Welcome to the huberman lab, guest Series, where I and an expert, guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode marks, the first in a series with dr. Andy Galpin dr. Andy Galpin is a professor of kinesiology at Cal State University Fullerton. And one of the foremost World experts on the science and application of methods to increase strength, speed, endurance, hypertrophy and various, other aspects of fitness exercise and sports performance across the six-episode series, dr. Andy go.
Urban pulls from his expertise, working with everything from professional athletes to recreational. Exercisers and teaches us the mechanisms logic and specific protocols for how to achieve any of the number of different exercise adaptations that I mentioned a moment ago, ranging from strength to endurance, hypertrophy and everything in between we get really far into details. But at all times paying attention to the macroscopic issues, that is how to create a program for endurance, or strength, or hypertrophy or speed.
One that combines all of those, we also talked about supplementation and nutrition and how to maximize recovery for each of the different types of exercise adaptations during today's episode dr. Galpin teaches us how to assess our level of fitness and more, generally how to think about Fitness, so that we can best achieve our fitness exercise and performance goals, dr. Professor Andy Galpin super excited to have you here. You're such an immense Treasure Trove of information on physical training, and optimizing for specific.
Goals and outcomes with physical exercise.
I'm curious. However, so many people have different levels of fitness.
Some people are professional athletes, of course, but most people are not many people exercise regularly. Some people are trying to do that more. Some people are doing too much of that, they're over training, they're not recovering enough.
If we were to take a step back and each and every one of us asked how fit are we?
With the word fit, of course, being a very broad encompassing word could Encompass endurance. Certainly does strength, the ability to run fast. Even if for short distances, it might even include hypertrophy or directed hypertrophy trying to balance once musculature to offset asymmetries recover from injuries Etc, how should, I, or anyone else for that matter?
Think about their level of Fitness, you know, I know my resting heart rate, but what do I do in terms of really assessing whether or not, I'm as fit as I could be and should be both for sake of health and performance. And here, I'm asking you the question, not as an athlete but as somebody who's been pretty consistent as an exerciser, but if we were to throw our arms around this question of, how do we assess our fitness, what would be sort of the different levels?
As of assessment that we should think about and do
when it comes to exercise, people generally have two major goals in mind goal. Number one is achieving some sort of appearance, right? This is I want to be big or want to not be too big or I want to be lean something, right. It doesn't matter what that goal is, but there is an aesthetic component to almost everybody. They want to look a certain way or not like a certain way. The other one is functionality so I want to be able to perform a certain way. Now again, that definition differs per person so I want to be better.
At strength. I want to be better at Mobility. I want to be able to have energy throughout the day, whatever it is. So there's some sort of appeal to aesthetic and there's some sort of appeal to functionality. So, within both of those categories, we want to be in a position where we can understand, where do I need to go with my exercise training so that I can be as fit and as healthy and Achieve these goals that I want. Now, as well as being a position where I can maintain them for a long period of time. So this Blends both
both immediate goals. So say, you're just interested in squatting, a lot of weight. So you're interested in running 5K time, the best you want. It doesn't matter. It Blends that with the ability, the desire to have a long Wellness, span to be fit throughout life to achieve all those things for as long as possible. So then, the question kind of comes back to saying, how do I know which area? I need to focus on the most and why am I not achieving these goals or how can I get there more effectively?
And if we look at the big picture, we have to understand that there are several major components to physical fitness that are going to be required in all of these categories. And to achieve that there are handful of components that have to happen to be able to hit those goals. Now they're infinite method. So the saying we actually use here a lot is the methods are many but the concepts are few. So what I'd love to do today is over the course of our discussion is hit exactly what those concepts are and then cover a whole bunch of different methods and we could do that for
Hours, but will cover a number of them for various
goals. So one of the reasons I went into neuroscience and not into exercise science is because of this thing, neuroplasticity, that nervous systems ability to adapt. But the more time I spend with you in the more I learn from you, I realized that many, if not all of the organ systems of our body have this incredible ability to adapt. And when we're talking about physical exercise, there are incredible adaptations. That of course, involve the nervous.
But also involve muscle and connective tissue and so many other cell types and tissues.
That said, when we talked about Fitness, what are the major types of adaptations that underlie? This thing that we call Fitness and later? I know we're going to get into how different forms of exercise can trigger different types of adaptations, but what are the major adaptations that one can create in their body using exercise.
There are many reasons why one should exercise and we could perhaps cover that later in our chats but the physiological
Actions can be bucketed really, in a nine areas. So the very first one is what I call skill or technique, so just learning to move better, more efficiently with a specific position and timing and sequence or whatever. That is, is, could be running more effectively. This could be practicing a skill like shooting a ball or an Implement swinging, a golf club, anything like that, I call that skill development. The second one is speed. This is simply moving at a higher velocity or with a better rate of acceleration, okay?
That's very similar to the next one, which is power. And power, is speed multiplied by force the next one. Then of course, on top of that is force or strength. So those are really synonymous terms, right? How effectively can you move something? Now, this is often confused strength, rather as muscular endurance. So, what I mean by that is strength, truly is a marker of how what's the maximum thing you can move, or it's the maximum amount of force you can produce one time.
It's not how many repetitions in a row. You can do. That's actually another one of our annotations called muscular endurance. All right. So that is typically under the order of like, say five to 25 maybe 50 repetitions think of a classic. How many pushups can you do in a roll? How many sit-ups going to do in a minute? Like things like that are muscular endurance, muscular endurance tends to be localized. So this is you know specific to just say your triceps and your and your deltoids. It's not a overall cardiovascular.
Endurance marker or anything like that. So, that's strength. Number four. Number five is muscle hypertrophy and this is the first time. Now, we're talking about an appearance rather than a functional outcome. So, you know, moving better, moving faster, moving heavier, are indicators of how well you can move. This is the first one that's just simply how big is your muscle and that's muscle hypertrophy or muscle size after that is muscular endurance. So this is how many repetitions you can typically do of a movement.
Think of how many pushups in a row, you can do how many sit-ups in a minute. You can do things that are typically in like five to fifty repetition sort of range and it is often or it is almost always local muscle. So what I mean by that is it is I don't push-up. Test is really how many reps that your triceps and packs and deltoids can do? It is not a cardiovascular endurance. It is not a global physiological endurance is specific to typically one or a few months.
All groups at a time. This is why you have to do multiple tests for sort of every group there after that. Now we've moved into number seven, which is what I call an aerobic capacity. This is more synonymous with maximum heart rate. And now we're actually looking at rather than a single movement or muscle group, it is a total physiological, limitation. So it is the maximum amount of work you can do and say 30 to 45 seconds. Maybe even up to 120 seconds of all-out work.
I think of your classic interval type of stuff here. So how much work can you do at a maximum rate where you're going to enter tremendous amounts of global fatigue? The next past that is maximal aerobic capacity. And this is probably something like in the 8 to 15 minute rain where you're going to reach, probably both a maximum heart rate as well as a true vo2max which will will talk a lot more about what that is.
Later. So that is is different from the previous one, where you can't reach this. In a matter of seconds, it simply takes multiple minutes to get to a position to where your VO2 max is actually going to be. Sufficiently challenged are an indicator there. And then the last one. Number nine is what I call a long duration and this is just your ability to sustain submaximal work for a long period of time. With no breaks, no reductions whatsoever. This is often called steady state training or a lot of people just think of this when they think of
Quote, unquote cardio, but your ability to continue move without any breaks or change or drop is the last and final
adaptation and for long-distance steady state, I'm guessing it exceeds 15 minutes because the previous one was 8 to 15 minutes or so what sort of time ranges are we talking about in terms of this long-duration? Well,
that's actually wonderful. You going to be anything past 15 minutes? So really if you look at a kind of a minimum number there, it's generally 20 minutes.
What we're looking for, but I'm more typical would be 20 to 60 minutes, but anything past that was still be limited by your long-duration endurance. So your ability to sustain work
overtime. Okay? So given that there are nine different major adaptations that can be induced with exercise of specific types. Is there anyone global test or assessment that people can take or do? That allows them to determine what level of ability of
Itness they have in each and every one of these, nine different
categories. There are probably dozens or more tests that you can do for each one of those nine categories. And what I would actually like to do is walk you through my favorites for each and giving you both the scientific gold standard. So if you have the ability unlimited resources, what should you go do as well as some that are our equipment free that are cost free things that anyone can do across the world. In addition to that, I want to walk you through what those numbers should be? How do you identify if your
The poor in something or if you're great and then, if you aren't as good, maybe in a category, you want to get better at it. Exactly what to do in terms of protocols for how to achieve optimal results in each of those steps.
So I noticed in your list of the nine, different adaptations to exercise that you did not mention fat loss or health-promoting benefits, which are two reasons that a lot of people exercise. Was there, a specific reason that you did not mention
those absolutely? It's because those things are actually not specific training Style.
Isles. They are byproducts of these nine. So what I mean by that is if you understand how fat loss occurs, which we can certainly talk about, you'll realize some of these nine. Protocols are effective for fat loss and some are not General. Health is the same thing when we understand what it actually means to be healthy from a physiological perspective. Then the rationale for what to train for is going to determine itself. So what I mean is looking at things like,
In order to be healthy, you have to have sufficient strength. You have to have cardiovascular fitness, you have to have sufficient muscle and Etc. Therefore training for one's health is determined by those restrictions. So, for you Andrew, you may need to do more strength training to be healthy where me, because I'm strong already way stronger than you. I may not need to do as much strength training. So our quote-unquote health based, Protocols are based on our current status or limitations and physical fitness.
And among these nine areas. So what I would like to do today is to cover, a brief history of exercise science. And the reason is it's going to explain a lot about why people are not getting the goals in their exercise programs that they want as well as give you very specific Direction about what to do.
Instead, I can't wait to hear all the things that I'm doing incorrectly and to have you help me remedy that before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at
It is also separate from dr. Galvan's teaching and research roles at Cal State, Fullerton. It is however, part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. We'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is momentous momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality. The huberman Lab podcast is proud, to be partnering with momentous for several important reasons. First of all, as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality. Second of all, there's
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And save $150 at checkout, eight sleep, currently ships in the USA Canada, United Kingdom select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's a sleep.com huberman to save $150 at checkout before we get into how the history of exercise science informs the mistakes that we are all making and how to remedy those mistakes I'm curious as to whether or not you have any favorite one or two studies that point to a sort of naturally occurring example of how
People can become very fit in one area and not another. You know I'm familiar with seeing endurance athletes that apparently have terrific endurance but at least to my I don't look like they are particularly strong. I'm also familiar with seeing individuals that are very very strong particular on social media but that don't look like they can walk up a flight of stairs. Much less run a mile. Do you have any examples of studies in or outside the laboratory that point to that in a concrete way?
There's a lot to happen to discuss here but
But I'll answer really clear if you look across the literature and this is actually back to as early as the mid 1950s. In fact, it actually goes back to previous to that to the Harvard fatigue lab 1927 to 1947 area. People actually were advocating at that point, a combination of strength training and endurance in the 1920s way back. Then, in fact actually goes prior to that, they'll 1880s. There's scientific evidence back then, it became more well developed in the mid 1950s and 60s. In fact,
there was the initial stages of What's called the exercise as medicine movement which is the movement now. But the initial stages of that actually route back to the 1950s and I could actually go into that whole discussion and the story of how that all came about. But that's the health is wealth. Mantra that came from the 1950s from the scientific community that
All those those data points are going to suggest you need a combination of some sort of broad strength training and brought endurance. Now if you have a specific goal, five months from now, you want to compete in a raise or hit a certain physique thing. That's fine to focus on one area of training. Certainly if you're an athlete, that's different, but if you want to maximize health and overall functionality throughout time and needs to be a combination and a really, really highlight this, I can actually talk about a couple of studies that I've done one of them. We actually did in Stockholm Sweden.
So I did this at The karolinska Institute, which you probably are aware of. It's actually one of the founding places of all of exercise physiology generally it started there. It was called something different back then. But really our entire field came out of Stockholm in The karolinska Institute. And we work with the whole bunch of cross-country skiers that were in their 80s and 90s. And so they were competitive skiers the 1940s and 50s, and they had been skiing competitively for that entire duration. So you're talking 50 to 60 consecutive year.
Of competing. So these are 80 to 90 year olds living alone, unhealthy, and we compared them to a group of individuals here in America who are the same age. But we're not exercising and what we want to do is to seeing it. Kind of look at what are these lifelong, endurance individuals. What do they look like when we brought them in to the lab? Which is, by the way, amazing to do a VO2 max test on a 92 year old especially in a language that they don't speak and your and you can imagine you're doing this in the hospital right? And
You're running people through. This is a cycling test and so for a VO2 max test, you have a mask on your face, you're hooked up to a metabolic cart. So we can collect all the gases that are coming out of your mouth and you're chanting these people on. And basically every minute, the workload gets harder and harder, and harder until you can't complete it. And we're doing this in a Cardiology Center, and the cardiologists are usually waiting for their heart rate to get like slightly elevated. And they stop them because they're, you know, 85, 86 years old, and only we not stopping them. But we are screaming in
Here's this, like, go, go go and Swedish or English in English, right? And then the translator, but it doesn't take a lot of translation when someone's screaming at your face, like, go, go, go. So we ran them through a whole bunch of VO2 max test and we did the same thing for those folks back here in America. And what was incredibly clear from that study was the VO2 max. You can think about these numbers and this is what's called a relative. So and the relative terms are milliliters per kilogram per minute. And so we standard number is about.
18 is what we call the line of Independence. So if your VO2 max is below, 18 ml per kilogram per minute, it's very hard for you to live by yourself. So your Fitness is so low. You probably are going to need to have somebody living with you or you'll need to be in some sort of assisted living home. So if you are in like the vo2max of 20 or 21 or 22, you're not below that line of Independence, but you're on that threshold. And so what we found was our folks here in America. The group average was right around that number, so they
Living at home by definition, we pick them to be people, living by themselves in their 80s, and not another living room, but they didn't have any bandwidth. So, if they got a cold or they had anything pop up where they lost a little bit of Fitness, they were going to drop below that line and would probably have to go to some sort of assisted living situation. The folks in Stockholm, the, the cross-country skiers, the group average was most closer to like 35 to 38 ml per kilogram per minute. Now, that number is about the vo2max you would find for
For a normal College mail. And so these folks that were literally 80 or 90, if the, you know, the joke, if saber-toothed tiger ran in the room or whatever and it tastes it down and we all had to run at the see who didn't get eaten alive. The College of men would probably have gotten eaten before the, the 90 year olds. And in one case, we had a 92 year old individual. And I think his VO2 max was 38, which was in our estimation world record, the highest vo2max for somebody. Over the age of 90.
May I ask? What is it?
Typical resting heart rate for somebody very fit like these older Swedish cross-country, skiers, they have somebody has a this let's say their number is 35 milliliters per kilogram in this VO2 max test. But since most of us don't have access to that kind of equipment but we can measure our pulse rate. Yeah. What was a typical resting heart rate resting pulse rate
sub 66. Yeah, I mean it typically that's a good number to go off of for
ADI, regardless of age, anytime I see somebody above that, I'm going to start asking questions. Certainly above, you know, you'll see in the literature, people will say 60 to 80 is normal, and I don't agree with that at all. If you're up, if your resting heart rate is 75 beats per minute, there's either something going on or you're not
fit, how much cross-country skiing were they doing on average in the previous, let's say, if we take the previous 20 years since they've been longtime, cross-country skiers divide that by 20 years. Yeah.
On average. Are these people cross country skiing five hours a day, two hours a day, an hour a day. Yeah,
that's actually a good question. I don't remember, it's been many years but they were not doing it every single day and the volume would not have shocked. You, it was the consistency over 50 years by got them there. Now, obviously, these people were again, world champions and Olympic gold medalist and 1940s and 50s. So they were Elite. They just continued consistently over time, but it wasn't a shocking amount of physical fitness. They also didn't go out either way, too.
To train hard. They were busy chopping wood, they were busy doing number of other things and then they just happen to do some of these races and ski along the way. But it wasn't a crazy amount to where you're like, oh that's great. But I could never hit that number. It was something much more
reasonable. So is the takeaway to be consistent about getting cardiovascular exercise and we can Define. Yeah, what consistent means in terms of days per week a little bit later and I know we will what are some other examples? I love these examples of
From The Real World. So here's the downside though, so I only told you about their VO2 max. What I didn't tell you about is their leg strength and functionality and that part was no more Superior than it was their counterparts who were not exercisers. So what that showed really, really clearly and many other Studies have been done since then that look out the classic, what we call Life long endurance exercises, you will see in general their VO2 max, their cardiovascular function, their resting heart rate,
Each their blood pressure, it will be markedly healthier than folks who don't exercise. It is extraordinarily clear. That type of exercise is very important for chronic disease management. No doubt about it. However it is not sufficient for overall Global health because it does almost nothing for leg strength for any other marker of Health, which we can talk about what are the things that are actually going to predict mortality morbidity than most. So that was a big, a big smashing.
Indication that's like, hey, this is great. However, you're leaving things on the table for your overall health. Now one could argue they're 80 and they're doing pretty well, but they weren't doing as well in these areas. And so a study we did later, actually is a follow-up was looking at models like as twins. So this is actually interesting being a scientist, this is a classic example of one of my graduate students who had been in my lab for, probably three or four years and she was in our single fiber, physiology lab and she's you imagine she's in she's
He's isolating individual muscle fibers from an athlete, one, by one, with the tweezer, and she's going to do several thousand individual cells, right? So, she's your down there for hours and things happen down there, you kind of lose your mind. And she was just kind of going on one day with one of my colleagues, just talking. And she's like, oh yeah, my uncle is really really fit and something or other and then oh yeah he's a twin. It was like 0z monozygous and she's like yeah,
for those that don't know. Monozygous. Are identical twins.
Yeah. What's his interesting? So you basically
We have what I'm setting up here is the perfect exercise. Scientific experiment monozygous. Identical twins mean the they have the exact same DNA. So an egg was fertilized split and then to humans grew out of that with the exact same DNA. And so now we can start answer the question of well. Yeah. Okay. What about maybe these cross-country skiers. Maybe they were just genetic freaks, maybe it didn't matter. It's like some people have will genetics or always a component to it but how much? Well, now we have a scenario lining up words, like wait a minute.
You have monozygous twins. So we have a replica of a human being exact, same DNA. The only difference is that we would see in their physiology now would be due to Lifestyle circumstances. Interesting. So models like us went on it. Dad and uncle, right? Uh-huh. Great, do they exercise? Well, one of them does. He's a lifelong endurance? Exercise, Runner cyclist swimmer Iron, Man, all these things? What about the other one? Nope, he doesn't exercise at all.
And at that point, like I wanted to kill my graduate student because I'm like, you've been in my lab for three years or more probably. And you've never told me that in your household is the perfect scientific experiment. For exercise you could ever create. And like Jesus, the the look on her face when my calling and I were staring at her. She's just like oh my God. So I'm like call them right now. They're coming in the lab of fly them in from Chicago. I don't care what we have to do. Like we're getting them in and so I wanted to actually going
Back to the model that was first developed by the Harvard fatigue lab. One thing that's interesting about that committee is they started off with the concept of trying to examine Human Performance through a holistic lens. And so it was the antithesis of looking at either organ by organ. So we're going to only look at the cardiovascular system are only going to look at skeletal muscle and then we're saying we're looking at this entire picture and so that model we wanted to carry through in these twins and I said all right I want to bring them in the lab but I'm not just going to look at one system. I want to do everything so we took
stool samples, we took blood, we did vertical jump test, we did maximum strength test, we did MRIs of muscle mass. We did VO2 max test. We did efficiency stuff. We did that testing with an IQ test. We did psychological battery. We want to look at everything to figure out all of these things. What differ between the Twins. And if so the second key question there is by how much so can I improve my vo2max? Sure, everyone knows that. But how much can it change my fight?
That 80% like, where's the number? And so putting some quantification on this was very important. And so again we had another example of a classic endurance only training Paradigm compared to a non X. So this is a person whose energy is a truck driver by vocation which is, I think actually drove for a potato chip company, which is even funnier the endurance. Athlete actually was great because like any endurance people, he had a, he had physical books of all his training mileage for the last 35 years.
Ears. And we could we just went through them and we calculated the total amount of Miles he ran as averages his heart rates per time. We had this unbelievable thing like what races he was any other documentation, he was just totally nuts, right? Like something that endurance people are like shaking their head right now gone. Oh yeah. I got that too.
And I real Durance folks are pretty nerdy. Yeah, super nerdy.
Right. So it's great because now we could validate as close as one could to actually how much you ran and things like that. So, they had about a 35 year Discord, they both exercised up through High School.
R18. They stopped doing it by the time, we got him in the lab, they're in their mid 50s. So it's about 35 years, a difference. And when we ran them through the testing, if you look at the measures that were similar to the Sweden study, it was almost identical. The the, the exercising twin was significantly better at things like a lipid panel, resting heart, rate, blood pressure vo2max any of those markers as predicted were much better. What was very interesting though, was the things that were in the middle. First of all, they're
Lamont of muscle mass was almost identical like to the G within the margin of error of a dexa. Scan could possibly ever be? The non-exercise are though was a little bit fatter. So the difference in actual body weight was explained almost entirely by body fat or non lean tissue. Really same sort of deal. So, okay, like no one's surprise there, that the exerciser was a little bit leaner even though it didn't change small amount of muscle mass at all,
When we looked at some of the more functional tests and we looked at things like muscle quality, so this is a metric, you can get from an ultrasound. You can kind of think about this, as how much fat is inside the tissue, which is sometimes an advantage for endurance. Athlete to have a little bit more of an order called intramuscular triglycerides because it's a fuel directly in the tissue. But in general, the exercises are the muscle quality was not in favor of the exerciser.
If you looked at the performance testing and if you looked at strength it favored then on the non exerciser. So now again we have the same finding we saw on our Sweden study but in identical twins is so it really, really highlighted. The fact that if you want to move forward with Optimal Health simply picking one Silo is not going to get you
there once Allah, meaning just running. Just cycling, right? Does this mean that the twin that did not exercise could
Could jump higher or win an arm wrestling competition. Not that. That's a vital thing to be able to do, but just in terms of measuring strength, you know, it's our isometric, strength was the non exercising, twin stronger, at least, as strong as they're exercising. Yes, particularly in
grip strength.
Yep. And any of the measures, like the vertical, jump leg, extension power, and a number of things. They often favored the non exerciser, which you're still a little bit of a chicken and egg. You don't know if necessarily the endurance training reduced that other twins, strength, or it doesn't even really matter per se. I think the highlight of it is, can you change some of these metrics of VO2 max? Yeah, not even close. These things are very responsive regardless of your genetics, your genetics will give you a starting Place very clearly.
I'm even a non exerciser was a pretty healthy guy, so they weren't a good spot in mid 50s, doesn't exercise doesn't really pay attention his diet at all and he was in pretty good shape. However,
If you want to actually move progress and move forward. Hi functionality. You have to do something besides just run, right? Just distance. Run. Now I could say the same thing for strength training that alone. I because I don't want to make this thing like I'm saying under its exercises, it worked and both case. Both these studies, those folks were much better off in metrics that are incredibly important to mortality. How long you're going to live vo2max eccentric?
It's just not going to get there. In terms of strength, we took a look at muscle fiber physiology as well, which is very interesting. So what I mean is there's generally two types of muscle fibers. Fast, twitch is slow twitch, and one of the things that is a Hallmark of Aging is a reflective reduction in fast-twitch fibers. And that's because it's difficult to activate them. Unless you're doing High Force activities, you're going to activate slow, twitch fibers, doing almost any activity of daily living. And so, they stay around
Fast food fibers unless you're doing something. If I force or going not be used and they're not going to be kept around and that's a problem because when you look at things like the need for leg strength through aging, the ability to catch yourself from a fall. These things are incredibly important. If you don't have fasted fibers, you don't have the speed to get your foot out in front of you on time, and you don't have the eccentric strength to stop the fall from happening. And so if you look across again, the Aging literature, they're very clear about the importance of maintaining strength and fast-twitch fibers over time.
So we know that this is an important distinction here of role. And people will often talk about, okay? How much of that is genetically determined? Can I change my fiber type? And the answer there is resoundingly. Yes, and, can I change it with exercise and the answers? Absolutely. You can. And the next question is, how much. So now again, we're going to see an order of magnitude in general without going too far down a, an area that maybe we could save for later. Each one of your muscles in your
Your body has a different percentage of fast twitch and slow twitch. For example, your calf, if you look at your Soleus, which is kind of the smaller one that goes in the back. That's generally mostly slow-twitch typically, 80 percent or so slow to it. The gastroc, which is the other one right next to it. So if you were to point your toe next to your face, and that part, that's kind of fluxes out in the middle pops out, that's your gastroc. That is almost the inverse. So it's generally 80% fast, which maybe 20% slow-twitch, generally anything antipositivism.
Little or postural, rather anti-gravity, spinal Erectors things that are meant to keep you up or moving all day, are going to be slow, twitch and things like your hamstrings, which refer explosion are going to be fast which well, we biopsied, the quad in these individuals. And in that muscle, it's generally about 50/50. Fast would slow twitch as a really broad number. Well, one of the things that we found was in the not exerciser, it was almost textbook what you would predict it was about 50% or so slow twitch.
Each a little bit of percentage of fast wish. And then about 20% of what are these called hybrid fibers, which are a Hallmark of activity, all right. Great in the exerciser, it was about 95 percent slow twitch, and so it's extremely clear. Again, I don't know if maybe they're set point was little bit higher towards that and then not exerciser d'you know devolve down to his place or the other one but it doesn't matter. I mean you going from 40% select which in one case to 95% switch and another case, it shows you that
The limits of physiological adaptation are darn near boundless give it enough exposure. And this case, 35 years of extremely consistent training and his muscle morphology was completely different than his identical twin with the exact same DNA.
Those are two beautiful examples of people doing endurance, work for a number of years and what that gives them in terms of benefits and functionality has the opposite experiment. Been
done or observed where somebody just weight lifted or just sprinted for a number of years. I don't know that there's a identical twin control, that's a little push. We had a third twin too much to ask for a right triplets. Okay? So triplets out there. If you're exercising in different ways or people who have triplets, maybe you assign one kid to be a runner when to be a weightlifter in the other one to be sedentary, please don't do experiments like that, but the expectation, as I understand, it would be that the
Person that Sprint's or that does heavy squats explosive. Work would then have more fast-twitch, muscle fibers in there quad and they're not exercising. Counterpart would have fewer that, that would make sense, but what happens if you assess the, the endurance level in somebody who's just done strength training or just sprinted.
Yeah, so we don't have those data specifically. There's, we're actually just starting to have studies come out on life, long strength, trainers.
And there's actually a very good reason for this, which is a whole story we can get into. But the, the quick answer is we don't have a lot of people who've been lifting weights for 30 plus years. We have a whole swath of people who've been doing endurance
training for that long is that because fewer people have been weight training or the weight trainers, all
dead, you gotta go back to the 1953. 1954 you had two major things happen that change the entire course of exercise physiology and exercise science and really exercises. We know it it's important to
And the history of our feel, a lot of the questions I get are based on false assumptions of what exercise can and can't do. As an example, we questions like momentum, should I use momentum or that's cheating right? Or it doesn't work it compromises. My results. It's actually totally untrue. There are excellent reasons when you should use momentum. When you lift, there are reasons when you should not, it is sometimes very beneficial to go fast with the
Sighs repetition sometimes very slow and controlled is better. Any question I get in fact I'm very Infamous for always responding with. It depends, the reason I say it depends is it depends on the goal when you're training for Speed or power or muscular endurance, the answer to some of these very common question, differs what people fail to realize is they think they're asking the right question because they don't understand this history was being planted in your brain. Subconsciously is driving that question and it's not
Society, the right one. So if we walk through that a little bit, you'll see what that field has led you why you think certain things matter when they actually don't, or maybe your assumptions are incorrect and then exactly what to do about them,
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offer. So in 1953 1954, you had Roger Bannister breaking, the four-minute mile, so sub 4 minute file, and then you also had Sir Edmund Hillary and then his Sherpa Norgay Summit, Everest and the same basically, two year span that exact same year after that was the formation of What's called the American College of sports medicine. Now, that is still around today. It is the preeminent group for this exercise as medicine. So if you're
Interested in things like exercise for obesity. Prevention for cancer treatment for things like that. It's not really sports medicine. It's more for clinical exercise. That's the place to go American College of sports medicine. So we have this launching of both a ton of people wanting to start doing endurance exercise, and start swimming, and cycling and running. And then you have a launch of people coming off of the back of the harbor fatigue lab. So the fatigue lab actually shut down on 1947. So you have these people interested in physical fitness, but
Where to go, we'll all those people left, the harbor, fatigue lab, and started their own labs, and other places. So, you've launched the careers of people, like they've costal, and, and John whole Asia. And some of these very famous exercise physiologist. And they start building Laboratories, and we start for the first time ever, studying the science of exercise. So years go by and these people happen, the 1960s and 1970s is what we call the runners bone. So, people start that if you, in fact, if you look at the numbers of people who are doing marathons,
It explodes through these two decades fans right? Because it's like them, we could do these endurance fees. Notice both those Feats were endurance, right? Running short term as well as going over there. No one has thought anything about strength training. And here's why the late 1880s there was a very famous physician. I'm Georgia, Winship, I think was his name. It was a big proponent of strength training. Well he died in like in the age of 50, Something of a heart attack and that terrified people of strength training for 70 years because they're like,
Whoa, whoa whoa. That stuff will kill you because he was a doctor he was trying his running around the country, doing these exhibitions and Reporting it and then he died.
It's sort of like Atkins 100% dying. All the, some people say he died of a heart attack. Other people said he fell through the ice and the cold water. That's debated but the fact that heavy proponent of a given nutrition plan dies suddenly yep, not good for
business. So now, the little storm is brewing.
1940s. And I'm going back a little bit, but bear with me for a second. There's a guy named Peter, karpovich, and he is a scientist out of Springfield, like, the decorater physical education PE like, that's a legendary Place Ringo college, and he is anti strength training for a lot of the same reasons and his entire career talked about no do this. He's the one that launched these ideas that strength training will make you lose flexibility. It will be bad for kids like all these things that we do now are clearly not true. He's
He's proponent of these things and there's a show that happened in his at Springfield College and guy named Bob York. And if you York barbell, that's still around. Today is going around the country and putting on these exhibitions, they come to Springfield and it's sort of like a new aged like social media thing where it's like the students know what's about to happen because carpet shows up to this event and everyone knows. He hates strength training and everyone is like waiting for it to end just to see what he's going to say. So
Whole exhibition goes on these. People are doing now. If you can remember back in the time, like body, building,weight lifting power, lifting strength, strong, man, it's like all the same thing, there's no differentiation yet and it finishes and karpovich stands up and like the crowd goes silent. And he just asks one question. He's points to one of the guys and says scratch your back. And now he's just assuming in waiting for the guy to be like, ah and not be able to put his hand behind his head. And I think he pointed to John gimmick who's like a famous bodybuilder and he reached back and scratched his back, no problem. And then they
Seeded to grab two dumbbells, I think there were 50 pound dumbbells, and do a backflip standing backflip with both any chant. They start doing the splits on stage and they start going performing, all kinds of physical function tests and and karpovich is stunned. He's like holy shit has nothing to say he leaves there and his whole life has changed all these things he was claiming were shown in his face to be false. He does a 180 on his career, he starts running study after study on strength training and starts finding immediately. There are no detriments
To strength training in terms of like Global Health, right? Of course, you can do it wrong and things like that. In fact, here comes a whole bunch of benefits. So through the 1950s, while this thing is going on with the endurance, folks, no one still strength training because there's no, there's no record to see. There's no American College of sports medicine. There's no societies your so science. We're not sure it's safe. And meanwhile, karpovich is just hammering study, after study, after study showing you, it's safe. It's safe is safe, but it hasn't picked up yet. And then everything changed in 1977.
Thank you, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He came out with the trifold, he hits you with Pumping Iron, which I know, you know, that movie, right
pumping interesting movie even for those not interested in bodybuilding, it's a very interesting movie because it really gives a window into, not just him. But the way in which weight training started to show up as a regular practice, you know, when I was growing up, the only people away, train were people preparing for football bodybuilders who basically didn't exist in the town where I grew up and
Only people who did yoga were like Yogi's doing Bikram. But now, you drive through any major American city or European city and their use yoga studios. There's Jim with free weights. Yep, Arnold Schwarzenegger is largely responsible. I think for for initiating that, that
shift. Yep, he cuz he hit, think about it. He hit us with, Pumping Iron Conan and then the Terminator almost in back-to-back like very close within ears. So you've got this whole Cascade of the 70s of people running
I'm cycling and swimming. Now, science is starting to come out that it's not dangerous and maybe actually some benefit and then boom, not only, is it not bad for you? It can make you into a real-world superhero.
I think about the psychology of a child growing up watching somebody like Conan, think about what Batman looked like in the 1950s and 60s, right? And then boom, I can look like that now, not everyone wants to look like Arnold but you see the like, you see the power that can land in people? No one had ever seen, or thought you can make your body transform like that you could maybe be born like that but no chance that's within the grass of all of you.
When I was a kid growing up, one of my favorite books was the Guinness Book of World Records. Yeah, I lived still have it.
Jizz In My Mind of the the coldest animal you know the measure the longest lifespan Etc. You know and there was a picture in there of Arnold Schwarzenegger and you know what his record was it said perfectly developed man. Yeah which is as you point out that isn't the physique that most people aspire to but it really I did Inspire this this ship. The other thing about resistance training that I think has a certain Allure for some people men and women.
Is that it's one of the few forms of exercise that because of the enhanced blood flow to the muscle that occurs during the training the so-called pump. Yep it gives you a transient but somewhat real window into what your results will be. 100 when you run and you're gasping for air, you don't get the. You aren't experiencing what it's like to be faster than you are that day. That's correct. But when you weight train you get an aesthetic picture into how your functionality anesthetic will change it. Disappears a few hours later. Sure. As the the so-called pump subside.
It's but it's a very interesting form of exercise in that way. It's almost as if you go in to learn a language. And during the process of learning for brief moments, you're actually fluent and then it gets taken away. Yeah, it sort of puts the dopamine carrot out in front of you. This is just me hypothesizing as to why weight training might have taken off the way that
it means. Like if you got paid every hour on the hour when you're working and then at the end of the day, like they take the money back. But you still like as the time clock is going on in your day, you're looking up and you just sing your while. You're watching your bank account grow in real life, like you can see
Why it's so addicting to those folks. So to finish the story here, what going back to your actual question? Answer it. This is happening. The late 70s, early 80s. And so now Joe Weider all these gems they're exploding because people want to look like that or if they have they realize they have a chance to change how they physically look that I'd never been around him before
you can Suleiman at that point, I'm almost exclusively.
Yep. For a large number of reasons cultural acceptance of cetera
Even with endurance stuff you could get fitter and run faster in that's better. But it wasn't wasn't going to change how you looked unless you were losing fat. Now you can change how you look which is so incredibly. Addicting fact there's a very famous quote. I think it's actually Joe Weider who said show me one man who wants to be strong and I'll show you ten. I want to look strong.
Right? It's like that's very, very powerful, right? There's there's a whole like the whole there's tons of this history. I can go into which is sort of explaining to but now you're now you're into the mid-80s and you have what I call my generation. So you have my generation who fall in love with strength training, the 18 in the 1980s and 90s but there's really no scientific field for it. It's not really come about yet, the science of endurance and exercise physiology is now humming along in a massive rate because these people came up in the 70s and 80s and there are 5 10 15.
Years in their career, they're producing their Janet, they're generating graduate students, they're starting their own labs and exercise physiology. Still to this day is 80% endurance. Steady-state stuff, almost exclusively. Well, now Mike My Generation. You love, you love sports, you love lifting you of all these things and now we see happen is the Chicago Bulls.
Michael Jordan starts picking up strength training. Oh, that's a nice on TV, he's on, SportsCenter in the mid-1990s lifting weights. And we go back actually to the late 1970s and I'm not sure if you're a football fan, but any football fan will recognize the Nebraska Cornhuskers in the 1970s and 80s change. How football is played? Well, the reason is because they started strength training and they started doing it with a guy named boy that Polly who was the founder of the NSC. A so the national strength in dishing association is formed in the late 1970s as well so just like
Casey assembles developed the year. After those two events happened 1978 the year after Arnold comes out. Boom, and SCA is formed. And now you have a scientific organization dedicated to strength and conditioning. You've got NFL strength Edition and coaches that are starting to. Come on board. You've got scientists or starting coming to laps and strength, auditioning becomes the scientific field. Well, everything swing is now from an exercise perspective, into bodybuilding. And so almost all of the things. In fact, we were sort of
Talking before I could run a whole bunch of tricks on you and I could ask you a whole bunch of questions about things that you think are absolute standards. Are guaranteed, 's about training. I'm supposed to do this. I'm never supposed to do that. For instance, for instance, is it okay to train a muscle group on back-to-back days? Most people are at home thinking, no, you're not supposed to train, the
muscle needs to recover and that's
total nonsense, right? Other things like body part, split training, right? Training one, muscle group per day.
Other things like cardio, endurance, training, influencing, will it ruin my gains from? I lift, all of these things are on at a base of assumptions that come from bodybuilding. Now, that's a fantastic world, but because everything started in the late 1970s as bodybuilding is terms of basic strength training. Was that weightlifting? Powerlifting were not at all around, right? They were, but nobody cared again. Show me someone who wants to be strong. I'll show you ten. Want to look strong. The physique thing, just
And we're not getting out of that yet. We're not all the way out of it. We're starting to though because here's why people started to realize this. This bodybuilding thing is fantastic. I can change my physique. I'm getting better, but damn, these workouts take an hour and a half two hours. And I'm going to spend that whole time on one or two body parts, which means I'm going to have to lift six days a week and I'm going to do that consistently right now. I'll send boom two hours on my on my elbow. Flexors. Damn, I uh
Bolster under
hurt. And yet my understanding is that it doesn't really require two hours a day, not at all, training in order to get benefits even just for hypertrophy.
Totally but, but a lot of the times you're going to have to get some amount of time and because you're spending so much isolation, so we've gone away from training movement. Running is a movement. Cycling is a movement training. My biceps is a muscle or muscle Group Training. My hamstrings are muscle group, that's not a human movement. So we've done a 180 in terms.
Of selecting the exercises from movement-based prescription to now muscle group Based training. So when you're isolating muscle groups, that means a whole chunk of your body is really not doing much throughout the day. So what happens if you're doing, say legs on Monday and you miss Monday, because you're on a flight.
Now, your legs have to wait a whole nother week, right? That's their social that. But so, this is just become problematic. People start getting beat up, people start realizing. I actually don't feel that great. I'm not super fit. I'm sweating just walking up the stairs, I'm out of breath. Why? Because all that training, you've done nothing for your cardiovascular, fitness, you've done nothing to improve heart rate, oxygenation blood flow and so that Paradigm swing way too hard into the exercising, especially lifting weights is single
Joint often machine often slow. Often high-volume isolation suck. And that left a giant opening of people going, wait a minute, what if you could get in the gym, I could promise you the same or better results in under 30 minutes. And in fact, you also feel better, you'll lose more weight. And that opened up group exercise classes kettlebell stuff, CrossFit type of stuff circuit training because you can come in, you won't get. So beat up because the volumes lower the time is much lower.
Multiple adaptations the same time. Great. The problem with that though, fast forward 10 years. Is it started burying people because you've now D emphasized, movement quality and you've overemphasize scores, right? So this is a classic example. If you go and you watch Pumping Iron, you'll see our anybody Builder. You'll see if they're doing a bicep curl. They don't even really pay attention to the rep range. They don't really pay attention, the load, they are looking at their muscle, they're trying to figure out. How do I get that thing to fire there?
Squeezing. They're flexing their posing at the end of every set. They're trying to figure out. Am I getting enough pump? It is exclusively. Founded on exercise quality, the rep range, the numbers, almost irrelevant. When you go to the other model, exercise technique, it doesn't matter. Just get the most amount of weight up, or the amount of reps, or the fastest time, etcetera, Etc. Hydras
CrossFit. I've walked past them CrossFit series of done to CrossFit. I want
to. So you sets CrossFit, I
didn't, oh, I don't know. I I enjoyed them. I definitely felt like I was working hard. I
You,
I observed a lot of people in very close. Proximity doing Olympic lifts and doing Kipping. That's where you kick your legs folks. Say, you know, sort of like bucking and Kipping type, pull-ups know I enjoyed it. It wasn't for me for the long term, but it did seem that there was a lot of ballistic movement in close proximity to other people. So the hazard to me seem more about that than the actual movement.
Well, again, the point of setting up here is that
Was actually a really brilliant solution for a lot of the problems. The classic bodybuilding hypertrophy introduced so it got away from isolation movements and got people doing big movements which are more effective generally better got people doing things fast and explosive. That's more athletic, that is more important for longevity, it's solved. A lot of the problems joint. Health wasn't getting crashed, the issue they went with is they just push the pace on score rather than quality. They push the pace on how many people can be in here at the same
I'm so now you're doing higher risk, movements higher, intensity higher fatigue and with a total not that they don't care about technique, but it's not the thing that they're most concerned about. It's getting the number in the thing done. They solved the time issue, though. You can get tremendous results in 3 days a week under 45 minutes, each session cetera. Burn people out though, way too much high intensity way too often. And the other problem, safety concerns, all kinds of Orthopedic issues and other
stuff. Can I
Interrupt you for a moment and just ask a question as we go through this Arc of the history of why endurance training, predominated or strength training or bodybuilding, type training, or CrossFit type training. Because I think this is fascinating, I know we're about to arrive at where we are today and what the future looks like for four people and what they should focus on and do at what point. If any do you think resistance training started to become adopted by women? You know, there was no equivalent of
Arnold Schwarzenegger. There was Linda Hamilton in The Terminator? Yeah, there are some impressive physiques. Certainly on a female actresses and athletes the Williams sisters, you know, very impressive, musculature and physiques and, of course, their tennis playing speaks for itself. Has that happened yet. I mean, what I mean, is, do you think since you work with both men and women? Yeah. Do you think that most women?
Stand that weight training, done properly is going to be extremely beneficial for them. Maybe even especially for them in terms of offsetting bone density loss and things of that sort or we still waiting for the stimuli the popular stimulus for getting a, you know, 80% of young women thinking I want to lift
weights. Yeah.
Hard for me to answer because I'm not like I'm not a woman right now. I have a daughter. She's for so, we'll see what I can say is. I've probably worked with, I don't know how many professional athletes in total. A lot, I've worked with them. Probably 14, professional sports, I've worked with Sai Yeung, winners MVPs, like, the whole all the credentials, right? I bet 35 40 %, the athletes. I've worked with our female. So I've worked with Olympic gold medalist. I've worked with a bronze medalist in in multiple Sports. I've worked with the
Creative power lifter of all time. So in a number of these areas Fighters, World Championship, all these things from me, I feel like that versus already happened my students, if you look at my classroom I don't know what the numbers are, but there is no small number of females in exercise science and exercise physiology. If you look at our Laboratories that's one thing you will see there are very few female exercise scientists. There are very few female strength conditioning coaches, but
That number is, is, is coming down an astronomical rate. You have people that are being hired in every sport. You pick the NFL, you pick Major League Baseball. Every every few months we're hearing first female hired for this first female hired for that. The Yankees, Rachel, Rachel block of. It's a fantastic,
you know. Yeah, Rachel's been out to my lab, she's
terrific. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's just fantastic. I mean, she's now being hired as the I think she's a hitting coach now. Actual sport God, she's going to be a gym like this.
Her goal, she's a Terminator. So that's already happening. And my students that are coming through our program are getting placed in these roles. They haven't gotten through yet a lot in terms of being an actual scientist, but they're getting their support scientists in the NBA, being hired females, in terms of like big data collection and Sports Science and Tech will cover, you know, in an another discussion. But I think it's happening whether or not the the cultural social practice, I can't speak to that end of the equation. What I can speak to though
is one of the things I think is most fun coming forward. Scientifically is, you know, a number of years ago and I came back. Lee came through with their mandates of saying, it's no longer acceptable to exclude women from scientific research, right? Because we just did that for
decades. Well, what happened? Just to fill this in because I think it's worth noting. Is that for many years studies even on rodents. Yeah. We're mainly carried out on male rodents because the Assumption and
The Assumption turned out to be wrong. But the Assumption was that the physiology of female rodents because they don't have a menstrual cycle, it's not 28 days. They've been estrous cycle. It's four days are different type of cycle that that would somehow disrupt the data turns out that's entirely wrong. Now, it's actually required when you sit on a grant, study panel, which is the people evaluate grants you. They ask, they literally say, did they meet the criteria for sex as a biological variable here? We're not sure about sex as the verb retirement sexist.
Well sex and if you don't say yes, that's a strong hit against the Grant. And if you say yes, then it checks off that box. So it's now required to both male and female rodents and humans be studied in a given study. Unless the study is specifically geared toward understanding that only exist in one one or the other populations such as study. Menopause for instance, you don't like menstrual cycle andropause for instance but this is extremely important. I'm excited to hear that.
So well, I was going to go with that is actually so that
Step one which is cool. You got to include them where we haven't gotten to yet but I've seen more and more Grant applications come through for this, it just the funding hasn't yet which is it's one thing to end the let women be in the same studies that's great. It's another thing though to start performing high performance research specifically for female questions that has not happened yet. And that's just like a funding issue, right? We haven't gotten money, yet people aren't supporting that, we don't get a lot of financial support for sports science, but we had can't track down the money out of something.
Me going. I want to do a study and female athletes, dancers, female athlete questions. These won't help men. These are questions specific to the female. That's the next step, right? That's where we got to get to. So we can say, maybe we should do things differently around training and Recovery or we shouldn't or, it doesn't matter. There's some there's a handful of not lower quality but like some studies. I don't love them yet. There just needs to be a ton of work birth control is a very good example, right? The
The information for women at female athletes or even just like hard exercises, you don't have to be competitive athlete around. What is birth control doing what types? How should I manage that? What conversation should have been having with my doctor almost nothing like women have nothing to go on for high performance. So so what if I'm trying to compete in an event or run a race how like all those types of questions should be answered, normative value, normative data performance testing like it's just not there on the female so that's an area.
I think like if somebody really wanted to make a change that the scientists want to do it, I know I've talked to so many in our field that would really love to explore it because it's getting there. The, like I said, the coaching side is getting their, they're seeing that they're hiring these people, I'm seeing it in my students. My followings is not all men. Like, it's a very large percentage of females and all I do is post about exercise science being like, this is all I do. So
will this podcast is very, we know very clearly. The audience is 50%.
Sent women 50% men as from which is
great. So just to jump back in our history discussion and to finish that point of where we're at now and where I think we're going to go, it should go. So we walk through the bodybuilding, kind of running, everything and people walking into a gym. Anytime, I lift weights there, they're making all their choices based on the assumption that maximizing muscle size, is the goal. And clearly, that's not the case. There are other adaptations. You maybe after
So we talked about how that had problems that we talked about how some of these other forms of exercise filled those gaps and then what problems those things introduced? Well, I think we're actually at this point where that pendulum is kind of slowly shifting into the middle. What I mean by that is, if you want to maximize muscle strength, we look towards the powerlifting Community. If you want to maximize muscle power, we're going to look at the weightlifting Community. If you want to look for muscular endurance well-roundedness, maybe we look in the CrossFit communities, and some of these obstacle course races
Or functionality things. So what we can do now is generate protocols, that get us the exact adaptations we want. And not ones, we don't want because we can look back at each of these different styles of training and pick and choose optimal, protocols or combinations for them. So somebody simply wants to get healthy. Like we talked about when we listed the nine adaptations and I mentioned, Health wasn't one of them. That's because what determines your health versus what determines? My Optimal Health differs. So if I need more hyper
Your fee, I can look towards bodybuilding Concepts, but if I have enough or maybe for personal reasons, I decide, I have too much. I don't want to add any more then I can say, hey, how can I get stronger without getting bigger and boom? I look towards powerlifting Concepts. How can I get more powerful? How can I get faster? But I don't, you know, again want to lose fat. Okay? Great. Or if I want physique changes so we have all these different areas we can pick and choose from that have expertise in specific, adaptations and develop ourselves. Perfect protagonist.
Calls based on that information,
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Jurors plans again that's inside tracker. Dot coms huberman to get 20% off. So with the understanding in mind, as to how we all myself included arrived at such lopsided Fitness too much endurance, not enough strength to much strength, not enough endurance. It's really hard to imagine any one's perfect in this regard.
Can you walk us through the nine different adaptations that you mentioned earlier and give us a way to assess our level of ability or our level of adaptation in each of those nine. All right,
the very first one we want to talk about is is movement skill Now, set aside sport-specific do. I'm not going to give you an assessment for optimal. Golf technique swing is this really about human movement so that you stay injury-free and you can continue to train for as long as possible. So what are the minimum, requirements?
Now, if you can have access to a highly qualified physical therapist, or movement specialist, That's the best route, right? Go to them. Have them identify all of your movement, patterns overhead, pressing squatting running, all these things. That's your gold standard. If you want to do it yourself though. Here is a very simple four step solution. So the way that I teach us is I go joint by joint. And so I think at this just as the major ones, your shoulder your elbow, your low.
Go back, hip knee and Ankle. Okay. Now what you can do is do a representative movement for you. So if you bench a lot, use the bench. If you do pull-ups, use the pull up. If you squat do that, I would recommend doing an upper body press and upper body pull a lower body press and lower body. Pull an example would be a push up a pull-up or a bent row, a squat and then a deadlift that would be a very, very well-rounded approach. What you're going to do is do that movement and I
Gortat, for yourself, and, and record, a frontal view, and a side view. Probably do three to ten repetitions per angle, okay, slow and controlled, you don't need anybody. Wait, what you want to do is move and you want to look for four key things at every joint. All right. So again, imagine of doing a squat, I'm going to do a squat and I'm going to focus on just my ankle and we look for these four things at the ankle and then I'm going to go back and watch my knee and look for these. Same four things, the knee to the Head.
Hip Etc. All right. So what are these four things? Number one is you want to look for symmetry? So symmetry is front to back left to right. And you're right, limb and your left lip. All right. And so what we want to look for are if they aren't moving perfectly, that's fine. But you want to see is one. Moving further ahead, in the other one is one turning to the side ones. Not is one fidgeting and and twitching around differently. So you want to look just to check to see and make sure that they're stable. That's one number two.
You want to look for stability. So key indicators here are things like if you can't control, you a squat, a controlled squat, where your knees? Don't start shaking like that would be an instability issues. So can you do the movement slow? Can you pause at the bottom? Maybe three seconds, maybe five seconds or 10? You should have complete control of that movement at all. Of these joints are your hips. Sliding to one side. When you stand up, is one elbow closer to your body when you're benching, the other ones more Flair now.
These are the things I'm talking about, right? I'm not worried about what angle they should be at or not. You're simply looking for a symmetries or instabilities. Alright. So again, as you're pushing up, does one elbow start flipping and twitching and going all over the place? The third one is what I call awareness. So there are a lot of movement technique issues that are simply people, don't know and so you'll watch them Squad. I do this in my classes all the time. I'll have a hundred kids out there squatting and you'll see some horrible squat technique and then you just tell them. Hey did you realize your
Those are supposed to be on the ground all times when you squat like okay and they can correct it, it's not actually a movement flaw. It was just simply an awareness. I didn't know. And then I actually didn't realize that that was happening that position. So we want all of our joints to be going through a general full range of motion, which is number four. So the ankles during like a squat, your knees should be able to go. As far over your toes possible while maintaining good position your feet flat on the floor. Your three points of contact your whole foot and you're not compromising another joint. So
Saul, you're going to look for those four. Things symmetry stability, awareness, and range of motion through each joint three movement. It sounds difficult and time-consuming. It's really not, right? You can generally kind of clear these things in one or two repetitions in a couple of seconds and what you're really going to look for. There's lots of scoring schemes, you can, you know, test that your physical therapist will sort of you. I just look for absolutely terrible like can't do it at all minor flaw.
Or pretty close to good. That that's really all I'm looking for. So my scoring system is 0130 is like you're not going to do this exercise because you're at a very high acute risk. You might get hurt on rep, one tomorrow.
Number one, like a score of one is like, there's a minor flaw here. We can probably do it, but we need to be cautious of load and volume. The other one is, maybe it's perfect, maybe it's not, but go ahead and sort of do it on a reasonable protocol, you'll be fine. So that's generally what you would need to do is they cost free method of identifying good movement, technique within any of the things that you would do, what about speed? I actually don't think this is one. Most people should test. If you're a high performance athlete, we can run a 40-yard dash.
Or we can do some different things with a velocity transducer on a bar Bill. If you're a weightlifter, something for most people pure speed is really maximum velocity or acceleration or kind of the two ways, we break it down. It's not just only not that necessary to
test. What about number three power, which I believe before you told me was speed times Force.
So, the reason why I don't worry too much about speed is because you can infer. A lot of it from a power test and a power test is easier to do.
As well as easier to train for for most people. So the the cost free version here is a simple broad jump. So this is stand with normal position, jump out as far in front of you, as you possibly can, and measure the distance between where you started and the back of your heel where it lands a super basic number to look for. There is your height. So you should be able to broad jump, how tall you are. If you're 5 foot five, you should find four, five, six foot, five, Etc. It's not perfect. That's going to ratchet down.
A little bit about 15 percent for females. They just simply don't have the power in general. That men have is. So you going to want to bring that down a little bit but that's a very crude number. If you were to look at like a high-performance NFL player, if they're six feet tall, they're going to be jumping like 9 to 10 to 11 feet. If you can jump your body height, we're not looking for optimization. In this particular test. What you are looking for red flags? If you can jump your body height, you're going to be just fine.
That's incredibly straightforward.
Yet. I have one question. Yeah, I'm assuming that I can squat down as low as I need to before I jump. I can swing my arms from Back to Front as harder with as much momentum as I can muster and when I land you said, I'm going to take the measure from where the back my
heels. You want to measure the distance, you actually covered. So to clarify, there's no running approach here. There's no steps into it. You're going to stand at a still. Yeah, you can swing bounce. As much as you'd like to do. You're going to project our laughs, you're going.
Measure the distance from the tip of your toe. So basically stand behind the line and then the farthest point back where you land. So basically the worst possible score not the best possible because your feet won't land symmetrically one's probably going to be a little bit farther. Now, technically, if you fall backwards, your hand touches the ground, we Mark that number. But in this case, just use the for this point, back of your back heel and go from there,
I'll be trying it tomorrow morning.
Now if you have access to a little bit more technology,
You just really want to know about a number. A classic vertical. Jump is a good starting place so you can actually do this in a simple cost-free way. You can just measure to your hands, put them together so that both of your middle fingers are touching overlap them and put them directly over your head, okay. And the account will reach up as high as you can get and you mark that on the wall, my brother and I used to do this all the time. We would take a highlighter, the yellow ones and color as much as we can on our fingertips, touch the wall so that the highlighter would stay.
The wall. If you actually go back to my house for my childhood, you'll see these markers all over our
house. I'm sure parents were
thrilled, my dad didn't care single that he didn't carry. This is like whatever you guys do it everyone. So you want to measure that and then of course you're going to jump with those two hands and touch sighs, you can up and you're going to measure the distance between your standing reach and the actual height that you jump there. Now, the reason you're doing it to handed by the way, is because if you do one-handed, you can actually reach pretty high by offsetting your shoulders and
You're getting into differences of, you know, who has more shoulder Mobility, who has ability to kind of get up there. A two-foot standard or two-handed standard approach is there? Same thing, no running approach. Here, you can dip, you can drive, you can do all those things, you can swing your arms, but you're going to be a two-handed touches. It is a general way to do that, and you want to look for a number of something like 24 inches or higher. If you're past the age of 50, that number can come down a little bit to closer to 20, and again, for females, it's going to be ratcheted down.
About 15% every way to go. If you're a middle-aged female and you're jumping, 20 inches, you're in a pretty good spot. You're going to be looking really nice there. So now, if you can do that on a force plate, that's even better. So, these are very basically scales that will go out to multiple digits. Sometimes five to nine digits passive zero and you can stand on these things. You do the exact same test and these are very interesting because I'll tell you not only how high you jump, but they'll tell you how much force you put in the ground. They can also
You how long it took you, this is called your rate of force development, as well as impulsive speed and a bunch of other stuff which are important to help you understand, we're on the power Spectrum, you need to be so you would do that in addition to using some sort of velocity transducer on a barbell. So a very classic thing to do would be, lets say you're going to do a squat and you're going to put this device on the barbell and and that's going to measure the speed at which the barbell moves and you're going to do that at 40% of your one repetition maximum.
X, 50 percent, 60 percent, 70, 80 92 up to 100 and that allows you to create what's called a force velocity curve. And you can start to see at what point when you start loading things. Heavy. Do you start slowing down too much? And that'll tell you what part of the force velocity curve that you want to train in, to optimize your power. Why that's important. A lot of people will do things like what I'm training for power. How heavy should I lift? Well, the general answer people say is 30% of your one rep max but that's actually not true at all. What's most
Animal for power development, which will discuss more much later is, depending on where you're flawed in the force, velocity curve. So, if you have access to technology like that, that can give you a lot, more insight and information. If not, do the broad jump test or the highlighter on your fingertips, and jump, and touch the wall
test at Andy. Yeah, opens
house. Hey just, you know, it come along. There's already. The walls are already messed up, just go ahead and come up to Washington and we'll do it.
Fantastic.
What about strength,
right? So strength is really important. You need to measure this in a in multiple areas and we'll start off with grip strength, okay? So you can do this in two ways you can buy a handgrip dynamometer. Now these are anywhere between twenty to a hundred dollars anywhere. These actually used to be like when I was in school, like hundreds of dollars and now you can literally buy them on any website, for 25 bucks. So, - recommendation is technically, that's not cost free. I know your whole thing about the cost, free protocols, but 25 bucks I'm calling that basically
Cost-free, you can bring that in and Tessa and that's just a little device where you going to squeeze and you're going to do and I would do your right hand and your left hand. You want to look for asymmetries there. But you want to look for something like typically, those are, they're going to give you a value in kilo grams and you want to look for something like a minimum score here of 40 kilograms. Ideally your up past 60 would be a really good spot to be in. You want to make sure that there's no less than ten percent variation between your left and right hand your non-dominant hand actually shouldn't
That much weaker and Nesta. So what you'll actually see, a lot of times is the non-dominant can be often times stronger because the dominant hand is more for movement, Precision, writing, things like that. So you want them to be close. If you are a male and you were under 40 kilograms on a hand grip, dynamometer.
Like, we're going to need to train that if you're female is not that much lower but about 35 kg is the cutoff point. If you're above 55, we can add it to your training but I'm not worried about leaving it out of your training. If you're a female, if it's about 50, that's my sort of caught off of where we want to go. So that's a fairly cheap one. Another one that you can actually do is just a dead hang. So you can hold on to any bar. Ideally one that is thin enough to where you can wrap your whole hand around it so you don't want to be using a giant
That fat grip. You're gonna have a false reading here. So, something like going to the gym and jumping on any pull-up bar or pull up rack and you want to hang and this is a simple time test. So in general we should be able to hang for a minimum of 30 seconds as what we're looking for. 32 kind of 50 seconds. Is my like good but we could probably get better here. If you're cruising above 60 seconds, I'm generally pretty happy. This is actually a good example of when
Males tend to be better grip, strength and women is tends to be strong and they can hang for quite a long time so those standards don't really change that much for women. Now if you are exceptionally large this thing doesn't scale perfectly you know if you're 240 pounds and even if you're lean it's just hard thats hanging. Hold 240 pounds
Conversely, if you're 140 pounds 5 pounds, even if you're unhealthy you're gonna be able to hang for a long time. It's just not that much weight to carry so just rough numbers as to start off with.
So that's grip strength. What about strength elsewhere in the body,
the primary ones, you can do an upper body strength test if you would like although it's not technically something, we do very often happy to do it. One arm acts bench press or something like that that's great. The more one I'm generally more interested in is a leg extension test and the reason I like this is a back squat is
Better a barbell back. Squat is look, that's my like that's my jam. That's my life, right? It's just very technically demanding and it's challenging, you need, spotters, you need comfort. A lot goes into this. For so for the average person, a leg extension test is fairly standardized. You don't have to worry about technique and people can just get into it and go. And so what you want to look for there is a couple of Standards you want to hit again, a very simple answer. Here is body weight
Can you do a leg extension with
your body weight?
How one repetition? One repetition. I can answer that right now. Can, you know? You can't know, I can hack squat a reasonable amount of weight, but I was on the leg extension this morning and I was a novelist Missy machine and I certainly could not like you statue my body
weight. Let me let me clarify. Are you doing a single leg? No. So by ladder you can't like you since your body weight. No
but I certainly can hamstring curl my body
weight. Okay so we maybe have some deficiencies in our quads that we need to go after.
But that, that's a pretty good number. You want to be at if you go up in age past age, 40 every decade that can come down about 10% and you'll still be in a pretty good slot. So if you're 50 years old and your 170 pounds, if you can do 160 unit, pretty good sort of spot and then you can just again take it down about 10% every decade after 40. But prior to 40 there's really no change in strength. But certainly somebody in their 40s to 50s should be able to leg extension their body weight.
Noted I look forward to our discussion a bit later, talk about how to build
strength. Any of these strength tests, they don't have to be done to a technical true 1, rep max. You can use what are called repetition conversion equation. So put on a load that you think is kind of close to your maximum and just do it for as many reps as you can as long as it's under five reps. Total you can then actually go online and enter that into any number of calculators anywhere and it will tell you okay, you did three repetitions
Has a 200 pounds. Your one rep, max is probably 215, whatever, so there's estimate equation. So if you don't want to spend the time or you're not truly comfortable, like absolutely going to your true one or two Max, just get to a number that's fairly close and do as many as you can. And then go online. Again, one rep, max, estimator, equations are everywhere. If you get past, five, repetitions or so, the accuracy of those equations starts going down, so don't put on something and go, I did 12 reps of it.
And then try to figure out, you're wondering Max, it'll get close. You start moving past that you just getting worse and worse and worse accuracy. So I want to make sure whether you're doing the leg extension test or a front squat test, you don't technically have to do it. Absolute one, rep max. If neither of those are an option, another one I like a lot here is simply a front squat or goblet squat? Hold. So you're gonna hold a weight in front of your chest, whether a kettlebell is great here, a dumbbell is fine here and you want to hold about half of your body weight.
Go all the way to the bottom position and try to hold that for about 45 seconds. So it's a pretty good indicator of number one, your position. It's hard to be in a bad position for that long at that load as well as core strength and low back stability. So it's a very different indicator than say the leg extension test but it's a really nice one so it doesn't require many moving Parts. It's more difficult than the leg extension but it's quite a bit more functional and it's going to give you insight into a lot more areas than just the
quadriceps.
Yeah. So 45 seconds down at the bottom of the squat. Yep. And then returning to a standing position. Yep.
And if you can't do the return actually, I'm not that worried, but as long as you can hold that good position without a technical breakdown in that 45 seconds, that's a really good spot. As an intro, I want a third of your body weight for 30 seconds.
Terrific, I plan to attempt all of those strength tests very soon. What about hypertrophy,
sure. Actually, before we get into that, I want to jump back really quickly. It's important to
add a couple of caveats to the strength stuff. So there's two that I want to do. Number one,
These are assuming you are technically proficient. So I don't want you to do any exercise to exhaustion or to maximum strength, if you're not comfortable with your Technique, so adjust these accordingly. If you're not comfortable with the front squat, do the leg extension, if you're not uncomfortable with that, do something different. So we never want to utilize maximum testing if it's going to come with a consequence of serious acute injury. So that's the most important flag. The second one is your warm up protocol.
Will have a huge effect on your actual results. And so, whenever you do these tests, especially if you're going to do a test, and I test again down the line, you want to make sure that that warm-up protocol is standardized. Now again the NFC a and I can we can I can give you resources has specific guides for exactly what to do for your warm up protocol, prior to 1 rep, max testing. So we can go there and you can look that stuff up. We can add that to show notes or
something. Yeah, and I think when we get into a deeper discussion about strength and hypertrophy and resistance training in general,
Well, if we could touch into the the best warm-up protocol, I know I have mine and I'm certain it's going to be suboptimal based on everything. I mean that's copies on every conversation we've ever had where I learned all the things I'm doing incorrectly but I do make changes on the basis of what you tell me it's not incorrectly so much as it
is. Like some optimal
that's very kind way of telling me it's incorrect. Thank you. What about
hypertrophy? So the thing you want to pay attention to here is
You have the aesthetic portion of hypertrophy that's entirely up to you. There is no rationale, you can decide what you feel like looks good or doesn't look good. That's irrelevant. There is a sufficient amount. You need to have where below that is detrimental to your health, regardless of your outcomes. And so the best way to do this is a couple of ways any sort of body composition test. It can do this. So whether this is a scan through like a dexa scan which is a gold standard or other ways.
As of biological bioelectrical impedance or otherwise. So there's a ton of different tests you can get that are pretty close. Okay, so what you want to pay attention to, when you get like a dexa, scan is a number called FF Mi and so that stands for fat free mass index. So you can look at it again. Any number of online calculators, these are all standard, so it doesn't actually matter where you pull them up, you don't have to worry about, looking it up and whether or not it's right or not or something. And so, that's going to actually tell you if you have sufficient muscle math and so a number you
Look for in general something like if you're a man you're FM. I should be something like 20 or higher. If you're a woman, you want to look for something like 18. So that that was the targets. If you get past like 24 25 for a man that's a lot of muscle mass assuming you're reasonably lean. Now if your FMI is like 24 25, but your body fat is like 40%. You're actually just a very, very large individual. You're not like you're not gonna great spot. So when we say these sort of numbers is
The assumption that you're probably sub 30 percent body fat for a man in sub 35 for a woman. So those are the numbers there are online calculators. All you really need to know is your total body weight, your body fat percentage and then your height. You can answer those three numbers. And then they'll tell you your FMI scoring, it'll correct for adjusted value. Then, most of those will actually tell you the grading rubric and then it's a good average, bad etcetera. But those are the numbers we look at. If you are as a man sub-17,
And as a woman sub 15. Now, we're in an area of pretty severe physiological. Detriment for insufficient muscle. And some of our later discussion we'll talk about why that
matters. So that's not sub. 17 percent body fat that says specifically the FMLA that's the correct yet. What about muscular endurance? Is this where you going to tell me? I need to do wall sits.
So this is really nice. You can do any number of tests here, a standard plank.
Is a good Testament of the of muscular endurance. So can you hold a front plank for 60 seconds? Can you hold a side plank for 45 seconds? Pretty easy. If you're able to do a push-up. So if you can't that sort of tells you alone, it's actually interesting. If you can't do a single push up, that's not a muscular endurance. Issue that's actually now strength issue because that's one rep, max problem. So we want to be able to do for again for a general male. We should have no problem doing 25 plus
Of push-ups.
I apologize for interrupting you, but as long as we're talking about push-ups, you just mention form. Are we talking chest touching the ground, elbows breaking, right? Angles? What is a proper push up? According to your
laboratory, unless you have a very specific reason to limit range of motion. I want all my testing done through a full joint, range of motion. This is different for the person, so it's individualized to them. But in general, for a push-up, this would be a full complete lock out of the elbows on the top and a full.
Just touch or close to it at the ground. You can do it different, it doesn't really matter but just keep it standard from your pretest or post-test if you're trying to Mark progress, okay? But for US, unless we have a very specific reason, we're going full range of motion for all of these tests.
So, 25
push-ups 35 miles for a male is a standard and even something like 10 is a number. We're looking for again is kind of minimum categories for an upper body muscular
endurance and not to get too down in the weeds but I
I have observed other people of course, never myself. No I'm kidding. But observed other people pausing at maybe at repetition 15 catching their breath and then continuing or you that would be a team. You like a like a like a piston that would be a failed. So no pauses correct, just up, down up down and trying to hit these 10 but ideally 25, I
learned this lesson in one of our studies probably nine years ago. Well, we didn't clarify that and so we actually had an individual. He wasn't, there's no, he wasn't being the various he just figured out if
Do a couple, take a quick break into a cup. He like quadrupled his post test results from his pre test result because he figured out that little hack their. So you want to standardize it, it's not that I'm against or have some sort of strong belief. It's just trying to keep protocol standardized and which means any brake failed test. So, 10 to
25 push-ups minimum for males. What about for? So I'll clarify
if it's sub-10 for a man, that's again in your like very severe, red flag.
Problem. We really like to see a number above 25. Okay, that's where we're anchoring. Anything, but teen tween 10 and 25 is like, yeah, but not
severe. It means they have work to do. We have work to do and for and for females for a
female, you want to scale that sort of back. So female, the answer could be as little as zero, right? So you're going to see that. Can you do a full position if they're in that position where generally not going to do a muscular endurance, test from the knees? We already know the answer is your 0 will actually default.
Her chest, which I'll talk about in a second here. So, for those, those folks, anything that's going to scale down a little bit, right? So basically you're looking at 15, is that marker? Like, 25 was for the mail where I want to see above 15 and if I do, we're good. Anything between 5 to 15 as the number of like, okay, if your sub 5, like we generally have some problems and if that is different between 1 and 0, then like now we zero is a problem, so we should be able to do that.
So if a female
Cannot do 10 full push-ups.
Yeah, 10 full, push-ups is hard for a female depending on size,
okay? Let's say a female, can't do 50 pushups. You said rather than go to Annie's down version, what would you do to assess their muscular endurance and would you then also encourage them to work on their
strengths? Well, absolutely. So again, if they can't do, the can do anything less than 3. You're gonna be strength. In fact, if you want to look at most going to do,
In general. So this is a bit of a topic but I promise I'll keep it short and I'll come right back.
When I was a doctoral student, I had to lab mates. One of them was a runner, female 120 pounds, something like that. Small. And the one was a male, and he was basically, like a straight bro, like he lifts weights thousand, do any other sort of training does like a very classic, not training program but kind of drink and they were sort of bantering back and forth for a while. And basically, she was saying you're so unfit, you can't run it all. And he's saying, you're so weak, you can't do a pull-up. So, they challenge each other to a competition. They said at the end of the year, the girl
Girl is going to do 26 pull-ups and the guy had to run a marathon. So 26 miles. So that was the thing. And then there was some sort of
consequence for whoever sort of failed to the guy quickly tried to figure out. How the hell am I gonna run? 26 miles when I have not run a mile in like many, many, many years. So, we just started running three miles for Miles, whatever. She will course. They both of them ran immediately to me, right? And then the, she was like how the hell I can't do a pull-up and I was like great and I gave her a very specific maximal strength protocol and she was like whoa, I want to go to the assisted pull-up machine and work on doing like sets of 25 because I've got to get my muscular endurance up and I tried to explain to her your
Endurance is irrelevant. If you can't do one, it's never going to matter. She did the most concerns protocol. The entire thing didn't listen to me. The end of the year came, she still produced exactly zero Pull-Ups. So point is, if you look at muscular endurance, where is it strength and wears it actually muscular endurance, the general sort of number that you're looking for is under like 80%, right? That's going to tell you. Is this a muscular endurance problem, or is it an absolute strength
problem under a presentable one repetition maximum?
Yep. So what I mean by that is this in fact this is actually these in your question. The other way to assess muscular endurance is take the exact strength test you did from the talk five minutes ago, what, which one did you do? Load that to 75% and then do that for as many repetitions as you can and that is a tremendous barometer of muscular endurance. So if you are able to 200 pounds in your leg extension test but 75% on any that as many reps as you can. You want to look for more than eight repetitions?
If you are below, eight repetitions then we have a muscular endurance problem, right? If it is, if it is higher than that, if you got 15 or 20, then we know we have probably some problems in your Peak strength or the test itself. So that is a good 11:52, sort of number is where you want to be looking at for there.
What about an aerobic capacity?
This one's more challenging. You either have to go to a laboratory and do something like a Wingate test. So this is a 30-second maximal test, where you're going to see how much work can you possibly do in that? 30 seconds. If you don't have a lattice as to laboratory you can, you can do this on any any protocol. You want you, this could be sprinting, this can be on a like an air bike, this could be on a rower.
I'm like that, anything where you can exert maximal effort and you don't have to worry about technical problems. So I generally don't like to do things like a kettlebell swing or something like that. There's just too many other variables. You need to be able to go as hard as you possibly can. Knowing you're going to get to a place of tremendous fatigue. Now in the lab, we often use what's called a Bosco protocol, and you're going to stand on a force plate, you're going to do as many vertical jumps as fast as you can, as high as you can for 60 seconds. And you're absolutely destroyed by like
I can 45. So either use that Wingate protocol or that Bosco protocol if you want though again take any of those other places 30 seconds or so, up to 45 seconds up to a minute, you want. It doesn't really matter and you just mark down the distance. You cover, that's all your. We don't really have standards for these things because it's going to be different. How far you can travel in 30 seconds on a treadmill. It is, it's going to be so different than sprinting in the field or on the assault bike or whatever. So,
What you really want to worry about there is, can you complete it and then how awful do you feel afterwards? So what what you really want to think about here is not those protocols but this you want to think about, can you get close to your predicted maximum heart rate? So the number we throw out is 220 minus your age. So, if you're 50 years old, 220, minus 50, you should be able to get to a maximum heart rate of around, 170 beats per
Minute. Now that number is extremely generic, if you don't get there, that doesn't have any indication of your Fitness if you get higher. That doesn't mean you're any more fit. It's just a rough number. So here's what I'm going to want you to do. In this case, your heart rate recovery is the better metric. So I want you to get up to a maximum heart rate and then test your heart rate recovery and what you should be looking for their as about half. A beat recovery per second.
So you're going to get up to a place where you reach like absolute terrible exhaustion, right? Maximum fatigue.
Test your heart rate and then count, right? Have a timer going within 60 seconds. You should have again that half a beat per second. You should have a heart rate recovery of 30 beats per minute within the next, the next minute. So 2 Min recovery should begin half that so 60 beats, those are rough numbers to go by on your three-minute recovery is again, half of that again. So, that is the closest way. If your heart rate recovery is worse than that, then we know we have a problem in your anaerobic capacity, or your cardiovascular
capacity.
I love it. What about number eight maximal heart rate because what you just described sounds a lot like maximal heart
rate. This is your VO2 max. So the gold standard here is to actually go into a laboratory and get this thing done so we can actually run a VO2 max test where you put a mask on, collect all your gases and run you to there. And there's a very specific protocol for completion of a true maximum test and it is scientist will know that if you don't have access to that, you can do a couple of tests, one of them is called
A 12-minute Cooper's test. So this is simply type your going to run for 12 minutes as far as you can and you can record the distance you cover again. You can go online to any any number of calculators enter that distance in and that will tell you, your proximal are estimated, VO2 max. So that's a 12-minute Sprint. 12 minutes, print maximum distance. You can cover in 12 minutes,
keeping a steady Pace, the whole time we're going ever. You
want? The goal is to get maximum distance covered in 12 minutes.
so that's anywhere between a mile 22 plus miles depending on how fit you are, but you just do that Cooper 12-minute test
Got it. I told you. All right. So if you remember aerobic
capacity is 8 to 12 sort of minutes where you're going to see a real true test of that vo2max, you simply can't get that in under a few minutes. So it is a if you want, you can do a little gentler version of that. So there are a number of submaximal tests there. In fact, there is a one mile walk test, you can do. So again, all you're going to do is in this case, you have to have some sort of either a stopwatch
We're ideally are a monitor and all you have to do is is the rock for one mile. Submaximal tests, you're going to walk, a mile record, the time, record your heart rate at the end, enter those in and those will give you again estimates of your view to Max. So that's the like, oh my gosh. I can't run for 12 minutes as hard as I possibly can, or I don't want to do it. Or we have a lot of these in our executive program, it's like my knee hurts too bad. I've got back pain when I run and whatever, can I? Okay. And you did the walk this.
It's pretty accurate. If you do it correctly. So technically all you have to do is measure your heart rate on your neck, I can count 60 seconds, but it's just easier to work with everyone's watches and stuff. Now, just where the heart rate monitor plug in those numbers. And again, those are all standard calculations. So anywhere you find those, you don't have to worry about the source so you just enter your stuff in and they're going to be running up the same
equation. I like the idea of the 12-minute run. I'm going to give it a shot. See what we
did for four years. We did a one mile
Version of this and there's just a lot more science on the Cooper told me to protest. So we did, that is pretty good, and it is not even remotely close to fun. It sounds like fun
for other
reasons. Yeah, well, it
is it were fun in the sense that it reveals a lot. Yep. Powerful potent. Super there's no
Hiding, you can hide with a leg extension test. It doesn't hurt that bad, but you cannot feel anything, but the 12-minute run as far as you can test. So
these are really actually psychiatric diagnostic tests. They are of sorcerer number nine long-duration, steady state. Yep, exercise, I think of this as AKA endurance but as you mentioned before, there are other forms of indirect so long duration, steady state exercise. Yep. So
You really want to think about this as not a standard number. This is you should maintain consistent work output for over 20 plus minutes, okay. And this one, I want you to just pick something that it was in your lifestyle. So is there a loop around your house? That you can do is there some protocol that you like to use for and you're simply going to test your ability. Can you maintain work without stopping? That's all it needs to be now. Ideally, I personally like to throw a little
Justin here, which is, can you do this with nasal breathing, only? That's when I feel really good, if you can go 30 straight minutes without needing to take a break, walking doesn't really cut it unless you're very, very unfit. Which case if walking 30 minutes, without a break, is a challenge. Okay, like there. But if you can, I want you moving at a non walking pace, I don't care what zone. This is two, three, four, five. I don't care. Show me. You can maintain minimum of 20 minutes of work with? No breaks, no interval is no downtime.
And again, ideally breathing through your nose only,
I love this list, but it worries me a bit, not because any one of these tests is necessarily that overwhelming, but because I'm unclear about how to arrange performance of these different tests. Yeah, for instance, do I separate them. So, I'm doing one test like long-duration output on one day and I'm doing strength on another day. Those seem pretty obvious to me, but are there ones that one can combine on different days? How much time?
One give oneself in between these tests. And how often should one do an assessment? Just as we don't want to necessarily evaluate body weight changes by getting on the scale three times a day. Maybe once a day, at the same time, each day is more practical. How often should we be assessing our fitness for each and every one of
these? Well, the way that I would say this is, you want to pick the one. That is the worst and do that more frequently. So if for example, you do the upper body strength test
And you are fantastic. If you can bench press, double your body weight,
I don't need to test your bench very often for the average person, not a powerlifter. Like maybe once a year or some maybe not even that we just don't need to get there. However if we then test your your VO2 max and in your 12 minutes you cover a total of a half a mile then like we might want to test that every month, right? And so we're going to let our priorities emphasize which one we're going to do more often. I would recommend doing this full battery once a year
full battery mean the entire list on
one the entire not on one day. But
Within a week so you can take a week. Now you could do these technically all in two days. Three days. Split here is probably best. So if you were to just say hey this is like testing week, I actually love this for beginning of the year, are whatever it is that you sort of change your training. But I think once a year just like once a year you should probably go to a physician and get full blood work, a full, you know, heart scan and everything like that. And then if maybe you had a hard issue, they would come back and test you or frequently, whatever the case is, right.
You should probably run through this and you're going to be thinking of. Yeah, but I don't want to like, give up on my exercise routine that week. Well, I promise you, you're not going to finish this week and think I didn't do very much work this week. It's going to feel great, and then you're going to have a very nice barometer of exactly where you need to change. And prioritize your training for the next quarter or half a year or wherever you want to go. If you want to actually do this, every six months. That's really we end up actually doing this quite honestly like more like every six months as a general test. That's really good way to do but
If minimum of of your argue with me, give me once a year, you want to do this. So, which order to do them in the non fatiguing tests, you can do whenever. So this is the the body composition, scan the FMI, the body fat composition. All this stuff can be done. Whenever I generally like to do that, though, as your very first activity, the reason is we know that acute exercise, can heavily influence things, like body composition measurements because of inflammation, water storage is cetera. So it's easiest to just sort of get that off of a
48-hour rest. You want to make sure you don't do any Hard Exercise the day before a body composition test and probably 48 hours before that. So just start yourself off of that. Your movement test can be the same thing. You don't want to try to do a assessment of how well you're squatting. If you're incredibly sore from your your brutal squatting test. So tend to do those things when you're the most fresh then what you want to do is any skill or maximum strength or power goes at the very beginning of the day. Any fatiguing thing happens at the end.
And so you could easily do this. All right. I'm going to do my power test. My broad jump.
Great. You're not going to be fatigued at all from that and on the same day, since I'm already pretty warmed up, now I'm going to roll right into my leg strength test. And since I'm really warmed up, I'm going to do my leg muscular endurance test right there. This is a very common strategy. We use, we do our one rep, max leg extension, five minutes, seven minutes, whatever we need to do. Come back, load it to 75%. It was many reps as you can. Boom you could roll right into then your upper body test or your grip strength test or anything else that you want to do. There is
They're a little bit of influence.
Yeah, but really for most people it's not that bad. What we impose, I mean if you do a leg strength test coming back, I'm doing that upper body strength test afterwards. It's not that big a deal. Give yourself 15 yourself, 20 minutes. Keep it, plenty of time so you can knock out your strength testing. And we also learned during the testing all in one day. That could be, you could do your performance, your skill, diagnostic, your power, jump, test your strength and your muscle endurance and all that stuff is knocked out. You're going to have to come back.
Kind of separate day and do your anaerobic test. This is 30 seconds maximum under and things like that you could do if you wanted do that. After your long duration, test your long-duration test is again as it's going to function as like a big warm-up, or you could flip those things or you can do them on separate days. You're going to have to do your VO2 max test on its own day. For the most part, unless you want to do again, your movement or your body, composition sort of before those things. So you really have the ability to
To kind of mix and match. Ideally this, most realistically probably takes three days if you want to separate them into four or five. The more separation, you do the better data, you're going to get. It's just a question of like, how pedantic are you really trying to get here? And are you willing to lose 5% to then save a whole day? Then you can do sort of things in multiple Stacks. So that's, that's how I would break it
up. So what I'm hearing is better to do it than to not do it, most definitely and be rational, don't don't
And do your strength output late in the day when you're fatigued, you know, if you're going to combine some of the steady-state endurance and maximal heart rate, fine. Understand there might be a slight deficit there but test it the same way each time and what you're really looking for is
Improvement. Yep. And you could also do the heart rate recovery under any modality so you can do the heart rate recovery after your VO2 max as well. So you finish that thing and then just again to the same test for up to three
minutes. These are Fantastic Tools. I'm almost
Most tempted to say that I'm willing to post my numbers. But that actually violates the core principle that I think we're getting at here which is that it's highly unlikely that anybody is going to be phenomenal across-the-board. I mean certainly there will be individuals that are but based on everything we talked about earlier specificity of training and how extensively somebody's been training a certain way will without question.
Lopsided them if you will yeah toward being better in some of these assessments and less good in others. And that's just simply the way that these adaptations work. Yep. And it's
not, you don't need to be optimal in. All these areas to be quote, unquote, Optimal Health, from this perspective, you just want to make sure again, there's no severe performance anchors. This is what we call them, right? The we wouldn't want any of these severe constraints because you're going to get limited by that thing. And so, what you want to do is move,
That up to just sufficient or concerning, right? And get it away from that. If you do that, that thing's not going to catch you. You're gonna be able to continue to pursue pursue optimization in any of. The one things that you have a specific passion for which is generally what moves people, right. You've trained so that you feel better you train because, you know, there are all these benefits to it and choose this audience probably could list hundreds of them but you also train because you generally like to get better at something. A lot of us like have something
And so you want to make sure that you're not going. Hey, I know you're good at endurance but you really shouldn't train anymore. We don't want that message. Not at all. I want you to love your training, we just want to make sure that you're not loving that so much, that you're not taking some blinders off and missing another area, which would actually again, you pull that performance anchor, this whole Ship Sails faster with less effort and less friction.
What I love about this is also that as you've described it, it's not just for athletes or people that are super into fitness. It's also for people that just want to be healthy and want aesthetic changes and that's why they're exercising, which I think accounts for a fairly large percentage of people out there. So I think what you described is it incredibly well structured incredibly clear and Incredibly actionable. So I want to thank you for that. I'm serious, about my willingness to do this.
And at least share those numbers with you. And I think for most people that are seeking what you listed off before, aesthetic, changes, functionality and Longevity. It's clear that all nine of these are going to be important in some regard or another.
So before we close out, I want to go back and finish off the metrics for VO2 max because I don't actually think I gave you numbers on that. So, in general, for men, a minimum number. We want to look at here is 35 milliliters per kilogram per minute and for women, that'd be about 30.
So we can actually push a lot higher on those things. In reality, I want to see men above 50.
If I could just interrupt you for a second. When you say 40 milliliters per kilogram mL of what specifically.
Yeah. So what's actually those metrics mean is the first one? Ml is oxygen. So it's amount of oxygen kg is body weight. So it's how much oxygen can you bring in per kilogram of body weight per minute? So it is a volume of oxygen per
Your size and a Time duration. In fact, the way that you calculate it is you multiply your cardiac output by what's called your AV O2 difference. Your cardiac output is your heart rate times your stroke volume. So how much blood you're pumping out / pump is just real call youm how many times you're pumping or you're beating you multiply that by your AV O2 difference. You have the O2 difference is artery - vein different so it's the amount of oxygen in your arteries - the amount of oxygen in your vein which is going to tell
Tell you how much you took up in your capillaries in your muscles. So you take those two factors, multiply them together and there's your VO2 max.
You know, as you were describing that I imagine you getting to an fmri machine and seeing that equation lighting up in your brain because clearly it's committed to memory very well. Thank you for that. Clear
description. Yep, so to finish those numbers, I really truly want to see some a man above 50 and I'm not even really stoked until I get above 55. In fact, it's sort of funny. Dave, costal whose lab I did my PhD and he was
By the time, but he's again, one of these legendary figures in exercise, physiology started in the 70s, he would always say. There's no human excuse to be below 60, which I was always like damn, like that's really actually pretty hard to get to if he was. He oh yes, dear. But he still actually setting World Records like in these last couple of years and is like all the Masters record for swimming and cycling and stuff. So he was a super super fit guy. So he was always above 6. He's probably like 50 something. Now, even
He's, you know, 80 or whatever 80 years old. Yeah.
With the vo2max of 50s,
probably really not 50s, probably, but he's probably going to remember that earlier. In the, we talked about how I had the 92 year old by the view to Max's 38 days, probably gonna break that record when he gets there, I'm sure. I'm sure I get. In fact, I guarantee you. He has that number in his brain. I haven't talked to him in 15 years, but I guarantee you that number is in his brain and he's probably training
for it. I love it and I love it because
It proves that exercise pays off. Oh yeah, it's one of the few things in life where there's a direct relationship between work and
outcome. Yeah, that's as Henry Rollins described in his wonderful essay. If you're familiar with that, oh my gosh well you're a punk rock guy you know Henry. I'm sure I mean I
certainly know who he is and I know his he has work and
incredible, one page, paper sort of something to do with the iron and he basically describes that as like this is the one thing where it's truth.
Like it is the most true thing you'll ever do. Which is I love for that.
It's almost like a principle of nature 100%. Yeah.
So with with the women I really want to see the women if I want to see men above 55. I really want to see what I'm about 50 as the Target and if you like you're there, I'm pretty good. So you can do the math on then the middle ground of what's like, okay, but we need to work on it. In fact, if you look across the literature at different athletes, you're going to see like the the really high level in durin's Folk.
Folks, you know they may pass 70 or 80. In fact there was talk a few years ago of a guy breaking 100 allies like an 18 or 19 year old. But I actually don't think it was ever fully confirmed or repeated but certainly you'll see plenty of people like 95 in those extremes. If you look at other sports like football or basketball, they're probably going to be in the 5565 sort of rain. So if you as an average person are 55, that that's a really good marker to be and if you get even close to that,
A good spot. I'm sorry if I let you down Dave,
we just love how you're describing this average person. You look at me with Just a Little Bit of Sympathy, like like if you, if you reach the standard of average, Andrew, listen, you're giving me prompts all over the place to try and improve my metrics whatever. They happen to be. And I think that's one of the great values of getting objective numbers, even if they have to be measured by some of these back-of-the-envelope techniques that, you know, I guess we always teach people in the laboratory, right? That a tool can be
Be not extremely precise, but as long as it's reliable, of course, there is still value there. I mean, of course you'd love to have the most precise and most reliable tool, but if you can't then at least go for a reliable tool and measure for
consistency. Yep. For the real-world reliability, beats validity is as much as we can for a lot of things we're talking about, especially for using it as a metric of, did I get better as long as that tools, reliable body composition, just all these things have inherent error and them. Some of them are smaller. Some of them.
Larger. But as you mentioned having standardization within the testing protocol is going to allow you to measure progress and that's going to tell you. So you're out now that we've sort of covered, all these areas of adaptation, we walk through the history and we walk through a bunch of the explanations for why people all are maybe not getting the results that they want to get through their training the way I would like to go with the rest of our conversations would be to just go through each of those adaptations step by step and make sure I cover very specific protocols for if you have
Run through this testing and identified an area of weakness. So, maybe you've sort of been lifting a lot because you like lifting and you maybe realize that your cardiovascular fitness or your heart rate recovery is not where it really should be or the opposite. Like we've talked about, maybe you're doing a lot of that type of work and your strength, isn't there? Your movement? Quality's not there. So you've identified a problem. How do I specifically solve it? What are the evidence-based and most effective protocols that I can put myself in for each one of these categories and I
That would give people a lot of take-home value, but it's going to take us some time to cover. So it's going to have to come across over multiple conversations between you and
I great. Well, I'm looking forward to each and all of those conversations and I want to add just one more metric to our discussion today which is really just my way of saying, thank you because if there were a metric for amount of useful information per sentence spoke you would be at the upper level.
Love that metric. You have this amazing ability to provide so much knowledge in a clear and concise and today, listed out format that is both interesting grounded in science and actionable. So on behalf of everyone listening and certainly for myself as well just want to say thank
you. Well I appreciate the compliments and I'm looking forward to the next conversation, jumping right into speed strength and hypertrophy training. And what are the evidence-based and
Practices for protocols. In those
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It's completely zero cost by going to huberman lab.com. You can also go into the menu tab and go to newsletter and see some example newsletters from months past. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercise and performance with dr. Andy Galpin. And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
