I could never see any development there,
link |
no increase in strength.
link |
And it took me probably a decade to figure out
link |
how the hell to actually get these things on.
link |
In fact, if you would have asked me,
link |
even in my college years as a college football player,
link |
hey, flex your lats, like show me your lats,
link |
you would have seen no movement there.
link |
When I was doing a pull-up, in that particular case,
link |
the only way I could get the bar to move
link |
was by using my biceps, right?
link |
So it's a synergistic muscle.
link |
It's supposed to be a secondary or tertiary muscle
link |
in that movement, but for me, it was primer
link |
because of my overstrength in my biceps
link |
coupled with my lack of activation in the lats.
link |
So you're compensating the same movement.
link |
Actually, kind of an easy way to think about this is,
link |
imagine doing a bent row.
link |
So imagine you're bent over kind of at a 45 degree
link |
or a horizontal angle, and you're gonna pull
link |
a barbell to your belly button, all right?
link |
Now you can actually do that exact same movement
link |
with very little back muscle activation
link |
by simply flexing your elbows more.
link |
And so you think the barbell's going all the way down,
link |
it's coming all the way up to touching my belly,
link |
and you think you're doing
link |
a great back development exercise,
link |
when in fact, because of the way
link |
that you're executing the movement,
link |
you're getting very little back development.
link |
And this is a really good example
link |
of why someone has done a specific exercise
link |
many, many, many times, but yet failed
link |
to see development in a muscle group,
link |
which goes back to earlier part of our conversation,
link |
which is why exercises themselves
link |
do not determine the adaptation.
link |
It's the execution that matters, right?
link |
It's the technique, it's the rep range,
link |
all of those are gonna determine your actual result.
link |
So if any time you're banging your head against the wall
link |
and thinking like, why am I not getting movement here,
link |
growth or strength or whatever,
link |
it's almost one of those,
link |
it's guaranteed to be one of those areas, right?
link |
You're probably not getting the muscle groups to activate.
link |
In that particular example, just because we're here,
link |
try, imagine doing that bent row.
link |
Instead of pulling the barbell to your belly,
link |
squeeze your shoulder blades together first,
link |
as far as they can possibly go,
link |
and then bring your elbows up
link |
without changing the angle of your elbow.
link |
So in other words, without bringing your hand
link |
closer to your shoulder.
link |
So keep that same angle and come up
link |
as high as you possibly can,
link |
and then finish out the movement.
link |
That's going to guarantee a utilization first
link |
of the back muscles and a finishing with the biceps
link |
at the end, which is how that movement is supposed to go.
link |
So how do you coach into that?
link |
Well, it can be a number of things.
link |
Whenever I'm diagnosing movement quality,
link |
I look for a handful of things,
link |
but very first one is awareness.
link |
You'd be surprised how many folks,
link |
when you just simply tell them that muscle group right there
link |
and maybe you give them a tactical prompt,
link |
so you touch it or you put something against it.
link |
This is actually why, sorry, I'm jumping over the place,
link |
but this is why things like a belt work very well
link |
for actually increasing abdominal strength.
link |
So a misconception out there is if you wear like a belt
link |
when you're lifting,
link |
then the belt kind of does all the work for you
link |
and your abs get weaker.
link |
That can happen, but the exact opposite can happen as well.
link |
So if you take a belt, for example,
link |
and you cinch it down really tight,
link |
and then you just completely disregard your midsection,
link |
you will see a loss of strength in your midsection
link |
because now the belt is doing the work.
link |
But if you put the belt on just a little bit,
link |
kind of tight to where you get some sensory feedback
link |
and you think about using that belt
link |
as a way to activate the core musculature,
link |
you will actually see a higher,
link |
and if we look at like EMG activation,
link |
the core muscles would be activated higher
link |
to a greater extent than when the belt is off.
link |
Because of proprioceptive feedback.
link |
And for those that are wondering what proprioceptive feedback
link |
is, proprioceptive feedback is that there are nerves
link |
that extend out to the muscles
link |
that control muscle contractions,
link |
but then there are sensory inputs from the skin and muscle
link |
that go back into the nervous system
link |
and those work in concert.
link |
And that feedback is proprioceptive.
link |
I think it literally translates to a knowledge
link |
of where one's limbs are and what's happening on those.
link |
I've seen, I don't have a training partner,
link |
but I've seen in gyms where someone will be training
link |
and someone would tap the muscle of the person
link |
who's doing the work in order to,
link |
this is consensual tapping of other people's muscles,
link |
not walking around touching people's muscles, please.
link |
To provide that proprioceptive feedback
link |
so that the person doing the exercises
link |
becomes more aware of the muscle
link |
that they're supposed to be training.
link |
And it seems that that's probably an effective practice.
link |
I'll give you two examples.
link |
I'll go to the back with that pulling movement,
link |
but then I'll stay on the belt really quickly.
link |
So a very easy example that you can do right now listening,
link |
and I learned this from Brian McKenzie,
link |
our mutual friend, right?
link |
So if you take your hands and open them up,
link |
like you make an L with both your hands,
link |
and I'll take those and put them around your waist
link |
just above your hip bones.
link |
Now, what I want you to do is press out
link |
as hard as you can on your hands with your core.
link |
And you can feel a lot of core activation.
link |
Most people think core activation
link |
is the front of your stomach, right?
link |
What you need to do is create a cylinder around your back.
link |
So it's the front, it's the side, and it's the back.
link |
So if you take your two fingers, point them.
link |
Now put them just outside your belly button.
link |
Can you move your fingers by just moving your ab muscles?
link |
90% of people can do yes.
link |
Now go to that same position
link |
just above what's called your ASIS,
link |
so your anterior superior iliac spine,
link |
right up that front of your hip bone, right in the front.
link |
Great, 50% of people are not gonna get any movement there.
link |
Take your thumb and go right above your PSIS.
link |
PSIS, posterior superior iliac spine, right?
link |
Now, can you move?
link |
Sort of if I do a mini little back extension.
link |
Don't, just with your core musculature.
link |
Yeah, 90% of people can't.
link |
If you can't perform that contraction,
link |
you can't stabilize your spine.
link |
So only way to get stabilization in your spine
link |
is then to go through hyperextension.
link |
And now that's a compression strategy
link |
you're putting on your spine.
link |
It's better than rounding your back, like going forward,
link |
but overextension is not great either.
link |
So you wanna be able to flex the musculature
link |
in a cylindric fashion so you have control.
link |
So if you go back to our very first things
link |
and with your hands open and you put them right here,
link |
and if you're like, I can't get activation,
link |
if you pay attention to your thumb, right?
link |
Now just move your thumb.
link |
And now you see activation back there, right?
link |
Now if you can imagine turning that on just a little bit,
link |
and now notice how I can do this, by the way,
link |
at the same time I'm talking.
link |
If you have to go,
link |
we don't have control, right?
link |
So you have to be able to separate breath from brace.
link |
So now if I can put myself in a position,
link |
and Kelly Starrett has always said 20%,
link |
give me 20% activation here.
link |
And now I can squat, I can hinge, I can jump.
link |
I don't need to be locked down to 100% scream
link |
to be able to brace my spine.
link |
That's gonna be ineffective and wasteful.
link |
Well, the belt provides that proprioceptive feedback
link |
where I can put it on 20%.
link |
And it just is a reminder,
link |
if I don't press against the belt,
link |
the belt slides and falls down a little bit
link |
because it's not on super tight.
link |
If it's on so dang tight, it's doing the work and I forget.
link |
So we just want a little bit of feedback there.
link |
Same thing with your upper back.
link |
If you're having a difficult time activating those rhomboids
link |
or those lats, someone can do a simple thing
link |
where they take their finger,
link |
put it right between your shoulder blades.
link |
And you just tell them things like,
link |
hey, squeeze my finger, squeeze my finger.
link |
As you're doing your bent row where you're pulled down,
link |
you can touch the lat.
link |
You can do just visualization stuff.
link |
So just imagine like a 3D rendering of that muscle group.
link |
And you're watching that muscle group contract.
link |
It's very powerful and very effective to do it.
link |
So a touch, a visual,
link |
all this stuff can help get people to activate.
link |
Outside of simple awareness,
link |
typically eccentric overload is a very effective way
link |
for activation of a difficult to target muscle.
link |
So the lowering of the bar
link |
or the lowering of the weight.
link |
The movement of the weight away from the body
link |
is not necessarily always lowering
link |
because that kind of depends on what
link |
muscle group you're doing.
link |
Things like a pull-up.
link |
Okay, so if I'm going to do a pull-up
link |
and I have poor lat activation,
link |
I can still get the pull-up muscle movement
link |
executed by contraction of the biceps
link |
and things like that.
link |
However, to make the movement simpler,
link |
I'm going to go all the way to the top.
link |
So imagine stepping on a box or something,
link |
going all the way to that top of that pull-up position.
link |
And starting from there,
link |
I want you to simply lower it under control.
link |
And so you're just simply breaking the movement down
link |
into smaller pieces that allow you
link |
to focus on the execution more.
link |
It's going to be great.
link |
Eccentrics are great for strength development,
link |
very good for hypertrophy,
link |
and allow you to focus on control.
link |
I'm willing to bet a huge percentage of you out there
link |
who've like, I've never had a sore lat.
link |
You know, I've done a lot of pull-ups and things like that.
link |
If you do that eccentric only,
link |
you'll probably wake up the next day going,
link |
oh gosh, I feel it there.
link |
And that's a sign,
link |
even if you didn't feel it in the workout,
link |
but I got a little sore the next day,
link |
keep down that path.
link |
And then eventually you'll be able to do a concentric,
link |
maybe take a break,
link |
maybe do an isometric where you just hold that position,
link |
and eventually work that into a progression
link |
where you can do the concentric, eccentric,
link |
and isometric portions and get activation.
link |
So that may take you six weeks,
link |
may take you six months,
link |
but that's generally a pretty good strategy
link |
for learning how to activate a muscle group.
link |
Terrific suggestions.
link |
Is it true that eccentric emphasized movements
link |
might require a little bit longer recovery
link |
or they lead to more soreness than concentric movements?
link |
Yeah, they typically can,
link |
but they're also higher force output.
link |
So very good for strength development,
link |
but they're going to lead on average to more soreness.
link |
So more potential for intracellular disruption,
link |
that is going to be associated with pain.
link |
There's not as much,
link |
people will like to explain muscle soreness
link |
as a result of microtrauma and micro tears in the muscle.
link |
That can happen, but that's not the norm.
link |
Most of the time it is things like disruption of calcium
link |
that's going to lead to excessive swelling,
link |
excessive pressure,
link |
and that's going to be then translated as extreme pain.
link |
So that's probably explaining more of muscle soreness
link |
than actually microtrauma.
link |
I was going to get to breathing later,
link |
but maybe just for now,
link |
if we can do a brief little foray into breathing
link |
as it relates to weight training.
link |
Is there a prescriptive for how to breathe
link |
during resistance training?
link |
Here I'm thinking with weights,
link |
not necessarily body weight only movements,
link |
although I suppose it could be,
link |
that applies 75% of the time to 75% of the people.
link |
What I was taught,
link |
and I'm hoping you're going to tell me this was wrong,
link |
because then there might be more benefits awaiting me,
link |
is that I should exhale on the effort
link |
and inhale on the lesser effort portion of an exercise.
link |
Is there a better way to breathe?
link |
There is a better way to think about it.
link |
So number one, if you can breathe and brace,
link |
then this conversation goes away.
link |
So if you can maintain intramuscular,
link |
intra-abdominal pressure while breathing,
link |
then I don't really care when you breathe.
link |
Very challenging to do at very heavy weights.
link |
If we flag this on two areas of a paradigm,
link |
paradigm one over here, you're going to do a set of 30,
link |
and you're going to do front squats
link |
where a barbell is sitting on your throat.
link |
If you don't take a breath,
link |
this is going to end one way and one way only,
link |
Clearly has to be some breathing strategy.
link |
The other end of the spectrum is,
link |
let's say you're going to do a vertical jump.
link |
You don't need any amount of breath there.
link |
It's never going to happen, right?
link |
The question is, what about in the middle, right?
link |
So I'm doing some sort of strength training there.
link |
Well, number one, make sure you're braced
link |
and then you can get away with less need to worry about it.
link |
In general, a decent strategy is to maintain a breath hold
link |
during the lowering or eccentric
link |
or most dangerous part of the movement,
link |
and then you can exhale on the concentric portion.
link |
So if the bench press is our example,
link |
if you held in, braced, lowered under control,
link |
and now started the concentric pushing away force,
link |
and then you wanted to take an expiration,
link |
during the last half of the concentric portion,
link |
that's an okay strategy.
link |
If you're going to do a single rep,
link |
you don't need to worry about it.
link |
You can just avoid or omit breathing entirely.
link |
You're going to be just fine.
link |
If you're doing more than that,
link |
especially three to four to five to seven, eight,
link |
you're going to have to have some breathing strategy.
link |
A very common one is probably every third breath.
link |
I'm going to do like,
link |
exhale on the third.
link |
Reset, re-breathe, something like that.
link |
If you feel like you need to breathe after every one,
link |
that's okay, but it's going to get wasteful
link |
because you have to take time in between reps
link |
If it's a squat, that's different versus a deadlift.
link |
If you're resting at the bottom.
link |
So there is a little bit of game here.
link |
So in general, though, is that 75,
link |
75 kind of really thrown out, you threw out.
link |
Breathe in, do the lowering, and exhale on the out.
link |
don't worry about more reps than you need to come up with some sort of breathing
link |
How about breathing in between sets and maybe even after the workout?
link |
This is something I think a lot of people overlook.
link |
and because that it is the case that recovery has to do both with the specific
link |
activation and to muscles and the nervous system,
link |
but also the attacks on the nervous system can also take place between sets.
link |
I mean, if you're really geared up between sets,
link |
and then you've got adrenaline, you know,
link |
as high in between sets or close to it as you are during your sets,
link |
you can imagine that the recovery would take longer or at least that you're not
link |
spending adrenaline in the most efficient way if there is such a thing.
link |
You're not going to see any athlete that I work with just breathe in between,
link |
whether it's in between innings or in between rounds,
link |
every single one of them is going to go back,
link |
and they're going to immediately be into a breathing routine.
link |
A very intense routine.
link |
A very intentional one. They're a little bit different for every athlete,
link |
depending on the sport.
link |
there's going to be a,
link |
we just hit our ball,
link |
we're moving to the next one,
link |
we're going to go into a breathing strategy.
link |
Every one of them.
link |
It's a huge area of potential benefit and consequence if you're just ignoring it.
link |
we want to do any sort of calming breath we want to restore.
link |
It depends on if the,
link |
it depends on what we're combating.
link |
Are we combating low oxygen or high stress?
link |
So that strategy is going to be a little bit different.
link |
that is a huge time opportunity to get better.
link |
people can go back and listen to some of your earlier episodes where you talked
link |
about what you have spoken about,
link |
When neuroplasticity works.
link |
And if you're losing that opportunity post exercise,
link |
you're leaving gains on the table,
link |
So not only are you going to see every of the athletes that I work with mostly have
link |
a breathing strategy in competition,
link |
we're not going to just finish a workout,
link |
drink water and walk out of the gym.
link |
There will be a down regulation strategy that is heavily involved with some sort of
link |
light control as well as breath control.
link |
The individual prescription on that,
link |
there's a ton of variation with what you can do.
link |
The easiest thing is do something that calms you down.
link |
Most likely that's going to be moved towards as much nasal breathing as you can possibly do.
link |
And a really easy rule of thumb is a double exhale length relative to inhale.
link |
So if you need to take a like four second inhale,
link |
double that time and breathe out for eight seconds.
link |
A box breathing is fine.
link |
So four second inhale for second exhale,
link |
A triangle is fine too.
link |
There's a lot of ways you can get really complicated.
link |
Like what Brian McKenzie will do and Rob,
link |
you can get all kinds of systems for inhale, exhale control.
link |
It can be optimized,
link |
but some strategy of calm.
link |
We're going to almost always put you on your back or close and then we're going to cover light.
link |
like we've done actually a number of musical interventions as well,
link |
but you can as just as simple as sit down in a locker room if you have to and just breathe for five minutes.
link |
That alone is going to be productive.
link |
If you're breathing in the locker room for five minutes,
link |
I suggest closing your eyes or you get some funny looks and if you'll still get funny looks,
link |
but you won't see people looking at you.
link |
And I started doing this because you and Brian McKenzie informed me about this and it completely changed the rate of recovery for me.
link |
I realized that I was leaving workouts,
link |
both endurance workouts and strength,
link |
hypertrophy workouts,
link |
but looking at my phone,
link |
getting right into email and meetings,
link |
not concentrating on my breathing.
link |
And all I did was to introduce on your recommendation a five minute down regulation.
link |
So exhale emphasized breathing of a bunch of different varieties,
link |
physiological size,
link |
exhale emphasized twice as long as the inhale component for five minutes.
link |
And I noticed two things.
link |
I recovered more quickly,
link |
workout to workout.
link |
No question about it.
link |
The numbers told me that.
link |
And the other is that I used to have this dip in energy that would occur three or four hours after a hard workout.
link |
And I always thought that had to do with the fact that I had generally eaten a meal at some point post workout.
link |
Turns out it wasn't the meal at all.
link |
It's that that that adrenaline ramp up during the workouts.
link |
I wasn't clamping that at the end.
link |
And so I think eventually it just crashed.
link |
And then three or four hours later,
link |
I'm having a hard time even reading what's on the screen of my computer thinking maybe it's the screen.
link |
Maybe it was what I ate for lunch.
link |
Turns out the down regulations allowed me to work through the afternoon with no issues whatsoever.
link |
It's really been quite powerful.
link |
And so I'm grateful to you for that.
link |
I think this is something that I think 98 percent of people are not doing.
link |
And it's only five minutes.
link |
You don't even have to do five.
link |
If you really have to push it,
link |
And you can even do this.
link |
You can save time.
link |
You can do this in the shower if you have to.
link |
So you're you're done.
link |
whatever it has to be.
link |
And you're getting in a shower.
link |
You're getting ready.
link |
Just give me three minutes in the shower.
link |
It's not ideal, but as little as that, it can pay huge dividends.
link |
You need some sort of internal signal that we're safe.
link |
Like throttle down here.
link |
We're going to move on.
link |
That has to happen.
link |
I could go on and on here, but I think we're making the same point kind of over again.
link |
It's a big deal to do it.
link |
And you're saving energy.
link |
I mean, the energy here is neural energy.
link |
I think fighters do this.
link |
Good fighters learn to do this between rounds.
link |
Sprinters learn to do this between events.
link |
I think humans should learn how to do this between any, you know, sort of interval type
link |
activity, including work, social engagement.
link |
I mean, this is such a powerful tool.
link |
Do this for one minute after every important, whether it's an individual high volatile interaction
link |
or if it's a, you just did a nice 45 minute sprint to work and you're deep into it or
link |
Just give me one minute.
link |
Set your alarm just one minute and that also will pay dividends.
link |
And as I said, it's made a outsize, a different positive difference on my training, but also
link |
activities outside my training, which is for me, I'm not a professional athlete.
link |
I trained for health and because I enjoy it, but when a really hard workout starts to interfere
link |
with the ability to do the other things in life, that's not a good situation.
link |
So this is really terrific.
link |
There's a lot more in each of those categories of strength and hypertrophy, but you've given
link |
us a tremendous amount of valuable information there.
link |
Maybe now would be a good time to shift to endurance and of the four types of endurance.
link |
And maybe you could remind us what those are.
link |
What do you think are the two that most people are seeking or pursuing in terms of health
link |
and aesthetics, right?
link |
I mean, I realize that we probably have athletes out there as well, but I think when I think
link |
health and aesthetics, I think, okay, the ability to do sustained endurance, 30 plus
link |
minutes of some ongoing activity, how does one maximize that work?
link |
What are the modifiable variables?
link |
And then maybe you could tell us what the other major category is that people ought
link |
to have in their kit.
link |
So starting off with exercise choice.
link |
One thing, as soon as we cross into the endurance world, and this is true for all four of those
link |
categories, exercise choice needs to be very concerned with eccentric landing, right?
link |
So you don't need to avoid it, but you need to recognize it relative or compare it against
link |
those other strength and speed ones.
link |
The volume is low on those ones.
link |
So if you have some eccentric absorption, it's okay.
link |
But as we sort of talked about five minutes ago, more eccentric means greater chance of
link |
muscle damage, soreness.
link |
So if you take something and magnify it across 30 minutes or even five minutes, but have
link |
maximal exertion, you have a recipe for blowing up.
link |
You can imagine I haven't run in forever and I've listened to this Huberman Lab podcast
link |
and I'm, okay, I'm going to get into my zone two training, whatever, whatever.
link |
And I start jogging.
link |
I'm going to do, you know, I remember when I used to be able to do 25 and you just do
link |
The amount of eccentric landing that just occurred on every single step, because you're
link |
never with running, even slow running, you never have two feet on the ground at the same
link |
One foot land, one foot land, your entire body mass plus gravity onto one leg at a time,
link |
repeated now hundreds of times.
link |
That eccentric landing is going to cause tremendous soreness.
link |
Your quads are going to go, you're probably going to get shin splints, which is what,
link |
this isn't, those are entirely caused by eccentric landing and when the tissue is not ready to
link |
If you're not landing correctly, this is when knee pain happens, back pain, shoulder neck
link |
pain because of movement compensation.
link |
Anytime we start pressing to fatigue, let's be very concerned with there.
link |
So my initial recommendation is start with activities exercise choice wise that are mostly
link |
So think about a cycle.
link |
So when you're riding on a bike, you're pushing the pedal, but you're never landing and absorbing
link |
So you could go out and do a 45 minute bike ride and you're not going to get that sore
link |
because there's not a lot of eccentric load.
link |
Swimming, similar thing here, right?
link |
There's some eccentrics when your hand hits the water, but fairly minimal.
link |
It's mostly a push, push, push, push, push, no load.
link |
Rowing, similar thing, mostly concentric.
link |
Pushing a sled is fantastic.
link |
Going uphill, running, or even walking hard uphill, all good because they're very minimal
link |
landing relative to like running downhill, which would be a very, very bad idea to start.
link |
So when you, if you're first jumping into these things, progress your volume for endurance
link |
very slowly if it involves eccentric landing.
link |
A really bad strategy would be to jump in and do say circuit training class that involves
link |
a bunch of box jumps, right?
link |
This is not a good way to do your first foray into conditioning.
link |
You're going to get incredibly sore because you're jumping and landing.
link |
You're now looking at three to 10 X body weight in terms of absorption with a single land,
link |
even if you're just jumping.
link |
So be careful of that in any of those endurance areas of exercise choice.
link |
Pick the one that you are most technically proficient in because you're going to do it
link |
It's going to be a lot of repetitions, whatever one you feel the most joy in.
link |
If that's rowing, great.
link |
If that's pushing a sled, it doesn't really matter.
link |
You can do this actually with weights.
link |
This is our preferred way, by the way, with our athletes.
link |
So we might do a 30 minute circuit where we do a five minute farmer's carry with a pretty
link |
So you're just going to carry some weights in your hand and you're just going to walk
link |
up and down the street for five minutes.
link |
You're going to set that down and then you're going to do say a three minute plank and then
link |
you're going to pick that up and you're going to do body weight squats, like slowly and
link |
And you're going to do a handful of different exercises so the athletes don't get super
link |
bored or a very simple one, if a 30 minute workout, 10 minutes on a treadmill, 10 minutes
link |
on a bike, 10 minutes on a rower.
link |
For those of you that are like, oh my God, I can't do 30 straight minutes of running.
link |
Break it up into three or four different exercises that are all fairly safe.
link |
So that's how I would do that long duration piece for exercise choice.
link |
And then in terms of heart rate during that period, I mean, how much tension should we
link |
The kind of very broad prescriptive I've thrown out on this podcast a few times based on my
link |
read of the literature is for most people that are oriented toward health, including
link |
people that are working on size and strength gains, hypertrophy and strength, of course,
link |
that getting 150 to 180 minutes of so-called zone two cardio, you know, can just barely
link |
have a conversation, but if one were to push any harder, you wouldn't be able to.
link |
That kind of thing.
link |
It's just a, as a sort of a generic recommendation that almost everybody should follow in order
link |
to just keep their cardiovascular system healthy.
link |
But I know there's a lot of nuance there and some people would like to be able to run continuously
link |
for an hour at speed, right?
link |
Um, obviously not sprinting, but what are some of the, um, finer, finer points on long
link |
distance endurance and how often should one do it?
link |
Um, obviously you could do it as daily, right?
link |
Even when strength, doing strength and hypertrophy.
link |
Well, that I think is an important point for people to hear it because a lot of people
link |
think that they are going to greatly diminish their strength and hypertrophy gains as it's
link |
often called, um, by doing in zone two cardio.
link |
Zone two, you have almost no ability to block your hypertrophy.
link |
Zone two truly, if it's within that category, if you're talking about conversational pace,
link |
um, there is very, in fact, there's strong reason to think that is not going to influence
link |
hypertrophy for the overwhelming majority of people.
link |
It might even help it by increasing blood flow to the various, um, does it matter?
link |
Let's say someone's doing primarily strength and hypertrophy.
link |
Their primary goals are strength and hypertrophy, and then they're going to do, they're going
link |
to hit that 150 to 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week, assuming they're breaking
link |
that up into three or four sessions.
link |
Does it matter if they do it in the same workout before or after?
link |
Um, I tend to do just by way of example for people, certainly I'm just one, uh, one example.
link |
I tend to do, uh, resistance training one day.
link |
Then I'll do zone two cardio and the next day I jog cause that's the thing I prefer.
link |
Then I'll do strength hypertrophy training on the next day and then jog for my zone two
link |
And then I take one full day off a week.
link |
I've never actually done the zone two cardio on the same day, but were I to do it on the
link |
Would it matter if I did it before or after my, my strength hypertrophy training?
link |
You're going to be just fine.
link |
Interference effects.
link |
The interference effect is what this is called.
link |
So this is all the way back to 1980, uh, Bob Hickman stuff, right?
link |
And he was actually working in a lab with John Halazi, who's one of the fathers of exercise
link |
biochemistry and the sort of the story goes that, uh, Hickman came in, he was a strength
link |
training guy and Halazi and almost all those initial exercise physiologists were conditioning
link |
So it's almost always swimmers and runners and that's why a bulk of the exercise physiology
link |
historically is, is shaped in that direction.
link |
That's what those scientists were interested in.
link |
So Hickman was there in the lab and then the, how much of this is myth or not, who really
link |
But so the story goes, um, that this is sort of chipping back and forth and you know how
link |
from a PI to a postdoc and kind of that razzing works a little bit and eventually he was like,
link |
you got to start running with us and he was like, you got to start lifting with me and
link |
kind of goes back and forth.
link |
Well, you know who wins in that equation.
link |
It's not the postdoc, right?
link |
So it's the PI gets in and says, Hickman says, okay, fine.
link |
So he starts running with Halazi and then eventually starts to realize I'm getting weak.
link |
I'm losing strength and I just can't, I think it was his bench press specifically was going
link |
down or maybe a squat.
link |
Who knows if it's even real, but point is, so he's going along and so eventually starts
link |
to create a little bit of animosity and it's like, actually I don't think it's good for
link |
me and then blah, blah, blah.
link |
And so they did what any good scientists would do and said, well, let's find out.
link |
And so they, he run a really famous experiment where he took a group, three groups.
link |
One group did a endurance piece, right?
link |
The steady state cardio.
link |
One group did a strength training piece and then the third group did both of those workouts
link |
Not like a reduction.
link |
So both volumes stacked on top of each other and the results are fairly predictable in
link |
terms of the endurance group only had the greatest increases in VO2 max and endurance
link |
The strength training group had the greatest increases in muscle hypertrophy.
link |
But where the interesting part was and where this whole field started was the combined
link |
So concurrent training is what it's generally called.
link |
So you're doing concurrent things and typically that means hypertrophy and strength stacked
link |
on top of some in steady state endurance in the same, same, same workout, two hour block
link |
or same like week.
link |
It doesn't really make it can be kind of all these.
link |
Well, the concurrent group saw the same improvements in VO2 max as the endurance group.
link |
And he's like, well, okay.
link |
So the strength training did not compromise the endurance adaptations.
link |
However, they saw much lower increases in strength and hypertrophy.
link |
And so it was the conclusion was the addition of endurance work compromised muscle growth
link |
and strength development.
link |
However, the addition of strength training to your endurance work will not compromise
link |
your endurance gains.
link |
Now that second piece has been shown countless more times, right?
link |
So if you're an endurance athlete, adding strength training is almost always going to
link |
be massively beneficial.
link |
Very little chance of detriment is why every endurance athlete is going to have some sort
link |
of strength and power component to their training.
link |
The controversy though, came in the interference effects.
link |
So how much endurance training really blocks muscular development.
link |
And for years, myself included, was we preached hard, you know, don't, don't do these two
link |
things at the same time.
link |
My friend, my colleague, Kevin Murek has a really nice review article, Jimmy Bagley.
link |
Those two guys put this thing out.
link |
You can go read that where they cover all these things and they've got some nice figures
link |
And the general answer here is interference effect is sort of real, but it's probably
link |
greatly overblown.
link |
So are you talking about a 20 minute jog at conversation pace?
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That's probably doing very little with the assumption that are you doing an eccentric
link |
based exercise like running?
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Well, then you're going to have more of an interference effect than cycling.
link |
That makes a ton of sense if you think about it, right?
link |
What's your total energy intake.
link |
If you're eating sufficient calories, you can still be in an anabolic state.
link |
If the addition of extra energy expenditure, that's all it really is, mark the cardio,
link |
put you in a negative energy state, it's been, it's going to become very difficult to go
link |
through anabolism.
link |
So those things matter.
link |
If you're talking about doing like running a few laps around the track as a warmup, like
link |
that's not interference effect.
link |
What we're really talking about is a big volume performed consistently.
link |
Now after Hickman came out with this pater paper in 1980, people followed it up in the
link |
90s and 2000s with mechanism.
link |
And we started to look and see, we started to see, hey, there's this cell signaling pathway
link |
that goes down called mTOR and that's what leads to muscle growth.
link |
And then on the other side of that equation, there's a thing called AMPK, which is more
link |
associated with mitochondrial biogenesis and endurance.
link |
And there's this little molecule in between at the time, most people would point to TSC2.
link |
Well, turns out AMPK activation is fine.
link |
If you activate mTOR, there's no bearing on AMPK, but if you activate AMPK, it's going
link |
to activate TSC2, which inhibited mTOR.
link |
And so it was like we had practical outcome, i.e. Hickman, you're going to get weaker.
link |
Now we had mechanism.
link |
So that story became very, very strong that this interference effect, and this is how
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science should work, right?
link |
When you see mechanism match up with practical human outcome, it's a strong thing.
link |
That's what you want.
link |
It was still wrong though.
link |
It just took more science, right?
link |
And this is why we always have to give science a bit of time.
link |
And you have to be willing to follow, right?
link |
And again, even me in the field who has a practitioner background in science, I felt
link |
very strongly, this is a big problem.
link |
It just didn't turn out to be the case.
link |
Enough studies came out where I'm like, okay, it's probably not that big a deal.
link |
Unless the movement is heavily eccentric based, the volume is very high, you're trying to
link |
maximize muscle growth and energy is not controlled.
link |
If that's not all the case, interference effect is probably not something most people should
link |
Especially when you compare that against the well-roundedness that you need for total physiological
link |
Probably not a big deal.
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Very reassuring for me to hear because I do enjoy lifting weights and I really enjoy running
link |
and I love running outside.
link |
I believe I used to experience the interference effect when I used to do a very long run on
link |
I would just go out for two hours or something like that.
link |
I don't know that I ate enough or who knows.
link |
I always feel like I eat enough or more.
link |
But that long Sunday run always made it hard for me to make progressive gains in strength
link |
and hypertrophy in the gym.
link |
Whereas when I cut that to 30 minutes, three or four times a week, I don't see any interference
link |
Probably very real.
link |
And I haven't trained specifically for endurance in a very long time, so I haven't experienced
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the non-interference effect, which as you said before, most, if not all endurance athletes
link |
probably are or at least should be doing some sort of strength work just to keep the undercarriage
link |
strong as I think.
link |
Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons.
link |
So what are some protocols that people could explore for continuous endurance training?
link |
I mean, I've thrown out this 150 to 180 minute zone two cardio, but that's really the kind
link |
of kindergarten of endurance.
link |
And there I'm probably being generous.
link |
It's probably the nursery school of endurance that everyone should do.
link |
What sorts of other protocols, I realize that can be very goal-directed, but is it unreasonable
link |
for instance, for somebody to do four hours of continuous endurance training with intervals
link |
in there as well to get it kind of all around heart health and the ability to go long distances?
link |
I'll answer this too.
link |
Is the very first one to tackle the long duration endurance is how I ever heard of it.
link |
You asked really about heart rate zones.
link |
To me, that's almost totally irrelevant.
link |
It doesn't matter, right?
link |
If you're moving, you're moving.
link |
That's the functional piece here.
link |
If you want to push it and go at a non-conversational pace, that has tremendous health benefits.
link |
If you want to do it a little bit slower, fine.
link |
If you're at the pace where you can have a conversation, to me, I don't even count that
link |
That's not a pejorative, by the way.
link |
That is just general physical movement and it is extraordinarily clear.
link |
You need a lot of that.
link |
You need a lot more of that than we get.
link |
You can do this in a couple of efficient ways.
link |
Just taking your phone calls moving.
link |
If you've got a 30 minute call every day or most days of the week and you can do that
link |
while moving, you've checked not that whole box, but a pretty good chunk of it.
link |
And that could even be done inside, pacing back and forth.
link |
Like you probably saw me, like I'm going to walk up and down all over the place.
link |
Most of the time when I'm in my office working, I'm shadowboxing, like I'm doing air squats.
link |
Not even intentionally.
link |
Do you have one of those treadmills under the dust?
link |
I don't, but like every lab I ever came through, somebody did.
link |
We did an episode on workspace optimization and the data on those treadmills are pretty
link |
They definitely increase alertness, which for obvious reasons, even a little bit of
link |
movement is going to generate a little bit of adrenaline.
link |
So pacing around, moving, taking calls, moving, getting walks when you can.
link |
And then in terms of building endurance, let's say somebody wants to quote unquote get into
link |
They already may or may not already have some size and strength that they're happy with
link |
and they just want to get in.
link |
They want to improve their health.
link |
So when does that 150, 180 minute thing tick over into a different protocol?
link |
I think the way that I can outline a weekly schedule, just as a conceptual model here,
link |
that long duration stuff is not even counting, as I mentioned, right?
link |
It's just a, this is what you need to do as a human moving forward.
link |
We haven't improved.
link |
If you're extremely unfit, you may see some changes in cardiovascular health there, but
link |
for the most part, this is just knocking out the general physical practice.
link |
You need to be higher functioning.
link |
So whatever that time domain is, I don't really care.
link |
It's not a huge concern of mine.
link |
What I think you need to hit are these nodes.
link |
You need to do something once a week that gets you to a maximum heart rate.
link |
Now I don't have to literally mean max, but close.
link |
So this means really sucking for air?
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Like as high as you can possibly get.
link |
You can wear a heart rate monitor if you want, but maximum heart rate, the rough equation
link |
we say is 220 minus your age.
link |
So if you're 40 years old, your maximum heart rate is probably about 180 beats per minute.
link |
Now I can tell you flat out right now, my max heart rate is close to 210, which means
link |
So take that number with a grain of salt.
link |
I have had a bunch of professional athletes who are in their twenties and their max heart
link |
rate is 175 and they are in way better shape than I am.
link |
So maximum heart rate is not a good proxy for physical fitness.
link |
It's a rough number.
link |
An easy way to do it is if you have a heart rate monitor or anything like that, do the
link |
hardest workout you can possibly do.
link |
See what the highest number you get as and assume that's close.
link |
If you want to just start at 220 minus your age, that's fine too.
link |
Do something though where you're like, yep, this is death.
link |
Like this is really, really challenging.
link |
However long that takes you.
link |
That can be a 30 second go on an aerodyne or an air assault bike.
link |
That could be a, do one of those things where you kind of like sprint, run as hard as you
link |
can during the straightaway on a track and then walk the corners.
link |
Kind of an old classic back when you and I were kids, interval training.
link |
They don't do that anymore?
link |
I don't even talk about it.
link |
It's a big change and if you didn't bring running shoes, you had to do it barefoot.
link |
And I love your teacher.
link |
It wasn't a, our football, basketball, baseball teams weren't that good, but anything like
link |
running cross country just because of where I grew up, brutal, brutal coaches.
link |
So that yeah, they'd make the all kids do these runs.
link |
So it can be in the 30 probably seconds at a minimum.
link |
It's hard to get you to a true heart rate max in shorter than 30 seconds.
link |
You can get the total suck in under 20 seconds, but getting to a true heart rate max is probably
link |
going to take more than 30 seconds.
link |
So it doesn't really matter what you want to do.
link |
It can be again, a sprint uphill.
link |
It could be, well, you're talking, it could be burpees to death, you know, like whatever,
link |
whatever you want to do.
link |
Those have an eccentric component, right?
link |
No question about it.
link |
Not to actual death, by the way.
link |
If you just did, I'm going to do as many burpees as I can for 90 seconds, it probably won't
link |
take you much longer than that to get to close to max.
link |
And is that the whole workout?
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So once a week, get to max heart rate.
link |
It's not the best, but it'll, it'll work.
link |
And what are the specific benefits that that provides?
link |
So earlier in our, in our chat, we were, we outlined the rule of specificity, specific
link |
adaptation to impose demand.
link |
If you're never getting to that high of a pace, you're never, it would be like trying
link |
to get stronger, but only going to 60%.
link |
So every cardiovascular adaptation that occurs with cardiovascular training is just simply
link |
going to get to the topper end by doing this.
link |
So if you just start at the heart itself, stroke volume increases, this is the amount
link |
of blood that's kicked out per contraction, cardiac output, resting heart rate.
link |
If you go to the endothelial function, you're talking about nitric oxide release, endothelial
link |
health in general, capillary, mitochondria, all the way down, like you just walk through
link |
the whole system, pulmonary exchange to the lungs.
link |
All of those are going to benefit by being challenged to their maximum.
link |
They also teach you where your vomit reflex is.
link |
Yeah, there you go.
link |
Stress is what causes adaptation, right?
link |
So if you push your, okay, here's the difference.
link |
If you did 25 minutes of steady state, you're not challenging the same thing as what we
link |
just talked about.
link |
The way that I explained this is if you understand the point, the point of physiological failure,
link |
then you understand the place of adaptation.
link |
So if you and I both go run on a, we did a both did a VO2 max test.
link |
So a classic VO2 max test is going to take 8 to 12 minutes and it's going to look something
link |
We're going to get in a treadmill and we're going to run.
link |
And every minute I'm going to just slightly increase that treadmill, either the speed
link |
Most of the time it's the speed, right?
link |
So we get to a high grade, say 10% grade or something.
link |
And then we go five miles per hour, 5.2, 5.4, and we just go until you can't go any longer.
link |
Now let's say you and I did that and we had the same exact timeframe.
link |
And so we both went eight minutes.
link |
The time that you last is not the thing that we care about, right?
link |
It's the volume of oxygen that you breathe out is what determines it.
link |
So let's say we went with the same time domain and we had the same VO2 max.
link |
Let's say they were both 50 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which is like a okay
link |
number but that's nothing to be extremely proud about.
link |
Just because we have the same number does not mean we have the same point of physiological
link |
And this matters because it's going to answer the what do I do about it then question, right?
link |
So if you got off and I started asking you a series of questions and you're like, I basically
link |
said, why'd you quit?
link |
You know, why did you jump off the treadmill?
link |
And you were like, my chest, like I couldn't catch my breath.
link |
I thought my heart was going to explode.
link |
If you asked me and I said, my legs were on fire, like I was breathing hard, but I couldn't
link |
take another step.
link |
This is a very rough indicator of different places of physiological disruption.
link |
Now what I've seen a lot with my professional athletes, especially like fighters, they're
link |
going to generally fail in their legs because they don't often do a lot of strength training
link |
They don't do a lot of leg work.
link |
They're fighting on their back, literally a lot or on top or on their knees.
link |
So their legs tend to give out before they're.
link |
Someone who fails in the cardiovascular system, like say you did a lot of leg training, typically
link |
like an endurance athlete, that's not going to be their issue.
link |
This is going to be, they're going to reach a heart rate and ventilation threshold that's
link |
they can no longer handle.
link |
If I put you on the exact same training protocols, it's not going to be as effective because
link |
you're going to always fail at your legs and they're going to always fail at their cardiovascular
link |
I need to flip that, right?
link |
You need to put you in a position to where you can reach a true heart rate or ventilation
link |
challenge while your legs are still hanging in there or the opposite.
link |
So the training protocol is based on that point of failure.
link |
The adaptation is in the same thing.
link |
So if you are failing because of your legs, then you might see a greater increase in capitalization
link |
Relative to somebody else who's failing in their cardiovascular system, they may see
link |
a greater change in something on that side of the equation.
link |
So that it matters how you're failing at all times.
link |
What I love about this is that it's, it's sounds like it's like a thermometer for where
link |
one is weak and needs work, but also provides a stimulus to improve the very thing that
link |
So to just get real brass tacks about it, it would be once a week, 90 seconds near maximum
link |
Could I, you know, could I do five or six of those 90 second bouts?
link |
You can do, as long as you touch that max heart rate, I'm good, right?
link |
Ideal world, probably four to eight.
link |
In that single session.
link |
So if that takes you 20 seconds or 90 seconds, it's fine.
link |
If you want to do 30 on 30 off, you want to do 20 on 40 off 40 on 20 off, those numbers
link |
And is there an interference effect of this on the other sorts of training that we've
link |
It actually tends to be complimentary.
link |
There, there is the, the evidence available suggests that this high interval stuff is,
link |
is more likely to be complimentary to hypertrophy training probably because of lactate and some
link |
other cool things which are very beneficial molecules that people don't understand.
link |
They think it's bad.
link |
It's a hugely, a hugely beneficial thing.
link |
It can be interference, it can provide an interference if calories are not accounted
link |
for, if rest is not accounted for and other things.
link |
But in general it's, it's probably okay.
link |
I wouldn't add it to your equation if you don't need it for maximizing hypertrophy,
link |
but for the person who wants to just get well-rounded physiology, yeah, I wouldn't hesitate to do
link |
these even in the same session or different sessions.
link |
So, and if that's done once a week and the 150 to 180 minutes or so of zone two cardio
link |
is done, you know, in the rest of the week, the person's doing their strength and hypertrophy
link |
training, we would hope.
link |
What other sorts of endurance practices could one incorporate?
link |
You mentioned muscular endurance, like the ability, would like a wall sit or the ability
link |
Was that, is that something that, is that useful for anything?
link |
Is that doing planks and wall sitting?
link |
It's extraordinarily useful.
link |
Let's hold on muscular endurance.
link |
I want to finish one more thing on this side.
link |
So if we're building this week of endurance, once a week hit that number, if you can do
link |
repeated bouts, you know, we talked four to eight, that's fantastic.
link |
If you can't muscle the, the, if you can't manage the mental energy every week, do it
link |
It's still very good, right?
link |
Because I, I get it.
link |
Like I'm a working person too and sometimes you're just like, I cannot, like those workouts
link |
feel incredible afterwards, but man, they are daunting.
link |
If you love this stuff, you could do it four times a week.
link |
If you hate it though, it's not realistic to think you're going to be able to knock
link |
You're going to end up doing 70, 80%, which is not going to get you the benefits.
link |
So just don't do it.
link |
You really have to hit that ceiling.
link |
You got to get up there.
link |
Have someone chase.
link |
I always say, you know, the, when doing this, this kind of work in, in my mind, I'm thinking
link |
that I'm basically being chased by somebody with a, with a syringe full of poison.
link |
You know, get your waterways out of the situation and for the benefit of what we're talking
link |
about, the one I'm referring to is to just run.
link |
My motivation is typically, if you just get this done, we're done in a couple of minutes.
link |
Like, don't go here if you're not going to do it, but when you show up, check in and
link |
it's over really quickly.
link |
Breathing down regulation afterwards.
link |
You have to, right?
link |
So if you absolutely can't do it, do it every other week.
link |
That's twice a month.
link |
Give me twice a month.
link |
Can be done on the road.
link |
Can be done at 20 minutes, like do a really good, thorough warmup.
link |
Don't just jump into those by the way, right away.
link |
It's not going to be as beneficial.
link |
Really nice, good sweat broke, a really good warmup and then give me four minutes of hard
link |
work and we're done.
link |
If you want to use like a bath or hot thermal stress to kind of like aid in that warmup
link |
Getting the sauna and getting a hot bath, get really hot, get up there, warm up, knock
link |
Whole thing is 20 minutes plus five minutes breathing.
link |
I'm going to start doing this.
link |
There's a bike right there.
link |
Yeah, I've got every room in this studio that has a different piece of equipment it seems.
link |
So I want that once a week, realistically every week if I have to.
link |
I want that physical activity piece, call it whatever you want, long duration thing.
link |
Ideally you'll do as much of that through your nose only.
link |
You're not going to be able to do the interval stuff at nose only, don't even try.
link |
But if you can go that whole 30 minute time or 20 or 40 minutes, whatever it's going to
link |
be, that's actually a good way to regulate intensity.
link |
So go as hard as you can while still being able to breathe through your nose only.
link |
If you have to open up your mouth a little bit, fine, but try to stay there.
link |
What you'll see is very quickly, you'll be able to increase your work output while just
link |
breathing through your nose, which has a bunch of other benefits.
link |
The other piece I want is this middle ground, which is, can you sustain hard work for eight
link |
to 12, maybe as little as four minutes, I'll give you four to 12 minutes.
link |
This doesn't have to be quite as high as the first one.
link |
You don't have to get to a heart rate max, but can you get somewhere in the 80% range
link |
and can you hold that for four minutes?
link |
Maybe give me two minutes, two minutes of rest and do that twice.
link |
Something like that.
link |
Ideal situation is what a runner would do is like what we'll call mile repeats because
link |
they're running four or five minute miles.
link |
Whatever time it takes them to finish, they're going to rest that.
link |
So it's a one to one work to rest ratio.
link |
So a five minute mile rest five minutes and go again.
link |
That's probably pretty unrealistic for a lot of folks.
link |
Well, the five minute part is unrealistic for most folks.
link |
For me, it would be, you know, eight minutes, eight minutes, fine.
link |
Probably something like that.
link |
Well, in your particular case, just do the 800 meter.
link |
So do 800 meters, do something that takes two to six minutes of work.
link |
It is a lower intensity than the max stuff, but it's a much higher workload.
link |
That is probably going to give you, you might even argue the most cardiovascular benefit
link |
because it is sustained work output and that's very critical.
link |
The downside of kind of like that conversational pace, it's physical activity, it's movement,
link |
it's blood flow, it's lymphatic drainage.
link |
It's not very cardiovascularly challenging though.
link |
You're just not going to get an optimal health from just walking actively.
link |
So two to six minutes of hard work of hard work with an equivalent amount of rest in
link |
between and then repeat how many times?
link |
Twice if you have to, if it needs to be one rep, if it needs to be a six minute thing
link |
and then downregulate, breathe.
link |
Twice if you can do that, six times, eight times, like whatever you can really do.
link |
And you can just take that as long of the training session as you want or short.
link |
Exercise choice can be whatever you want.
link |
So again, you can do sled pushes or it could be a kettlebell circuit or any combination
link |
of things where you're just, you're working and you're not giving yourself a break.
link |
You have got to be able to hold on at a very high waste product production level as well
link |
as a high demand for energy and then bring it down.
link |
And breathing during this two to six minutes of hard output is mainly through the nose
link |
or combination nose and mouth or is that getting too technical?
link |
Well, it's probably like I like it, but you tell me if it's too technical.
link |
You're going to try to maintain nasal only as much as you can, but you're going to lose
link |
You can go through Brian and Rob's gear system and learn more and you can kind of see what
link |
If you have to go nose in, mouth out or something like that, but I don't really care too much
link |
honestly in that range.
link |
I'm getting most of my nasal only stuff at night and training and everything.
link |
So if you have to open up the throttle there to get the work done, that's okay.
link |
Oh, then we'll actually go to your answer your question, which is muscular endurance.
link |
Let's go back to that piece.
link |
Muscular endurance is incredibly important for general maintenance of joint health.
link |
In other words, you have got form follows function, right?
link |
It's a very classic science-y physiology saying, meaning you've got a couple of different,
link |
there's a bunch, but to make it easy, two different types of muscle fibers, fast twitch
link |
Fast twitch fibers tend to be, but they're not always bigger.
link |
They contract with a higher velocity.
link |
That's why they are called fast twitch, but they tend to be more glycolytic and thus fatigueable.
link |
Slow twitch are tend to be smaller or not always.
link |
They are more packed with mitochondria that we're generally better at burning fat as fuel,
link |
but contract with lower velocity.
link |
Well, we have these two types so that we can regulate function more.
link |
You have some muscle groups that we're going to, sorry, let me go back up a quick second.
link |
Each individual muscle in a human body has a combination of some amount of fast and some
link |
That percentage of fast versus slow differs from muscle to muscle.
link |
So it also differs from person to person.
link |
Easy example is your calf muscle.
link |
There's three, but there's two primary muscles in your calf.
link |
One's called the soleus and one's the gastroc.
link |
The gastroc is the one where if you take your toe and point it towards your face and then
link |
flex, that's the one that pops out on the medial side, the inside.
link |
The soleus is what we call an anti-gravity muscle.
link |
And it is generally about 80% to even 90% slow twitch.
link |
And that's because it's supposed to be contracted lightly all time, supposed to be on permanently.
link |
It's meant to keep, we call it anti-gravity because it's meant to keep you erect, up and
link |
Your spinal erector is supposed to do this, various muscles for postural are generally
link |
slow twitch muscles.
link |
So we're supposed to be on all times, not produce fast, not produce force, but don't
link |
The gastroc is the opposite.
link |
It's not activated very often, but when it's activated, it's meant for extreme propulsion.
link |
This gives us the ability to reach up and scratch our eyeball and also punch somebody,
link |
We have to be able to regulate force output, which is going back to Hennemann, right?
link |
Controlling what we use and what we don't use while also not wasting energy, which is
link |
the downside of activating a big threshold motor neuron is it requires a ton of energy.
link |
It's a more efficient mode of energy, but the total amount is really, really high.
link |
So muscular endurance is going to help those slow twitch muscle fibers and slow twitch
link |
predominant muscles maintain their working job.
link |
So if you lose your muscular endurance ability in your spinal erectors or your calf, you're
link |
going to start slumping into bad positions.
link |
You're going to be getting, putting joints in a movement pattern that they're not going
link |
to be the most happy with.
link |
So it's more about than being able to just maintain a two minute wall squat.
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It's about maintaining joint integrity and allowing that musculature to not fatigue when
link |
you ask it to do heavy and fast.
link |
So what I mean by that is you've got a whole combination of muscles in your shoulder and
link |
we will generally call these like the rotator cuff muscles.
link |
Well, let's imagine those slow twitch postural muscles get fatigued and they start to lose
link |
contractile tension and then you go to do something heavy or fast or an emergency situation.
link |
Those are already prefatigued.
link |
You're going to rely more upon the fast twitch muscle fibers, which are there less for postural
link |
You're likely to get out of position and this is a whole recipe of like, God, why is my
link |
shoulder just hurting?
link |
That's very often a case of the slow twitch fibers and the slow twitch muscle groups losing
link |
muscular endurance.
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So you need to build that back up so that they can control and hold the joint in the
link |
position so the fast twitch fibers can then contract with force.
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I'm hoping that what I'm going to say next meets what you said accurately.
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My experience is that getting injured, lifting weights or even doing housework or yard work
link |
almost always happens when I'm not paying attention, fatigued.
link |
That's kind of obvious, but also getting in position to initiate a movement, setting down
link |
a weight or lifting weights off the rack or picking up dumbbells.
link |
That's almost always when I seem to activate this lower back thing that happens every,
link |
you know, six or eight months.
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And what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that this muscular endurance from wall
link |
sits or planks or things of that sort, maybe you could give us a few other examples of
link |
these can help us because they actually prepare the system to do what we normally think of
link |
as the more intense work.
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So it's really the, it sounds like it's really the architecture of the body that includes
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nerves and muscles and everything else, of course, that lets the limbs and other kind
link |
of action end of the body do its best work.
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Yeah, let it express its own power and force.
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We've actually landed on one of my final laws of strength and conditioning, which is similar
link |
to what I said earlier, right?
link |
So I said exercises do not determine adaptations.
link |
Application determines adaptation.
link |
So it sounds similar, but it's quite different.
link |
There are no good or bad exercises.
link |
There's only good or bad application.
link |
Here's a great example of that, right?
link |
So you do not get hurt deadlifting because deadlifts are dangerous.
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You only get hurt deadlifting because you either got in bad position, you got in bad
link |
position because you either started in bad position, which is one of the things you just
link |
said, or you ended up in bad position.
link |
You did too much volume, you did too much intensity, or you did too much complexity.
link |
Those last three things all hurt you because they result in the first one, which is out
link |
of position, or another way to think about this if it's not a visible change in position
link |
is stress got put into a part of the system that should not absorb that much stress.
link |
So you did too much of it, you did it too heavy, you got fatigued and so you broke position.
link |
You got too heavy so you broke position.
link |
You made the exercise too complex, you put too many moving parts in it, you put too many
link |
joints in it, and you got out of position.
link |
You did that too many times.
link |
Over time, now we've led from either an acute injury, bam, you know, back pops and you fall
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on the floor or just like, man, this thing is hurting over time.
link |
All these are the result of the same thing.
link |
So you cannot ever blame the exercise for causing the problem.
link |
It's always either the user or the coach.
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You programmed way too much here and I can't handle that position, or you yourself went
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So if you're getting these little tweaks and problems going on, you've made an error in
link |
one of those things.
link |
So simply back off, reduce the complexity, give yourself more stability, less moving
link |
parts, do less volume, do less intensity.
link |
In fact, if you look at the people from the physical therapy world in terms of the pain
link |
literature, it's very clear that just stopping a movement is very rarely going to work.
link |
What you want to do is back off all the way down to just below that threshold of that's
link |
what aggravates it.
link |
And you want to train right there.
link |
That's going to allow you to do two things.
link |
Number one, tissue tolerance, and then number two, desensitization.
link |
A lot of pain stuff, and you can probably speak a lot about this, especially with things
link |
like low back pain, is there's not necessarily often much damage there.
link |
It's a lot of hypersensitization of just pain signal, pain signal.
link |
Omitting the movement entirely does not get that signal to go away.
link |
You need to train just below that signal and desensitize it.
link |
So you want to make sure that the muscular endurance allows you, you're just putting
link |
volume right below where you start to get a tweak.
link |
And it is beautifully effective for that.
link |
I've experienced this right side lower back pain for years, sometimes shooting down the
link |
The two things that really helped were doing anterior tib work.
link |
So you know, hats off to knees over toes guy, Ben Patrick, who has created a lot of popularity
link |
But it turns out joints, full range of motion, you're in a better spot.
link |
Yeah, something about stabilizing the stuff from the knee down helped my back and then
link |
also some some neck work and friends of mine are always teasing me that my gym is filled
link |
with the most bizarre equipment, you know, it doesn't look like any other gym.
link |
A lot of it is just designed to keep me healthy and still training.
link |
But I love this idea of getting right at the below the threshold of pain activation and
link |
not simply going into complete non-action or just taking complete rest because that
link |
actually can be detrimental.
link |
I'd love to talk about a few items that support training of all kinds and where there's a
link |
lot of confusion and indeed, misconception and mystery.
link |
And just get your take on these and I just want to acknowledge at the outset that for
link |
some of these, there's a lot of science for some of them, there's less science, but there
link |
certainly is a lot of experience in your camp.
link |
And those categories are cold, heat and hydration.
link |
Because obviously, whether or not you're a runner, whether or not you're strength training,
link |
if you're a human being, you need to hydrate.
link |
But in terms of work output and physical work output, maybe even cognitive work output,
link |
maybe tackle hydration first.
link |
There is what I call and what I think is now come to be known as the Galpin equation, which
link |
you really do deserve credit for because I think that people realize that there are a
link |
range of solutions out there, but there is a really a desperate need for straightforward
link |
solutions that work for 75% of people, 75% of the time.
link |
So hydration is key.
link |
Maybe you could underscore just how, how key it is for us.
link |
And then what is the Galpin equation as, as I call it, and I think others are now referring
link |
Benefits of hydration slash consequences of mis-hydration.
link |
So whether it's dehydration or overload, you, physiology has hermetic curves, right?
link |
Now, typically we think about this in terms of toxicology.
link |
So what this means is at some point giving you a dose of something, testosterone is very
link |
If you're clinically deficient or low in testosterone and I gave you a little bit and it brings
link |
you back into a normal range, you generally see an improvement in health and functionality.
link |
Taking you though from normal to super high doesn't always necessarily provide additional
link |
In fact, if you continue to go, it's going to provide detriment, right?
link |
So everything has this curve.
link |
And then some things are hermetic stressors, which means like a, a small, short, fast insult
link |
is actually beneficial because then you come back bigger, faster, stronger, and it's, that's
link |
how adaptation works.
link |
Hydration is the same way.
link |
So at the end of the curve here, if you are under hydrated, we all know that you could
link |
You have to have things.
link |
In fact, water is the only thing that is ubiquitous across biologies in terms of every living
link |
thing has to have it.
link |
There's no other vitamin mineral nutrient that is required among all living things with
link |
the exception of water.
link |
So that should give you a pretty good indication of it's important day, right?
link |
Like you got to have this thing down here at the bottom.
link |
If you're dehydrated and I give you more, it's beneficial effects.
link |
However, if you're up the top already and I continue to give you more water past that,
link |
now we run into actual problems and we can get what's called hyponatremia, which is more
link |
common than people realize.
link |
Netremia being actually not referring to the water, but the sodium concentration being
link |
And you've probably talked about that at a length of why that's an issue.
link |
If sodium potassium balances inside, outside of cell come off, your heart stops, right?
link |
Muscle contraction ends and all these things.
link |
So you don't want to be over or under hydrated.
link |
So understanding this rough equation I sort of loosely calculated one day is helpful for
link |
The most context is talking about how much water to drink throughout the day and then
link |
how much water to drink during exercise.
link |
So the very easy answer is half your body weight in ounces per day is a very loose guideline
link |
for total amount of fluid consumption.
link |
So if you weigh 200 pounds, aim for a hundred ounces of water.
link |
It's like a very easy number.
link |
If you hit that, you're probably, I'd say 90% of you are a good 90% of the time alone.
link |
If you then go to exercise, you need to then account for that fluid loss with exercise.
link |
And in general, you want to consume 125% to 150% of the amount of weight you lost in fluid.
link |
In other words, if you worked out and you were 200 pounds naked and you went and did
link |
your workout and then you dried off and you weighed yourself again and now you're 198
link |
pounds, you lost two pounds of water.
link |
You want to drink back about 125% of that.
link |
So instead of drinking 32 ounces, I want you to drink 40, 42, 45, like something like that.
link |
Because one of the reasons why is unless you're drinking something that is isotonic, meaning
link |
the same exact concentration in your blood and that you're in your fluid, you're just
link |
going to go closer to that hyponatremia.
link |
You're going to get a bunch of baro reflector responses and you're going to actually think
link |
you have too much fluid and you're going to urinate it out.
link |
What if I'm not weighing myself before and after workouts?
link |
And is there a shorthand version of this that, you know, after training for an hour, I should
link |
drink at least X number of ounces, assuming it's at kind of taller, you know, I'm not
link |
sweating super heavily.
link |
Um, in that particular case, you could probably go something like if everyone in the world
link |
did, I don't know, 12 to 20 ounces, that's probably like pretty decent and they're probably
link |
And what about electrolytes?
link |
If that thing only works though, if you're coming in at optimal hydration, then this
link |
This is why you have to, you have to flag this starting with a good total daily amount
link |
Because if you're coming in and you're like, oh, I drink two or three glasses of water
link |
a day, then you might need to drink 50 or 60 ounces post workout because you're way
link |
So that like, oh, 12 ounces or so works if you're already generally very well hydrated.
link |
And if people are drinking, you know, four to six glasses of water a day, but they're
link |
also drinking a lot of caffeine in any form, then they're going to be excreting more water
link |
Well, because caffeine's a diuretic.
link |
It kind of is, but it kind of isn't either.
link |
It's not the diuretic that we used to think about it as, um, it is still fluid consumption.
link |
So it's only a diuretic if it causes you to excrete more fluid than it actually was being
link |
So, um, if caffeine intake is in a normal range, I don't, I don't have to worry about
link |
the diuretic effects.
link |
If someone is drinking 12 cups of coffee a day, we're going to, or they're taking caffeine
link |
pills or something.
link |
Now the excretion is going to outkick the coverage.
link |
So now we're gonna have problems, right?
link |
Cause there's no fluid consumption with the caffeine pill.
link |
So in general, things like tea, consumption, like I'm not super worried about those things.
link |
You can count those towards your total fluid intake if you want.
link |
So if you're like, I drink 60 ounces of water plus 20 ounces of coffee, and then, you know,
link |
this is like, you're gonna add that all up and you're going to be totally okay.
link |
So natural, you also have problems with synthetic forms of caffeine versus natural forms of
link |
Natural forms are, are pretty okay.
link |
So coffee, tea, et cetera.
link |
Pill form is where it gets tricky.
link |
Like always, right?
link |
So general, just eat real food and things, you're gonna be just fine.
link |
The last piece to consider is your diet quality matters because the fluid content in your
link |
food can vary wildly.
link |
So something like a bagel might be, you know, five to 10% water or something like a watermelon
link |
is 98%, 95%, something in a huge range, even meat is very high percentage of fluid intake.
link |
Like it's a really high, even after you cook it, there's still a lot of fluid in there.
link |
So if you're eating a whole food, mostly whole food based diet, your endogenous hydration
link |
is actually pretty high already just from your food.
link |
If you're eating a very highly processed, dehydrated, oversalted diet, you've, you're
link |
way low on hydration just in your food.
link |
So you have to factor all these things.
link |
And in fact, one of the things that happens to us constantly with folks that go from a
link |
like highly processed, low quality diet to a high quality one is they just, they're just
link |
I'm like, what the hell is going on?
link |
I'm like, well, you're actually have brought in 60 additional ounces of water in your diet
link |
relative to what you used to have.
link |
And you've gone from 10 grams of sodium there to four to two, sometimes one.
link |
Sometimes it gets very low.
link |
Cause you're not like salt.
link |
Are you salting your food?
link |
Well we don't have sodium intake then like we're way down.
link |
So everything that we're considering is based on that.
link |
So let's assume someone's eating a pretty well balanced diet.
link |
They're drinking 60 ounces of water and maybe some caffeine, coffee and tea, things like
link |
We don't exactly know the optimal amount of sodium one should intake.
link |
High sodium concentrations are still associated with a lot of negative health outcomes, especially
link |
in combination with poor physical activity, in combination with low food quality and all
link |
their comorbidities.
link |
That's a very bad thing.
link |
You need to be very careful about those things.
link |
If everything else is okay, we're okay playing with a little bit of higher salt.
link |
In fact, you're probably gonna feel better.
link |
You're gonna feel generally pretty good.
link |
You just, it needs to be very clear.
link |
If you are overweight, highly stressed, and you don't have a lot of these things ticked
link |
off and you have known comorbidities, you really need to pay attention to salt intake.
link |
It can be very nasty.
link |
So that being said, what we're generally going to look at folks is are you at least can we
link |
categorize you as a low sodium or high sodium sweater?
link |
If so, there's a whole list of electrolytes you can look on that are gonna have something
link |
like 200 to 400 milligrams per serving.
link |
There's a whole list of these things.
link |
If you're a low sodium sweater, I'm probably gonna send you after one of those.
link |
If you're a high sodium sweater, there's a lot of electrolyte supplements that are closer
link |
to six or 800, even a whole gram per single serving size.
link |
So you wanna play with that.
link |
How do you know if you're a low sodium or high sodium sweater?
link |
We actually have an episode on salt we put out that, or is coming out soon if hasn't
link |
come out already, which is when you look at the hazard ratios for salt intake, basically
link |
your probability of really bad things happen to you, goes way up as you get towards a lot
link |
of sodium intake, 10, 12 grams per day.
link |
And this is translated to teaspoons of salt, et cetera, but also very low sodium intake
link |
It's not a perfect U shape.
link |
It's kind of a J shaped curve or a kind of hockey stick shape more or less.
link |
But how would I know if I'm a low sodium or high sodium sweater?
link |
Would I just kind of lick my sweat or have someone else do it?
link |
Find a super friend who will lick your sweat for you.
link |
No willing volunteers that I'm aware of, but would I be able to tell?
link |
You can get sweat testing done.
link |
Actually, you have a number of options.
link |
The kind of the original one that most of us used in the background for many years was
link |
They'll send you out a little patch.
link |
You can wear that, send it in the lab and they'll measure it directly in the lab and
link |
It's 150 bucks or-
link |
Did they bring you into low, medium and high sodium?
link |
They're going to do that, but they're going to tell you exactly the milligrams.
link |
And then they're going to actually tell you what products and stuff that are exactly matched.
link |
Do you do this with professional athletes?
link |
We have many times.
link |
You can do a more consumer grade version.
link |
Gatorade has a patch.
link |
For 25 bucks, you can get two of them.
link |
You can put that patch on your left forearm and download the Gatorade app and you can
link |
do a workout, measure it right there and click it over and they'll tell you exactly, not
link |
only high or low, but again, they'll tell you the milligrams of sodium that are in your
link |
sweat and then you can figure out, again, kind of high, medium or low.
link |
I do much better on a slightly higher sodium intake.
link |
But in my carbohydrate, I do eat carbohydrates.
link |
I'm one of those that is pretty moderate, but I try and eat clean foods.
link |
So I noticed, and I tend to be slightly low blood pressure.
link |
So again, to reiterate the warning there that if somebody is a prehypertension or has hypertension
link |
or obese, you really do need to be careful with your sodium intake.
link |
But many people seem to find that they feel better when they increase their sodium intake
link |
and they're still in that healthy portion of the hazard ratio curve.
link |
Most of the athletes, I would say in general, we're going to go higher in salt.
link |
When they come, we're going to run their stuff and we're going to add salt.
link |
Very few times have I gone, ah, we need to cut this back.
link |
One of the exception, the ones that come in that eat like 14 year olds and I'm like, okay,
link |
you're at 15 milligrams or you're 15 grams a day because you're eating nothing but garbage.
link |
So we're like, we're going to come down, you're going to feel way better and all this bloating
link |
and everything else that's going to happen, go down.
link |
There are actually more, there are biosensors that are coming out that are not available
link |
yet, but they're coming very soon in this space.
link |
They're going to be able to give you real time metrics on salt.
link |
So you can pay attention to those.
link |
I haven't seen one and used one personally, so I don't want to espouse about how good
link |
or bad it is, but I know that those are coming from a handful of companies.
link |
An easy way to do is just look at, wear a hat or wear some sort of headband or something
link |
and do your workout.
link |
If you see a just huge white band or if it's completely clear and that's going to tell
link |
you big white band, you're probably a high salt sweater, completely clear, very little
link |
And I can see the posts on Instagram now, people showing their salt band from, from,
link |
I mean, obviously salt is so essential for so many physiological functions.
link |
You don't want too high or too low, but if you're losing more, it makes sense.
link |
You would need to take in more.
link |
So half of my body weight in ounces as a just foundation of, of a fluid intake coffee and
link |
tea could be included in that, but that should probably be mostly water or things similar
link |
Um, what, and then during exercise, the, how do I want to think about this again?
link |
Let's say I'm a, let's say I'm a high salt output.
link |
Then I'd want to drink maybe 40 ounces of water with or, or more.
link |
So let's talk about pre and mid and post, right?
link |
So what to drink pre.
link |
If you, if you come in having hit these rules, you're okay.
link |
And pre workout can be as little as like five or six ounces, basically a couple of sips
link |
Um, if you come in poorly hydrated, then you maybe need to go more like 12, but here's
link |
If you start off a session in a bad spot, you're not going to catch back up.
link |
Like you're just, you're, you're in trouble.
link |
Let's say you come in, you did, you follow directions.
link |
500 milligrams salt before 500 milligrams after a very easy rule, pick whatever source
link |
That's a couple of sprinkles of table salt.
link |
If you want Himalayan, that's fine.
link |
You don't have to.
link |
Himalayan is actually a fairly low sodium salt, so it's not the best for, for this purposes.
link |
Um, if you're a higher solder sweater, a little bit more.
link |
If you want to go choose an electrolyte of which there are infinite, um, you can look
link |
on the packet and it'll tell you, you know, 250 milligrams per serving or 400 or 600 or
link |
whatever happens to be, but around 500 pre 500 post is a very general rule.
link |
And then during is thanks to you, uh, my famous Galpin equation now that is all over the world.
link |
All I did is I took the literature and I said, okay, in general, the research shows pretty
link |
clearly two milligrams per kilogram body weight over 15 minutes seems to put you in a pretty
link |
Most people don't think about kilograms or milligrams.
link |
So can I just run that over?
link |
And then it turns out it's about your body weight divided by 30 in ounces.
link |
Like that's, that's all you have to body weight and pounds divided by 30.
link |
So you weigh 200 pounds divided by 30 and that's the number of ounces you don't want
link |
to go every 15 or 20 minutes.
link |
So I'm getting that amount every 15 to 20 minutes throughout the training.
link |
And now in the weight room, that's pretty easy to do because there are rest intervals,
link |
but you, people will need to do this while running or cycling.
link |
Um, and that can cause a little bit of gastric distress if you're not used to it.
link |
You can, you can learn to run with a, with some water in your belly.
link |
A hundred percent, the gut is very trainable in a lot of directions, but in terms of fluid
link |
as well as carbohydrate, which is another thing that is going to get people.
link |
Um, but that's, yeah, very trainable.
link |
It'll be uncomfortable initially, but you'll, you'll quickly get into it.
link |
The better solution for those folks just come in hydrated and you might not even need any
link |
You could probably perform just fine.
link |
So the ones that don't have as much of an opportunity, you really have to emphasize
link |
We have this problem with like a professional golfers.
link |
They have plenty of time to drink water, but they're so focused on the shot and there's
link |
a lot of variables coming up.
link |
Once they hit their shot and they're moving on to the next one, they're thinking about,
link |
I mean, they're going over a scorecard of 185 yards away.
link |
Can I go 184 and a half yards?
link |
Can I go 186 yard?
link |
What's the slope of that?
link |
What, what's the wind up here?
link |
What's the wind up there?
link |
It's just, they're just thinking and they just forget even though they have four and
link |
So we have to make sure that they immediately get off the course.
link |
We go right into recovery as hard as we possibly can.
link |
They wake up the next morning.
link |
They're in a good spot.
link |
We crush recovery.
link |
And now it's like, hey, if you can remember to drink this, great.
link |
If not, we're still fine.
link |
If it's not a big deal and you have time, like in a lifter, because I deal with that
link |
problem with fighters too.
link |
Like I, we can only drink so much in the middle of a fight.
link |
A couple sips over there, but we can't go mix them.
link |
It's like, can you get a couple sips in?
link |
Like it's not going to happen.
link |
It's not going to happen anymore.
link |
So start your recovery process immediately and then come in the next day.
link |
That's your window.
link |
And then whatever you can get in during the workout, that's fine too.
link |
If you're a higher salt sweater, instead of doing 500, 500, 100, maybe go 750, 750.
link |
If you have a longer bout of exercise, especially if it's hot or humid, then you might want
link |
to consider some salt in the workout as well.
link |
And 300 milligrams during the workout, totally fine.
link |
It's enough if it is a really long workout and it's really hot and you're going to lose
link |
pounds during it, you need a specific strategy.
link |
If you're going to lose less than a pound, you don't need to worry about it.
link |
You're going to be, it's not going to be enough of a detriment for you to really care.
link |
So that's a kind of a rough rule.
link |
Now if you're 200 plus pounds, maybe that number moves from one pound to two pounds.
link |
But really the number we're looking at is what 1% of your body weight.
link |
If you're losing more than 1% of your body weight, we need to start caring.
link |
If it's less than 1%, it's not going to really pay that much of a difference.
link |
Okay, so for myself, because I don't get super technical, I don't wear any devices besides
link |
I do the very attached to this watch or it's attached to me, I suppose.
link |
My body weight in pounds divided by two, that's what I'm going to try and get across the entire
link |
day as a kind of baseline.
link |
And then my body weight in pounds divided by 30 during the workout.
link |
Maybe 15 or 20 minutes, that I'm going to try and consume that amount.
link |
And then I definitely do better when I increase the amount of salt that I'm taking in anywhere
link |
from 500 to 500 milligrams to a gram of salt, several times a day actually.
link |
But I'm not eating that often, which leads me to my other question, which is, I prefer
link |
to train fasted or semi-fasted, meaning first thing in the morning or within an hour or
link |
Obviously I've been fasting while I'm asleep or having not eaten anything for three or
link |
four hours before.
link |
I just feel lighter and more energetic.
link |
If that works for me, is that okay?
link |
Or should I try, is it better to eat something before one trains?
link |
Personal preference, easy answer there.
link |
It depends on, of course, how hard you trained, what the training was like, what sport you're
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involved with, how many total counts, et cetera, but in general, personal preference for the
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And that probably handles 90% of the questions about that cold, cold showers, ice baths,
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and cold immersion up to the neck.
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I always preface this by saying there are not a lot of studies.
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There are some, but not a lot of controlled studies looking at cold showers because it's
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harder to control the variables of where people stand.
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So I would say if you have access to cold immersion of some sort, ice bath or cold immersion,
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But if you don't, cold showers will be the next best thing.
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The lore goes that if you do an ice bath or cold water immersion after strength or hypertrophy
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training that you are short circuiting some of that.
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The lore also goes that cold showers might be okay.
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And my interpretation of those data and that discussion is that all that is probably true,
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but I have a hard time imagining that the effects are so robust that it can completely
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prevent strength gains and hypertrophy such that my stance for myself is try and do the
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cold exposure training away from the strength and hypertrophy training.
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But if you can't do it any other time, right afterward probably isn't going to throw my
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whole system out of whack and prevent the improvements.
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Am I deluding myself?
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Couple of caveats here.
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Number one, I would say I have a personal vested interest in cold.
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I've been around this stuff for a long time.
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Being involved and being an advisor for XPT and being in this space a long time, I'm a
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big believer in cold, especially cold water.
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Deliberate cold exposure.
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A hundred percent, right?
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So that being said, I do think getting into an ice bath immediately after a hypertrophy
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session is getting pretty close to you just shouldn't have done the session.
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It is detrimental.
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I guess is the most blunt way to put it.
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If you're like, hey, like, I'm not super concerned with growing muscle and I want these other
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things that come with cold water immersion, fine.
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It's not taking you backwards.
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How much does it cut you down?
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Like that'd be a difficult number to come up with.
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Is it one percent reduction?
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No, it's more than that.
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I don't know where it lands though.
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It's enough though for me to go, in general, best practices don't get in the ice immediately
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How long should I wait?
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Well, in theory, the best answer we could give you would be four hours because of what
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we talked about earlier today of going, okay, immediately you've got this signaling cascade
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that takes seconds.
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You've got gene expression that's happening in this rough four hour window.
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After the genes have gone off and now you're just going through the protein synthesis process,
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the signal is already there and it's gone back down to baseline.
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So then reintroducing or introducing cold here is not going to disrupt that signal.
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That's a very non-scientifically founded because we don't know at this point at all.
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What is very clear though is if you get off your workout goal right into the ice, it's
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probably 10% attenuation of growth.
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Maybe more depends on the person.
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Some people, if you look at the individual data, it's pretty bad.
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It's enough to where it's like that's a really big deal.
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The benefits of the ice, I don't think now outweigh the benefits of hypertrophy training.
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What about cold showers?
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I don't think cold showers are going to do much.
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If you've been in both, you know that this is like, we're not playing the same game here.
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An ice bath or a cold water, a true cold water immersion up to the neck with limbs in for
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one to five minutes is a completely different stimulus than in the cold shower.
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Especially also compared to a similar like cryo is not even the same, same thing here.
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So in general, I would say don't do those cold shower.
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I don't really care.
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Can you work it out so you don't do them the same time?
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That would be my hope.
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I would actually prefer you do the cold before if you really had to do it.
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Certainly will wake you up.
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Get that adrenaline burst.
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No, we've played with that actually years ago doing that.
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There's actually some fun stuff you can do with the endurance piece with cold stuff,
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but it's totally not feasible for most people because you get out of, you're getting water
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They're going to jump on your bike and just get shit.
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And it's just a giant mess.
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But yeah, I would say walk away from it if you can.
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That's actually where I stand based on the data.
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Based on my intuition and experience, I don't think it's a good thing to do.
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Now having said that, that's mostly concerned with maximizing hypertrophy.
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Strength is not as clear.
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There are some data to show it actual block strength adaptations, but because of what
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we talked about earlier, the mechanisms and the drivers are different.
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And so I don't think it's as big a concern for strength development, though I would still
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generally say if you can get away with staying out of the ice immediately after the workout
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and you can at least wait a few hours, that's the better approach.
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Less concerned with strength, more concerned with hypertrophy in terms of interference
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If you can do it on off days or before or any other time, that's the place to land.
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That's generally when I try to do it.
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I'm just kind of throwing out an extreme case because I get asked that question a lot.
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What about the use of ice bath or cold water immersion or cold shower after endurance training?
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Okay, so a couple of interesting things here.
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You mentioned we don't have a tremendous amount of data on cold water immersion overall.
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So a lot of this is moving.
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There have been some papers to show that cold water immersion can actually enhance mitochondrial
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And actually even for endurance stuff, it's been shown to cause improvement in endurance
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adaptations relative to not.
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It's not enough for me to be truly confident in that statement yet.
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I would like to see that repeated.
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Not that I have a problem with the paper or the methodology that they use in that particular
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study, but this is a weird thing.
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So I want to see this repeated more often.
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So I have less concern with doing it immediately post endurance because you could even argue
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that there may be some benefit.
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I don't think you need to go out of your way to try to make sure you get into ice immediately
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afterwards and thinking you're going to get some massive adaptation.
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We use ice a decent amount when I can get athletes to do it.
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But this context is different.
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Number one, when we're in camp and we've got a world title fight coming up or something
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else, we've just pitched in a major baseball game.
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I am not concerned about hypertrophy.
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I'm not even concerned with strength development.
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I am now pushing towards recovery.
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There's a paradigm that I think is important with all of these things to understand, which
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is, are you pushing for optimization or adaptation?
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When you're pushing for adaptation, you don't want to block the signal for adaptation.
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This means less recovery, you're not going to feel as good, and you probably should be
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hedging towards stress.
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When you're pushing for optimization, it's the opposite.
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So if I'm in season and I had a pitcher just throw 125 pitches, I'm not trying to cause
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I'm trying to recover as quickly as possible because four days from now, we've got to do
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And I've got to do this across 162 games.
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You're going to play five days in a PGA golf tournament and you're going to have to do
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it again every week for a bunch of weeks in a row.
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I need recovery as fast as I possibly can.
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So if I'm blunting adaptation, fine.
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I'm not actually trying to do that.
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I'm trying to optimize.
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If you spend all of your time in one of those two areas, you're going to have problems.
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So you need to be judicious about thinking, is this a point in my life or training cycle
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that I want to cause adaptations or am I trying to optimize?
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You spend too much time in one of the other ones, again, you're going to have problems.
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So that's generally how I will treat the ice for all those adaptations.
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When, and I'll frame this question differently because I'm sure there are a number of ways
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in which heat can short circuit all sorts of things.
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I mean, heat in excess can kill you.
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It can shut down fertility, it can in excess, right?
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It can do all sorts of things, but it can also increase growth hormone, increase vasodilation,
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improve one's ability to sweat, which can be very beneficial in a number of contexts.
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For the typical, for 75% of people, 75% of the time, when do you think heat is most useful?
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And here I'm referring to dry sauna or wet sauna.
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I'm not specifically talking about infrared sauna because the data there are a little
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And I don't even know that my sense with infrared saunas is they don't go hot enough for my
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You and I have a similar taste there.
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We're not crushing 200 past, I'm not interested.
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And my sense about infrared sauna is that maybe I haven't seen the data is that, but
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that a lot of people like it because they like the way they look in the infrared sauna.
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It feels like you're doing something unusual.
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Now infrared lights are beneficial for other reasons, actually for mitochondrial health
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and the retinas, the good data, but infrared sauna to me, they never goes hot enough.
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So I'm talking about 200 or hotter, maybe 180 to 220, obviously do what safe folks and
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heat all the warnings about pregnant people not going in saunas, et cetera.
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I assume you're lumping in hot water immersion.
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Hot water immersion.
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So hot baths, hot sauna.
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When would you like, when do you think most people could leverage sauna or hot baths to
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benefit their training and fitness and health?
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I have a handful of things to say about this topic.
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One of them is you never have a hard time convincing people to get hot.
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Everyone feels good.
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Like yeah, get a hot bath.
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Like, can you take more hot showers?
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There are a handful of studies that have looked at this immediately post and it seems to even
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augment hypertrophy.
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So after hypertrophy training, getting in the sauna for 20 minutes?
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Yeah, whatever, whatever it needs to be.
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We don't have a good titration.
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What's the number minutes wise?
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We don't have a temperature titration.
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Hot shower would, would be a second, that would be a week second bath.
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I would say it's a very week.
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It's like a hot bath.
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I think a hot bath is probably a lot closer to what you're looking for.
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It actually kind of goes back to our initial conversations.
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Theoretically you're just going to aid in blood flow.
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So you're going to put more nutrients in, more waste product out, metabolic stress,
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all that stuff is going through.
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So that's the thought anyways, far from no ends.
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Absolutely plausible.
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Something people will do.
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I would say with cold and hot, I want to caution you against a couple of things.
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This is true across all physiology, but you need to be really careful about moving percentages
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from molecular to outcome.
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So for example, it's easy to see a paper that says, okay, we put you in a hot bath or something
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and we saw a growth hormone increase 300%.
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That is not going to result in 300% increase in muscle size, right?
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In fact, 300% might result in absolutely no change in physical size, right?
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So the, and the reason I'm saying this is because there's a lot of people in this space
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that will misapply the mechanisms and they'll, they'll grossly overestimate what these things
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can do and what they do do because they'll find something like that.
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I mean, you know this, you've done enough cellular work to, in the lab, if I see mTOR
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doubled, I think, shit, it didn't work.
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I need to see a 10X increase before I know it's even physiologically relevant.
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So reading that paper, reading someone's social media post, you're like, wow, it increased
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I'm like, well, that didn't work.
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And you're like, wow, that's huge.
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I'm like, that's not 38% increase in muscle size.
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So that's a very important point I want to make because I'm going to talk about the benefits
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But I don't want people to be fooled into thinking that this is some crazy miracle.
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The same thing with the sauna.
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In terms of general health outcomes, it is a clearly a beneficial thing.
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This is a really good idea to get hot a lot.
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It is not a substitute for exercise though.
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It's a very important distinction.
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If the options are nothing or sauna, get in the sauna, really, really good idea.
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If the exchanges though, I don't need to work out because I did the sauna, bad.
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This is not a winning solution.
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You and I know some maniacs that actually work out in the sauna.
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I don't necessarily recommend that.
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That actually would probably kill a large number of people, but it can be worked up
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So every time I talk about that, I flag that because it's just too easy to hear that and
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go, oh, well, I think Dr. Huberman said, if I just get in the sauna, I don't have to work
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Those words have never come out of his mouth.
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I definitely didn't say that.
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And I'm definitely not working out in the sauna.
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If I'm in the sauna, I'm either sitting or I'm lying down and I'm trying to make it through.
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I tend to do three 20-minute bouts across the entire week.
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So I aim for 60 minutes per week of heat exposure, which is not a ton.
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If I said I've never worked out in the sauna.
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Oh, so you're one of those.
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People will do air squats.
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They'll bring the air dime bike in there.
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I look at the sauna as kind of a time to get lazy and sweat.
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Going back to your general question.
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So potential to eight plausible aid.
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We need to see more research on that to really get a, you know, I had to put this in practice.
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I think if you try it very little harm, I struggle to see a downside if you make sure
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your hydration is on point, right?
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Because now you've got to factor in the fact you just kicked out two or three pounds.
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If you're you at 200 plus pounds, I assume, or roughly if you're in the sauna for 20 minutes,
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I would imagine you can do two, three pounds.
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Usually I'm, I'm hovering somewhere around like 225 and I drink.
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I drink a 32 ounce, it's water with a electrolyte solution that's pretty high salt afterwards
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and sometimes during.
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And sometimes after that, if I do it late in the evening, I'll go to sleep and I'll
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wake up in the middle of the night just feeling so parched.
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It's amazing how much water one loses in the sauna.
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Like a normal sweat rate for someone 225, especially in 20 minutes in a sauna, I would
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absolutely expect you to do three pounds easy without like really more probably even more
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And you mentioned the, the possible benefits of doing it after strength hypertrophy training,
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which are, makes sense for plausible mechanistic reasons on not no official data there yet.
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What about after endurance training?
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Assuming somebody hydrates well enough and they're not overheated from their endurance
link |
Could also be a benefit.
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So more and more what I'm thinking the framework here is in an ideal world, one would train
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and then do sauna or heat exposure of some kind, endurance training or strength hypertrophy
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training and then do sauna and then do cold exposure on off days or at least four hours
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away from the, from any kind of training.
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Or if you had to do it close to train, do it before training.
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I love cold in the morning.
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We, we've actually run this experiment on professional athletes where we do enough tracking
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with things like HRV, which is a global metric of like overall fatigue.
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And you've, you've probably talked about that before, but problems with it, but roughly
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idea of overall fatigue, HRV in general, higher the score, the better, right?
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So low HRV is fatigue, right?
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Well, if you wake up and take your HRV in the morning and then you get into ice, what's
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going to happen is you're going to see that number plummet.
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The second you get out, that's going to fall off the earth, which means roughly you've
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moved into a sympathetic place.
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You get in 30 degree water, you're going to go very sympathetic very quickly.
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However, if you continue to watch your HRV for 30, 60, 90, and up to two to three hours
link |
post, you will generally see an improved HRV score relative to where you started.
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So it's, it's back to this hormetic stressor, right?
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A really cold, shocking exposure will be a net result of you being more relaxed throughout
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the day in general.
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And we've seen that now, like very consistently across years with, with athletes.
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So I think it's a great way to start your day.
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You won't need nearly as much coffee after spending three minutes in 30 degree water.
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30 degrees is pretty, pretty darn cold.
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I was in the ocean this morning for about three minutes and it felt, I didn't bring
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a thermometer, but it felt like somewhere in the low fifties, but 15 moving is really
link |
That's really cool.
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The thermal layer that, that surrounds you when you sit still in a cold water immersion,
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I'm encouraging people now, if they really, I was a joke that, you know, people like to
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look real stoic and tough when they're in there.
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Like they're just grinding through it with no pain at all.
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But the stillness is actually reducing the stimulus.
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If they sift around a little bit, you break up that thermal layer.
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That's where the real action is.
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We've joked about this for years.
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Like do 50 degrees with a whirlpool jet on.
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Now I'm impressed because that is hard.
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You sit in 35 degree for three minutes, I guess.
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But with XBT, I've seen, I can't even tell you how many hundreds of people from all walks
link |
of life on all age that we've been able to get in 30 some degree water for three minutes.
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50 degrees with a whirlpool going.
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That number gets very small.
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And if you don't have access to a whirlpool, this is, this should be reassuring to you.
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You can, some people say, Oh, you know, I don't have access to ice and ice can actually
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get pretty expensive.
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You're doing a $50 ice bath every day.
link |
So you can fill your bathtub with cool to cold water.
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Get in, but just make sure that you keep sifting your limbs and it's chilly.
link |
And this, the studies on the very well established, now well established increases in dopamine
link |
and epinephrine that occur in cold water exposure.
link |
They're actually done at an hour in 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
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And so it, you don't necessarily need an ice cold or an ice bath, but immersion is really
link |
better than the cold shower.
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The cold shower is kind of a, it's the, it's, it's kind of the espresso shot version.
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You know, that's a, it's sort of funny cause if you look at most of those initial studies
link |
and you think, man, how did they get people to sign up to spend 45 minutes in 55 degree
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55 degrees is cold, even if it's not moving and then they're going to not spend five minutes
link |
in them, they're going to go an hour.
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If you've ever done ice baths at that temperature, you know, like, all right, after a few minutes,
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it's not that bad, but man, that's a protocol.
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It's just, it's kind of a cold endurance protocol because it's one thing to get in for one minute
link |
to three minutes and you know, you're getting out, you could sing a song, you could do anything
link |
to distract yourself, but 45 minutes to an hour is, is intense.
link |
Maybe they, I don't know, I don't think they paid the subjects, but anyway, that, that
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study was done in Europe.
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I forget where it was done, but anyway, they were, they were hardy subjects.
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I want to talk a bit about over-training and gauging recovery.
link |
So there are a couple of methods that I've heard about and that I use based on some data
link |
that I've seen, but mainly discussions with really informed people like yourself, Brian
link |
McKenzie, Kelly Starrett and others.
link |
The two that I'm aware of for gauging recovery of the nervous system and kind of systemic
link |
recovery are grip strength, especially grip strength on waking in the morning and the
link |
so-called carbon dioxide tolerance test.
link |
The ability to do a long controlled exhale after a few rhythmic deep breaths, just which
link |
I'm assuming taps into both one's ability to mechanically control the diaphragm, but
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also how well one is regulating carbon dioxide.
link |
First question is, is this stuff fiction, fact, or a combination of kind of anec data
link |
Are there any peer reviewed published data?
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Is your lab working on these things and am I deluding myself using these tools or are
link |
It's not fiction at all.
link |
There are, with like CO2 tolerance, there's less published data.
link |
We've run a study in our lab looking at the associations between the CO2 tolerance and
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what we call trait and state anxiety.
link |
And those are in the publication process is what I'll say.
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So you can't really talk about that stuff as you know until it's out.
link |
But in general, I'd say like, there's a reason I'm still doing it.
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I'll just leave it at that.
link |
Well, assuming it's not a clinical trial.
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I mean, I think sharing preliminary findings is fine as long as we highlight them as preliminary.
link |
I'm not a reviewer, but I look forward to reading the paper.
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But as you know, scientific, ethically, like you need to be careful about telling people
link |
results before you've gone through that process.
link |
Which is why I'm flagging this as these results are not yet passed through the peer review
link |
So you're hearing about it prior to peer review.
link |
Having said that, there's enough in that field.
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I'm not the first one into that field.
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And so I'm very confident that that's a real thing.
link |
In terms of actual tracking recovery, the big picture is this.
link |
When we run through a full analysis, when we have an athlete go through a biomolecular
link |
athlete program, we're going to run and we're going to look at three major categories.
link |
Category one are what we call visible stressors, and then we have hidden stressors, and then
link |
we have recovery capacity.
link |
Any time the total stress load outpaces recovery capacity, you're either going backwards in
link |
your physical ability or you're reducing adaptability.
link |
Now you have levers to pull here.
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You can reduce stress intake or you can increase recovery capacity.
link |
What we want in an ideal situation is to be able to implement the most stress possible,
link |
because that's the driver of adaptation, recover from that.
link |
Now we get the most adaptation, and adaptation being simply a change, whatever change you
link |
That's our gold standard.
link |
It's pie in the eye.
link |
Some people have endogenous differences.
link |
They just recover better.
link |
There are genetic factors.
link |
But let's talk about the ones that are manipulatable.
link |
If we go to the stress side of it, you want the throttle to be pushed as far down on the
link |
ones you want stress from and as far off of the ones you don't want stress, so that the
link |
adaptation comes in the exact area you want, and you're not burning gas in something you
link |
don't care about, because you're taking that total stress bucket too high.
link |
Recovery capacity over there.
link |
So here's how you can do that.
link |
You can run some analytics and measure what we do with everyone through these very comprehensive
link |
breakdowns to figure out what's that physiology look like hidden and visible, and then what's
link |
the recovery capacity.
link |
Once we have that blueprint, we can now figure out what are the two or three things we need
link |
to track that are these indicators of what we call performance anchors.
link |
So an anchor is something that kind of drags behind you or below you that slows you down.
link |
The analogy being, let's say we're going down one of these amazing canyon roads, and I won't
link |
say which canyon we're in so you can stay hidden here, and your car is going down at
link |
a certain velocity and you want to go faster.
link |
Most people's first impulse is to hit the gas, the accelerator.
link |
Well, that's fine, but if your foot is on the brake and you push the accelerator, you
link |
might go a little bit faster, but number one, you're wasting a lot of literal gas to go
link |
a little bit faster, and two, you're burning your engine.
link |
You might, you're going to blow.
link |
The easier solution is just take your foot off the brake.
link |
You're going to go faster by just stopping yourself.
link |
Then if that's not fast enough, we can hit the accelerator.
link |
Everyone wants to just push down, right?
link |
More stimulants, more optimization, bing, bing, bing, bing here.
link |
Our first analytics are where are these performance anchors?
link |
What's dragging you back?
link |
What's putting down the brake?
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I want to move those two or three things out of the way, and now let's see how far you
link |
Your recovery capacity has gone way up.
link |
Your adaptations are happening faster now, or we can do more work because you're recovering
link |
So we're trying to figure out in those buckets, and we have a whole host of things that we
link |
can measure, biomarkers and surveys and everything else that we go through to find out what's
link |
So after we've done that, now we're just going to track a few of these recovery markers along
link |
the way to figure out what's globally happening.
link |
So that could mean grip strength.
link |
I have some folks who are going to test grip strength daily.
link |
Others, we're going to look at HRV or combinations.
link |
We may look at performance metrics like a force plate, so you're going to do a vertical
link |
jump every single day, and we're going to see where that's at.
link |
We've used the tap test before, which is how many times you can tap your finger as fast
link |
It's a rough indicator of central nervous system.
link |
In say one minute or exactly.
link |
And there's just apps you can do on this.
link |
Like you tap his fingers as fast as you can, and it's going to say, hey, you did 60 taps
link |
today and your average is 75.
link |
I like that because it taps into, no pun intended, into upper motor neuron capacity because a
link |
lot of things like grip strength, obviously I have to send the deliberate signal to my
link |
hand to grip, but at some point the lower motor neurons are going to be taking over
link |
the majority of the work.
link |
The signal is probably one and done, whereas the tapping is going to be a repetitive sending
link |
of signals from upper motor neurons.
link |
So some of the athletes I work with, we track blood every day.
link |
We track urine every day.
link |
We track ideally a combination of subjective and objective measures.
link |
Everything from how did you feel last night to environmental sensors of their bedroom,
link |
full PSGs going on, running like actual sleep diagnostics, not or ring, nothing against
link |
the floor, but like full analytics and some of them, it's as simple as how'd you feel
link |
today and what was your vertical jump, right?
link |
So we're going to put people in a position to succeed and we're going to figure out what's
link |
the lever that they need to pull as well as what's their aptitude.
link |
What sport are they in?
link |
What can we realistically get away with?
link |
And some of them will take machines with them and we'll do blood every day and urine and
link |
all kinds of stuff.
link |
And some of them, it's a lot lower.
link |
For myself, I'm not, as I mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of devices.
link |
I'm trying to wear the wristwatch, I tend to go off feel, which is not, it's not the
link |
ideal objective way to gauge things.
link |
But part of my reasoning for this is my colleague from the psychology department, Dr. Alia Crum,
link |
has done some studies where they've given people, deliberately given people false feedback
link |
about their sleep.
link |
So told people you didn't sleep very well, or they've told people you slept really well
link |
and performance can be driven in the expected direction based on feedback, independent of
link |
how well people slept or didn't sleep.
link |
Now that doesn't mean you can take someone that only slept two hours or was up every
link |
30 seconds because of apnea and tell them they slept great and they're going to perform
link |
great cognitive tasks.
link |
But you can take someone who slept very well, tell them that their recovery quotient wasn't
link |
very good and their output is going to be worse.
link |
And that's my concern about a lot of devices out there, not to name specific devices, but
link |
it's still unclear to the general public what the specific algorithms are to generate these
link |
recovery scores, right?
link |
And so many of the things that reportedly track sleep aren't tracking sleep, they're
link |
tracking heart rate and breathing, which are correlates of sleep depth, but that's different.
link |
And again, I'm not knocking those.
link |
I think the sleep trackers, if nothing else, have provided a forum whereby people are very
link |
conscious of getting good sleep.
link |
It's sort of like knowing the total caloric intake of your food, people go, wow, I'm actually
link |
eating a lot more than I thought or less in some cases, but often the case is that it's
link |
So I think for the typical person, I'm wondering whether or not like myself, because I'm not
link |
a competitive athlete or certainly not a professional athlete competitive with myself, I suppose,
link |
Morning pulse rate, I tend to take when I'm waking.
link |
If I wake out of a really stressful dream, I might relax a little bit and then just take
link |
my pulse rate, kind of get a range and see if it's spiking for whatever reason.
link |
I don't tend to measure grip strength, although I've heard you can just use a classic scale,
link |
old fashioned scale with the Neil now old fashioned or some other more technical devices,
link |
probably good if there's a low cost one and then the carbon dioxide tolerance test.
link |
So we haven't really talked about that in specific ways.
link |
My understanding of it is it's four deep, slow breaths in through the nose, out through
link |
the nose, and then a big inhale as max exhale and then time duration of exhale through the
link |
nose and then stopping the stopwatch at the point where lungs are empty.
link |
Not necessarily as long as one could hold their breath.
link |
Did I get that right?
link |
And I guess we should credit you and Brian McKenzie.
link |
And the folks under Brian's umbrella for really establishing this as a really good metric.
link |
When and how can I use the carbon dioxide tolerance test to gauge recovery?
link |
When waking, post training session?
link |
Would that be a good time?
link |
Number one answer is whatever you do, do be consistent.
link |
So do it under like any good science experiment, do it under the exact same conditions as you
link |
That generally means somewhere in the morning because that's when you're probably going
link |
to have the most control, most stability going.
link |
So yeah, like you would take any HRV or other metric, wake up, get under control, get stabilized,
link |
Going to be pretty good.
link |
Sodium bicarb baking soda.
link |
Rumor has it and data has it that it can actually be a pretty effective training tool.
link |
Could you explain a little bit of about how it works and how one might explore using sodium
link |
bicarb to enhance training output in a couple of different contexts?
link |
So there's a handful of these ubiquitously effective supplements for performance.
link |
Sodium bicarbonate is one of them.
link |
It's a very ingenious idea because it's so simple.
link |
Effectively, muscle contraction happens because enzymatic function occurs within a fairly
link |
specific pH range, right?
link |
So if it gets extremely acidic, it doesn't like it.
link |
And so whether you're running through aerobic glycolysis or anaerobic or anything else,
link |
all of these things require, even ATP hydrolysis requires ATPase.
link |
An enzyme has to do.
link |
Enzymes don't function well outside of this fairly special range.
link |
So what happens is generally fatigue, the sensations of fatigue are actually caused
link |
by some signal that, hey, we're starting to run out of pH or we're getting in the wrong
link |
You're not out of gas usually, you're not too low on oxygen, you're not running low
link |
on muscle glycogen yet.
link |
You're typically going to see signs or feel signals of fatigue way prior to that, mostly
link |
That being said, what if we could regulate pH better?
link |
Enter bicarbonate, right?
link |
So without going too far into metabolism, effectively what happens is you take an inhale
link |
and you're mostly breathing in oxygen, O2.
link |
When you exhale, you're breathing out CO2.
link |
So the difference is you've gained a carbon somehow.
link |
Well, all of your carbohydrates in your body come in the form of long carbon chains.
link |
In fact, that's what a carbohydrate means.
link |
It is a one carbon molecule that has one water molecule attached to it.
link |
It's a carbon that has been hydrated.
link |
In the case of like glucose, blood sugar, it's a six carbon molecule.
link |
In terms of fat, which are the only two places you're going to get most of your cellular
link |
energy, carbohydrates and fat, that is also a big long block and chain of carbons.
link |
So whether you're getting your energy from fat or carbohydrate, you're going to split
link |
So in other words, you've got six carbons attached to each other.
link |
In this part of chemistry, it's exergonic.
link |
So when you break that carbon bond, so break one of those carbons off from the other, that's
link |
going to release energy.
link |
Just like if you had a pencil in here and I snapped it, you'd go bang and pop.
link |
I broke the bonds that were connecting that graphite to the next piece of graphite and
link |
that released energy because I put energy into the system, et cetera.
link |
As a result, though, we've now had, you know, say five or six carbons chained together.
link |
We broke one off the end, which is not how it works, but making the point.
link |
And now you have one free floating carbon.
link |
Use that energy release to then go make ATP, to then go make your muscles contract.
link |
But now you've got carbon floating around.
link |
You can associate free floating carbon with being at a higher acidic level.
link |
It's not going to happen.
link |
The only way that you're going to go through this process is if your body says, do we have
link |
an oxygen molecule available that we can bind this to immediately?
link |
That carbon attaches to that oxygen molecule.
link |
You can't just put CO2 in the blood because of what we just talked about.
link |
So you're going to bind it through this bicarbonate process.
link |
It's going to go through your blood.
link |
It's going to go into the lungs.
link |
It's going to go back into its carbon dioxide molecule.
link |
It's going to trans go through the alveoli into the lungs and you're going to exhale.
link |
So you went from carbon to this bicarbonate system, back into carbon, exhale.
link |
So inhaled O2 plants go the opposite, by the way.
link |
So they're going to breathe in the CO2, they're going to cleave off that carbon, stack those
link |
carbons together and that's how they get larger.
link |
In your blood, those six carbon chains are called glucose.
link |
If we store that in your muscle, we call it glycogen.
link |
So we take a bunch of glucose and stack it together in a plant.
link |
We call that starch.
link |
That's effectively what it is, right?
link |
So you took a bunch of carbon from the atmosphere, stuck it all together and that's a starch.
link |
If you want to do it in the form of fruit, we take that starch like from the ground,
link |
you put it up through the tree, go all the way up to the top, put it into the flower,
link |
break it up into these big, huge chunks of starch, into little forms called fructose
link |
That's why fruit has fructose in it and that's why tubers and stuff have starch in them.
link |
Basically starch in an animal is glycogen in us.
link |
All that to say, if that's happening and we know that a byproduct specifically of anaerobic
link |
glycolysis, meaning the breakdown of carbohydrates for fuel, typically in a very fast pace with
link |
low oxygen availability, the downside of that equation is acid production.
link |
We know that that's a problem because I started the conversation off there intentionally.
link |
So what if we could reduce the acid buildup and I, you know how pH kind of works?
link |
I went and kind of double negatives there, right?
link |
You don't want too much acid buildup.
link |
Then could we prolong and sustain energy in a more effective pace, especially in this
link |
anaerobic interval kind of environment?
link |
And again, that's important because in those things, failure is not a result of running
link |
out of fuel or oxygen.
link |
It's a result of fatigue building up way too quickly.
link |
Is that also true for resistance training?
link |
There's maybe more of the, the creatine phosphate system.
link |
That can be an issue.
link |
It could simply be an issue of force production.
link |
You just don't have enough force.
link |
At least you're not out of energy.
link |
You just can't muster enough force.
link |
You do enough reps, then it's going to be an issue there.
link |
Protein phosphate would be the big winner, depending.
link |
So to come back a little bit to the beginning and then I'll, I'm circling this all together
link |
Well, the way that we produce energy is going to be in two primary categories, anaerobic
link |
Aerobic meaning with oxygen, anaerobic meaning without.
link |
In terms of muscle contraction, you're pretty much talking about carbohydrates or fat.
link |
Now fat is going to be exclusively aerobic, meaning I'm going to use fat from the entire
link |
body, roughly equally.
link |
So you're doing a sprint up a hill and your hamstrings or your glutes or your quads are
link |
You can't, you're not just going to use the fat that's directly in those hamstrings.
link |
You're going to lose it from the entire body.
link |
It has to go through lipolysis, so it's in this stored form in adipose tissue.
link |
It's got to get broken down, put into blood.
link |
Blood's going to have to go through your body, get taken up in a muscle, taken up through
link |
muscle into the mitochondria.
link |
Then we're going to have to go through this process called beta oxidation.
link |
So remember, carbohydrates and glucose especially is a six carbon molecule.
link |
Fat if it's in the form of a triglyceride, it is a three carbon glycerol backbone and
link |
three, you know, tri one, two, three fatty acids.
link |
Three carbon backbone and those fatty acids are just big long chains of carbon.
link |
That's all it is, right?
link |
So we're going to break that thing down, put it in the blood, move it up, move it into
link |
You can't walk those things across the mitochondria wall, they're too big.
link |
So what you have to do is cleave them off into little chunks and it turns out we break
link |
them off into two carbon chunks, so we call it beta, as in two, move those into mitochondria.
link |
That can go through this little thing called Krebs cycle or triaxilic acid cycle and you
link |
kick out a bunch of energy out of that.
link |
You add two carbons, so as a result of that process, you're going to generate two carbon
link |
But remember, you can only go through that process if oxygen is available because you
link |
have to be able to place those carbons onto something or acid gets up way too high too
link |
This is one of the reasons why fat is a nice fuel source, but it's very slow.
link |
It takes physical time to move from the back of your shoulder into your blood, down your
link |
hamstring, uptake, uptake, uptake.
link |
In addition, it's required oxygen availability.
link |
If you need energy faster, you simply don't have the time to bring in the oxygen, transport
link |
it through, go through capillaries, exchange through a tissue, etc.
link |
Carbohydrate, on the other hand, is going to be stored locally in the exercising muscle
link |
So specifically in the cytoplasm.
link |
As glycogen in the store there.
link |
So what's going to happen initially, your initial demands for exercise or for fuel are
link |
going to come from the glycogen stored within the muscle fiber itself.
link |
It's just going to break right there and you're going to be off the races.
link |
So you have the six carbon molecules, you're going to break it into two separate three
link |
That breaking provides you a tiny bit of energy, very small, but some.
link |
Now you're going to take those two, three carbon molecules and you want to be able to
link |
oxidize them because that's your only next step.
link |
But in order to do that, you've got to go those into mitochondria.
link |
So you've got to break one of those molecules off.
link |
So then you'll be back to your two carbon molecule, just like you did with fat.
link |
That's going to go into mitochondria and then it's going to go through the exact same Krebs
link |
cycle, two carbons, etc.
link |
If you don't have sufficient oxygen or sufficient mitochondria availability and you're stuck
link |
at that two, three carbon place, what do you do?
link |
We have problems, right?
link |
Now we have to say, okay, wait a minute.
link |
We have a three carbon molecule and we have a bunch of this acid buildup.
link |
Now acid functionally is hydrogen.
link |
That's what pH, potential hydrogen is what pH stands for, right?
link |
So if hydrogen is building up as a byproduct of muscular contraction and then you're having
link |
this three carbon molecule, what it can actually do is grab one of those hydrogens.
link |
And those three carbon molecules, by the way, are called pyruvate, pyruvic acid, right?
link |
If you take a pyruvic acid and you grab hydrogen and put it on top of it, we now have a different
link |
It's called hydrogen peroxide, lactate bingo, right?
link |
That's what lactate or lactic acid is, right?
link |
So we've now built that up.
link |
So number one reason why lactate is not causing your fatigue, it's actually preventing it
link |
and that it does a bunch of other really cool stuff.
link |
But the point is that system can only last so, so long.
link |
That gets overwhelmed very quickly.
link |
What are you going to do with the rest of this hydrogen?
link |
Well, if you started off in a normal pH range, you don't have very far to go before you've
link |
now gone into that level of too much acidity.
link |
If you start off in a more basic, and basic, I don't mean simple, I mean chemistry, right,
link |
and more alkaline, then that same amount of increase in pH is no longer, now just puts
link |
you back in your physiological range.
link |
So sodium bicarbonate, whether taken as a cream or a powder or baking soda or anything
link |
else can simply put you in a more alkaline state even acutely.
link |
So this is something you can take right now before your workout.
link |
You're going to delay what we call delay the progression of fatigue.
link |
And how would people start to approach this practice?
link |
My understanding is you can do this with common, you know, store-bought baking soda.
link |
There's always a concern about gastric distress, that it's a very effective laxative, sometimes
link |
an unwanted laxative effect.
link |
But how would one approach this before?
link |
Let's say I'm going to, I'm doing the mile repeats exercise, mile repeats protocol that
link |
we talked about earlier.
link |
I'm doing that for a few months, and now I want to try the sodium bicarb approach.
link |
I'm well hydrated, hopefully I'm well rested, I'm ready to go.
link |
When am I going to drink this sodium bicarb solution?
link |
How would I make the solution?
link |
Let's say I take 10 ounces of water.
link |
How much bicarb do I want to, sodium bicarb should I put in there?
link |
Can we come up with it?
link |
Is it half a teaspoon?
link |
Here's what I'm going to tell you.
link |
You will thank me by starting lower.
link |
You can always go more later.
link |
So a little pinch.
link |
You cannot go backwards.
link |
How about I start with a quarter teaspoon?
link |
Honestly, half is fine.
link |
Dissolve that, slug that down.
link |
I read a study recently that showed that people will hit their, the peak benefits of this
link |
at different times, but it's somewhere, if memory serves me correctly, somewhere between
link |
60 and 90 minutes later, so I might want to drink it on the way to the track.
link |
It can be as low as 20.
link |
So maybe as I get to the tracks since I'm going to do some warm up with some walking
link |
That's just a very rough standard.
link |
But yeah, you're right.
link |
It is, it is individualized and you probably want to play with that a little bit, if not
link |
just somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to an hour.
link |
And then the perceived and real fatigue, if done correctly, the perceived and real fatigue
link |
ought to be reduced.
link |
I can do more work without feeling exhausted.
link |
Will I feel less of a lactate burn done in air quotes for those listening.
link |
I realize that's a very crude way to describe a complex physiological process.
link |
Can sodium bicarb be used repeatedly for longer duration training?
link |
And if I were going to use it with weight training for whatever reason, maybe I'm doing
link |
circuit type training or I'm doing the super set type strength training that you talked
link |
about before, push, pull, push, pull, where it's a little bit more cardiovascularly demanding.
link |
Then maybe I'd sip that throughout the workout, make sure there's a bathroom nearby, it sounds
link |
Because I do, I am aware that many people get pretty serious gastric distress.
link |
It can happen very quickly.
link |
Well, it sounds like an amazing training tool.
link |
I really appreciate you sharing it because I think it's, it's one that doesn't get a
link |
lot of airtime these days because it's been around, but sounds like it has some pretty
link |
impressive effects.
link |
You know, what's sort of funny about that is, I mean, I get it.
link |
Pop culture is what it is, but still to this day, if you want to talk about sort of your
link |
most effective general health slash performance supplementation, it's the same three to four
link |
to five and it's because they work really well.
link |
Without going into the chemistry of each one and the practice of each one, because I definitely
link |
want to get you back to talk about diet, nutrition and supplementation at some point.
link |
But I think we need a full couple of hours to get that right, at least.
link |
If you, as a teaser, would you mind just listing off the other supplements that you have found
link |
are very effective for, for many people?
link |
So sodium bicarb or baking soda is one.
link |
What are some of the other ones?
link |
And we'll go kind of in reverse order.
link |
Beta alanine is another very classically effective one, similar idea of sodium bicarbonate.
link |
So it's, it's, it's going to, beta alanine is going to come in, it's going to be converted
link |
and stored as what's called carnosine in the muscle and carnosine is an intracellular buffer.
link |
So in other words, it's just going to delay the buildup of acid.
link |
So fatigue blocker, if you will.
link |
So very effective, very cheap, very safe, well studied.
link |
The top one though of all of them by far that has an incredibly strong safety profile.
link |
It has, it is a cheap, it is a simple form to get, has a important magnitude of effect
link |
and is effective across multiple domains of physical health and performance.
link |
And it is, because of that, it is my crown jewel.
link |
It is, in my opinion, without question, the Michael Jordan of all supplementation.
link |
And that's creatine monohydrate.
link |
It affects so many things.
link |
We typically think about it as it's muscle stuff, right?
link |
You've talked kind of, you quickly were talking about the creatine phosphate system, but we
link |
have to realize the mass majority of research on creatine phosphate is not in sport performance
link |
and has not been for 20 years.
link |
And it has everything from effects on the neurological system to there have been associations
link |
to mental health and depression.
link |
And to be very clear, I am certainly not saying you can take creatine and cure anything.
link |
And I'm not saying it's going to stop you from depression or anything, but I'm saying
link |
there's, there's a lot of research in these areas and there's a reason people are doing
link |
I completely agree.
link |
And if you're willing, I'd love to have you back for us to do a discussion on creatine
link |
and the brain or creatine and the nervous system, that would be a lot of fun and maybe
link |
we can do a kind of a journal club in advance of that.
link |
For those that don't know, a journal club is where scientists read a bunch of papers
link |
and then argue about them, discuss them and try and extract the kind of agreed upon center
link |
of mass, if you will.
link |
I think I've long been taking five grams of creatine monohydrate per day for mainly for
link |
the cognitive effects.
link |
I sense an effect.
link |
That's obviously anek data, but there, I think there are a lot of data out there.
link |
There's enough that you're not, you're not crazy.
link |
There's enough there.
link |
And in fact, there's enough mechanism now to understand the metabolic needs.
link |
People think the med, I'm a muscle guy, right?
link |
So I'm going to think about the metabolism needed to fuel muscle, but we forget cells,
link |
immune cells, red blood cells, nerve cells, astrocytes, brain, all this stuff requires
link |
And it's all going through metabolism.
link |
Super interesting.
link |
We will do the deep dive on that soon.
link |
I have a final question for you.
link |
You're involved in a really interesting, I think really cutting edge project that I first
link |
learned about from you.
link |
I don't know of anyone else doing anything as forward thinking and frankly, as relevant
link |
to the general population because of my interest in people getting better sleep and learning
link |
how to do that, avoiding stress and learning how to do that.
link |
Tell us a little bit about what I believe is called absolute rest, right?
link |
So this is something that we've been playing with behind the scenes for a long time.
link |
And this is typically how high performance stuff works, right?
link |
People want exclusivity and so this has been built.
link |
Effectively what happened is a friend of mine, Cody Burkhardt, I don't know if you know Cody,
link |
Just down the road thinker.
link |
Everyone's interested in sleep, right?
link |
And for forever, I would cover using with athletes, but everything available tells you
link |
how you're sleeping.
link |
Nothing can tell you why you're sleeping that way.
link |
And so we got together in Boulder and then I met some of his former colleagues, computer
link |
science folks, Harvard MD, and some really impressive tech folks and we were just thinking
link |
about an idea and we came up with, we started to realize the problems, right?
link |
We use first principle thinking.
link |
It's one of my favorite approaches.
link |
If you're not familiar with that, go Google that.
link |
Like that's just a recipe to solve problems, this first principle thinking.
link |
And we just started to think about like, man, all the sleep tech is there.
link |
I don't need to convince people that they need sleep.
link |
Everyone's done that.
link |
You need high quality sleep, but how can I provide solutions?
link |
And with the people I work with, I can't just tell them your testosterone's down or your
link |
sleep's down or recover.
link |
I need to be able to be like, this is down and here's why and here's our solution.
link |
That's how our high performance world works.
link |
So enter absolute rest.
link |
This is saying, okay, what are the actual nodes that go into high effective, high quality
link |
Number one is psychology.
link |
So there has to be some sort of screening diagnostic for, are you not sleeping because
link |
of simply you can't control yourself and you've done a wonderful job of giving people tools
link |
or if you can't quiet your mind before sleep, do this.
link |
If you wake up and you can't go back to sleep, here are a bunch of things, right?
link |
So we have some screens that we can do and there's some of that stuff we can do to analyze.
link |
This is a psychological issue.
link |
Let's say it's not.
link |
They're under control and we have different tricks we use and stuff on gymnastics we talk
link |
But it's not that.
link |
Which is node number two.
link |
Do we know what your dopamine levels are like?
link |
Do we know what your serotonin levels are like?
link |
What's melatonin look like?
link |
What's adrenaline?
link |
Cortisol being the primary driver.
link |
What is this relationship DHEA?
link |
Where are these things at?
link |
So we're going to measure all that and track that.
link |
We're going to measure that during the day prior to sleep, we're going to measure that
link |
next morning and even sometimes throughout sleep.
link |
And we're going to figure out is this a physiology problem?
link |
If it is, then we have clear corrections.
link |
If not, we're going to go on the next step, which is, is this possibly a pathology?
link |
So you have some sort of sleep disorder.
link |
We're going to run full what's called PSG, so polysomnography, the exact same stuff you
link |
would get in a sleep clinic.
link |
It's a sensor that's going to go on there measuring EEG and EOG and we're going to have
link |
a muscle activation sensor to see if your legs are moving and everything else is going
link |
And we're going to get a full diagnostic.
link |
So if anyone's ever done this, the amount of sleep issues that are happening in people
link |
that they don't even realize is extraordinarily high.
link |
So we're going to figure this out.
link |
One very quick example, we just did this with a professional athlete and he was having like
link |
280 roughly of these episodes per night and to be categorized as an episode, you have
link |
to meet these four specific criteria, oxygen saturation, ventilation changes, brain changes,
link |
And he hit that over 280 times a night.
link |
And what this technology allowed us to do is figure out what position did all these
link |
Well, in his particular case, most of them are happening on his back.
link |
And so we bought a very simple like pillow basically that went on his back that kept
link |
him from sleeping on his back.
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And we saw an 85% reduction in sleep-awakeness issues the very first night.
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Now we did that, testosterone eventually tripled after three months by just improving sleep
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and all we did is move him onto his left or right side.
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So huge improvements just by understanding where the problem occurred and why it occurred
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We didn't have to change hardly anything else.
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He had the basic hygiene stuff down and temperature and all that stuff and he had his chili pad
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and all that to keep the thing cool.
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We couldn't fix it.
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Years, by the way.
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This took us two years of just trying everything.
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And it was just like, I wish, I wish we could get you to sleep better and we, I pulled out
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every trick I knew.
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And it's just as soon as we built this dinner, I'm like, oh my God, it's all, he's not overweight
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He doesn't have any, he's not iron deficient.
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He doesn't have any of these other classical symptoms that are associated with Batsy.
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Supplementation, everything we've done, a thousand protocols, that fixed it overnight.
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So if it's not psychology and it's not physiology and it's not pathology, then the last one
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that people don't have any idea about is environment.
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And so what you don't realize is we have a box.
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We can sit right next to your bed.
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You just plug it in.
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You don't have to do anything and it's going to run full environmental scans.
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So it's going to look at the temperature in your room.
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It's going to look at the humidity in your room.
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It's going to look at the volatile organic acids, these are things that are seeping out
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from your mattress.
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It's going to look at particulates in the air and possible allergens and things that
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are floating around that are closing your nose off so you can't sleep at night and now
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your mouth breathing.
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And you've talked a lot, I'm sure on the previous episodes about why that's bad.
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It's going to look at your CO2 cloud.
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So we've talked, we've already set this point up, right?
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You're inhaling O2, but then you're exhaling CO2.
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Well during the day and when we're conversing, you have quite a bit of force with that exhalation,
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But at night, it's just barely seeping out of your mouth.
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So what happens is CO2 sends to cloud up and build around your face and then you end up
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re-breathing that CO2.
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And this can cause a large number of sleep problems because you're simply re-breathing
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Whether you're fully awake or just kick out of a sleep stage, the CO2 around your face
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This stuff has all been known, by the way, with the astronauts for a very long time.
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It just hasn't translated into the commercial spaces.
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Of course, gone into our high performer space.
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So we can measure that as well.
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And then we can figure out, like for the most extreme, we can actually come into a bedroom
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and build an entire sleep optimization setup and control the entire thing.
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But for most folks, the minimum we can do is run fold diagnostics and check off is this
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environmental related?
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Is there something else?
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So is this a commercial device that people can eventually access?
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So where can people learn more about Absolute Rest?
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And just for full disclosure, I wasn't aware that you had done this prior to today.
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You mentioned I always like to ask people, scientists or otherwise, I always love to
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ask you, what are you most excited about lately?
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And this sounds like an amazing technology.
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And just to be really clear, that's not like something we're working on.
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We're ready to go.
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Well, and that's one of the things I appreciate about you is that you're willing to sometimes
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speculate but you always say it's speculation.
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But in general, you seem like the kind of guy where if you're going to be public facing
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about something, if you're going to make a statement, there's got to be quite a bit behind
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You're not going to allude to the in 10 years, we might be able to do this or in five years.
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You're very data driven kind of guy.
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Well, the people I work with, we need answers, right?
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We don't have that timeframe.
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And we typically have like, hey, we start the season in four weeks.
link |
So that's just where I'm at.
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Well, as I said, I appreciate that about you.
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That is but one of the many things I appreciate, I think the listeners and I can well appreciate
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on the basis of today's discussion, what a enormous wealth of information you are, how
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clear and, and potently you communicate that information and also how you can take a huge
link |
cloud of information and still distill it into protocols that ought to work for 75%
link |
of people, 75% of the time, which is an immensely valuable thing to do.
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So for me and from the listeners, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the several
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I lose track of time, which is a good, reflects all good things.
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Several hours to take a break from teaching, take a break from research, take a break from
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the other important commitments of your life and really share with us all this incredible
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I'm so, so grateful.
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I'm glad we finally got to connect.
link |
This has been a long time in the making.
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And I'm going to, I'm going to bring the breathing protocols to my training.
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I'm going to start doing more of the endurance type and interval type training.
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I'm going to start moving when I do heat.
link |
I'm going to start moving when I do cold, I might even start throwing some sodium bicarb
link |
into a very small amount of sodium bicarb into some water before I train.
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And listen Andy, professor Andy Galpin, thank you ever so much.
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Thank you for joining me today for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin, if you'd like to learn
link |
more about his work and learn further information about exercise science from Dr. Galpin, please
link |
find him on Instagram at Dr. Andy Galpin.
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You can also find him on Twitter at the same handle, Dr. Andy Galpin spelled with one L.
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And if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube
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We also have a Patreon, it's patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman, and there you can support
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the podcast at any level that you like during today's conversation.
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And on many previous episodes of the Huberman lab podcast, we discuss supplements while
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supplements aren't necessary for everybody.
link |
Many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like sleep and focus and energy,
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and many other features of our physiology and mental functioning.
link |
There are some important issues to consider when considering supplements.
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One of those issues is the quality of the ingredients.
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For that reason, we've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E, because Thorne supplements have
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the highest possible standards with respect to the quality of the ingredients they include.
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If you'd like to see the supplements that I take, you can go to Thorne, that's thorne.com
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slash the letter U slash Huberman, and there you'll see the supplements that I take and
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you can get 20% off any of those supplements.
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If you navigate further into the Thorne site through that website, thorne.com slash U slash
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If you're not already following Huberman lab on Instagram and Twitter, please do so.
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There I discuss science and science-based tools, some of which overlap with the content
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of the Huberman lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information covered on
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Thank you once again for joining me for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin.
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And as always, thank you for your interest in science.