Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Build Physical Endurance & Lose Fat | Huberman Lab Guest Series

(Upbeat music) 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 third in the six-episode series on fitness, exercise, and performance. Today's episode is all about endurance and fat loss. That is, the specific protocols required to achieve the four different kinds of endurance and how to maximize fat loss. Dr. Andy Galpin, great to be back. Today, we're going to talk about endurance, and I'm very interested in this conversation because I, like many other people, strive to get a certain amount of cardiovascular work in each week, maybe a long-ish jog, maybe a swim, ride the bike, et cetera. But when I think about the word endurance, the idea that almost immediately comes to mind is about doing something for a long period of time repeatedly, but I have a feeling that there are other ways to trigger this adaptation that we call the endurance adaptation. So, I'm excited to learn about that. I'm, uh, also excited to learn about the fuel systems in the body that allow for endurance and other modes of repeated activity. So, in order to kick things off, I'd love for you to frame the conversation by telling us, what is endurance and are there indeed a large variety of ways to induce what we call this endurance adaptation?

Sure. The way I want to start actually here is, is calling back to some of the things we talked about in our previous conversations, which are really, people ha- exercise for three reasons. Number one, you want to feel better. Number two, you want to look a certain way. And then number three, you want to be able to do that for a long time, right? So you need to went- the way that we say it in sports is look good, feel good, play good, right? So I want some sort of functionality to be able to perform a certain way, whatever that is for you. You want to be able to look a certain way that, whatever that matters for you, and then you want to be able to do that for a long time. So when it comes to endurance, we have a bunch of misnomers here, which is the same thing with the strength training or resistance exercise side, where, where we wanted to dispel this myth that I lift weights only because I, I want to gain muscle or play a sport, and I want to do cardio because I want to either lose fat or for long health's sake. And just like we smashed that myth from the strength training side, I want to smash it from the endurance training side. There are so many other reasons that you want to perform endurance training regardless of your goal, right? Whether that is longevity, whether it is performance, or whether it is aesthetics. And so we're gonna, I wanna cover all those reasons, uh, exactly what to do, uh, protocols, of course, a- and why those things are working that way. In general though, the quick answer is really endurance comes down to two independent factors. Factor number one is fatigue management and then factor number two is fueling. And that's all it really comes down to. So all the different types of training are going to reach a limitation, which are either, again, your ability to deal with some sort of fatigue, and that's generally a fatigue signal. The other one is managing some sort of restriction of energy input. And a lot of the... Spoiler here is, a lot of the times people think it's a fueling issue when really it's a fatigue management issue or the opposite. And to have a complete health spectrum, regardless of whether you're a high performance athlete like I typically deal with or general public, you need to be able to do both, manage fatigue as well as understand fuel storage. So that's really what we're gonna get into today.