Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Build Strength, Muscle Size & Endurance | Huberman Lab Podcast #65

- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman,

and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today my guest is Dr. Andy Galpin.

Dr. Galpin is a full and tenured professor

in the department of kinesiology

at California State University in Fullerton.

He is also a world expert

in all things exercise science and kinesiology.

Today, you are going to hear what is essentially

a masterclass in how to build fitness,

no matter what level of fitness you happen to have.

He talks about how to build endurance,

and the multiple types of endurance.

He talks about how to build strength and hypertrophy,

which is the growth of muscle fibers.

So if you're seeking to get stronger,

or build bigger muscles, or build endurance,

or all of those things, today you're going to learn how.

You're also going to learn how to build flexibility,

how to hydrate properly for exercise.

And we'll also talk about nutrition and supplementation.

What makes Dr. Galpin so unique

is his ability to span all levels of exercise science.

He has the ability to clearly communicate

the sets and repetition schemes that one would want to follow,

for instance, to build more strength

or to build larger muscles.

He also clearly describes exactly how to train

if you want to build more endurance,

or enhance cardiovascular function.

What's highly unique about Dr. Galpin

and the information he teaches,

and the way he communicates that information,

is that he can take specific recommendations

of how recreational exercisers,

or even professional athletes ought to train

for their specific goals,

and link that to specific mechanisms.

That is the specific changes that need to occur

in the nervous system and in muscle fibers,

and indeed right down to the genetics of individual cells

in your brain and body,

in order for those exercise adaptations to occur.

It's truly rare to find somebody that can span

so many different levels of analyses,

and who is able to communicate

all those levels of understanding

in such a clear and actionable way.

Indeed, Dr. Galpin is one of just a handful of people

to which I and many others look

when they want to make sure

that the information that they're getting about exercise

is gleaned from quality peer-reviewed studies,

hands-on experience

with a wide variety of research subjects,

meaning everyday people

all the way up to professional athletes

in a wide variety of sports.

So it's no surprise that he's not only

one of the most knowledgeable,

but also the most trusted voices in exercise science.

Dr. Galpin is also an avid communicator

of zero cost to consumer information about exercise science.

You can find him on Instagram at Dr. Andy Galpin,

and also on Twitter at Dr. Andy Galpin.

Both places he provides terrific information

about recent studies,

both from his laboratory and from other laboratories,

more in depth protocols of the sort

that you'll hear about today.

So if you're not already following him, be sure to do so.

He provides only the best information.

He's extremely nuanced and precise and clear

in delivering that information.

I'm certain that by the end of today's conversation,

you'll come away with a tremendous amount of new knowledge

that you can devote to your exercise pursuits.

I'm pleased to announce

that I'm hosting two live events this May.

The first live event will be hosted in Seattle, Washington

on May 17th.

The second live event will be hosted in Portland, Oregon

on May 18th.

Both are part of a lecture series entitled

"The Brain Body Contract",

during which I will discuss science and science-based tools

for mental health, physical health, and performance.

I should point out that

while some of the material I'll cover

will overlap with information covered here

on the "Huberman Lab Podcast",

and on various social media posts,

most of the information I will cover is going to be distinct

from information covered on the podcast or elsewhere.

So once again, it's Seattle on May 17th,

Portland on May 18th.

You can access tickets by going to hubermanlab.com/tour.

And I hope to see you there.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however, part of my desire and effort

to bring zero cost to consumer information

about science and science-related tools

to the general public.

In keeping with that theme,

I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin.

Welcome Dr. Professor Andy Galpin.

It's been a long time coming.

We have friends in common,

but this is actually the first time we've sat down

face-to-face.

- Yeah, I'm very excited.

- Yeah, there are only a handful,

meaning about three or four people,

who I trust enough in the exercise physiology space,

that when they speak, I not only listen,

but I modify my protocols,

and you are among those three or four people.

So first of all, a debt of gratitude, thank you.

You've greatly shaped the protocols that I use.

And I know there's far more for me and for others to learn.

So you're a professor, you teach in university,

and you have a tremendous range of levels of exploration.

Muscle biopsy, literally images down the microscope,

all the way to training professional athletes

and everything in between.

So you are truly an N-of-1.

And just to start us off,

I would love to have you share with us

what you think most everybody,

or even everybody should know,

about principles of strength training,

principles of endurance training, and principles of,

let's call it hypertrophy power

and the other sort of categories of training.

And this could be very top contour.

But what do you think everybody on planet Earth should know

about these categories of personal and athletic development?

- Well, that's a great first question.

Holy cow!

I think I'll start it this way.

I tend to think about,

there's about nine different adaptations

you can get from exercise.

Fat loss is not one of those.

It is a byproduct.

But that's not really what I'm getting at.

And so we can kind of categorize everything like that.

And what we're going to, we can talk about,

or what are the concepts that you need to hit

within each one.

And then you could have infinite discussion

of the different methodologies, right?

And so that first thing to hit is

the concepts are actually fairly few,

but the methods are many, right?

People have said that in iterations throughout time.

So if you walk from the very beginning,

the first one to think about is what we'll just call skill.

So this is improving anything from say a golf swing,

to a squatting technique, to running.

And this is just simply moving mechanically,

how you want your body to move.

I'm just going to globally call that skill.

From there, we're going to get into speed.

So this is moving as fast as possible.

The next one is power, and power is a function of speed,

but it is also a function of the next one,

which is strength.

So if you actually multiply strength by speed,

you get power.

And the reason I'm making this distinction by the way is,

some of these are very close,

and I'm going in a specific order on purpose here.

For example, power is, like I just said,

it's a function of speed and strength.

So if you improve speed, you've also likely improved power.

But not necessarily, right,

'cause it could've come from the force direction either.

So there's carryover,

so like a lot of things that you would do

for the development of strength and power,

they are somewhat similar,

but then there's differences, right?

So things that you would do correctly for power

would really not develop much strength, and vice versa.

So we can get into all these details later.

Once you get past strength,

and the next one kind of down the list is hypertrophy,

this is muscle size, right?

Growing muscle mass is one way to think about it.

After hypertrophy, you get into these categories of,

the next one is,

these are all globally endurance-based issues.

And the very first one is called muscular endurance.

So this is your ability to do how many pushups can you do

in one minute?

You know, things like that.

Past muscular endurance,

you're now into more of an energetic

or even cardiovascular fatigue.

So you've left the local muscle,

and you're now into the entire physiological system,

and its ability to produce and sustain work.

And we can get into a bunch of differentiations

with an endurance,

but just to keep it really simple right now,

the very first one, think about this as,

I call this anaerobic power, right?

So this is your ability to produce a lot of work

for say 30 seconds to maybe one minute,

kind of two minutes like that.

The next one down then is more closely aligned

to what we'll call your VO2 max.

So this is your ability to kind of do the same thing,

but more of a time domain of say three to 12 minutes.

So this is going to be a maximum heart rate,

but it's going to be well past just max heart rate.

Then after that we have what I call long duration endurance.

So this is your ability to sustain work.

The time domain doesn't matter in terms of

how fast you're going.

It's how long can you sustain work?

This is 30 plus minutes of no break.

Like that.

So as just an high level overview,

those are the different things you can target.

And again, some of those crossover,

and some are actually a little bit contrarian

to the other ones.

So pushing towards one

is maybe going to sacrifice something else.

So as an overall start, that's really what we're looking at.

Within all those though, they do have similar concepts,

in terms of there is a handful of things you have got to do

to make all of those things work.

And we could talk about as many of those as you want,

but one of them is functionally called progressive overload.

So whichever one you're trying to improve at,

if you want to continue to improve,

you have to have some method of overload.

And as you well know, and you've talked about a lot,

adaptation, physiologically,

happens as a byproduct of stress.

So you have to push a system.

So if you continue to do say the exact same workout

over time, you better not expect much improvement.

You can keep maintenance,

but you're not going to be adding additional stress.

So in general, you have to have some sort of

progressive overload, and we can talk in detail

about what that means for each category.

But this could come from adding more weights.

This could come from adding more repetitions.

It could come from doing it more often in the week.

It could come from adding complexity to the movement.

So going from say a partial range of motion

to a full range of motion, or adding other variables.

So there's a lot of different ways to progress.

But you have to have some sort of movement forward.

So if you have this kind of routine

where you've built Monday, Wednesday,

and Saturday or something, and you just do that infinitely,

you're not going to get very far.

So that's, I guess the most high level overview

of all the things people can go after,

and then we can go from

whatever direction you want from there.

- Well I'd love to do the deep dive on each one of these

- Yeah man. - for several hours.

But, and I imagine that over time, we probably will.

I'd love to chat about a couple of these

in a bit more depth.

So in terms of defining

what the progressive overload variables are,

- Yeah. - for these

different categories,

maybe we could hit the two most common combinations

of these nine things.

The first one being strength and hypertrophy.

- Yeah. - And maybe we could

lump power in there.

Maybe not.

You're the exercise

physiologist. - Yes and no, yeah.

- But strength and hypertrophy,

which at least bears some relationship.

And then maybe separately we could explore

sustained work endurance.

This 30 minutes or longer continuously,

'cause I think many people train in that regime.

And probably something like VO2 max anaerobic as well,

because I know that a number of people now incorporate

so-called HIIT or high intensity interval training,

I think with the hopes of either shortening their workout.

- Yeah. - And or,

gaining some additional cardiovascular benefit.

So if we could start with strength and hypertrophy,

I know many people want to be stronger.

They want to grow larger muscles,

or at least maintain what they have.

So what are the progressive overload principles

that are most effective over time

for strength and hypertrophy?

- Yeah, okay.

So I'll actually go a little step back.

With every one of those categories I talked about,

you have what we call your modifiable variables.

So this is a very short list

of all the things you can modify,

the different variables within your workout

that can be modified, that will change the outcome.

A fancy way of saying, if you do this differently,

then you're going to get a different result.

So modifiable variables.

The very first one of those is called choice.

So this is the exercise choice that you select.

Now one of, I'm going to go double back here,

so I'm kind of doing a little bit of inception.

So follow me here as I'm going up a layer

to come down a couple layers.

I have these fundamental laws of strength and conditioning

that, they're kind of like a little bit of a joke.

But progressive overload's one of those laws.

Another one of those laws is your exercises themselves

do not determine adaptations.

So here's what I mean.

If you're like I want to get stronger,

you can't select an exercise.

That doesn't determine you getting strong.

If you don't do the exercise correctly,

and I'm not even referring to the technique.

That of course matters.

But if you don't execute it in the right fashion,

then you're not going to get that adaptation.

So if you choose I want to get stronger,

I'm going to do a bench press.

Well, if you do the wrong set range,

the wrong repetition range, the wrong speed,

you won't get strength, you maybe get muscular endurance,

and very little strength adaptation.

So the exercise selection itself is important,

but it does not determine the outcome adaptation.

So the very first thing that you need to think about

if you're like I want to get stronger or add muscle,

is not the exercise choice, right?

It is the application of the exercise.

What are the sets, what are the reps,

what are the rest ranges that you're using?

That's going to be your primary determinant.

Now some exercises are certainly better

for some adaptations.

For example, a deadlift is probably not a great exercise

to do for long duration endurance.

Like you could theoretically do

30 straight minutes of dead-lifting,

but it's probably not our best choice, right?

It's probably a pretty good choice

for strength development, right,

'cause you're going to do a low repetition, high set range.

You could theoretically do bicep curls for power,

but probably not your best choice, right?

Single joint isolation movement is not the best

for developing power.

If you've ever done a bicep curl

as fast as you possibly can, like that's not going to go well.

So in theory, any exercise can produce any adaptation,

given the execution is performed properly.

So now that we've understood that a little bit,

the exercise itself does not determine the adaptation.

Coming within each one of these categories,

exercise choice is an important variable

because it does lend you to things like

what movement pattern you're in.

So in other words, if you want to get stronger

and you're thinking, okay, what exercise do I do,

you need to think a little bit about

what muscle groups do I want to use,

and that's going to be leading you towards the exercise choice.

For example, I want to use my quads more.

Okay, fine.

Maybe you're going to choose more of a front squat

type of variation, a goblet squat,

so the bar, the load is in front of you.

If you want to emphasize

maybe more of your hamstrings and glutes,

you're going to maybe put a barbell on your back

or do a different one.

So the exercise choice is important to the prescription

because it's going to determine a lot of your success.

Okay, another kind of simpler way to think about this.

If you're a beginner, or moderate to intermediate,

or maybe you don't have a coach,

you probably want to hedge towards an exercise selection

that is a little bit easier technically.

So you maybe don't want to do a barbell back squat.

It's actually a pretty complicated movement.

Maybe you want to do a little bit more of, again,

a goblet squat, or even use some machines, or a split squat,

something that's a little bit simpler

because you don't have a coach,

you're not a professional athlete.

The likelihood of success is higher,

and the risk is now gone lower.

So the very first variable within all of these

is the exercise choice.

The second one is the intensity, and that refers to,

in this context, not perceived effort,

like, wow, that was a really intense workout.

It is quite literally either a percentage

of your one rep at max,

or a percentage of your maximum heart rate or VO2 max.

So for the strength-based things,

you want to think about what's the percentage

of the maximum weight I could lift one time,

and that's what we're going to call one rep max.

Or it's a percentage of my heart rate, right?

So if I tell you to get on a bike

and I want you to do intervals, and I want you to get 75%,

I'm typically referring to 75% of your max heart rate,

or VO2 max, or something like that.

If I tell you to do squats at 75%,

that means 75% of the maximum amount of weight

you could lift one time, or close.

- In terms of determining one rep max,

I confess I've never actually taken the one rep max

for any exercise.

But I have some internal sense

of what that might be or what range it might be.

Is it necessary for people to assess

their one repetition maximum,

before going into these sorts of programs?

- No, not at all.

I think a more intuitive way is to take a repetition range.

Well, you can do this a couple of different ways.

So there are equations you can run,

and you can just Google these anywhere,

and these are called conversion charts.

And so it says okay, if I did 75 pounds on my bench press

and I did it eight times,

you can just run an estimate to say, okay,

you're probably going to be able to bench

about 95 pounds for one rep max or something.

So that's a very easy conversion chart.

So just pick a load that you feel comfortable with,

but it's kind of heavy but not like crazy heavy,

and do as many repetitions as you can

with a really good technique.

And then look what that number would be.

So conversion charts. - Probably safer than doing it

one repetition maximum.

- For the general public who has, again,

no coaching, it's safer.

For a professional athlete, it's not any safer, but,

or not even a professional athlete,

but a trained person with a coach.

But for most people, yeah, that's a good way to go about it.

You can also just kind of do it with feel,

in the sense that say you want to do

a set of five repetitions, and you do the load,

and you think I could've done one or two more.

And then you kind of have an idea of

what that number's going to be.

If you think, man, that last one I had to kind of

really, really, really get after it,

then maybe just call that that number, right?

So you don't have to get overly concerned.

In fact, when we start getting into these number ranges,

you're going to see that they're all ranges.

We're not going to give a specific 95%,

for one of these exact reasons.

It's not that precise for most of 'em.

In fact, some of 'em like hypertrophy

have enormous ranges that you like almost can't miss.

So the intensity in that case

doesn't even matter for the most part,

because that's not the primary determinant.

Some of these you're going to see intensity as a determinant,

and some of these you're going to see volume

is the true determinant.

So intensity though is that second one,

choice was the very first one, manipulable variable.

Intensity was the second one.

The third one is what we call volume.

And so this is just how many reps

and how many sets are you doing, right?

So if you're going to do three sets of 10,

that volume would be 30, right?

Five sets of five, that volume is 25.

It's just a simple equation.

How much work are you totally doing?

The next one past that is called rest intervals.

So this is the amount of time you're taking

in between typically a set.

Then from there, you have progression,

which is what we started to talk about,

this progressive overload,

are you increasing by weight, or reps,

or rest intervals, or complexity, or whatever.

So all of those things can be changed

as a method of progression.

And so maybe you want to go progressing

from a single joint exercise,

like a leg extension on a machine,

and you want to progress

by moving to a whole body movement like a squat.

That in of itself,

you don't have to change the load, or the reps, or the rest.

That is a representation of progressive overload.

And it's probably a pretty good place to start,

because number one, especially for beginners,

you want to make sure that the movement pattern is correct.

Don't worry about intensity.

Don't worry about rep ranges or any of these things.

You need to learn to move correctly,

and you need to give your body some time to develop

some tissue tolerance.

So that you're not getting overtly sore.

In general, soreness is a terrible proxy

for exercise quality.

It's a really bad way to estimate

whether it was a good or a bad workout,

especially for people in that

beginner to middle to moderate.

In fact, even for our professional athletes,

we do not use soreness as a metric of a good workout.

It's a really bad idea for a bunch of reasons.

On the same token,

because stress is required for adaptation,

you don't want to leave the gym and feel like

I didn't really do much.

There has to be there.

So if you think about soreness on a scale of one to 10,

you probably want to spend most of your time

in like the three.

- You mean post-exercise?

- Yeah. - In between workouts.

- [Andy] Totally.

- And I know we'll talk about recovery extensively later,

but if one body part or set of body parts is sore,

is that an indication that one should stay out of training?

I would imagine the answer is no.

- Right. - In most cases.

And secondarily to that, if a particular muscle is sore,

does that mean that muscle is not ready to be trained again?

- Yeah, the answer to both those is the same, which is no.

Right?

You can certainly train a sore muscle.

You need to, I guess,

have a little bit of feel on that, right?

So if you're sore of like, okay,

and you're moving around a little bit and you're like, man,

this is a little bit sore, you can train.

If you're like, I can't sit on the couch without crying

because my glutes are so sore,

like we probably don't need to train again, right.

- Does whimpering count as crying?

- Yeah, in that particular case I'd say

you've actually gone to a place of detriment,

because now you're going to have to skip a training session.

And now you're behind,

so your actual total volume say across the month

is actually going to be lower

because you went way too hard in those workouts,

had to take too many days off in between.

You're going to see that you're going to cover less distance

over the course of a month, or six month, or even a year.

So you want to walk a pretty fine line,

and for most people I would say hedge a little bit

on the side of less sore than more so.

Because frequency is very, very important

for almost all these adaptations.

- Training frequency.

- Which is the last modifiable variable, right?

Frequency.

Which is how many times per week are you doing that thing?

So those are, kind of are global things

that we can play with.

So when I'm trying to manipulate,

and you can get strength versus hypertrophy,

or, you know, I want like a little bit of both,

all those variables are the things

that are going through my mind.

Which one do I need to move in which direction,

so that I can get this outcome

and not this outcome over here?

For example, some folks might want to get stronger,

but not put muscle mass on.

Some folks just kind of want both.

And that's a lot of the general public.

I want to get a little stronger and a little bit more muscle.

Great.

But there are instances where people,

for performance reasons or for purely personal preference,

like I don't want to get any more muscle, great,

but I want to get stronger.

Awesome.

If you manipulate those variables correctly,

you can get exactly that.

Very little development of muscle size,

and a lot of development in strength.

And this is why we continue to break world records in sports

like power lifting and weightlifting,

that have weight classes.

So there's a top number that we can hit

in terms of body size,

but yet we continue to get stronger and faster.

So this is very possible,

if you understand how to manipulate all those variables.

So that being said, we can start off with,

you wanted to go strength and-

- Yeah strength, and I love that you mention the fact that

it is possible to increase strength

without increasing muscle size, at least not dramatically,

because think it's not just weight class athletes.

I know a lot of people who, for aesthetic reasons,

they'd like to be stronger,

they're hearing that having strong bones

and strong muscles and tendons,

it's great for longevity and for avoiding injury,

and so many other features of life.

And yet they don't want to fill out

progressively larger and larger sizes of clothing.

- And we can go harder to the mechanisms on that piece

if you want, or we can save that and come back to it.

- Sure.

What I'd love to, both, what I'd love to know was

if we could define some of these modifiable variables,

- Yeah. - in the context of strength.

So let's say I-

- Oh okay, yes. - was somebody who,

I come to you and I say,

and let's just say for sake of balance here,

'cause she actually does do some weight training.

I bring my sister in,

and I say, me and my sister both want to get stronger.

What modifiable variables should,

how should we modify the variables?

- Love it, all right, great.

I'm going to do inception on you one more time.

So one of my other laws, this one will be fast, I promise,

of strength and conditioning, is in general,

the default is all joints through all range of motion.

So this is important because it's going to answer

your very first question on this strength category.

So in general, the ankle should go through

the full range of motion in the ankle.

The knee should go through the full range of motion

in the knee.

The hip, the elbow, et cetera, et cetera, right?

- Across the workout, not in a single movement.

- Well, right.

- I would hope.

Unless there's an amazing exercise I haven't heard about.

- Well there are some exercises that we're going to call

more full body.

Think about a full snatch.

Like you're going to take a lot of your muscles,

a lot of your joints through a lot of the range of motions.

Other ones like in isolation,

we call these single joint exercises.

So imagine a bicep curl.

You have one joint in that particular case,

the elbow moving.

The shoulder and everything else is pretty much stable.

And this is how we'll differentiate

multi-joint from single joint movements.

But yeah, so across,

I would even say it doesn't even have to be the day,

but maybe throughout the week,

try to get every joint through full range of motion.

Now, a couple of quick caveats to that.

I am not advocating using full range of motion,

and allowing really bad exercise technique.

So when I say full range of motion, that's the default.

That doesn't mean every single person can do that

for every single exercise.

It means that's where we should be striving to,

and that's our starting point.

You're going to see a lot less injury

and a lot more productivity out of your training sessions.

In fact, the science is fairly clear on this one.

Strength development as well as hypertrophy

is generally enhanced

with a larger range of motion of training.

And the mechanisms are like somewhat understood on that.

So that being said,

if you have to get into say a bad position

with your say lower back, the spine is a very good one.

In general, the spine should stay,

it's very neutral is what we call it.

So no flexion, no extension,

especially in the lumbar region.

So if you're doing a, say a deadlift,

and in order to take your knee through

a full range of motion or deadlift,

you have to compromise your back position,

that's no [speaking in foreign language].

So, caveats there aside, don't kill me,

like in good positions

always. - And don't kill yourselves.

- Yes. - More importantly.

- So why that matters is if we walk through strength,

the very first thing I'm going to go through

is the exercise selection.

So let's choose an exercise which ideally has

a full range of motion or close to it,

that doesn't induce injury for you,

that you can still maintain good neck and low back

and position and everything else.

You feel comfortable with, so you can feel strong

but you don't feel like, oh my gosh,

if you've never snatched before,

having you do a snatch for a maximum, even 75%,

like it's a terrible idea.

You're not going to feel confident,

it's going to be a train wreck.

I would rather put you on a machine bench press,

so you can go I feel stable, I feel safe here,

and I could just express my strength.

So exercise choice in general, full range of motion,

and you want to kind of balance between the movement areas.

So this is an upper body press,

so this is pushing away from you.

Bench press, things like that.

Upper body pull, pulling an implement towards you.

Bent row, pull up.

The pressing should be horizontal.

So perpendicular to your body, as well as vertical.

So this is lifting a weight over top of your head,

lifting a weight away from you.

The pull version is pulling horizontally to you

and pulling vertically down.

Pull up, things like that.

From the lower body, we typically call these hinges.

It's sort of a funny muscle thing

that no one's going to laugh at,

but like maybe me and you here,

is we'll categorize muscles as, or movements, exercises,

as pushes and pulls, right?

So like a squat tends to be a push,

'cause you're pushing away the ground.

A deadlift is a pull,

'cause you're pulling the implement up to you.

But in reality, every single exercise is only ever a pull,

'cause muscle doesn't push things away,

muscle can only contract and pull on itself.

And so again, super nerdy thing that like

most people are like, yeah,

and everyone's like, that's so dumb.

- No, but I think it's a really important point

because it also speaks to something

I think we'll get into later, which is that, you know,

posterior chain, anterior chain.

- [Andy] Totally.

- And if that's mysterious to people,

it'll become clear before long.

Posterior chain, anterior chain, makes a lot of sense to me

because of the way it's grounded

in the firing of motor neurons,

which is ultimately what controls muscle.

So it's also I think- - You and your nerves

all the time.

- Exactly, so it also depends on the lens through which one

looks at life and exercise.

Of course my lens is primarily neuroscience.

But I realized that the importance, I like this idea

of pushing perpendicular the body overhead,

pulling both toward the body and from overhead.

That just makes really good, intuitive sense,

especially since a lot of people are just listening to this

and not watching it.

So in your minds, folks, you can think about pushing away

like a punch or overhead, like lifting something overhead,

and then pulling toward your midline

or towards your body rather,

and then pulling yourself up like a pull up in PE class,

for those of. - Yeah.

- That experienced- - So the lower body's

the same thing, right?

It's some sort of pushing away

like a squat, or a split squat, or a lunge,

or something like that.

And then some sort of, again, what we'll call pull or hinge.

So a deadlift or Romanian deadlift, or a hamstring curl,

or something where you're contracting and pulling the thing.

And you could split these into

like a thousand different categories.

If you're really in that field,

you're going to want to add a bunch of other ones.

But that's just like a rough conception,

so if you're going to do a single workout,

you could choose four exercises,

and you could choose one of each.

One press, upper body press, one upper body pull,

one lower body hinge, one lower body press.

And then that would be like

a decently well-rounded exercise.

That's your exercise selection.

And if you're taking those through a full range of motion,

you're at a pretty good spot.

As close as you can.

The next one is intensity.

So if you want to develop strength,

this comes back to one of my favorite scientists

of all time who happens to be a nerve guy actually.

And generally, I like to shit on nerves

as much as I possibly can, 'cause I'm a muscle guy.

But I have to give Henneman some credit here, right.

And I know you know who that is.

- Henneman size principle.

- Yeah, of course, right?

So this is a series of papers, I think in the,

I think it was in nature.

- At least some of them, yeah.

- Yeah, in 1954, '56, or like something.

You can fact check me, I'm sure you will.

But he basically outlined this idea that, okay,

there's a certain recruitment threshold needed

for neurons to fire.

And we have muscle fibers in what we'll call

fast twitch muscle fibers and slow twitch muscle fibers.

And in general,

you're going to activate the slow twitch ones first

because they tend to be associated with

low threshold motor neurons.

It's not exactly that way, but it's close enough, right?

Well, the only way that you activate

some of these higher threshold neurons

is to demand the muscle to produce more force,

and it's fairly specific to force, right?

It's not something you can do

over an endurance thing, right,

unless it gets really extreme and fatigue happens.

So in general, the only way to use

these big chunks of your muscle,

which are incredibly important for aging by the way,

one of the major problems we have with aging developing

or development of aging-related issues with muscle,

is the fact that we lose fast twitch fibers preferentially.

And then we have major problems as we go down the line,

because we've lost a big chunk of our strength in size.

So you want to make sure these fibers stay alive and intact.

Okay, so if that being said,

the only way to develop strength

is then to challenge the muscle to produce more total force.

If you are fairly untrained or new,

I guess I should have stated this

all at the beginning as well,

one more inception then I'll stop.

When it comes to this level of detail

of exercise prescription,

a fairly untrained person is going to respond

basically the same to every single thing you do.

In fact, we've done this in the lab many times,

we've done training studies doing things like

30 minutes of cycling,

and seen huge increases in muscle strength and size,

which is not a prescription for most people

to increase size, but people that are really untrained,

if you did plyometrics or strength training

or endurance running,

they all just get better at everything.

So that caveat kind of aside,

if you want to be more intentional and more specific

to the goal of strength, you need to produce more force.

Specificity matters, right?

So we have size principle to help understand this.

And we have our laws of specificity

which say SAID principle, right?

Specific adaptation to imposed demand.

So the adaptation you get, or the result of your training,

is going to be a reflection of the demand that you imposed.

So if you want to get stronger,

you need to impose a demand of strength, not repetitions.

So this has to be, the load has to be very high.

In general, you're probably looking at

above 85% of your one rep at max.

If you're moderately trained, maybe 75% will work.

Lowly trained, again, everything works.

But in general, we want to be pressing a load

that's very high.

So because the intensity demand is so high,

that is going to force you to do a low repetition range.

You can't do 12 reps at 95%.

Then it wouldn't be 95% of your one rep at max.

So by definition,

true strength training is really going to be in the like

five repetitions per set or less range.

That's where most of it's going to occur.

With specificity.

So we've covered choice, intensity, and repetitions, right?

The total amount of sets that you do

is really kind of up to your personal fitness level, right?

If you did as little as like three sets per exercise,

that's probably enough.

- Work sets.

- Totally, yeah, totally work sets, right.

So get fully warmed up and build up to that 85%.

Don't just walk into the gym and throw 85% on

and go thank you, that's an important distinction.

So work your way up.

Do some, like a very classic warm up thing would be

like a set of 10 at 50%.

A set of eight at 60%.

A set of maybe eight again at 70%.

And then maybe like a set of five at 75%.

So two or three or four sets kind of building intensity

and lowering rep range.

And then you would go after your two or three working sets.

Also, in terms of rest intervals,

now, because we're trying to,

the primary driver of strength is intensity.

It's not the volume, right, it's the intensity.

So in order to maintain that

we have to do a low repetition range.

But in addition, we also have to have a high rest interval.

Because if we start to,

if we have any amount of fatiguing occur,

and we have to then either reduce the reps

or reduce the intensity, we've lost the primary driver.

We've lost that main signal.

So the number we're going to throw out typically

is like two to four minutes.

So imagine you did your set of bench press

and you did five repetitions at 85%.

You probably want to rest two to four minutes

before coming back to the bench.

That doesn't mean you have to sit there on your phone.

In fact, please don't.

Everyone will thank you for not doing that, I promise.

You can engage other muscle groups.

This is what we would call super setting.

So you're doing your bench press,

and while that two minute clock is running for your chest,

to rest, you can go over and do your deadlifts.

And so you can kind of move back and forth,

and this is how you can make strength training

not a seven hour workout.

If you're a professional athlete,

you're going to take that time,

because you want to maximize the outcome.

We've done this actually in our lab too,

super sets will reduce the strength gains,

but by a tiny amount, and most of us don't care enough,

relative to it's going to triple the length

of your training session.

It's not worth it.

So for the average person I will tell them, yeah, super set.

For someone who's trying to break a world record

in weightlifting or power lifting, don't super set.

- Interesting.

Yeah, I think, I've found that I don't recover

particularly well from strength and hypertrophy training.

So-

- Like in the workout or the next day?

- From workout to workout,

unless I keep the total duration of those workouts,

I like to say no more than 60 minutes of work, of real work.

- Yep, yep.

- Maybe 75.

Past 75. I find that I just start to-

- [Andy] That's a lot.

- I have to introduce additional rest days,

or I just get weaker over time.

So I'd set a kind of a limit at 50 minutes

and then I usually violate that limit

and end up doing 60 minutes.

So I'm excited to hear that one can super set exercises,

as long as they work different muscle groups, of course.

- Yeah. - Right.

So I wouldn't want to do like bench press and overhead press,

super set it,

'cause you're going to weaken- - Yeah.

- I think that goes without saying for most people,

but just to point that out.

But that I could do some push, pull, push, pull,

without compromising total intensity that much.

And I certainly would be willing to give up

a rep here or there, or a few pounds here or there.

And may I ask whether or not in doing that,

one gets any even tiny bit, or more of additional benefit

in terms of cardiovascular work?

Because I imagine after a,

even a one rep max which I've never done as I mentioned,

but let's say I get three reps on the overhead press

and then I get four reps on a weighted pull up,

and I'm going back and forth.

I'm no doubt going to be breathing harder

than if I was sitting there texting away on my phone.

- Yeah. - In between sets.

- Yep, of course.

Yeah, and so in fact in general,

one of the things that I'll present in my class

is a giant list of, in fact on the top

is all these different exercise adaptations

I started the conversation with.

And on the vertical column are as many of the

physiological potential adaptations one would get.

So changes in endogenous pH.

Blood pressure.

Lymphatic changes.

Bone density.

All these things, right, and just have this giant list.

And then you can run a matrix and you can start to look at,

okay, if I do speed training,

am I going to see changes in the nervous system?

Well, like very much so, right?

That's the primary, actual reason those things work.

Very little change in the muscle system.

It's almost exclusively explained by

the central or peripheral nervous system, right?

On that same token, are you going to expect

many cardiovascular adaptation from speed?

And the answer is no, because although we didn't cover it,

speed is very low intensity, very low rep range,

very high rest.

Well, as you go to like strength

and then you go to hypertrophy,

you start seeing more and more increases

in cardiovascular adaptations

because you're doing exactly that, right?

You're starting to reduce rest,

and you're starting to increase volume.

But you're going to lose things like bone mineral adaptations,

because the load starts to go down.

So you can look at this matrix and kind of understand

if I'm a person who wants to kind of

maximize the adaptations I get across my entire physiology

for the least amount of work,

you can choose these different adaptations to go after

that are going to kind of land on these things, right?

And exactly as you mentioned,

if you're going to take five minutes rest between each rep.

So let's say the extreme,

you're going to do three sets of one repetition for strength

at 95%, you're going to take probably five,

maybe seven minutes between each attempt.

Like you better not expect many like changes

in your resting blood pressure.

That there's no cardiovascular strain there.

You're going to put it together in a circuit

where you're going to lose some potential strength adaptation,

but you're going to gain something there.

So all these things are,

it's not about good or bad or right or wrong.

It's always about what advantage do you want

and what disadvantage do you want?

And I can cut like really in to the chase here

on one of these things, 'cause we'll get to this eventually.

If you want to know the ones that are going to

generally give you the most physiological adaptations

across the most categories,

you're almost always looking for

hypertrophy type of training.

And then this anaerobic conditioning piece

that we'll get into.

That's going to hit the most systems at once.

- That's great to know,

and we should definitely go a little bit deeper

on those types of what the modifiable variables are

for those categories.

'Cause I think that,

I'm guessing the vast majority of people

want to be a bit stronger, maybe add some,

a little bit of muscle, or more,

make sure their heart is healthy and et cetera.

This is wonderful, and I think is clarifying

certainly a lot for me.

So for strength, let's, I guess training frequency.

- Frequency, cool. - So what should determine

training frequency?

And I had the great benefit of a long time ago

when I was in high school actually,

I paid for a session over the phone with Mike Mentzer.

- Oh, lovely! - Yeah, the Mike Mentzer.

- Sure. - And we got to be friends,

over time. - High intensity training!

- At the time I was pretty young and my mother kept saying

like, why is this like grown man calling the house?

And then we would talk all the time about training,

but he tried to convince me to train

once every five to seven days, very few sets,

very high intensity.

And I must say, it worked incredibly well.

- Sure. - It was,

I think with my recovery quotient, which was not very good,

I think has improved over time but was not very good,

it was remarkable.

But of course this was a time when I was, you know.

- Full of the most animalism

- I was 14. - you've ever had.

- On my own version of anabolics, right.

I had a long arc of puberty, so.

- And you were untrained.

- And I was mostly untrained.

I'd been running cross country and skateboarding,

and playing soccer.

So.

- And doing all the things that are like

the antithesis of growing muscle.

- Yeah, it was literally,

and people would probably say impossible.

It was something like 40 pounds of muscle

inside of 12 months.

It was crazy.

- [Andy] I would believe that.

- And so, then of course that stopped working over time.

- Sure. - And then you start

going down the odyssey of trying to find the thing

that's going to work that well.

And you eventually realize that it was

because you were untrained, right?

So training frequency is crucial.

Let's say that people are doing these whole body workouts

as you've described them,

not alternating upper body, lower body,

'cause there's so many different splits that we talk,

probably doesn't make sense to go into splits right now.

But how often can and should one train a muscle?

And how do you know if a muscle is recovered locally?

And how do you know

if your nervous system is recovered systemically?

- Okay, this is a bunch of really interesting questions.

I'm not sure exactly what route you want to go,

so I'll start here.

As I mentioned earlier, soreness is not a good barometer

of exercise quality, because some types of training

are going to induce more soreness

and some are going to induce less.

That's important to this conversation because

when you ask about how do you know

if a muscle is ready to train again,

one of the question is, well what are you training for?

If you're training for hypertrophy, right,

muscle size, muscle growth,

we need to hedge towards recovery.

Because what you're trying to do is cause

a massive insult there,

allow then protein synthesis to occur,

building of new tissue which takes time, 48 to 72 hours,

like kind of at a minimum, that process needs to occur.

If you're doing actually more strength,

and this is a differentiation

between hypertrophy and strength,

then you didn't induce actually much damage.

In fact, you're generally not going to get very sore

from true strength training.

Very little, unless you get really heavy, you did it a lot.

The primary driver of hypertrophy

is not the same primary driver of strength.

We talked about that already.

That's intensity driven.

For hypertrophy it's not intensity.

So because we have different mechanisms,

we have different outcomes,

even though they're closely aligned,

strength is not going to cause a lot of soreness.

Therefore intensity is the driver.

Therefore frequency can be as high as you want.

So you can train every single day the same exact muscle,

if speed or power or strength

are the primary training tools,

because you need stimulus, there's skill as well, right?

Practice.

You know that as much as anybody.

Developing a new motor pattern requires

a lot of repetitions, right?

You don't need a tremendous amount of rest.

That's not, it's not a damage thing, right,

it's a re-patterning issue.

So strength training, in fact, if you look at again,

true strength professional athletes,

they're going to train the same muscles basically every day.

- Wow.

- [Andy] They're going to squat every day.

- And is that because the primary mode of adaptation

is recruitment of these high threshold motor units?

So it's mainly neural.

- No.

So everyone's going to say that.

And this is where I get all feisty.

- Well, I'm not saying that.

That was actually, there was a question mark there.

- [Andy] Okay, okay.

- If we were online putting comments,

there'd be a question mark.

- We would've fought.

I would've blocked you.

I'm just kidding.

- You already blocked me.

No. - Probably twice!

Okay.

The early adaptations to exercise,

especially strength training,

are hedged towards the nervous system.

No question about it.

People always say central nervous system,

but it's probably more peripheral, right?

Whatever, semantics probably, but pedantic.

It's nerve, if you train today,

tomorrow morning you're not going to wake up

with a actually increase in contractile proteins and muscle.

Your muscle might be a little bit bigger

due to some acute swelling,

but you could have a pretty acute that persists,

change in the nervous system we'll call it,

that allows you to be stronger,

like within a couple of days.

Sustained hypertrophy is probably more

along the lines of four weeks.

We can see that right?

We can actually see changes like in the ultrasound.

Now you're making changes immediately,

that protein synthesis process is happening like very fast

and it's going to last.

It just takes us time to measure it in terms of

a noticeable change in your whole muscle size.

So that being said, the first four weeks we typically say

are primarily nervous system.

After that, now we're starting to see most of the changes

coming from the muscle side of the equation.

So with strength development,

it's a combination of three areas.

In fact, all muscle contraction has these same three things.

It starts off with some signal, right,

from somewhere in the body,

whether it's all the way up the top

or at the level of the spine,

depending on if this is a reaction

or an actual conscious control.

From there, some signal has to tell the muscle to contract.

Okay.

So signal is one.

Two it's muscular contraction.

And there's a lot of variables

inside the muscle tissue itself

that determine its functionality.

And so if we took an individual biopsy

and took a muscle fiber from you and took one from me

and we took those muscles out and put them in a Petri dish,

and I tied one end to a force transducer

and the other end to a thing that pulls it,

and we soaked it in a bath of calcium

and a bunch of other stuff, even if they were the same size,

your fibers might contract a lot faster than mine,

even relative to size.

Or not, or slower, or there's various properties.

So the intrinsic fibers themselves

determine a lot of functionality.

From there, muscle fibers don't cause movements.

Muscle fibers simply contract.

They're all surrounded with connective tissue.

And that's all surrounded with

a bunch of more connective tissue.

That all surrounds into a muscle.

That muscle is then surrounded with more connective tissue.

That all comes together into a giant tendon.

That tendon attaches to the bone.

It's the pulling on those tendon that actually move the bone

that cause human movement.

So that's area three.

Area one, the nervous system,

area two, the muscle contraction,

area three, some sort of connective tissue thing.

Changes happen at all three of those levels.

And we're not even now talking,

when you entered the discussion of biomechanics,

and you changed say the pennation angle of the muscle,

which is the angle at which the muscle fibers

lay relative to the bone, right?

So this is basic mechanics.

Is it pulling perpendicular to the bone?

Is it pulling horizontal to the bone, or some sort of angle?

All of these things determine human performance.

So when you're talking about again,

that strength development,

you can see tremendous improvements

in total force production

by manipulating all of those areas,

and you have not touched changes in muscle size.

If you change muscle size in a true sustained fashion,

whether this is sarcoplasmic or contractile proteins,

you have given yourself more opportunity

to produce more force.

It doesn't guarantee you produce more force.

Bodybuilders are not stronger than power lifters,

even though they have more muscle.

But bodybuilders are probably stronger than most people.

So there is a relationship between muscle size and strength.

It's just not a one-to-one guaranteed ratio.

And that's generally because the,

although the muscle has been aided,

they may have not changed the biomechanical considerations.

They may have not changed the connected tissue

nor the nervous system stuff.

And so that's why we see this giant relationship

that our value is pretty high

between strength and hypertrophy,

but if you really want to get to the ends of it, it's not.

And that matters to your actual question 10 minutes ago,

because again, you can train strength daily

on the same muscle,

but if you want to allow for that process of

contractile proteins to add and grow,

then you're going to have to allow some recovery.

Because if you go back into that muscle too soon,

you're going to blunt the response.

You're going to stop it.

You're going to cut it off.

You have all kinds of problems going on in the cell

that are going to just attenuate that growth response.

So I gave you the answer for strength training.

The answer for hypertrophy is probably less than

three out of 10, on level of soreness, so you can go again.

In general, you're probably looking at 72 hours

is the optimal window.

So if you trained your shoulders on Monday,

you probably don't want to train 'em again on Tuesday.

If hypertrophy's the goal.

Maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday's best.

So something like an every two to three day window

is probably, and we know a little bit more now

about why that is.

The gene cascade, the signaling and response happens,

well the signaling happens instantaneously,

right, within seconds.

The gene cascade is probably in the,

peaked in the four hour window,

like depending on which gene you want to look at.

But it's just kind of a snapshot.

But the protein synthesis process is 24 to 48 hour thing,

and so it tends to kind of look like let that thing finish

and let that signal go back to baseline,

and then hit it again.

And then hit it again.

And now as long as you're providing the nutrients,

the recovery should happen and you should be able to sustain

the same work output in the training session.

So the stimulus stays high and the recovery's there,

and you can now continue to grow muscle.

- You mentioned 48 to 72 hours for hypertrophy.

What if, for whatever reasons,

the training split, lifestyle factors, et cetera,

somebody say, let's use your example,

trains shoulders on Monday,

ideally they would train them again on Thursday,

in their particular instance.

Wednesday or Thursday.

But they don't.

They wait until Saturday or Sunday, for whatever reason.

Maybe it's more compatible with their work

and other exercise schedule.

Whatever the reason.

Are they actually losing hypertrophy that they gained,

or they've missed a window to induce further hypertrophy?

- It's probably better to think about it as the latter.

It's not that you've lost, it's just,

you've just kind of lost an opportunity

to make more progress.

I will save you a little bit,

kind of going back to your HIIT program.

This is the original high intensity training,

the Mentzer thing, right?

Which is not.

- The HIT with one I

not the high intensity interval training,

but high intensity training.

- Correct. - Like one set

to absolute failure.

- Totally. - Maybe two.

For each muscle group.

- 20 minute workouts.

- [Andrew] Dividing your body into a three-way split,

and then literally training like

- Smashing. - six times a month.

Which most people think that is absolutely crazy.

- Yeah. - There's no way

that's going to work.

And I can tell you this.

- It does. - If you are untrained,

you grow like a weed.

If you train hard enough.

- Even if you're trained, look at the people Mike trained.

He put a lot of bodybuilders on really high levels.

Now they had the same similar help you had

at that timeframe.

- Wait, to be very clear,

I was not taking exogenous anabolics.

In fact I-

- But your endogenous was just as good.

- It probably was.

I wasn't measuring my levels there, but I probably would.

I grew easy and, in general,

I tend to grow pretty easily from weight training.

And I should say that, to Mike's credit,

and I think this is an important message,

that he was the one who really said look,

unless you're going to make a professional career out of it,

do not run the health hazards of exogenous hormones.

And certainly not at your age.

So he deterred me from that,

which was great because it never entered my mind.

It just was one of those things where

Mike Mentzer said don't do it.

And he had clearly done it, right?

And so he's speaking from an informed place.

It never entered my mind.

But also what was really wild is

I was continuing to run cross country.

And so there was a trade-off there at some point.

- A bit of an interference. - But when you're young,

you can get, many people can get away with,

- Totally. - with what at this age

would surely place me

into a state of over-training, even at low volume.

We'll see. - Yeah, well I mean like,

the whole field on interference effect

has changed quite a bit recently,

which we could come back to if you want.

But just to finish out the idea here

with that last question.

If you want to take five days or six days

in between each muscle group, you can do that.

In fact, if you look at the research,

it's going to show that frequency is not that important.

It's not that it's unimportant, but it can handle changes,

as long as you get to the same total volume.

So you can do that.

You just have to do a lot more work in that one workout.

If you care about the six week, eight week thing,

if you're like I'm in this for the next 60 years,

like it's probably okay, right?

But it can be there, the challenge with splitting up

your training sessions for hypertrophy into smaller numbers,

like once or twice a week,

it's just difficult to get that number.

It's difficult to get that volume done.

Volume-wise, the more recent meta analyses are going to say

that you're probably looking at around 10 working sets

per muscle group per week.

Seems to be kind of the minimum threshold

that you're going to want to hit.

So if you did three sets of 10 at your shoulders on Monday,

three sets of 10 shoulders Wednesday, and three on Friday,

that's nine working sets.

If you wanted to do three different shoulder work exercises

on Monday and hit your nine sets,

it's not really actually going to be that much different.

The problem is 10 is kind of the minimum.

You probably want to look for more like 15 to 20,

and in fact, well-trained folks, 20, 25.

That becomes very challenging in one workout.

In fact de functo, you're not going to be able to do it, right?

And so that is where,

it's not the frequency that looks like it kills you,

it's just the fact you have got to get,

because the total driver of strength is intensity,

but the total driver of hypertrophy is volume.

Assume you're taking it to fatigue, right,

or muscular failure.

So it's just tough to get enough done.

If you can, and if you want to set your schedule up that way,

like you probably remember,

if you do those types of training sessions

where you're just going to completely exhaust a muscle,

it's going to be sore for a while.

You're probably not going to come back,

and that's sort of the logic behind that was

let's take this thing to tremendous failure

and give it six days to recover.

It can work, it's just not the best,

I think is one way to think about it.

For most people.

- It's also hard to do those workouts

without a training partner,

if you really want to do them correctly.

- And stimulants and headphones

and all kinds of other things, right?

- Well, anyway, yeah stimulants are not,

I certainly don't recommend those.

It may be a cup of coffee or two, if that's your thing, but,

and maybe some of the safer supplements,

but certainly not the sorts of stimulants

that the guys in the '70s and '80s

were famous for taking. - No way, or still use.

- Or still use.

You talked about repetition ranges,

broadly for strength training, so five or less.

You said frequency could be as often as every day.

Rest two to four minutes, maybe even longer

if you're going for one repetition maximum.

- Yep.

- [Andrew] For hypertrophy.

- Sure.

- What are the repetition ranges that are effective,

and what are the ones that are most effective,

if one is trying to maximize some of the other variables?

Like people don't want to spend more than an hour

to 75 minutes - Realistic.

- in the gym.

Because I think that while the rep ranges

might be quite broad, as you alluded to earlier,

there's the practical, there are the practical constraints.

- [Andy] Yeah.

- So what repetition ranges or percent

of one repetition maximum should people consider

when thinking about hypertrophy?

- Right.

The quick answer there is

anywhere between like five to 30 reps per set.

That's going to show across the literature

pretty much equal hypertrophy gains.

And we can have a really interesting discussion

about why that is.

But I'm just remembering one thing from a second ago.

I want to give a better answer for the frequency.

You can do every single week for strength,

or every single day for strength.

If you want though

like what's probably minimally viable, two,

twice per week per muscle.

So hamstrings strength, twice per week.

That's a good number to get most people really strong.

- Okay. - You can do every single day.

You don't need to though.

So I want to make sure that,

like I wasn't saying you have to train a muscle

85% every single day to get it strong.

Two is a good number, three is great,

but probably even two is really effective.

- Got it.

And this explains the high frequency of training

for strength athletes that's always mystified me.

- Yeah. - And the very long workouts

make sense, because very long-

- They're going to even train twice a day.

Even they'll just squat,

in the morning squat and the afternoon, every day.

- With their eating and their sleeping,

they probably don't have time for anything else.

- Well, that's why they're pros.

So it's their job, right?

That's what they do.

So yeah, your hypertrophy.

Strength training programming

is somewhat complicated, right, because of,

it's not the danger,

but you're going to have to pay, one way or the other, right?

The risk is a little bit higher 'cause the load's higher

and you have to be a little bit more technically proficient.

When it comes to hypertrophy training,

the way I like to explain it is it's kind of idiot-proof.

The programming is idiot-proof, the work is hard though.

So here's your range.

Anywhere between five reps and 30.

Can you hit somewhere in there, perfect,

it's all equally effective, you can't screw that up.

The only caveat for hypertrophy is

you have to take it to muscular failure.

- And you need enough rest for the adaptation

and protein synthesis to occur.

- Yep. - Yeah.

- And if you recover faster,

you can maybe do it more frequently.

And if you don't, maybe less frequently.

- By that logic, should people perhaps experiment

and figure out what repetition range allows them to recover,

in concert with the training frequency

that they can do consistently.

- My recommendation is I think you should actually set your,

use the repetition range as a way to have some variation,

because most people don't want to go in the gym

to do three sets of 10.

They're going to get very bored very quickly.

And so I think you should actually intentionally

change the rep schemes for simple sake of having more fun.

It is a very different challenge.

The mechanisms that are inducing hypertrophy are different,

but there's only a maximum amount of growth

that one can get, right?

And so you have, as best we think it now,

and some people actually will espouse that we know

really clearly about the mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy,

which we don't.

It's still very much a guessing game,

but the three most likely drivers are one, metabolic stress,

two, mechanical tension, and then three, muscular damage.

You don't have to have all three.

One is sufficient.

You can have a little bit of one or two, and you can cut it,

so you get it to play here.

We've already talked about the muscular damage.

Again, it's very clear, more damage is not better.

But it is somewhat a decent proxy, right?

Like again, a little bit of soreness is good.

Just don't get so sore

it's compromising your total volume, right?

Mechanical tension is kind of like strength.

And this is why if you do even sets of five or eight,

and you're kind of close to that strength range,

you will gain a little bit of muscle.

It's not optimal muscle gain,

but you're going to gain some because everything in these,

like physiology didn't cut off at four reps

and then five reps is a different thing, right?

It's always a blend, so think of it as like a fading curve.

As you get closer to the end, it fades less effective.

As you get closer to the middle, it's more effective.

Anywhere between eight reps per set to 30,

it's equally effective.

Past 30, it's going to blend out.

Past eight to five to four to three, it's going to blend,

you know, lesser there.

So metabolic stress is one, the damage is the other,

or sorry, mechanical tension is the one that's heavy.

Muscle damage is the other one.

The third one is metabolic stress.

And this is, again, a bit of an area

of scientific contention, but something's there.

I know something's there.

We're just kind of fumbling to figure out

what exactly it is.

And this is, metabolic stress is the burn, right?

It's there.

It's why blood flow restriction training probably works.

That's done very light, so there's no mechanical tension,

there's very little damage,

but somehow it induces a good amount of hypertrophy.

- [Andrew] Very painful.

- Oh boy.

- I tried this.

I have a friend, former special operator

who lives out on the East Coast and took me through

a blood flow restriction training protocol in a park.

And I don't think I actually cried, but.

- You probably did.

- But I might've cried out once or twice.

It was unbelievable, especially the lower body movements.

Now it was a humid day,

I'll claim a little bit of jet lag, but

- No, no. - it was brutal.

It was really brutal.

And I also-

- Do it on the best day of your life, and it's still brutal.

- Okay, well,

- Still brutal. - that makes me feel

a little bit better.

It was intense, and people should know that it is important

to use the proper cuffs for these things.

I don't have any relationship to any of the companies

that sell these cuffs.

But the reason is that you actually need to block

particular avenues of blood flow.

You can't simply cinch off a muscle.

You can't tourniquet a muscle and train.

- Not a good idea. - You can actually

kill yourself that way.

- Yeah, you can get a blood clot.

- Yeah.

And so if you're interested in

blood flow restriction training,

I imagine you have some content about this,

or will at some point,

but also there are resources online that people can look up.

A question about hypertrophy training I think.

Many people are wondering about train to failure,

or don't train to failure.

Assuming good form.

- Yeah, okay, assuming good form, great.

The answer is both.

So you want to train to failure,

but you don't need to go to extreme failure.

So you don't need to necessarily go to that like,

a partner has to lift the barbell off my chest.

But you have to get close.

You have to drive either

heavy, stress damage, right, or pump.

And so a really easy practical way to think about this.

I heard Mike Israetel,

who runs a company called Renaissance Periodization,

years ago, outlined this at a NSCA talk.

And it was beautiful, and I thought

this is the most eloquent way to explain the context

about training for hypertrophy.

So I want you to look for three things in your workout,

and let's say that you want a particular muscle to grow.

Let's say you want your glutes to get larger.

Okay.

When you're doing your glute exercises, number one,

are you feeling the glute contract?

Okay, it doesn't have to be there,

but that's a good sign if it is.

Okay, let's say I didn't really feel my glute contract.

I felt it more in my quads or my back.

Okay.

Did you feel a big pump afterwards?

No, I didn't really feel a pump there

either wards or during.

Okay, great.

Number three.

Next day, did you feel a little bit of

soreness there at all?

No, I didn't.

Well, that's a very good indicator,

you didn't feel it during the workout,

you felt no sort of pump, and it didn't get sore.

Don't expect much growth.

Didn't happen. - You distributed the work

across a bunch of muscle groups.

- Most likely other muscle groups were too involved, right,

especially if you're like, no, but man, my back got really.

Well that's a really good indication of telling you

what the hell was moving.

And so in terms of targets,

if you were to put, again, a one to 10 scale,

how much should I feel it burning during?

Anything less than a three, okay,

it's probably not doing much, right?

But it doesn't, like seven is not,

a 10 is not better than seven.

You need to feel it, but it doesn't have to be like,

oh my gosh, I'm dying here.

Soreness, same barometer, right?

So if you can get like three, three and three,

you're probably in a pretty good spot.

Five, five, and five is maybe better,

but you don't need to go much past that.

So I want you to feel the muscle group either working,

or if you're like I didn't feel it much,

I didn't really get a pump

but the next day it got really sore,

well then you're still on a good path.

Again, really sore isn't like ooh, a little tender,

but next day it's okay.

Day after that, I could train, no problem.

That's really what you want to go after.

And in terms of understanding,

is this likely to produce some growth or not?

- Excellent, excellent.

Very clear parameters and recommendations

I know are benefiting me, and will benefit a lot of people.

If you'd be willing to throw out a few sort of

sets and rep parameters that could act as broad guidelines

for people who want to explore further.

I realize that with all these modifiable variables,

that there's no one size fits all for strength.

I love this five to 30 for hypertrophy,

that's a pretty vital thing.

I don't think I've ever done a 30 rep set of anything.

But now that you've thrown that out there,

I see it as a bit of a challenge.

- You want to know what's awesome about 30?

You're going to get an insane pump.

You're going to burn like crazy.

But you won't get super sore.

Because the mechanical tension's so low.

It's so light.

So you can get away with those things and you,

it's hard because your mind is going to wander.

You're going to get it like rep 20,

and you're going to be like I'm done, and you're like no,

there's a lot left here to get to 30.

Where like a set of 10 is much easier,

you're just like, okay, two more, two more.

Set of 30's like, I got 16 more.

It's awful, but you're not-

- Just the counting is work.

- It's terrible, right,

and people tend to just kind of like check out.

So 30 is possible, but a little bit extreme.

But I would recommend all of 'em.

Like it's a really fun play, you can do different,

in the same workout too, by the way.

Like you could do one set of 10 pushups

and then take a little break and then do a set of 25.

You can mix and match these things.

There's no magic recipe that has to happen for all those,

or do it different.

So Mondays are my sets of 10 days.

Wednesdays are my set of 20 days.

And Fridays are my set of 30 days.

And you can have all kinds of fun there,

and it's hard to screw up.

- Great.

I love, that phrase is always reassuring.

So for strength, is there a sets and reps protocol

that is pretty surefire?

- So a way to just think about a really fast answer

for power, well speed, power and strength,

is what I just call the three to five concept.

All right?

So pick three to five exercises.

If you're feeling better that day, choose on the higher end.

If you're feeling less that day,

or you have a shorter timeframe to train, go less.

So this would be three sets, or three exercises rather,

or five exercises the most.

So three to five exercises.

Do three to five reps, three to five sets,

take three to five minutes rest in between,

and do it three to five times a week.

So that can be as little as three sets of three,

for three exercises, three times a week.

That's a 20 minute workout, three times a week.

It can be as high as five sets of five for five exercises,

five days a week.

So it's very broad and allows people to still stay within

the domains of strength and power,

while still being able to move

and contour towards their lifestyle

and soreness and time and all those things.

The only differentiator to pay attention to

between power and strength, is intensity.

So if you want strength,

this is now 85% plus of your max, right?

And if you want power, it needs to be a lot lighter,

'cause you need to move more towards

the velocity end of the spectrum,

because power is strength multiplied by speed.

So while getting stronger by definition can help power,

you probably want to spend more of your time

in the 40% to 70% range, like plus or minus.

So that's it.

Both of them, conceptually they'll work, everything else,

the exercise, the reps, the frequency,

all that can be still in the three to five range.

Just change the intensity,

depending on which outcome you want.

- The nervous system obviously plays

an important role at the level of

nerves controlling the contraction of muscle fibers.

But of course, we have these upper motor neurons,

which are the ones that reside in our brain,

that control the lower motor neurons, that control muscle.

And this takes us into the realm of

where the mind is at during a particular movement.

And to me, this is not an abstract thing.

I can imagine doing workouts

that are mainly focused on strength,

or mainly focused on hypertrophy,

and in the case of strength, am I trying to move weights,

and when I'm trying to generate hypertrophy,

am I trying to, quote unquote, challenge muscles?

In other words, if I'm just trying to move a weight

away from my body, you know, pushing a bench press

or an overhead press,

I don't know that I want my mind thinking about

the contraction of my medial delts.

I think I want my mind in getting the weight overhead

with the best proper form.

Best, excuse me, and proper form.

And certainly with hypertrophy training,

best and proper form is going to be the target as well.

But that simple, or I should say subtle mental shift,

changes the patterns of nerve fiber recruitment.

So can we say to get stronger focus on moving weights,

still with proper form and safely,

and to get hypertrophy focused on challenging muscles,

still with proper form and safely.

- It's very fair.

Yeah, as a snapshot answer,

it is a very fair thing to think about.

Intentionality matters for both.

In other words, if you look at some interesting science

that's been done on power development and speed development,

the intent to move is actually more important

than the actual movement velocity.

So if you're doing say something for power or strength,

and you're doing just enough to get the bar up,

that will result in less improvements in strength

than even if you're moving at the exact same speed,

but you're intending to move faster.

And this is one of the reasons why good coaching matters.

So if you're coaching an athlete

through a power workout especially,

and they're doing enough to just lift 50%

of their one rep at max,

it's not going to generate as much speed development

as them trying to move that bar as fast as they can,

even if the net result is the same barbell velocity.

Turns out nerves matter.

- That's a, I mean I was about to say amazing,

but as a neuroscientist,

if I say amazing that nerves matter.

What's amazing to me is, if I understand correctly,

what you're saying is that even if the bar is moving

at the same speed, same weight,

if my internal representation, my thoughts are,

I'm trying to move this as fast as possible,

versus I'm just trying to get the bar away from me,

and get the weight up, I'm going to get different outcomes.

- Yep, this is quality of work, right?

This is, did you do enough to just check off a box

or did you actually strive for adaptation, right?

Similar concept actually works for hypertrophy,

in terms of there is a handful of very recent studies

that have looked at what we'll call

the mind muscle connection.

And this is doing things like imagine a bicep curl,

and you're simply looking at and watching your biceps,

and you're thinking about contracting it harder.

Even though you execute the same repetitions

at the same exact intensity,

initial indications are the mind body connection

are going to result in more growth than not.

- You just gave authorization for people

to look at their muscles

- Please do. - contracting in the gym.

- Please do.

- Oh my. - Yeah, of course, right?

- But the selfie is still ruled out.

- I'd rather you look at your muscles in your phone.

So I'm fine with it.

Those are initial.

We don't have a large depth of research to support that.

And maybe some stuff will come and counter it.

But it does, it matches what folks in that community

have been saying for a very long time, right?

There's actually some stuff on simply flexing in between.

So if you've ever seen a body builder,

they'll do their set of bicep curls

and then they'll get out and they'll flex and they'll check.

And they're literally, this is what Arnold did, right?

This is, if you go back to pumping in iron.

- Or college weight rooms, I should say.

- Right. - And for some reason

there's something about that age group.

- Yeah. - That there's a lot of

checking of biceps in college weight rooms,

for reasons that escape me.

- If you ever interact with my wife,

like she will be the first to tell you,

I cannot walk past the mirror without like,

I'm checking something out.

- That you can't,

- I can't. - or that she can't?

- I can't. - Okay.

- Not her me. - Got it.

- [Andy] Like I'm the one that cannot walk past.

- All right, well then I'll be careful

not to disparage-

- It has nothing to do with the hypertrophy, but I just like

I'm a muscle guy, so I'm always like thinking

and tinkering, or whatever.

But yeah, it is, I think it's very much worth your time

to do a higher quality training session.

Be more intentional, be present,

than just executing the same exact workout.

I think that's globally very clear to be to your advantage.

So if you're thinking like, I'm going to,

like, I don't want to work out today.

I got all this going on, or I'm tired or whatever,

I'm just going to do the workout I know and get through it.

Okay.

If you can go, you know what though,

like, I'm going to cut 15 minutes out of this thing.

I'm going to get my head right.

I'm going to go get two 20 minutes of quality work done,

that's your best option by far.

- You alluded to the fact that

even just looking at a particular muscle

might benefit in terms of the number of fibers

you can recruit, or its potential for hypertrophy.

I've heard before, and I certainly have experienced that

muscles that for whatever reason,

genetics or sports that one played, et cetera,

muscles that we find that we can contract

to the point of almost a slightly painful contraction,

seem to grow more readily

than muscles that we can't recruit very easily.

- [Andy] Yeah.

- And the reason I mentioned sports that we played earlier

is, I mean, you just have to watch the Olympics to see that,

swimmers obviously are very good at engaging their lats.

You look at the gymnasts,

they seem to be very good at engaging everything.

- Yeah. - And they go through

a huge number of different dynamic movements,

so that explains that.

So I find that, you know, if people say, oh

I can't get stronger in this,

or my whatever body part is weak,

in terms of its inability to engage hypertrophy.

- Yeah, I see where you're going.

- That oftentimes that can be because of an inability

to engage those upper motor neurons,

to deliberately isolate those muscles.

Are there ways that people can learn to engage

particular muscle groups more effectively over time,

for sake of hypertrophy or strength,

or for cases of trying to overcome

injury potential or injury,

because imbalances are bad across the board.

- Yeah, this is actually very common,

and I think everyone has probably gone through this.

There's some part that you just can't get going,

for me, that was the lats.

That was the rhomboids.

So my back muscles.

For years, I couldn't activate my lats or my rhomboids.

These are the muscle groups that connect

your shoulder blades.

So if you try to squeeze your shoulder blades together,

that set of muscles there are called your rhomboids.

Your lats of course are more vertical

and pull you kind of up and down.

And no matter how many lat pull downs I did, bent rows,

pull ups, I could never see any development there.

No increase in strength.

And it took me probably a decade to figure out

how the hell do I actually get these things on.

In fact, if you'd have asked me,

even in my college years as a college football player,

hey flex your lats, like show me your lats,

you would've seen no movement there.

When I was doing a pull up, in that particular case,

the only way I could get the bar to move

was by using my biceps, right?

So it's a synergist muscle,

it's supposed to be a secondary or tertiary muscle

in that movement, but for me it was primer,

because of my over strength in my biceps

coupled with my lack of activation in the lats.

So you're compensating the same movement.

Actually kind of an easy way to think about this is

imagine doing a bent row.

So imagine you're bent over kind of at a 45 degree

or a horizontal angle,

and you're going to pull a barbell to your belly button, right?

Now you can actually do that exact same movement

with very little back muscle activation,

by simply flexing your elbows more.

And so you think the barbell's going all the way down,

it's coming all the way up to touching my belly.

And you think you're doing

a great back development exercise.

When in fact,

because of the way that you're executing the movement,

you're getting very little back development.

And this is a really good example

of why someone has done a specific exercise

many, many, many times,

but yet failed to see development in a muscle group.

Which goes back to earlier part of our conversation,

which is why exercises themselves

do not determine the adaptation.

It's the execution that matters, right?

It's the technique, it's the rep range,

all of those are going to determine your actual result.

So if anytime you're banging your head against the wall

and thinking like why am I not getting movement here,

growth or strength or whatever, it's almost one of those,

it's guaranteed to be one of those areas, right?

You're probably not getting the muscle groups to activate.

In that particular example, just because we're here,

try imagine doing that bent row.

Instead of pulling the barbell to your belly,

squeeze your shoulder blades together first,

as far as they can possibly go,

and then bring your elbows up

without changing the angle of your elbow.

So in other words,

without bringing your hand closer to your shoulder.

So keep that same angle

and come up as high as you possibly can,

and then finish out the movement.

That's going to guarantee a utilization

first of the back muscles

and a finishing with the biceps at the end,

which is how that movement is supposed to go.

So how do you coach into that?

Well, it can be a number of things.

Whenever I'm diagnosing movement quality,

I look for a handful of things,

but very first one is awareness.

You'd be surprised how many folks,

when you just simply tell them

that muscle group right there,

and maybe you give 'em a tactical prompt,

so you touch it, or you put something against it.

This is actually why, sorry I'm jumping all over the place,

but this is why things like a belt work very well

for actually increasing abdominal strength.

So a misconception out there is

if you wear like a belt when you're lifting,

then the belt kind of does all the work for you

and your abs get weaker.

That can happen, but the exact opposite can happen as well.

So if you take a belt, for example,

and you cinch it down really tight,

and then you just completely disregard your midsection,

you will see a loss of strength in your midsection

because now the belt is doing the work.

But if you put the belt on just a little bit, kind of tight,

to where you get some sensory feedback,

and you think about using that belt as a way

to activate the core musculature,

you will actually see a higher,

if we look at like EMG activation,

the core muscles would be activated higher,

to a greater extent, than when the belt is off.

- [Andrew] Because of proprioceptive feedback.

- Hundred percent.

- And for those that are wondering

what proprioceptive feedback is.

Proprioceptive feedback is that

there are nerves that extend out to the muscles

that control muscle contractions,

but then there are sensory inputs from the skin and muscle

that go back into the nervous system,

and those work in concert,

and that feedback is proprioceptive.

I think it literally translates to a knowledge of

where one's limbs are, and what's happening

on those limbs. - In space, yeah.

- I've seen, I don't have a training partner,

but I've seen in gyms where someone will be training

and someone will tap the muscle

of the person who's doing the work, in order,

this is consensual tapping of other people's muscles,

not walking around

- Please. - touching people's

muscles, please.

That to provide that proprioceptive feedback,

so that the person doing the exercises becomes more aware

of the muscle that they're supposed to be training.

And it seems that that's probably an effective practice.

- Yeah.

I'll give you two examples.

I'll go to the back with that pulling movement,

but then I'll stay in the belt really quickly.

So a very easy example that you can do right now, listening,

and I learned this from Brian McKenzie,

our mutual friend, right?

So if you take your hands and open 'em up,

like you make an L with both your hands,

and now take those and put 'em around your waist,

just above your hip bones.

Now what I want you to do is press out as hard as you can

on your hands with your core.

And you can feel a lot of core activation.

And most people think core activation

is the front of your stomach, right?

Your six pack.

What you need to do is create a cylinder around your back.

So it's the front, it's the side, and it's the back.

So if you take your two fingers, point them.

Now put them just outside your belly button.

Can you move your fingers by just moving your ab muscles?

90% of people can do yes.

Same exact thing.

Now go to that same position,

just above what's called your ASIS,

so your anterior superior iliac spine,

right up that front of your hip bone, right in the front.

Can you now move?

Great, 50% of people are not going to get any movement there.

- Really?

- Take your thumb and go right above your PSIS.

- My what?

- PSIS.

Posterior superior

iliac spine. - Okay.

- Right, now can you move?

Most likely no.

- Sort of if I do a mini low back extension.

- Don't.

Just with your core musculature.

- Barely.

- [Andy] Yeah.

- Maybe- - 90% of people can't.

If you can't perform that contraction,

you can't stabilize your spine.

So only way to get stabilization in your spine

is then to go through hyper-extension.

And now that's a compression strategy

you're putting on your spine.

It's better than rounding your back,

like in going forward,

but over-extension is not great either.

So you want to be able to flex the musculature

in a cylindric fashion, so you have control.

So if you go back to our very first thing,

and with your hands open, and you put 'em right here,

and if you're like I can't get activation,

if you pay attention to your thumb, right?

Now, just move your thumb.

And now you see activation back there, fight?

- Mm-hmm.

- Boom.

Now if you can imagine turning that on just a little bit,

and now notice how I can do this, by the way,

at the same time I'm talking.

If you have to go [gasping] we don't have control, right?

So you have to be able to separate breath from brace.

So now, if I can put myself in a position,

and Kelly Starrett has always said 20%.

Give me 20% activation here, and now I can squat,

I can hinge, I can jump.

I don't need to be locked down to a hundred percent scream

to be able to brace my spine.

It's going to be ineffective and wasteful.

I want to be here.

Well, a belt provides that proprioceptive feedback

where I can put it on 20%, and it just is a reminder,

if I don't press against the belt,

the belt slides and falls down a little bit,

'cause it's not on super tight.

If it's on so dang tight, it's doing the work, and I forget.

So we just want a little bit of feedback there.

Same thing with your upper back.

If you're having a difficult time activating

those rhomboids or those lats,

someone can do a simple thing where they take their finger,

put it right between your shoulder blades,

and you just tell them things like hey, squeeze my finger.

Squeeze my finger.

As you're doing your bent row, or your pull down,

you can touch the lat.

You can do just visualization stuff.

So just imagine like a 3D rendering of that muscle group,

and you're watching that muscle group contract.

It's very powerful, and very effective to do it.

So a touch, a visual, all this stuff can help,

get people to activate.

Outside of simple awareness,

typically eccentric overload is a very effective way

for activation of a difficult to target muscle.

- So the lowering of the bar, or the lowering of the weight.

- The movement of the weight away from the body.

It's not necessarily was lowering.

'Cause that kind of depends on what muscle group

- Right, sure. - you're doing, right?

- [Andrew] I misspoke, yeah.

- Things like a pull up.

Okay, so if I'm going to do a pull up

and I have poor lat activation,

I can still get the pull up muscle movement executed

by contraction of the biceps and things like that.

However, to make the movement simpler,

I'm going to go all the way to the top.

So imagine stepping on a box or something

going all the way to that top of that pull up position.

And starting from there,

and I want you to simply lower it under control.

And so you're just simply breaking the movement down

into smaller pieces,

that allow you to focus on the execution more.

It's going to be great,

eccentrics are great for strength development,

very good for hypertrophy,

and allow you to focus on control.

I'm willing to bet a huge percentage of you out there

who're like I've never had a sore lat,

you know, I've done a lot of pull ups and things like that,

if you do that eccentric only

you'll probably wake up the next day going, oh gosh,

I feel it there.

And that's a sign,

even if you didn't feel it in the workout,

but it got a little sore the next day, keep down that path.

And then eventually you'd be able to do a concentric,

maybe take a break.

Maybe do an isometric, where you just hold that position.

And eventually work that into a progression

where you can do the concentric, eccentric,

and isometric portions, and get activation.

So that might take you six weeks.

May take you six months.

But that's generally a pretty good strategy for learning

how to activate a muscle group.

- Terrific suggestions.

Is it true that eccentric emphasized movements

might require a little bit longer recovery,

or they lead to more soreness than

- They can. - concentric movements?

- Yeah, they typically can,

but they're also higher force output.

So very good for strength development.

But they're going to lead on average to more soreness.

So more potential for intracellular disruption

that is going to be associated with pain.

There's not as much, people like to explain muscle soreness

as a result of microtrauma and micro tears in the muscle.

And that can happen, but that's not the norm.

Most of the time, it is things like disruption of calcium

that's going to lead to excessive swelling, excessive pressure,

and that's going to be then translated as extreme pain.

So that's probably explaining more muscle soreness

than actually microtrauma.

- Terrific.

I was going to get to breathing later, but maybe just for now,

if we can do a brief little foray into breathing,

as it relates to weight training.

Is there a prescriptive for how to breathe

during resistance training?

Here I'm thinking with weights,

not necessarily body weight, only movements,

although I suppose it could be,

that applies 75% of the time to 75% of the people.

What I was taught, and I'm hoping you're going to tell me

this was wrong, 'cause then there might be

more benefits awaiting me,

is that I should exhale on the effort

and inhale on the lesser effort portion of an exercise.

Is that true?

Is there a better way to breathe?

- There is a better way to think about it.

So number one, if you can breathe and brace,

then this conversation goes away.

So if you can maintain intramuscular,

intra-abdominal pressure while breathing,

then I don't really care when you breathe.

Very challenging to do at very heavy weights.

If we flag this on two areas of a paradigm.

Paradigm one over here, you're going to do a set of 30,

and you're going to do front squats

where a barbell is sitting on your throat.

If you don't take a breath, like this is going to end

one way and one way only.

You passing out.

Clearly has to be some breathing strategy.

The other end of the spectrum is

let's say you're going to do a vertical jump.

You don't need any amount of breath there,

it's never going to happen, right?

The question is, what about in the middle?

Right?

So I'm doing some sort of strength training there.

Well, number one, make sure you're braced

and then you can get away with less need to worry about it.

In general, a decent strategy is to maintain a breath hold

during the lowering, or eccentric,

or most dangerous part of the movement,

and then you can exhale on the concentric portion.

So if the bench presses are example, if you held in, braced,

lowered it under control,

and now started the concentric pushing away force,

and then you wanted to take an expiration,

during the last half of the concentric portion,

that's an okay strategy.

If you're going to do a single rep,

you don't need to worry about it.

You can just avoid or omit breathing entirely.

You're going to be just fine.

If you're doing more than that,

especially three to four to five to seven, eight,

you're going to have to have some breathing strategy.

A very common one is probably every third breath

I'm going to do like [gasping],

exhale on the third.

Reset and re-breathe.

Something like that.

If you feel like you need to breathe after every one,

that's okay, but it's going to get wasteful,

'cause you have to take time in between reps

of sitting there.

If it's a squat, that's different, versus a deadlift,

if you're resting at the bottom.

So there is a little bit of game here.

So in general though, is that 75,

75 kind of really thrown out, you threw out.

Breathe in, do the lowering, and exhale on the out.

If you have to less reps, don't worry about it.

More reps, then you need to come up with

some sort of breathing strategy.

- How about breathing in between sets,

and maybe even after the workout?

- Yeah.

- This is something I think a lot of people overlook,

like and because the,

it is the case that recovery has to do both with

the specific activation and to muscles,

and the nervous system,

but also the attacks on the nervous system

can also take place between sets.

I mean, if you're really geared up between sets

and you get adrenaline, you know,

as high in between sets or close to it

as you are during your sets,

you can imagine that the recovery would take longer.

Or at least that you're not spending adrenaline

in the most efficient way, if there is such a thing.

- Yeah, fair.

You're not going to see any athlete that I work with

just breathe in between.

Whether it's in between innings or in between rounds,

every single one of them's going to go back, sit in the stool,

and they're going to immediately be into a breathing routine.

A very intentional one.

They're a little bit different for every athlete,

depending on the sport.

Even a PGA golfer, there's going to be a, we just hit our ball,

we're moving to the next one,

we're going to go into our breathing strategy.

Every one of 'em.

It's a huge area of potential benefit and consequence,

if you're just ignoring it.

In general, we want to do any sort of calming breath,

we want to restore.

It depends on what we're combating.

Are we combating low oxygen or high CO2?

So that strategy is going to be a little bit different.

But in general, that is a huge time opportunity

to get better.

In fact, people can go back and listen to

some of your earlier episodes where you talked about,

well you have spoken about, I think, on this show,

when neuroplasticity works,

and if you're losing that opportunity, post-exercise,

you're leaving gains on the table if you will.

So not only are you going to see the athletes that I work with

mostly have a breathing strategy in competition.

We're not going to just finish a workout, high five,

drink water, and walk out of the gym.

There will be a down regulation strategy

that is heavily involved with some sort of light control,

as well as breath control.

The individual prescription on that,

there's a ton of variation with what you can do.

The easiest thing is do something that calms you down.

Most likely that's going to be moved towards

as much nasal breathing as you can possibly do.

And a really easy rule of thumb is a double exhale length

relative to inhale.

So if you need to take a like four second inhale,

double that time and breathe out for eight seconds.

Box breathing is fine.

So equal inhale, equal hold, equal exhale, equal hold.

So four second inhale, four second hold,

et cetera, et cetera.

A triangle is fine too.

There's a lot of ways, you can get really complicated,

like what Brian McKenzie will do, and Rob,

and those guys have, you can get all kinds of systems

for inhale exhale control and it can be optimized.

But some strategy of calm.

We're going to almost always put you on your back or close,

and then we're going to cover light.

We can do some, like we've done actually a number of

musical interventions as well,

but you can just as simple as sit down in a locker room

if you have to, and just breathe for five minutes.

That alone is going to be productive.

- That's great.

If you're breathing in the locker room for five minutes,

I suggest closing your eyes, or you get some funny looks,

and if, you'll still get funny looks,

but you won't see people looking at you.

- Yeah, exactly.

- I love this, and I started doing this

because you and Brian McKenzie informed me about this,

and it completely changed the rate of recovery for me.

I realized that I was leaving workouts,

both endurance workouts and strength hypertrophy workouts

feeling great, but looking at my phone,

getting right into email and meetings.

- Ooh, ooh, rough, - Not concentrating

on my breathing.

And all I did was to introduce a, on your recommendation,

a five minute down regulation.

So exhale emphasized breathing,

a bunch of different varieties,

physiological size, box breathing,

exhale emphasized, twice as long as the inhale component

for five minutes.

And I noticed two things.

One, I recovered more quickly, workout to workout,

no question about it.

- [Andy] Yeah.

- The numbers told me that.

And the other is that I used to have this dip in energy

that would occur three or four hours after a hard workout.

And I always thought that had to do with the fact that

I'd generally eaten a meal at some point post-workout.

Turns out it wasn't the meal at all.

- Yeah.

- It's that adrenaline ramp up during the workouts,

I wasn't clamping that at the end.

And so I think eventually it's crashed,

and then three or four hours later

I'm having a hard time even reading what's on the screen

on my computer, thinking maybe it's the screen.

Maybe it was what I ate for lunch.

Turns out, the down regulations allowed me

to work through the afternoon with no issues whatsoever.

It's really been quite powerful,

and so I'm grateful to you for that.

And I think this is something that I think 98% of people

are not doing, and it's only five minutes.

- You don't even have to do five.

Give me three.

If you really have to push it, give me three.

And you can even do this, you can save time.

You can do this in the shower if you have to.

So you're done, you're finished.

Drink of water, whatever has to be,

and you're getting in a shower, you're getting ready.

Just give me three minutes in the shower.

It's not ideal, but as little as that,

it can pay huge dividends.

You need some sort of internal signal that we're safe.

Like throttle down here, we're going to move on.

That has to happen.

I could go on and on here,

but I think we're making the same point

kind of over and over again.

It's a big deal and do it.

- Yeah, and you're saving energy.

I mean, the energy here is neural energy.

I think fighters do this,

good fighters learn to do this between rounds.

Sprinters learn to do this between events.

I think humans should learn how to do this between any,

you know, sort of interval type activity,

including work, social engagement.

- Yeah, I was going to say- - I mean, this is

such a powerful tool.

- Do this for one minute, after every important,

whether it's an individual high volatile interaction,

or if it's a, you just did a nice 45 minute sprint to work

and you're deep into it or whatever, fine.

Just gimme one minute.

Set your alarm, just one minute,

and that also will pay dividends.

- I love it, and as I said,

it's made a outsize different,

positive difference on my training,

but also activities outside my training.

Which is, for me, I'm not a professional athlete,

I train for health and 'cause I enjoy it,

but when a really hard workout starts to interfere

with the ability to do the other things in life,

- Of course. - that's not

a good situation.

So this is really terrific.

There's a lot more in each of those categories

of strength and hypertrophy,

but you've given us a tremendous amount

of valuable information there.

Maybe now would be a good time to shift to endurance,

and of the four types of endurance,