Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Protocols to Build Strength & Grow Muscles | Huberman Lab Guest Series

1. 0:00 – 10:52

   Benefits of Strength & Hypertrophy Training, Aging

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      (Upbeat music) 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 marks the second episode in the six-episode series with Dr. Andy Galpin, a professor of kinesiology at Cal State University, Fullerton, and one of the foremost world's experts on the science and applications of methods to increase strength, hypertrophy, and endurance. Today's episode is all about how to increase strength, speed, and hypertrophy of muscles. Professor, Dr. Andy Galpin, great to be back. Last episode, you told us about the nine specific adaptations that exercise can induce, everything from strength and hypertrophy to endurance, muscular endurance, so on and so forth. And you gave us this incredible toolkit of fit tests for each of those adaptations so that people can assess them for themselves and then, of course, improve on each and every one of them if they choose. By the way, people can access that information simply by going to the first episode in this series with you. And it's all there and time-stamped, and I highly recommend people do that. Today, we're talking about strength and hypertrophy. And so right out the gate, I just want to ask you, why should people think about and train for strength and hypertrophy? And that question is, of course, directed towards those that are trying to get stronger and grow bigger muscles. But I know that many people out there perhaps have not thought about the benefits of strength and hypertrophy training and how beneficial it can be, not just for people that want to get bigger biceps, et cetera, but that have other goals, longevity goals and health goals unrelated to what most people associate with hypertrophy. So what are the benefits of training for strength and hypertrophy for the everyday person, for the athlete, for the recreational exerciser, and so on?

   2. AGAndy Galpin1:55

      There's a wonderful saying. Um, I think it was Bill Bowerman, the founder- one of the founders of Nike, and he always said, "If you have a body, you're an athlete." And, and I think that's very important for people to understand because one of the major disservices we've done in this field is convince people that things like strength training are for athletes or for growing bigger muscles and cardiovascular training are for things like fat loss and heart health. And that is a tremendous disservice because it puts a lot of unnecessary barriers and leads to a lot of false assumptions and then, therefore, poor actions. Uh, classic examples of this are people who are resistant to strength training because they don't want to put on too much muscle. Um, people who only perform one type of exercise because they want, say, fat loss or they're in it for longevity and health, and they don't wor- they're not worried about, you know, being an athlete. And so right out the gates, we can actually draw back a little bit to what we were- our previous conversation when I walked you through the history of, of exercise science. And the reason I did that is to help you understand these are the railroads that you're running down and you don't even realize it in terms of everyone thinks of strength training and they immediately default to our principles to optimize muscle growth. And that's not the only adaptation one should be after with strength training. When we think of endurance training, we immediately default to things like, again, cardiovascular health or fat loss or things like that. What I really want to do across this entire, um, series and conversations is to, to just break that immediately, talk about all the other things, uh, that you can do with your- with your training, uh, and so that people can be comfortable and confident in doing an optimal training program for whatever goal they have, whether that be specific, like growing muscle, or non-specific, like just feeling better, having more energy, um, being more prepared for life and, and longevity. And so to, to directly answer your question, I could really- we could do 100 episodes on the benefits of exercise, and we could run all the way from mood and focus, um, cognitive tasks, to a better immune function. You'll get less colds. You'll be- you'll fight them off more effectively. Um, to mortality, right? So s- some of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you will live are exercise. However, there are independent benefits that come from just endurance training, and there are independent benefits that come from strength training. And so to just give you one categorically, um, the way that you want to think about this is resistance exercise and strength training is the number one tool to combat neuromuscular aging. You cannot get that through any other form of exercise besides heavy overload strength training. And we- and we can walk through in detail what that is, but that is reason number one. In general, human movement is, is a function of, number one, some sort of neuromuscular activation. So nerves have to turn on. The second part is muscles have to contract. And the third part is those muscles have to move a bone. All right, if you want to be alive and you want to live by yourself, you have to be able to engage in human movement. If you have any dysfunction in the neuromuscular system there, then you're not going to be able to do that. And again, as I mentioned, the only way to preserve that or fight that loss of aging i- is to strength train. So people will tend to hear numbers like you lose about 1% of muscle size per year after age about 40. And that's true. However, what they don't realize is you lose about 2 to 4% of your strength per year. So the loss of strength is almost double that the loss of muscle mass with aging. Muscle power is more like 8 to 10% per year. And so we can very clearly see the problem you're going to have with aging is not going to be preservation of muscle, although that is incredibly important. It's going to be very specifically preservation of muscle power and strength. And why that really matters is your ability to, again, stand up and move, your ability to catch yourself from a fall, your ability to feel confident doing a movement. Um, that is a function of muscle power more than it is muscle size. And so functionality is really what we want to be, right? You want to be able to do whatever you want to be- do physically and feel confident in doing that.... as you age. That's going to only be obtained through strength training.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman6:11

      So is it appropriate to say that training for strength and hypertrophy is also a way to keep your nervous system healthy and young?

   4. AGAndy Galpin6:19

      Yeah, absolutely. I- it is the only exercise route we have for that. Uh, if you look at just basic numbers like motor units, you're gonna see that older individuals have like a 30 to 40% reduction in total motor units.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman6:31

      So when you say older, approximately what ages are you referring to? 'Cause I know many people out there, such as myself, are 40 and older. But I know many of our listeners are in their 20s, maybe even in their teens. And I can imagine that people that start doing strength and hypertrophy training younger will afford themselves an advantage over time, but that everybody should be doing strength and hypertrophy training for as much of their lifespan as possible. That's really the message that I'm getting. Um, so if somebody is, for instance, 45, would that fall into the bin of older?

   6. AGAndy Galpin7:06

      You're gonna start seeing decrements past, again, around the age of 40 or so. Now, there's a lot of genetic variation there and a lot of other things go into that equation like your sleep and your nutrition. But that's a fair number to sort of think about. Um, one actually, responses, it's actually sort of counterintuitive. The wonderful thing about strength training is you don't actually have to start at a young age. Uh, you can actually... In fact, I was reading a paper this morning because of our previous conversation. It was an over age 90. So these were folks 90 plus, and they saw improvements like 30 to 170% in things like muscle size and hypertrophy over a very short period of time. I think it was 12 weeks. So y- you don't actually have to start. There are some adaptations that you're gonna need for health that you... God, you really need to start in your 20s. The reason I like to mention that is because if you are listening and you are 50 and you're like, "Oh shit, I- I haven't been strength training," you're not toast. Like you should absolutely start now. Um, but y- you're gonna be able to get to a- a fantastic spot very quickly. Similarly though, if you are 20 or 25 and 30 and you aren't lifting, there are still many reasons why you should do that now. And I want- I'd like to point that out because a lot of folks would be like, "Oh my gosh, they said I have to do it when I'm 20 or 25 or, you know, I'll be sort of screwed." And that's not the case at all. There's really no age limit on this. In fact, there's actually interesting data that just came out showing, um, th- this reduction in muscle strength and hypertrophy that I sort of talked about is basically ameliorated with a preservation of activity. In other words, you don't lose these functionalities because of aging. You lose these because of a loss of training. To state that again, you don't lose these because of some innate physiological thing that happens with genes become less sensitive or you lose functionality. You pretty much can describe the loss of function of strength and muscle in aging as exclusively because of a loss of training and nutrition and- and anabolic resistance and some other things. So you can do a lot more than you think, um, (laughs) when it comes to maintaining high quality muscle, and that's really important to point out.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman9:10

      I'm reminded of the words of the great Sherrington. He won the Nobel Prize.

   8. AGAndy Galpin9:16

      Sure.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman9:16

      He's a physiologist. Uh, I guess the neuroscientists try and claim him as a neuroscientist because he worked on the nervous system. The physiologists claim him as a, as a physiologist.

   10. AGAndy Galpin9:23

       He is 100% a physiologist.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman9:25

       I would call him a neuroscientist.

   12. AGAndy Galpin9:26

       (laughs) .

   13. AHAndrew Huberman9:26

       Maybe we can argue about this later. Um-

   14. AGAndy Galpin9:29

       We will.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman9:29

       ... but I think one of the key things that Sherrington pointed out was that, and I believe the quote was that, "Movement is the final common path." And what he was referring to was the fact that a significant fraction of the brain itself is devoted to our ability to move-

   16. AGAndy Galpin9:47

       Yeah.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman9:47

       ... and our ability to engage in resistance-type movements. And that resistance-type movements and the continuation of movement throughout the lifespan is what keeps the brain young and healthy and vital.

   18. AGAndy Galpin10:00

       Yeah.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman10:00

       And there are so much data now to support that. But, uh, I'm so grateful that you brought up early this fact that there's a neuromuscular link 'cause I think a lot of people think about musculoskeletal. They forget that the nervous system is really in charge of the, um, strength of- of the muscle contractions and the types of muscle contractions that occur. I'm certain we're gonna get into that in a lot of depth today.

   20. AGAndy Galpin10:23

       Eh, you're cl- close there. We're not totally right, but we're close.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman10:25

       Okay. Well, I- I look forward to being corrected-

   22. AGAndy Galpin10:28

       Yeah.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman10:28

       ... um, and to achieving the precision that you're known for, uh, around that discussion. So if we are to step back and say strength training and hypertrophy training is critical for people of all ages-

   24. AGAndy Galpin10:39

       Yeah.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman10:40

       ... for developing and maintaining the neuromuscular system and for our ability to function in the world-

   26. AGAndy Galpin10:48

       Yeah.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman10:49

       ... not just offset injury, but the ability to pick things up and move, et cetera,

2. 10:52 – 14:02

   Strength & Hypertrophy Training, Aesthetics

   1. AHAndrew Huberman10:53

      what are some of the other things that strength and hypertrophy training, um, can provide? I know a lot of people use strength and hypertrophy training for changing their aesthetics.

   2. AGAndy Galpin11:02

      Yeah.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman11:03

      What is your sense about its potency for changing aesthetics as compared to, say, cardiovascular exercise?

   4. AGAndy Galpin11:09

      Yeah. The- the mantra I always like is the reason you wanna exercise is threefold, right? You wanna look good, feel good, play good. That- that's really, and that comes from sport, um, comes from football specifically we always say that. And what that means really is you wanna look good. People want to look the way they want to look, um, whatever that means to them. And there are many versions of what you feel to be aesthetically pleasing, and that's totally irrelevant. But people want to look the way they wanna look. Um, number two, you wanna be able to feel good. What's that mean? You wanna be injury-free. You wanna have energy throughout the day. You wanna be able to execute anything you want to. So whether you wanna go surf in the morning, you wanna play racquetball, or you wanna hike, or you wanna do all three of those in one day, you should have the ability to do that. Uh, and then you wanna play good, which means you should be able to execute, um, any, again, activities, uh, that you wanna execute, whatever that means. All right. So backing all that, what's that got to do with your question? Um, one of the major benefits of strength training is the responses tend to happen extremely fast. So you can see noticeable changes in muscle size certainly within a month. Uh, absolutely within six weeks. And so we have this wonderful feedback loop that sort of tells you, am I doing this incorrectly?Oh, my gosh. Yes, I am. Also, it's very addicting. The feedback, the response, the physical changes. Whether this is actually point two or three, look good or feel good, play good, or it's even just part one, you're starting to see that when you compare that to things like fat loss, that journey tends to be longer. It's more difficult. It's more reliant upon other factors like nutrition, et cetera. Strength training is really about, like, there's some very minimal nutritional requirements. Outside of that, it comes down to the training, and the feedback is immediate. That's powerful because if you look across, uh, the literature on exercise adherence, you'll see that that is in fact the number one predictor of effectiveness of any training program. So what that means is if you were to put any variable possible and figure out what is going to determine whether or not this program works, um, this is what we typically call the methods are many and the concepts are few. So the methods of exercise, the methods of strength training, the method of- methods of hypertrophy training, which we'll talk about, are, are infinite. However, there are only a handful of key concepts that you have to achieve in order for that program to work. Adherence is one of them, and again, is often the top one. So you need to do something. You need to do something consistently. When you are getting that feedback and you're seeing results in your appearance immediately and you see that every single day, every time you take off your shirt or every time you, um, look in the mirror you see that result, that tends to drive adherence, um, really powerfully. So it's important to give people wins, especially people who are not maybe like you and I who are like, "I'm gonna lift weights and I'm gonna exercise, like, no matter what the rest of my life 'cause I just love it." Not everyone's like that. And so giving them a little bit of carrot of success, and if you can achieve that in, you know, say, three to four to five weeks already, um, it's very powerful tool.

3. 14:02 – 17:48

   Momentous, Eight Sleep, Levels

   1. AGAndy Galpin14:02

   2. AHAndrew Huberman14:02

      Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is also separate from Dr. Galpin'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, their supplements are generally in single-ingredient formulations. If you're going to develop a supplementation protocol, you're going to want to focus mainly on using single-ingredient formulations. With single-ingredient formulations, you can devise the most logical and effective and cost-effective supplementation regimen for your goals. In addition, Momentous supplements ship internationally, and this is, of course, important because we realize that many of the Huberman Lab Podcast listeners reside outside the United States. If you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned on the Huberman Lab Podcast, in particular, supplements for hormone health, for sleep optimization, for focus, as well as a number of other things including exercise recovery, you can go to live momentous, spelled O-U-S, so that's livemomentous.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I've been using an Eight Sleep mattress cover for about the last eight months, and it has completely transformed my sleep. I'm sleeping about the same amount, but I'm sleeping far deeper and I'm now getting the proper ratios of so-called rapid eye movement or REM sleep and slow wave sleep and waking up feeling far more recovered mentally and physically. The underlying mechanism for all that is very straightforward. I've talked many times before on this podcast and elsewhere about the critical relationship between sleep and body temperature. That is, in order to fall asleep at night, your body needs to drop by about one to three degrees in terms of core body temperature, and waking up involves a one to three degree increase in core body temperature. With Eight Sleep mattress covers, you can adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment to be one temperature at the start of the night, a different temperature the middle of the night, and a different temperature as you approach morning, each of which can place you into the optimal stages of sleep and have you waking up feeling more refreshed than ever. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman and check out their Pod 3 Cover 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 eightsleep.com/huberman to save $150 at checkout. Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and activities affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your blood glucose using a continuous glucose monitor. Many people are aware that their blood sugar, that is their blood glucose level, is critical for everything from fat loss to muscle gain to healthy cognition, and indeed aging of the brain and body. Most people do not know, however, how different foods and different activities, including exercise or different temperature and environments, impact their blood glucose levels. And yet blood glucose is exquisitely sensitive to all of those things. I first started using Levels about a year ago as a way to understand how different foods, exercise, and timing of food relative to exercise, and quality of sleep at night impact my blood glucose levels, and I've learned a tremendous amount from using Levels. It's taught me when best to eat, what best to eat, when best to exercise, how best to exercise, and how to modulate my entire schedule from work to exercise and even my sleep. So if you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself, go to levels.link/huberman. That's levels.link/huberman.

4. 17:48 – 22:42

   Strength vs. Hypertrophy Training: Adaptations

   1. AHAndrew Huberman17:48

      Let's talk about strength and hypertrophy. If you would, please remind us what strength and hypertrophy are in terms of the specific adaptation they represent. What I mean by that is when somebody is training for strength, what are they really training for? Obviously, it means the ability to move more weight, but I know that it includes a number of other things as well. And when one is training for hypertrophy, for the growth of muscle fibers, what does that represent? Because I think...If people understand that, they will far better understand the methods and protocols that are going to be best for strength and hypertrophy.

   2. AGAndy Galpin18:26

      At its core, you, you've basically described it. When we talk about strength, we're talking about an actual function. So, can you create more force across a muscle or muscle groups, or, or total movement? And when we talk about hypertrophy, well, now we're specifically referring to just an increase in size. There's no actual mention of function. So, a muscle can grow larger without actually technically being stronger, uh, for a number of reasons. Um, however, there is a strong relationship between strength and hypertrophy. So, a lot of the times in the general public, in the lay conversations, we sort of lump those two things in as the same thing. And so we have to recognize, people who are, uh, new to training or people even who are intermediately trained, there is a huge overlap between strength and hypertrophy. Once you get past that though, they become disentangled. And a good example of it is this. If you look at the strongest people in the world, this would be people who compete in the sport of powerlifting. All right? That's a true test of maximal strength. So, it is, uh, a deadlift, a bench press, and a back squat. And you're going to do a one repetition max in all three of those. And so, whoever wins is the person who lifted the most amount of weight one time. That's it. It's not like World's Strongest Man where it is how many reps can you do in a row, or your time, right? It's a true maximal strength test. And you compare those to, say, bodybuilders. Now, both of those individuals are strong and both of those individuals have a lot of muscle. However, it is extremely clear the powerlifters will be significantly stronger than the bodybuilders, o- on average, right? There are individual exceptions, but we're just talking collective averages. And the bodybuilders will have more muscle than the other ones. In addition, whether you look at Olympic weightlifting or powerlifting, or World's Strongest Man for that matter, there are weight classes. And the reason is, as you go up in weight classes, you will always see the world records go higher and higher and higher. Right? So, you can clearly get stronger without adding any muscle. However, there's a point, right, where you simply have to add more mass to get a higher number. And that's why we have weight classes in those sports and in combat sports, and lots of other things. So, we have the... There's a lot of confusion, right? Because people think, "Man, either these are the same thing e- or if I wanna get stronger, I have to get bigger," which is not the case at all. Another misnomer here is, "I can't get stronger unless I add muscle." That's not true either, right? And it's a similar idea. So, what, what I'm saying is you have the ability to do whatever you'd like. If you'd like to get stronger and add muscle, great. If you add muscle, you're probably going to bring some strength along for the ride. However, if you wanna get stronger and you don't want to add muscle for any reason, personal preference on aesthetics, whether you're in a weight class and you simply can't afford it, it is quite easy to get stronger and not add much muscle mass either. And so differentiating these two things is one of them is simply a measure of size and the other one is a measure of force. And when we talk about strength, what we're really talking about are two unique components. Component one is what I call the physiology. So, what i- what is the ability of the neuromuscular system? What is the ability of the muscle fibers to contract and produce force? The other one is what we call mechanics. And mechanics is simply things like, i- it's minutiae down to how long your femurs are relative to your tibia, or, or other things, right? This is biomechanics. This is also technique. This is skill. This is how smooth you feel. This is, are you firing the right muscle group in the right sequence and order? And all of these things play into strength. So, somebody who maybe has, uh, more f- force capability in their muscle fibers but their technique and the movement is worse may lose in a competition. Or somebody, again, who's, um, like i- if you go into the world of speed and power, uh, especially, you'll hear a lot of people talk about like the rhythm. And there's just a certain rhythm that has to happen if you wanna jump as high as possible or run as fast, fast as possible. But that's all mechanics, uh, at this fundamental level. So, when we look at hypertrophy, it's just still simply about how big the muscle is. So, those are the, really the, the, the similarities and distinctions between strength and hypertrophy.

5. 22:42 – 28:05

   Ligaments, Tendons & Resistance Training

   1. AGAndy Galpin22:42

   2. AHAndrew Huberman22:42

      When strength improves and when hypertrophy increases, is there also involvement in the ligaments and tendons? That is, of course, the ligaments and tendons are involved in the movements and-

   3. AGAndy Galpin22:59

      Yeah.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman22:59

      ... but do ligaments and tendons themselves grow and/or get stronger?

   5. AGAndy Galpin23:05

      This field is really difficult because, uh, connective tissue is not vascular. And so their plasticity is significantly lower than skeletal muscle. In fact, if you look across all the organs, uh, skeletal muscle is one of, if not the most plastic. Meaning, it's the most pliable, the most responsive, um, the one that's going to adjust. It's basically s- it's paying attention to everything that's being said in the body. Um, y- you cannot change blood pressure or pH or, um, macronutrients floating around without muscle knowing about it. It, it is, uh, in fact, this is why we call muscle an organ. People don't tend to think about this. If you were ever on, like, Jeopardy and they ask you that question of like, "What's the biggest organ system in the body?" people tend to say-

   6. AHAndrew Huberman23:45

      The skin.

   7. AGAndy Galpin23:47

      Muscle's actually the correct answer.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman23:48

      All right. Well, I'm gonna cite you when I g- get it-

   9. AGAndy Galpin23:50

      You'll probably get it wrong on Jeopardy? (laughs)

   10. AHAndrew Huberman23:52

       ... wrong (laughs) on Jeopardy. I don't have any immediate plans-

   11. AGAndy Galpin23:54

       Yeah.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman23:54

       ... to go on Jeopardy but who knows?

   13. AGAndy Galpin23:55

       Oh, there you go. Celebrity Jeopardy, Andrew Huberman.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman23:57

       Wait, uh, I don't know about the celebrity part, but-

   15. AGAndy Galpin24:00

       Yeah.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman24:00

       ... uh, Jeopardy would be fun.

   17. AGAndy Galpin24:01

       Yeah.

   18. AHAndrew Huberman24:01

       Um, but I will say-

   19. AGAndy Galpin24:02

       (laughs)

   20. AHAndrew Huberman24:02

       ... the muscle and I'll, I'll d- if you get a phone call on Jeopardy, I don't know, I haven't seen that show in a very long time-

   21. AGAndy Galpin24:07

       Yeah.

   22. AHAndrew Huberman24:07

       ... uh, maybe ever, then I'll, I'll call you. But that makes sense, um, the, the-

   23. AGAndy Galpin24:11

       So, the r-

   24. AHAndrew Huberman24:12

       ... muscles would be the largest organ system in the body.

   25. AGAndy Galpin24:14

       Yeah. The reason I was saying that is, so muscle is both listening and talking. It is controlling, uh, th- uh, the immune system a lot. It's controlling blood glucose regulation. It is r- it is the central depot...... for, uh, amino acids, which are needed to do things like regulate the immune system, build, um, any new red blood cells. A lot of this stuff is coming from skeletal muscle. So i- when we say organ, by the way, that's actually like a physiological definition, so something that's communicating, uh, to either another organ itself or, uh, throughout the system. So it's listening and it's talking. Connective tissue is not the same way. And so we do see adaptations with strength training, um, in connective tissue. It's just much lower. It's difficult to measure. Um, effectively what we know now is you're gonna have a combination, um, of adaptations throughout the connective tissue. It is beneficial. Uh, this is probably one of the major reasons that s- that strength training reduces injury risk, which is very, very important, because people who tend to want to pick, uh, up an exercise routine after, say, 10 years, um, the- the classic cliché is like, "I played all these things in high school, then I went to college, got a job. Now, I'm 25 or 35 or whatever," and you sort of want to jump back into what you did when you were 20. Well, there's no tissue tolerance left. And what we almost always mean by that is connective tissue. The tolerance in there i- is not ready for the load you're about to handle, and so you go through some movement and then boom, sprains, tears, um, you know, even th- like the more significant ones around Achilles tear, which is gonna really sideline you. So those are some of the problems, and we know strength training has a- a large role in injury reduction for stress and strain and overuse injuries, and that's specifically coming from the connective tissue adaptations. Again, the difficult part here is it's very hard to assess. We actually, um, when I was a doctoral student, we played around with, uh, patella tendon biopsies. So I actually had one. This is like a-

   26. AHAndrew Huberman26:05

       There's a little piece of your patella tendon missing?

   27. AGAndy Galpin26:07

       Yeah.

   28. AHAndrew Huberman26:08

       Because of your own-

   29. AGAndy Galpin26:09

       Yeah.

   30. AHAndrew Huberman26:09

       ... own lab work here?
6. 28:05 – 32:38

   Bone Strength & Resistance Training, Age, Women

   1. AGAndy Galpin28:05

      Yeah.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman28:05

      ... when muscle tissue grows. And I- I- I do want to ask about bone.

   3. AGAndy Galpin28:08

      Yeah.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman28:08

      Um, and here I'm not referring to-

   5. AGAndy Galpin28:10

      Bones.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman28:10

      ... bone mineral density. What I was going to ask is whether or not bone itself can grow and get stronger. And the reason I'm asking is there's a favorite result of mine. I have about 3,800 favorite results, 3,000 pet peeves and 3,800 plus, uh, favorite results. Um, but one of my favorite r- results is from Eric Kandel's lab at Columbia. Eric won the Nobel Prize for learning and memory, and his laboratory got really into the effects of exercise on learning and memory.

   7. AGAndy Galpin28:36

      Yeah.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman28:36

      And they had this incredible result, which is that load bearing exercise-

   9. AGAndy Galpin28:43

      Yeah.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman28:43

       ... stimulates the bones to release something called alst- osteocalcin, excuse me. And then osteocalcin acts as a, more or less a hormone, travels to the brain and enhances the memory systems in the brain by enhancing neuron health. That's the basic crux of- of the studies. There were several of these. And the moment I saw the first of those studies, I thought, "Well, here's another reason to do resistance type exercise and not just aerobic exercise."

   11. AGAndy Galpin29:08

       Yeah.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman29:08

       And then it brings to mind whether or not bones themselves get stronger when we do resistance training. I don't know the answer to that.

   13. AGAndy Galpin29:15

       Yeah, that's very clearly demonstrated, and we've known that for- for many decades. Um, you have a diminishing ability to do so with age. Uh, particularly, uh, you need to do this in your teens and 20s. This is where you're going to have the largest ability to enhance, um, bone mineral density. And it's particularly responsive to axial loading. Now, I'm a muscle guy. I- I'm not a bone specialist, so we would have to, uh, consult somebody who can give you more precision here. But that's the problem.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman29:40

       Could you explain axial loading?

   15. AGAndy Galpin29:42

       It's- it's up and down. It's vertical. Uh-

   16. AHAndrew Huberman29:44

       Okay, so it's almost like a, like a cylinder putting-

   17. AGAndy Galpin29:46

       Pressure.

   18. AHAndrew Huberman29:47

       ... weight, uh, th- on the small end of the cylinder-

   19. AGAndy Galpin29:48

       Yep.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman29:49

       ... sm- uh, on both small end of the cylinders.

   21. AGAndy Galpin29:50

       Yeah. So-

   22. AHAndrew Huberman29:50

       If someone doesn't do this in their 20s or teens, however, can we assume that some degree of positive change will occur if they do resistance training, even if it's a small fraction?

   23. AGAndy Galpin30:02

       The answer is yes, i- it is small. Um, we have worked with a number of women in our, um, our Rapid Health program, uh, that come in and they are in their 20s and they're in their 30s and they have significant bone mineral density problems. And eight months later we can see noticeable changes that are outside of the measurement error of- of a DEXA.

   24. AHAndrew Huberman30:21

       Positive changes?

   25. AGAndy Galpin30:22

       Positive changes, correct. And- and if you worked with, uh, there are many physicians that specialize in this area, you- you're going to need a nutrient- nutrition.... here. Um, strength training alone is probably not going to get you there, particularly with women because you have to figure out why. And, and there's a lot going on with the physiology and biochemistry, so you probably, uh, like almost surely need to have some blood chemistry done with that. Um, you have to figure out what's going on menstrual cycle-wise. In fact, like oftentimes what we'll do for our women very specifically is, we use a, a thing called the Rhythm Plus, a 30-day test. So you can actually do a salivary test across the entire menstrual cycle, and you can take, uh, samples. It's about every other day. So you'll get 15 or 16 samples, and you get a really beautiful picture of what's happening hormonally across the entire menstrual cycle. And that's really, really important because typically for women, uh, if you get a single sample or simple time point, whether it's salivary, urine or blood, you can have, um, well, like a, a, an order of magnitude difference in, in any number of metrics because of what phase they're in. This is one of the many reasons why it's been such a challenge to do a lot of physiology research with females. Um, some metrics change throughout, uh, the menstrual cycle. Others don't. Like strength is a very good example. I can strength train and I can do a one rep max test on a woman at any point. I don't have to do that at a certain phase of their menstrual cycle because it's, it's, the evidence I think is pretty clear at this point that number won't change. So, I have no qualms including females in any of my studies where strength is an absolute, uh, is an important dependent variable, because I don't have to adjust around menstrual cycle. Other factors, like anything in, in blood, anything hormone-related, you're gonna have to automatically account for it. So, uh, what I would say is, uh, those folks sh- should absolutely work with a qualified physician. Um, and, and you, you're gonna have to get some nutrition supplementation potentially, uh, and then maybe even some other stuff going on. To make that even more complicated, if you're on any form of birth control or not, that's going to change the entire equation, especially if it's a hormone-based birth control. So, it just gets really, really complicated. Uh, to answer it though, you can see adaptations. They are significantly diminished, uh, relative to if you would have started in your teens and 20s. But there is hope. You just need to work with somebody who specializes in that area.

7. 32:38 – 41:32

   Strength Training & Major Adaptations

   1. AGAndy Galpin32:38

   2. AHAndrew Huberman32:38

      So for both men and women, boys and girls, what are the major adaptations that occur to underlie improvements in strength? And if you would, if you could just provide a bullet point list of that, and then we can dive into each of those in detail. For instance, are nerves getting more-

   3. AGAndy Galpin33:00

      Yeah.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman33:00

      ... efficient at firing? Are bones enjoying adaptations in different-

   5. AGAndy Galpin33:05

      Yeah.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman33:05

      ... bone connective tissue relationships that, that underlie strength? I have to imagine all these things are happening, but what are the, the major changes that are occurring in those organs and organ systems that reflect someone's ability to on one day lift, you know, 100 pounds and then-

   7. AGAndy Galpin33:21

      Yeah.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman33:21

      ... a week later to lift, uh, 105 pounds?

   9. AGAndy Galpin33:23

      Now, I'll, I'll try to keep this condensed. Again, this could be an entire university course. Um, I will also try to give you a little bit of bones here. So normally as a muscle guy, I only, I take all the credit in muscle. Turns out, the nervous system gets a little bit of credit too here.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman33:39

       Thank you.

   11. AGAndy Galpin33:40

       Um, (laughs) so as we walk through it, just in, as, as a big picture, if we think about again what causes human movement, basically everything along that chain will improve with strength training. And I'm not really being, using too much hyperbole there. It, it's quite impressive. So g- going from the nervous system side of the equation, what has to happen for human movement is a nerve has to send a signal through a motor unit. Now a motor unit, uh, i- is, comes down and innervates multiple muscle fibers. So if you think about your actual muscle, it's not a thing. It is a component of many individual muscle fibers. So you've got millions, if not more. Um, think of it like a ponytail. So we collectively say ponytail and you think of it as, like, one thing. But really, a ponytail is a combination of tons of individual hairs. Okay? Muscle's the same way. So this motor unit comes in and innervates a lot of dis- m- different muscle fibers. Now every one of the fibers in a motor unit is generally of the same fiber type. So fast twitch or slow twitch. And they are not laid out next to each other in the muscle. They are spread out across, uh, horizontally, vertically, as well as, um, closer to the bone and further to the surface. So they're, they're moved throughout the entire way. And this is what allows you to have smoother contractions, and you don't have spasticity and things like that. So, we see improvements from the neuromuscular side like firing rate. We see synchronization improvements, um, that, that are coming in. You also see, um, improvements in things like, uh, acetylcholine release from the presynaptic neuron. Um, so you're getting it faster. We see calcium recycling is improved back, uh, to there. So, you know, in order for, without walking into too much of the biochemistry, in order for a signal to go from nerve to muscle, there's a little bit of a gap. There's a physical space that happens. A- and what happens as you release this molecule called acetylcholine, this goes into the postsynaptic cleft, and then that actually binds to a receptor. That receptor actually opens up a door that lets sodium in. That's really what's happening. So it's not the acetylcholine. Well, that acetylcholine then sits on that receptor site. It's broken down, put back in and recycled back up in the presynaptic neuron site. The faster you can do that, the faster you can recycle that signal. And so almost everything that I describe in that entire system improves and has been shown to, to, to increase with training. So that alone i- is given to give you benefits. We haven't even walked into, to getting from an electrical signal now into an action potential, which is gonna cause a muscle contraction. So, getting from nerve into the muscle, we see the- everything from improvements in what we call contractility, which means the muscle fiber themselves can produce more force or more velocity independent of muscle size changes. This is another component. When we ask, like, "Well, how is it I got stronger, uh, without getting bigger?" Well, in the muscle fiber itself, its ability to contract force increases. And this is because we have everything like the sarcoplasmic reticulum, which is the place that stores and releases the calcium, which is what's needed for this entire cross-bridge interaction from the myosin and actin, um, to happen. I know a lot of, I just lost a lot of people, but you can go look at some of these images. The sarcoplasmic reticulum gets...... uh, gets activated more. It gets more sensitive. It is better at releasing calcium, bringing it back in, and doing it again. Um, the bond between the cross-bridge, the myosin and actin, gets stronger. Um, the calcium affinity is the phrase that we use there, um, increases. So, uh, we're literally walking through almost the entire process of skeletal muscle contraction here, and every step along the way we, we see improvement. So that re- net result is we see, again, more force production independent of any change in size, independent of any increase in contractile units. We didn't add anything to the equation. We didn't change size. We did nothing but improve efficiency, uh, effectively. Independent of that, now we can actually start talking about changing muscle fiber type. So, we can change our fibers from a slow twitch fiber to a fast twitch fiber. That alone is gonna give you more force production, again, independent of size. Fast twitch fibers tend to be larger than slow twitch fibers, but not always, especially in the presence of endurance training. So, if you do a lot of consistent endurance training, it's very common for us to find slow twitch fibers that are as similar size, if not larger, often, very often larger, than the fast twitch fibers. If you do a lot of-

   12. AHAndrew Huberman37:51

       So, big, slow fibers.

   13. AGAndy Galpin37:52

       Big, slow, very metabolically effective-

   14. AHAndrew Huberman37:55

       Hmm.

   15. AGAndy Galpin37:55

       ... fibers. So, extremely fatigue-resistant. Um, so it's not a bad thing to call them slow. It's, like, we tend to say fast is slow and s- slow has this negative connotation, but it's a quite healthy, like, fiber type to have. Um, outside of that, now we haven't even gotten into things like pennation angle. So, this is the angle at which your muscle fibers interact with your bone. So, we tend to think about this as like a muscle fiber is pulling on a muscle. Well, some of these are oriented at almost a 90 degree. So, a fiber runs perpendicular into the bone. And some of them are closer to like a 45 degree, and some of them are closer to almost parallel. And that confers a lot of unique mechanical benefits. So, in one area, it's actually gonna increase force production. You go the other direction, increases velocity. And so we have all kinds of changes in the angle at which the muscle inserts into the bone. Now we're already in the mechanic side of it, right? So, we've, we've influenced how effectively it pulls. Um, and with any of these things, it's always a give and take. So, you're gonna give up, in the case of pennation angle, you're gonna give up strength, but you're gonna increase velo- shortening velocity. Or if you want to increase the velocity, you're gonna give up sort of the strength. All right? Um, we haven't gotten to any of the energetics at all. So, we haven't talked about increasing storage of phosphocreatine, which is the energy, uh, system needed to power that muscle contraction at the fastest possible rate. So, we could continue to go as, as long as you want here, but, uh, hopefully you're getting the point, uh, of a little bitty of the adaptations that occur. Um, the reason I want to actually, why I think that stuff is important to bring it back, uh, maybe for some listeners, I know I took you on a journey there and you're just like, "What the hell just happened?" That matters because, again, this is the specific explanation for how is it possible that I got stronger but I didn't get bigger? And this is also why strength and hypertrophy are intertwined and heavily overlapped, but are not necessarily the same thing. So, for example, we can increase muscle size and actually reduce strength because of what's called lattice spacing. So, what happens is, um, you r- you have to kind of remember, your muscle fibers are these long cylinders. And, uh, the way that they contract requires an optimal space. And so what happens is you have this molecule called actin, and you have this molecule called, um, myosin. Myosin sits in the middle and there are six actin that surround each individual myosin, um, in a three-dimensional circle here. So, you got a m- a myosin in the middle that has all these globular heads and they can reach up and grab an actin. And again, there's six sort of around them, right? Um, well, one of the things that can occur is if those, those actin are too close together ... So, u- imagine my hands, um, a- I'm, I'm reaching out and doing a giant T, right? So, I'm horizontal out there. Well, if my fingertips are the tips of the myosin and I'm trying to reach up and grab an actin and I want to pull those actins closer to my face, well, those actins stack on top of each other and that's what actually makes your muscles grow up. Like if I flex my bicep, it actually, you know, grows up three or four inches t- 'cause you're stacking these, these sarcomeres, or what they're called, on top of each other. All right, great. Well, if I'm reaching out to grab them and the muscle is stretched too far, I can't actually make that strong of a connection. It would be like if I reached out and grabbed something but I can only reach my longest fingertip on it. When I go to contract, I can't make that strong of a contraction 'cause my grip is weak. My grip's gonna break before I reach my strength limit. If I'm too close, there's nowhere to go. I'm already as close. So, if you actually disrupt that lattice spacing too much you can actually lose a little bit of strength. Um, so it's not that getting bigger will ever make you weaker. It's simply that you're not optimizing for strength. You're simply optimizing, um, for size. And so that can, that can explain a little bit of the, of the discontinuity between growing and performance.

8. 41:32 – 42:25

   AG1 (Athletic Greens)

   1. AGAndy Galpin41:33

   2. AHAndrew Huberman41:33

      I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a vitamin mineral probiotic and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic Greens daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me meet all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it covers my vitamins, my minerals, and the probiotics are especially important to me. Athletic Greens also contains adaptogens which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work, or just general life. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, if you'd like to try Athletic Greens go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer.

9. 42:25 – 45:56

   Hypertrophy Training & Major Adaptations; Protein Synthesis

   1. AHAndrew Huberman42:25

      What are a few of the major changes that occur in muscle, nerve, et cetera when we experience hypertrophy? I've heard of protein synthesis-

   2. AGAndy Galpin42:38

      Yeah.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman42:38

      ... changes. I'm assuming that's true. Maybe you can tell us a bit more about that. Changes in blood flow?

   4. AGAndy Galpin42:44

      Yup.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman42:45

      ... perhaps changes in neural innervation. Uh, who knows, maybe even changes in fascia. I-

   6. AGAndy Galpin42:51

      Yeah.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman42:51

      ... I'm not aware of any specifically, but, um, I have to imagine that they're somehow involved.

   8. AGAndy Galpin42:57

      Sure. So the, when we talk about hypertrophy, a lot of the adaptations are going to be similar because the, the mode of training is close enough. Um, so your nerves probably aren't smart enough to differentiate between a set of five reps or a set of eight repetitions. They, they're smart enough to differentiate anything, like they know everything that's going on, uh, but it's going to be a huge overlap. The primary difference with hypertrophy is a couple of things. So if you think about the muscle microstructure, um ... I, I have a whole series of videos on YouTube if you wanna see the visuals behind this. In fact, in there I include the specific diameter size of muscle fibers that I was, failed to give you a, a few minutes ago.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman43:33

      It's okay, we will provide an, an active link to those.

   10. AGAndy Galpin43:35

       Great. So, um, what happens is this. When we talk about, and you hear th- this classic buzz phrase of muscle protein synthesis, generally what we're talking about there is, is contractile units. And so when we say contractile units, we're talking about the myosin and actin. And so what we're really trying to do is say, "Okay, there's some amount of protein turnover where, um, we're coming in and we're trying to add more proteins to the equation." And so what has to happen there is this series of steps. So step number one is there has to be some sort of signal from the external world. Um, this could actually, oftentimes it's things like stretching of the cell wall, which is what happens with exercise, right? So you're contracting and shortening, you get this big stretch of the cell wall. It can come from as simple things like an amino acid infusion. This is just eating protein. This is why protein ingestion alone is anabolic, right? It'll help you grow muscle independent of even moving. Uh-

   11. AHAndrew Huberman44:24

       So just eating protein will grow your muscles?

   12. AGAndy Galpin44:28

       Yeah, certainly. Uh, and those da- those data are, are very clear. Um, of, of course, like anything, there's a saturation point, uh, in terms of total amount you need to get to and, and things like that. But yeah, i- if you were to walk into a laboratory fasted overnight and I gave you 30 grams of protein, we would see a very measurable increase in protein synthesis, um, quite clearly for several hours, probably four to five plus hours. Um, we could maybe bring in some people that would know those data better, but many hours later.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman44:54

       With no weight training?

   14. AGAndy Galpin44:55

       Correct.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman44:56

       I am betting that most people are not aware of that fact.

   16. AGAndy Galpin45:00

       You know what's actually interesting about it is, um, if you do the exact same study again and you just did strength training, you would also see an improvement in protein synthesis, right? But those factors are independent and the mechanisms are independent, such that if you do them both together, they stack on top of each other, which is really wonderful. And if you were to add carbohydrate into that mix, now you're actually adding fuel for the, the entire mu- muscle protein synthesis process. Uh, and now you're gonna see even additive benefits. And this is why for so many years, um, this is what bore the whole like post-exercise anabolic window thing, which is like you gotta get carbs and protein in post-exercise to maximize, um, muscle hypertrophy. Now, that turned out to be like not totally true in terms of meeting-

   17. AHAndrew Huberman45:38

       Well, the window-

   18. AGAndy Galpin45:39

       ... the magical window.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman45:39

       ... turned out to not be as strict as people initially, uh, asserted, I, as I-

   20. AGAndy Galpin45:43

       Correct.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman45:44

       ... recall. But-

   22. AGAndy Galpin45:44

       Um, but that's what-

   23. AHAndrew Huberman45:44

       ... but still, I think that's super interesting. These are parallel pathways for, for protein synthesis. Simply eating protein, um, or training each independently increases protein synthesis.

10. 45:56 – 52:26

    Endurance vs. Strength Training & Cell Signaling, Protein Synthesis

    1. AHAndrew Huberman45:56

       Uh, I can't help but ask, is the same true if one does endu- endurance type exercise? If I go out for a, a 45-minute jog, um, where I can nasal breathe the whole time, but if I were to go any faster, I would have to kick over into mouth breathing as well, so-called zone two-ish cardio-

    2. AGAndy Galpin46:11

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman46:12

       ... uh, will I see an increase in protein synthesis as, simply as a consequence of that jog?

    4. AGAndy Galpin46:17

       No. Th- this is one of, uh, the unique factors of strength training. You're, you're not going to see that. In fact, you would, it's difficult to measure protein breakdown. That's been, is extraordinarily challenging, uh, to do in the laboratory, but you're not gonna see those benefits. Um, in fact, you're gonna see quite the opposite. It's an, it is an entire molecular cascade. Um, so this is kind of how it works. So you have to have some sort of signal on the outside, and this can be, uh, an energetic signal. Um, so this could be glucose uptake, uh, could be protein intake. Uh, it could be a, a physical stretch. Um, what happens is on the cell wall, there is some sort of, it could be testosterone, right? Testosterone could bind to beta-adrenergic receptors, and this activates a whole series of cascades of signaling proteins. And these proteins basically play a game of telephone. So one tells the next one, that tells the next one, and they sort of walk this entire way. Well, that molecular cascade is fundamentally the same thing whether, regardless of the insult, but they're different pathways. And so the pathway from strength training or protein ingestion is going to go to the same nucleus. It's gonna activate a whole set of gene cascades that are gonna tell you to, to go through this entire process of protein synthesis, which I'll walk through what that is in a second. If you do endurance training, it's a different pathway. And so instead of activating this entire thing of like mTOR and AKT and this, this anabolic signaling cascade, it's gonna do a different one, um, which you can think of more of like as AMPK, um, and energy signaling things. So there's a crossover point here. In fact, one, one of the things you'll notice is mTOR and AKT don't really influence AMPK. Uh, but there is some literature that n- years ago showed AMPK will activate another protein called, um, TSC2, and that will actually inhibit mTOR. And that was the first molecular explanation for the, quote-unquote, interference effect of endurance training on hypertrophy.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman47:58

       Could you just, like highlight for people what this is? Because as you describe these signaling pathways, I just wanna, um, maybe just put a, a top contour explanation. The mTOR pathway is synonymous with cell growth-

    6. AGAndy Galpin48:10

       Yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman48:10

       ... both during development as organisms, humans included-

    8. AGAndy Galpin48:14

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman48:14

       ... mature and cells get larger, mTOR is abundant in the system.

    10. AGAndy Galpin48:20

        Totally.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman48:20

        That's just, uh, to put it quite simply. And then the AMPK pathway and some of the metabolic signaling that you're referring to m- is more synonymous with cardiovascular exercise in this-

    12. AGAndy Galpin48:29

        Yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman48:29

        ... at least in the context of this discussion, and fuel utilization.

    14. AGAndy Galpin48:33

        Yeah.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman48:34

        And what you described as a crossover point where certain forms of exercise can tap into both of these-

    16. AGAndy Galpin48:40

        Yeah.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman48:40

        ... but at least for the sake of this conversation, we're, we're largely separating them.

    18. AGAndy Galpin48:45

        Yeah. Because the, the, the byproduct is the thing that, uh, that matters here. So the result of, um, mTOR and AKT getting into the nucleus is going to be increase in protein synthesis. The result of AMPK running down to the mito- is gonna be a result in increasing mitochondrial biogenesis. So the net outcome is different.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman49:04

        Mm-hmm.

    20. AGAndy Galpin49:04

        Now...I do, I do want to flag it very quickly. This is an (laughs) extraordinarily complicated thing, and, um, i-in fact in our laboratory we were able to, to be one of the first that figured out how to measure all the different sub-units of AMPK in individual muscles by fiber type. So we were able to-

    21. AHAndrew Huberman49:22

        So that's 'cause you were ripping people's muscles out of their knees and their-

    22. AGAndy Galpin49:25

        Yeah.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman49:25

        ... patellar tendons, uh-

    24. AGAndy Galpin49:26

        So, AMP-

    25. AHAndrew Huberman49:27

        Just teasing. They're, they're gently removing with-

    26. AGAndy Galpin49:29

        Uh...

    27. AHAndrew Huberman49:30

        ... under IRB protocol.

    28. AGAndy Galpin49:31

        Of course.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman49:31

        Of course.

    30. AGAndy Galpin49:32

        Um, so even when we say something like AMPK, it's not one thing. And when we say things like mTOR, it's not one thing either. It is, you have the total amount that matters, you have the activation, and the activation sites are many of them, so it's not as simple, um, a-a-as what I'm laying it on. I just want to g- uh, yeah, a b-big concept of kind of what's happening here, to, to actually kind of answer your question, which is, okay, so how is the muscle actually growing? What you have to understand is, is a little bit of how, um, protein synthesis occurs. So what I'm generally meaning is you have a whole bunch of amino acids, and this actually goes back to maybe, like, middle school biology class, right? So if you take a bunch of amino acids and you combine them together, we get these things called a peptide, right? And if anyone who's never heard of, like, peptides, that's all it really means. You put a bunch of those together, you have a polypeptide. You put a bunch of those together and we now have a protein. So any protein I want to make is gonna go through the exact same system, the exact same steps. It doesn't matter if that protein is going to be a red blood cell, it doesn't matter if that's going to be a hair follicle, doesn't matter if it's gonna be skeletal muscle. That's basically protein synthesis. So when we tend to think of protein synthesis, we, we just paint this picture of growing more muscle, and that's not the only thing. And so when we talk about the benefits of having high quality muscle as being this place that's gonna regulate most of your protein synthesis, we tend to lose some people because they're thinking, "Oh, I don't need to gain muscle." And that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about regulating the immune system. We're regula- we're talking about regulating any protein turnover, so any protein that's degradated or needs to be broken down in your, in your system at all. Autophagy, this is the en- like, this is such an important buzzword. Um, that's just protein breakdown of, of an unneeded or, or damaged protein, right? That whole thing is going to go through protein synthesis to be able to come back and replace, uh, the thing's... The only reason you go through autophagy is so you can clean that garbage out and then come back and build in a more properly functioning protein. So, it's not just about growing more muscle mass. It's why you want these systems to be operating well. So, the protein ingestion is going to just activate that cascade, because it's basically saying, "Oh, hey, look, we have an abundance of supply here. Why don't we make something out of it? Because we don't know the next time this thing is going to be around." Um, carbohydrates and fat are very easy to store. Protein is very challenging. It's more transient. A- and so you can store some of it and keep it around, but most of it you're going to lose. And so when it's available, your, your body wants to act very quickly. It doesn't necessarily care if you have extra fat floating around in your system. It's, "All right, let's just package it up and store it. We can easily bring this back out." But if you got protein around, y- you're going to want to use it. And so that's why it alone will activate and increase protein synthesis, um, independent of exercise. So those effects are additive, like I said, because that signaling process is independent, a- a- and then once you hit a rate-limiting phase, then it, you are, you are there. Uh, but at its onset those things will work independently.

11. 52:26 – 56:37

    Muscle Hypertrophy, Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy

    1. AGAndy Galpin52:26

       Okay, so that being said, what is skeletal muscle hypertrophy? In general, we think about it as this increase in contractile proteins, so those myosin and actin effe- effectively get thicker. Okay, now what happens is since they are thicker, and as I talked about a second ago, that influences and actually hurts the lattice spacing. And so what your body does as a result is say, "Hey, let's increase the diameter of the entire cell so that we can maintain our spacing between these things," right? I- it's effectively like if, if, you know, the two of us were sitting in this room and you doubled in size, and I was like, "Whoa, whoa, you're in my personal space." Like, and I doubled in size. Now we're in each other's space. The, uh, at some point we just have to make the room larger, and that's exactly what's happening in the cell. And so a- as you can continue to increase muscle size, you can make it, or, uh, musc- myofibrillar, um, accretion, you're gonna continue to increase muscle fiber size. For years there was this other comment about, um, non-functional hypertrophy, and this was often called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Now, this is not sarcoplasmic reticulum. This is a fancy way of saying, "My muscle is larger, but it has no function." And the question would be, well, how the hell is that possible? If I have more contractile units and I can make more of these crossbridges, perform more of these power strokes, is what these contractions are called, how could I possibly be losing function? Well, that was challenged for... That was bro science for a very, very long time. And in fact what it really came down to was, are there different types of hypertrophy training, some that induce contractile protein hypertrophy and some that induce sarcoplasmic hypertrophy? And that was significantly challenged until recently. Mike Roberts did a, uh, at Auburn did a, a series of wonderful studies that showed quite clearly that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is probably happening, um, and in fact there's probably a pretty easy explanation. In general, what happens is it is, it is a increase in fluid, uh, in the muscle fiber. And so n- this would allow for the diameter to be larger, but since there is no addition of contractile units, no more force production happens. And so he actually has a wonderful review paper, I believe it's open access, where you can go look and he created a wonderful graph. Um, I think that's in my, in my hypertrophy videos on YouTube as well. And you can actually see that it's likely happening in phasic changes throughout your training experience. So at the beginning of your training, but as, uh, as the years and year- or weeks, rather, and months and then eventually years go by in your training, we have a change in the hypertrophy that's coming from, uh, contractile units versus sarcoplasmic. Um, so I think that is, is an important note, because again people are wondering like, "Well, how the hell is it even possible for me to get larger muscle and somehow I'm not stronger?" Well, if it came from simply fluid retention, and, and this is not bloating, this is not... There's no negative really to this. It is simply, um, holding of, of more hydration in the cell. Diameter gets larger, a- and then everything works that way.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman55:16

       What you just described calls to mind something similar in the nervous system, which is neuroplasticity, which of course, is the nervous system's ability to change in response to learning and experience, and damage for that matter.

    3. AGAndy Galpin55:26

       Yep.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman55:27

       And we think about it as one term, but there are many different forms of neuroplasticity.

    5. AGAndy Galpin55:32

       Yeah.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman55:32

       Uh, a discussion that we don't need to get into now, but there's spike-timing-dependent plasticity and LTP and long-term depression, which has nothing to do with psychological depression-

    7. AGAndy Galpin55:40

       Yep.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman55:40

       ... and on, and impaired pulse facilitation, and on and on and on, and short-term plasticity. And so what I'm starting to understand is that there are many paths to what we call strength increase, and there are many paths to what we think of as hypertrophy. Many of these are going to operate in parallel. It's going to be rare that any one of them is going to be active a- alone-

    9. AGAndy Galpin56:02

       Yep.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman56:02

        ... in order to create hypertrophy or strength changes. And that certain forms of exercise and certain ways of doing exercises, in terms of sets and repetition schemes and rest intervals between sets and between training sessions, are going to tap into different mechanisms, but also overlapping sets of mechanisms. Which is why, if I understand correctly, you mentioned at the beginning that often, not always, but often strength increases are associated with some hypertrophy changes, and hypertrophy increases are often, not always, associated with strength increases. Do I have that

12. 56:37 – 1:04:00

    Muscle Physiology & Plasticity, Muscle “Memory”

    1. AHAndrew Huberman56:37

       right?

    2. AGAndy Galpin56:37

       Correct. And the beauty of this whole thing is, while we don't yet know the mechanisms specifically, and there's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of changes that happen. There's a... We actually just submitted a paper a few days ago. Um, myself, uh, Jimmy Bagley out of San Francisco and Kevin Murick at, uh, a won- has a wonderful muscle physiology lab at Arkansas. And we, we, we actually, this is a very lay article, actually. It's incredibly easy to read. Um, we describe the, the role of myonucleation in, uh, muscle hypertrophy. And this is actually a lot of interesting stuff we get into there, but, um, we're, we're learning more and more about it. Uh, as a quick example, so skeletal muscle is unique in the fact that it is so large in diameter. It's also unique in the fact that it's multi-nucleated. What that means is, um, typically in biology, you see like a cell has one nucleus. That's the place that houses and holds the DNA and it's a control center. It tells it to grow, shrink, die, repair, that whole thing. Well, skeletal muscle in a human is awesome because it has thousands, if not more of those nuclei, which gives it that plasticity. And so a normal cell has one place it has to go to for any time it wants to up-regulate, down-regulate, do whatever the thing is. Your muscle fibers have these little control centers all throughout them. And for years we were like, "Okay, great." The amount of hypertrophy that you can experience is probably limited by the amount of nuclei you have, because you're not going to exceed a certain size of muscle fiber if that's going to mean you lose control. And so we were like, "Okay, great. We've found and identified a limiting factor to what will determine how much a muscle can actually grow." And then the next question was then, "Then where are these things coming from?" And, and this is where satellite cells come in. And so it was very clear, a satellite cell that's lying dormant sort of on the, the outside, the periphery of the fiber, will then go in, um, into the ph- into the fiber. It will turn into, uh, uh myonuclei and then it can actually, you know, increase your diameter like that. And so then actually it was like, "Hey, you're actually limited by the amount of these satellite cells you can get in and turn into nuclei." And then w- the evidence came out that showed, hey, well what if you detrain? So what if I ... I used to lift weights like a long time ago and I got big, but now I've lost a lot of my muscle. If I train again, do you actually get that muscle back faster than it took you the very first time to build it? Like that's what we call muscle memory, like in our field. Now, on your side of the equation, muscle memory is something different, right? It's a neuromuscular thing.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman59:00

       Well, when people talk about muscle memory, um, like the ability to ride a bicycle after so many years of not having, uh, tried to ride one, that's actually largely independent of the muscle.

    4. AGAndy Galpin59:10

       It's ex-

    5. AHAndrew Huberman59:10

       It has something to do with the muscle.

    6. AGAndy Galpin59:11

       It's exclusively independent of the muscle.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman59:12

       It's, it's m- it's basically a nervous system phenomenon.

    8. AGAndy Galpin59:14

       100%.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman59:15

       So muscle memory, uh, has been co-opted, uh, by different communities to mean different things.

    10. AGAndy Galpin59:19

        Yeah.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman59:20

        Um-

    12. AGAndy Galpin59:20

        So on our side, muscle memory is going to mean that ability to remember that muscle size, right? That hypertrophy. Because as you explained, the, the motor control thing is a, it's a totally a nerve thing. This is the one, I'll give you this one. You guys, the nerve people can have this one.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman59:34

        Well, it seems to me that there are a tremendous number of parallels between strength and hypertrophy changes and neuroplasticity. This is coming up again and again in this conversation, um, because we know, for instance, that if you are exposed to a couple of different languages early on in life, you will learn any number of different languages far more easily later in life.

    14. AGAndy Galpin59:55

        Of course.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman59:55

        And that's because there's some crossover between different languages-

    16. AGAndy Galpin59:57

        Yeah.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman59:58

        ... especially Latin-based languages, that allows for that. There's a substrate for it. It's similar to the, the ability to-

    18. AGAndy Galpin1:00:03

        Right.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:03

        ... hop on a bicycle again phenomenon or play an instrument phenomenon.

    20. AGAndy Galpin1:00:07

        Yeah.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:07

        But it's broader than that.

    22. AGAndy Galpin1:00:08

        Yeah.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:09

        And, uh, again, I think this speaks to the huge number of different adaptive changes that are occurring in the cells and in-

    24. AGAndy Galpin1:00:16

        Yeah.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:16

        ... the nerves that innervate these cells when one experiences increases in strength and hypertrophy.

    26. AGAndy Galpin1:00:20

        Yeah. So to, to round that out, um, and to go back to what I was saying there, what we're actually learning now is that nucleation thing. A- and by the way, this entire trajectory story is probably over the last like eight years. Like this is how fast we've changed our understanding of how muscle grows. Uh, the sarcoplasmic reticulum thing five years ago was, was bro science. Now it's, it's pretty well established. The myonucleation thing was eight to 10 years ago. It's changing every week. This paper we just submitted this week showed actually, um, why we had generally thought a few years ago ... And in fact, you can find me on podcasts and probably in some of my videos talking about this, and I'm gonna tell you right now, those things are wrong. Like we've just had new things come out in these last couple years where that detaining effect we thought was a reason of ... Well, what happens is if you had the muscle before and you brought in these nuclei and they differentiated and turned into, into nuclei, and then the muscle got small again, you would preserve those nuclei. And that's why when you go to train again, they were already around, so the muscle grows faster the second time than it did the first time. Well, now it looks like that's actually not the case. In fact, it's actually probably hap- what's happening is it's a, it's a epigenetic change.... um, in the nuclei's ability to access the DNA needed to grow muscle. It's effectively ... The analogy we used, it's ... The nuclei are r- remembering how to ride a bike. So, it's quite funny that you said that, because it's not really necessarily that they're being preserved over time. They're ... They have learned the sequence it takes to grow the protein there, and it goes ... It happens faster the second time. And we've also learned that there are specific nuclei. We've known this for actually a, a while. We, we found this in our lab. We didn't discover it. Um, we just ... We saw this in, in our ... some of our hybrids, but there are different shapes to the nuclei. Uh, some are more oval, some are more elongated, and the shape determines a lot of the function. Some of them are hanging out more towards the periphery, and some of them are hanging out right around the nucleus. Well, it looks like there's actually probably different types of nuclei, um, a lot of them that are specific to the mitochondria. Uh, in fact, you can see, like, the ... on some of the imaging we have, where you're just like, they're just packed around the mi- the mitochondria. And there are some that are probably specific to injury repair. And so this is probably explaining a lot of the, the individual variation. I mean, I know you've, you've said previously, like, you're just a very ... you're very slow at recovering. There's a lot of things that go into that, and I would, I would love to walk through sort of all the buckets, uh, oh, maybe later, uh, into recovery. But one of the inherent genetic variations is could be simply that you maybe have more or less of the nuclei responsible for tissue repair. Um, that's something that's been happening the last, like, handful of months that's been coming out. We'll see if that holds up as true or not. Um, so as we're learning more and more almost every day about muscle physiology, what's super fun and interesting, and I think the most exciting, what to do in nor- in terms of, like, how to train and how to eat and how to do everything else to get these adaptations has been pretty well-established for a long, long, long time. We're just figuring out how, like, what's happening in the muscle now, but we know what to do. So from a practical standpoint, putting together protocols, um, for any outcome that you want or don't want, for any modality. You don't have a gym. You have, uh, weights. You have dumbbells only. You only have kettlebells. You don't wanna ... You only use body weight. We can ... You only have three days a week, you have seven days a week, you wanna maximize muscle growth, you wanna get a little bit stronger, any of these variables you wanna throw at me, um, we have a large evidence base for exactly how to get those adaptations and not others. So, um, while we have a lot to learn about the mechanisms and the physiology, um, we have pretty good legs to stand on in terms of what to do to get whatever adaptations you

13. 1:04:00 – 1:11:51

    Non-Negotiables & Modifiable Variables of Exercise Training

    1. AGAndy Galpin1:04:00

       want.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:00

       So what are the essential components of an effective strength and hypertrophy protocol?

    3. AGAndy Galpin1:04:05

       Okay. So what I would like to actually do is, is walk you through both of those, because as we mentioned before, they overlap. Um, but the training needs to be differentiated so that you can optimize either strength, hypertrophy, or if you actually want, you can get a combination of both. This allows you to then get the adaptation you want, avoid ones you don't want, uh, and then get it ... even a combination if that's the preference. So you know a lot of people will talk about, "I wanna get a little stronger, I wanna add some muscle." That's a different answer than someone who wants to truly maximize muscle, which is a different answer from somebody who maximizes ... wants to maximize strength, which is a different answer from somebody who wants to maximize strength but not actually gain muscle. So we have all these combinations. What's important to understand before we get into the details is a couple of things. Number one, we, we've been teasing this concept so far of the concepts are few but the methods are many, and so I wanna hit those concepts right now. These are, um, as you, as you say, these are the non-negotiables that have to happen in any training program. And, and I'm referring to these in the strength and hypertrophy conversation, but these are true of power development, speed development, muscular endurance, uh, endurance, any other thing. These are things that just have to happen for any training program to work. I mentioned one, uh, a l- a little bit earlier, which was adherence. And so the ... My, um, frequent collaborator, Dan Garner, will constantly say, "Consistency beats intensity." Um, a- again, in fact, the literature will show you very clearly adherence, um, is the number one predictor of physical fitness outcomes. So we wanna do something that you will engage in, will ... uh, you'll put effort into, and you'll be able to repeat consistently over time. So that's number one. The second one is ... And this is a major reason that people don't hit their fitness goals. In fact, I would argue outside of not doing it, the number one mistake they make is progressive overload. So I'm gonna walk you through exactly how much you should be increasing, um, your sets and reps and weight, et cetera, uh, per week, per month, uh, later. But that's the biggest thing. You have got to have some sort of overload, uh ... The body works as an adaptation mechanism, right? So in fact, um, we, we talked previously about the Harvard Fatigue Lab, and one of the things actually people don't realize is the concept of homeostasis is actually comes from research at the Harvard Fatigue Lab. It was, um, work that they did on an endurance runner. I, I forget his name. A- and they sort of realized that after a long period of time working out ... Uh, this is an acute exercise spell. The body actually comes back to some stable place, despite the fact he was continuing to work. And that's exactly what bore the phrase steady state. Uh, and that actually then they launched off. They said, "Wow, there's this state that the body wants to be in, and we'll call this homeostasis." So that all ... Those all concept came out of exercise physiology, which is really, really cool, right? Um, we don't get a lot of love a lot of times scientifically, but that's a good one that we took. So why that all matters is we have got to achieve some sort of overload without, uh, going excess. So w- we'll cover that later, uh, exactly what to do, and we'll get pote- potentially get into overtraining and monitoring

    4. NANarrator1:07:07

       mhm.

    5. AGAndy Galpin1:07:08

       ... and things like that. But you have to have some sort of consistent, predictable overload. That's what's gonna cause adaptation to continue to cause stress. If you don't do that, you can still do things like burn calories. You can still get some of the other benefits of exercise, like improved mood, cognitive function, et cetera, et cetera. Flexibility increases. All those can happen without a progressive overload. But if you want to see these gains in strength and hypertrophy, you really need to, um, progress with the overload. So that's concept number two.Uh, the third one here, um, i- is going to be individualization. And this is when we can get into things, like, personal preference, you know, equipment availability. You have kettlebells or dumbbells, or you only have bands, or you have none of that. Um, these are all smaller details, but that's an important component, uh, to it. The last one I really want to get into is picking the appropriate target. And w- we went through this when we talked about the fitness protocol. And, and if you run through something like that and you run some testing and figure out where your biggest limitations are, that's going to help you identify where you need to go. Um, so if you can do all those things, you're going to be in a good spot to balance specificity and variation. All right? So if you want to make sure you grow your biceps, you better make sure your biceps are working. Having said that, if you over-rely on specificity, you're going to increase the likelihood of overuse injuries, which is going to come back and actually hamper consistency over time. All right? So this is when hedging towards specificity is important, but too much can cause a problem. If you go the other direction and you go too much variation, so imagine you're just sort of doing all kinds of different exercises every time you, you work out, that's actually not enough stimuli directly on the muscle or muscle groups or movement pattern, if you're wanting to learn a new movement, um, to get you very far. And so this is a classic problem of, "I'm doing a lot of work but I don't have a very clear direction. I lack specificity. So I'm working but I'm not seeing a lot of improvements." And this is like, in the business world, et cetera, this is like doing a whole bunch of different things means you get nothing really done. So that's the game we're gonna play here, right? How do we overload this stuff? How do we make sure we're balancing specificity and variation? How do we make sure I want to do this? And then, how do I individualize it for my needs and circumstances and, and movement restrictions and of time availability and my calendar and desires and all these things? So those are the concepts we absolutely have to hit. The methods that we choose run across a handful of variables and we call these things modifiable variables. Because as you modify them or you make different choices within these variables, you get different outcomes or adaptations. This is exactly what determines the nine adaptations we- that we've been talking about. So the way that I like to say this is, exercises do not determine adaptation. So you can't simply go, "I want to get stronger, therefore I'm going to choose these exercises." That's not how it works. What determines adaptation is the execution of the exercises. So a deadlift is my favorite example. A deadlift is a common, um, example that people think of when they want to choose a lower body strength exercise. But a deadlift will not increase your strength unless you're executing it in the proper fashion. I'm not only talking about technique here, I'm talking about these modifiable variables. The same thing for power exercises. We'll commonly see mistakes of doing, uh, activities like a box jump. Which is great. People think, "Oh, I'm gonna get- improve my power," which we know is extremely highly correlated to, um, activities of daily living and particularly living unassisted as you age, right, i- is reduction of power. So they'll do an activity like a box jump. What they're failing to realize is unless you do it powerfully, you won't actually increase power. Um, if you don't move fast, you won't get faster. So the, the way that we manipulate these variables is everything to determining the adaptation you get or, again, don't get. So with that foundation, I think we can kind of run right into these things, uh, and we can start off with perhaps speed and power. And I want to- what I would like to do is walk you through all those modifiable variables, uh, what to do with them, and then hit you with as many different methodologies as, as we really have time for. Uh, and then we'll move on to strength and hypertrophy and kind of round the entire thing out. Uh, and then maybe at the end we can talk some other variables like, what happens if, uh, I have a training protocol and I'm halfway through it and I can't finish my workout? Uh, what should I do? Reduce my weight or reduce my duration or things like that. So there's lots of what if scenarios that we can go through that potentially, uh, a lot of people listening have questions about. So sound like a plan?

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:50

       Sounds like a plan.

14. 1:11:51 – 1:12:53

    InsideTracker

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:51

       I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor, InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health and wellbeing can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. One issue with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there, however, is that you get information back about various levels of lipids and hormones and metabolic factors, et cetera, but you don't know what to do with that information. InsideTracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy. They have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are, of course, but then also what sorts of behavioral dos and don'ts, what sorts of nutritional changes, what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can visit insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of InsideTracker's plans. Again, that's insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20%

15. 1:12:53 – 1:22:02

    Tool: Speed & Power Training, “3 to 5” Approach, Periodization, Planning

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:53

       off. So just to interrupt briefly and make sure that I and everybody else have in mind the proper nine adaptations that we've been referring to and that were discussed in detail in episode one, I have listed number one, skill and technique, number two, speed, number three, power, which is speed times force, number four, strength, number five, hypertrophy, number six, muscular endurance, number seven, anaerobic capacity, number eight, maximal aerobic capacity, and number nine, long duration steady state exercise.

    2. AGAndy Galpin1:13:31

       Yep. You nailed it. Thank you for, for that. It was probably important clarification for everybody. Um, so that being said, let- let's jump right into, to speed and power.Now, I'll do these a little bit simultaneously. Uh, they are different. If you're a high-performance athlete, you really need to separate these two things. M- for the most people though, we can probably think about them as, as the same thing. There's not a lot of pure speed training, uh, that the general public is, is interested in. Um, if you want to actually further break down speed, there are multiple components. There's acceleration, there's top-end velocity, there's change of direction or agility, things like that. So we'll just kind of call all that speed and power for now. Now, at the onset, there's this three to five concept that, that we talked about, uh, many times, where this is really fairly true for speed, power, or strength. Now, I, I didn't develop the three to five. It's just an easy way to help you remember one concept that will run true across all these things. So three to five, i- it refers to three to five days per week. Uh, pick three to five exercises, and you're gonna do three to five repetitions per set. You'll do three to five sets, uh, and you'll rest three to five minutes, uh, between each set. If you do that and you execute any of the exercises that you choose at a high intent, and that part is critical. You don't get faster by moving kind of fast. You can't improve power by moving like, eh, powerfully. You have to be trying. Regardless of whether you're actually moving faster or not, any time you're talking about speed or power, you're, by definition, using submaximal weights. So you're going to be able to lift it. That's not the question. The question is, how fast can you lift that implement? A- and so intention is incredibly important. So if you do that, the same for strength, by the way. So if you land on that, that allows you to run the gamut from as little as three days a week, you're doing three exercises, you're gonna do three sets of three, which is a very, very low volume. It's a, uh, a very low amount of days. Easy to handle. All the way to five sets of five of five exercises five days a week. So it, it, it's... Again, it's, it's just one sample, uh, that's something easy to remember and is quite effective for a very long time. And this has been, um, tested quite extensively in, in both the coaching realms as well as the scientific realms to be, um, quite productive and, and easy to follow and grasp. If you do that, all you need to do is slightly increase the load, um, or the volume, but mostly the load over time, and the number we want to look for there is something like a 3 to 5% increase per week. Uh, so an example would be if you're going to do, uh, an exercise at 100 pounds, you can't necessarily just add five pounds every week. That's gonna catch up to you pretty quickly. And so you may have to run some, a, a smaller increment. Uh, if you're doing like a lower body exercise where you might have a couple of hundred pounds on the weight, you can probably get away with adding five pounds 'cause it's still a, a low percentage of the total load. So, um, that's roughly, uh, the guide that we wanna get to for speed, power, and strength.

Episode duration: 4:39:23