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

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

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

Thank you. Likewise.

Thank you.

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

Oh, thank you.

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