Essentials: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness | Dr. Andy Galpin

1. 0:00 – 0:44

   Andy Galpin

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. Doctor, Professor Andy Galpin, super excited to have you here. You're such an immense treasure trove of information on physical training and optimizing for specific goals and outcomes. How should I, or anyone else for that matter, think about their level of fitness in terms of really assessing whether or not I'm as fit as I could be and should be, both for sake of health and

2. 0:44 – 2:32

   Fitness Goals, Appearance & Performance

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:44

      performance?

   2. AGDr. Andy Galpin0:44

      When it comes to exercise, people generally have two major goals in mind. Goal number one is achieving some sort of appearance, right? This is, uh, I wanna be big or I wanna not be too big, or I wanna be lean. There is an aesthetic component to almost everybody. They wanna look a certain way or not look a certain way. The other one is functionality, so I wanna be able to perform a certain way. Now again, that definition differs per person, so I wanna be better at strength, I wanna be better at mobility, I wanna be able to have energy throughout the day, whatever it is. So there's some sort of appeal to aesthetic, and there's some sort of appeal to functionality. So within both of those categories, we want to be in a position where we can understand, where do I need to go with my exercise training so that I can be as fit and as healthy and a- achieve these goals that I want now, as well as be in a position where I can maintain them for a long period of time? So this blends both immediate goals, so say you're just interested in squatting a lot of weight, say you're interested in running a 5K time, the best you want, it doesn't matter. It blends that with the abil- the, the desire to have a long wellness span, to be fit throughout life, to achieve all those things for as long as possible. So then, then the question kind of comes back to saying, "Well, how do I know which area I need to focus on the most, and why am I not achieving these goals, or how can I get there more effectively?" And if we look at the big picture, we have to understand that there are several major components to physical fitness that are going to be required in all of these categories. And to achieve that, there are a handful of components that have to happen. So what I'd love to do today is, over the course of our discussion, is hit exactly what those concepts are, and then cover a whole bunch of different methods, and w- we could do that for hours, but we'll cover a number of them for various goals.

3. 2:32 – 6:03

   Nine Components of Physical Fitness

   1. AHAndrew Huberman2:32

      What are the major adaptations that one can create in their body using exercise?

   2. AGDr. Andy Galpin2:37

      The physiological adaptations can be bucketed really into nine areas. So the very first one is what I call skill or technique. This could be running more effectively. This could be practicing a skill like shooting a, a ball or an implement, swinging a golf club, anything like that. I call that skill development. The second one is speed. This is simply moving at a higher velocity or with a better rate of acceleration. That's very similar to the next one, which is power, and power is speed multiplied by force. The next one then, of course, on top of that is force or strength. So those are really synonymous terms, right? Uh, how effectively can you move something? Now, this is often confused, strength rather, uh, as muscular endurance. So what I mean by that is strength truly is a marker of what's the maximum thing you can move, or what's the maximum amount of force you can produce one time. Number five is muscle hypertrophy, and this is the first time now we're talking about an appearance rather than a functional outcome. This is the first one that's just simply how big is your muscle, and that's muscle hypertrophy or muscle size. After that is muscular endurance, so this is how many repetitions you can typically do of a movement. So think of how many push-ups in a row you can do, how many sit-ups in a minute you can do, things that are typically in like 5 to 50 repetition sort of range, and it is almost always local muscle. A push-up test is, is really how many reps that your triceps and pecs and, and deltoids can do. It is not a cardiovascular endurance. It is not a global physiological endurance. It's specific to typically one or a few muscle groups at a time. And this is why you have to do multiple tests for, for sort of every group there. Uh, after that, now we've moved into number seven, which is what I call anaerobic capacity. This is more synonymous with maximum heart rate, and now we're actually looking at, rather than a single movement or muscle group, it is a total physiological limitation. It is the maximum amount of work you can do in, say, 30 to 45 seconds, maybe even up to 120 seconds of all-out work. Think of your classic interval type of stuff here. So how much work can you do, uh, at a maximum rate where you're gonna enter tremendous amounts of global fatigue? The next past that is maximal aerobic capacity, and this is probably something like in the 8 to 15-minute range, where you're going to reach probably both a maximum heart rate as well as a true VO2 max. So that is different from the previous one, where it-- you can't reach this in a matter of seconds. It simply takes multiple minutes to get to a position to where your VO2 max is actually going to be, uh, sufficiently challenged or an indicator there. And then the last one, number nine, is what I call long duration, and this is just your ability to sustain submaximal work for a long period of time with no breaks, no reduction whatsoever. This is often called steady-state training, or a lot of people just think of this when they think of, quote-unquote, "cardio." But your ability to continue movement without any breaks or change or drop, uh, is the last and final adaptation. So really, if you look at a kind of a minimum number there, it's generally 20 minutes of what we're looking for. But a, a more typical would be 20 to 60 minutes. But anything past that would still be limited by your long-duration endurance, so your ability to sustain work over time.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman5:53

      Can you walk us through the nine different adaptations that you mentioned earlier and give us a way to assess our level of adaptation in each of those nine?

4. 6:03 – 9:53

   Movement Skill, Tool: Assessing Movement Quality

   1. AGDr. Andy Galpin6:03

      All right, the very first one we wanna talk about is, is movement skill. This is really about human movement so that you stay injury-free. And you can continue to train for as long as possible. So what are the minimum requirements? Now, if you can have access to a highly qualified physical therapist or movement specialist, that's the best route. Go to them, have them identify all of your movement patterns, overhead pressing, squatting, running, all these things. That's your gold standard. If you wanna do it yourself, though, here's a, a very simple four-step solution. So the way that I, I teach this is I go joint by joint. And so I, I think of this just as the major ones, your shoulder, your elbow, your low back, hip, knee, and ankle. Okay, now what you can do is do a representative movement for you. So if you bench a lot, use the bench. If you do pull-ups, use the pull-up. If you squat, do that. I would recommend doing an upper body press, an upper body pull, a lower body press, and lower body pull. An example would be a push-up, a pull-up or a bent row, a squat, and then a deadlift. And record a frontal view and a side view. Uh, probably do three to 10 repetitions per angle, okay? Slow and controlled, and you wanna look for four key things. Number one is you wanna look for symmetry. So symmetry is front to back, left to right, and your right limb and your left limb. If they aren't moving perfectly, that's fine, but you wanna see is one moving further ahead than the other one? Is one turning to the side and one's not? Is one fidgeting and, and twitching around differently? So you wanna look just to check to see and make sure that they're stable. Number two, you wanna look for stability. So key indicators here are things like if you, if you can't go through a, a squat, a controlled squat where your knees don't start shaking, that would be an instability issue. So can you do the movement slow? Can you pause at the bottom, maybe three seconds, maybe five seconds or 10? You should have complete control of that movement at all of these joints. Are your hips sliding to one side when you stand up? Is one elbow closer to your body when you're benching and the other one's more flared out? These are the things I'm talking about, right? I'm not worried about what angle they should be at or not. You're simply looking for asymmetries or instabilities. All right, so again, as you're pushing up, does one elbow start flipping and twitching and going all over the place? The third one is what I call awareness. There are a lot of movement technique issues that are simply people don't know, and so you'll watch them squat. I do this in my classes all the time. I'll have 100 kids out there squatting, and you'll see some horrible squat technique, and then when you just tell them, "Hey, did you realize your heels are supposed to be on the ground at all times when you squat?" They're like, "Oh, okay," and they can correct it. It's not actually a movement flaw. It was just simply an awareness. I didn't know, and then I actually didn't realize that that was happening, that position. So we want all of our joints to be going through a general full range of motion, which is number four. So the ankles, uh, during, like, a squat. Your knee should be able to go as far over your toe as possible while maintaining good position, your feet flat on the floor, your, you know, three points of contact, your whole flat foot, and you're not compromising another joint. So that's all you're going to look for, those four things, symmetry, stability, awareness, and range of motion through each joint, through each movement. You can generally kind of clear these things in one or two repetitions in a couple of seconds. I just look for absolutely terrible, like can't do it at all, minor flaw, or pretty close to good. That, that's really all I'm looking for. So my scoring system is zero, one, three. Zero is like you're not going to do this exercise 'cause you're at a very high acute risk. You might get hurt on rep one tomorrow. Now, like, a score of one is like there's a minor flaw here. We can probably do it, but we need to be cautious of load and volume. The other one is maybe it's perfect, maybe it's not, but go ahead and sort of do it on a reasonable protocol. You'll be fine. So that's generally, uh, what you would need to do as a cost-free method of identifying good movement technique within any of the things that, that you would do.

5. 9:53 – 10:15

   Speed Testing

   1. AHAndrew Huberman9:53

      What about speed?

   2. AGDr. Andy Galpin9:54

      I actually don't think this is one most people should test. If you're a high-performance athlete, we can run a 40-yard dash, or we can do, uh, some different things with a velocity transducer on a barbell if you're a weightlifter or something. But for most people, pure speed is really maximum velocity or acceleration or kind of the two ways we break it down. It's not s- s- generally not that necessary to

6. 10:15 – 11:36

   Power, Tool: Standing Broad Jump

   1. AGDr. Andy Galpin10:15

      test.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman10:15

      What about number three, power, which I believe before you told me was speed times force?

   3. AGDr. Andy Galpin10:21

      The cost-free version here is a simple broad jump. So this is stand, you know, normal position, jump out as far in front of you as you possibly can, and measure the distance between where you started and the back of your heel where it lands. A super basic number to look for there is your height. So you should be able to broad jump how tall you are. If you're five foot five, you should hit five foot five, six foot five, et cetera. That's gonna ratchet down a little bit, about 15% for females. They just simply don't have the power in general that men have, and so you're gonna wanna bring that down a little bit. But that's a, it's a very crude number. If you were to look at, like, a high-performance NFL player, if they're six feet tall, they're gonna be jumping, like, 9 to 10 to 11 feet. We're not looking for optimization in this particular test. What you are looking for red flags. If you can jump your body height, you're gonna be just fine. To clarify, there's no running approach here. You're gonna stand at a still. Yeah, you can swing, bounce as much as you'd like to do. You're gonna projectile off, so you're gonna measure the distance from the tip of your toe, so basically stand behind the line, and then the furthest point back where you land, so basically the worst possible score, not the best possible, 'cause your feet won't land symmetrically. One's probably gonna be a little bit farther. Just use the furthest point back of your back heel and

7. 11:36 – 13:35

   Grip Strength, Dynamometers & Dead Hangs

   1. AGDr. Andy Galpin11:36

      go from there.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman11:36

      What about strength?

   3. AGDr. Andy Galpin11:37

      So strength is really important. You need to measure this in a, in multiple areas, and we'll start off with grip strength. You can do this in two ways. You can buy a hand grip dynamometer. Now, these are anywhere between $20 to $100 anywhere. These actually used to be, like, when I was in school, like, hundreds of dollars, and now you can literally buy them on any website for 25 bucks, so technically that's not cost-free. I know your whole thing about the cost-free protocols, but 25 bucks, I'm calling that basically cost-free. Um, you can bring that in and test that, and that's just a little device where you're gonna squeeze and you're gonna do... And I would do your right hand and your left hand. They're gonna give you a value in kilograms. You wanna look for something like a minimum score here of 40 kilograms. Ideally, you're up past 60, would be a really good spot to be in. You wanna make sure that there's no less than 10% variation between your left and right hand. Your, your non-dominant hand actually shouldn't be that much weaker in this test. So what you'll actually see a lot of times is the non-dominant can be oftentimes stronger, because the dominant hand is more for movement precision, writing, things like that. If you are a male and you are under 40 kilograms on a hand grip dynamometer, we're gonna need to train that. If you're a female, it's not that much lower, but about 35 kilograms is the cutoff point. Another one that you can actually do is just a dead hang. So you can hold onto any bar, ideally one that is thin enough to where you can wrap your whole hand around it. Something like going to the gym and jumping on any pull-up bar or, or pull-up rack. In general, we, we should be able to hang for a minimum of 30 seconds, is what we're, what we're looking for. 30 to kind of 50 seconds is my, like, good, but we could probably get better here. If you're cruising above 60 seconds, I'm generally pretty happy. Now, if you are exceptionally large, this thing doesn't scale perfectly. You know, if you're 240 pounds, and even if you're lean, it's just hard [laughs] to hang and hold 240 pounds. Conversely, if you're 145 pounds, even if you're unhealthy, you're gonna be able to hang for a long time. It's just not that much weight to carry. So just rough numbers, uh, to start off with.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman13:32

      So that's grip strength. What about strength elsewhere in the body?

8. 13:35 – 16:10

   Lower Body Strength, Leg Extensions & Squat Holds

   1. AGDr. Andy Galpin13:35

      You, you can do an upper body strength test if you would like, although it's not technically something we do very often. What I'm generally more interested in is a leg extension test, and the reason I like this is... A back squat is better. A barbell back squat is... Look, that's my, like, that's my jam. That's my life, right? It's just very technically demanding, and it, it's challenging. You need spotters, you need comfort. A lot goes into this. So for the average person, a leg extension test is fairly standardized. You don't have to worry about technique, and people can just get into it and go. And so what you want to look for there is a couple of standards you want to hit. Again, a very simple answer here is body weight. Can you do a leg extension with your body weight? That's a pretty good number you want to be at. If you go up in age past age 40, every decade, that can come down about 10%, and you'll still be in a pretty good slot. So if you're 50 years old and you're 170 pounds, if you can do 160, you're in a pretty good sort of spot. And then you can just, again, take it down about 10% every decade after 40. Any of these strength tests, they don't have to be done to a technical true one-rep max. You can use what are called repetition conversion equation. So put on a load that you think is kind of close to your maximum and just do it for as many reps as you can. As long as it's under five reps total, you can then actually go online and enter that into any number of calculators anywhere, and it will tell you, "Okay, you did three repetitions at 200 pounds. Your one-rep max is probably 215," or whatever. So there's estimate equations. So if you don't want to spend the time or you're not truly comfortable, like, absolutely going to your true one-rep max, just get to a, a number that's fairly close and do as many as you can, and then go online. Again, one-rep max estimator equations are everywhere. If you get past five repetitions or so, the accuracy of those equations starts going down. So don't put on something and go, "I did 12 reps of it," and then try to figure out what your one-rep max. It'll get close. You start moving past that, you're just getting worse and worse and worse accuracy. If neither of those are an option, another one I like a lot here is simply a front squat or a goblet squat hold. So you're gonna hold a weight in front of your chest, whether a kettlebell is, is great here, a dumbbell is fine here, and you want to hold about half of your body weight, go all the way to the bottom position, and try to hold that for about 45 seconds. So it's, it's a pretty good indicator of, number one, your position. It's hard to be in a bad position for that long at that load, as well as core strength and low back stability. It's more difficult than the leg extension, but it's, it's quite a bit more functional, and it's gonna give you insight into a lot more areas than just the quadriceps.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman16:06

      So 45 seconds down at the bottom of the squat-

   3. AGDr. Andy Galpin16:08

      Yep

   4. AHAndrew Huberman16:08

      ... and then returning to a standing position.

9. 16:10 – 17:08

   Safe Testing, Technique & Consistent Warm-Ups

   1. AGDr. Andy Galpin16:10

      Yep. And if you can't do the return, I actually, at, at, I'm not that worried. But as long as you can hold that good position without a technical breakdown in that 45 seconds, that's a really good spot. As an intro, I want a third of your body weight for 30 seconds. It's important to add a couple of caveats to the strength training stuff. So there's two that I want to do. Number one, these are assuming you are technically proficient. So I don't want you to do any exercise to exhaustion or to maximum strength if you're not comfortable with your technique. So adjust these accordingly. If you're not comfortable with the front squat, do the leg extension. If you're not even comfortable with that, do something different. So we never want to utilize maximum testing if it's gonna come with a consequence o- of serious acute injury. So that's the most important flag. The second one is your warm-up protocol will have a huge effect on your actual results. And so whenever you do these tests, especially if you're gonna do a test, and then a test again down the line, you want to make sure that that warm-up protocol is standardized.

10. 17:08 – 19:14

    Muscle Mass, Body Composition & Fat-Free Mass Index

    1. AHAndrew Huberman17:08

       What about hypertrophy?

    2. AGDr. Andy Galpin17:09

       So the thing you want to pay attention to here is you have the aesthetic portion of hypertrophy. That's entirely up to you. There is no rationale. You can decide what you feel like looks good or doesn't look good. That's irrelevant. There is a sufficient amount you need to have, where below that is detrimental to your health, regardless of your outcomes. And so the best way to do this is a couple of ways. Any sort of body composition test can do this. So whether this is a, um, a scan, uh, through like a DEXA scan, which is a gold standard, or other, uh, ways of bioelectrical impedance or other ways. So there's a ton of different tests you can get that are pretty close. Okay, so what you want to pay attention to when you get, like, a DEXA scan is a number called FFMI. And so that stands for Fat-Free Mass Index. So you can look at, again, any number of online calculators. These are all standard, so it doesn't actually matter where you pull them up. You don't have to worry about looking it up and whether or not it's right or not or something. And so that's gonna actually tell you if you have sufficient muscle mass. And so a number you want to look for, uh, in general is something like, if you're a man, your FFMI should be something like 20 or higher. If you're a woman, you want to look for something like 18 So that, those are the targets. If you get past, like, 24, 25 for a man, that's a lot of muscle mass, assuming you're reasonably lean. Now, if your FFMI is, like, 24, 25, but your body fat is, like, 40%, you're actually just a very, very large individual. You're not in a, in a great spot. So when we say these sort of numbers, it's the assumption that you're probably sub-30% body fat, um, for a man and sub-35 for a woman. So those are the numbers. There are online calculators. All you really need to know is your total body weight, your body fat percentage, and then your height. You can enter those three numbers, and then they'll tell you your FFMI score, and it'll correct for an adjusted value. Uh, then most of those will actually tell you the grading rubric, and then it's, like, good, average, bad, et cetera. But those are the numbers we look at. If you are, as a man, sub-17, as a woman, sub-15, now we're in an area of, of pretty severe physiological detriment for insufficient muscle.

11. 19:14 – 20:44

    Muscular Endurance, Planks & Push-Ups

    1. AHAndrew Huberman19:14

       What about muscular endurance? Is this where you're gonna tell me I need to do wall sits?

    2. AGDr. Andy Galpin19:18

       [laughs] So this is really nice. You can do any number of tests here. A standard plank. Can you hold a front plank for 60 seconds? Can you hold a side plank for 45 seconds? If you're able to do a pushup, we want to be able to do for, again, for a general male, we should have no problem doing 25-plus consecutive pushups. This would be a full, complete lockout of the elbows on the top and a full chest touch or close to it at the ground. You can do it different, it doesn't really matter, but just keep it standard from your pre-test to your post-test if you're trying to mark progress.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman19:52

       And for females?

    4. AGDr. Andy Galpin19:53

       So for those, those folks, any-- That's gonna scale down a little bit, right? So basically you're looking at 15 as that marker like 25 was for the male, where I wanna see above 15, uh, and if I do, we're good. Anything between 5 to 15 is the number of, like, okay. If you're sub-5, we generally have some problems, and if that is different between 1 and 0, then, like, now we... 0 is, is, is a problem, so we should be able to do that. The other way to assess muscular endurance is take the exact strength test you did from the talk five minutes ago. Which one did you do? Load that to 75%, and then do that for as many repetitions as you can, and that is a tremendous barometer, uh, of muscular endurance. So if you were able to do 200 pounds on your leg extension test, put 75% on that and do that as many repetitions as you can. You wanna look for more than eight repetitions. If you are below eight repetitions, then we have a muscular endurance problem.

12. 20:44 – 22:18

    Anaerobic Capacity, Maximum Effort Tests

    1. AHAndrew Huberman20:44

       What about anaerobic capacity?

    2. AGDr. Andy Galpin20:47

       This one's more challenging. You either have to go to a laboratory and do something like a Wingate test. So this is a 30-second maximal test where you're gonna see how much work can you possibly do in that 30 seconds. If you don't have allowed access to a laboratory, you can, you can do this on any protocol you want. Y- this could be sprinting. This can be on a, like, an air bike. This could be on a rower. Anything like that, anything where you can exert maximal effort and you don't have to worry about technical problems. So I generally don't like to do things like a kettlebell swing or something like that. There's just too many other variables. You need to be able to go as hard as you possibly can, knowing you're going to get to a place of tremendous fatigue. Now, in the lab, we often use what's called a Bosco protocol, and you're gonna stand on a force plate, and you're gonna do as many vertical jumps as fast as you can, as high as you can, for 60 seconds, and you're absolutely destroyed by, like, second 45. So we either use that Wingate protocol or that Bosco protocol. If you want though, again, take any of those other places, 30 seconds or so, up to 45 seconds, up to a minute if you want. It doesn't really matter. We don't really have standards for these things because it's gonna be different. H- how far you can travel in 30 seconds on a treadmill i- is just gonna be so different than sprinting in the field or on a, on the assault bike or whatever. So what you really wanna worry about there is can you complete it, and then how awful do you feel afterwards? So what, what you really wanna think about here is not those protocols, but this.

13. 22:18 – 23:33

    Maximum Heart Rate & Heart Rate Recovery

    1. AGDr. Andy Galpin22:18

       You wanna think about can you get close to your predicted maximum heart rate? So the, the number we throw out is 220 minus your age. So if you're 50 years old, 220 minus 50, you should be able to get to a maximum heart rate of around 170 beats per minute. Now, that number is extremely generic. If you don't get there, that doesn't have any indication of your fitness. If you get higher, that doesn't mean you're any more fit. It's just a rough number. So here's what I'm, what I want you to do. In this case, your heart rate recovery is the better metric. So I want you to get up to a maximum heart rate and then test your heart rate recovery, and what you should be looking for there is about a half a beat recovery per second. You're gonna get up to a place where you reach, like, absolute terrible exhaustion, maximum fatigue, test your heart rate, and then count, right? Have a timer going. Within 60 seconds, you should have, again, that half a beat per second. You should have a heart rate recovery of 30 beats per minute. Within the next minute, so two-minute recovery, it should be, again, half that, so 60 beats. Those are rough numbers to go by, and your three-minute recovery is, again, half of that again. So that is the closest way. If your heart rate recovery is worse than that, then we know we have a problem in your anaerobic capacity or your cardiovascular capacity.

14. 23:33 – 25:19

    VO2 Max, Running & Walking Tests

    1. AHAndrew Huberman23:33

       What about number eight, maximal heart rate? Because what you just described sounds a lot like maximal heart rate.

    2. AGDr. Andy Galpin23:38

       So this is your VO2 max. So the gold standard here is to actually go into a laboratory and get this thing done. So we can actually run a, a VO2 max test where you put a mask on, collect all your gases, and run you to there, and there's a very specific protocol for completion of a, a true maximum test, and any, any of the scientists will know that. If you don't have access to that, you can do a couple of tests. One of them is called, uh, a 12-minute Cooper's test. So this is simply time. You're gonna run for 12 minutes as far as you can, and you're gonna record the distance you covered. Again, you can go online to any number of, of calculators, enter that distance in, and that will tell you your estimated VO2 max.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman24:14

       So that's a 12-minute sprint?

    4. AGDr. Andy Galpin24:16

       12-minute sprint. Maximum distance you can cover in 12 minutes. So that's anywhere between a mile to two-plus miles, depending on how fit you are. But you just do that Cooper 12-minute test. If you want, you can do a little gentler version of that. There, in fact, there is a one-mile walk test you can do. In this case, you have to have some sort of either a stopwatch or ideally a heart rate monitor, and all you have to do is, this is a rock-core one-mile sub-maximal test. So you're gonna walk a mile, record the time, record your heart rate at the end, enter those in, and those will give you, again, estimates of your VO2 max. So that's the, the like, "Oh my gosh, I can't run for 12 minutes as hard as I possibly can" or, "I don't wanna do it" or, uh, we have a lot of these in our executive program. It's like, "My knee hurts too bad. I've got back pain when I run" or whatever, "Can I..." Okay, and you do the walk test, and it's pretty accurate if you do it correctly. And again, those are all standard, uh, calculations, so anywhere you find those, you don't have to worry about the source. So you just enter your stuff in, and they're gonna be running off the same equation.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman25:15

       Number nine, long-duration steady-state exercise.

15. 25:19 – 26:20

    Long-Duration Endurance, Steady-State Exercise & Nasal Breathing

    1. AGDr. Andy Galpin25:19

       Yep. So you really wanna think about this as not a standard number. This is, you should maintain consistent work output for over 20-plus minutes. And this one, I want you to just pick something that it was in your lifestyle. So is there a loop around your house that you can do? Is there some protocol that you, you like to use for? And you're simply going to test your ability, can you maintain work without stopping? That's all it needs to be. Now, ideally, I personally like to throw a little twist in here, which is, can you do this with nasal breathing only? That's when I feel really good. If you can go 30 straight minutes without needing to take a break, um, walking doesn't really cut it unless you're very, very unfit, in which case, if walking 30 minutes without a break is a challenge, okay, like there. But if you can, I want you moving at a non-walking pace. I don't care what zone this is, two, three, four, five. I don't care. Show me you can maintain minimum of 20 minutes of work with no breaks, no intervals, no downtime, uh, and again, ideally breathing through your nose only.

16. 26:20 – 30:38

    Testing Frequency, Test Order & Training Priorities

    1. AHAndrew Huberman26:20

       How often should we be assessing our fitness for each and every one of these?

    2. AGDr. Andy Galpin26:24

       Well, the way that I would say this is I would recommend doing this full battery once a year. Now, you could do these technically all in two days. A three-day split here i- is probably best. So if you were to just say, "Hey, this is like testing week," I actually love this for beginning of the year, uh, or whenever it is that you sort of change your training. Just like once a year, you should probably go to a physician and get full blood work. You're going to be thinking, "Yeah, but I don't wanna like give up on my exercise routine that week." Well, I promise you, you're not going to finish this week and think, "I didn't do very much work this week." It's gonna feel great, and then you're gonna have a very nice barometer of exactly where you need to change and, and prioritize your training for the next quarter or half a year or wherever you wanna go. So which order to do them in? The non-fatiguing tests you can do whenever. The FFMI, the body fat composition, all this stuff can be done wherever. I generally like to do that, though, as your very first activity. The reason is we know that acute exercise can heavily influence things like body composition measurements because of infl- inflammation, water storage, et cetera. So it's easiest to just sort of get that off of a 48-hour rest. You wanna make sure you don't do any hard exercise the day before a body composition test and probably 48 hours before that. So just start yourself off with that. Your movement test can be the same thing. You don't want to try to do a assessment of how well you're squatting if you're incredibly sore from your, your brutal squatting test. So tend to do those things when you're the most fresh. Then what you wanna do is any skill or maximum strength or power goes at the very beginning of the day. Any fatiguing thing happens at the end. And so you could easily do this. All right. I'm going to do my power test, my broad jump. You're not gonna be fatigued at all from that. And on the same day, since I'm already pretty warmed up, now I'm gonna roll right into my leg strength test, and since I'm really warmed up, I'm gonna do my leg muscular endurance test right there. So this is a very common strategy we use. We do our one-rep max leg extension, five minutes, seven minutes, whatever we need to do, come back, load it to 75%, do as many reps as you can. Boom. You could roll right into then your upper body test or your grip strength test or anything else that you wanna do there. So you can knock out your strength testing and muscular endurance testing all in one day. You could do your performance diagnostic, your power jump test, your strength, and your muscular endurance, and all that stuff is knocked out. You're gonna have to come back on a separate day and do your anaerobic test. This is 30 seconds maximal endurance, things like that. You could, though, if you wanted, do that after your long-duration test. Your long-duration test is, again, is just gonna function as like a big warmup, or you could flip those things, or you could do them on separate days. You're gonna have to do your VO2 max test on its own day for the most part, unless you wanted to do, again, your movement or your body composition sort of before those things. So you really have the ability to kind of mix and match. Ideally, this most realistically probably takes three days. You don't need to be optimal in all these areas to be, quote-unquote, "optimal health" from this perspective. You just wanna make sure, again, there's no severe performance anchors. This is what we call them, right? The, we, we don't want any of these severe constraints 'cause you're going to get limited by that thing. And so what you wanna do is move that up to just sufficient or concerning, right? And get it away from that. If you do that, that thing's not gonna catch you. You're gonna be able to continue to pursue, pursue optimization in, in any of the one things that you have a specific passion for, which is generally what moves people, right? You train so that you feel better. You train because you know there are all these benefits to it, and, and geez, this audience probably could list hundreds of them. But you also train because you generally like to get better at something. A lot of us, like, have something, and so you wanna make sure that you're not going, "Hey, I know you're good at endurance, but you really shouldn't train anymore." We don't want that message. Not at all. I want you to love your training. So before we close out, I wanna go back and finish off, uh, the metrics for VO2 max 'cause I don't actually think I gave you numbers on that. So in general, for men, a minimum number we wanna look at here is 35 milliliters per kilogram per minute, and for women, that'd be about 30. We can actually push a lot higher on those things. In reality, I wanna see men above 50, and I'm not even really stoked until I get above 55. In fact, if I wanna see men above 55, I really wanna see women above 50.

17. 30:38 – 31:30

    Acknowledgements

    1. AHAndrew Huberman30:38

       I want to add just one more metric to our discussion today, uh, which is really just my way of saying thank you, because if there were a metric for amount of useful information per sentence spoke, you would be at the upper level of that metric. You have this amazing ability to provide so much knowledge in a clear and concise and today listed out format that is both interesting, grounded in science, and actionable. So on behalf of everyone listening and certainly for myself as well, I just want to say thank you.

    2. AGDr. Andy Galpin31:13

       Well, I appreciate the compliments, and, uh, I'm looking forward to the next conversation, uh, jumping right into speed, strength, and hypertrophy training and what are the evidence-based, uh, and best practices for protocols in those areas. [outro music]

Episode duration: 31:30