How to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline

1. 0:00 – 2:29

   Pavel Tsatsouline

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel Tsatsouline is considered one of the premier strength training and fitness coaches in the world. He has pioneered the development of various programs to improve strength, which he calls the mother of all fitness. Indeed, today you will learn about strength as a practice, as a skill that can be applied to sports, that can be applied to general fitness, to getting leaner, to getting faster, and to improving your endurance. As Pavel Tsatsouline explains, by building one's strength through body weight exercises, free weight exercises, and occasionally machines, one can develop incredible levels of fitness at any age. We discuss some of the spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing strength feats like 100 pull-ups per week, and we emphasize that one does not have to be seeking hypertrophy, one does not have to be seeking getting larger muscles in order to get exceptionally strong. I myself these days am focusing primarily on trying to get stronger and build endurance for sake of health and for general life reasons, and because getting really strong turns out to be very beneficial in every aspect of life. Today you're going to learn how to get extremely strong. You can add muscle if you want in parallel with that, or as Pavel Tsatsouline explains, you can pursue strength and flexibility for their own sake. And there's tremendous value for doing so. So today's discussion pertains to women, to men, and frankly, to people of all ages. I do think that pursuing strength as its own thing independent of muscle growth, right, which we hear so much about these days, everyone wants hypertrophy, grow muscle, this and that, pursuing strength as its own thing is a tremendously valuable endeavor. Today you're going to learn how from the world's premier expert in this topic. You're in for a very special episode with Pavel Tsatsouline. He is truly in a class all his own when it comes to fitness and strength training. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Pavel Tsatsouline.

2. 2:29 – 7:19

   Fitness, Strength, Model Athlete

   1. AHAndrew Huberman2:29

      Pavel Tsatsouline, welcome.

   2. PTPavel Tsatsouline2:31

      Andrew, uh, pleasure to be on your podcast. I respect your work a lot.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman2:34

      Thank you. Likewise.

   4. PTPavel Tsatsouline2:36

      Thank you.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman2:36

      I will say that you and perhaps one other person have truly changed the way that I think about fitness, the way that I train, and I'm super excited to talk to you today.

   6. PTPavel Tsatsouline2:49

      Oh, thank you.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman2:49

      So I'm withholding excitement. There are a bunch of different ways to think about this thing that we call fitness, strength, endurance, hypertrophy, and there's so much information out there now. How do you conceptualize fitness? Meaning do you look at things through the lens of, are we focused on nervous system, bone, connective tissue, or muscle? Do you look at things through the lens of anterior chain, posterior chain, hypertrophy, strength? I would just like to get your sort of high-level conceptualization of this thing that we call fitness, with the idea in mind that most people would like to have some level of endurance, some level of strength and feel healthy, and presumably look however they want to look. But let's set aesthetics aside for the moment. How do you think about this thing we call fitness?

   8. PTPavel Tsatsouline3:36

      Well, first of all, Andrew, is, uh, strength is the mother qua- mother quality of all the other qualities. So this is, again, it's a statement by Professor Matveev, Leonid Matveev going way back. And without a foundation of strength, you cannot build anything. So any athletic event requires a base of strength. Of course, that, uh, shot putter's gonna need much more strength than triathlon, uh, triathlon athlete, but they all need strength. Speaking of which, uh, in triathlon, in marathon running, in distance, uh, in cycling, it's been proven that putting athletes on a heavy low repetition strength regimen, the kind that doesn't really add muscle but just makes you stronger neurologically, and, uh, it makes them race faster. So once you're stronger, everything becomes easier. How much stronger you need to get, that will vary. In the Soviet Union, they had something called the model athlete. So they figured out that for every particular event, uh, your odds of succeeding are gonna be much higher if you're able to, you know, squat this much or bench this much and jump this high and so on and so forth. And this is easy enough to find these numbers for your individual sport and talk to various coaches. For people who are not competitive athletes who just want to enjoy life, you just need to think about, uh, having a reserve of strength for whatever it is that you might do. So look at some PT standards in, let's say, in the military or in law enforcement, and possibly apply them to yourself. I don't want to impose my set of standards, because there are many different. Like, I might prefer, you know, pull-ups in X and Y and Z, but if we're looking at strength as the foundation for general physical preparation, right? So there's such a thing as general strength preparation. That's part of that. There's also, you know, special strength, which is sport-specific work. That's different. And, uh, there are different ways of getting this done. But as you and I know that, uh, certain exercises are going to have a great carryover outside these particular exercises. So as long as you're mobile, as long as you're symmetrical, and those are the things you have to address first, you need to look into work of, uh, Gray Cook, for example, then strength has to be your priority. Once you have reached a certain level of strength that's appropriate for your sport or appropriate for your lifestyle, at that point you can just maintain it and focus on other qualities.So I will, um, give you an example. Uh, Soviet scientists, Vyssochin and Denisenko, they obs- they measured a number of athletes in 20 different sports, athletes of different levels. So they evaluated various quality. One was absolute strength, and now there was a rate of force development, pretty much power, and the third was, is the rate of muscular relaxation, so how quickly the muscle can relax after contraction, which is very, very important. And they have found that, uh, strength grew just very little from the intermediate level to the advanced level. There's not a lot of improvement. Power increased a little bit more, but the speed of relaxation is just, just shot up as the athlete beca- became more advanced. So it's again, so strength, it is the mother of all qualities, but that's not the end-all for everybody. So reach the level that is appropriate for your sport or activity, then just maintain it efficiently and, uh, focus on something else, if we're talking about strength. If we could talk about other qualities, well, we could get to them later.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman7:18

      Mm-hmm.

3. 7:19 – 13:46

   Tool: Essential Training Movements

   1. AHAndrew Huberman7:19

      What movements do you believe, if they exist, all people should include in their weekly routine someplace when thinking about how to develop, perhaps maintain, but for most people it's going to be the goal of still achieving some strength?

   2. PTPavel Tsatsouline7:34

      Okay.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman7:35

      Strength increase, excuse me.

   4. PTPavel Tsatsouline7:37

      I think there has to be a very low quantity of exercises, just very few exercises you want to focus on, and, uh, I'm going to give you some options to choose from.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman7:44

      Mm-hmm.

   6. PTPavel Tsatsouline7:45

      So what we try to do at Strong First, in my company, in my School of Strength, is we try to provide people with various simple, very low-tech, high-concept ways of addressing- uh, reaching their needs because for one reason or another, for this individual, the barbell is the preferred tool. For another, it's the kettlebell or body weight or some- or something else. So I'm not going to say that if you don't do kettlebell swings or barbell squats, you'll never amount to anything. That's just not true, but you can pick some, you can pick some events. So you definitely ought to do something for your posterior chain. You absolutely do. If we are looking at, uh, at the barbell, I would start out with the narrow sumo deadlift.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman8:27

      So this is narrow grip, but it's key-

   8. PTPavel Tsatsouline8:29

      Not narrow grip, pardon me, but your stance is just wide enough to let your arms through. Uh, your arms stay parallel to each other.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman8:35

      Mm-hmm.

   10. PTPavel Tsatsouline8:35

       And, uh, so you just find a very comfortable stance for yourself. So Professor McGill has been on your podcast, he explained to you about the, uh, you know, different hip ac- architecture and so on. So you have to find whatever works, whatever works for you, and when people talk about functional strength training and then they start standing on a ball and juggle oranges, doesn't make a lot of sense to me because that doesn't look like my life or yours probably, right? But if you have to get a heavy bag of groceries or something, you got to deadlift. And the narrow sumo deadlift... So if you look at power lifters, an example would be, classic example would be Ed Coan. That's a narrow stance sumo. I'm not talking about wide sumo. That's a very sport-specific event. And, uh, you practice that first. You learn how to hip hinge. It's extremely important to learn how to hip hinge. Again, uh, Stuart stressed that, how important it is for your back health and for your longevity, so you learn to do that. Then whether you decide to pursue the deadlift or not, if you decide not to pursue high numbers in the deadlift, maybe it's not appropriate for you or maybe you're lacking the coaching, a fantastic exercise for everybody is a Zercher squat. So in a Zercher squat, you hold the bar like this in the crooks of your elbows, so it's resting right here. It's possible to pick it up off the ground, but it's, you know, it's- it's an advanced skill that's, it's an advanced skill. Better just to walk it off the rack. The advantage of the Zercher squat over, let's say, the back squat or the front squat, is even if you have messed up shoulders, wrists, elbows, you still can do that. Coaching, uh, the Zercher squat is very easy, very simple, and you have tremendous reflexive stabilization, uh, of your midsection. It's just very, very powerful. So you acquire that skill of getting tight. So getting high numbers on that exercise, in the Zercher, so let's say an athlete could shoot for double, double body weight, it, that's- that's a really good goal.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman10:30

       And the bar for those listening, not watching-

   12. PTPavel Tsatsouline10:32

       It's right here.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman10:32

       ... is cradled in the, in the crooks of the elbows-

   14. PTPavel Tsatsouline10:35

       Correct.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman10:35

       ... in front of the body. Are the arms, uh, crossed?

   16. PTPavel Tsatsouline10:37

       You can hold them like this.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman10:38

       Mm-hmm.

   18. PTPavel Tsatsouline10:38

       You can hold them like this, or different ways of holding them.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman10:41

       Mm-hmm.

   20. PTPavel Tsatsouline10:41

       You definitely would want to get proper coaching.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman10:43

       Mm-hmm.

   22. PTPavel Tsatsouline10:43

       Uh, you don't want to, you know, uh, you don't want to bruise yourself. You want to be comfortable. You want to do it right.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman10:48

       Mm-hmm.

   24. PTPavel Tsatsouline10:48

       But it's not, doesn't take a lot of skill to do that. You find some pressing exercise and again, uh, if we're sticking with the example of the barbell, the bench press has gotten bad reputation, you know, thanks to the gym bros, and you know, all gym bros just use the bench pretty much. Well, these days they also check out their phones, I guess.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman11:07

       Every set, between every set. The 11th rep, I joke, but it's people checking their phones.

   26. PTPavel Tsatsouline11:13

       Yeah, there we go.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman11:14

       Yeah.

   28. PTPavel Tsatsouline11:14

       But if you look at athletes, they, the athletes who also do some lower body work, some posterior chain- oh, uh, chain work, and something for the midsection, and again, the Zercher squat could address that, they are making a great use of the bench press. So it's nothing, it's a very simple exercise. Well, not very simple. It's a relatively simple exercise, and uh, unlike other pressing exercises, it allows you to make strength gains with a very low volume of training. So you can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger. Good luck doing that in the overhead press or the one-arm push-up or something like that. So those are just a couple examples. Uh, there are many other examples. You can do snatch grip deadlifts, you can, uh... The list is very, very long. We can address the same thing in the same way with kettlebells. You can look in the body weight exercises, but you need to find several exercises that have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond-... the ability to do this exercise.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman12:12

       Mm-hmm.

   30. PTPavel Tsatsouline12:13

       If you just do curls, you know you're gonna do, you're gonna get better at curls but not at much else. So Canadian, um, (smacks lips) Canadian scientist back in the '80s did, ... and his team made some interesting, uh, some interesting discoveries and they just found that doing something like extensions are going to carry over to the squat. They're just not. The coordination is so radically different. So you find several exercises that you enjoy, that don't hurt you, that, uh, you, uh, have the equipment available, that you get the proper coaching for and you pretty much stick with them and there is absolutely no reason for you to change these exercises. It's possible to change with margins, you know, from a wide grip bench press to a narrow group bench press, uh, squats with a pause and so on and so forth, but you don't really have to do, uh, a great variety of things. Variety is a good topic, we can discuss this later.
4. 13:46 – 16:29

   Sponsors: Eight Sleep & Levels

   1. PTPavel Tsatsouline13:46

   2. AHAndrew Huberman13:46

      I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. Now I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night. Now one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct, and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep makes it very easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle, and end of the night. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly four years now and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the Pod Cover, called the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity. I find that very useful because I like to make the bed really cool at the beginning of the night, even colder in the middle of the night, and warm as I wake up. That's what gives me the most slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. It also has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in both your short and long-term health is your body's ability to manage blood glucose or blood sugar. To maintain energy and focus throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or crashes. I first started using Levels about three years ago as a way to understand how different foods impacted my blood glucose levels and it's proven incredibly informative for determining my food choices, when I eat specific foods and how I time eating relative to things like my workouts, both weight training and cardiovascular training, things like running, and when to eat before I go to sleep to allow for the most stable blood sugar throughout the night. Indeed, using Levels has helped shaped my entire schedule. So if you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a CGM yourself, you can go to levels.link/huberman. Levels has just launched a new CGM sensor that is smaller and has even better tracking than before. Right now they're also offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's levels.link, spelled L-I-N-K, /huberman to try the new sensor and two free months of

5. 16:29 – 29:57

   Dips, Pull-Ups, Farmer Carry, Tools: Kettle Bell Mile, Grip Strength & Longevity

   1. AHAndrew Huberman16:29

      membership. Would a combination across the week of some sort of squat, let's say the Zercher squat, a, um, perhaps a kettlebell swing or something else for, uh, posterior chain, pull-up and dip be a very, fairly comprehensive program?

   2. PTPavel Tsatsouline16:47

      Absolutely.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman16:47

      Yeah. I'm a fan of dips, I like dips a lot. I heard you say that you, uh, were, uh, some years ago, you said that you were using dips for economy of time, um, and I started getting into dips. I, um, haven't quite figured out the best way to load dips once, because once you get past 15, 20 repetitions of the body weight dip, it gets, I don't know, turns into something else.

   4. PTPavel Tsatsouline17:07

      Sure, absolutely.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman17:08

      Um, uh, turns into aerobic exercise (laughs) perhaps. Uh, not-

   6. PTPavel Tsatsouline17:12

      Well, uh, Luke Ambs, uh, he was a power lifter from the golden age of American power lifting, he says anything over six reps is body building.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman17:19

      Yeah.

   8. PTPavel Tsatsouline17:20

      You know. They're right there.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman17:20

      I've been trying to stay in the lower rep range today.

   10. PTPavel Tsatsouline17:22

       Yeah.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman17:22

       I'll talk about this with you more, uh, because I think a growing number of people, both men and women who are starting to do weight training or really incorporate strength training into their program, are seeking a combination of strength and perhaps endurance as well-

   12. PTPavel Tsatsouline17:35

       Sure.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman17:35

       ... without putting on too much size. Maybe size-

   14. PTPavel Tsatsouline17:38

       Sure.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman17:38

       ... in some select body parts. Yeah.

   16. PTPavel Tsatsouline17:39

       Well, Andrew, I think they need to, uh, do possibly several different types of, types of training but going, going back to your examples, dips are fantastic if you can, uh, if your shoulders can handle them, if you know how to do them. It's a great exercise, but not particularly democratic. That's the problem. So either you can do it safely or you can't.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman17:56

       Mm-hmm.

   18. PTPavel Tsatsouline17:56

       And possibly, it's possible to coach some people to do, to do the dip. So if you're coaching somebody to do the dip, the first prerequisite is to build up to full skin the cat. So it means you're hanging upside down, you know, look up what it means folks, uh, on a bar.... so you gotta be able to get yourself in that position. So if you're able to do that and if you're able to g- get out of the position, you know, strongly and confidently, there is a good chance that you can start up in doing dips and be coached into that. If you can't, probably not.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman18:26

       Hm.

   20. PTPavel Tsatsouline18:26

       So either try to build up to that, unless there are medical restrictions, or not. Uh, you mentioned the example of pull-ups. Absolutely, pull-ups are one of the best general strength exercises. And again, to your listeners, uh, general versus special. Special, in Soviet terminology, just means more specific. So the carryover when you start doing pull-ups, when you excel at pull-ups or the dips, you are going to get a carryover so far beyond these exercises, which is exactly the reason you do that. So I like your choices very much. Yeah.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman18:58

       What about specialized training for grip strength? I, I believe that if somebody's large, if they can squat 500 pounds, if they deadlift 600 pounds, I don't really care if th- um, the question is can you open the pickle jar.

   22. PTPavel Tsatsouline19:13

       Sure.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman19:14

       This is a critical-

   24. PTPavel Tsatsouline19:15

       I just get my-

   25. AHAndrew Huberman19:15

       ... home test.

   26. PTPavel Tsatsouline19:15

       ... wife to do it.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman19:16

       (laughs)

   28. PTPavel Tsatsouline19:17

       So, uh, it's, uh, grip strength is extremely important and you, being a neuroscientist, you know the disproportional representation in motor cortex of your gripping muscles and the form and everything. So, uh, and there is another reason why grip is so important. So if you make a fist, if you make a very tight fist, you're going to feel, uh, you're going to feel the overflow of tension, irradiation going to other muscles. So pretty much by gripping tighter, you are instantly increasing your strength in anything that you do. And, uh, so a very simple example for your listeners. Take some, um, pedestrian exercise like curls and do as many strict reps as you possibly can the way you normally do them, and then start just crushing that bar or that dumbbell or whatever that you're curling. You will immediately be able to knock out several more reps. So that makes you so much stronger. And again, the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important. Uh, for whatever reason, obviously it correlates with longevity. We don't know why. We have no idea. Correlation is not, uh, causation, so we don't know whether getting stronger, a stronger grip is gonna make us live longer, but-

   29. AHAndrew Huberman20:27

       Yeah.

   30. PTPavel Tsatsouline20:28

       ... statistically it's worth a try, right?
6. 29:57 – 38:38

   Concentric vs Eccentric Only Movements, Isometric, Tool: Pause Reps

   1. PTPavel Tsatsouline29:57

      keeps getting oxygen pretty much.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman29:58

      I'd like to talk about concentric versus eccentric portions of a movement.

   3. PTPavel Tsatsouline30:02

      Mm-hmm.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman30:02

      Concentric generally being the lifting phase and eccentric, of course, folks, the, the lowering phase. Um, is there a case for just doing concentric movements?

   5. PTPavel Tsatsouline30:12

      Yes.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman30:12

      Um, is there a case for emphasizing the eccentric portion? Uh-... how does one balance those when thinking about soreness, recovery, and frequency of training?

   7. PTPavel Tsatsouline30:21

      Okay. Well, first of all, the case for concentric only is if you're trying to minimize muscle growth and, uh, if you also are trying to minimize soreness. So for athletes, uh, in weight classes or athletes in sports where you get punished by carrying extra weight, it's a very good idea. So for example, uh, when Barry Ross coached Allyson Felix, at that point she became the, uh, fastest. She won the 200 meters, uh, in the world, she was 17 years old, I think. She was the youngest. And so he would have her do deadlifts, and they were concentric only, and she would have her drop the bar. And, uh, the reasoning for that is, is exactly that. You're able to get stronger. You're not, uh, putting on, uh, extra muscle mass. Also it's, it's safe. It's really a very, very safe way to train. And in programming, in programming, uh, a protocol for somebody who's not necessarily in that, in that boat, it's still just for the sake of variety, you may want to choose to avoid the, avoid the eccentric on certain days. Like you're trying to recover, accelerate the recovery. So you, uh, lift the weight, but then you step down. So you could definitely do that. Eccentric work, it's supposed- supposedly very helpful to promote hypertrophy, but there are a lot of ifs and buts in there. I'm going to talk right now about the eccentric strength wo- e- eccentric work for strength specifically. It's very ... because the muscle is strongest whenever you're lowering the weight, it's very easy to, uh, do something knuckleheaded and get hurt, which is ... gym bros do that all the time. And instead of doing that, what the wise, much wiser approach is to get a perfect spotter, great, competent spotter, and put on ... after you're done your normal couple of low repetition heavy sets, add maybe five, ten pounds over your maximum. And make a perfect eccentric with an intention of lifting it. So you're lowering this bar that you're just, uh, you know, the bench press, uh, bench press barbell. You're lowering it to your chest and you're loading yourself like you're ready to press it back. You pause on your chest without losing tension, you're ready to blast it back. And then your spotters take it off you. And you do this about, do this about two, three times. This, uh, this sort of a strategy or variation of it was, uh, used by Rick Will. He was, uh, he was able to bench press over 500 pounds wearing a T-shirt, uh, at a body weight of buck 81 back in the '80s. One of the great, greatest, uh, bench pressers. Was extremely intelligent about his training and he did the same thing with his heavy attempts as well. And incidentally, even better ... not even better, I should say you do this on a different day. When you combine this eccent- this same type of eccentric with a very, uh, con- perfect assisted rep, not forced rep like bros do. "It's all you, bro." You know (laughs) and the guy's shaking there and dying. No. So again, let's say that your best bench press is, you know, 315. So you load up 325. You lower it perfectly and you're not ... and you're lowering at the speed of your, uh, max attempt. So you're not going very, very, very slow. You know how guys do it. They take the first, uh, quarter of the range of motion very slow and then they fall through.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman33:59

      Mm-hmm.

   9. PTPavel Tsatsouline33:59

      That doesn't do anything at all. No. You lower it at that, uh, uh, rhythm of your maximal weight. You pause and then you press it and your training partner gives you enough assistance to make it feel like it's about your 90%. So the fact is you're not r- you get to feel a super maximal weight, but you're not experiencing any, uh, psychological stress. It's very, very powerful. And again, you do this, uh, you do this maybe for one or two singles. This, uh, also ties with the Soviet research on gymnasts. They came up with something called artificial controlling environment. So they compared a group of gymnasts that was, uh, working up to some strength-demanding skill with doing typical regressions. And at the same time they were also working on, um, typical strength training, weighted pull-ups and so on. And the other group would have the coach provide this perfect assistance to enable the athlete to perform the skill at a higher level, as they put it, uh, living their motor future, motor future. But with enough help not to, to make it hard but not stressful. And the difference in gains were just, just, just dramatically there was so much gained so much faster. So I would say that would be a very good way to use, uh, eccentric work. Uh, isometric, isometric training calls can also be very powerful for strength and a great value of isometric training is in its ability to coach you to lift properly. And not just lift properly, other, uh, other athletic events as well. If, let's say that you're trying to learn to throw a front kick and you're doing it, you're all over the place, but if you place your foot on a wall and if your coach or sensei positions your body, your foot in a certain way and teaches you to start, to start applying pressure to that wall and the ground at the same time and kind of, uh, pulse it against the wall, adjust your body, uh, and then you relax, shake off your muscles and you go hit the bag and suddenly you're gonna do so much better. The same thing, let's say that you're trying to optimize your, uh, position for the bottom of the deadlift. So you load up more weight that you could possibly lift and then you wedge yourself under and you start applying pressure.... and it doesn't feel good, so you change a little bit. So isometrics are very powerful for, uh, not just for strengthening the sticking points, but also for optimizing the angles. Then we're also dealing with something that, um, there's also great disinhibition effect. So what your listeners might not know is, uh, so there are two y- your, you have two pedals in your nervous system, as in, pardon me for telling you this, you don't n- obviously you know all this, but there's the excitation and inhibition. There's the gas, the gas pedal and the brake pedal. And there are various influences, some of them psychological, but not all of them, that are taking away from your strength. That's called inhibition. And under certain circumstances, there are documented cases, like a lady lifting off the front of a 36 pound, 36 pou- uh, 100-pound car to save her son, and there are documented cases of that. So that disinhibition takes place. So isometrics does have some disinhibition effects, properties, very, very powerful. Also, isometrics teaches you to, uh, teaches you not to give up on a heavy attempt because if you put, um, the experiments were done in a safe manner on the machines, obviously, but if you put an inexperienced person and, uh, the machine is moving at a slow, at a slow rate. So if, if when it starts appro- uh, the speed starts approaching zero, uh, that inhibition takes place. So pretty much, the subject thinks the gig is up. "I'm not going anywhere. That's it. I'm done. I'm just giving up because I failed." But training with isometrics allows you to develop, to develop this kind of a neural drive endurance that you need to grind through safely through a heavy attempt. So very, very powerful. How would you incorporate isometrics into it? So you can do this, uh, as a part of your warmup. You can, uh, also do paused reps. They're fantastic. It's when you combine, combine, uh, eccentric, concentric, and isometric contraction all in one. So perfect example for the squat, you lower to parallel and you stay tight and you stay there for three to five seconds, and then you explode upward. So that, uh, that's a great way to train.

7. 38:38 – 39:53

   Sponsor: AG1

   1. PTPavel Tsatsouline38:39

   2. AHAndrew Huberman38:39

      I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still take AG1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement. What that means is that AG1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health. AG1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status, your metabolic health, your hormone health, and much more. So I've consistently found that when I take AG1 daily, my digestion is improved, my immune system is more robust, and my mood and mental focus are at their best. In fact, if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs, plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 with your order of AG1. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim

8. 39:53 – 48:27

   “Greasing the Groove”, Cramming Analogy, Strength is a Skill

   1. AHAndrew Huberman39:53

      this special offer. I'd like to talk about neural drive. Um, I attribute you with popularizing, maybe you in- invented it, but, uh, certainly popularizing the term like greasing the groove-

   2. PTPavel Tsatsouline40:06

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman40:06

      ... uh, in one of your books. And by the way, we provide links to, um, Pavel's books in the show note captions. I'm a collector of your books.

   4. PTPavel Tsatsouline40:13

      Thank you.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman40:14

      Um, I love them. Um, some of them-

   6. PTPavel Tsatsouline40:15

      Thank you.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman40:15

      ... um, are getting to be collectors items. They're a little bit harder to find, but you'll have to compete with me on eBay. Um, but some of them can be found elsewhere and we'll provide links, uh, to those. But this notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength training-

   8. PTPavel Tsatsouline40:30

      Thank you.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman40:30

      ... because I was weaned, uh, more or less trying to run cross-country during the cross-country season, only ran it once, but I greatly enjoyed it and continued that sort of training, or trying to put on strength and size-

   10. PTPavel Tsatsouline40:42

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman40:42

       ... in kind of a, a numbskull, young male approach to things. But it, it-

   12. PTPavel Tsatsouline40:46

       That's what we do at that age.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman40:47

       ... it served me reasonably well.

   14. PTPavel Tsatsouline40:48

       Sure, yeah.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman40:49

       I'm grateful that I included both. However, I was so tuned to this notion of training a body part, creating an adaptation, then waiting for the adaptation to occur, and then training the body part again. You know, the arguments are all over the internet, two times a week, three times a week. And then I came across this concept of greasing the groove-

   16. PTPavel Tsatsouline41:09

       Mm-hmm.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman41:10

       ... which as a neuroscientist felt so intuitively correct and turns out to be correct. You'll explain what it is, but the idea that more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of opportunities for development of strength, of size, hypertrophy if one wants, and I would say just generally more flexibility over one's total fitness program. Once one understands this concept-

   18. PTPavel Tsatsouline41:36

       Absolutely. Yes.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman41:36

       ... you no longer look at this split or that split or this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume. All that is important, but you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous system. And to me it was like, uh, water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together all these different concepts. So could you ex- please explain for people what greasing the groove is, and then I think the implications of it will become obvious, but we'll also spell out what some of those are.

   20. PTPavel Tsatsouline42:00

       Andrew, please interrupt me because this is about to become a, this might get really long, so please interrupt me at any time. So first I'll talk about the neural component, then we're gonna talk about the frequency and the morphological adaptations, structural adaptations as it leads. So ladies and gentlemen, grease the groove. We are talking about, uh, let's use an analogy. Let's imagine that you are a bow hunter and you work in your garage.And then you walk out of your garage and you shoot an arrow. And you just go back to going about your business, just working in your garage. Or let's say you're a kid who, uh, who practices martial arts. And every- on every break between classes, you just go in the corner and you practice your kata. This is the best way to practice your skill, in small portions, in a spaced-out manner. What's really fascinating is, um, traditional education and traditional strength training is based on the cramming model. So r- remember cramming for an exam? So you're studying at night and you somehow squeak by and you pass it. Okay, great. And then a couple of days later, you f- happily forget everything. So in contrast, imagine that you're, let's say you're studying a foreign language. You write, uh, words on cards and at every opportunity, you're standing in line in the bank. So the lesser mortals are fooling around on their phones, you're just going through your deck like, "Oh, can I translate this word?" And go put it back in the deck, flip it over. Then next time you're in some other place, you do this again. So this is an example of spaced practice versus the traditional massed practice. And the evidence of the superiority of spaced practice is just overwhelming. It goes back to the 19th century and there is at least, like a- more than 1,000 papers published on that. And still very few people do that, which is really sad. And, uh, strength is a skill. So two th- interesting things happened in the '50s. One is, uh, Thomas Rasch, he was an American, uh, exercise physiologist. He proposed that strength adaptation was largely, uh, sk- largely a skill. And, uh, he looked at pretty much the adaptations, he noticed that there's no correlation between the muscle growth and the strength. Then, uh, at the same time, a Soviet scientist, uh, Stepanov was his last name, he was measuring the electrical activity in the muscles of weightlifters who were pressing overhead. And back then, the press was one of the competition events. And what he found is as the athletes got stronger, after some months, the EMGs started dropping off when they're lifting the same weights. So pretty much he found out that the nervous system activity became more economical. They were able to try less hard, yet still lift the same weights. Or pretty much they were- they could try harder and lift even heavier weights. And hypertrophy could not explain that because in the '50s, the Soviets were very anti-hypertrophy. They were just doing doubles, triples, singles pretty much. So i- if we look at what's going on, it's, uh, the Hebbian mechanisms. So pretty much every time that you activate a p- particular connection, synaptic connection, you know, between the neurons, that connection becomes, uh, stronger. So if you did over and over and over. So the grease the groove is the analogy is that command that's coming in from your brain to your muscles, that's the groove, that's that pathway. And the more you use it, pretty much the more greased it becomes, so it, like, becomes a superconductor. So in the future, you don't have to try as hard to lift the same amount of weight or you can try the same amount and you can lift harder. So we're not e- we haven't even addressed the neural drive yet. We just pretty much made the motor neurons more respon ... more responsive to it. And, uh, it's a very easy and very simple way to train. And, uh, strength comes very easily and very, very unexpectedly. To make sure that it does happen, you have to address, uh, the issue of specificity. So specificity pretty much means without getting too, uh, too much into the weeds, to get stronger, first of all, you need to lift weights that are heavy enough. And, uh, if you're looking at about percentages of one rep max, we're looking at, like, 75 to 85 typically. If you go too light, you don't make the impression on your nervous system and it's just not specific enough. If you go too heavy very quickly, you're just gonna burn yourself up. And, uh, so pretty much, like, it's a weight that's heavy enough to respect and light enough not to fear. And the second of all, and this is very surprising, is you only do about half or fewer reps that you possibly could do. So for example, let's say that you're lifting 80% of your one rep max and let's say that you're able to do eight reps maximum with it. That's your, uh, that ... l- we're just fairly, fairly common. Well, you're only going to do about three, uh, three to four reps per set and that's it. And the gym bros at this point go crazy, like, "Where's the intensity?" Well, intensity in strength training is just how heavy the weight is. It has nothing to do with the effort and it's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard you're exerting yourself. There are times for that, there are absolutely times for that, but if the weight is heavy enough and if you do half the repetitions that you possibly could do, you're going to get stronger. It's very safe and you're not going to burn out psychologically and it's also very easy on your body. So, um, also that builds muscle as well purely because you're able to do a very high volume of work. I'm not able to explain the mechanism why it builds muscle, but as the Soviets found out, uh, in weightlifting research, there's a correlation between the volume and, uh, Robert Roman, uh, between the volume and the hypertrophy, everything else being equal, you're going to get bigger. So almost every day, you're doing the sets of three, four reps, maybe even five, and they start adding up. And before you know it, you're stronger and at the same time you have developed

9. 48:27 – 54:12

   Tool: Greasing the Groove Protocol

   1. PTPavel Tsatsouline48:27

      muscle. So to summarize the grease the groove, you're trying to train, uh-... uh, m-moderately heavy as often as possible while saying as, staying as fresh as possible. And, uh, if you decide to do it in the gym, a very simple protocol would be a set every 10 minutes. It sounds really bizarre, like, why? Why, why would you, would you rest for so long? This apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation. There's so much is still unknown. So we do know that grease the groove works great, but we speculate that some of it has to do with some of the same phenomena related to, uh, to learning in other fields. So if you're doing something over and over, like, like you're saying 2 plus 2 is 4, 2 plus 2 is 4, you're just using your short-term memory. You're not memorizing anything. But if you say 2 plus 2 is 4, you go get a coffee, you come back and you try 2 plus 2, 4. So there's that desirable difficulty that you have in there, and you have to process that instead of just go through the groove. That, uh, that apparently helps, helps this adaptation. So rest for at least 10 minutes, do sets of about the repetitions of half of which you are possibly able to do, and, you know, listen to your body. Typically train two, three days in a row and then take a day off, but listen to your body. Incidentally, this grease the groove is the topic of, uh, my next book. I have completed it, it's not published yet. If you look at, uh, I can't pronounce the Hungarian professor's last name.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman50:00

      Uh, Csikszentmihalyi.

   3. PTPavel Tsatsouline50:01

      Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that. So he's talking about that perfect, uh, challenge, perfect practice lies in that channel between boredom and anxiety. So if you put yourself in that channel, and if you keep lifting these moderately heavy weights with a moderate effort over and over and over, you're going to get strong. That's one of the many ways to get stronger.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman50:21

      Are you doing anything in the, um, rest periods between these 10 minutes? So is it, uh, let's say, uh, bench press, um, wait 10 minutes 'til you bench press again, but in the meantime you're doing Zercher squat five minutes after the first bench press? Are you scattered?

   5. PTPavel Tsatsouline50:35

      That's one of the way to do that.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman50:36

      Uh-huh.

   7. PTPavel Tsatsouline50:36

      You can do up to three exercise, three exercises at the same time. So let's say you like Zercher squat and the bench press, and maybe a third thing, but I'd say those two are enough. And, uh, another option is you can do that, you can incorporate this into if you would do only one exercise, you can squeeze it into your lifestyle or your athletic practice. So for example, uh, in, uh, let's say you're teaching a track, uh, track, uh, practice or martial arts class, and every 10 minutes on the clock you just have the class do, drop and do three hard, uh, let's say three one-arm push-ups, okay, and then get back to the class. So there's no interference whatsoever. In fact, it's better than no interference. Back in the '60s, Soviets found out something called the, uh, strength aftereffect. So if you do strength work that's non-exhausting in nature, and that's not novel to you, it has a tonic effect, uh, just for any, any, uh, anything that you can do with your brain or with your body. Anything. So what they would even do, some coaches do, do so-called strength warmup, let, they would, um, warm up as usual for a track class, let's say, track practice. Then they would do, let's say, three sets of three of something, like, with 80% max, which is not much, and they start, they start their practice. Then the coach noticed that the athletes are starting to droop a little. He'll repeat that, you know? He might repeat that up to three times. So what you have is by having this short, uh, very small dose, like a nano practice of strength, you rejuvenate yourself and your productivity increases so much. So whether you want to just do the strength exercise, several of them in that one hour period, or whether you want to combine that with, uh, writing a great American novel, that's, you know, that's your business.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman52:26

      I suppose if someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home, you could incorporate grease the groove into your entire day.

   9. PTPavel Tsatsouline52:32

      That's ideal, yes.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman52:33

       Yeah.

   11. PTPavel Tsatsouline52:33

       And obviously it's difficult with some equipment, but what you could do, you could use the heavy-duty grippers. You could do, uh, one-arm push-ups. You could, uh, uh, you could keep a kettlebell under your desk and do, press it at, at every opportunity. And again, the idea is really just practice. You just try to hit a perfect, perfect rep. And notice that, um, if you have some issues, if you're a warmup-dependent person for orthopedic issues, I'm talking about warmup in the very much in the, uh, body, not the mind in this particular case, then it might not be appropriate for you. Although, you know, with 10-minute rest it might still be okay. But, uh, practicing a skill without, uh, the warmup, that means rehearsal, is very powerful for improving that skill. People think they automatically equate performance with improvement, with learning, but it's not so. Not at all. When you're doing something that's just out of the blue, it's, uh, you know, the way a sniper would take a cold shot. That's so much harder because you have to have produced that solution, uh, or maybe a- an example that's closer to most, uh, viewers, golf. Uh, you go to the driving range, you start hitting it and like, wow, you're amazing. You just get yourself fine-tuned, you hit, you're perfect. Then, uh, then you go and you play the game and you cannot replicate that because suddenly different club, uh, different topography, everything's different. And you didn't have the luxury of that tuning yourself up right there. So it feels, it doesn't feel like you're stronger, but you are going to get much stronger.

10. 54:12 – 1:00:00

    Tool: Movement & Motivation; Nervous System

    1. PTPavel Tsatsouline54:14

    2. AHAndrew Huberman54:14

       I've been eager to share with you some recent findings that are not my own, but that I think you might be curious about and that I think most people hopefully will be curious about as well. It's not greasing the groove specifically, but it provides a at least partial mechanistic understanding of how particular types of physical movement with this high motor neuron and attentional engagement can generate high levels of alertness that can be devoted to s- as you say, writing the great American novel perhaps. Uh, there's a guy at the University of Pittsburgh named Peter Strick who for the first time started to map the connections between the adrenals-... and the brain. And he was able to do this using some really cool technology. The basic takeaway is the following. Uh, adrenaline release from the adrenals, as, uh, some of the listeners may know, doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. But it turns out it binds to receptors on the vagus, which then stimulates noradrenaline in the brain and provides this increase in alertness. So then the question is, how do you get your adrenals engaged? You know, we can sit here and we can, we can do a staring competition, which I'll lose, um, uh, for certain. But you know, there are all sorts of psychological tools. We got, you know, caffeine, et cetera. There, there are all sorts of ways to... Cold water. But it turns out what Peter found was that there are particular locations in the motor cortex that send a two, uh, basically a two-synapse connection, disynaptic connection, directly to the adrenals. And the areas of motor cortex that engage the adrenals, cause them to release adrenaline-

    3. PTPavel Tsatsouline55:37

       Mm-hmm.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman55:38

       ... but just by sheer movement of particular muscle groups, are the core, as you were talking about before, like bracing the core causes the release of adrenaline, which then via the vagus, uh, causes the, uh, brain stem area, uh, to release noradrenaline, wake up the whole brain essentially, increase learning and performance in anything. And as well, the stronger and stronger activation of the motor neurons, deliberate activation of the motor neurons seems to engage adrenaline release. Now to me, this was a wonderful way of, um, trying to persuade people that they have internal control over this thing that we call motivation-

    5. PTPavel Tsatsouline56:12

       (laughs)

    6. AHAndrew Huberman56:13

       ... that movement itself can increase adrenaline, which can increase the tendency to want to move.

    7. PTPavel Tsatsouline56:16

       As long as, again, you don't-

    8. AHAndrew Huberman56:17

       Yeah.

    9. PTPavel Tsatsouline56:17

       ... want to have too much adrenaline either.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman56:19

        Right, right.

    11. PTPavel Tsatsouline56:19

        That-

    12. AHAndrew Huberman56:19

        And, and I'd like to talk about that. Um, but I think I and so many other people were kind of raised and conditioned, at least in this country, to think, "Oh, if I want to increase my level of motivation, I need to like," um, I don't know, "'watch an inspiring video, that could be great.' Or I can, uh, drink caffeine and that... Or an energy drink." And, and certainly that will do it, but to me the, the discovery, uh, that particular movements and particular muscles being engaged in activity itself changes the neurochemical milieu. I mean, of course it had to be, right?

    13. PTPavel Tsatsouline56:49

        Mm-hmm.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman56:49

        It's a big duh. But I think that, um... Anyway, I was excited to share with you, uh, these data.

    15. PTPavel Tsatsouline56:54

        Well, thank you. That, that is news to me.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman56:54

        I didn't discover them, but-

    17. PTPavel Tsatsouline56:55

        That is news to me.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman56:56

        So I read The Naked Warrior. I was clothed when I, when I read it. (laughs) Um, but it's a wonderful book because it-

    19. PTPavel Tsatsouline57:01

        Thank you.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman57:01

        ... talks about body weight, um, only exercises, and this concept of, for instance, like, cr- trying to crush, um, one's fist on, uh, you know ... making a really strong fist on the other side and how that will increase your, uh, your gripping ability on the other side. This kind of thing.

    21. PTPavel Tsatsouline57:16

        Yes. As you know with your background in neuroscience obviously, there's so many, uh, neurological phenomena, like if you can think of like muscle software-

    22. AHAndrew Huberman57:24

        Mm-hmm.

    23. PTPavel Tsatsouline57:25

        ... that we have access to, that if we become conscious about accessing that, we can be so much stronger.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman57:29

        Mm-hmm. Yeah. So when you talk about, you know, doing a, a s- set of three or four repetitions-

    25. PTPavel Tsatsouline57:35

        Mm-hmm.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman57:35

        ... or two to three repetitions at about 85% or 80% of one rep max, waiting 10 minutes, and in the intervening 10 minutes going and trying to learn something important, or, uh, physical or cognitive, this makes perfect sense to me because of the relationship of adrenaline, but also the way that your entire nervous system is changed-

    27. PTPavel Tsatsouline57:51

        Mm-hmm.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman57:52

        ... in the, in the intervening period.

    29. PTPavel Tsatsouline57:53

        And plus you have-

    30. AHAndrew Huberman57:54

        Yeah.
11. 1:00:00 – 1:10:25

    Frequency & Recovery, Heterochronicity, Soviet vs American Training

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:00

       system component. One, one thing that I'd love to ask about the nervous system in terms of training, adaptation, and recovery is that I was weaned somewhat under the, uh, thought patterns of Mike Mentzer. This was in the Dorian Yates era. And I knew Mike a little bit, I paid for a consult, uh, with him over the phone. We never met in person. Um, so that had my mother asking, you know, "Why is this grown man calling our home?" And, "Why are you wir-" Uh, in the old days you had to wire somebody money, so I do... Um, but it was so worthwhile because, uh, Mike taught me that the goal of training was to induce an adaptation.

    2. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:00:33

       Mm-hmm.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:33

       Anything additional was not necessary and in his case he, he felt was counterproductive. Very infrequent training, et cetera. And it worked tremendously well to take me from like 150 pounds to 210 pounds, which I had no need to do, but-

    4. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:00:46

       Sure.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:46

       ... my body just reacted like crazy.

    6. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:00:48

       Yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:48

       But then again, I was 16, 17, and 18 years old in that time, probably could have done any number of different things and, and experienced similar results. Who knows? But the concept of course is that you train to induce an adaptation, then you rest, and then you allow the adaptation to serve the m- m- moving higher poundages in good form, this sort of thing.The problem, however, is that, and Mentzer highlighted this, is that training of any kind, running, lifting, et cetera, taxes both the nervous system as a whole and the muscles locally in the connective tissue.

    8. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:01:19

       Mm-hmm.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:19

       How should we think about training and recovery? So when you describe Grease the Groove, I could imagine if I had a home setup or I'm going to the gym, I could maybe do four or five rounds of this training. But at some point-

    10. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:01:30

        Mm-hmm.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:30

        ... it becomes counterproductive. So, um-

    12. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:01:33

        Wow, a lot of great questions.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:34

        Yeah. I'm just trying to think about how to schedule this sort of thing, keeping in mind that the nervous system fatigues as a whole, and then there's also the issue of local muscle fatigue or, or even the propensity for injury if you just overdo it.

    14. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:01:46

        Sure.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:47

        Yeah. So if we could just riff on this for a little bit.

    16. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:01:48

        If you don't mind, Andrew-

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:49

        Yeah.

    18. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:01:49

        ... I'll break it up because there are-

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:50

        Yeah, please.

    20. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:01:50

        ... a lot of great questions right there. So one is you mentioned there are different ways of training. And again, uh, we... The Grease the Groove load parameters apart from the long rests are very much based on Soviet weightlifting system, and I'd like to talk a little bit about that later.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:04

        Mm-hmm.

    22. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:02:04

        Another system that's completely and radically different and it ties very much to Mike Mentzer's training, uh, for reasons that become obvious, is the classic American powerlifting system from the sev- from the '80s. And, uh, when people argue about training methods, what they need to understand is, uh, there are many ways to get the job done. You know, Ott Kiviraha, his research in Estonia found because there's so many different combinations of stimuli and the different ad- different adaptations that result, you can arrive to similar outcomes in a lot of different ways. So to say this is right and this is wrong, you cannot sometimes do that. I mean, I can say most of things are wrong, but I can also say there's multiple right ways of training and they can be radically different, and they're different because they rely on very different phenomena. So in this particular case you're talking about recovery and frequency which is a- again, a great way to address it. I'm going to talk about two systems that are completely different and yet have that same pedigree that they have, uh, brought so many gold medals. So one system is the Soviet weightlifting system, is again where athletes would train several times a day and Bulgarian system is even more extreme example of that, and every day. And the other extreme would be the American powerlifting system exemplified by, um, uh, Hugh Cassidy, Marty Gallagher, Ed Coan, Curt Kowalski. So starting from the '70s through the '90s. Those are really glorious day for US powerlifting. And in that system they would pretty much do one or two heavy sets per lift once a week. So it's kind of a little bit like Mike Mentzer's work, kind of but n- but w- we'll, we'll address why. So how can that be and how can both systems work? So you addressed the recovery. There's a concept called heterochronicity which hetero means different, chronicity refers to time. So the different systems in the body decov- recover at different rates. And if you don't take that into account then, uh, you're going to have some serious problems. So the Soviet system took, uh, if you look at the Soviet system with frequent training, they looked at, okay, we want to do frequent practice which is exactly what we do. We don't want to beat the muscles up so much that they, that it takes them very long time to recover. You know, not too much eccentric stress, not too much acidosis, avoiding things like that. Uh, and they were able to adjust the loads in such a way, so let's say your weights are heavy but not too heavy. The reps don't go too high so you're able to recover pretty much, pretty much overnight. And the benefit of that is it's been shown that if you fragment a given workload over more days, over more sessions, you get better results. And it's, uh, your body is able and your ni- nervous system, endocrine system, your carcass, everything is able to handle much more if it's split into small doses. So let's use an example of a meal. Let's say if you were trying to do an eating competition, how much you can eat in 24 hours. So it's not like those Coney Island, you know, how many hot dogs you can eat in one sitting, no. But you'd probably eat a lot more if you spread it throughout the day and, uh, this is the same idea. Just like that parable from Nassim Taleb about, uh, the king that got angry at his son and he says he- he's going to crush him with a big rock. And then he realizes, "Oh, what did I do? I don't want to kill this kid." But the king's na- king's word is king's word, right? So he ordered his, uh, peons to break up the rock into pebbles and then just dumped these pebbles on the kid. So that's the same idea, so fragmentation of the load always, uh, allows you to do more and do it safer. So something else is related to that. In some training systems, some training systems rely on adaptations, let's say for strength, uh, that go, in the muscle, that go beyond just the contractile proteins which is, you know, the part m- you know, my ph- part that make, uh, that create force. So for example, the Soviet system, they also tried to increase the storage of creatine phosphate which is the kind of immediate fuel for, for muscle contractions, for this type of work, for lifting heavy weights over and over. And so by training sometimes easier, you're able to keep stimulating that creatine phosphate adaptation but without- still allowing muscles to recover, so there's kind of a dance. And it's fairly complex. Then on the other hand, the American system did something completely different and, uh, the explanations for what happens in the muscle with this, within this American system, we don't know for sure but there's a hypothesis by, uh, Russian specialist, ƒ Vadim Payatsienko, that's seems quite credible. So here's... So again, the system, here's the system. You train hard, you do one hard set once a week or two hard sets. So the-... satellite cells that are immature cells and muscle, they're sitting there waiting to jump in, in, you know, if you need to replenish the messed up ones. In order for the satellite cells to get their job done, they try to figure out, scientists try to figure out what sort of stimuli are, are required. And one, it, there can, a strong case can be made that a very particular damage to the microstructure of the muscle can, can provoke that stimulus. So but that damage has to be very, very specific. If you beat up the muscle with a baseball bat, you're just gonna get a whole lot of scar tissue and, you know, some satellite cells will just die and others will just be- become scar. But if the crossbridges in the muscle, the crossbridges is that part that does create force in the muscle, if they do tear in a very specific way, it seems to do the job. So the way the muscle contracts is, so there is, uh, imagine that you're rowing a boat on the water. So water is one protein, it's called actin, and myosin is the, the oars that are moving in there. So the oar dips into the water, hooks, and pulls, and that oar relies on available energy in the muscle, so these, uh, ATP molecules are, you know, stored energy, they're floating around, and the head, myosin head needs, needs that ATP in order to both to hook, to produce force, but it also, it needs ATP to unhook as well. And it's in this in-between stage is called a rigor. So whenever the muscle has produced force, but there's not enough energy for it to relax, so the muscle's stuck in rigor. So think of rigor mortis. So if you tear a dead body's muscles, you know (laughs) there is g- it's gonna tear. And supposedly this is going to happen only when you're able to, uh, when the consumption of ATP is really high in the muscle, but the, but the supply is not. And so if you're, if you do that in the first, let's say, 20, 20, 30 seconds before acidosis set in, that's what, that's what should happen. Because if you wait longer when there's a lot of acid in the muscle, acid, uh, it kills that reaction that, uh, it kills that reaction that uses ATP, so you're not using as much anymore. Sure, the, the demand is down, the supply is down but so in demand, so it's not so good. So if you race that fatigue point, so if you try to deplete that creatine phosphate, that kind of a rocket fuel of the muscle, within about 20, 30 seconds, then presumably some of these hooks, some of these oars are gonna get stuck, and when the muscle's lengthening, and they're gonna tear. And that's a very specific tear. It doesn't happen on the outside of the muscle. It happens just on the inside, in there. Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but it's a pretty good theory that does explain Mike Mentzer's method and e- and explains the, uh, American powerlifting

12. 1:10:25 – 1:20:00

    Soviet vs American Strength Schools, Periodization, Recovery

    1. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:10:25

       method. Interestingly about, about Mike Mentzer, and again, to the listeners who are not aware of the method, that means train the muscle really hard, very infrequently, with very low volume. Professor Yuri Verkhoshansky before he died, you know, a famous Soviet sports scientist known, uh, known in the West mostly as the father of what is called plyometrics in the West, and, but he's also done many other things as well, he spoke very highly about Mentzer. He thought Mentzer was brilliant, Mentzer was an innovator, but many people, some people get good results from it like you did, and a lot of people do not. And, uh, so pretty much what Protasenko suggested that might happens is eventually, uh, you'll reach the limit of adaptation of how much you can deplete, how much you can deplete the creatine phosphate in that window. That's when you hit the wall. And this is where the American system comes in. This system is called cycling. The history of cycling is fascinating. The relationship, uh, the interaction between the Soviet and American strength schools is absolutely fascinating. So, uh, just to go back for a minute, Soviet track athletes in the '50s were using the typical stupid high rep, uh, high rep reps to burn. Then in the (laughs) then in the late '50s, uh, some very sharp young specialist, uh, Vitaly Chuzinov, he, uh, made a case at a conference said, "What are we doing? Let's look at what..." He said, "Let's look what Paul Anderson, Dy Hebbern, Bruce Randall, these North American strength guys, let's look what they're doing. They're lifting heavy stuff for sets of three to five reps. Let's knock this

    2. NANarrator1:12:06

       (music plays)

    3. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:12:06

       ... down some soft." Soviet track athletes started doing that right there. So this is how the Soviets, for example, learned from Americans. As an example of how it went the other way, uh, the classic periodization as it's known, Matveev's periodization, in which you kind of, uh, start out with higher volume and, uh, less specific to lower, you know, to lower volume, more intensity and so on, that, uh, periodization is not used by lifters in the Soviet Union. Lifters thought that's just completely not, it's, it's just not usable, it's just inappropriate for their needs. Arkady Vorobyov, the professor and, uh, Olympic champion made a very strong case why. But Americans who got some limited information about it, American powerlifters, not weightlifters, were able to develop (laughs) their own training system based on that premise, something that the Soviets didn't do, and the way it worked is, is like this. You don't necessarily have very high volume but you start... I'm gonna give you the most classic example of this type of cycling. Again, this is, again, Cassidy, Gallagher, Cohen-Kowalski. Four week blocks. Let's say they're, um, that there's, like, gonna be three four-week blocks, maybe four.So you'll do your lift once a week. On week four, you go for a PR. So let's say this is a month of fives. So this is, on your week four, you're going to do a PR set of five. You plan for it. Week three is somewhere around your old PR. Week two is lighter. Week one is lighter still. Okay? And then after that, you may increase the weight, but still relative effort is going to drop, and you're going to kind of repeat the process. So it does multiple things. On the muscular level, so what, uh, Partashin explained, you pretty much decondition yourself, from temporary, temporarily, and you progressively increase that creatine phosphate use, so initially, when you're deconditioned, it doesn't take as much to get the stimulus. You don't have to push really hard in the first week. You push harder in the second, and harder and harder. There's a concept, uh, their concept in, uh, periodization, so in sports science, of reactivity versus resistance. Reactivity means how responsive your body is to the stimulus, and resistance, kind of like in the medical terms, you know, how much it can, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's not affected by it. So when you're starting light after a layoff, your reactivity is high and your resistance is low. It doesn't take much. So boom, suddenly you build this muscle. And then you keep building up. And when you reach, when you reach a peak, then you just, then you just, uh, step back again. And, uh, on the side of the nervous system and endocrine system, much later Soviet research, they said you can train hard maximum two weeks out of four. That's it. More than that, you cannot handle.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:08

       So for every month, you're training two weeks hard.

    5. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:15:11

       Two weeks hard. That's it.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:11

       The other ones, you're cruising? You're...

    7. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:15:14

       Not as hard. Sometimes easy, sometimes ... Uh, there are different ways of programming it. The typical one that you hear about in the West is you're going to build things up for three weeks and then down in four. It's one of the about 16 different possible arrangements. Doesn't have to be. There can be, um ... Here's one brilliant way. Uh, Franco Columbu, who, uh, passed unfortunately, was not just a great bodybuilder. He was a great chiropractor and great strength athlete.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:40

       Super strong.

    9. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:15:41

       Very strong, and brilliant. So he told me about when, h- how, his deadlift cycle. Week one, moderate. Week two, heavy. Week three, moderate. Week four, very heavy. Again, this is different way of arranging the same concept. And these American powerlifters were able to build a system that built the muscle probably exactly in this manner. What was happening at the same time ... Oh yeah, and there's also another angle, how that system possibly has worked. This is fascinating. Any type of exercise that you do, uh, makes your muscles more slow-twitch. It's just the way it is. It's very, very bizarre.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:24

        Really?

    11. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:16:24

        Yeah.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:25

        Even explosive work?

    13. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:16:26

        Even explosive. Goldspink-

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:27

        Even just trying to crush the bar and drive the deadlift up?

    15. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:16:29

        Even that, the more you do it.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:30

        Huh.

    17. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:16:31

        So Goldspink's research back in the '80s, that any cycle of stretching or contraction resets the, uh, heavy chain myosin, you know, the contractile proteins that makes it towards slower time. So any type of work. If you do biopsy on somebody who is a couch potato, you're gonna find that person probably has a higher, uh, concentration of white fibers than you and I.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:52

        Wild. Very counterintuitive.

    19. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:16:54

        Very counterintuitive. And, uh, so that's like a default setting for the fibers. However, if you take time off, uh, it's, it's something changes, and the changes be- it goes beyond the change. So this, uh, this research came out some- out of Sweden, I believe. When they trained a group of subjects in strength, they saw a predicted decrease in their ratio of type IIx fast twitch fibers. Then they took a couple months off, and then they experienced, they called it MHC overshoot, myosin heavy, heavy chain. Again, like fast fiber overshoot. So they had something like 70 more percent, uh, fibers after that.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman1:17:35

        Wild. Nobody takes two, three months off these days.

    21. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:17:38

        And, but they figured out, Verkhoshansky figured out, that is not needed for athletes, because obviously you get deconditioned in other ways, right?

    22. AHAndrew Huberman1:17:46

        Mm-hmm.

    23. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:17:47

        So remember we're talking about hetero, heterochronicity. Different processes take place at different rates. So it's like you're constantly playing the m- whack the mole. So this is getting out of shape, but this has not recovered yet. It's, it's a game. That's, that's the game of, uh, training programming. So in the American system, first of all, the infrequent training, it reduced the stimulus for the conversion of the fibers towards the-

    24. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:10

        I see.

    25. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:18:10

        ... towards the slower isoform, slower types.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:12

        Okay.

    27. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:18:12

        And the second of all, the taper that they did later, so suddenly switching from five, so like one triple, one double for a few weeks, if you do that for just a few weeks, you're do like a one triple, one double, you're not gonna l- lose much muscle mass because it really takes over a month. But it, there's enough time for the, uh, for the myosin to reconfigure itself to a faster type. So that's probably what happens.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:36

        Interesting.

    29. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:18:37

        And neurologically, I think what happens, probably they exerted themselves very strongly once, uh, once, twice a month. So it's again an, you know, neural drive, probably with strength and disinhibition and other things like that. And the irony is the system has lost its popularity. Some records in the deadlift, like Dan Austin's record and possibly Inaba's, set back in the '90s and '80s, there's ... Oh yeah, Lamar Gant. Lamar Gant is, this is the strongest deadlifter pound per pound in history. So like 683 at box 32 or something like that. A- and it was done back in the '80s. So he trained that way. Dan Austin. And other lifts records have increased in part because of the equipment changes and some other reasons. But, uh, Ed Coan dominated the platform for decades.And so there are some great, great lifters who train this way. But then the system lost its popularity for reasons have nothing to do with its effectiveness.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:35

        Mm-hmm.
13. 1:20:00 – 1:22:45

    Sponsors: LMNT & Joovv

    1. PTPavel Tsatsouline1:20:00

       certain type of people.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:02

       I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes sodium, magnesium, and potassium all in the correct ratios but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of LMNT in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great-tasting flavors of LMNT. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. And now that we're in the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, LMNT has their chocolate medley flavors back in stock. I really like the chocolate flavors, especially the chocolate mint when it's heated up. So you put it in hot water and that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate, especially when it's cold and dry outside when hydration is especially critical. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by Joovv. Joovv makes medical-grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near-infrared light sources have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, even mitochondrial function, and improving vision itself. What sets Joovv lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning specific wavelengths of red light and near-infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Joovv whole body panel about three to four times a week and I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you'd like to try Joovv, you can go to Joovv, spelled J-0-0-V v.com/huberman. Joovv is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off Joovv products. Again, that's Joovv, spelled J-0-0-V v.com/huberman to get

14. 1:22:45 – 1:27:15

    Bell Squat, Non-Spine Compressing Leg Work, Tool: Zercher Squat

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:22:45

       up to $400 off. Based on what you just told us about Franco's training and, and the rest, seems that shorter training cycles might be advantageous, even just conceptually and, and practically. Like I, I've tended to break up my year into 12 to 16-week training cycles.

Episode duration: 4:15:13