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Speaker A: 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. Today, my guest is doctor Andy Galpin. Doctor Galpin is a full and tenured professor in the department of Kinesiology at California State University in Fullerton. He is also a world expert in all things exercise science and kinesiology. Today you are going to hear what is essentially a masterclass in how to build fitness, no matter what level of fitness you happen to have. He talks about how to build endurance and the multiple types of endurance. He talks about how to build strength and hypertrophy, which is the growth of muscle fibers. So if you're seeking to get stronger or build bigger muscles or build endurance or all of those things today you're going to learn how. You're also going to learn how to build flexibility, how to hydrate properly for exercise. And we'll also talk about nutrition and supplementation. What makes Doctor Galpin so unique is his ability to span all levels of exercise science. He has the ability to clearly communicate the sets and repetition schemes that one would want to follow, for instance, to build more strength or to build larger muscles. He also clearly describes exactly how to train if you want to build more endurance or enhance cardiovascular function. What's highly unique about Doctor Galpin and the information he teaches and the way he communicates that information is that he can take specific recommendations of how recreational exercisers, or even professional athletes ought to train for their specific goals and link that to specific mechanisms. That is, the specific changes that need to occur in the nervous system and in muscle fibers, and indeed right down to the genetics of individual cells in your brain and body. In order for those exercise adaptations to occur. It's truly rare to find somebody that can span so many different levels of analyses and who is able to communicate all those levels of understanding in such a clear and actionable way. Indeed, Doctor Galpin is one of just a handful of people to which I and many others look when they want to make sure that the information that they're getting about exercise is gleaned from quality peer reviewed studies, hands on experience with a wide variety of research subjects, meaning everyday people all the way up to professional athletes in a wide variety of sports. So it's no surprise that that he's not only one of the most knowledgeable, but also the most trusted voices in exercise science. Doctor Galpin is also an avid communicator of zero cost to consumer information about exercise science. You can find him on Instagram otrandygalpin and also on Twitter Andy Galpin. Both places he provides terrific information about recent studies, both from his laboratory and from other laboratories. More in depth protocols of the sort that you'll hear about today. So if you're not already following him, be sure to do so. He provides only the best information. He's extremely nuanced and precise and clear in delivering that information. I'm certain that by the end of today's conversation, you'll come away with a tremendous amount of new knowledge that you can devote to your exercise pursuits. 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, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Athletic Greenshouse. Athletic Greens is an all in one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens, and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With athletic greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D three k two there are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D three is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin d three, and k two is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body, and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com Huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D three k two. Today's episode is also brought to us by element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are an element, and those are sodium, magnesium, and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium, and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. If the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone systems go off. Our ability to get into physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element. That's lMnt.com huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to elementlmnt.com Huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga Nidra sessions, and NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the Waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app turned out to be the waking up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much. So I gave the waking up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on the which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know. Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations, and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga nidra and something similar to it called non sleep, deep rest, or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a free 30 day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor Andy Galpin. Welcome, doctor. Professor Andy Galpin. It's been a long time coming. We have friends in common, but this is actually the first time we've sat down face to face.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm very excited.

Speaker A: Yeah. 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. So, first of all, a debt of gratitude. Thank you. You've greatly shaped the protocols that I use, and I know there's far more for me and for others to learn. So youre a professor, you teach in university, and you have a tremendous range of levels of exploration, muscle biopsy, literally images down the microscope, all the way to training professional athletes and everything in between. So you are truly an n of one. And just to start us off, I would love to have you share with us what you think most everybody, or even everybody, should know about principles of strength training, principles of endurance training, and principles of, let's call it hypertrophy, power, and the other sort of categories of training. And this could be very top contour, but what do you think everybody on planet Earth should know about these categories of personal and athletic development?

Speaker B: Well, that's a great first question. Holy cow. I think I'll start it this way. I tend to think about there's about nine different adaptations you can get from exercise. Fat loss is not one of those. It is a byproduct, but that's not really what I'm getting at. We can categorize everything like that, and what we can talk about are what are the concepts that you need to hit within each one? And then you can have infinite discussion of the different methodologies. That first thing to hit is the concepts are actually fairly few, but the methods are many. Right. People have said that in iterations throughout time. So if you walk from the very beginning, the 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. I'm just going to globally call that skill. From there, we're going to 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. And the reason I'm making this distinction, by the way, is some of these are very close, and I'm going in a specific order on purpose here. For example, power is, like I just said, it's a function of speed and strength. So if you improve speed, you've also likely improved power, but not necessarily because it could have come from the force direction either. 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, right. So things that you would do correctly for power would really not develop much strength and vice versa. So we can get into all these details later, once you get past strength. And the next one, kind of 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 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 pushups can you do in 1 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. And we can get into a bunch of differentiations within endurance. But I just to keep it really simple right now, the very first one, think about this, as I call this, anaerobic power, right? So this is your ability to produce a lot of work for, say, 30 seconds to maybe 1 minute, kind of two minutes like that. The next one down then is more closely aligned to what we'll call your vo two max. So this is your ability to kind of do the same thing, but more of a time domain of, say, three to twelve minutes. So this is going to be a maximum heart rate, but it's going to 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 you're going, it's how long can you sustain work. This is 30 plus minutes of no break like that. So as just a high level overview, those are the different things you can target. And again, some of those crossover and some are actually a little bit contrarian to the other ones, so pushing towards one is maybe going to sacrifice something else. So as an overall start, that's really what we're looking at. Within all those, though, they do have similar concepts. In terms of there's a handful of things you have got to do to make all of those things work, and we could talk about as many of those as you want, but one of them is functionally called progressive overload. So whichever one you're trying to improve at the, if you want to continue to improve, you have to have some method of overload. And as you well know, you've talked about a lot. 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. So in general, you have to have some sort of progressive overload. And we can talk in detail about what that means for each category, but 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 going from, say, a partial range of motion to a full range of motion, or adding other variables. 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, you're not going to get very far. So that's, I guess, the most high level overview of all the things people can go after, and then we can go from whatever direction you want from there.

Speaker A: I'd love to do the deep dive on each one of these for several hours, but, and I imagine that over time we probably will. I'd love to chat about a couple of these in a bit more depth. So in terms of defining what the progressive overload variables are for these different categories, maybe we could hit the two most common combinations of these nine things, the first one being strength and hypertrophy. And maybe we could lump power in there, maybe not. You're the exercise physiologist. But strength and hypertrophy, which at least bear some relationship and then maybe separately we could explore sustained work, endurance, this 30 minutes or longer continuously, because I think many people train in that regime and probably something like vo two max anaerobic as well, because I know that a number of people now incorporate so called HIIT, or high intensity interval training, I think with the hopes of either shortening their workouts and or gaining some additional cardiovascular benefit. So if we could start with strength and hypertrophy. I know many people want to be stronger. They want to grow larger muscles or at least maintain what they have. So what are the progressive overload principles that are most effective over time for strength and hypertrophy?

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so I'll actually go a little step back with every one of those categories I talked about. You have what we call your modifiable variables. So this is a very short list of all the things you can modify, the different variables within your workout that can be modified, that will change the outcome. A fancy way of saying if you do this differently, then you're going to get a different result. So modifiable variables, the very first one of those is called choice. So this is the exercise choice that you select. Now, one of, I'm going to go double back here. So I'm kind of doing a little bit of inception. So follow me here as I'm going up a layer to come down a couple layers. I have these fundamental laws of strength and conditioning that kind of like a little bit of a joke, but progressive overload is one of those laws. Another one of those laws is your exercises themselves do not determine adaptations. So here's what I mean. If you're like, I want to get stronger, you can't select an exercise that doesn't determine you getting strong if you don't do the exercise correctly. And I'm not even referring to the technique, that, of course matters. But if you don't execute it in the right fashion, then you're not going to get that adaptation. So if you choose, I want to get stronger, I'm going to do a bench press. Well, if you do the wrong set, range the wrong repetition, range the wrong speed, you won't get strength. You maybe get muscular endurance and very little strength adaptation. So the exercise selection itself is important, but it does not determine the outcome adaptation. So the very first thing that you need to think about if you're like, I want to get stronger or add muscle, is not the exercise choice. Right. It is the application of the exercise. What are the sets, what are the reps, what are the rest ranges that you're using? That's going to be your primary determinant. Now, some exercises are certainly better for some adaptations. For example, a deadlift is probably not a great exercise to do for long duration endurance. Like you could theoretically do 30 straight minutes of deadlifting, but it's probably not our best choice, right. It's probably a pretty good choice for strength development, right? Because you're going to do a low repetition, high set range. Um, you could theoretically do bicep curls for power, but probably not your best choice, right. Single joint isolation movement is, is not the best for developing power. You've ever done a bicep curl as fast as you possibly can. Like, that's not going to go well. So in theory, any exercise can produce any adaptation given the execution is performed properly. So now that we've understood that a little bit, the exercise itself does not determine the adaptation coming within each one of these categories. Exercise choice is an important variable because it does lend you to things like what movement pattern you're in. So in other words, if you want to get stronger and you're thinking, okay, what exercise do I do? You need to think a little bit about what muscle groups do I want to use, and that's going to be leading you towards the exercise choice. For example, I want to use my quads more. Okay, fine. Maybe you're going to choose more of a front squat type of variation, a goblet squat. So the bar, the load is in front of you. If you want to emphasize maybe more of your hamstrings and glutes, you're going to maybe put a barbell on your back or do a different one. So the exercise choice is important to the prescription because it's going to determine a lot of your success. Okay, another kind of simpler way to think about this. If you're a beginner or moderate to intermediate, or maybe you don't have a coach, you probably want to hedge towards an exercise selection that is a little bit easier technically. So you maybe don't want to do a barbell back squat. It's actually a pretty complicated movement. Maybe you want to do a little bit more of, again, a goblet squat or even use some machines or a split squat, something that's a little bit simpler because you don't have a coach, you're not a professional athlete, the likelihood of success is higher and the risk has now gone lower. So the very first variable within all of these is the exercise choice. The second one is the intensity. And that refers to, in this context, not perceived effort. Like, wow, that was a really intense workout. It is quite literally either a percentage of your one rep at max or a percentage of your maximum heart rate, or vo two max. So for the strength based things you want to think about, what's the percentage of the maximum weight I could lift one time? And that's what we're going to call one rep max, or it's a percentage of my heart rate, right. So if I tell you to get on a bike and I want you to do intervals, and I want you at 75%, I'm typically referring to 75% of your max heart rate or vo two max or something like that. If I tell you to do squats at 75%, that means 75% of the maximum amount of weight you could lift one time or close.

Speaker A: In terms of determining one rep max, I confess I've never actually taken the one rep max for any exercise, but I have some internal sense of what that might be or what range it might be. Is it necessary for people to assess their one repetition maximum before going into these sorts of programs?

Speaker B: No, not at all. I think a more intuitive way is to take a repetition range. Well, you can do this a couple different ways. So there are equations you can run and you can just google these anywhere, and these are called conversion charts. And so it says, okay, if I did 75 pounds on my bench press and I did it eight times, you can just run an estimate and say that, okay, you're probably going to be able to bench about 95 pounds for one rep max or something. So that's a very easy conversion chart. So just pick a load that you feel comfortable with. But it's kind of heavy, but not like crazy heavy. And do as many repetitions as you can. What a really good technique. And then look what that number would be.

Speaker A: So conversion safer than doing one repetition maximum?

Speaker B: For the general public, who has, again, no coaching, it's safer. For a professional athlete, it's not any safer, but. Or not even a professional athlete, but a trained person with a coach. But for most people, yeah, that's a good way to go about it. You can also just kind of do it with feel in the sense that say you want to do a set of five repetitions and you do the load and you think, I could have done one or two more, and then you kind of have an idea of what that number is going to be. If you think, man, that last one I had to kind of really, really, really get after it, then maybe just call that that number, right. So you don't have to get overly concerned. In fact, when we start getting into these number ranges, you're going to see that they're all ranges. We're not going to give a specific 95% for one of these exact reasons. It's not that precise for most of them. In fact, some of them, like hypertrophy, have enormous ranges that you like, almost can't miss. So the intensity in that case doesn't even matter for the most part, because that's not the primary determinant. Some of these you're going to see, intensity is the determinant. And some of these you're going to see volume is the true determinant. So intensity, though, is the second one. Choice was the very first manipulatable variable. Intensity was the second one. The third one is what we call volume. And so this is just how many reps and how many sets are you doing? So if you're going to do three sets of ten, that volume would be 30, right? Five sets of five, that volume is 25. It's just a simple equation. How much work are you totally doing? The next one past that is called rest intervals. So this is the amount of time you're taking in between, typically a set. Then from there you have progression, which is what we started to talk about, this progressive overload. Are you increasing by weight or reps or rest intervals or complexity or whatever? So all of those things can be changed as a method of progression. And so maybe you want to go progressing from a single joint exercise like a leg extension on a machine. And you want to progress by moving to a whole body movement like a squat that in of itself, you don't have to change the load or the reps or the rest. That is a representation of progressive overload. And it's probably a pretty good place to start because, number one, especially for beginners, you want to make sure that the movement pattern is correct. Don't worry about intensity, don't worry about rep ranges or any of these things. You need to learn to move correctly. And you need to give your body some time to develop some tissue tolerance so that you're not getting overtly sore. In general, soreness is a terrible proxy for exercise quality. It's a really bad way to estimate whether it was a good or a bad workout, especially for people in that beginner to middle to moderate, in fact, even the fat. For our professional athletes, we do not use soreness as a metric of a good workout. It's a really bad idea for a bunch of reasons. On the same token, because stress is required for adaptation, you don't want to leave at the gym and feel like. I don't really do much. Like, there has to be there. So if you think about soreness on a scale of one to ten, you probably want to spend most of your time in, like, the three.

Speaker A: You mean post exercise?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: In between workouts.

Speaker B: Totally.

Speaker A: And I know we'll talk about recovery extensively later, but if one body part or set of body parts is sore, is that an indication that one should stay out of training? I would imagine the answer is no in most cases. And secondarily to that, if a particular muscle is sore, does that mean that muscle is not ready to be trained again?

Speaker B: Yeah. The answer to both those is the same. Um, which is no. Right. Um, you can certainly train a sore muscle. You. You need to, I guess, have a little bit of feel on that, right. So if. If you're sore of, like, okay, like, and you're moving around a little bit and you're like, man, this is a little bit sore, you can train if you're like, I can't sit on the couch without crying because my glutes are so sore, like, we probably don't need to train again. Right.

Speaker A: Does whimpering count as crying?

Speaker B: Yeah. In that particular case, I'd say you've actually gone to a place of detriment because now you're going to have to skip a training session, and now you're behind. So your actual total volume, say, across the month, is actually going to be lower because you went way too hard in those workouts, had to take too many days off in between, you're going to see that you're going to cover less distance over the course of a month or six months or even a year. So you want to walk a pretty fine line. And for most people, I would say, hedge a little bit on the side of less sore than more sore because frequency is very, very important for almost all these adaptations at training. Frequency, which is the last modifiable variable. Right, frequency, which is how many times per week are you. Are you doing that thing? So those are kind of our global things that we can play with. So when I'm trying to manipulate and get strength versus hypertrophy or, you know what I want, like, a little bit of both, all those variables are the things that are going through my mind, which one do I need to move in which direction so that I can get this outcome and nothing. This outcome over here, for example, some folks might want to get stronger, but not put muscle mass on. Some folks just kind of want both. And that's a lot of the general public. I want to get a little stronger and a little bit more muscle. Great. But there are instances where people, for performance reasons or for purely personal preference, like, I don't want to get any more muscle. Great. But I want to get stronger. Awesome. If you manipulate those variables correctly, you can get exactly that. Very little development of muscle size and a lot of development in strength. And this is why we continue to break world records in sports like powerlifting and weightlifting that have weight classes. So there's a top number that we can hit in terms of body size, but yet we continue to get stronger and faster. So this is very possible if you understand how to manipulate all those variables. So that being said, we can start off with, you wanted to go strength and strength.

Speaker A: Yeah, strength. And I love that you mentioned the fact that it is possible to increase strength without increasing muscle size, at least not dramatically, because I think it's not just weight class athletes. I know a lot of people who, um, for aesthetic reasons, they'd like to be stronger. They're hearing that having strong bones and strong muscles and tendons, it's great for longevity and for avoiding injury and so many other features of, of life. And, uh, and yet they don't want to fill out progressively larger and larger sizes of clothing.

Speaker B: Um, and we can go harder to the mechanisms on that piece if you want. We can save that and come back to it.

Speaker A: Sure. Uh, what I'd love to both, uh, what I'd love to know if we could define some of these modifiable variables in the context of strength. So let's say I was somebody who I come to you and I say, and let's just say for sake of balance here, because she actually does do some weight training, I bring my sister in and I say, me and my sister both want to get stronger. What modifiable variable should. How should we modify the variables?

Speaker B: Love it. All right, great. I'm going to do inception on you one more time, so one of my other laws. This won't be fast, I promise. Of strength and conditioning is, in general, the default is all joints through all range of motion. So this is important because it's going to answer your very first question on this strength category. So, in general, the ankle should go through the full range of motion. The ankle, the knee should go through the full range of motion. The knee, the hip, the elbow, etcetera.

Speaker A: Etcetera, right across the workout, not in a single movement. Well, right I would hope, unless there's an amazing exercise I haven't heard about.

Speaker B: Well, there are some exercises that we're going to call more full body. Think about a full snatch. Like, you're going to take a lot of your muscles, a lot of your joints, through a lot of the range of motions. Um, other ones, like in isolation, we call these single joint exercises. So imagine a bicep curl. You have one joint in that particular case, the elbow moving the shoulder and everything else is pretty much stable. And this is how we differentiate multi joint from single joint movements. Um, but, yeah, so across, I would even say it doesn't even have to be the day, but maybe throughout the week, try to get every joint through full range of motion. Now, a couple of quick caveats to that. I am not advocating using full range of motion and allowing really bad exercise technique. So when I say full range of motion, that's the default. That doesn't mean every single person can do that for every single exercise. It means that's where we should be striving to, and that's our starting point. You're going to see a lot less injury and a lot more productivity out of your training sessions. In fact, the science is fairly clear on this one. Strength development as well as hypertrophy is generally enhanced with a larger range of motion of training. And the mechanisms are like, somewhat understood on that. So that being said, if you have to get into, say, a bad position with your, say, low back, the spine is a very good one. In general, the spine should say it's very neutral, as we call it. So no, no flexion, no extension, especially in the lumbar region. So if you, if you're doing a, say, a deadlift, and in order to take your knee through a full range of motion or deadlift, you have to compromise your back position. That's no bueno. So, caveats there aside, don't kill me, like in good positions all, and don't.

Speaker A: Kill yourselves, more importantly.

Speaker B: So why that matters is if we walk through strength, the very first thing I'm going to go through is the exercise selection. So let's choose an exercise which ideally has a full range of motion or close to it that doesn't induce injury for you, that you can still maintain good neck and low back and position and everything else you feel comfortable with. So you can feel strong, but you don't feel like, oh my gosh, if you've never snatched before, having you do a snatch for a maximum, even, you know, 75%, like, it's a terrible idea. You're not going to feel confident. It's going to be a train wreck. I would rather put you on a machine bench press so you can go, I feel stable, I feel safe here, and I could just express my strength. So exercise choice in generally, in general, full range of motion, and you want to kind of balance between the movement areas. So this is an upper body press. So this is pushing away from you. Bench press, things like that. Upper body pull, pulling an implement towards you, bent row pull up. The pressing should be horizontal, so perpendicular to your body as well as vertical. So this is lifting a weight over top of your head, lifting away, away from you. The pole version is pulling horizontally to you and pulling vertically down, pull up, things like that from the lower body. We typically call these hinges. It's sort of a funny muscle thing that no one's going to laugh at, but, like, maybe me and you here is we'll categorize muscles as our movements, exercises as pushes and pulls, right? So, like, a squat is. Tends to be a push because you're pushing away the ground. A deadlift is a pull because you're pulling the implement up to you. But in reality, every single exercise is only ever a pull because muscle doesn't push things away. Muscle can only contract and pull on itself. And so, again, super nerdy thing that, like, most people are like, yeah, and everyone's like, that's so dumb.

Speaker A: No, but I think it's a really important point because it also speaks to something I think we'll get into later, which is that, you know, posterior chain anterior chain. And if that's mysterious to people, it'll become clear before long. Posterior chain anterior chain makes a lot of sense to me because of the way it's grounded in the firing of motor neurons, which is ultimately what controls muscle.

Speaker B: So it's also firing nerves all the time.

Speaker A: Exactly. So it also depends on the lens through which one looks at life and exercise. Of course, my lens is primarily neuroscience, but I realized that the importance, I like this idea of pushing perpendicular to the body overhead, pulling both toward the body and from overhead. That just makes really good intuitive sense, especially since a lot of people were just listening to this and not watching it. So in your minds, folks, you can think about pushing away like a punch or overhead, like lifting something overhead and then pulling toward your midline or toward your body, rather, and then pulling yourself up like a pull up in PE class for those.

Speaker B: So the lower body is the same thing, right? It's some sort of pushing away, like a squat or a split squat or a lunge or something like that. And there's some sort of, again, we'll call pull or hinge. So a deadlift or romanian deadlift or hamstring curl or something where you're contracting and calling, pulling the thing in. And you could split these into like a thousand different categories. If, if you're really in that field, you're going to want to add a bunch of other ones. But that's just like a rough conception. So if you're going to do a single workout, you could choose four exercises and you could choose one of each. One press upper body press, one upper body pull, one lower body hinge when lower body press. And that would be like a decently well rounded exercise. Um, that's your exercise selection. And if you're taking those through a full range of motion, you're in a pretty good spot, as close as you can. The next one is intensity. So if you want to develop strength. This comes back to one of my favorite scientists of all time, who happens to be a nerve guy, actually. And generally I like to shit on nerves as much as I possibly can because I'm a muscle guy. But I have to give Henneman some credit here. Right. And I know you know who that.

Speaker A: Is and size principle.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. Right. So this is a series of papers, I think, in the. I think it was in nature, at.

Speaker A: Least some of them.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. In 19, 54, 56. Or like something here. You can fact check me. I'm sure you will. But he basically outlined this idea that, okay, there's a certain recruitment threshold needed for neurons to fire. And we have muscle fibers in what we call fast touch muscle fibers and slow touch muscle fibers. And in general, you're going to activate the slow twitch ones first because they tend to be associated with low threshold motor neurons. It's not exactly that way, but it's close enough. Right. Well, the only way that you activate some of these higher threshold neurons is to demand the muscle to produce more force. And it's fairly specific to force. Right. It's not something you can do over an endurance thing. Right. Unless it gets really extreme and fatigue happens. Um, so in general, the only way to use these big chunks of your muscle, which are incredibly important for aging. By the way, one of the major problems we have with aging, developing or development of aging related issues with muscle is the fact that we lose fast switch fibers preferentially, and then we have major problems as we go down the line because we've lost a big chunk of our strength and size. So you want to make sure these fibers stay alive and intact. Okay. So if that being said, the only way to develop strength is then to challenge the muscle to produce more total force. If you are fairly untrained or new, I guess I should have stated this all at the beginning as well. One more inception, then I'll stop. When it comes to this level of detail of exercise prescription, a fairly untrained person is going to respond basically the same to every single thing you do. In fact, we've done this in the lab many times. We've done training studies doing things like 30 minutes of cycling and seeing huge increases in muscle strength and size, which is not a prescription for most people to increase size, but people that are really untrained, if you did plyometrics or strength training or endurance running, they all just get better at everything. So that caveat kind of aside, if you want to be more intentional and more specific to the goal of strength, you need to produce more force. Specificity matters. Right. So we have size principle to help understand this, and we have our laws of specificity, which say said principle. Right. Specific adaptation to imposed demand. So the adaptation you get or the result of your training is going to be a reflection of the demand that you imposed. So if you want to get stronger, you need to impose a demand of strength, not repetitions. So this has to be, the load has to be very high. In general, you're probably looking at above 85% of your one rep max. If you're moderately trained, maybe 75% will work. Lowly trained. Again, everything works, but in general, we want to be pressing a load that's very high. So because the intensity demand is so high, that is going to enforce you to do a low repetition range. You can't do twelve reps at 95%. Then it wouldn't be 95% of your one rep max. So by definition, true strength training is really going to be in, like five repetitions per set or less range. That's where most of it's going to occur with specificity. So we've covered choice, intensity and repetitions. Right. The total amount of sets that you do is really kind of up to your personal fitness level. Right. If you did as little as, like three sets per exercise, that's probably enough work sets. Totally, yeah, totally work sets. Right. So get fully warmed up and build up to that 85%. Don't just walk into the gym and throw 85% on and go, thank you. That's a, that's an important distinction. So work your way up. Do some like a very classic warm up thing would be like a set of ten at 50%, a set of eight at 60%, a set of maybe eight again at 70%, and then maybe like a set of five at 75%. So two or three or four sets, kind of building intensity and lowering the rep range. And then you would go after your two or three working sets also in terms of rest intervals. Now, because we're trying to, the primary driver of strength is intensity. It's not the volume. Right? It's the intensity. So in order to maintain that, we have to do a low repetition range. But in addition, we also have to have a high rest interval, because if we start to, we have any amount of fatigue incur and we have to then either reduce the reps or reduce the intensity. We've lost the primary driver, we've lost that main signal. So the number we're going to throw out typically is like two to four minutes. Um, so imagine you did, you know, you're set a bench press and you did five repetitions at 85%. You probably want to rest two to four minutes before coming back to the bench. That doesn't mean you have to sit there on your phone, like, please don't. Like. Everyone will thank you for not doing that. I promise. Um, you can engage other muscle groups. This is what we call super setting. So you're doing your bench press, and while that two minute clock is running for your chest to rest, you can go over and do your deadlifts. And so, you know, you can kind of move back and forth. And this is how you can make strength training. Not seven hour workout. If you're a professional athlete, you're going to take that time because you want to maximize the outcome. We've done this, actually in our lab, too. Supersets will reduce the strength gains, but by a tiny amount. And most of us don't care enough relative to. It's going to triple the length of your training session. It's not worth it. So for the average person, I will tell them, yeah, superset. For someone who's trying to break a world record in weightlifting or powerlifting, I don't superset.

Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah. I think I've found that I don't recover particularly well from strength and hypertrophy training. So, like, in the workout or the next day, from workout to workout, unless I keep the total duration of those workouts, I like to say no more than 60 minutes of work, of real work, maybe 75 past 75. I find that I just start to. I have to introduce additional rest days or I just get weaker over time. So I set a kind of a limit at 50 minutes, and then I usually violate that limit and end up doing 60 minutes. So I'm excited to hear that one can super set exercises as long as they work different muscle groups, of course. Um, so I wouldn't want to do like, bench press and overhead press, superset it, because you're gonna. We can eat. Uh, I think that goes without saying for most people, but just to point that out. But that I could, um, do some push, pull, push, pull without compromising total intensity that much. And I certainly would be willing to give up a little, a rep here or there or a. A few, um, pounds here or there. Um, and may I ask whether or not, um, in doing that, one gets any even tiny bit or more of additional benefit in terms of cardiovascular work? Because I imagine after even a one rep max, which I've never done, as I mentioned, but let's say I get three reps on the overhead press, and then I get, um, four reps on a weighted pull up, and I'm going back and forth. I'm no doubt going to be breathing harder than if I was sitting there texting away on my phone in between sets.

Speaker B: Yep, of course. Yeah. And so, in fact, in general, one of the things that I'll present in my class is a giant list of. In fact, on the top is all these different exercise adaptations I started the conversation with. And on the vertical column are as many of the physiological potential adaptations one would get. So changes in endogenous ph, blood pressure, lymphatic changes, bone density, all these things, right? And you just have this giant list, and then you can run a matrix and you can start to look at, okay, if I do speed training, am I going to see changes in the nervous system? Well, like, very much so. Right? That's the primary actual reason those things work. Very little change in the muscle system. It's almost exclusively explained by the central or peripheral nervous system. Right. On that same token, are you going to expect many cardiovascular adaptation from speed? And the answer is no, because although we didn't cover it, speed is very low intensity, very low rep range, very high. Rest well as you go to, like, strength and then you go to hypertrophy, you start seeing more and more increases in cardiovascular adaptations because you're doing exactly that, right? You're starting to reduce stress and you're starting to increase volume, but you're going to lose things like bone mineral adaptations because the load starts to go down. So you can look at this matrix and kind of understand if I'm a person who wants to kind of maximize the adaptations I get across my entire physiology for the least amount of work, you can choose these different adaptations to go after that are going to kind of land on these things, right? And exactly as you mentioned, if you're going to take five minutes rest between each rep, so let's say the extreme, you're going to do three sets of one repetition for strength at 95%, you're going to take probably five, maybe seven minutes between each attempt. You better not expect many changes in your resting blood pressure, that there's no cardiovascular strain there. You're going to put it together in a circuit where you're going to lose some potential strength adaptation, but you're going to gain something there. So all these things are, it's not about good or bad or right or wrong. It's always about what advantage do you want? What disadvantage do you want? And I can cut, like, really into the chase here on one of these things, because we'll get to this eventually. If you want to know the ones that are going to generally give you the most physiological adaptations across the most categories, you're almost always looking for hypertrophy type of training, and then this anaerobic conditioning piece that we'll get into, that's going to hit the most systems at once.

Speaker A: That's great to know. And we should definitely go a little bit deeper on those types of what the modifiable variables are for those categories, because I think that I'm guessing the vast majority of people want to be a bit stronger, maybe add some, a little bit of muscle or more, make sure their heart is healthy and etcetera. This is wonderful, and I think is clarifying, certainly a lot for me. So for strength, let's, I guess, training frequency.

Speaker B: Frequency.

Speaker A: What should determine training frequency? And I had the great benefit of a long time ago when I was in high school, actually, I paid for a session over the phone with Mike Mentzer. Be Mike Mentzer. We got to be friends. High intensity training. At the time, I was pretty young, and my mother kept saying, like, why is this, like, grown man calling the house? And we would talk all the time about training, but he tried to convince me to train once every five to seven days. Very few sets, very high intensity. And I must say it worked incredibly well. Sure it was. I think with my recovery quotient, which was not very good, I think has improved over time, but was not very good. It was remarkable. But, of course, this was a time when I was, you know, full of.

Speaker B: The most anabolic 14 I've ever heard.

Speaker A: On my own version of anabolics.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I was, you know, really heading. I had a long arc of puberty, and you were untrained, and I was mostly untrained. I've been running cross country and skateboarding and playing soccer, so.

Speaker B: And doing all the things that are, like the antithesis of growing muscle.

Speaker A: It was literally, and people will probably say impossible. It was something like 40 pounds of muscle inside of twelve months. It was crazy. I would believe that, you know, but. But I. And so then, of course, that stopped working over time. And then you start going down the odyssey of trying to find the thing that's going to work that well, and you eventually realize that it was because you were untrained. Right. So training frequency is crucial. Let's say that people are doing these whole body workouts, as you've described them, not alternating upper body, lower body, because there's so many different splits that we talked about. Doesn't make sense to go into splits right now. But how often can, can and should one train a muscle? And how do you know if a muscle is recovered locally? And how do you know if your nervous system is recovered systemically?

Speaker B: Okay, this is a bunch of really interesting questions. I'm not sure exactly what route you want to go, so I'll start here. As I mentioned earlier, soreness is not a good barometer of exercise quality because some types of training are going to induce more soreness and some are going to induce less. That's important to this conversation, because when you ask about how do you know if a muscle is ready to train again, one of the question is, what are you training for if you're training for hypertrophy, right. Muscle size, muscle growth. We need to hedge towards recovery, because what you're trying to do is cause a massive insult there, allow then protein synthesis to occur, building of new tissue, which takes time, 48 to 72 hours, like kind of. At a minimum, that process needs to occur. If you're doing actually more strength, and this is a differentiation between hypertrophy and strength, then you didn't induce actually much damage. In fact, you're generally not going to get very sore from true strength training. Very little, unless you get really heavy. You did a lot. The primary driver of hypertrophy is not the same primary driver of strength. We talked about that already. That's intensity driven for hypertrophy. It's not intensity. So because we have different mechanisms, we have different outcomes, even though they're closely aligned, strength is not going to cause a lot of soreness. Therefore intensity is the driver, therefore frequency can be as high as you want. So you can train every single day the same exact muscle. If speed or power or strength are the primary training training tools, because you need stimulus there. Skill is skill as well, right? Practice that. You know that as much as anybody. Developing a new motor pattern requires a lot of repetitions, right? You don't need a tremendous amount of rest. That's not, it's not a damage thing, right. It's a re patterning issue. So strength training, in fact, if you look at, again, true strength, professional athletes, they're going to train the same muscles basically every day. Wow. They're going to squat every day.

Speaker A: And is that because the primary mode of adaptation is recruitment of these high threshold motor units. So it's mainly neural.

Speaker B: So everyone's gonna say that. And this is where I get all feisty.

Speaker A: Well, I'm not saying that that was actually, there was a question mark there.

Speaker B: Okay. Okay.

Speaker A: If we were online putting comments, there'd be a question mark.

Speaker B: We would have fought. I would have blocked you. I'll just kidding. I think you already blocked probably twice. Okay. The early adaptations to exercise, especially strength training, are hedged towards the nervous system. No question about it. People always say central nervous system, but it's probably more peripheral. Whatever. Semantics probably, but pedantic. It's nervous. If you train today, tomorrow morning, you're not going to wake up with a actually increase in contractile proteins in muscle. Your muscle might be a little bit bigger due to some acute swelling, but you could have been pretty acute. That persists change in the nervous system, we'll call it. That allows you to be stronger, like within a couple of days. Sustained hypertrophy is probably more along the lines of four weeks where we can see that, right. We can actually see changes like in the ultrasound. Now you're making changes immediately. That protein synthesis process is happening like very fast and it's going to last. It just takes us time to measure it in terms of a noticeable change in your whole muscle size. So that being said, the first four weeks, we typically say, are primarily nervous system. After that, now we're starting to see most of the changes coming from the muscle side of the equation. So with strength development, it's a combination of three areas. In fact, all muscle contraction has these same three things. It starts off with some signal, right, from somewhere in the body, whether it's all the way up the top or at the level of the spine, depending on if this is a reaction or an actual conscious control from there that some signal has to tell the muscle to contract. Signal is one. Two, it's muscular contraction. And there's a lot of variables inside the muscle tissue itself that determine its functionality. And so if we took an individual biopsy and took a muscle fiber from you and took one from me, and we took those muscles out and put them in a petri dish, and I tied one end to a force transducer, the other end to a thing that pulls it, and we soaked it in a bath of calcium and a bunch of other stuff. Even if they were the same size, your fibers might contract a lot faster than mine, even relative to size or not, or slower, or there's various properties. So the intrinsic fibers themselves determine a lot of functionality from there. Muscle fibers don't cause movements. Muscle fibers simply contract. They're all surrounded with connective tissue. And that's all surrounded with a bunch of more connective tissue that all surrounds into a muscle. That muscle is then surrounded with more connective tissue that all comes together into a giant tendon, that tendon attaches to the bone. It's the pulling on those tendon that actually move the bone that cause human movement. So that's area three, area one, the nervous system. Area two, the muscle contraction area three, some sort of connective tissue thing changes happen at all three of those levels. And we're not even now talking even you entered the discussion of biomechanics, and you changed, say, the pennation angle of the muscle, which is the angle at which the muscle fibers lay relative to the bone, right? So this is basic mechanics. Is it pulling perpendicular to the bone? Is it pulling horizontal to the bone or some sort of angle? All of these things determine human performance. So when you're talking about, again, that strength development, you can see tremendous improvements in total force production by manipulating all of those areas. And you have not touched changes in muscle size. If you change muscle size in a true sustained fashion, whether this is sarcoplasmic or contractile proteins, you have given yourself more opportunity to produce more force. It doesn't guarantee you produce more force. Bodybuilders are not stronger than power lifters, even though they have more muscle. But bodybuilders are probably stronger than most people. So there is a relationship between muscle size and strength. It's not a one to one guaranteed ratio. And that's generally because although the muscle has been aided, they may have not changed the biomechanical considerations. They may have not changed the connective tissue nor the nervous system stuff. And so that's why we see this giant relationship. That r value is pretty high between strength and hypertrophy. But if you really want to get to the ends of it, it's not. And that matters to your actual question ten minutes ago, because again, you can train strength daily on the same muscle. But if you want to allow for that process of connect contractile proteins to add and grow, then you're going to have to allow some recovery, because if you go back into that muscle too soon, you're going to blunt the response, you're going to stop it, you're going to cut it off. You have all kinds of problems going on in the cell that are going to, um, just attenuate that, that growth response. So I gave you the answer for strength training. The answer for hypertrophy is probably less than three out of ten. On level of soreness, you can go again. In general, you're probably looking at 72 hours is the optimal window. So if you trained your, your shoulders on Monday, you probably wouldn't want to train them again on Tuesday. If hypertrophy is the goal, maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday is best. So something like an every two to three day window is probably. And we know a little bit more now about why that is. The gene cascade, the signaling response happens. Well, the signaling happens instantaneously, right? Within seconds. The gene cascade is probably peaked in the four hour window, like depending on which gene you want to look at. But it's just kind of a snapshot. But the protein synthesis process is 24 to 48 hours thing, and so it tends to kind of look like let that thing finish and let that signal go back to baseline and then hit it again. And then hit it again. And now as long as you're providing the nutrients, the recovery should happen and you should be able to sustain the same work output in the training session. So the stimulus stays high and the recovery is there and you can now continue to grow muscle.

Speaker A: You mentioned 48 to 72 hours for hypertrophy. What if, for whatever reasons, the training split, lifestyle factors, et cetera, somebody say, let's use your example, trains shoulders on Monday. Ideally they would train them again on Thursday in their particular instance, somewhere Wednesday or Thursday, but they don't have wait until Saturday or Sunday for whatever reason. Maybe it's more compatible with their work, work and other exercise schedule. Whatever the reason, are they actually losing hypertrophy that they gained or they've missed a window to induce further hypertrophy?

Speaker B: It's probably better to think about it than the latter. It's not that you've lost. It's just, you've just kind of lost an opportunity to make more progress. I will save you a little bit and kind of going back to your HIIT program. This is the original high intensity training, the menstrual thing, right?

Speaker A: Which is not the hit with one eye, not the high intensity interval training, but high intensity training, like one set to absolute failure, maybe two for each muscle group.

Speaker B: 20 minutes workouts, dividing your body into.

Speaker A: Three, into a three way split, and then literally training, smashing six times a month, which most people think that is absolutely crazy. There's no way that's going to work. And I can tell you it does. If you are untrained, you, you grow like a weed just if you train.

Speaker B: Hard enough, even if you're trained. Look at the people who Mike trained. He put a lot of bodybuilders on really high levels. Now, they had the same similar help you had at that time frame.

Speaker A: Wait, to be very clear, I was not taking exogenous handle box.

Speaker B: In fact, your endogenous was just as good.

Speaker A: I probably was. I wasn't measuring my levels there, but I probably would. I grew easy. And in general, I tend to grow pretty easily, um, from weight training. But the. But, and I should say that, to Mike's credit, and I think this is an important message, that he was the one who really said, look, unless you're going to make a professional career out of it, do not run the health hazards of exogenous hormones. You know, it's certainly not at your age. So he deterred me from that, which was great, because it never entered my mind. It just was one of those things where Mike Mentzer said, don't do it. And he had clearly done it. Right. And so he's speaking from an informed place. It never entered my mind. But also, I was, what was really wild is I was continuing to run cross country. And so there was a trade off there at some point. But when you're young, you can get, many people can get away with what, at this age, would surely place me into a state of overtraining, even at low volume. We'll see.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, like, the whole field on interference effect has changed quite a bit recently, which we could come back to if you want, but just to finish out the, the idea here with that last question, if you want to take five days or six days in between each muscle group, you can do that. In fact, if you look at the research, it's going to show that frequency is not that important. Well, it's not that it's unimportant, but it can handle changes as long as you get to the same total volume. So you can do that. You just have to do a lot more work in that one workout. If you care about the six week, eight week thing, if you're like, I'm in this for the next 60 years, it's probably okay, right? But it can be there that the challenge with splitting up your training sessions for hypertrophy into smaller numbers, like once or twice a week, it's just difficult to get that number. It's typical to get that volume done volume wise. The more recent meta analyses are going to say that you're probably looking at around ten working sets per muscle group per week seems to be kind of the minimum threshold that you're going to want to hit. So if you did three sets of ten at your shoulders on Monday, three sets of ten shoulders Wednesday and three on Friday, that's nine working sets. If you wanted to do three different shoulder work exercises on Monday and hit your nine sets, it's not really actually going to be that much different. The problem is ten is kind of the minimum. You probably want to look for more like 15 to 20. And in fact, well trained folks, 2025, that becomes very challenging in one workout. In fact, defuncto, you're not going to be able to do it, right. And so that is where it's not the frequency that looks like it kills you, it's just the fact you have got to get. Because the total driver of strength is intensity, but the total driver of hypertrophy is volume. Assume you're taking it to fatigue, right, or muscular failure. So it's just tough to get enough done if you can. Um, and if you want to set your schedule up that way, like you probably remember, if you do those types of training sessions where you're just going to completely exhaust a muscle, it's going to be tight, it's going to be sore for a while, you're, you're, you're probably not going to come back. And that's sort of the logic behind that was, let's take this thing to tremendous failure and give it six days to recover. Um, it can work. It's just not the best, I think, is one way to think about it.

Speaker A: For most people, it's also hard to do those workouts without a training partner, if you really want to do them.

Speaker B: Correctly, and stimulants and headphones and all kinds of other things.

Speaker A: Well, anyway, yeah, stimulants are not. I don't, certainly don't recommend those. Maybe a cup of coffee or two, if that's your thing, and maybe some of the safer supplements, but certainly not the sorts of stimulants that the guys in the seventies and eighties were still using or still use. Um, you talked about repetition ranges broadly for strength training, so five or less.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: You said frequency could be as often as every day.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Rest two to four minutes, maybe even longer if you're going for one repetition maximum for hypertrophy.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: What are the repetition ranges that are effective and what are the ones that are most effective if one is trying to maximize some of the other variables? Like people don't want to spend more than an hour to 75 minutes in the gym, because I think that while the rep ranges might be quite broad, as you alluded to earlier, there are the practical constraints.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So what repetition ranges, or percent of one repetition maximum, should people consider when thinking about hypertrophy?

Speaker B: Right. The quick answer there is anywhere between like five to 30 reps per set. That's going to show across the literature pretty much equal hypertrophy gains. And we could have a really interesting discussion about why that is. But, but I'm just remembering one thing from a second ago. I want to give a better answer for the frequency. You can do every single week for strength or every single day for strength if you want, though. Like, what's probably minimally viable? Two, twice per week per muscle. So hamstrings strength twice per week. That's a good number to get most people really strong. You can do every single day. You don't need to, though. So I want to make sure that, like, I wasn't saying you have to train a muscle 85% every single day to get it strong. Two was a good number, three is great, but probably even two is really effective.

Speaker A: Got it. This explains the high frequency of training for strength athletes. That's always mystified me. And the very long workouts make sense because very long, they're going to even.

Speaker B: Train twice a day, even though they'll squat in the morning, squat in the afternoon, every day.

Speaker A: With their eating and they're sleeping, they probably don't have time for anything else.

Speaker B: That's why they're pros. So that's a job, right? That's what they do. So, yeah, your hypertrophy strength training programming is somewhat complicated because of. That's not the danger, but you're going to have to pay one way or the other. Right. The risk is a little bit higher because the load's higher and you have to be a little bit more technically proficient when it comes to hypertrophy training. The way I like to explain it is it's kind of idiot proof. The programming is idiot proof. The work is hard, though. So here's your range. Anywhere between, you know, five reps and 30. Can you hit somewhere in there? Perfect. It's all equally effective. You can't screw that up. The only caveat for hypertrophy is you have to take it to muscular failure.

Speaker A: And you need enough rest for the adaptation and protein synthesis to occur.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And if you recover faster, you can maybe do it more frequently, and if you don't, maybe less frequently.

Speaker A: By that logic, should people perhaps experiment and figure out what repetition range allows them to recover in concert with the training frequency that they can do consistently?

Speaker B: My recommendation is I think you should actually set your. Use the repetition range as a way to have some variation, because most people don't want to go in the gym and do three sets of ten. They're going to get very bored very quickly. And so I think you should actually intentionally change the rep schemes for simple sake of having more fun. It is a very different challenge. The mechanisms that are inducing hypertrophy are different, but there's only a maximum amount of growth that one can get. Right, and so you have, as best we think it now, and some people actually will espouse that. We know really clearly about the mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy. We don't. It's still very much a guessing game, but the three most likely drivers are one, metabolic stress, two, mechanical tension, and then three, muscular damage. You don't have to have all three. One is sufficient. You can have a little bit of one or two, and you can kind of. So you get it to play here. We've already talked about the muscular damage. Again, it's very clear more damage is not better, but it is somewhat a decent proxy. Right? Like, again, a little bit of soreness is good, just don't get so sore. It's compromising your total volume. All right. Mechanical tension is kind of like strength, and this is why if you do even sets of five or eight and you're kind of close to that strength range, you will gain a little bit of muscle. It's not optimal muscle gain, but you're going to gain some, because everything in these, like, physiology isn't cut off at four reps, and then five reps is a different thing. Right. It's always a blend. So think of it as like a fading curve. As you get closer to the end, it fades. Less effective as you get closer to the middle, it's more effective anywhere between eight reps per set to 30, it's equally effective. Past 30, it's going to blend out. Past eight, to five, to four, to three, it's going to blend, you know, lesser there. So metabolic stress is one that damages the other, or, sorry, mechanical tension is the one that's heavy. Muscle damage is the other one. The third one is metabolic stress. And this is, again, a bit of an area of scientific contention. But something's there. I know something's there. We just. We're just kind of fumbling to figure out what exactly it is. And this is metabolic stress is the burn, right? It's there. It's why blood flow restriction training probably works. That's done very light, so no mechanical tension. There's very little damage, but somehow it induces a good amount of hypertrophy.

Speaker A: Very painful.

Speaker B: Oh, boy.

Speaker A: I tried this. I have a friend, former special operator, who lives out on the east coast, and took me through a blood flow restriction training protocol in a park. And I don't think I actually cried. You probably did, but I might have cried out once or twice. It was unbelievable, especially the lower body movements. Um, now, it was a humid day. I'll claim a little bit of jet lag, but it was brutal. It was really brutal. And I do it on the best.

Speaker B: Day of your life, and it's still brutal.

Speaker A: Okay, well, that makes me feel a little bit better. It was intense, and, um. And. And people should know that it is important to use the proper cuffs for these things. I don't have any, uh, relationship to any of the companies that sell these cuffs, but the reason is that you actually need to block particular avenues of blood flow. You can't simply cinch off a muscle. You can't tourniquet a muscle and train.

Speaker B: Not a good.

Speaker A: Actually kill yourself that way.

Speaker B: Yeah. You can get a blood clot.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so if you're interested in blood flow restriction training, I imagine you have some content about this or will at some point, but also there are resources online that people can look up. A question about hypertrophy training that I think many people are wondering about. Train to failure or don't train to failure? Assuming good form.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. Assuming good form, great. The answer is both. So you want to train to failure, but you don't need to go to extreme failure. So you don't need to necessarily go to that. Like, a partner has to lift the barbell off my chest, but you have to get close, you have to drive. Either heavy stress damage right. Or pump. And so a really easy, practical way to think about this. I heard Mike Israel, who runs a company called Renaissance periodization years ago, outlined this at a NSCA talk, and it was beautiful. And I thought this is the most eloquent way to explain the context about training hypertrophy. So I want you to look for three things in your workout, and let's say that you have a particular muscle to grow. Let's say you want your glutes to get larger. Okay. When you're doing your glute exercises, number one, are you feeling the glute contract? Okay. It doesn't have to be there, but that's a good sign if it is. Okay, let's say I didn't really feel my glute contract. I felt it more in my quads or my back. Okay. Did you feel a big pump afterwards? No, I didn't really feel a pump there eitherwards or during. Okay, great. Number three, next day, did you feel a little bit of soreness there at all? No, I didn't. Well, that's a very good indication. You didn't feel it during the workout. You felt no sort of pump, and it didn't get sore. Don't expect much growth.

Speaker A: You distributed the work across a bunch of muscle groups.

Speaker B: Most likely, other muscle groups were too involved. Right. Especially if you're like, no, but, man, my back got really sore. Well, that's a really good indication of telling you what the hell was moving. And so, in terms of targets, if you were to put, again, a one to, you know, ten scale, how much should I feel it burning during anything less than a three. Okay. It's probably not doing much, right? But it doesn't like, seven is not. A ten is not better than seven. You need to feel it. But it doesn't have to be like, oh, my gosh, I'm dying here. Soreness. Same barometer, right? So if you can get, like, three, three and three, you're probably in a pretty good spot. Five. Five and five is maybe better, but you don't need to go much past that. So I want you to feel the muscle group either working or if you're like, I didn't feel it much. I didn't really get a pump, but the next day it got really sore. Well, then you're still, you know, you're on a good path again. Really sore as in, like, who? A little tender, but next day it's okay. Day after that, I could. I could train, no problem. That's really what you want to go after? And in terms of understanding, is this likely to produce some growth or not?

Speaker A: Excellent. Excellent. Very clear parameters and recommendations I know are benefiting me and will benefit a lot of people if you'd be willing to throw out a few sort of sets and rep parameters that could act as broad guidelines for people who want to explore further. I realize that with all these modifiable variables that there's no one size fits all four strength. I love this. Five to 30 for hypertrophy. That's the thing. I don't think I've ever done a 30 rep set of anything. But. But now that you've thrown that out there, I see it as a bit of a challenge.

Speaker B: You want to know awesome. About 30, you're going to get an insane pump. You're going to burn like crazy, but you won't get super sore because the mechanical tension is so low, it's so light. So you, you can, you can get away with those things and you, it's hard because your mind is going to wander. You're going to get it, like rep 20 and you're like, I'm done. And you're like, no, there's, there's a lot left here to get 30 where, like, a set of ten is much easier. Like, you're just like, okay, two more. Two more set of 30 is like, I got 16 more. It's awful. But you just.

Speaker A: The counting is worth.

Speaker B: It's terrible, right? And people tend to just kind of like, check out. So 30 is possible, but a little bit extreme. Extreme. But I would recommend them, all of them. Like, it's a really fun play. You can do different in the same workout too, by the way. Like, you could do one set of ten push ups and then take a little break and then do a set of 25. You can mix and match these things. There's no magic recipe that has to happen for all those. Or do it different. So Mondays are my sets of ten days, Wednesdays are my set of 20 days, and Fridays are my set of 30 days. And you can have all kinds of fun there and it's hard to screw up.