GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Protocols to Build Strength & Grow Muscles

How do I improve training quality? And one of those tips is set your playlist before you go to the gym ... People spend so much time in between sets just finding the next song that they like; it makes their workout so long and so unproductive... Or, do what you do, which is ditch the music entirely...

You do not want to get in the ice post-hypertrophy training. You wouldn't want to do that immediately after the workout. You probably don't want to do it before the workout, and you probably don't even want to do it that same day. It's just not worth it. It will blunt hypertrophy.

So, '3 to 5' refers to 3-5 days per week, pick 3-5 exercises, and you're going to do 3-5 repetitions per set. You'll do 3-5 sets, and you'll rest 3-5 minutes between each set.

I will say a major mistake folks do make is they change their exercises entirely way too often ... I would say don't change anything on your exercises for 6 weeks, probably realistically, maybe even 10-12 weeks...

This is a major reason that people don't hit their fitness goals. In fact, I would argue outside of not doing it, the number one mistake they make is progressive overload ... That's the biggest thing—you have got to have some sort of overload.

If you're going to be doing something in which you can complete the entire exercise without a breath and it is of a maximal or close to load, that's probably your best strategy.

You don't have to go to failure to see strength gains, especially early or even moderate—and I'm talking, maybe, 5+ years into your lifting career.

One mistake that we see here commonly is grossly under-appreciating that the legs are not a muscle group ... You have 4 days dedicated to the upper body and 1 for 'legs'? Well, I hope you can see the imbalance that's going to happen over time.

If you're doing a strength type of work... then a 1-1 post-exercise protein to carbohydrate ratio is generally what we're going to go after. So, this would be something like 35 grams of protein, 35 grams of carbohydrate.

Machines are greatly under-appreciated. They're a fantastic resource, especially for somebody who's either early in their fitness journey or somebody who really is having a hard time targeting a muscle group with a bigger compound movement.

By the way, I am so pro-curls in the squat rack ... Nobody kill me.

You can take up to 3-5 minutes of rest in between sets and be fine. The caveat here, though, is this: If you're going to rest longer, that means the metabolic challenge is lower. So, you need to then increase the challenge in either mechanical tension, which think about as weight (load) or muscle breakdown.

This is actually a wonderful area of these, like, 5-8 repetitions where you're going to get a nice combination of a lot of strength gains and a lot of hypertrophy ... Train pretty hard in that 4-8 repetition range, and you're going to get a lot stronger, and you'll still induce a lot of hypertrophy.

If you're 225 pounds, you're not going to get the same dosages of creatine as a 125-pound girl ... So, we may slide that number down a little bit closer to 3 for the smaller girl ... If you're one of our 275 or 330-pound offensive right tackles... that number is going to go up to 7, 8, 9, maybe even 10 grams a day...

You lose about 1% of muscle size per year after age about 40 ... You lose about 2-4% of your strength per year, so the loss of strength is almost double that the loss of muscle mass with aging. Muscle power is more like 8 to 10% per year.

You don't lose these functionalities because of aging; you lose these because of a loss of training ... You pretty much can describe the loss of function of strength and muscle and aging as exclusively because of a loss of training and nutrition and anabolic resistance and some other things.

One of the major benefits of strength training is the responses tend to happen extremely fast; so you can see noticeable changes in muscle size certainly within a month, absolutely within 6 weeks.

What if I used to lift weights a long time ago and I got big, but now I've lost a lot of my muscle? If I train again, you actually get that muscle back faster than it took you the very first time to build it.

10 would be sort of the minimum number you want to get to. The more realistic number that most people, especially if you're advanced or even intermediate , is more like 15-20 working sets per week...

Resistance exercise and strength training is the number one tool to combat neuromuscular aging. You cannot get that through any other form of exercise besides heavy overload strength training.