Body Fat Loss Expert Reveals: 'Intermittent fasting is a hoax!' (Do THIS Instead!) @drandygalpin

Dr. Andy Galpin 0:00 You wanna gain more muscle and you wanna have more energy, you wanna have more mental focus. Okay, why haven't you done that before? I want to find what is that single thing that stopped you from winning, and that's all I wanna work on.

Speaker 0:09 Professor of kinesiology. Expert in muscle physiology. Dr. Andy Galpin.

Dr. Andy Galpin 0:13 What's gonna burn more calories, walking a mile or running a mile?

Jay Shetty 0:17 Running a mile.

Dr. Andy Galpin 0:18 A calorie is energy. Walking a mile, running a mile, it's the same thing.

Jay Shetty 0:21 If someone's listening right now and they're thinking, "Fitness and strength are my big goals this year," how would you encourage them to think about it?

Dr. Andy Galpin 0:28 Number one predictor of success with training programs is... [upbeat music]

Speaker 0:35 The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 0:43 What routine is the best for someone that wants to gain muscle and lose weight?

Dr. Andy Galpin 0:49 There is no specific direction to that, and I know that was, like, the most deflated answer possible after that enormous setup, but I'm saying that because I actually want to empower people, not the opposite. Having done this for many years, having taught for a very long time, one thing that is very clear, if you give hyper-specific answers to questions like that, when someone hears that and they go, "Oh, I can't do that exercise 'cause my knee hurts," or, "I can't s- train like that because I..." Fill in the blanks, right? Then they often feel like they can't do anything, and so what you do is you take people from 10 to zero, and I hate that. I wanna go everyone from zero to two. I wanna get somebody to 10, but I want all the wins we can possibly get. And so if you look at that combination of things you said, two very things, specific things. Grow muscle, lose fat. Okay, great. That gives you effectively every option under the table for your fitness routine. There are some core things that will lay in that foundation, though, that will be true regardless of your approach. I can hit those very quickly. This is a basic saying that we will, uh, and there's variations of this, but the concepts are few and the methods are many. As long as you hit these next couple of concepts,

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:56 you can choose all kinds of different methods. The methods are things like how many days you do it. Do you use kettlebell? Do you run? Do you go outside? Do you use group classes? Do you go... Those are all methods methods. They're important. We can get to that detail. But concepts are few. Here's what that's gonna look like. Are you doing something consistently? If you look across the literature for many years now, the strongest predictor of success with training programs, fitness programs, exercise programs, and nutrition programs, number one predictor of success short and long-term is adherence. You have to be consistent. I will take a consistent approach with a suboptimal program, with a bad program any day of the week for that particular question. So be consistent. Second one is there's gotta be some sort of progressive overload. That doesn't mean you have to lift more weights. It doesn't mean you have to train harder or more, but there has to be some sort of intentional progress. And that can be done within a day, the week, the month. You got lots of ways to get there, but be consistent and try to keep progressing eventually. Outside of that, we're getting into more nuance, and so now we're thinking about things like you probably wanna use really high-efficient movements. These are exercise types, movement patterns that have a lot of caloric expenditure with minimal time, right? Most likely, I'm inferring from that question, that pe- person probably doesn't wanna spend 20 hours a week in their fitness, and so you wanna choose things, um, this is not typically isolation work. So I wouldn't spend 20 minutes doing bicep-specific exercises for that particular person. You gotta get a lot of muscles worked, and you gotta l- burn a lot of calories. So this could be a combination of some type of strength training program and some type of cardiovascular program, or anything in between. The reality of it, though, is, I'll reiterate one more time, and 'cause I've done this many, many times personally, this is consistent across the literature. Those two goals can be achieved with no or minimal cardiovascular training. These can be achieved with very minimal strength training. These can be achieved with body weight training, with any other combination of those things. You have tons of options there. So if that is truly your goal, pick something that's gonna give you a little bit of both sides of that equation. Stay safe. Don't get hurt. You still gotta work, and our, 'cause this is our third one, there's gotta be consistent effort there. So be consistent. Keep doing it. Try to be high productivity with that, and then tr- you gotta try. I need a six to seven out of 10 on an effort scale. Would love to see a little bit more, but I'll live with six. Below six, we may not be having enough actual stimuli to grow muscle or lose weight. But you give me those three things, and most people are gonna have a tremendous amount of success.

Jay Shetty 4:39 Absolutely. Thank you for that. I appreciate the refreshing answer and not having to be specific. And, and I agree with you. I think that's, that's a very fair way to go, and it's actually the only truth and reality to it as well.

Dr. Andy Galpin 4:51 Yeah. You know, honestly, I have a hard time when I get questions like that because I want, at home as a listener, when I hear people on podcasts, I'm like, "Would you just give me, like, one example?" So I'm sen- sensitive to that. But the reality of it is, that's not the most honest answer. It's not the answer scientifically, and me coaching people now, the people that I personally train, the non-athletes, it's not real. That's not really how I would approach them, so I, I try to do my best to give an honest answer, and I know that's not always as tangible, but it is the honest reality.

Jay Shetty 5:20 Yeah. If someone's listening right now and they're thinking, "Fitness and strength are my big goals this year," how would you encourage them, like the work- the people that you work with? If someone's like, "Andy, train me now. Coach me now. How should I be thinking about my goals over the next 12 months?" How would you encourage them to think about it?

Dr. Andy Galpin 5:38 There's a handful of ways. Um, we will always start at the top. Okay, what's, what's our biggest constraint? And that sounds a little bit backwards, but we call these things performance anchors. So you want a goal, right? And I use the soccer example here, football maybe, if you're listening. You want to kick, you want to goal, and there's something in that way. There's a defender. There's a goalie there. What's your goalie? And I'm saying that to say, is it finances? Is it time? Is it injury? Is it you've never been to the gym before and you're nervous? Because once I know that, the entire path I'm taking is going to be different based on that very first filter. You wanna gain more muscle, you want to fill in all those blanks. Okay, why haven't you done that before? Have you tried in the past and failed? Have you never tried? That's the biggest lever we have to work on. If it is a finance issue, I can't afford gym membership. Okay, got it. Now I'm gonna take you on a totally different route. If it is unlimited finance, like, okay,

Dr. Andy Galpin 6:34 now we're doing, you know, next level stuff. If it's somewhere in the middle, we have different answers. So this could be a combination of saying, identify why you failed in the past or why you've never started, and overcome that barrier, and I'm done. I'm gonna stop right there. That'll give me six months, right? In this initial case, in that person you laid out, I'm cons- I'm going back to what I said earlier, adherence is number one and consistency over time. So I want this first January push, this February push towards fitness, like new year, new me, I wanna win. I want wins, wins, wins. I don't care if it's an optimal program, it doesn't necessarily matter, we'll come to those details later, but I want you to have an experience through fitness that went, "Yeah, that was kinda, it was okay. It wasn't so bad. I, well, I wasn't super sore, and I..." Okay, now you're a believer. Now I can get that two days a week to three. Now I can get you to invest $50 and get you a kettlebell at home. Okay, great. Like, we can start pushing the pace here. If we do the opposite and we give these big huge charges, that can work if you're an all-in type of person. You, maybe I could get you on that. All right, like, let's get it personality wise. But if that's not your personality, oftentimes that is a crash and burn by February or March, and it actually dissuades you probably more from starting again the next time. So for the general population, as a aggregate answer here, I want to find what is that single thing that stopped you from winning, and that's all I wanna work on. When we program this for our executive clients and all those, we look at the year, and we look at this whole thing, and we use a, what we call a quadrant model. So the quadrant is you get 10 total points, and you can choose to spend those 10 total points across four areas, right? So 10 total, not 40 total. Here are your four areas, and we do this practice before they start anything. They don't get a workout before an- any this question is answered. We go through this exercise, we lay out their answer, this gets posted on a note card, it goes in their most vulnerable place. This could be their office. Where's the point where it's gonna, you were gonna work out today, and then you didn't? Is that your Netflix TV? Is that the office 'cause you wouldn't stop working? Is it... Right? You get held accountable to that, and we're gonna hold you accountable to that. Here's what the quadrant looks like. Quadrant one is, we'll just call it business. Whatever you do for your life and your finances, okay, that's business. Quadrant number two is social, family, relationships, whatever that means to you. Number three is your physical health. Again, these, these are wide-ranging definitions, and everyone gets to define it for themselves. Quadrant number four is recovery. So we start off by asking, and we always do this, and if, if you wanna play along, you're welcome to. This is kinda fun sometimes.

Jay Shetty 9:13 Let's do it.

Dr. Andy Galpin 9:14 Great. Let's do that right now for you. So you got 10 total chips, let's start with business. Of your 10, how many do you wanna spend? Let's say this is January, and you're gonna get kickstarted. Jay, what are you gonna put in business?

Jay Shetty 9:24 And it's time? Am I thinking about it in terms of time or energy or?

Dr. Andy Galpin 9:27 It, it's all of it, right? So we intentionally keep it vague. If I say you got life energy.

Jay Shetty 9:32 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 9:32 You got 10.

Jay Shetty 9:34 Right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 9:34 Could be money, could be combination, focus, attention, resources, however that makes sense to you.

Jay Shetty 9:40 Yeah. And it's business, family-

Dr. Andy Galpin 9:41 Bus- let's start with business

Jay Shetty 9:42 ... health, and?

Dr. Andy Galpin 9:43 Recovery.

Jay Shetty 9:44 Recovery, right. So business, and I would s- and over what period of time?

Dr. Andy Galpin 9:50 It doesn't matter. You define it.

Jay Shetty 9:52 Okay. Okay. So I'd say, yeah, over the year. Uh-

Dr. Andy Galpin 9:55 Let, let's do a, let's do at a quarter. Quarter one next.

Jay Shetty 9:57 Over the quarter, okay, yeah. So I'd say, honestly, where I'll probably prioritize would be, like, five.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:04 Great.

Jay Shetty 10:04 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:05 Most common answer is five.

Jay Shetty 10:06 Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:07 By far the most common answer is five.

Jay Shetty 10:08 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:08 Nobody wants to say six 'cause in their head they go [inhales]

Jay Shetty 10:11 Haven't got enough left, yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:12 ... and no one, everyone knows it's not four.

Jay Shetty 10:14 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:15 Right. So we're at five for business. Now let's go on to, uh, relationships.

Jay Shetty 10:19 Relationships I'd say is... Well, my work, I, the business relationships are very strong in that sense.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:26 Sure.

Jay Shetty 10:26 So my personal relationships, I'd, i- it's an easy one for me. I, my, my circle's small, so I'd say two.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:36 Okay, great. We're at seven now, right? How many to your fitness?

Jay Shetty 10:40 Two.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:41 Great. Now we have an obvious one left.

Jay Shetty 10:42 One left, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:43 Couple of rules we have on this one. By the way, what you just gave is by far the most common total answer, right?

Jay Shetty 10:47 Yep.

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:47 Almost everybody has this problem. There's issues with what you just said. We never let recovery be less than half-

Jay Shetty 10:55 Mm

Dr. Andy Galpin 10:56 ... of our next highest category. I'm happy you did two and one, that's great. Most people, recovery end up going to zero. What does recovery mean? It doesn't necessarily mean a massage or s- a sauna. Fine, that can be it. Recovery can be a night out with friends.

Jay Shetty 11:10 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 11:11 Recovery can be I need alone time. Recovery, tons of ways, but what is the thing that gives you energy back is what we're trying to go after. Physical fitness, same sort of thing. There's always overlaps between these things. We will work through you on that one. So that, that routine you laid out says fine, okay. You gave me two for physical fitness. I'm gonna construct a program now that says this is at most 20% of Jay's energy. If I come in and get you with this program five days a week, I know I've lost already. You're not gonna get it, and if you are, are you gonna get it for three straight months? Hmm, you just told me business was a really big priority. At the same token, when you come back to me and you're asking and you're wondering why the program isn't getting you the success that you want, I'm gonna say, "You gave it 20%. What expectations did you have?" Okay? What do you wanna take it from? If you're not willing to move it from somewhere else, there's only finite things that a human can do. So we're gonna walk backwards from that equation. So I might say, fine, we're there. Now we get to quarter 2 and you wanna adjust that. You want more results, you wanna lose more fat, fill in the blank for the adaptation. I go, "Great. Where are we gonna pull it from?" It's not gonna come from recovery. Now it means less business, less friends. This is the ultimate dynamic we have to play, right? People don't wanna do the recovery, and they don't wanna pull it from there, but then they expect massive gains in fitness. We can get you through short periods of time. Uh, we have these special scenarios all the time where it's like, "Hey, the Olympics are coming. World Championships are com- " We, we can juice up this a little bit with all kinds of little tricks, but those don't last, and sometimes they burn you into a bigger hole. So if we're thinking long-term strategy with you, I'd say, "Great, I'm fine with two." We would scuff up a little program, and in your brain it goes to two. And I'm watching, and I'm like, "Jay, you didn't do this thing for recovery. It's been three days. It's been a week. We're at zero for recovery. Don't expect fitness goals with no recovery." Bam. Jay, been out, went out again last night, went out a little again, took another trip. Friends has been at three or four. You get the point here, right? So we, I can hold you really accountable to that and saying, "If you're not getting your fitness goal, number one starter is, are you even giving it a chance to succeed?"

Jay Shetty 13:11 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 13:12 If not, we have a non-starter and we have to change our expectations.

Jay Shetty 13:15 Yeah. Smart.

Dr. Andy Galpin 13:16 If you want more results, you gotta give me more pie. Give me a bigger shot at it, and we'll get more results. Physical strength is one of the single strongest, pun intended, predictors of lifespan. We will focus more typically on fat loss, quarter two. No holidays, nothing around, and everyone has a little bit of extra motivation to look a little bit better over the summer when the sun comes out and they're more likely to have their shirts off. People generally want three things in their fitness. They wanna look good, they wanna feel good, and they wanna perform good. Now, what does look mean? I don't know. You tell me.

Jay Shetty 13:53 I really appreciate the constraint approach, too.

Dr. Andy Galpin 13:55 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 13:55 I found my constraint was travel.

Dr. Andy Galpin 13:58 Great.

Jay Shetty 13:58 And so I haven't traveled for the last six weeks, and I've felt my absolute best with-

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:04 Always

Jay Shetty 14:05 ... sleep, food, diet, everything.

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:07 I've been on the road-

Jay Shetty 14:07 [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:08 ... for probably eight straight weeks, and I'm the opposite-

Jay Shetty 14:10 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:10 ... of you right now.

Jay Shetty 14:10 Yeah, exactly. And, and, and that was my... My life was like I'd be working out for one week, eating right for one week, everything's good. Then traveling for one week. Then one week... So I was one week on, one week off, and then I'd planned to spend these two months in LA.

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:24 Good.

Jay Shetty 14:25 And it has been life-changing from a workout point of view, sleep point of view, recovery point of view, everything we just talked about.

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:31 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 14:31 I can do, I have been doing five days of workouts a week, you know-

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:35 Yeah

Jay Shetty 14:35 ... eating really well, whatever, because I'm in one place. Because g- I'm saying

Jay Shetty 14:39 all of this to reiterate your point. It was all about the constraint.

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:43 Always.

Jay Shetty 14:43 It was all about the constraint. I had the motivation, I had the drive, I had the discipline, I had all that stuff, but travel was the thing that made me feel like I was having gains for a week and then losing it, and then getting discipline and then losing it, and that was just exhausting.

Dr. Andy Galpin 14:58 So let, let me run you through two specific examples on that, and I love you brought up travel. This is super easy. We, uh, have a coaching program called Arete. This is this, like, excellence in kinda everything program. If you were in Arete with us right now, I would say, "Great. You've been home. I'm gonna change your entire program. It's gonna be more gym stuff. We're gonna lift more weights. We're gonna have a very specific plan. I'm gonna ask you to report back exactly how much you lifted, and we're gonna track it, and we're gonna do heavy there." Had we flipped the role and you were all of a sudden on the road, I would say, "Great." If I gave that same program, that's gonna be a terrible one.

Jay Shetty 15:31 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 15:32 It's not gonna work. Why? 'Cause everywhere you land, you're gonna have to go to find a gym. It's not gonna work, and then the hotel gym sucks. Like, I've set you up for failure. That's bad coaching. I would've spent six weeks going, "You know what? Here's what we're gonna do. It's called a flexible program. We don't need anything more than a, a band and a kettlebell." Okay? Maybe not even the kettlebell. And we're gonna rotate the days. So what I mean by that is right now, if you're at home, I would say, "Okay, Mondays are this, Tuesdays are this, Wednesdays are this," and when you didn't do that on Wednesday, I would be calling you. "Why didn't you finish? Why didn't we train Wednesday, dude? What... I don't care. I'm on it," right? That doesn't work when you're on the road. I would do more flexible program where we have a concept we're trying to hit. We're trying to get a strength training day in. You do that strength training day whatever day that comes up, and as soon as you get it in, we check it off. And then we have, say, the next day is gonna be a, a, a long duration workout. Great, you get that in when you can. But we also have flexibility 'cause when you go, "Hey, you know what? I got an extra hour today. There was no gym, but I went for an hour walk," boom, got that thing in. You have different things you can plug in and play based on availability, time, and energy, right? So that's the way to have you success. At the end of the six weeks, we wouldn't have probably made a ton of progress on you if you're on the road constantly, but we would have not gone backwards anywhere. The, the literature is really clear. The science is clear. You can maintain muscle size. You can maintain muscle strength very, very well. Cardiovascular fitness is incredibly stable with one or so training sessions per week.

Jay Shetty 16:52 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 16:53 We could have kept you right where you're at, and then we would've looked at this and said, "Okay, our expectations for progress are not gonna be high during Jay's six weeks of travel. Let's all set expectation here. But when when we get home, we're getting after it and our expectations are higher."

Jay Shetty 17:08 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 17:08 So at the net end of both of those, you add them together and, and you see where I'm going with that, right?

Jay Shetty 17:13 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 17:13 So it's not just expecting yourself to, to gain five pounds of muscle every single month. It's unrealistic.

Jay Shetty 17:18 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 17:18 We'd have looked at the whole quarter or the whole year is what we... In our take, we look at the whole year for people, and we go, "Okay, great. Quarter one's not the quarter we're gonna go after it. We're gonna work on mobility. We're gonna work on our breathwork. We're gonna work on thousand other things that can be done on the road, can be done when traveling. We're gonna get our best gains in," fill in the other blank, "when we've got eight, maybe it's quarter three." And we actually have goals for each quarter for the year that are plotted out, and so we give people the best chance of success. The g- best example I can give of that is quarter four is the worst possible time to have fat loss goals in America. Like, it's impossible. You run into Halloween, eh, have a little bit of candy, right? And then it's like, well, I'll get back on it, but reality it is, like, Thanksgiving's gonna be here in a couple weeks.

Jay Shetty 18:02 [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 18:04 All the way out through New Year.

Jay Shetty 18:05 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 18:05 Terrible. If you try to have the, m- for most people, a huge fat loss goal, you're gonna lose. So we don't play that game. You know what we typically focus on this part of the year? We're gonna shift towards muscle growth

Jay Shetty 18:16 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 18:16 That's when you need excessive calories, right?

Jay Shetty 18:18 Mm-mm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 18:19 Let's feed the beast. Let's not fight our life. Life will win. We're gonna go back typically just as, you know, big examples here. It's different for everyone. We will focus more typically on, on fat loss quarter two. You know why? No holidays, nothing around, and everyone has a little bit of extra motivation to look a little bit better over the summer when the sun comes out, and they're more likely to have their shirts off, clothing down. So it fits life a little bit better.

Jay Shetty 18:47 Yeah. Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 18:47 Is, is... You see my point here, right?

Jay Shetty 18:48 Yeah, it's seasons.

Dr. Andy Galpin 18:49 Totally.

Jay Shetty 18:50 There's seasons of when to shift, and sometimes we have one goal. It's really basic. It's really simple. It's like, "I wanna do this," and it's not possible throughout the year, and we don't shift it or mold it. And I think, Andy, you know, I'm taking a couple of steps back here, but it comes from this societal view of what fitness is, right? Like that's... And I wanna talk about that with you-

Dr. Andy Galpin 19:11 Oh, boy

Jay Shetty 19:11 ... because-

Dr. Andy Galpin 19:11 I love this.

Jay Shetty 19:12 Yeah, because I just feel like as I'm listening to you, I know it's one of the biggest challenges is we don't actually know. It's like every year there'll be a new thing. Like strength is really important. Protein's really important. This, whatever, right? And it just, there's a new fad every year and, and I wanna talk about that with you. But I think for a lot of us, we don't really know what the pillars of fitness are. Like, we don't know what defines someone as fit. We just have goals like, "Oh, I want abs this year. I want this this year. I want less belly fat this year." And you know, for someone who grew up overweight, I grew up overweight, and then when I changed my diet, started working out, I just got super skinny and lean. It's like to me, there was a point in my life where I just believed if I was lean and I wasn't overweight, then I was healthy, right? It was as basic as that, and I think a lot of us carry that around, where it's like you see someone with abs or whatever you want, and it's like, yeah, they're healthy. They're fit. If you had to break down and say what is the pursuit of fitness, w- what's the answer?

Dr. Andy Galpin 20:10 Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. So f- at its highest category, we always define it as people generally want three things in their fitness. They wanna look good, they wanna feel good, and they wanna perform good. Pardon my grammar, right? Now, what does look mean? I don't know. You tell me. You wanna have this look, or you don't want... I, I do not care, but at some point you want your body to look a certain way or not look a certain way, up to you to define. You want it to feel a certain way. You want it to feel strong. You want it to feel fast. You want it to feel mobile. You want it to feel... Don't care. You define that. Then you wanna perform. What's that mean? You wanna have more energy. You wanna have more mental focus.

Dr. Andy Galpin 20:50 You want your digestion problem to go away. Um, you want that knee pain gone, okay? So it's, it's a look or feel or performance metric-

Jay Shetty 20:57 Absolutely

Dr. Andy Galpin 20:58 ... ultimately everybody's after, right?

Jay Shetty 20:59 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 21:00 So from our professional athletes to non to the students that work in my lab for our research questions, that's the first lens I'm looking at. What does that mean for you? So when I'm designing a, when we're designing a study or we're, again, working with individuals, filter number one, what does fit, w- what does look mean to you? What does feel? What does perform look to you? Now I'm calibrated, right? Because I, I love this question so much. Fitness can be, "I just wanna be able to surf every day." Amazing. I'm in, right? Fitness just means I want more energy with my kids. I'm, I'm o- I'm here for all of that. All of that can be rooted in performance. We have a saying that if you have a body, you're an athlete, which is to say I don't care if you wanna use those physical abilities to shoot a basketball or hit a golf ball like some of our clients or you wanna use that to just run your business better, be a better leader, make better decisions, be able to work more hours and less fatigue. Fine. You're still asking your body to perform. It's the exact same thing-

Jay Shetty 21:57 Mm-hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 21:58 ... except for a couple of little points at the end of physical movement skill, right? So that's answer number one. Now, taking this question entirely differently, if you look at what is generally true for most people, fitness is a combination of a handful of things. You wanna be able to do activities and not pay major consequences. That is it, right? I, I wanna be able to walk up this dang hill and then not wake up tomorrow in s- in screaming pain. So it is a, I want to do A, and I, then I don't want B to happen-

Jay Shetty 22:28 Mm-hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 22:28 ... as a consequence, right?

Jay Shetty 22:30 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 22:30 So I wanna empower everyone to be able to have that and then not pay major consequences, whether it's injury or handful of other things. So for most people to be able to execute a, a resilient physiology, that is be able to do many things, is, it's one of the reasons, again, we called it Arete, is this concept of I wanna be able to do many things and then not have severe consequences. So you're gonna have to have some semblance of physical strength, number one, right? You don't need to be a powerlifter or a bodybuilder or a weightlifter, blah, blah, blah, but minimal levels of strength. If you wanna look at this from the medical perspective, I can make that argument. We can go into tons of the research.

Jay Shetty 23:07 I was about to ask you that, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 23:08 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 23:08 Why is strength so important? Because I feel like we've undervalued it for a long time, and you don't, y- you could go your whole life without it.

Dr. Andy Galpin 23:17 Well, I would say that we as a f- strength conditioning field didn't help ourselves much. Uh, this was actually the whole fun story here. In the early 1900s, strength training was viewed as something that was really deleterious. It was dangerous. There's a long story here, but, uh, you'll have a heart attack. It's this thing, right? And that stayed along for a long period of time. The science said it was bad for you, and then the science changed. In fact, there's a famous individual named Dr. Karpovich, who himself was a scientific advocate of this is dangerous and then collected more data and realized actually it's not dangerous and then, oh my gosh, there's all

Dr. Andy Galpin 23:53 these health benefits. That happened in the 1950s and '60s. Right after that, on the back of it, you've got Arnold Schwarzenegger. You've got Pumping Iron. You've got Conan. You've got these things, and you went from bad for my health to, oh my gosh, I can become a superhero, and this empowered a generation of men mostly. Oh my gosh, I can become a physical superhero. That was awesome, but the downside of that was everyone's association with him with strength training was muscle and bodybuilding. And that is a very limited perspective of strength. So scientifically, the people in this field were not strength training people. The exercise physiologists, the nutritional scientists for, and most were the 1960s through '90s were all endurance folks. And so you had no research being done. I mean, you couldn't make the argument anymore that it was bad for your health, but there was no argument that it was really great for your health. And they had a whole generation of kids like me who came up on that, but then also liked science, and started saying like, "Why aren't we doing studies on strength and high intensity stuff?" And well, that only lasted so long before work started coming out in that area, and now it is so clear. We have mechanism, we have epidemiological evidence, we have randomized control trials in men and women, young, old, and the research goes on. Physical strength is one of the single strongest, pun intended, predictors of lifespan. And so you've got lifespan, which is how long you're going to live. You have healthspan, which people talk about now, which is, you know, how many-- how healthy are you within those years? And now scientifically, we call that strengthspan, right? And what they're saying is strengthspan, it's not the only thing that matters, but it's an important characteristic to your healthspan. If you lack physical strength, a number of things start to happen. Number one, uh, this is one of the reasons why we look at, for the record, like leg strength and grip strength as two of the most ubiquitous predictors. And you'll see this all across the literature as statistically significant predictors of mortality, and in fact, some of the papers that directly compare strength, again, mostly leg strength, leg extension, and grip strength to VO2 max, oftentimes, but not always, but oftentimes will show strength is a stronger predictor of mortality or all-cause mortality than VO2 max. So we've, we've talked ad nauseam, you know, in the last bunch of years about important VO2 maxes, and it's absolutely true, but strength is, is right there as an equivalent predictor of how long you're going to live. So the question is why? Well, you have correlation and causation here. Lots of evidence on both sides. If you are weak, say, in your hands, it is a proxy for overall strength. So that in of itself is, is true. It's also direct intervention. If you can't carry a bag confidently, and you can't put a, a backpack in an overhead compartment, you're not gonna take the bus. You're very less li-- you're much less likely to go on an airplane. This now g- leads to secondary problems with social isolation. You're not confident. One of the single bi- biggest predictors or one of the single biggest issues we have with unsuccessful aging is that people, when people start to feel like they become a burden on society, they start to withdraw rapidly. No one wants to be the person in line holding everybody up. No one wants... Like, you just, you know all those examples there, right? So people are m- more likely to just socially withdraw. And now we're having all the secondary problems of social isolation, and even physical activity starts to go down 'cause people don't leave their house, they watch TV more, and this whole cascade of, of things start to happen. And so we have direct and indirect mechanisms there that say, again, you don't have to be massively strong, but just maintain some semblance of grip strength. Your legs are gonna tell the same story. This is your interface with the world, your legs and your hands. And so your ability to locomote, to move throughout the world is mostly your legs. If you don't feel confident that you can walk up the steps to that museum, slowly you stop going on those trips. You start doing that extra thing. It hurts too much. It's too exhausting. Again, fill in all the blanks here. And so having some sort of physical leg strength gives you confidence that allows general physical activity, which then pays all those additional benefits. That doesn't even carry in, in count the direct physical benefits. So if we start looking at muscles specifically, muscle quality, and this can be defined a lot of different ways, is going to regulate, in part, things like your blood glucose. And you've, I'm sure, talked, uh, to many people about the importance of metabolic health. Skeletal muscle is gonna explain about eighty percent of the variance in your resting metabolic rate. That's, that's your, you know, your faster, slower metabolism. Again, eighty percent of the variance is gonna be explained by how much lean muscle you have for the most part. So you don't need to be huge, but losing muscle is, is called sarcopenia, if it's you lose muscle faster than you should be with aging. Highly associated with inflammatory states, reduced met- resting metabolic rate, which then goes right back to the equation. Uh, glucose regulation, inflamma- like, all of these things start to happen. Last fire hose, I know I'm going after this a little bit here, but this is a, a topic of clear passion to me, is you have the presence of strength as well as the act of the training itself. So going through the strength training process has additional benefits to things like your central nervous system, brain, and neurological system. The evidence is very clear. Your physical brain will stay healthier in terms of, uh, white matter and things like that when you strength train. It will stay around a lot longer. There's actually a lot of research now that's starting to point to the fact that things like dementia and Alzheimer's, late onset specifically, is highly preventable. And that, h- by highly, I mean it's an extraordinarily high number. You'd have to get a neuroscientist on to, to really get numbers there. But it is way more preventable than we realize, specifically from physical activity and exercise as a, as a, not the only thing there, but a huge component to that. Lastly, why? Remember, the way that you move throughout the world has three big components to it. So when you pick your leg up like that and you just shifted your toe, what ended up happening there is three things. Some signal went from your central nervous system. This could be your brain, spinal cord, it doesn't matter. Nerves send a signal. That's part one. Part two, those nerves activate or turn on muscles, and then the muscles contract. That's part two. Those muscles are surrounded by connective tissue. The connective tissue actually is tied into your bone Pulling the connective tissue is what actually made your foot move like that. So connective tissue is part three. So the reality is any time you're strength training, you're keeping connective tissue healthier, you're keeping that muscle quality high, and you're con- continuing to keep that nervous system activated. Keeping that nervous system alive is keeping your brain alive. It's physically what you're doing. It's keeping your entire nervous system around and fine-tuned. It's the same process. And so when we tend to think about strength training as something we're doing for our muscles, we cannot forget we're also doing it for our joints, we're doing it for our bones, and we're also doing it for our brains and nervous system. By far, there's nothing that will land even close to as impactful as even moderate quality sleep. You, you have to have that. Brain fog and energy are the most common ones. I'm comfortable saying 10% of the time it's just been a hydration issue. Intermittent fasting does nothing particularly special, doesn't help you lose fat any faster. Long as you equate for protein, you equate for calories, you, you'll get basically the same result.

Jay Shetty 31:32 What's the difference between walking, 'cause we always hear walk 10,000 steps if that's-

Dr. Andy Galpin 31:37 Yeah

Jay Shetty 31:37 ... the least you can do. What's happening when you're walking 10,000 steps versus running one, you know, a mile, three miles, five miles, whatever it may be, versus strength training with weights for your legs?

Dr. Andy Galpin 31:48 Great. I, man, I lo- you're on fire. I love these questions so much.

Jay Shetty 31:51 Okay, good.

Dr. Andy Galpin 31:51 Let me ask you a trick question, and I'm telling you I'm tricking you right now.

Jay Shetty 31:54 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 31:54 Right? Um, what's gonna burn more calories, walking a mile or running a mile?

Jay Shetty 31:59 Running a mile.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:02 Well, it's calorie.

Jay Shetty 32:03 Oh, walking. Sorry, my bad.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:07 A calorie is energy.

Jay Shetty 32:08 Right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:09 A calorie is work.

Jay Shetty 32:10 Right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:10 Walking a mile, running a mile-

Jay Shetty 32:12 Oh, same thing

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:13 ... it's the same thing.

Jay Shetty 32:15 Interesting, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:16 Now, it's a bit of a trick-

Jay Shetty 32:16 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:16 ... because

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:17 you probably would burn a few more calories walking-

Jay Shetty 32:19 Yeah, right

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:20 ... or, or rather-

Jay Shetty 32:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:20 ... running rather because there's a little bit of inefficiency in the system.

Jay Shetty 32:22 Right, right, right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:23 But theoretically, if you're simply looking for caloric work, this is why we have so much evidence at this point, you can manage calories any way you'd like.

Jay Shetty 32:34 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:35 That'll hit people. If you like long duration, slower stuff, you like, you know, cardio or HIIT, I hate those phrases, but if that's ringing a bell to you-

Jay Shetty 32:42 Which phrases do you hate?

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:43 Things like cardio.

Jay Shetty 32:45 Okay.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:45 I-

Jay Shetty 32:46 Because?

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:46 It doesn't mean anything, right? Well, it's cardiovascular training, anything that uses your heart.

Jay Shetty 32:50 [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:51 Like, well, fantastic. That is literally every form of exercise, right? Like, it doesn't make any sense.

Jay Shetty 32:55 Right, right, right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 32:55 If you hate that though, you don't ever have to do it. We can get the same place, and the energy thing I just gave you was just a little silly example of saying, "Hey, look, if we really actually get down to the physiology and science, these are not major differences like people think that they are." So I, if I'm looking at fitness across the entire spectrum here, I think it's helpful to break it up into three global areas. If you can't tell by this point in the show, I'm a, I'm a teacher, so like [laughs] I like-

Jay Shetty 33:21 I love it. I love it

Dr. Andy Galpin 33:22 ... I like systems and numbers and-

Jay Shetty 33:23 Yeah, it's great.

Dr. Andy Galpin 33:25 Number one, what you laid out when you said walking 10,000 steps. I will bucket that into physical activity. This is human movement. We should have a default state of human movement, right? Um, whether this is walking, standing, playing with our kids, gardening, if you're in a, a laborer and you have a physical j- fantastic. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, "My lifestyle is really active, uh, because I'm a, a construction worker, or I'm a nurse and I'm walking up," okay. You probably don't need to go out of your way to do a whole bunch of low-intensity cardiovascular exercise. And you could, but if we're trying to get really efficient in saying kinda, "What's my minimal viable option here?" I could say, "If we gotta give one up, let's give that one up," because you're getting your 10,000 or 15 or 20,000 steps. If you've ever paid attention to, uh, teachers. My wife spent 17 years as a preschool special ed teacher. Her step count was outrageous 'cause her whole life was just going three steps at a time trying to keep a kid from-

Jay Shetty 34:22 [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 34:22 ... like doing something really naughty or dangerous or whatever. So there's a lot of professions that are even outside of a true, uh, like construction jobs, that get a lot of physical activity, they don't realize it. So that person, I'm gonna go, "We're good there." Maybe we're gonna go float on category two, which is, we'll just call this structured cardiovascular exercise. This is intentionally going to work out. This could be intervals. It could be swimming. It could be pickleball, sports, uh, wrestling, like any number of things. It could be higher intensity stuff or even lower intensity stuff, but you're, you're going to work out, right? Heart rate's gonna be much higher here. You're probably gonna break a sweat or something like that. I hope you're not breaking a sweat walking. Like, th- th- that's physical activity, right? So if you, if those things help you kinda understand the general category of number two, that's what we're after. So if we go back to that nurse, um, or that teacher and we're thinking, "Okay, we're good over there," but we still n- need to get one to two days a week most likely of this structured cardiovascular training. If we wanna make it simple, give me one day where we get a really high heart rate. I'd like to... I'll call it max. It doesn't necessarily need to literally be 100%, but it's gonna have to be well past comfort zone. One day a week is all we really need up there. Doesn't have to be a long time. I don't care the method you pick. I don't care the machine you go on. If you wanna run sprints, I'm all for it. You wanna swing kettlebells to do it, like, great. What I'm looking at is did we get that node knocked off? Yes, we got high heart rate up there. Cool. Category three is more of our traditional strength training thing. And you asked a little bit of a question earlier about why is that different? Why is it not the same? Why isn't the walking and the higher intensity... Well, I did sprints. Why... My legs were tired and sore. Why is that not strength training? Well, there's a very specific reason. First of all, it's pretty good. If that's all we can do, I'll take it. That's a win. But your muscles are actually constructed of hundreds of thousands of individual muscle fibers. So think of this like a ponytail. So a ponytail you think of as like one thing, but in reality it's just a conglomerate of a bunch of individual hairs. That's how your muscles work. You have lots of hair, you know, we call them muscle fibers in there. Each one of those muscle fibers can be broadly categorized as either fast twitch or slow twitch. Fast twitch does what it sounds like. Slow twitch is more-- has more mitochondria in it. It handles most of your basal physical activity. Right now, you and I are using almost exclusively slow twitch fibers.

Jay Shetty 36:52 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 36:53 Nothing we're doing fast here, right? And so they're not fatigable. So if I ask you to take your finger, uh, maybe your right finger, left finger, we'll do left finger, and reach up and touch your nose with that left finger. Now, what you just did right there is you activated a set of neurons that said, "Okay, turn on the muscles in combination to touch that nose." The neurons you just turned on are very low threshold, which means they're easy to activate, they're very energy efficient, but they're gonna activate generally those slow twitch fibers. Now, if I said, um, "Grab that can of juice, will you?" Or too sorry to call it juice.

Jay Shetty 37:26 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 37:26 What? Tea? Is that-

Jay Shetty 37:28 Yeah, sparkling tea.

Dr. Andy Galpin 37:28 Yeah. Okay, great. Put that back in your left hand. Now, do the same exact activity and raise it to your nose. Boom. You just did the exact same process, but you needed to produce more force. Why? 'Cause you got an extra eight ounces or something in that. Hmm. So your body went, "Wait a minute. I'm assuming nothing was gonna be in my hand," but then I realized there's an additional amount of force needed, and so how did it increase force production? Your muscle fibers can't squeeze any harder. When they contract, they contract as hard as possible every single time. The only way that you increase force production is to turn on more of those nerves.

Jay Shetty 38:01 Hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 38:02 We just train our nervous system. That's what it is. More of those nerves turned on. If I were to now take that tea and we had it, made it forty kilos, the only way that you can continue to produce more force to lift it up to your nose is to turn on those additional muscle motor neurons, which are going to be your fast twitch mus- muscle fibers. So if we extend this all out, when you're doing those other activities, you're not ever gonna get to that high threshold. You're never gonna use those muscle fibers. And so one of the things we know happens with aging, when we omit strength training or strength training-like activities, those motor neurons and those muscle fibers die.

Jay Shetty 38:42 Hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 38:43 And this is why we lose strength and power as we age, is because we never activate those neurons.

Jay Shetty 38:49 Hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 38:50 I don't care about getting you PRs in the gym right now. We're trying to make sure that we just don't lose any functional capacity fifty years from now.

Jay Shetty 38:59 Hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 39:00 The sprinting that got your legs sore was good, but those nerves are turned on when force is required.

Jay Shetty 39:07 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 39:08 We didn't get enough physical force production. This is the exact same reason why things like bodyweight exercise is great. It's good. It can take people a long way. But eventually-

Jay Shetty 39:18 Hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 39:18 ... we're gonna run out of some options here, especially for our lower body, because we just won't have enough load to activate all the nerves or the motor units rather in the legs to truly get force production to keep them as strong and healthy as possible. So that third category we're talking about, remember category one was kind of physical activity, category two is that structured cardiovascular, category three was the structured strength training stuff. You gotta give me one of those days a week, right? So if we go back to this kind of nurse, phys-- lots of physical activity, one to two days a week of that, one to two days a week of something related to strength, we'd be good there. We change that scenario up to somebody more like you and I, that's probably not doing a lot of steps throughout the day-

Jay Shetty 40:01 Yeah [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 40:02 ... 'cause we're s- sitting.

Jay Shetty 40:03 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 40:04 You and I are gonna have to engineer that back into our lives.

Jay Shetty 40:06 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 40:06 So the fitness routine, um, I don't know any- anything about how your day is set up. I'm just assuming-

Jay Shetty 40:11 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 40:11 ... you're sitting more than that type of person, that avatar. I would put more structured physical activity in your life.

Jay Shetty 40:18 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 40:18 We would maybe do something like, uh, a ten-minute walk three times a day, two times a day. We would maybe, uh, let's add in a walking treadmill. Maybe let's add in... Like, we would look for little games that we can... Maybe we need to add in one or two days a week of an hour-long hike as a part of your f- structured fitness-

Jay Shetty 40:35 Yes, yes

Dr. Andy Galpin 40:35 ... program to get that back, right? So what we're always doing is, again, assessing the entire nature and saying, "Those are the three big areas most people have, and you gotta move well within those categories, and don't get hurt, and never lose your flexibility," and there's more stuff. But categorically, these are the first layers of filters I'm going through and saying, "Okay. If we have to leave one of these things out, maybe we can." All right? So maybe you sit at a desk job, but then you go and you, you do kickboxing class. Okay, we actually got node two out of there. Maybe now we just put some physical activity in there and put some strength training in there, and we're actually, we're okay. We can survive with that.

Jay Shetty 41:10 Right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 41:10 Right? That's kind of the best way to think about your lifestyle and think, "Am I getting any of these three?" Great. And then if, okay, optimal's not realistic to me, then what do I have to do to just kind of get MVP-

Jay Shetty 41:21 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 41:21 ... out? And then that's how I go about thinking it.

Jay Shetty 41:23 Yeah, that's brilliant. That's such a great breakdown because I think we often, like you said, we kind of live in either extreme. We're doing a lot of number three and not one or-

Dr. Andy Galpin 41:34 Yeah

Jay Shetty 41:34 ... two and not three or however it works, and I think I've been through every phase in my life-

Dr. Andy Galpin 41:38 Of course

Jay Shetty 41:39 ... of doing tons of one, ignoring two and three, doing tons of two, ignoring one and three, and then doing tons of three and ignoring one and two. And so-

Dr. Andy Galpin 41:46 It's hard to be-

Jay Shetty 41:47 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 41:47 ... really good at all three.

Jay Shetty 41:49 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 41:49 This would go back to quadrant, and we would say, "Okay, what's a realistic goal?"

Jay Shetty 41:53 Yeah, right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 41:53 Okay, realistic goal is I'm s- I'm at five with business. Okay. Well, then maybe we go, "Look, he doesn't have time to do three and a half hours of zone two, and then do his strength training, and then do..." That's... We're gonna lose that. But we're not

Dr. Andy Galpin 42:09 gonna let that be an excuse for never doing it.

Jay Shetty 42:11 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 42:11 So next quarter, we're gonna come back, and you gotta pay me back.

Jay Shetty 42:14 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 42:15 We're gonna go back into it. We're gonna now emphasize maybe caloric restriction. We're gonna do more movement 'cause it'll burn the same calories, and we have more time, and you gotta promise me we're gonna take business down to four.

Jay Shetty 42:25 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 42:26 Deal. Great. Now you have a window. You're looking at it, you're going, "Okay, I got this month. I got the..." You don't have to feel bad about skipping this thing because there's a plan, there's a strategy, right? But then we're also gonna be able to hold you accountable to something- That was realistic, um, in making progress. So you don't have to have those balances I talked about all year round.

Jay Shetty 42:44 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 42:44 It's okay to shift them. Different priorities, different times of the year. Look at your schedule, look what you want, look at what's realistic, and then set yourself up for the best chance for failure.

Jay Shetty 42:54 Yeah. What-

Dr. Andy Galpin 42:54 Or for success, sorry. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 42:55 Yeah, for sure. What recovery aids or what supportive environment do you need for strength training? 'Cause as you explained, that's, like, the most intense or the one that's really working you the hardest in that sense. What do you need to support that to make sure it's effective?

Dr. Andy Galpin 43:11 Right. So with recovery, when you think about strength training, recovery in most people's mind is, how sore was I?

Jay Shetty 43:19 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 43:20 Okay? However, you gotta remember, with higher intensity cardiovascular stuff, that has a different recovery demand as well. So I don't want you to think strength training requires more recovery, because we've seen a lot of people burn themselves into the ground with lots of high intensity cardiovascular training, and they have no idea why.

Jay Shetty 43:37 Got it.

Dr. Andy Galpin 43:38 Right? Especially your, your hard-charging executives,

Dr. Andy Galpin 43:42 decision makers, surgeons, high pressure jobs. High pressure, high pressure, high pressure. High ventilatory rate. [panting] High sympathetic drive all day, and then leave, straight to the gym, high, high, high, high, high, probably had a pre-workout.

Jay Shetty 43:58 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 43:58 And then guess what? We can't sleep. Stunning, right?

Jay Shetty 44:01 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 44:02 So there's a recovery requirement for both pieces there, and they are separate, right? So when we're thinking that higher intensity cardiovascular stuff, we're thinking more systemic, right? So now I'm looking at is our overall caloric expenditure there, do we have recovery time? Are we down-regulating throughout the day? Are we not overindulging in stimulants? A whole set of equations over there. From the muscle side, um, number one, if we're getting excessively sore, we might have issues with our training program. We shouldn't be getting that sore that often unless you're at a, a pretty high level, and even then the research is very clear. The amount of muscle soreness you get from after lifting weights has almost no correlation to how much muscle growth you'll get from that workout.

Jay Shetty 44:42 Wow.

Dr. Andy Galpin 44:43 So that's the terrible proxy for good or bad workout of-

Jay Shetty 44:46 What-

Dr. Andy Galpin 44:46 ... how sore I got

Jay Shetty 44:47 ... what is the proxy for a good or bad workout?

Dr. Andy Galpin 44:49 There's a, there's a fantastic model that I heard years ago from a friend of mine named Dr. Mike Israetel, and I'm stealing this directly from him, so I'll give him his due credit for that. You can kind of think of three things. Here we go with the list again. In the workout, if you're trying to grow muscle, you should probably feel that muscle. This sounds crazy, but you'd be stunned how many people have tried to, say, get a bigger chest, and they're benching, and they're benching, and they're benching, and it's... They're never getting a bigger chest from it, and, like, are you feeling your chest contract? No. Well, then for you, that position, the way that your, uh, anatomy works, your technique, whatever equipment you're using, it wasn't probably targeting your chest. So then why do we expect your chest to grow? Doesn't mean it has to be maximally contracted, but there's gotta be s- probably some feeling of it's con- feeling like it's contracted. Number two, you probably wanna feel some sort of what we call a pump in there. So after the session, that muscle should look a little bit bigger. It should have contracted, filled with blood, filled with fluids, like, it should look a little bit bigger. Number three, you should feel it something the next day.

Jay Shetty 45:56 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 45:56 A little bit tight, good. Um, 3 out of 10 in terms of, like, how tight, how sore, it's probably good. If it's 7, 8, 9 out of 10, you may actually be going backwards because you may take so long to recover from that, that it's gonna compromise the quality of the next training session.

Jay Shetty 46:14 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 46:14 I- if you love the stuff and you're into it, I'll take 5 or, 5's okay. Uh, but if, more than that, if you're at 0, then I might be thinking, "Okay, maybe we didn't get actually enough out of that session."

Jay Shetty 46:27 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 46:28 2 to 3 is a really good level of, of soreness out of that. So, um, we're initially thinking those types of things. So number one, if you're getting excessively sore, my biggest tip for recovery is making sure you're not actually getting too sore to begin with. Second one, by far, there's nothing that will land even close to as impactful as even moderate quality sleep. You, you have to have that.

Jay Shetty 46:50 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 46:50 If you look at any of, uh, the scientists that work in this area of muscle growth, if you look at many of the people that coach people here, when you start seeing stalled progress, you start looking at sleep as your first. Before you look at supplements, before you look at anything else, you definitely go to sleep. And if you see compromises in sleep, you're gonna go back to that as your first area of emphasis. And I know people hate to hear that, but I'm telling you, look at the people who are the best in the world at growing muscle. There's a reason that that's, like, one of the first places they're going after.

Jay Shetty 47:24 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 47:24 So don't get overly sore, number one. Make sure you're prioritizing your sleep. After that, if you wanna go to nutrition, we can look at it. Okay, great. Maybe our total caloric intake is low. That's generally where we're gonna start. From a protein perspective, oftentimes, um, as long as it's reasonable-

Jay Shetty 47:43 Walk us through the ideal amount of protein we actually need.

Dr. Andy Galpin 47:45 Yeah. I mean, reasonable is... And this is a heavy-ish, by the way. Something like 1 gram per pound of body weight or 2.2 grams per kilo. Rough starting point. If you wanna go below that, I'm not gonna argue. I- if you wanna go below that, as in, let's say, you're at, uh, 0.8, 0.6, uh, I can survive that. Uh, that'd be closer to, say to, like, 1.6 grams per kilogram. So 0.6 would be grams per pound, right? So both units there for you. I, I can live with that. People can grow muscle like that, no question about it. Um, s- people can grow muscle very clearly on, on many food sources. Plant-based, animal-based, like, they're both effective. If you go above

Dr. Andy Galpin 48:29 that, you don't necessarily guarantee more growth either. And so what we're looking at with protein for most people is, like, just be in the stratosphere. Don't make it your constraint. Don't make it the problem.

Jay Shetty 48:40 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 48:41 Once you make it not the problem, then it's probably, like, going up more- Sometimes that's helped w- with people, but it's generally not been the thing that, that has really been like, "Oh, I was only at one gram per pound and I went to 1.5 and I don't get sore anymore." That can happen, but that's probably not what we're looking at. Um, so it, it, it's, again, it's one of those things where like just don't make it the contractor-

Jay Shetty 49:02 Mm

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:02 ... and you're probably okay.

Jay Shetty 49:03 Yeah, that was a big one for me because I've definitely... I tried to match my body we- weight and protein, but I just couldn't take it every day. It just wasn't possible for me.

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:12 Ah, we got a lot of tricks.

Jay Shetty 49:13 Yeah?

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:13 We, we could get you there if you want.

Jay Shetty 49:14 Like how?

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:15 Depends on how you're eating it is why, right? So we can sneak it in in different places. A really good example of this is how many meals do you eat a day roughly?

Jay Shetty 49:24 Three.

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:24 Three meals. Okay, great. So sliding in 25 grams in between, before, after a meal is not as hard as one thinks.

Jay Shetty 49:32 Right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:33 If you're trying to eat that in, you know, eight ounces of chicken breast, uh, that, that's gonna be uncomfortable, but if we get that in in terms of this is why protein shakes-

Jay Shetty 49:42 I'm plant-based as well. Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:44 ... no problem.

Jay Shetty 49:44 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:44 Right? We can easily get that. Um, a friend of mine, Dr. Mike Ormsby at Florida State, has been doing research in an area, uh, for over 15 years now of protein feeding immediately before bed. Now, a lot of people-

Jay Shetty 49:58 Fascinating

Dr. Andy Galpin 49:59 ... immediately are like-

Jay Shetty 50:00 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 50:00 ... "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What?"

Jay Shetty 50:01 Yeah, that's surprising.

Dr. Andy Galpin 50:03 15 years of research in this area. He's tested combinations, men, women, metabolically unhealthy people. Like, and in, and in general, most of his studies point to the same thing.

Jay Shetty 50:15 That is?

Dr. Andy Galpin 50:15 40 grams of protein about 30 minutes before bed, he's yet to find any disturbances in sleep. Now, this is 40 grams of protein. This is 120 to 150, 60 calories. These are not 500 calorie full meals, right? This is a, a fairly modest amount. Admittedly, I think the best he's done with sleep so far are kind of questionnaires, and so I know one of the things he's working on right now is, is more high fidelity sleep testing, uh, 'cause this is one of the things that-

Jay Shetty 50:46 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 50:47 ... obviously I'm a, you know, we have a, I have a sleep company. Like, I'm very interested in maximizing sleep. So in fairness there, it's plausible, but o- on the surface so far of all of his studies, he's yet to report any significant disturbances in sleep. Um, what he has reported though is very little change in things like fat oxidation. So one, there's this misnomer like if you eat right before bed, your body won't use it, so you'll store it all as fat, and he, he's done so many studies now that I think that door is about as slammed shut as possible to that. That's just not going to be the case.

Jay Shetty 51:21 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 51:22 And so his research is also not indicating some over-the-top advantage for muscle growth. It's not gonna increase muscle growth by 25%. Like, none of that's true. It's a modest benefit. So for me, when I summarize his work, I say, "Okay, look, very little detriment-

Jay Shetty 51:42 Mm

Dr. Andy Galpin 51:43 ... an opportunity to get in 40 more grams of protein if you're low on your protein targets." So if you're okay on your protein targets, you don't, I don't think you need to do this.

Jay Shetty 51:52 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 51:53 I don't think there's a huge advantage, but if you're really struggling, this is one of the things that we'll go to, and 30 minutes by the way is a arbitrary number.

Jay Shetty 52:01 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 52:02 If you go, "Oh my gosh, I tried that one time and I..." Don't do it then. Like, absolutely. There's, there's not worth, there's not a ton of benefit here, and I, I'm trying to make that really clear, right? I don't like overselling. This is just, "Hey, there's no detriment really," and as, if it's not messing with your sleep and this helps you get closer to your protein-

Jay Shetty 52:20 Mm-hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 52:20 ... I would imagine, and by the way, he's done this in plant-based as well, same thing. Like, basically the same results from plant-based ones. So maybe 40 is too much for you. All right. Give me 25.

Jay Shetty 52:31 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 52:32 Give me 20. 15? Uh, uh, we don't wanna like... Don't get too lost in detail here, right?

Jay Shetty 52:37 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 52:37 The point is, here you go. You had dinner at 6:00, 6:30, something like that probably f- and then maybe a couple of hours later, you, you wanna do whole food, great. In his research, you know, scientifically, w- he uses protein powders just to control... Well, he's actually used whole food as well. You wanna do a yogurt thing. You wanna do whatever your favorite-

Jay Shetty 52:59 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 52:59 ... source protein is. 100, 150, 160 calories, like these are not-

Jay Shetty 53:04 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 53:04 ... gonna all of a sudden like massively disrupt your blood flow and stuff like that there. So it, I think it's a very viable option. It's not required.

Jay Shetty 53:10 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 53:10 No special magic benefit to it, but that's one of the many little tricks we can use to plug in, and you, you kind of put together two or three of those strategies, you'd be surprised 60, 80 grams of protein can kinda come like that, and you're like, "Oh, wow, like that was actually sort of not hard."

Jay Shetty 53:25 Wow. Yeah. That's surprising. I wanna hear your thoughts about another thing that I think people get hung up on and, and maybe don't know the insights behind this. What should you eat before and after a workout?

Dr. Andy Galpin 53:35 I have an old YouTube video up that is called something like Post Exercise Anabolic Window. Uh, I think it's like 25 minutes or something. So you want all the details, you can go there. I'll give you the two-minute version, right, for those that, that don't wanna do that. The post-exercise anabolic window was this idea that there's this magic, it started off as 30 minutes, window post-exercise where you had to consume your nutrients, specifically carbohydrates and protein, to maximize, and there was good rationale, molecular mechanisms as to why we thought that existed. Summarized many years later, it's very clear that that's, that's just not the case.

Dr. Andy Galpin 54:12 And so the way you wanna think about this is total protein intake throughout the day is gonna determine almost all of your variance there. So as long as you hit your total... And, and even I'll say total protein intake throughout the day is not even that important. It's probably thought about as like protein throughout the week. So like, as long as kinda like maybe you're a little bit lower today, a little bit higher tomorrow, that's, that's how real life actually works.

Jay Shetty 54:37 100%, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 54:38 Right?

Jay Shetty 54:39 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 54:39 Yeah, end up having steak for one night and you got an extra 60 grams of protein, the next night you had a pasta dish and what... Oh, it'll be okay, right? So don't be overly concerned about you were 10 grams low today or 20. Like, you'll be fine, right? So that matters most. There are some exceptions, though. When you are performing at a high level of energy expenditure, let's just take some of our, like baseball players. It's not a big deal because the energy expenditure in baseball is not incredibly high for Major League Baseball. NBA players, this is different though. Our UFC fighters, way different. Our professional boxers, way different. They're training hard twice a day, almost always, right? Um, golfers, a little bit different. So if you're training really, really hard, whether you're an athlete or not, but you're, you're a workouter, you're super active, you're on the walking treadmill, you know, you're, you're an endurance bu- you burn all those calories, your nutrition window might matter because you may not have enough time to restore muscle glycogen. Remember, you store carbohydrates in your muscle, and you'll use some of those during exercise, and if you're doing a lot of hard work, you use a lot of it. And then if you're not consuming nutrients, you just, you kinda run out of time before then the session happens again four hours later. So in those particular cases, nutrient timing does start to matter, but it's not a magic molecular signaling window as so much as it is practical issue of just like you ran out of time to refill those muscle glycogen stores, and so your training for the next session went down because we, we couldn't refuel. We actually just completed an intermittent fasting study, and it was the first of its kind because we were looking specifically at... There's been a lot of research, uh, Grant Tinsley in Texas Tech has done a lot of awesome work and many others on 16/8 intermittent fasting, right? Really, really common. You eat all your calories- Mm-hmm ... in an eight-hour window. Let's just say you don't eat breakfast, you start eating at 11:00 AM, and you eat dinner at 7:00. Like really common thing. Lots of research on that compared to normal feeding, three meals a day, six, five, whatever, and the re- the evidence is pretty clear at this point. Intermittent fasting does nothing particularly special, doesn't help you lose fat any faster or anything like that. Really? No, not at all. Wow. Long as you equate for protein and you equate for calories, you, you'll get basically the same result. Wow. Hmm, some studies have reported maybe like a half a kilogram extra fat loss, others not. But if you look at the research on aggregate, it's about the same. Hmm. If it fits your lifestyle, if it has you be more adherent, tremendous. I'm all for it. That's great. Nothing's super special- Yeah. -about it for caloric restriction, right? Yeah. Probably s- oh, 15, 20 studies from different labs- Hmm. -at this point, so like generally they're all- Yeah ... kinda saying the same thing. Yeah. What we were interested in though is what about if you're trying to grow muscle? What happens, right? 'Cause all those studies have put people in a caloric deficit trying to lose weight, right? So you bring them down there for the most part, or caloric maintenance. So we took young, highly trained people that tri- were trying to grow muscle. We put them in a caloric surplus. We went way above energy needs, put them on very high protein. One group did 16/8, one group did not. And we did everything. We took muscle biopsies, looked at molecular signaling, genetic signaling, single fibers, adaptations. We looked at muscle size. We looked at sleep. We looked at digestion. We looked at hunger. We looked at happiness, complaints of how hard or easy the diet was. We looked at all of it. Net result, there were differences, but in terms of muscle growth, about the same. Wow. One of the biggest things with the fasting group was there was just a lot of anecdotal like, "Oh, this is hard". [laughs] Like, it's just hard, and specifically the problem was carbohydrates. Right. It was hard for them to get their carbohydrates in without getting a lot of GI distress. We had that come up a number of times. Performance, specifically leg strength, started to come down in the fasting group and, uh, I, I think we have pretty good rationale to suggest if you're trying to maximize, um... Because we were progressively overloading them. Basically, you can imagine this, like you're in the gym training and you finish every set. This isn't exactly what we did, but it gives you the concept. You finish every set, and let's say you do a leg press at 200 pounds and you do 10 reps. Okay, next time you come in you're gonna do 11. If you did 11, next time we're gonna do 12. So like every single session, if they were getting- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm ... they were gonna... So they were training really hard for eight weeks. I just don't think they had the recovery capacity. Right. I think either there was underreporting 'cause it was just like, "I can't, I'm just gonna write the number down, but I can't really eat that food." That, that's always possible in like real human studies. Yeah. Or there was actually... And, and we have, in the paper we have pretty good rationale to think that this is a real finding. So coming all the way back, like if you're trying to maximize strength and muscle gain and you're training really hard, both would work. Mm-hmm. Um, in, in fact, actually the intermittent fasting group didn't put on as much fat. So the reality of it is, it's my opinion, this is how science, this is how nutrition really works. One of the reasons I advocated so hard to ask sleep questions, um, fatigue was higher in the fasting group too. Oh, interesting. Energy got lower. Interesting. Harder throughout the day, more naps, uh, and actually naps Yeah. But that's the real honest- True ... truth of how it works, right? Very true. So right. You're gonna have to make your selections, right? I don't like to be the person of going like, "You should optimize for this over that," right? But you should have some knowledge of going, "Okay, I'm gonna choose intermittent fasting. Okay- I like it because I get A, B, and C, but then I'm probably going to lose D and B. These things are-

Jay Shetty 1:01:06 You're constantly experimenting and figuring it out.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:01:08 Totally.

Jay Shetty 1:01:08 Yeah. I really appreciate that take because I think that's what it's been for me. I've, I've found that with so many things that you've heard and tried to do and felt it was right, and it's like, well, actually, I just want to feel... And it goes back to what you started with, right? How do I want to look? How do I want to feel? And what was the third one?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:01:25 Perform.

Jay Shetty 1:01:26 Perform, right, yeah. And so I, I spend a lot of time in that. How do I want to feel and perform? And so many things that I'm told would help me look better are not things that help me feel and perform better.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:01:37 That's probably pretty true, [chuckles] yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:01:39 Right, yeah. And, and no, but I just love the take that it's about figuring it out. How important is hydration, and how much water do we actually need?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:01:46 Okay, this is another one where if you want to get scared, look at the hydration research. Scared in the sense of, um, you want to pick erectile dysfunction. You want to pick headaches. You want to pick... In fact, there's, there's actually a paper that I just saw a week ago, uh, two weeks ago. Less than... I actually... Yeah, I think it was about 1% dehydration will reduce cognitive function in a statistically significant manner, right? So if you are less than 1% dehydrated, which is almost functionally impossible for you to notice, you will see clinically meaningful and statistically, uh, significant reductions in a number of different markers. This is-- When I say cognitive function,

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:02:28 I mean, I think... I can't remember honestly, specifically this paper, but it's often things like word recall, executive decision-making, um, short-term memory, things like that, right? So I'm, again, again, I can't remember the exact metrics in this particular study. So you'll see that. You can pick thermoregulation. You can pick, I mentioned sexual function, endocrine health, body composition, sleep. Like you'll, you'll run yourself dead worrying about this. That said, it's not as scary as it sounds because when we typically report like 1% dehydration, 2% dehydration, what we're talking about is percentage of your body weight and not like, "Oh my God, I'm, I'm just tiny below optimal." You have to be like pretty far below optimal to be 1% of your body. Uh, you have... Most of your body is water, so to lose 1% of that is, you know, a liter or sort of more, right? So that's to say, when we have done this a lot, I'd probably say, I'm making this number up, somewhere between 5 and 15% of our people that we've coached o- over the years have come in with problems, and all we had to do is just get their hydration not terrible. And this is everything from headaches, constant headaches, to brain fog. Brain fog is probably the biggest one. Brain fog and energy are the most common ones. 10%. I'm comfortable saying 10% of the time it's just been a hydration issue.

Jay Shetty 1:03:49 Wow. What, what is it the other times?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:03:52 Sometimes it is... By the way, sometimes it's overhydration.

Jay Shetty 1:03:55 Interesting.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:03:56 Very... Like probably... And, and this is just anecdote here.

Jay Shetty 1:03:59 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:04:00 This is not my lab. I don't know the research on this or if, if it exists or not, but this is just what we've seen. Generally, women have an issue with overhydration. There's like... [chuckles] My, my wife and her friends have these like called emotional support models. It's like they go to work or whatever, it's like seven different wa- a tea and a, like a recovery drink, and their hydration's like bottles everywhere, right? I'm talking about you, Dara and Danny. [laughs] Um, but sometimes that's a case of like they just consistently drink water, water, water, water, and so they get w- they get close to what's called hyponatremia. That's the science word for salt, right? Sodium more specifically, and hypo meaning low. So what ends up happening is not that your salt or sodium gets low in your system. Um, by the way, this is actually really common in endurance athletes, and every year somebody dies in an endurance race from hyponatremia, drinking too much pure water. You drink too much pure water, it gets really dilute. Sodium is half of the eq- well, it's part of the equation rather, that causes an electrical gradient that lets muscles contract. Why that kills you is your heart is a muscle, so your heart will, will stop contracting because there's no gradient difference. There's not a positive and negative charge from one side of the cell to the other side, so it won't contract and, and transmit electricity. It's not really super common. You know, you're probably not gonna die drinking like a little bit of extra water. But if you remember back in the day of there used to be things like, um, fraternity rushes and things like that where they make the, the new pledges drink a gallon of water, or there's been terrible stories of parents like punishing their kids, and again, it's not really common, but people have died pretty routinely.

Jay Shetty 1:05:40 Really?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:05:40 Yeah, lots of fraternity people died from these like-

Jay Shetty 1:05:43 That's terrible.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:05:44 You just... Your heart will stop.

Jay Shetty 1:05:46 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:05:46 Right? You get super diluted. So most likely you're not drinking, you're not gonna kill yourself, but what you can get is some way up that journey to where electricity... Again, I'm kind of screwing up some science here on purpose to, for communication purposes. But if you can't send electricity from one side of a neuron to the next one, then why are you expecting cognitive function to be at its peak? So we have seen this, again, many times. It's not the most common. Maybe 10% of people, it's a hydration issue. Of that 10%, probably I'd say 70% are under hydrating. So 30% of that 10, it's a small number, but it is real, are just drinking too much water.

Jay Shetty 1:06:24 And the rest?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:06:25 And the rest of that are on the op- opposite side of the equation, right? So they're drinking insufficient amounts of water or they're having things that look like dehydration that are... This is gonna sound funny, but they're actually, we'll call them anxiety-

Jay Shetty 1:06:37 Hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:06:37 ... related. There's a very clear relationship between hyperventilation, and this is resting hyperventilation. So if you're sitting there and you don't realize it, but your respiratory rate is actually like [panting] I'm exaggerating, but-

Jay Shetty 1:06:51 Yes, yes

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:06:51 ... I'm making a point, right?

Jay Shetty 1:06:52 Yes, yes, yes.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:06:53 That can actually put you in a position of, um, where you're actually getting rid of too much carbon dioxide because you're breathing in oxygen, breathing out carbon dioxide. You're getting carbon dioxide concentrations too low in your system. This is gonna put you into what's called respiratory alkalosis. Okay? Respiratory alkalosis is oftentimes then matched with metabolic acidosis, so that that entire side of the equation tries to balance the pH in your system. One of the mechanisms that has to do that is to then start altering how your kidneys res- resorb and, and reabsorb electrolytes, mm, salts and things like that, which then alters hydration. So some of the times this comes back to us going, and I'm again using anxiety like very inappropriately here, but-

Jay Shetty 1:07:36 Mm-hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:07:36 ... roughly of saying, "Oh, okay, this is a hydration issue, but that's not because you're not drinking enough water or having enough salt or whatever the case is. This is the fact that your system is continually trying to dump fluids. That's the problem we have to come backwards and solve." So we can cover the symptom, give you more salt or reduce water, something like that, but really we gotta work all the way back to the beginning and say like, "Let's stop this problem from reoccurring." That happens really commonly. We see that a bunch in that, you know, 10% sort of people.

Jay Shetty 1:08:09 Mm-hmm. What are some of the healthy solutions for brain fog?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:08:14 Yeah, I mean, we get this one a lot. So th- it's, it's funny, um, I would say of brain fog people, I don't know, again, I'm making a number up, but it feels to me like 90% of the time they think something unique and special is going on. Some micronutrient is out of whack. They've got some sort of toxic thing floating around. They got a pathogen or a gut bacteria thing. Um, and those, those happen. We, we see those, and that's a real thing. Mostly, eh, it's the basics, and I, and I really truly mean that. We have a very high success rate at Arete with brain fog, really high success rate, and often the majority of the time it is the, okay, for you,

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:08:55 it might be your sleep is completely dysfunctional. Boom. You maybe don't realize your sleep is dysfunctional. Gone. Brain fog gone. Like, that's it, right? Um, maybe it has nothing to do with your sleep. Your sleep is okay. Maybe it's not great, but it's okay, and your nutrition is really mixed with your physiology. Great. Sometimes it is gut microbiome related. Sometimes we do see-

Jay Shetty 1:09:16 Mm

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:09:16 ... heavy metal toxins at, at high concentrations. Like, those things are real. I would say if you don't have access to a program like ours or advanced testing, if you do the basics, really get your stress management under control, quality water, like really all that stuff, and I'm really trying to emphasize that because that's mostly free stuff. You don't need to turn to coaching. You don't need to turn to a stool sample. You don't need to turn to a blood test. You don't need to buy supplements yet. Get your house in order with movement, sunlight, quality food. A large percentage of your brain fog is, is probably gonna go away.

Jay Shetty 1:09:51 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:09:51 If you've tried that and haven't had success, maybe you can take additional steps, but really, um, we've, we've had... We, we joke sometimes, um, that like we've had a lot of people spend a lot of money, and we're like [laughs] "You knew the answer."

Jay Shetty 1:10:05 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:10:06 "We told you this coming in, and you..." So past that, it can be micronutrient related. There's no question about that. Um, there... We, we see that pretty routinely. That can look like all kinds of different stuff. Um, I, I, I'm, I'm wishing there was like one or two I could pull out and say, "Jay, it's usually B6 or B12." It's not the honest answer though. It has come up, but like sometimes i- it's, it's al- It's, it's-

Jay Shetty 1:10:31 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:10:31 ... honestly it's super sporadic.

Jay Shetty 1:10:32 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:10:33 If you get your breathing in order though, if you get stress in order, you get reasonably close with hydration, reasonably close with quality foods, and see some sun, like most of you will probably see really significant improvements.

Jay Shetty 1:10:50 Yeah. Andy, I'm intrigued. We're talking about all of this. I'm wondering, what's your schedule?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:10:54 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:10:54 What, what do you prioritize?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:10:57 Well, I have a family.

Jay Shetty 1:10:58 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:10:59 I have five companies, and I have a research lab. So...

Jay Shetty 1:11:03 Let's answer it with your f- your quadrant.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:11:05 Oh, my quadrant.

Jay Shetty 1:11:06 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:11:06 Okay.

Jay Shetty 1:11:06 We'll start there.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:11:07 Yeah, no, so that's actually really cool, um, 'cause I, I do this practice. Um, just moved my family pretty recently, moved my lab, so now my lab is in, uh... I'm at Parker University in Dallas, Texas. We're building a 65,000 square foot human performance center. It's gonna be open to the public. So really, really excited about that.

Jay Shetty 1:11:27 That's so cool, man.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:11:27 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:11:27 That's dope.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:11:28 We're gonna be able to do a lot of testing and stuff in there, graduate students, a lot of research in there. Um, we have a cool visitor center

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:11:36 that's gonna be a part of it. I'm just like so stoked to be-

Jay Shetty 1:11:38 Congrats, man. That's awesome.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:11:39 Thank you, man. So that all happened this quarter, and then, um, my, my sleep company, Absolute Rest, our blood work company, Vitality, [laughs] and our coaching program, um, all this stuff came up. So this quarter is, was quite frankly a seven in business, and I have to give a huge shout-out to my wife 'cause like sh- we knew coming into this quarter, I'm like, "This is gonna be rough."

Jay Shetty 1:12:02 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:12:03 I'm not gonna say she's hasn't complained at all, but for the most part... So my fitness has been a one, the lowest it's probably been in my memory. I'm doing the best I can. My, my coach Tim is sort of like, "Geez, are you ever gonna train?" I'm like, "I'm doing, like, doing sort of the best I can."

Jay Shetty 1:12:18 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:12:19 Um, everything, the rest of it's one, right? So it's one, one, one all category. Recovery, one. Relationships, one. My relationships, personal b- things like that have been almost non-existent very intentionally. That said, I'm super stoked because, um, I'm about... Well, actually fact, when I leave here, I'm gonna be spending about seven straight days with nothing but family.

Jay Shetty 1:12:38 I love that.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:12:39 So I'm paying that back. Um, when the new quarter comes, and when we start off that, that's gonna go back down to five from a business perspective, and that's all gonna come back up in training. So I'm super stoked, uh, to get back after it, but we made this decision in early summer. Um, just it's the unfortunate thing of like the, the lab move and our family move and two of our companies really taking off, like really taking off, and I was like, "I see where this is going-

Jay Shetty 1:13:08 [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:13:09 ... and I'm just gonna set expectations personally."

Jay Shetty 1:13:11 Yeah. Well, it's great to hear the reality of it, right?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:13:13 It's all fair.

Jay Shetty 1:13:13 Like, that's the point. That's the re- that's the reality of life that you've kind of had throughout this whole conversation. I feel like you've given no ... false solutions, quick fixes. There's, there's no hacks and habits that are like, it, it's not who you are. And, and I appreciate it because even in your life you're like, "Yeah, this is what it actually looks like." When you are working out consistently, training every day, what does your workout look like?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:13:37 So I have different phases, is what I do, right? Now, one of my biggest things I look forward to every year, my dad, my brother, and I always go on a hunting trip in the fall, right? There's like all kinds of stuff. This year we were up in, uh, about 10,000 feet elevation in the, in western Wyoming, and we're running up and down the hills basically the whole time. So I will generally schedule my entire year around that phase, which means prior to that it was a lot more long duration, um, rucking, moving, training, things like that. Not emphasizing muscle growth, not emphasizing even like VO2 max or anything like that. I need to be able to handle the mountain, and I need to be able to handle my respiration and the elevation. So I'm geared towards that. Coming back off of that trip, then I knew this quarter was gonna be awful, so this quarter was just about moving. I'm trying to move. I did a little workout yesterday in the hotel room. Um, today all I basically got in was, was sauna for the most part, right?

Jay Shetty 1:14:31 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:14:32 No time and, and I had a... Well, that's a lie. I did a bath. I did a bath in the hotel room. It's like the best I could come up with. I had no break in meeting, and I'm like, "I can get a 15-minute hot bath in and, like, sweat," move throughout the day. Okay. That's how it is now. When I go back, um, to start off after this refresher here, it's generally gonna look something like this. I'm mostly going to be lifting weights three to four times per week, and I don't ever have a Monday is legs, Tuesday is arms, things like that, because that's never gonna happen. I just have the next workout, and I get that thing done the next time it's available. So I don't actually have like seven-day routines.

Jay Shetty 1:15:10 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:15:10 I just have a thing I'm trying to get done over across 90 days, and it... So what that ends up looking like is generally like 70 workouts I try to get done in 90 days. Sometimes that's 9 or 10 or 11 days in a row-

Jay Shetty 1:15:19 Hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:15:20 ... because I like have the space, and then I know I'm gonna have two workouts in eight days.

Jay Shetty 1:15:24 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:15:25 Right? So I'm just like, if I have a chance to train, I'm gonna train because I know like schedule's gonna eat me right now. So I do that. So generally three to four days a week of lifting, generally one to two days a week of trying to move a ton. This could be a lot of steps up and down the mountain, uh, where I live. This could be, I will do many of my meetings where like people always laugh at me 'cause I'm just gonna like pace back and forth. I love pacing when I work, so I'm just like trying to accrue movement throughout the day. Um, and then something at least once a week, like I said earlier, where I touch maximum possible heart rate in a lot of different varieties. The last probably year or so of lifting specifically has been m- probably the most frustrating year of, more like almost a year and a half now, because I made a conscious decision of saying, "You know, I feel good. Everything is great, but I need to be thinking about the next 60 years." And so I have a couple little asymmetries and a couple of little things that I know are not moving how they should be moving. So I have a coach, and all of my programming is just correcting those things.

Jay Shetty 1:16:34 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:16:36 So the w- the workouts are just infuriating 'cause it's all the stuff you suck at. It's none of the stuff that like feels these big rewarding things out of it, but it is a sa- it's me stepping back and going, what if you spent a year? What if you spent a year and you weren't trying to maximize growth or maximize strength, but you're really trying to maximize joint health and function? Would you regret that 40 years from now? I doubt it.

Jay Shetty 1:16:59 [chuckles]

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:00 Right? And so it's, it was just like looking back and going, let's run the counterfactual. What if you didn't do that? You'd probably regret it.

Jay Shetty 1:17:07 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:08 So then you make that choice.

Jay Shetty 1:17:09 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:09 So, um, lifting for me specifically the last year has just been like so not fun, but, like, that's the conscious decision I made of investing in myself, so-

Jay Shetty 1:17:19 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:19 ... um, that-

Jay Shetty 1:17:19 Thanks for the honesty, man

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:20 ... that's what it looks like. Yeah, man.

Jay Shetty 1:17:21 Yeah, I really appreciate it. It's, it's great to hear, and I think everyone who's listening can give themselves a bit more grace as well because, you know, you know all of this, and I think often people look at people who n- who know a lot and are doing so much research and have good healthy habits.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:36 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:17:37 But there's a reality of, you know, and, and I c- I, you know, same for me, like in the work that I do, like it's, you know, I'm constantly trying to share the moments where I'm like, you know, probably didn't respond as well as I could have or wasn't as mindful as I should've been.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:51 Sure.

Jay Shetty 1:17:52 You know, that's the reality of, of what it means to be alive, and so I app-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:55 It's a practice, man

Jay Shetty 1:17:56 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:17:56 It's always a practice, right?

Jay Shetty 1:17:57 Yeah, absolutely. Uh, Andy, we end every episode with a final five, but before we do that, there are a few more questions that I kind of wanted to loop back to. Um, and so one of them was, why do you suggest that we don't work out at night?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:18:10 Um, you can work out at night, but you wanna just be careful of how much it's disrupting your sleep and what type of workout you're doing, especially if your day is laid out. The example I think I gave earlier was really high intensity, a sympathetic fight or flight type of day. If you're then always matching that with additional sympathetic drive, some people that's okay, but a lot of people in our experiences, that has been their, you know, quote-unquote, "root cause" of fill in the blank, right? So low testosterone, brain fog, sleep. Sort of like, okay, when you're on gas pedal all day, maybe for you right now, your exercise needs to be a little bit more restorative rather than the opposite.

Jay Shetty 1:18:52 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:18:52 It's not always the case, though. I train at night with generally no issues whatsoever. I, I like it. I almost always train at the end of the day. Um, so it can be just fine.

Jay Shetty 1:19:02 Got it.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:19:02 Just be mindful of-

Jay Shetty 1:19:04 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:19:04 ... if you're looking at your system and going, "Okay, great, um, I can do really high intensity stuff. I can do..." And we've, like our sleep technology is pretty outrageous, so I can verifiably say these things. I can do lots of stimulatory stuff. I can watch Lord of the Rings in 8K on a 90-inch screen, I don't have this, but like right in front of my face. A minute before bed. And I, I have zero issues with blue light. I have zero issues with stimulation, and-

Jay Shetty 1:19:31 That's just how you're wired

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:19:32 ... sleep architecture is gonna be fine. Sleep duration, sleep quality, the amount of time, the depth within each sleep phase, I, I, I track all these every night, right? No change for me. So i-i-intensity of exercise is gonna have no bearing on-

Jay Shetty 1:19:47 Got it

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:19:48 ... on me personally.

Jay Shetty 1:19:48 But that's for you specifically, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:19:50 Totally.

Jay Shetty 1:19:50 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:19:51 What I've seen though for a lot of our people is, um, not always, but many people it's the opposite, where we have to be a little bit more mindful, and so what we might have to do is say, "Okay, we can train, but your training has to look like this."

Jay Shetty 1:20:04 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:20:04 "We have to redefine what training is for you. We have to do our higher intensity stuff earlier or at minimum" and this is what we do for our athletes because they don't have an option. They have to... Their competition is at night, right? NBA plays at 7:00, or you get the idea. Let's at least match the high intensity work with downregulation post-exercise. If we just walk off the court or walk out of the gym and go right, "Now, now we finally see our kids for the day," or whatever, like, you're just asking for disaster here. Give me five minutes. Three to seven is what I say. Give me three to seven minutes. Can we downregulate a little bit? And we have really found that can give us 80%-

Jay Shetty 1:20:43 Mm

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:20:44 ... of what we need to get. It's not 100, but if all those things are, or you're fused, you're like, "That's it. That's my only time of day, and I'm not giving up my..." Okay, fine. Give me my five minutes post-training. You can do this in a car. You can do this in a locker room or wherever it is. Lights down. Cover your face with... Our athletes will put just their shirt or their towel over their face. Lie on your back. I would love to give you a, a specific and highly designed downregulation breathwork routine. That's what we... That's our gold standard, but if you can't do that or won't do that, just give me the other stuff. Fine.

Jay Shetty 1:21:17 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:21:17 Just breathe through your nose. All right, you wanna do a, a double extended exhale, so you wanna do a cadence like a four-second inhale, eight-second exhale. Generally, the longer you're exhaling, the more downregulatory it is. Like, o-okay, great. Like, we have lots of protocols. We can go into tons of customized breathing programs. We do that a lot. But if not, can you make it as simple as go sit in your car, close your eyes, and just breathe through your nose. Set a timer for four minutes. That actually is a stunning amount of effectiveness to that.

Jay Shetty 1:21:48 Wow. I love that, man. That's great. Yeah. I, I definitely start... I was playing pickleball at night. I was doing my morning workout in the gym, and then-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:21:56 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:21:56 ... pickleball in the evening. It was destroying my sleep. Like, I-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:21:58 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:21:59 ... it would take me two hours. Like, I'm someone who thankfully falls asleep pretty quickly, and it's like, I would get into bed at, like, 9:30, and I wouldn't get to bed till, like, 11:30, 12-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:07 Ooh

Jay Shetty 1:22:08 ... 'cause I was just, like, wired from playing pickleball from, like, 7:00 to 9:00 or whatever it was. And so I'm having to figure out... I, I've, I've just stopped playing because-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:17 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:22:17 ... it was having such a big impact. But I appreciate that.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:19 Try that.

Jay Shetty 1:22:19 I'll try that out. I will try it out.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:20 Yeah. You, you-

Jay Shetty 1:22:21 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:21 ... you'd be surprised. It might not be enough for you.

Jay Shetty 1:22:22 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:22 You might, you might have to do 15-

Jay Shetty 1:22:24 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:24 ... or 20 minutes.

Jay Shetty 1:22:24 Yeah, yeah. I'll try it out.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:25 Or it might not work at all.

Jay Shetty 1:22:26 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:26 But, but give it a go. You might... We've seen enough. Um, might work.

Jay Shetty 1:22:30 Yeah. I'll try it out. Another audience question we had to answer was what do you suggest for women with PCOS in terms of an ideal workout?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:22:38 So when you get into situations like that, whether it's PCOS, whether it's just simply really difficult menstrual cycles to manage, whether it's a menopause or, you know, you know, if we're going through it, things like that, um, this area of research is so tricky because symptomology is so wide-ranging. Defining menopause is, uh, physiologically easy, but even understanding... You know, it could be six months or 10 years. Like, it's a really hard thing. Symptoms are up and down. The menstrual cycle alone, independent PCOS, you, you're, you're adding on top of those things. I have yet to see a clear-cut specific this is better.

Jay Shetty 1:23:14 Got it.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:23:15 Um, and just sort of, like,

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:23:17 if you wanna follow some guidelines and you're feeling better, I'm, I'm all in. Like, that's great.

Jay Shetty 1:23:21 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:23:22 If not, though, I, I don't have a specific thing that says you have to do this this way. Um, we on... are yet to give women different styles of training while we're here. We don't train them differently just because they're women. We don't, um, do anything different throughout the menstrual cycle with training or nutrition just because they're women. Um, we do everything that's based on the individual. So if, if we need to do set stuff, we absolutely will, but we do not walk them in and saying, "Oh, okay. Our women do this style of training. Our men do this." We, we absolutely do not, and I know that wasn't what you're asking, but-

Jay Shetty 1:23:55 No, no, but that's really useful. Yeah, I didn't know that. I'm... No, I'm intrigued.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:23:58 We d- we definitely do not do that.

Jay Shetty 1:23:59 You don't have different protocols. You have a... It's so individual.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:24:02 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:24:02 It's not based on gender. It's not like, oh, you're male-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:24:04 Totally

Jay Shetty 1:24:04 ... so this is better for your strength than female.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:24:06 Yeah, it... Yes. Like, men and women have massive differences, and we're always gonna acknowledge and pay attention to those things, but I'm always just coaching you, and-

Jay Shetty 1:24:14 What are the differences that people should be aware of?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:24:17 You have clear hormonal differences generally, right? Um, one of the things that we have seen in, in our research, and I would say it's, it's held true in our coaching practices, a lot of the times women handle volume better from an exercise perspective, and when I say handle, I mean you can give them more reps, more sets. They can train more often. Their recovery's faster. The other way you can flip that-

Jay Shetty 1:24:38 Why is that?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:24:40 Well, we've actually done some work here, and nobody really knows.

Jay Shetty 1:24:43 I noticed that with my wife. My wife's like that. She- [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:24:45 Yeah. You, you honestly, like-

Jay Shetty 1:24:47 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:24:47 ... it's pretty true. Uh, my friend Brett Contreras made a, a really awesome post recently, and I'm like, "Wow, this is great," specifically on this point. Again, I wanna give him credit 'cause I'm like, oh, actually, he, he nailed this. When people say things like, "Oh, we don't train men and women differently," like I just said, I generally hear that and go, "Okay, you've never trained women." Like, you've never trained women if you're gonna say that. That's exactly what's Brett's post was. I'm like, okay. Because honestly, we, we sort of do. Now, walking in, we do not, but I know that oftentimes we can bring the volume up. Also, it oftentimes means they need more volume. Not always, but I'm hedging quickly of going, okay, we gotta start probably thinking more volume here, and if we're not getting responses as quickly as you want, we're pretty quick to just go to volume.

Jay Shetty 1:25:31 Right.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:25:31 And it oftentimes when... Oftentimes men That'll go the other direction. When it comes to performance, too, women, because of that, generally don't need as much of a taper. They don't need to have... They don't have to back off as much to get that super compensation, that, that peaking day. Again, these are very-

Jay Shetty 1:25:49 Yeah, broad, yeah, yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:25:49 ... like generalizations, right? We're always coaching the individual.

Jay Shetty 1:25:52 Yeah, we can't get specific without a-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:25:53 Totally

Jay Shetty 1:25:54 ... avatar in front of us.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:25:55 Exactly. So, um, those are some ones that we kind of like pop out to immediately where we see differences. I've coached world champion females in pro- probably six or more sports at this point. So we've done powerlifting and the UFC and, and a bunch of different sports, um, wrestling. I can also say most often women are more in tune with their body than men.

Jay Shetty 1:26:21 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:26:22 They generally give better feedback. Yeah, if you go ask one of our male athletes, like, "How you feeling today?" Like, I know what they're gonna say. [laughs] "Pretty good, coach." Like, whatever.

Jay Shetty 1:26:30 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:26:30 Where women are more likely to be like, "I feel pretty good, but, uh, back's a little bit tighter here. Energy's just a touch down." You're like, "Oh." And they're, they're really in tune with-

Jay Shetty 1:26:39 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:26:39 ... this feeling feels a little bit off over here. Men are like kind of blunt instruments. A lot of the times women will, um, be more responsive to changes in caloric intake, where, again, men are, are a little more robust to those things. So you have to be really careful. You have to be really careful of lowering calories too much, too long for women. You gotta be careful on that with men, but you can get away with it a little bit more.

Jay Shetty 1:27:03 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:27:03 So when it comes to just sort of these generalities, those are the ones that pop up-

Jay Shetty 1:27:06 Got it

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:27:07 ... the most.

Jay Shetty 1:27:08 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:27:08 Some things that are counterintuitive, actually, since we're here, we... and, and there's a lot of research on this, that I'd say e- empirically our, our coaching practice scientifically, uh, we actually just published a meta-analysis. I, I was a co-author on this one, so, uh, somebody else led this one, but you don't really see much of a difference in rate of increase between men and women-

Jay Shetty 1:27:29 Mm

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:27:29 ... in terms of strength and muscle. It's not that different. You grow at about the same relative rate.

Jay Shetty 1:27:35 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:27:36 It's just that men are generally bigger.

Jay Shetty 1:27:38 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:27:39 So if you both gain 10%-

Jay Shetty 1:27:41 Yeah

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:27:41 ... your absolute amount is, is far much higher, so it looks like you just got up there. There are some subtle differences there within that meta-analysis. You can read the details if you're a, a nerd like that. But the, the take-home message for that is it's, it's pretty much the same.

Jay Shetty 1:27:55 Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:27:55 And I would say our coaching experience has seen that. We don't see women on average struggling to put on more muscle relative to men, or strength. Um, if the training and the nutrition and all the other factors are equal, they're gonna progress pretty much equally, um, for a long, long period of time. The last one that would jump out to me is on a similar note there is we generally see women through aging are a little bit more successful against joint injury.

Jay Shetty 1:28:24 Oh, interesting.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:28:25 Men are gonna be a little more banged up-

Jay Shetty 1:28:26 Mm-hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:28:26 ... for the most part. So I, I think that's a believable story, too. I don't know why, but... Well, I could, I could guess. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:28:32 Go on. [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:28:33 A little more aggressive, probably worse decision-making.

Jay Shetty 1:28:35 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:28:36 But you get it. So categorically, those would be some of the differences.

Jay Shetty 1:28:39 Got it. Thank you. Andy, I want to ask you a final five. These questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:28:46 Oh, boy.

Jay Shetty 1:28:47 So the first question is what is the best health advice you've ever heard, received, or given?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:28:53 The notion of adaptability and plasticity is far greater than people realize. Your genetics play a big part of course, but your lifestyle is far more important to your end story than your genetics. So you have the ability, the capacity within reach to make a significant improvement in any aspect of that look, feel, perform that you choose. Some work there, but you have autonomy in your body.

Jay Shetty 1:29:18 That's very hope-giving. I love that. Uh, question number two: What's the worst health advice you've ever heard or received?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:29:24 [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:29:26 Oh, boy. [laughs] I'm gonna cheat with my answer here-

Jay Shetty 1:29:29 Mm-hmm

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:29:29 ... and give a antithesis to my first answer, which is the idea that there is a certain food you can or can't eat.

Jay Shetty 1:29:37 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:29:37 That all of us in humanity have to be eating or sleeping or training or living a certain way, or we're gonna be unhealthy.

Jay Shetty 1:29:43 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:29:44 That is colossally untrue, unfair, and unhelpful.

Jay Shetty 1:29:48 Mm. Great answer. Uh, question number three: For someone who's really trying to lose some stubborn belly fat, what should they do?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:29:56 This will sound a little bit counterintuitive, but a large portion of your resting metabolic rate, your metabolism, is defined by how much muscle you have. So getting those last few pounds off the belly, maybe try to put some muscle on.

Jay Shetty 1:30:12 Mm.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:30:13 My guess is you've already done everything else, so try that option.

Jay Shetty 1:30:16 And, and would you recommend how, or that's case specific and-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:30:20 Yeah, totally.

Jay Shetty 1:30:20 Question number four: What's something you used to believe to be true about health that you disagree with now?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:30:28 I have a lot of answers. I've been open, honest, a- and I probably should do more about things that change. I was very against cardiovascular exercise. Uh, I thought, like, strength training is the only thing you need to do. That, that, that's very wrong. I was also very against low carbohydrate diets in any form. I was very against intermittent fasting, and I think I wasn't totally wrong on that, but those are viable strategies for most people. They're not perfect for all goals, but those things are options. So I'd say those three specific ones, but in general, I was simply too closed-minded about assuming I knew what everyone wanted in terms of the outcome and the goal. When you do that, you start limiting options, and you are working too much off of hubris. The more you realize people are looking for different things, then you start to realize, okay, these are potentially acceptable. They just aren't gonna get to where I thought everyone wanted to go, and that was not the appropriate approach. So all of your questions, by the way, I'm on, like, sentence nine.

Jay Shetty 1:31:33 [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:31:34 I'm heading 10, but-

Jay Shetty 1:31:35 I love it, man. It's all good. Uh, fifth and final question, it's the question we ask everyone who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:31:45 You know what's quite funny about this answer is I literally sent a tweet out the other... yesterday-

Jay Shetty 1:31:51 [laughs]

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:31:51 ... that said, "I think we should make it illegal for people to recline their seats on airplanes."

Jay Shetty 1:31:55 [laughs] That's so good.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:31:57 It's off my top of my brain.

Jay Shetty 1:31:58 I'd be really mad at you for that law.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:31:59 God, I hate that.

Jay Shetty 1:32:01 But you can recline yours, too.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:02 No.

Jay Shetty 1:32:02 That's the whole point.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:03 Not 'cause you're smashing into my lap, and I can't work.

Jay Shetty 1:32:06 Oh, right. Oh, you're a worker. That's it.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:08 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:32:08 I get it. I get it.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:08 I'm, I'm like-

Jay Shetty 1:32:09 You're a plane worker

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:09 ... plane time is perfect work time.

Jay Shetty 1:32:11 Got it. Got it.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:11 So now, like-

Jay Shetty 1:32:12 Plane time's the only time I switch to entertainment, so-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:14 Oh, really?

Jay Shetty 1:32:15 Yeah, I'll read a book or I'm watching something or-

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:17 No, man, I hate it.

Jay Shetty 1:32:18 Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:18 So my, my cheeky answer here would be I'd make it illegal to recline seats on airplanes.

Jay Shetty 1:32:22 I love it. Andy Galpin, everyone. Thank you so much for listening and watching. Andy, thank you for all your incredible insights, wealth of wisdom. I hope that you will take away one thing and apply it from this episode. Remember, that's my request. You won't be able to do all of it. You won't be able to do everything. Try and pick the one thing and just apply it to make a shift in your life. Follow Andy across social media, his podcast, everything else he has going on to make sure that you're connected to his insight. I'm sure it's had a big impact on you. I know it has on me, and Andy, I look forward to having you on the show many, many times. Thank you so much.

Dr. Andy Galpin 1:32:54 Ah, it's my pleasure, man. I can't wait to come back.

Jay Shetty 1:32:56 Yeah. Thank you. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.

Speaker 1:33:05 If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain. You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over 1,000 convicted felons and over 100 murderers, and their brains are very damaged