Science of Muscle Growth, Increasing Strength & Muscular Recovery

- [Andrew Huberman] 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.

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,

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I've long been a fan of getting blood work done

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Today's podcast is also brought to us

by Belcampo Meat Company.

Belcampo is a regenerative farm in Northern California

that raises organic grass fed

and finished certified humane meats.

While I don't eat a lot of meat, when I do

I insist that that meat be a very high quality.

How the animals were cared for is extremely important to me

and the life that the animal had and what it consumed

is very important to me.

So the way that I eat I've discussed on this podcast before

but very briefly, I basically fast until about noon,

then I eat a piece of beef or chicken with lunch

and a salad.

So that's basically my lunch.

That's what optimizes my levels of alertness

for work throughout the day.

Then in the evening I shift over

to eating primarily carbohydrates.

That's what allows me to sleep very well.

So I'm not eating huge volumes of meat

but am eating meat every day.

Conventionally raised animals are confined to feed lots

and need to diet of inflammatory grains

which is bad for them and it's bad for us

when we eat their meat.

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My favorite meats from Belcampo

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That's typically what I eat.

I think I probably eat about three or four

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They're really delicious,

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Today's episode is also brought to us by Headspace.

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I've found that staying with meditation

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Today's episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast is our fourth

and final episode in this month

which is all about skills and athletic performance.

Now, in a previous episode, we talked about science-based

in particular neuroscience-based tools

for accelerating fat loss.

Previous to that, we talked about ways

to improve skill learning, motor movements

which also included things like music

and piano playing not just athletic performance.

And we've also been exploring other aspects

of physical performance throughout the entire month.

Today I want to talk about something

that is vitally important for not just athletic performance,

but for your entire life and indeed for your longevity,

and that's muscle.

Now, many of you, when you hear the word muscle

think muscle growth and building big muscles.

And while we will touch on muscle hypertrophy

muscle growth today, and science-based protocols

to enhance hypertrophy, we will mainly be talking

about muscle as it relates to the nervous system.

And I can't emphasize this enough

the whole reason why you have a brain is

so that you can move.

And one of the things that's exquisite and fantastic

about the human brain, is that it can direct

all sorts of different kinds of movement,

different speeds of movement,

movement of different durations.

We can train our musculature to lift heavier

and heavier objects or we can train our musculature

to take us further and further so-called endurance.

We can also build smoothness of movement, excuse me,

smoothness of movement as well as speed of movement,

suppleness of movement.

All of that is governed by the relationship

between the nervous system, neurons

and their connections to muscle.

So when you hear the science of muscle

and muscle hypertrophy, you might think, oh, well

I'm not interested in building muscle

but muscle does many critical things.

It's important for movement.

It's important for metabolism.

The more muscle you have and not just muscle size

but the quality of muscle, that's a real thing,

the higher your metabolism is,

and indeed the healthier you are.

It turns out that jumping ability

and ability to stand up quickly

and to get up off the floor quickly

is one of the most predictive markers of aging

and biological aging and no surprise that is governed

by the brain to muscle connection.

In addition, muscle and musculature is vital for posture

and we don't talk about posture enough.

We all have been told we need to sit up straight

or stand up straight, but posture is vitally important

for how the rest of our body works.

It's vital to how we breathe.

It's actually even vital to how alert or sleepy we are.

So we're going to talk about the musculature for posture.

We also are going to talk about muscle

as it relates to aesthetic things.

Now, these are all linked.

Muscle for metabolism, movement, posture and aesthetics

of course are linked, right?

As our posture changes, our aesthetic changes.

As our posture and aesthetic changes, how we move changes.

And as we improve muscle quality

whether or not that's increasing muscle size or not,

that changes the way that our entire system

not just our nervous system and our muscular system

but our immune system and the other organs of the body work.

So today, as always we're going to talk

a little bit of mechanism.

I'm going to explain how neurons control muscle

and then we're going to look at muscle metabolism,

how muscle uses energy.

I promise to make all of this very simple.

I'm actually going to keep it very brief

probably about 10 minutes total.

And by the end of that 10 minutes, you will understand a lot

about the neuromuscular connection,

how your brain and nervous system control your muscle

and how those muscles work.

Then we are going to talk about how muscles use energy

and can change how they use energy

for sake of getting stronger, if you like

for also increasing the size so-called hypertrophy of muscle

and for improving endurance as well as for improving posture

and how you move generally.

We will touch on some nutritional themes

and how that relates to muscle in particular

a specific amino acid that

if it's available in your bloodstream frequently enough,

and at sufficient levels, can help you build

and improve the quality of muscle.

And we'll talk about specific exercise regimes

as well as of course, supplementation

and things that can enhance

neuromuscular performance overall.

We are also going to talk about recovery.

Recovery as everybody knows, is when things improve.

That's when neurons get better at controlling muscle,

that's when muscle grows,

that's when muscle gets more flexible.

None of that actually happens during training.

It happens after training and there is a lot of confusion

about how to optimize recovery and how to measure

whether or not you are recovered and ready to come back in

for another neuromuscular training session.

So we'll talk about that as well.

Today is going to have a lot of protocols

and you're going to come away with a lot of understanding

about how you move, how you work

in these incredible organs that we call the nervous system

and the musculature, the so-called neuromuscular system.

Before we dive into today's topic,

I want to just take about three minutes

and cover some essential summary of the previous episode.

In the previous episode, we talked about fat loss.

Talked about shiver induced fat loss.

We talked about neat non-exercise activity thermogenesis

for increasing caloric burn and fat oxidation.

And we talked about how to use cold specifically

to enhance fat loss.

I described a protocol involving getting into cold

of some sort, whether or not it's ice bath, cold shower,

some form of cold could even be a river or an ocean

if you have access to that and inducing shiver

and then getting out, not crossing your arms or huddling

but allowing that cold to evaporate

off you and continuing to shiver

and then getting back into the colder environment

of water or stream or shower, et cetera.

All of that is described

in a beautifully illustrated protocol

that I didn't illustrate.

That's why it's beautifully illustrated

at the coldplunge.com.

They've made that protocol for you

and they've made it available free of charge for you.

So there's no obligation there of any kind financially.

You can go to the coldplunge.com.

There's a little tab that says protocols

and you can download that protocol, someone there

I don't know who exactly illustrated it,

and you can come away with a PDF

of what I described in the previous episode.

So I just want to make sure

that you are aware of that resource.

The other announcement I'd like to make is that

many of you have asked how you can help support the podcast.

And there's a very straightforward zero cost way to do that.

And that's to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

So if you go to YouTube,

if you're not already there watching this now

hits the Subscribe button that helps us tremendously

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And we thank you for your support.

Most people, when they hear the word muscle

they just think about strength.

But of course muscles are involved in everything that we do.

They are involved in speaking,

they're involved in sitting and standing up,

they're involved in lifting objects, including ourselves.

They are absolutely essential

for maintaining how we breathe.

They're absolutely essential for ambulation, for moving,

and for skills of any kind.

So when we think about muscle,

we don't just want to think about muscle

the meat that is muscle, but what controls that muscle.

And no surprise what controls muscle is the nervous system.

The nervous system does that

through three main nodes of control areas of control.

And I've talked about these before on a previous podcast.

So I will keep this very brief.

Basically, we have upper motor neurons in our motor cortex.

So those are in our skull

and those are involved in deliberate movement.

So if I decide that I'm going to pick my pen

up and put it down, which is what I'm doing right now,

my upper motor neurons were involved

in generating that movement.

Those upper motor neurons send signals down

to my spinal cord where there are two categories of neurons.

One are the lower motor neurons

and those lower motor neurons send little wires

that we call axons out to our muscles

and cause those muscles to contract.

They do that by dumping chemicals onto the muscle.

In fact, the chemical is acetylcholine.

I've talked before about acetylcholine in the brain

which is vitally important for focus

and actually can gait neuroplasticity,

the brain's ability to change in response to experience.

But in the neuromuscular system,

acetylcholine released from motor neurons is the way

the only way that muscles can contract.

Now, there's another category of neurons

in the spinal cord called central pattern generators

or CPGs.

And those are involved in rhythmic movements.

Anytime we're walking or doing something

where we don't have to think about it

to do it deliberately, it's just happening reflexively

that central pattern generators and motor neurons.

Anytime we're doing something deliberately,

the top-down control as we call it,

from the upper motor neurons comes in

and takes control of that system.

So it's really simple.

You've only got three ingredients.

You've got the upper motor neurons, the lower motor neurons

and for rhythmic movements that are reflexive,

you've also got the central pattern generators.

So it's a terrifically simple system at that level,

but what we're going to focus on today is

how that system can control muscle

in ways that make that system better.

Now, when I say better, I want to be very specific.

If your goal is to build larger muscles,

there's a way to use your nervous system

to trigger hypertrophy to increase the size

of those muscles.

And it is indeed controlled by the nervous system.

So you can forget the idea that the muscles have memory

or that muscles grow in response to something

that's just happening within the muscle,

it's the nerve to muscle connection

that actually creates hypertrophy.

I'll talk exactly about how to optimize that process.

In addition, if you want to improve endurance

or improve flexibility or suppleness or explosiveness,

that is all accomplished by the way

that the nervous system engages muscles specifically.

And so what that means is we have to ask ourselves

are we going to take control of the upper motor neurons,

the central pattern generators, or the lower motor neurons

or all three in order to get to some end point

of how the nervous system controls muscle.

So neurophysiology 101.

I'll give you one piece of history

because it's important to know.

Sherrington, who won the Nobel prize

called movement, the final common path.

Why did he say that?

Well, the whole reason for having a nervous system

the whole reason for having a brain is

so that we can control our movements in very dedicated ways.

That is one of the reasons, perhaps the predominant reason

why the human brain is so large.

You might think, oh it's so large for thinking

and for creativity.

Ah, no when you look at the amount of real estate

in the brain that's devoted to different aspects of life,

it's mainly vision, our ability to see

and movement, our ability to engage

in lots of different kinds of movements.

Slow movements, fast movements, explosive, et cetera.

Other animals don't have that ability

because they don't have the mental real estate.

They don't have the neural real estate in their brain.

They have neuromuscular junctions.

They have central pattern generators

what they don't have

are these incredible upper motor neurons

that can direct activity the muscles in very specific ways.

So we can all feel blessed that we have this system.

And today I'm going to teach you how to use that system

toward particular end points.

So if we decide that we are going to direct our muscles

in some particular movement of any kind.

Whether or not it's a weightlifting exercise,

or whether it's a yoga movement

or simply picking up and putting down a pen,

we are engaging flexors and extensors

and our body is covered with flexors and extensors all over.

So for instance, our bicep is a flexor

and our tricep is an extensor.

Those are what are called antagonistic muscles.

They move the limbs in opposite directions.

So if you bring your wrist closer to your shoulder,

that's flection using your bicep.

If you move your wrist further away from your shoulder,

that's extension, using your tricep.

And without getting into a lot of detail

the way that the nerves and brain are wired up to muscle

make it such that when a flexor is activated,

when the nerve dumps chemical acetylcholine

onto the muscle to activate the biceps,

the triceps is inhibited.

It's prevented from engaging.

There are ways to bypass this

but that's the typical mode of action.

The converse is also true when our tricep is in activated,

when we move our wrist away from our shoulder

our bicep is inhibited.

And we have flexors like our abdominal muscles.

And we have extensors in our lower back.

Many of you probably know this

but some of you probably don't that your spine

has flexors to move basically your chin toward your waist.

And it has, those are your abdominal muscles among others.

And you have extensors that move your chin, basically back

like looking up toward the ceiling.

And those are your extensors.

You have other muscles that are stabilizing muscles

and things of that sort

but those movements of flection and extension,

and the fact that they are

what we call reciprocally innovated or mutual inhibition,

you hear different language around this

is characteristic of most of our limb movements.

So hamstring and quadriceps, the hamstring brings the ankle

closer back towards the glutes.

Basically it's lifting your heel up

which is almost always done toward the back.

Whereas your quadriceps is the extensor

opposite to the hamstrings.

So you get the idea.

So there's flexors and extensors

and it's the neurons that control those flexors

and extensors that allow us to move in particular ways.

So, now you have heard a neuromuscular physiology

in its simplest form, but I do want this to be accessible.

I want to get just briefly, just briefly

into some of the underlying metabolism

of how muscles use and create energy.

Because in doing that, we will be in a great position

to understand all the tools that follow about

how to optimize the neuromuscular system

for your particular goals.

So in the previous episode about fat loss,

we talked about lipolysis.

The breakdown of fat into fatty acids

so it can be used as fuel.

And it ended in a step where we got ATP,

which is the bottleneck and final common path

for all energy producing functions in the body.

There are other ways but basically ATP

is the key element there.

Now with muscles, they don't function on fats normally

what they are going to function on their ability to move

and their ability to do things and allow us to move

in any way that we want to,

is based on a process of glycolysis,

the breakdown of things like glycogen

and glucose into energy.

And it's a very simple process.

You don't have to know any chemistry.

So if I say the words carbon or hydrogen

or something like that, don't freak out.

You don't have to understand any chemistry.

But basically what happens is you've got this

available sugar resource that stored in muscle.

And that's glucose.

And that glucose has six carbons and six waters, basically.

That can be broken down into two sets of three carbons.

All right.

So basically you take glucose and you break it

into these two little batches of carbons

that we call pyruvate.

So six divided by two is three.

So you get three and three pyruvate.

And that generates a little bit of ATP of energy

but just a little bit.

Now, if there's oxygen available,

if there's sufficient oxygen there,

what can happen is that pyruvate can be brought

to the mitochondria and through a whole set of things

that you probably don't want to hear about right now

like the electron transport chain and citric acid cycle.

What happens is it's broken down and you get 28 to 30 ATP,

which has a lot of ATP.

So the only things you need to know,

the only things you need to know about this process

is that glucose and glycogen are broken down into pyruvate.

You a little bit of energy from that.

And when I say energy, I mean the ability to move.

It's fuel, literally just gets burned up.

But if there's oxygen available and that's key

then within the mitochondria, you can create 28 to 30 ATP

which is a lot of ATP.

Now, what does this mean?

This means that movement of muscle

is metabolically expensive and indeed compared

to other tissues compared to fat, compared to bone,

compared to almost all other tissues, except brain tissue

muscle is the most metabolically demanding

which is why people who have more muscle relative

to adipose tissue to fat, they can eat more

and they're more of a furnace.

They just kind of burn that up.

So even if you didn't understand anything that I just said,

what you probably did hear, and that I hope you heard

is that if you have oxygen around, you can create energy

from this fuel source that we call glycogen and glucose.

But what if there isn't oxygen around?

And what is that like?

Well, you've experienced that.

I'm not talking about oxygen in the environment.

I'm talking about oxygen in the muscle.

So if you've ever carried a box while moving,

or you're carrying heavy groceries to the car,

or you're exercising particularly hard

and you felt the burn, well, that burning

which most people think is lactic acid is actually a process

by which pyruvate, which as I said before

normally could be converted into ATP if there's oxygen,

well, if there's not enough oxygen

'cause that muscle is working too hard or too long,

what ends up happening is that

a hydrogen molecule comes in there

and you get something called lactate.

So believe it or not, humans don't make lactic acid.

That's another species, we make lactate.

And we hear that lactate is bad.

We need to buffer the burn or avoid the burn.

That lactic acid and lactate are what prevent us

for performing as well as we ought to be able to

or going as far as we possibly could

in an endurance event.

Guess what, that's not true at all.

Lactate has three functions,

all of which are really interesting and really important.

First of all, it's a buffer against acidity.

You don't want muscle to get too acidic

because it can't function.

You don't want any body tissue to get too acidic.

So that burn that you feel is acidity in that environment

and lactate what most people call lactic acid,

but again, we don't make lactic acid.

Lactate is there to buffer that

to reduce the amount of burn.

So, most people have this exactly backwards.

So when you feel that burn that is not lactic acid,

that is lactate that's present to suppress the burn,

to suppress acidity.

It's also a fuel.

When you feel that burn,

lactate is shuttled to those areas of the muscle,

and there's an actual fuel burning process

where in the absence of oxygen

you can continue to generate muscular contractions.

Now, this is informative 'cause it also tells us that

that burning that acidity that we feel

can inhibit the way that our muscles work

but that lactate comes in and allows our muscles

to continue to function.

So we'll talk a little bit more about

what this whole lactate thing and the burn means

but it's a really important process.

And it's amazing to me that most people understand it

in exactly the incorrect way.

They think a lactic acid is bad and the burn is bad.

No, it reveals a number of really important things

are going on with this vital molecule lactate,

which can reduce acidity, reduce the burn

as well as act as a fuel.

Now, here's where it gets really, really cool.

And if you don't have enough of an incentive to exercise

based on all the information out there

about how it'll make you live longer

and make your heart better, et cetera,

here's a reason that regardless

of what kind of exercise you do,

if it's weight training, or running, or cycling, or swimming

that every once in a while, about 10% of the time

you should exercise to the point of intensity

where you start to feel that so-called burn.

The reason for that is that lactate shows up

to the site of the burn, so to speak,

and it acts as a hormonal signal for other organs

of the body in a very positive way.

As you may recall, from a very early episode

of the Huberman Lab Podcast, I talked about

what a hormone is and how it works.

We have lots of different kinds of hormones

but hormones are chemicals that are released in one location

in the body and travel, have effects on lots

of other organs of the body.

So when I say that lactate acts as a hormonal signal,

what I mean is that it's in a position to influence tissues

that are outside of the muscle.

And basically it can send signals

to the heart, to the liver and to the brain,

and it can have effects on the heart, the liver

and the brain that are very positive.

So just to zoom out for a second

I promise we won't get any more technical than this.

We will get into tools and protocols

that are really straightforward

but what I'm telling you is that

if you feel a burn from a particular exercise or movement,

that burn is going to be buffered

by this molecule we call lactate.

Lactate will then provide additional fuel

for additional work.

So this is a good incentive provided you can do it safely

to "Work through the burn."

That burn acts as a beacon to the lactate

which comes in and allows you to do more work.

It's not a signal to stop necessarily.

I mean, stop if you're doing something unsafe

but it's a signal that lactate should come in

and allow you to continue to do work.

And it can act as a hormonal signal.

Lactate can then travel to the heart

and to the liver and to the brain

and can enhance their function in positive ways,

not just in those moments,

but in the period of time that follows.

So many people are curious about how they can exercise

to make their brain better.

That's one of the most common questions I get.

What I'm telling you is that provided you can do it safely

by engaging the so-called burn

which is at a different threshold for everybody,

your hill run will be different than my hill run

to generate the burn,

but provided you can do that for about 10%

of your workouts or of an individual workout,

or activity of any kind, you are generating the activity

of this lactate based hormonal signal

that can improve the function of neurons.

And it does that if you want to know for the aficionados

by improving the function of another cell type

called the astrocytes which are a glial cell type.

Which are very involved in clearance

of debris from the brain,

they're involved in the formation of synopsis

connections between neurons in the brain.

So put simply, if you are an exerciser

if you're doing movement of any kind, and you're interested

in allocating some of that movement toward enhancing

brain, heart and liver health, there is a nice set

of scientific data that points to the fact

that getting a lactate shuttled to the muscles

by engaging this burning sensation is advantageous

for the health of those other tissues.

So, as I mentioned that burn is present

from lack of oxygen being present.

And then the hydrogen comes in and you get this lactate.

But this process of lactate acting as a buffer

of fuel and a positive hormonal signal for other tissues,

occurs only if there's oxygen.

So if you feel the burn, you definitely want to focus

on your breathing at that point.

That would be the time to take deep inhales

and try and bring more oxygen into your system.

It's definitely not a time to hold your breath.

And if ever you've run to the point of feeling the burn

and then you were exercised in any way on the treadmill

or on the bike or whatever, and felt that burn,

and then you held your breath,

it feels much more intense.

By breathing you bring lactate to the site

and you are able to allow lactate to act more

as a buffer, a fuel, and a hormonal signal.

And the reason I brought this up today is

because as I mentioned so many people are interested

in using exercise not just for sake

of improving physical health and wellbeing and performance,

but also for enhancing their brain.

And there are a lot of data out there speaking

to the findings that exercise of various kinds

can increase neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons.

Well, the unfortunate news is that

while that's true in mice,

there is very little evidence for enhanced neurogenesis

from exercise or otherwise in humans.

There's a little bit, and there are a few sites

within the brain, such as the dentate gyrus

of the hippocampus, which may be involved

in the formation of new memories, to be clear

the dentate gyrus is definitely involved

in the formation of new memories,

whether or not the new neurons that are added there

in humans are involved in new memories.

The evidence for that is weak at best, frankly

whereas an animals the data are quite strong,

but most of the data points to the fact

that hormonal signals, things that are transported

in the blood during exercise are beneficial for the brain

and that those signals are not causing the increase

in the number of neurons in the dentate gyrus or otherwise.

That it's more about the health of the connections

between the neurons growth factors of various kinds

things like IGF-1, there's a long list of these things.

So if you've heard the exercise increases the number

of neurons in your brain, well, that's not true.

And that probably is a good thing, frankly

because we always hear more neurons, more neurons

as if it's a good thing, but the brain doesn't do so well

with bringing in entirely new elements.

It has a hard time negotiating that

and making use of those new elements.

We know about this from things like the cochlear implant

where deaf people are given a device

where they suddenly can hear.

Some people really like that,

deaf people really like that and can benefit from it.

Other deaf people find that it's very intrusive.

That is hard to take an existing neural circuit in the brain

and incorporate a lot of new information into it.

So new neurons, as great as that sounds

more neurons, more neurons,

it actually might not be the best way

for the nervous system to change and modify itself

and to promote its own longevity.

So when I tell you not such great evidence

from new neurons past puberty,

that's what the data really show in humans.

And I sort of knocked back the data

on exercise and neurogenesis,

don't let that depress you.

If you have dementia in your family,

don't translate that into necessarily

that you will develop dementia.

Understand the exercise is still beneficial

for the brain and other aspects of the nervous system

but that it's going to be doing it

through these hormonal signals.

Things like IGF-1, things like this lactate pathway

when you experience the burn from exercise.

And again, you don't want to try

and get this feeling of a burn

throughout the entire episode of exercise,

there'll be far too intense and would inhibit your recovery.

I don't think it'd be good for performance either.

It's only about 10% of your total effort

in any one exercise about

that's going to give you this positive effect.

So now you know how to devote a small portion

of your exercise, 10% in order for muscle and lactate

to benefit other tissues

namely your heart, your liver, and your brain.

I'd now like to shift our attention

to how to use specific aspects of muscular contraction

to improve muscle hypertrophy, muscle growth,

as well as improving muscle strength.

There are a lot of reasons to want to get stronger.

And I should just mention that it's not always the case

that getting stronger involves muscles getting bigger.

There are ways for muscles to get stronger

without getting bigger.

However, increasing the size of a muscle

almost inevitably increases the strength of that muscle

at least to some degree.

Reasons why most everyone should want

to get their muscles stronger is that

muscles are generally getting progressively weaker

across the lifespan.

So when I say getting stronger, it's not necessarily

about being able to move increasing mounts

of weight in the gym.

Although if that's your goal

what I'm about to discuss will be relevant to that,

but rather to offset some of the normal decline in strength

and posture and the ability to generate a large range

of movement safely, that occurs as we age.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode

we just tend to lose function in this neuromuscular system

as we get older.

And doing things to offset that

has been shown again and again, to be beneficial

for the neuromuscular system for protection of injury,

for enhancing the strength of bones and bone density.

So there are a lot of reasons to use resistance exercise

that extend far beyond just the desire

to increase muscle size because I know many

of you are interested in increasing muscle size,

but many of you are not.

So there's an important principle of muscle physiology

called the Henneman size principle.

And the Henneman size principle essentially says

that we recruit what are called motor units.

Motor units are just the connections

between nerve and muscle from in a pattern

that staircases from low threshold to high threshold.

What this means is when you pick up something that is light,

you're going to use the minimum amount of nerve

to muscle energy in order to move that thing.

Likewise, when you pick up an object that's heavy,

you're going to use the minimum amount of nerve

to muscle connectivity and energy

in order to move that object.

So it's basically a conservation of energy principle.

Now, if you continue to exert effort of movement,

what will happen is you will tend

to recruit more and more motor units with time.

And that process of recruiting more neurons,

more lower motor neurons

if you recall from the beginning of the episode,

these lower motor neurons are in our spinal cord

and they actually dump a chemical acetylcholine on muscle,

caused the muscles to contract.

As you recruit more and more of these motor units,

these connections between these

lower motor neurons and muscle,

that's when you start to get changes in the muscle.

That's when you open the gate for the potential

for the muscles to get stronger and to get larger,

if that's what your goal is.

And so the way this process works

has been badly misunderstood

in the kind of online literature of weight training

and bodybuilding, and even in sports physiology.

The Henneman size principle is kind of

a foundational principle within muscle physiology

but many people have come to interpret it by saying

that the way to recruit high threshold motor units,

the ones that are hard to get to

is to just use heavy weights.

And that's actually not the case

as we'll talk about the research supports

that weights in a very large range of sort of a percentage

of your maximum, anywhere from 30% to 80%.

So weights that are not very light but are moderately light,

too heavy can cause changes in the connections

between nerve and muscle that lead

to muscle strength and muscle hypertrophy.

Put differently, heavyweights can help build muscle

and strength but they are not required.

What one has to do is adhere

to a certain number of parameters,

just a couple of key variables that I'll spell out for you.

And if you do that, you can greatly

increase muscle hypertrophy, muscle size

and or muscle strength if that's what you want to do.

And you don't necessarily have to use heavy weights

in order to do that.

Now, I'm sure the power lifters

and the people that like to move heavy weights around

will say, no, if you want to get strong

you absolutely have to lift heavy weights.

And that might be true if you want to get very strong

but for most people who are interested

in supporting their muscular such that they offset

any age related decline in strength,

or in increasing hypertrophy and strength to some degree,

there really isn't a need

to lie about the Henneman size principle

which many people out there are doing

and claiming that you absolutely need

to use the heaviest weights possible

in order to build strength and muscle.

So I'm going to explain all of this works in simple terms.

So first of all, let's just talk about what hypertrophy is

and what strength changes in the muscle are.

We can make this very simple as well.

If this were a muscle physiology class

we would talk all about myofibrils

and sarcomeres and all that stuff.

We're not going to do that.

That's not the purpose of today's conversation.

If you're interested in that

as well as a lot of the other information

that I'm going to discuss in more detail,

I highly encourage you to check out the YouTube channel

and the writings of Dr. Andy Galpin.

He's a PhD and a full professor in exercise physiology.

He's extremely knowledgeable in this entire area

of science-based tools for hypertrophy,

how strength and hypertrophy really work.

His lab does everything from biopsy on muscles,

working with athletes and typical folks as well.

A lot of the information that you're going to hear

from me in the next 15 minutes or so

comes from an extensive exploration of the work

that he and his colleagues have done as well

as folks like Brad Schoenfeld, another academic who's superb

in this whole space of muscle physiology

and from a lengthy conversation that I had with Andy,

Dr. Galpin prior to this episode.

So if we want to think about muscle hypertrophy,

we have to ask what is changing

when muscles get larger or stronger.

And there are really just three ways

that muscles can be stimulated to change.

So let's review those three ways

and talk about what happens inside the muscle.

So there are three major stimulate

for changing the way that muscle works

and making muscles stronger, larger, or better in some way.

And those are stress, tension, and damage.

Those three things don't necessarily all have to be present

but stress of some kind has to exist.

Something has to be different

in the way that the nerve communicates

with the muscle and the way that the muscle contracts

or performs that makes the muscle need to change.

So this is very reminiscent of neuroplasticity in the brain.

Something needs to happen.

Certain chemicals need to be present.

Certain processes need to happen

or else a tissue simply won't change itself.

But if those processes and events do happen,

then the tissue has essentially no option except,

but to change.

So muscles move, as I mentioned

because nerves dump chemical onto the muscles

but they move because they have these things called myosin

and actin filaments.

And if you want to read up on this,

you can look on the internet

you can put the sliding filament theory

of muscle contraction if you really want to go deep down

that rabbit hole.

It's interesting.

You can learn about this in a muscle physiology class.

But basically, along the length of the muscle

you have, what's called myosin.

And just think of myosin as kind of like a wire.

It's like a bunch of beads and wires

that extend across the muscle.

I think that's the simplest way to describe it.

And the myosin is surrounded

by these little beads called actin.

The way muscles get bigger is

that basically the myosin gets thicker.

It's a protein and it gets thicker.

So put this in your mind if you're listening to this

or even if you're watching it on YouTube,

the way to think about this whole actin myosin thing

and thing and muscles getting bigger is imagine

that you're holding a bouquet of balloons,

a bunch of balloons by their strings

except you're not holding the strings all at their bottom.

So the bouquet isn't nicely arranged.

It's not like some balloons that are all up at the top

and you're holding the strings down at the bottom.

Imagine that one of the balloons that is very close

to your hand and other one is a little bit higher up.

And so this bouquet is very disorganized.

In other words, the string extending out of your hand

the strings rather extending out of your hand

are all different lengths.

And so the balloons are all over the place.

That's essentially what myosin looks like in the muscle.

And those strings are what we call the filaments,

and then the myosin head is the balloon.

When you stress a muscle properly,

or you give it sufficient tension,

or you damage the muscle just enough,

there's an adaptive response that takes place

where protein is synthesized.

And it's a very specific protein, it's myosin.

The myosin gets thicker.

In other words, the balloons get bigger.

So the way to think about muscle growth

and the way to think about muscles getting stronger is

that those balloons get bigger and the muscle gets thicker.

Now, the question then should be as always

how does that happen?

I mean, the muscle doesn't really know anything

about what's happening in the outside world.

The way it happens is the nerve, the neuron has

to tell the muscle to get stronger.

And it does that through what we call a signaling cascade.

It talks to the muscle in terms of chemicals.

It doesn't whisper to it or shout or Hey, get bigger.

What it does it release a certain chemicals

that within the muscle,

there are certain chemicals released rather

that make those balloons as I'm referring to them,

the myosin get thicker.

So let's talk about the stimulus for doing that.

And if already in your mind, you're imagining

oh my goodness, these balloons of muscle

are going to get thick, thick, thick, thick, thick,

and it's just going to spiral out of control,

don't worry about that.

People invest a ton of time and energy

into trying to make their muscles larger.

It's actually much harder for people to do

than you might think.

But I do want to give one exception because it illustrates

an important principle of where we're headed next.

Everybody has imbalances in how muscles can grow.

How well muscles can grow, or how poorly,

or how challenging it is for their muscles to grow.

Now, many people who are afraid of like getting too bulky

for instance, are afraid of lifting weights.

But I think the research shows now that every one

of pretty much every age should be doing

some sort of resistance exercise

even if that's body weight exercises

in order to offset this age-related decline

in muscle contractile ability,

muscle strength, et cetera, improve bone density.

There's nothing good about getting frail and weak over time.

And people who invest the effort

into doing resistance exercises of some kind

whether or not it's with bands or with weights

or with body weight, really benefit tremendously

at a whole body level at a systemic level

as well as in terms of muscle strength.

There is a good predictor of how well

or how efficient you will be in building the strength

and or if you like the size of a given muscle.

And it has everything to do with those upper motor neurons

that are involved in deliberate control of muscle.

You can actually do this test right now.

You can just kind of March across your body mentally

and see whether or not you can independently contract any

or all of your muscles.

So for instance, if you are sitting in a chair

or a you're standing,

see whether or not you can contract your calf muscle

just using those upper motor neuron, sending a signal down

and deliberately isolating the calf muscle.

If you can contract the calf muscle hard

to the point where that muscle almost feels

like it's starting to cramp

like it hurts just a little bit,

that can be extremely painful

nor is it going to have no sensation whatsoever,

chances are you have very good

upper motor neuron to calf control.

And chances are, if you can isolate that

what they call the brain or mind muscle connection,

and you can contract the muscles

to the point where it cramps a little bit,

that you hold a decent to high potential

to change the strength and the size of that muscle

if you train it properly.

Now, if you have a hard time doing that,

chances are you won't be able to do that.

If for instance, you focus on your back muscle.

Like we all have these muscles called the lat.

The latissimus dorsi muscles, which basically are involved

in chin ups and things like that,

but their function from a more of a kinesiology standpoint

is to move the elbow back behind the body.

So it's not about flexing your bicep.

It's about moving your elbow back behind your body.

If you can do that, mentally

or you can do that physical movement

of moving your elbow back behind your body

and you can contract that muscle hard,

chances are that you have the capacity

to enhance the strength and or size

of that particular muscle

because you have the neural control of that muscle.

This is a key feature of the neuromuscular system

to appreciate as we begin to talk more

about specific protocols.

Because everything about muscle hypertrophy,

about stimulating muscle growth is

about generating isolated contractions

about challenging specific muscles in a very unnatural way.

Whereas with strength, it's about using musculature

as a system moving weights, moving resistance,

moving the body.

The specific goal of hypertrophy is

to isolate specific nerve to muscle pathways

so that you stimulate the chemical

and signaling transduction events in muscle

so that those muscles respond by getting larger.

So there's a critical distinction

in terms of getting stronger versus trying

to get muscles to be larger hypertrophy per se.

And it has to do with how much you isolate those muscles.

Muscle isolation is not a natural phenomenon.

It's not something that we normally do.

When we walk we don't think, okay, right calf contract,

left calf contract.

No, you just generate those rhythmic movements.

And of course, there's no reason for them to get stronger

or larger in response to those movements.

Let's say you were to do a kind of strange experiment

of attaching 30 pound weights to your ankles.

And you were to do those movements.

Well, if you weren't specifically contracting your calves

in each step, there's no reason for the calves

to take on the bulk of the work.

And you would distribute that work across your hip flexors

and other aspects of your musculature.

Your whole nervous system seeks to gain efficiency.

It seeks to spread out the effort.

So you can nest this as a principle for yourself

which is if you want to get stronger

it's really about moving progressively greater loads

or increasing the amount of weight that you move.

Whereas if you're specifically interested

in generating hypertrophy, it's all about trying

to generate those really hard,

almost painful localized contractions of muscle.

Now, of course, how much weight you use

in order to generate those contractions

will also impact hypertrophy.

But I think most people don't really understand

the mind muscle connection.

It sounds like a great thing,

but it's actually one of the things you want to avoid

if your goal is simply to become more supple

or to become stronger.

You want to do the movements properly and safely, of course

but it's the opposite of hypertrophy

where with hypertrophy you're really trying to make

that particular muscle sometimes two muscles

do the majority, if not all the work

whereas in moving force loads

in trying to generate activity of any kind

like lifting a bar, doing a chin up or something

those so-called compound movements involve a lot

of muscle groups.

If your goal is to be better at those,

you want to avoid isolating any one particular muscle.

Now, I know this probably comes across

as a kind of obvious duh, especially to the folks

who have spent a lot of time in the gym

aimed at getting hypertrophy.

But I think most people don't appreciate

that it's the nerve to muscle connections

and the distinction between isolating nerve

to muscle connections versus distributing the work

of nerve to muscle connections,

that's vital in determining whether or not

you generate hypertrophy isolated nerve

to muscle contractions versus strength

and offsetting strength loss

which would be distributed nerve to muscle connections.

If ever there was an area of practical science

that was very confused, very controversial,

and almost combative at times,

it would be this issue of how best to train.

I suppose the only thing that's even more barbed wire

of a conversation than that is how best to eat for health.

Those seem to be the two most common areas

of online battle and the scientific literature

has a lot to say about both of those things.

Again, my sources for what I'm about to tell you

are Professor Andy Galpin and colleagues.

I know there are other excellent people out there

in the field, but I really trust his work.

He does very controlled studies.

He spent a lot of time in this space

and what's really exciting is that

in just the last three years or so,

there's been a tremendous amount of information

to come out about the practical steps that one can take

in order to maximize the benefits

of resistance exercise of any kind.

So I'm going to talk about those

and I'm going to talk about the research.

I will provide some links, a couple of the more

in-depth tutorials from Dr. Galpin, as well as some

of the papers that the information I'm about

to tell you stems from.

There's a lot of information saying

that you need to move weights that are 80 to 90%

of your one rep maximum or 70%, or cycle that

for three weeks on and then go to more moderate weights.

There are a lot of paths as some people say

there are a lot of ways to add up numbers to get a 100.

There's a near infinite number of ways

to add up different numbers to get to a 100.

And what's very clear now

from all the literature that's transpired

and especially from the literature in this last three years,

is that once you know roughly your one repetition maximum,

the maximum amount of weight that you can perform

an exercise with for one repetition

in good form, full range of motion,

that it's very clear that moving weights

or using bands or using body weight, for instance

in the 30% to 80% of one-rep maximum.

That is going to be the most beneficial range

in terms of muscle hypertrophy and strength.

So muscle growth and strength.

And there will be a bias if you're moving weights

that are in the 75%, 80% range

or maybe even going above that 85 and 90%,

you're going to bias your improvements

towards strength gains.

This is true.

And if you use weights that are in the 30%

of your one-repetition maximum or 40% or 50%

and doing many more repetitions, of course,

then you are biasing towards hypertrophy

and what some people like to call muscle endurance.

But that's a little bit of a complicated term

because endurance, we almost always think of as relating

to running or swimming or some long bouts of activity.

So 30% to 80% of one-repetition maximums,

it doesn't really seem to matter

for sake of hypertrophy, except at the far ends

when you're really trying to bias for strength.

Now, it is clear, however

that one needs to perform those sets

to failure where you can't perform another repetition

in good form again or near to failure.

And there's all sorts of interesting nomenclature

that's popping up all over the internet.

Some of which is scientific, some of which is not scientific

about how you are supposed to perceive

how close you were to failure, et cetera.

But there are some very interesting principles

that relate to how the nerves connect to the muscles

that strongly predict whether or not this exercise

that you're performing will be beneficial for you or not.

So here's how it goes.

For individuals that are untrained

meaning they have been doing resistance exercise

for anywhere from zero, probably out to about two years,

although for some people, it might be zero to one year,

but those are the so-called beginners.

They're sort of untrained.

For those people, the key parameter seems to be

to perform enough sets of a given exercise

per muscle per week.

The same is also true for people that have been training

for one or two years or more.

What differs is how many sets to perform

depending on whether or not you're trained or untrained.

So let's say you're somebody

who's been doing some resistance exercise kind of

on and off over the years and you decide you want

to get serious about that for sake of sport

or offsetting age related declines in strength,

the range of sets to do in order to improve strength

to activate these cascades in the muscle ranges anywhere

from two, believe it or not to 20 per week.

Again, these are sets per week

and they don't necessarily all have to be performed

in the same weight training session.

I will talk about numbers of sessions.

So it appears that five sets per week in this 30% to 80%

of the one repetition maximum range,

getting close to failure, or occasionally actually

going to full muscular failure, which isn't really

full muscular failure, but the inability

to generate a contraction of the muscle

or move the weight in good form.

I'll go deeper into that in a moment.

But about five sets per week is what's required

just to maintain your muscle.

So think about that.

If you're somebody who's kind of averse

to resistance training, you are going to lose

muscle size and strength.

Your metabolism will drop.

Your posture will get worse.

Everything in the context of nerve

to muscle conductivity will get worse over time,

unless you are generating five sets or more

of this 30% to 80% of your one repetition maximum per week.

So what this means is for the typical person

who hasn't done a lot of weight training,

you need to do at least five sets per muscle group.

Now, that's just to maintain.

And then there's this huge range

that goes all the way up to 15

and in some case, 20 sets per week.

Now, how many sets you perform is going to depend

on the intensity of the work that you perform.

This is where it gets a little bit controversial

but I think nowadays most people agree

and Dr. Galpin confirmed that 10% not to be confused

with the 10% we discussed earlier, but 10% of the sets

of a given workout or 10% of workouts overall

should be of the high-intensity sort

where one is actually working to muscular failure.

Now I say not true muscular failure

because in theory you have a concentric movement

which is the kind of lifting of the weight,

and then you have the ecentric portion

of muscle contraction, which is the lowering.

And ecentric movements because of the way

that muscle fibers lengthen and that sliding act myosin

that we talked about before,

you're always stronger in lowering something

than you are in lifting it.

But the point being that most of your training

most of your sets should be not to failure.

And the reason for that is it allows you to do more volume

of work without fatiguing the nervous system

and depleting the nerve to muscle connection

in ways that are detrimental.

So we can make this simple.

Perform anywhere from 5 to 15 sets

of resistance exercise per week,

and that's per muscle, and that's in this 30% to 80%

of what your one-repetition maximum.

That seems to be the most scientifically supported way

of offsetting any decline in muscle strength

if you're working in the kind of five set range

and in increasing muscle strength

when you start to get up into the 10 and 15 set range.

Now, the caveat to that is everyone varies

and muscles vary in terms of their recover ability.

Depending on how well you can control the contraction

of muscles deliberately.

And you can actually figure that out by sort of marching,

you might take five minutes

and just kind of March across your body

and mentally try and control the contractions

of muscles in a very deliberate way

to the point where you can generate a hard contraction.

And you may have to move a limb

in order to do this, by the way.

I'm not talking about just mentally contracting your bicep

without moving your wrist.

I'm talking about doing that without any weight

in hand or any band or any resistance.

If you can generate a high intensity contraction

using these upper motor neuron

to lower motor neuron pathways to muscle,

you might think, well I should perform many more sets.

But actually, the opposite is true.

If you can generate high-intensity muscular contractions

using your brain, using your neurons,

it will take fewer sets in order to stimulate the muscle

to maintain itself and to stimulate the muscle

in order to grow or get stronger.

So the more efficient you are in recruiting motor units,

remember, Henneman's size principle

the recruit men have more motor units

which isn't just muscles,

it's nerve to muscle connections.

The better you are at doing that, the more

you will recruit these so-called high threshold motor units

the ones that are hard to get to,

the more you will kick off the cascades of things

within muscle that stimulate muscle growth and strength.

So if you have muscles that are challenging to contract,

it's going to take more sets

in order to stimulate the desired effect

in those muscles not fewer.

If you have muscles that you are very good

at generating force within, it's going to take fewer sets.

Now, how many sets you are going to have to determine that

it's going to depend for those of you that are using

like 50% of your one-repetition maximum,

because you're doing a lot of repetitions,

you might find that three or four, five sets

will maintain the muscle.

You might decide to do that once

at one point in the week and then do it again.

So if you're going for 10 sets a week

you can divide that among two sessions.

You could do that all in one session.

The data really show it doesn't matter.

There are some differences in terms of

whether or not you're trying to generate maximum intensity

within a workout or whether or not

you want to spread that out.

But in general, resistance workouts

of any kind tend to be best favored

by workouts that are somewhere

between 45 minutes and 60 minutes.

And generally not longer than 60 minutes

because that's when all the things like cortisol

and some of the inflammatory pathways really start

to create a situation in the muscle and in the body

that's not so great for you.

So it's not a hard and fast rule.

The ax doesn't drop at 60 minutes

but it's pretty clear that performing this five

to 15 sets per week, whether or not it's in one workout

or whether that's divided up across multiple workouts

is really what's going to be most beneficial.

And please do keep in mind Henneman's size principle

and the recruitment of motor units.

And remember the better you are

at contracting particular muscles

in an isolating those muscles,

the fewer sets likely you need to do

in order to get the desired effect.

Now, what about people who have been training for a while?

If you're somebody who's been doing

weight training for a while, the data points to the fact

that more volume can be beneficial, even for muscles

that you are very efficient at contracting.

Now, the curve on this, the graph on this

begins again at about five sets per week

for maintaining a given muscle group,

and extends all the way out to 25 or 30 sets per week.

However, there are individuals who for whatever reason

can generate so much force.

They're so good at training muscles

that they can generate so much force in just four

or six or eight sets that doing this large volume

of work is actually going to be counterproductive.

So everyone needs to figure out for themselves.

First of all, how often you're willing

to do resistance exercise of any kind.

And again, it doesn't matter if you're using bands

or weights or body weight.

For instance, if you're doing chin-ups chances are

unless you are very strong that you're not using weights.

You're just using something that you can hold onto.

Or if you're doing pushups, some of you will be working

in that 30% to 80% of your one-repetition maximum range.

It doesn't necessarily mean

that you have to be moving weights in a gym for instance.

So the purpose here is to figure out

what muscles you're trying to train.

That's an issue that we'll talk about in a moment.

And then it does appear that somewhere

between five and 15 sets per week is going to be

the thing that's going to work for most people.

Now, this is based on a tremendous amount of work

that was done by Andy Galpin and colleagues,

Brad Schoenfeld and colleagues and others, Mike Roberts.

There's a huge group of people

out there doing exercise physiology and a small subset

of them that are linking them back to real-world protocols

that don't just pertain to athletes.

So that's mainly what I'm focusing on today.

And surely there will be exceptions.

Now, if you are going to divide the sets across the week

you're not going to do all 10 sets for instance

for a given muscle group in one session,

then of course, it's imperative

that the muscles recover in between sessions.

And we are going to talk about recovery

both at the systemic level, the whole nervous system

and at the local level the nerve to muscle

and local even muscle level.

We'll talk about that in about 10 minutes

when we talk about recovery.

I do want to mention something very important

which is that everything I'm referring to here

it has to do with full range of motion.

And you might ask, well, what about the speeds of movements?

This is actually turns out

to be a really interesting dataset

for generating explosiveness and speed.

So for sprinters or throwing sports,

or for people that want to generate a lot of jumping power,

it does appear that learning to move weights

as fast as you safely can, especially under moderate

to heavy loads, can increase explosiveness and speed.

And most of that effect is from changes in the neurons.

It's not from changes in the muscle.

It's from changes in the way that the upper motor neurons

communicate with the lower motor neurons

and generating a pathway, a neural circuit, as we call it,

that is very efficient at generating action potentials,

which are the electricity within neurons

to trigger the muscle.

Now, of course there are events that happen

from nerve to muscle

but the takeaway from that enormous literature, frankly

is that if you want to get faster,

yes, it can be beneficial to get stronger.

But if you want to dedicate resistance training specifically

to jumping higher, to running faster, to throwing further

and these sorts of things that learning to generate force

with increasing speed is going to be beneficial.

On the flip side of that

for people that want to get stronger,

it appears that the slowing down of the weight

as things get harder is a key parameter

in recruiting those high threshold motor units.

So let me phrase that a little bit differently.

Think about a set in the gym

or think about a set of pushups or a set of pull-ups.

Initially you can move very fast if you like.

If you want to generate hypertrophy,

the goal really is not necessarily to move super slow

but to isolate the muscle

and therefore not to use momentum rather

than lift weights, as they say, challenge muscles.

If you want to get stronger,

you're going to be distributing that effort

over more muscles and more of your nervous system.

For generating explosiveness and speed,

it's very clear that learning to generate forces quickly

and to move heavy or moderately heavy loads quickly

is going to be beneficial because of the way

that you train the motor neurons.

And of course changes in the muscle.

But this could look different for different sports.

And obviously you want to make safety paramount.

If you're injured, you're not going to be able

to train at all for sport or for any purpose that is.

And so what this would involve is something like 60% to 75%

of a one-repetition maximum, and then in a controlled way

moving that as quickly as one can throughout the entire set.

And certainly not going to failure

because as you approach failure,

the inability to move the weight with good form,

the weight inevitably slows down.

In fact, there are a lot of new technologies now

that are focused on informing people

of how quickly the bar or weight is moving.

I saw an advertisement for this the other day.

There are things that people can attach to bars

that will literally speak to you

as you're doing a set and inform you

whether or not you're moving four times more slowly per rep

than you were at the beginning.

And trying to hone in on the exact speed of movement.

In talking to these experts prior to this episode

it does appear that for sake of hypertrophy,

as long as you're not moving the muscle so quickly

that you start to distribute the effort

to lots of other muscles,

it doesn't really matter because as the set gets harder,

the motor units that you recruit will increase the number

of neurons that you recruit

and the number of muscle fibers and particularly

these high threshold muscle fibers will increase.

And so it's really only for purposes of hypertrophy

that you really need to be concerned about

how quickly the weight is slowing down.

However, if you're trying to get faster, more explosive

and generate more speed and jumping power, throwing power

things of that sort, you never really want to use a weight

or get to a portion of the set

where you're moving the bar very, very slowly.

And I'm sure as I say that some

of the exercise physiologists

and advanced trainers out there will come

after me with pitchforks, which is fine.

I'd love to see the literature that shows

that low gear slow movements with very heavy weights

can indeed improve explosiveness.

And that may in fact be the case,

but the data that I was able to access was essentially

as I described just a moment ago.

So as you're probably starting to realize you need

to customize a resistance practice

for your particular needs and goals.

And I certainly am not the first to suggest

that people periodize their training.

That they do things from anywhere

from one month to six months, and to see how it goes

and to make modifications as they go.

Because the nervous system in particular

the neuromuscular system changes very quickly

at the beginning of training.

In fact, some of the changes that one can see

when they first embrace or start resistance training

can be very remarkable, but they tend to slow over time.

So we've talked about a few principles.

The fact that you need to get sufficient volume,

you need at least five sets to maintain

and you probably need about 10 sets per muscle group

in order to improve muscle.

That moving weights of moderate

to moderately heavy weight quickly

is going to be best for explosiveness.

The isolating muscles and really contracting muscles hard

something that you can test by just

when you're outside the training session,

seeing whether or not you can cramp the muscle hard

will tell you your capacity to improve hypertrophy

or to engage strength changes in that muscle.

That your ability to contract a muscle hard is

inversely related to the number of sets that you should do

in order to isolate and stimulate that muscle.

And there are some other things that can enhance

the whole process of building nerve to muscle connections,

making them more efficient and generating if you like

more strength and hypertrophy.

One of them I loath to say I was told

is in between set contractions.

The other name for this is the people

in the gym does typically seem to be guys in the gym

flexing their muscles in between sets.

And indeed the research supports the fact

that contractions have about 30 seconds

in between the actual work sets,

they're not going to favor better performance

on the work sets, if anything

they're going to compromise them.

But those hard contractions in between sets

for a variety of reasons related to local muscle metabolism

as well as what we talked about before

which are stress, tension, and damage,

they seem to improve stress, tension, and damage

and the nerve to muscle contraction

in ways that facilitate hypertrophy.

In other words, if you see that person flexing

in between sets in the gym,

provided that they're really isolating that muscle

and provided it's one that they ought to be improving,

not one of these people

that always skips leg day type of people.

These people are highly asymmetric

although that's up to them,

that process of flexing in between sets does seem

to improve the nerve to muscle connection

and enhance hypertrophy.

And I say I was low to say it because nowadays with phones

it seems like the end of every set includes a selfie

sort of like the 11th rep of every set.

I like to joke.

It seems like very few people are capable of actually going

into the gym and doing a workout

without taking a picture of themselves,

which I think is fine if that's your thing.

Although I must say that the athletes that I know

and even the recreational athletes that I know

who seem to get the most out of their training

and who also seem to get the most out

of other aspects of their life,

seem to be able to control their phone behavior

both in the gym and outside of the gym.

But that's more of an editorial point there.

In an earlier episode,

I talked about estrogen and testosterone.

And during that discussion, I talked about

the use of resistance exercise specifically

for increasing testosterone, both in men and in women.

And indeed that is a powerful effect of resistance exercise.

And indeed it's mediated by the nerve to muscle connections.

We talked about that in that earlier episode.

I just want to briefly mention that protocol

since it's distinctly different

from the other protocols I've talked about today.

The protocols I've talked about today thus far

of explosive movements or of hypertrophy-based training

provided the training is 60 minutes or less

will cause increases in serum testosterone

that's been shown over and over again.

And if the session extends too long, past 75 minutes

and is of sufficiently high intensity chances are

testosterone levels will start to drop

and cortisol levels will go up

in ways that can be detrimental to recovery

and the goals of the training.

But that's different than training

that's specifically geared toward increasing testosterone.

Duncan French, who's one of the directors

of the UFC Performance Center,

when he was a graduate student

at University of Connecticut Stores did some beautiful work.

He and his colleagues found the ideal training protocols

for stimulating testosterone release

which is something that many people want to do

for a variety of reasons.

And that involved doing six sets of 10 repetitions

even if it requires lightening the weight

on one set to the next, with about two minutes

120 seconds rest in between sets.

Which if you think of about it is pretty short rest

and is pretty darn hard work.

Now, what's interesting is that

there's a very limited threshold

for increasing testosterone.

That protocol of six sets of 10 repetitions led

to these big increases in serum testosterone.

But if people did 10 sets of 10

so just four more repetitions per set,

then testosterone did not increase.

In fact, you got more of this

catabolic cortisol like pathway.

You get other benefits from this

so-called 10 sets of 10 protocol,

but not the testosterone increase

and maybe even reductions in testosterone.

Now, it's important to point out that

that six sets of 10 was done with big compound movements.

So things like squats, or deadlifts, or chin-ups

or things of that sort.

And those were done as single sessions

not in concert with a bunch of other exercise, although

if athletes are doing that, there's no reason

why they couldn't also do other types

of training elsewhere in the week.

I asked Duncan about this and he mentioned that

that done twice a week is probably the maximum

that anyone could do that

and still maintain this increase in testosterone.

It's a very interesting protocol

because as a neuroscientist, it's amazing

to me that six sets of 10 repetitions with something,

causes a distinctly different result

in terms of hormone output

than 10 sets of 10 of the exact same movement.

And it speaks to the exquisite way in which nerve

to muscle connections dictate the whole physiology

of your entire system.

If there's a theme that I really want to bring forward today

is that weight training or resistance training of any kind

is really used for either systemic effects.

10% of training done where you're feeling that burn

which means lactate will be present

and sending signals to your brain,

and your heart and your liver that are beneficial

or isolating muscles which may also generate

a kind of a lactate which is associated with the burn result

but that isolation of muscles distinctly different.

So systemic versus isolated.

Those are the two general ways

in which resistance training can be applied.

So I just wanted to mention that earlier protocol

because it's well supported by the literature.

If you were to incorporate that protocol,

you might ask, well, then can you do any

other weight training during the week?

And sure, of course you can provided you're recovering.

So let's talk about how you know if you're recovering.

How you know if a muscle is recovered

and how you know if your whole system is recovered.

Because recovery is what dictates whether or not

you can come back and do more work of a different kind.

Meaning, I don't know, you do a leg training one day,

can you and should you come back

and do the upper body training day?

And it dictates whether or not you'll see any improvement

from session to session at all.

Before I talk about recovery

I just want to make sure I nailed down the details

that I was able to extract from the literature

and from my conversation with Dr. Galpin.

If you're wondering how quickly to perform repetitions

for sake of hypertrophy or strength gains,

anywhere from a half a second per repetition

all the way up to eight seconds per repetition,

it doesn't seem to matter.

Again, if you're thinking about explosiveness

or building speed, or you're specifically

using resistance training to build endurance,

that's a separate matter.

We talked about explosiveness and speed.

I'll talk about endurance in a few moments.

We also talked about in between set contractions

the so called selfie effect

of people flexing a particular muscle,

isolating a particular muscle between sets,

just want to mention that would be a terrible thing to do

if your goal is performance on sets.

So moving a particular amount of weight.

That's actually going to diminish the amount of weight

that you can move.

It's going to enhance muscle growth

and it's going to enhance the nerve

to muscle isolation of that particular pathway.

So again, that flexing between sets is going

to favor hypertrophy, not performance.

If you're trying to get stronger,

you're trying to move more weights,

you're trying to distribute work,

and you're trying to do maybe skill training

with resistance then flexing between sets

is absolutely the wrong thing to do for obvious reasons

you're fatiguing the muscle further.

Just remaining still or walking around a little bit

has been shown to be beneficial in terms

of moving some of the lactate out of the muscle

as well as just recovering between sets.

Now, how long to recover between sets, is a question.

For the testosterone protocol, Duncan French and colleagues

found that it was about two minutes keeping

that really on the clock, two minutes not longer.

For hypertrophy and for strength gains,

it does seem that resting anywhere from two minutes

or even three or four, even five or six minutes

can be beneficial.

And if you're interested in expanding the volume

of work that you can do in a given session

at high capacity at high intensity, with a given weight,

please see the episode that I did

on cold and performance about supercharging performance

which is based on the work of my colleague

Craig Heller in the Biology Department at Stanford,

which talks about Palmer Cooling,

about how you can cool the core of the body best

through the palms using these particular venous portals

that are only present in your hands.

People are now doing this with ice packs or with gel packs.

There are a number of different ways one can do this.

I talk all about that in that episode.

It allows you to do more repetitions

and more work at a given weight over time.

So rather than getting 10 repetitions

and then eight and then seven and then six

through proper use of palmer cooling,

one can do 10, 10, 10, 10, and even add sets.

And that's one way that one can accomplish

higher volume work without having

to drop the weight considerably.

So that's where you can hit that really sweet spot

if that's your goal of getting strong

and generating some hypertrophy.

Because as soon as you have to drop to lighter weights,

then you're shifting more towards hypertrophy

and endurance and less toward strength of any given muscle.

So check out that episode.

The last thing besides between set contractions

and whether or not you're distributing work

or whether or not you're really trying to isolate muscles

is this notion of pre-exhausting muscles.

It's been shown over and over again

that for instance, if you want to generate force

in a given muscle and really isolate that,

doing the isolation work before a compound movement.

So this would be leg extensions

the thing where you sit

and you extend your toes up toward the ceiling.

Leg extensions before squats will allow the squats

to target that muscle group more effectively.

And that makes perfectly good sense based on

the Henneman's size principle and fatiguing motor units.

It should be obvious why that's the case.

But of course that's going to be anti performance

in terms of how much weight you can lift,

and maybe even the form that you can maintain

when you move to the bigger compound movement.

So you really have to ask yourself a number of questions.

How good are you at isolating a given muscle?

Therefore, how many sets do you want to do?

How often are you willing to train

therefore, how many sets are you going to do

in a given session versus how many are you going

to distribute across the week?

Are you aiming for performance?

Are you going to distribute that work

across the nervous system and musculature?

Are you trying to move weights?

Are you trying to challenge muscles?

If you're trying to challenge muscles,

then you really want to focus on things

like this pre exhausting the isolation

of a muscle before the compound movement.

Your performance on compound movements

will absolutely suffer but your ability

to isolate that muscle and generate hypertrophy

through the accumulation of larger myosin,

those bigger balloons, will benefit.

And once again, if you're trying to get faster

than the speed of the movement really matters.

So how do we know if we've recovered?

How can we test recovery?

And this is not just recovery from resistance training,

this is recovery from running, recovery from swimming.

Up until now I've been talking about resistance training

more or less in a vacuum.

I haven't even touched on the fact

that many people are running

and they're doing resistance training

or they're swimming and they're doing resistance training.

It's not simply the case that if a given muscle is fatigued

you can just work other muscles.

Because even if you've beautifully isolated a muscle,

let's say you have incredible abilities

to isolate just your quadriceps for instance

and you do a workout where you isolate your quadriceps

you do your six sets of intense work

or maybe use palmer cooling,

and you're able to do 12 sets of intense work

and you're done, and that muscle group

the next day is certainly not going to be recovered

unless you're somebody who's extraordinary at recovery

or you're enhancing your recovery through chemical means

which we'll talk about at the end.

Well, you can assess systemic recovery

meaning your nervous system.

And your nervous system's ability to generate force

both distributed and isolated through three main tests.

And fortunately, these tests are very simple

and two of them are essentially zero cost,

require no equipment.

HRV, heart rate variability has made its way finally

into the forefront of exercise physiology

and even into the popular discussion.

I've talked about HRV before.

How when we exhale, our heart rate slows down

because of the way that our diaphragm

is connected to our heart and to our brain

and the way our brain is connected to our heart.

When we inhale our heart rate speeds up

and that is the basis of heart rate variability.

Heart rate variability is good.

It means that you're breathing properly,

and when I say it's good it means

you want a lot of heart rate variability.

You don't want a heart rate that is high

or low consistently over time.

That might come as a bit of a surprise for you

endurance athletes, who probably are trying

to accomplish your endurance work at a steady cadence

to really hit that nice sweet spot

where you're breathing rhythmically,

your heart rate's going rhythmically.

You're in that steady heart rate,

and then away from exercise,

you have a nice low heart rate as they say.

Well, nice low heart rate isn't necessarily always so nice.

Turns out the introducing bouts

of increasing your heart rate during exercise

and even through your waking day,

through stressful events even is provided their brief

is beneficial.

A good nerve to heart system benefits

from being able to increase heart rate

and decrease heart rate.

Heart rate variability is good.

So you don't want high heart rate,

you don't want low heart rate all the time.

But heart rate variability is difficult

for a lot of people to measure.

There are some devices that will allow you to do that.

Various watches and devices.

There are more devices becoming available all the time.

Hopefully soon, some that are integrated

with your phone that involve no contact

or anything on your body.

But those do carry some costs and they are not perfect yet.

The measures of heart rate variability that one can use

while in movement are still in that phase

I would say of technology development

where everyone isn't using them, let's leave it at that.

There are two measures however,

whether or not you recovered that you can use

first thing in the morning when you wake up,

maybe after five, 10 minutes, if you like,

but ideally right when you wake up

in order to assess how well recovered you are

and therefore whether or not you should train

your whole system at all that day.

The first one his grip strength.

Grip strength, the ability to generate force

at the level of squeezing the fist

or squeezing down on something,

might seem like kind of a trivial way

to assess recovery but it's not because it relates

to your ability to use your upper motor neurons

to control your lower motor neurons

and to generate isolated force.

So that's really what you're assessing when you do that.

Some people will use one of these grip tools

or Costello has this toy that's shaped like a donut

and it's this hard rubber.

And I've tried this before.

If I've been working really hard, not sleeping very well,

or I've been training a lot

any one or combination of those things, my grip suffers.

I can't actually squeeze that thing down

as much as I can Costello because he was born

with like a 24 inch neck

even though he's never touched a weight

somehow he can just clamp down on that thing,

and he can turn it into a pancake with ease

and he likes to chuckle while I struggle with this thing.

But on a good day, I can squeeze this thing

so that I eliminate the hole in the donut so to speak.

You can also take a floor scale and squeeze the scale

and see how much force you can generate.

I would do that as a baseline to establish

what you can do when you're well rested.

And then if you do that in the morning,

you can see whether or not you're able

to generate the same amount of force

or you could use over the rubber donut or something.

A lot of this is very subjective

with a scale you're really trying to assess

whether or not you can generate the same amount of force.

If you start seeing a 10% or 20% certainly reduction in that

that's concerning, it means that your system,

your nervous system as a whole

it's not necessarily fatigued, is that the pathways

from nerve to muscle are still in the process

of rewiring themselves in order to generate force.

And you might think, well, I train one muscle group one day.

Why am I having a hard time doing this

for a completely different muscle group?

It doesn't make any sense.

But there's something about the upper motor neuron

to lower motor neuron pathway generally

that allows you to use something like grip strength

as a kind of a thermometer, if you will

of your ability to recover.

So look for your ability to generate force in grip

when you first wake up.

It's not going to be as good as it is at 3:00 PM

after a cup of coffee and a couple meals

but the point isn't performance overall,

the point is to assess whether or not

you're getting better, worse or the same from day to day.

The other one that's really terrific

and the Andy Galpin's group is using.

And I'm delighted about this because it relates

to something that my lab is very excited about as well

is carbon dioxide tolerance.

So this is a really interesting tool

that endurance athletes, strength athletes

I think can all benefit from.

In fact athletes and people of all kinds.

Even if you're not an athlete,

even if you're not exercising at all,

there's a good question of whether or not your system

as a whole is doing okay or not.

We rely on the thermometer.

Do we have a fever or not?

We rely on subjective things.

Do I feel good or not?

Am I digesting well or not?

Those are all subjective.

The carbon dioxide tolerance test is,

its objective in that it measures your capacity

to engage the so-called parasympathetic arm

of your nervous system which is the calming aspect

of your nervous system.

And it measures your ability to consciously control

a particular skeletal muscle, which is your diaphragm.

So here's how you do the carbon dioxide tolerance test.

You wake up in the morning.

If you have to use the restroom first, do that,

but try and stay away from your phone.

If you have your phone, put it on airplane mode,

go to the timer or use a hand watch or some other way

of measuring time, stay off social media

for just a few seconds.

It'll be okay.

And what you're going to do is you're going to inhale

through your nose as deeply as you can,

you can do this lying down, sitting, whatever

inhale through your nose and then exhale all the way.

So that's one.

You're going to repeat that four times.

So inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale

inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale four times.

And ideally you're inhaling through the nose

and you're exhaling through the mouth.

That's just the beginning

of this carbon dioxide tolerance test.

Then you take a fifth inhale

as deep as you can through your nose.

Fill your lungs as much as you can,

and if you can try and expand

make your stomach go out while you do that,

that means that your diaphragm has really engaged.

So you're inhaling as much as you possibly can.

Then hit the timer and your goal is to release

that air as slowly as possible through your mouth.

So it looks like you have a tiny, tiny little straw

in your mouth and you're letting it go.

As slowly as you possibly can.

Measure what we call the carbon dioxide blow off time

or discard rate.

I know you can all sit with lungs empty

after you eliminate all that air, but don't lie to yourself.

Don't stop the timer when you've been sitting

with your lungs empty for a while,

stop the timer when you are finally no longer

able to exhale any more air.

So you do inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale,

inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale slowly.

I just said it quickly for sake of time

then you can do this fifth big inhale through your mouth,

and then [deep exhale]

And I'm not going to do it for the full duration.

And then you're measuring that time.

Your carbon dioxide discard rate will be somewhere

between one second and presumably two minutes.

Two minutes would be a heroic carbon oxide discard time.

30 seconds would be more typical.

20 seconds would be fast.

If your carbon dioxide discard time

is 20 or 25 seconds or less,

you are not necessarily recovered

from your previous days activities.

There's ways to push through this

but hold onto that thought for a moment.

If your carbon oxide discard time is somewhere

between about 30 seconds and 60 seconds,

you are in what we would call kind of the green zone

where you are in a position to do more physical work.

And if your carbon dioxide discard time is somewhere

between 65 and 120 seconds,

well then you have almost certainly

recovered your nervous system.

I'm not talking about the individual muscles

but your nervous system is prepared to do more work.

And Andy's Lab has great data on this

as it relates to exercise physiology.

I think that story should be out

in the not too distant future.

My lab has been using carbon oxide discard time

to look at anxiety and recovery from bouts of anxiety.

So two totally independent projects

but using the same measure.

So you've got HRV, which requires some technology usually.

You've got grip strength,

which you can assess subjectively

or you can use a floor scale

and now you have carbon dioxide tolerance.

You want to do this in the morning when you wake up

and keep track just write down in a little book,

or maybe just keep tracking your mind

of your carbon oxide discard time.

If you find that your discard times are dropping

even if they're in the 42nd range or 52nd range,

but normally you can do 75 seconds or 120 seconds.

If they're starting to drop by anywhere from 15% to 20%,

you're veering in the direction of not recovering.

And I'm really keen on this tool

because everybody has different recovery abilities.

Some people are eating really well and sleeping really well.

Some people have minimal stress

or can buffer stress really well.

Other people they dissolve into a puddle of tears

if they read one text message that's troubling or whatever.

And I realize, and I say that with sympathy,

I realize people have varying levels of stress

and demand in their life.

It's just to to prescribe an entire protocol

that says, okay, yes you should train today

and this is exactly what you should do.

No, you shouldn't.

Use carbon dioxide discard rate because a,

it's valuable, it's informative.

b, it's zero cost and c,

it's something you can track objectively over time.

And that's really the key.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't say

that what carbon dioxide discard rate is tapping into

is your ability to mechanically control your diaphragm

certainly that's one aspect of it,

but that relates in a very direct way to your ability

to put the brake on your stress system.

To engage the so-called parasympathetic

or calming arm of your autonomic nervous system.

And another thing that Andy Galpin's group is testing

is at the offset of training after your run,

after your weight training session,

maybe even after your plyometrics session,

we didn't really talk about jumping and throwing

and that sort of thing.

Maybe we'll talk about it in a future episode.

But they and other groups, including some elite athletes

and other groups that are very interested

in physical performance are using a tool

where they deliberately disengaged

for five minutes at the end of training.

They deliberately engage this calming or parasympathetic arm

of the nervous system.

And you can do that through any number of different tools.

I'm a big fan of respiration tools

'cause they're always available to you.

Your breathing is always there.

I talk about some of these tools in previous episodes

but you could use things like non sleep deep rest and SDR

at the end of a training session.

You could do 10 physiological size,

double inhales through the nose followed by long exhales,

that will definitely engage the

parasympathetic nervous system at the end of training.

So rather than finish your training session

and then just hop onto your phone,

serious athletes and people who are serious about recovery

initiate that recovery at the very end of their training

and they start to kickstart that recovery process rather

and they measure CO2 tolerance in the morning.

So there are several groups that are doing that.

In fact, I know several groups because I'm working

with them that are using physiological size between sets

in order to recover their nervous system

and maintain nerve to muscle contractibility.

Maintain focus throughout their training session

enhance their focus by doing a few physiological size.

So double inhale, exhale in between sets.

So they're getting very focused and very intense

about their strength work or explosiveness worker,

muscle isolation work during their sets.

And then in between sets, they're deliberately

disengaging the nervous system,

and then they're re-engaging it again.

So I just wanted to emphasize that.

So recovery is a complex process.

It's got a lot of things

but the CO2 tolerance set should be a valuable tool.

Now, another tool for recovery

that people are very excited about

is the use of cold and the ice bath.

And this is important.

If you are somebody who uses cold through cold shower,

or ice bath, or jumping in a lake, or a river

whatever it is that used to generate cold

as a recovery tool, you should be aware

that there are data starting to emerge that

if your goal is recovery or strength improvements,

using cold within the four hours following a workout.

I'm not talking about palmer cooling, I'm talking

about whole body cooling or cooling from the neck down.

Yes, it will reduce inflammation.

Yes, it will reduce the amount

of delayed on muscle soreness one readout

of how intense or damaging a given workout was

not the only readout,

but it does seem to interfere with some

of the things like mTOR pathways,

the mammalian target of rapamycin pathway

and other pathways related to an inflammation

that promote muscle repair and muscle growth.

Remember, stress, tension, and damage

or the stimulus for nerve to muscle connections to change

and for muscles to get bigger, stronger, and better.

And so if you're getting into the ice bath after training

or taking a really cold shower

after doing resistance training,

you are likely short-circuiting the improvements

that you're trying to create.

Now, athletes who are trying to recover quickly

so that they can get back into more training sessions,

or let's say you're somebody who doesn't really

want to gain much strength or hypertrophy

and you're mainly focused on endurance

and you want to do more endurance work

and you've been weight training,

well then exposing yourself to cold can be beneficial,

but you're not going to get as great of benefits

from the resistance training.

In other words, cold after resistance training

seems to short circuit some of the benefits

of that resistance training.

There are some other things

that can short circuit the benefits

of resistance training as well.

One of those is anti-histamines.

Some interesting data were published recently.

I believe it was in scientific reports, yes

that showed that anti-histamines can prevent some

of the benefits of cardiovascular exercise

of endurance type work as running, swimming

of fairly long duration or even sprint type work,

as well as inhibit some of the processes associated

with resistance training.

Remember, it resistance training or endurance training,

that's a stimulus for stress

and the adaptation to that stress is how you get better.

That you can run further, faster,

lift more weight, hypertrophy the muscle, et cetera.

So anti-histamines can be a problem.

Obviously don't compromise your ability

to breathe completely, but anti-histamines generally work

by blocking what are called mast cells and M-A-S-T.

Mast cells are really interesting cells

that we'll talk about in our month on neuro immune function.

They travel in the bloodstream

and these little packets that burst open

it sites of inflammation.

Muscle damage and inflammation is a signal

that something needs to change.

And so taking it to histamines it appears can disrupt

some of that inflammatory process.

So you actually want inflammation

during and immediately after a workout,

then you want to bring inflammation down later

and I'll mention how to do that.

The other thing are non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs

you know their trade names.

These are painkillers that many people take.

Those as I've mentioned in a previous episode

can interfere with the benefits of endurance training

and the benefits of resistance training.

In addition to that, they block pain signals

and pain is a very good signal

that you might be doing something wrong.

And so while nobody likes to be in pain,

I suppose there are probably a few people out there

like to be in pain, but that's a different story

but nobody likes to be in pain.

The non-steroid anti-inflammatory the NSAIDs

as they're called, and the anti-histamines seem

to prevent a lot of the gains

the improvements in endurance, strength and size

that people are specifically using exercise for.

So be cautious about your use

of non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs

especially within the four hours preceding

or the four hours following exercise.

So I hope you're starting to get the picture.

In order to change the nerve to muscle connectivity

in ways that will better serve you,

you need a stressor during the actual training

which particular stressor depends on your training goals.

But that stressor is almost always going

to be associated with inflammation,

and then after the training, you want to try

and get into a state of reduced inflammation.

And that's why you would do some sort of protocol

non sleep depressed which we will link to in our caption

or perhaps you would use the hypnosis app

that we've talked about before Reveri, R-E-V-E-R-I.com.

There's a great app for accessing deep rest states

or the physiological side to try and get your system

to calm down after training.

There are also tools that one can use to reduce inflammation

at a kind of foundational level away from training.

And these are tools that I've talked

about many times before, but I'll just restate them again.

The kind of Golden Three according to Andy Galpin

and the ones that he recommends are

sufficient omega-3s again, that can be accomplished

through diet, through whole food intake

or through supplementation or both.

So in general, getting above a 1,000 milligrams

of EPA per day to keep inflammation low or relatively low.

Vitamin D and in some cases, magnesium malate.

Magnesium malate seems to be particularly effective

in offsetting delayed onset muscle soreness.

Soreness itself is not required

for improvements in strength, improvements in explosiveness,

improvements in hypertrophy.

That's a myth.

Now, if you do experience delayed onset muscle soreness,

chances are you stressed that particular muscle pretty well

or even maybe to well, maybe you stressed it too much

and you need longer recovery.

There's a total debate out there about whether

or not you should train again when a muscle is still sore.

I think the general takeaway is, no

that means it's not recovered.

And there are things of course like massage,

like fascial release and things of that sort

sauna, cold that can perhaps accelerate the movement

from soreness to not sore.

But in general, the omega-3, vitamin D,

and magnesium malate trio seemed to be an effective way

to reduce inflammation at kind of a systemic level.

But remember you want inflammation provided

you're not damaging the muscles so much

that you're injured during the training session

because that's the stimulus for change in those muscles.

I want to talk about a few other things

that support the process of nerve to muscle communication

and touch on some of the things that a lot

of people are doing to try to "enhance their workouts"

and evaluate whether or not those are

in fact enhancing workouts or not.

Because weight training, unlike a lot of other forms

of exercise has a unique aspect to it,

which is this feature that I guess some people

call it the pump which is the fact that blood goes

into the muscle when you train, it's the only gun

of training where you actually get a window

into what the result might actually look like

before you actually accomplish that result.

So if you think about when you go out for a hard run

and let's say you go out for a two mile run,

let's say your goal is to break

you want to do a sub ten two mile.

Actually, when I went to university

I was running cross country, my senior year of high school

and I wanted to walk on for the cross country team.

And so I went out there and turned out

you had to do a sub 10, two mile.

And I think the best mile I ever ran in high school

was a 457, which isn't terrible.

I can't do that now.

It's not even close to what

the best high school athletes can do now.

But that would have meant doing it back-to-back.

So it was sub 10 minute two mile didn't even come close.

I told Costello this story the other day

and he just kind of laughed at me.

He was like, why would you even want to run two miles?

Because Costello is built almost exclusively

of these type two fast twitch muscles

they're designed for moving objects.

He's incredibly strong.

He has been since he was a puppy.

I mean that dog could probably drag a tractor

if he wanted to, but he can't really go far.

Whereas a Greyhound or a Whippet

or some of these other sight hounds or scent hounds

can go, go, go.

They have a higher percentage of the

so-called slow-twitch muscle fibers.

They are much better at endurance.

So a sub-10 two mile would have been very, very challenging,

no chance I could have done that.

I don't think even with a lot of training.

But let's say that you want to improve your performance

in a given type of exercise.

Let's talk about some of the things that seem to work

across the board to improve strength, improve hypertrophy,

and improve nerve to muscle communication and performance.

The first thing that's absolutely key

for nerve to muscle communication and physical performance

of any kind might not sound that exciting to you

but it is very exciting.

And that's salt.

Nerves cells, neurons communicate with each other

and communicate with muscle by electricity.

But that electricity is generated by particular ions moving

into and out of the neuron.

And the rushing in of a particular ion, sodium, salt

is what allows nerve cells to fire.

If you don't have enough salt in your system

your neurons and your brain and your nerve

to muscle communication will be terrible.

If you have sufficient salt, it will be excellent.

How much salt will depend on how much water you're drinking,

how much caffeine you're drinking,

and how much food you're ingesting.

And whether or not you're taking any diuretics

how hot it is, et cetera, how much you're sweating.

So you want to make sure that you have enough salt,

potassium and magnesium in your system

if you want to perform well.

I realized that salt isn't very glamorous performance tool

but it is a vital.

Its absolutely vital.

And the endurance athletes and the people that train

in high heat can speak to the fact that

when your electrolytes are low, your brain doesn't function,

your body doesn't function nearly as well.

In fact, even for mental work, for studying

and for writing and for doing math and coding,

doing analytic work of any kind,

even a hard conversation that's important to you,

having sufficient electrolytes is really going to help

and being low on electrolytes won't help

and just drinking water won't help

because you need electrolytes.

The other thing that's been shown over and over again,

a numerous well-controlled studies

to improve muscle performance is creatine.

Early on there was a lot of controversy about creatine

but there are many studies if you want, you can go

to this website that everyone now knows I love

which is this free website examined.com

that there are no fewer than 18 studies there.

66 studies...

So 18 studies supporting that muscle creating content

can be increased by ingesting creatine.

How much creatine?

Well, I asked the experts and they tell me

that for somebody who is about 180 pounds,

five grams a day should be sufficient or so.

Heavier than 180, so if you got like

if you're a 220 pound or 230 pound person,

10 to 15 grams of creatine.

People lighter than 180 pounds

maybe three to five grams of creatine

or even one to three grams.

Creatine is a fuel source for early in bouts of activity

for high intensity activity.

It is also a fuel source for neurons in the brain

and it can have some cognitive enhancing effects.

So creatine is a very interesting molecule.

Early on when it was released as a supplement,

it was thought that you had to load it

in higher dosages for a few days

and then maintain it at lower dosages.

So you'd take 20 or 30 grams a day

then back off to five or 10.

It doesn't seem to be the case

that you can get all the benefits

from taking the dosages at the low level.

I just mentioned a few moments ago

as they relate to body weight throughout.

So salt and electrolytes absolutely key.

You need those present.

You need to be well hydrated.

Creatine seems to have a performance enhancing effect.

There are 66 studies, 66 showing that power output

is greatly increased anywhere from 1%2 to 20%.

And this is sprinting and running

and jumping as well as weightlifting by creatine.

The ability to hydrate your body is improved

by creating because of the way that it brings more water

into cells of various kinds.

As an indirect effect, it can help in increasingly mass

because of the way that it brings more water into muscle

and probably also because of the way that

if you get stronger, you can generate more force

and generate more hypertrophy.

It reduces fatigue.

Seven studies have shown that it reduces fatigue.

There are even some interesting effects

on improving cognition after traumatic brain injury.

Although that's a serious medical condition in situations

you absolutely should talk to a board certified physician

before adding anything or taking anything out

of your current regimen.

There are a few other effects that are interesting

and notable, but the big ones are the ones that I referred

to before about increased power output, et cetera.

And I just want to emphasize

that creatine can increase this hormone

that we talked about in the testosterone episode,

dihydrotestosterone which is testosterone converted

by five alpha reductase into dihydrotestosterone.

It's the more dominant androgen in humans.

Leads to increases in strength and libido and so forth.

It also can increase male pattern baldness.

Some people, not everybody experience some hair loss

with creatine other people don't.

Some people experience accelerated beard growth

because basically [mumbles]

has the opposite effect on hair follicles on the face

as it does on the scalp, some people don't.

Women who ingest creatine

there are essentially no data showing

that it increases hair loss or facial hair growth,

but of course, everyone is different.

So you can go to examine.com.

You can explore those studies.

So creatine definitely a powerful

performance enhancing molecule.

The other one, one that personally I've never tried

but that seems to have a very strong

and well-supported effects is beta-alanine.

Now, beta-alanine is interesting

because when you hear about weight training

you think about heavy deadlifts and bench presses

all that kind of stuff that people are doing.

But beta-alanine seems to support exercise

that is of slightly longer duration.

So a mix of anaerobic and aerobic type movement.

These are physical performance in the 60 to 242nd range.

So you can use your mind and kind of figure out.

Things that weights that limit you

to 8 to 15 repetitions.

Cardiovascular exercise of the sort

like rowing or sprinting.

So interval work, it seems to help with that kind of work.

So we're not talking about long runs,

we're not talking about heavy deadlifts.

The standard dose is somewhere between two and five grams,

again, as always check with a doctor,

make sure these things are safe for you.

I'm not responsible for your health.

You are.

I don't say that just to protect me.

I'd say that also to protect you

but it really seems to improve muscular endurance,

improve anaerobic running capacity, reduce fatigue.

There are even some interesting effects

on reduction of body fat and improvements in lean mass.

So creatine, beta-alanine, electrolytes,

these are kind of the core three things

that seem to improve performance

and are well supported by the scientific literature.

And in the earlier episode on supercharging performance

we talked about palmer cooling.

That's certainly a performance enhancing tool.

It's nothing you ingest your cooling your palms

in a very specific way.

That's very powerful.

Now, what about for longer duration bouts of exercise?

We've mainly been focusing on resistance training,

but what about for long runs, long swims,

these kinds of things?

Well, it does seem that juice and ingesting things

like arginine and citrulline can improve performance

for those long bouts of exercise

that's mainly going to be due to effects

of those compounds on vasodilation.

It's going to open up the vasculature

and allow more blood flow.

Do note that things like citrulline and arginine

can have some side effects if you will.

They can increase the likelihood

of having herpes cold sore outbreaks on the mouth.

The arginine is in the pathway by which I don't know

if people know this, but the herpes virus lives

on neurons of the trigeminal nerve that innervates the lips

and the eyes and the mucus membranes of the face.

So this is the herpes type 1 simplex virus.

The virus lives on those neurons

and then periodically inflames those neurons,

and that's what leads to the cold sores seems like arginine

and citrulline can lead to increases in cold sores

and canker sores, and outbreaks of those kinds.

So you want to be aware of that.

That's not everybody, and not everybody is caring HSV-1,

just be aware that I think it's now 80% or 90% of people

by time they're 12 years old, they've contracted HSV-1.

It's very contagious and typically one outbreak,

and then only under conditions of stress

or heightened arginine or citrulline ingestion

we'll have them later.

Again, this is not necessarily an STI,

a sexually transmitted infection.

This is an infection that is passed very easily

from mucous membranes, just in terms of touching objects

and things of that sort.

Very common in the general population.

Any discussion about muscle and muscle performance

would not be adequate if we didn't mention something

about nutrition,

but rather than have a whole discussion about nutrition,

'cause there's lots of information about that online,

for instance, if you want to gain muscle

that you need to have a calorie surplus of about 10 to 15%.

You could have a calorie surplus of more.

If you want to avoid gaining weight

then you would not create a calorie surplus, et cetera.

You can find all that information online.

That's not what this podcast is really about.

We had a month where we talked a lot

about hormones and food and moods.

We talked about foods, but more

as they relate to the nervous system.

When it comes to supporting muscle.

So supporting the synthesis of larger

what I called myosin balloons, it does seem

that ingesting 700 to 3000 milligrams

of the essential amino acid leucine

with each meal is important.

Now, that does not necessarily mean from supplements.

In fact, most people recommend that you get your protein,

you get your amino acids,

including your essential amino acids

and your leucine from whole foods.

High quality proteins aren't high density proteins.

What do you mean by that?

Well, it is true that a lot of sources of protein are found

in things like beans and nuts and things like that

that all the essential amino acids can be found there

but per unit calorie, if it's in your practice,

if it's in your ethics to ingest animal proteins,

it's true that for instance, 200 calories

of steak or chicken or fish or eggs

will have a higher density of essential amino acids

than the equivalent amount of calories from nuts or plants.

That's just simply the way it works.

So for the vegans and vegetarians

I'm certainly, I'm not saying there's no way

that you can support muscle growth.