Dr. Andy Galpin: Maximize Recovery to Achieve Fitness & Performance Goals | Huberman Lab

(rock music plays) Welcome to the Huberman Lab Guest Series, where I and an expert guest 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. Today's episode is the fifth in a six-episode series on fitness, exercise, and performance, and today's episode is all about recovery. That is, how to maximize your recovery to achieve your fitness and exercise and performance goals and how to avoid overtraining. Dr. Andy Galpin, great to be back. Today we are discussing recovery, and I'm very excited to have this discussion because, as we know, despite the fact that different types of exercise can be used to trigger different types of adaptation such as increased long distance, endurance, anaerobic capacity, strength, hypertrophy, et cetera, the workouts themselves are not actually when the progress occurs, when the adaptation occurs. And this to me is extremely interesting because it parallels what we see with so-called neuroplasticity, which is the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience. We sit down to learn something, we experience something, and that is the trigger for rewiring of the nervous system. But the actual rewiring occurs away from the experience or the learning. So too in fitness and in exercise, recovery is where the real results actually emerge, where we get better. So I'd love for you to explain what recovery really is and the different types of recovery, certainly different ways to enhance recovery, and I'd also love for you to explain whether or not there are ways that people can become better at recovering. Because if indeed recovery is when progress emerges, when we get better, well then anything that supports our recovery and gets us better at recovering ought to increase our rate and our degree of progress.

Absolutely. You nailed it in the description. What people really want is some sort of change, whether we were talking athletes or general population, this change is, uh, some sort of improvement in muscle function, reduction in body fat, higher functioning, uh, metabolism, w- whatever the case is. And the only way that happens is, we talk about the equation of stress causes adaptation, but as you alluded to, the piece in the middle is only if you can recover from it. And so the game we're playing here is we all agree we want more adaptation. That means we need to bring more stress into the system, but we then have to ensure that our recovery outpaces the stress input or else we will... no adaptation will occur. In fact, what happens is you will actually be in a negative spot and start going backwards. And so what I would love to do is, is talk about how we've handled this. Um, and I've had a decent amount of experience here. I was fortunate enough to do my master's degree in the laboratory of a gentleman named Andy Frey, who is an NSCA Lifetime Achievement Award winner, and he studied in large part recovery, overtraining, overuse, overload, a- and a lot of areas. In addition, I've been fortunate enough to work with individuals from high functioning CEOs and executives who have little time for recovery, high job stress, to in- to athletes, uh, in the... think of the example of pitchers in Major League Baseball who have to recover in a matter of four days so that they can pitch again at maximum velocity. So I would love to outline some of the tools and tactics, strategies that we use for all these individuals, um, give you some foundational stuff, and I would love to maybe actually cover some things that most people have never heard of, um, some stuff you may not have access to, some technologies that we use, some biomarkers, um, and then even a whole bunch of things that are, keeping with the theme of your show here, cost-free or extremely low-cost, so all those strategies. Um, what I'd also like to do is cover nutrition and supplementation and fueling and hydration and things, but that's probably gonna have to be saved for an additional conversation that we'll do in the next episode.