Essentials: How to Build Strength, Muscle Size & Endurance | Dr. Andy Galpin

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. Welcome, Dr. Professor Andy Galpin. There are only a handful, meaning about three or four people who I trust enough in the exercise physiology space that when they speak, I not only listen, but I modify my protocols. And you are among those three or four people. I would love to have you share with us what you think most everybody or even everybody should know about principles of strength training and principles of, let's call it hypertrophy, power, and the other ca- sort of categories of training.

There's about nine different adaptations you can get from exercise. First one to think about is what we'll just call skill. So this is improving anything from, say, a golf swing to a squatting technique to running. And this is just simply moving mechanically how you want your body to move. From there, we're gonna get into speed. So this is moving as fast as possible. The next one is power. And power is a function of speed, but it's also a function of the next one, which is strength. So if you actually multiply strength by speed, you get power. So there's carryover, so like a lot of things that you would do for the development of strength and power, um, they are somewhat similar, but then there's differences. Once you get past strength, then the next one kinda down the list is hypertrophy. This is muscle size, right? Growing muscle mass is one way to think about it. After hypertrophy, you get into these categories of, the next one is, um, these are all globally endurance-based issues, and the very first one is called muscular endurance. So this is your ability to do how many push-ups can you do in one minute, you know, things like that. Past muscular endurance, you're now into more of an energetic or even cardiovascular fatigue. So you've left the local muscle, and you're now into the entire physiological system and its ability to produce and sustain work. Think about this as, um, I call this anaerobic power, right? So this is your ability to produce a lot of work for, say, thirty seconds to maybe one minute, kinda two minutes like that. The next one down, then, is more closely aligned to what we'll call your VO2 max. So this is your ability to kinda do the same thing, but more of a time domain of, say, three to twelve minutes. So this is gonna be a maximum heart rate, but it's gonna be well past just max heart rate. Then after that, we have what I call long-duration endurance. So this is your ability to sustain work. The time domain doesn't matter in terms of how fast go-- you're going. It's how c- how long can you sustain work? This is thirty-plus minutes of no break like that. So as just an high-level overview, those are the, the different things you can target. And again, some of those cross over, and some are actually a little bit contrarian to the other ones. So pushing towards one is maybe gonna sacrifice something else. There's a handful of things you have got to do to make all of those things work. One of them is functionally called progressive overload. If you want to continue to improve, you have to have some method of overload. Adaptation physiologically happens as a byproduct of stress, so you have to push a system. So if you continue to do, say, the exact same workout over time, you better not expect much improvement. You can keep maintenance, but you're not going to be adding additional stress. In general, you have to have some sort of progressive overload. This could come from adding more weights. This could come from adding more repetitions. It could come from doing it more often in the week. It could come from adding complexity to the movement. So there's a lot of different ways to progress, but you have to have some sort of movement forward. So if you have this kind of routine where you've built Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday or something, and you just do that infinitely, um, you're not going to get very far.