239 ‒ The science of strength, muscle, and training for longevity | Andy Galpin, Ph.D. (PART I)

hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast I'm your host Peter attia well Andy uh you know it's wonderful to see you uh here on video we were supposed to do this in person but we got a good laugh as to why that didn't pan out but that's okay uh perhaps there will be an in-person chance the next time yeah yeah I'm excited to be here this way it would have been more enjoyable in person but we'll make it work you know I've wanted to speak with you for for quite a while and and I think listeners to this podcast are not uh not strangers to the idea of how much of an emphasis I place on exercise I've said it many times before I'll continue to reiterate it until the data suggests otherwise that there's really no more potent tool to improve uh longevity meaning extending the length of life and improving the quality of life and exercise and that includes nutrition and that includes sleep and that includes the entire entire pharmacopoeia of medication supplements drugs hormones Etc so it's probably for that reason that I would say that exercise makes up a disproportionate amount of the content on our podcast and of course within exercise I tend to divide it really down into these different pillars of of strength stability uh and cardiorespiratory Fitness which of course then gets further subdivided by the by the metabolic State and energy state of it of course what we're going to probably talk a lot about today is is strength but also all of the things that kind of stem from that like hypertrophy and uh and and various things like that which I think are of huge interest to people but maybe for folks who don't know you can you give us a sense of your path uh even you know frankly out of high school college like you know what was your athletic background and what what made this be something that you have you know kind of dedicated all of your time to sure I I guess initially I need to State a conflict of interest which is I'm an actual scientist so if you want to start giving more credit to exercise for longevity and wellness like I cannot be a little more biased into that lane um especially but then actually assign strength training so I've been waiting for 30 years for this to happen in the field so now I get to prove that all my preconceived notions are actually holding true and I will refuse to change despite what you said I will refuse to change despite what the data suggests um no for really I grew up in a very small town in Southwest Washington uh so I played everything in high school uh football basketball baseball track and field the whole thing um I went to a small school in Oregon where I played college football and got my undergraduate degree in exercise science and then after that I made some stops in Arizona and worked in a facility training professional athletes I went back and got my master's degree in human movement Sciences which is just another fancy way of saying Kinesiology or exercise science and then got my PhD in human bioenergetics so in 2011 I got that came out um here to California and I've been working at Cal State Fullerton ever since so I've been for a while now the director for the center for sport performance there as well as my lab which is about chemistry and molecular exercise physiology lab so that's the the commence version of the academic path um now I think a more important to your question was college football and then training professional athletes started at that point as well and then I started competing in weightlifting which locally is Olympic weightlifting that version of it and then Combat Sports a lot after that so I've continued to work with athletes the entire time still over the last 10 years you know running my labs running our research I've worked with professional athletes um and just about every sport with the exception of racing I have yet to get into formula one but uh Cy Young winners MVPs all Pros you know the whole the whole thing Olympic gold medalists Etc so my my research actually and my interests really come back from the exact same point and if someone returned to the very beginning here which was I was a decent athlete but I actually feel like I was in the perfect spot because I wasn't so good that these details didn't matter I was going to be in all pro was going to you know go to the next level no matter what that wasn't the case so when I did things better it was more effective with training more effective recovery it mattered I saw differences on the field right it was the difference between me being a starter and being not a starter or whatever the case is I also was good enough to know where I got rewarded so if you're not good enough then it's just like doesn't matter what you do you're not gonna play at the next level so I was in that perfect scenario and so I was totally obsessed with making sure I gave myself every Advantage possible to have some success I knew I was never going to be you know professional level caliber or even division one but I was like the difference is do you want to play college football or not that's going to be the difference so if you can do these things you might be able to do it if not you're going to have no chance and where I'm from people don't don't really go to college in general and they certainly don't play college sports um there's no Advanced degrees so to me I was like wow you got a chance to do something really special here and do something that no one else you really know has done that often so that's that initial passion came from uh Additionally the the town I grew up with my parents and everybody I knew it is a very working class place so losing was always fine there was always better than you but losing because you didn't prepare was totally unacceptable um we all most of the kids I grew up with we worked on farms where we cleaned stalls we did something before school you know my parents worked in construction like building so that whole idea of like you fend for yourself and you get what you earn and all that sort of stuff was just something I grew up with and so moving that into sports Academia was like if you want a chance like this on you and nobody else and so do the work or don't do the work so that's what all pushed me to get here and then as I'll finish up the background is then when I started moving past my athletic career and I started started finding athletes who wanted to pursue these tremendous goals like go to the Olympics but in a sport like women's wrestling like No One's Gonna help them they don't have funds and so I just became very interested in these people because I'm like man I can help you a lot no one else cares about you there's no money on the back end here there's no Fame there's no social media at the time I just want to get help you here in this journey because that's something that's going to reach my soul of let's give everything we can have to do something really special that no one's going to care about besides you and I and like your team and your family and so that's what drove it initially and that's what really put me in this position and that's what put me in the position to continue to go get my masters to get my PhD was you got to learn more there's more things going on here you've got to find all the answers you know that you can and if you're doing anything less than that what are you doing uh you're just giving up so that's that's the background of sort of how I got here and and what I do now you mentioned briefly um uh Olympic lifting uh we've had Lane Norton on the podcast several times Lane obviously is a very successful power lifter I think folks are kind of familiar with powerlifting having the three lifts and it's really about um you know these three lifts and what your total is in those three lifts can you contrast that a little bit with what Olympic lifting is and I think more importantly what are what are the physiologic differences between those two and and I'll preface the question for The Listener by saying again even if you never plan to powerlift or Olympic lift this is going to be germane to our discussion yeah so this is very uh we there's actually a uh fairly recently we published the most in-depth analysis of muscle composition of Olympic weightlifters so we can actually come back to that we can talk more specifically about muscle composition but in general as some background if you think about power lifting It's tricky because we're about to run some loops on your brain here so technically you have Force production which is in the case of lifting it is one rep max so it's the most amount of weight you can lift one time period not repetitions on how many times you can do an auto fast you can do it just what can you get up and the sport of powerlifting like what Lane does it is three exercises you have the deadlifts bench The Squat and is how much weight can you lift one time you get a couple of tries at it but it's that's effective what it is right so it's really an expression of pure strength it's not really an expression of power at all because the speed component is very poor in fact the deadlift can take as long as you want it doesn't matter did you get it up or did you not squat Etc so we're already at the gates which confuse people because the name of the sport is called powerlifting despite the fact it is not a power exercise nor is it determined by power when you move over to Olympic weight I think it's the same basic idea there are now two lifts instead of three one left being called the snatch another one's called the clean and jerk it's called the clean and jerk because it has two parts you clean it to your chest and then you jerk it over your head but it's still considered one lift the name of the game is still one rep max so whoever can lift the most amount one time is the winner man there's no repetition method to it the difference is though this is now more expression of power because although it's all about one or at Max it's difficult to lift something over your head as high as possible slowly so there's a speed component required to the movements to perform whether it's a clean or the snatch and so it is an expression of tremendous strength but there's a force or a velocity component to it so when you multiply force by velocity now you've got power and so technically the weight lifters Olympic weightlifters are significantly more powerful than a power lifter despite the fact the power lifter resistorical power lifting so the confusion there is and this gets worse when we start roping in things like strong map so strong man is fantastic because again you see strength and you think that must be the biggest expression of strength or in fact it's not because strong man is contested over multiple repetitions so it is an expression of very very high strength repeated several times very very high strength but it's not technically a true one rep max that actually goes to the back of the power lifters so now you've already confused power lifting weightlifting and strong man and none of those three things are actually explaining what they do correctly we can keep going on with multiple Sports here but this is this is the Gen the the core of the problem the reason you're I think you're bringing this up is this also explains training adaptations this exactly it's a perfect way to outline to understand what's happening so if you train like a power lifter that's probably represents the best way to get truly strong if you train like a weightlifter it represents the best way to get powerful if you train like a strong man it represents a fantastic way to get very very strong and more what we'll say life functional movements so walking carrying lifting objects and doing it probably multiple times so the only difference between all those three in the last part I'll add two is with the Olympic weightlifting the amount of coordination required because you're going to take away from the ground throw it over your head and catch it over your head in a full squat so when it comes to things like balance and proprioception and eccentric catching it is uh the advantage goes to weightlifters you know big time there you're not going to see that powerlifting is very controlled it's a very specific foot position hand position there's no movement ideally and it's very um it's typically your minimizing range of motion intentionally because you want to minimize work right so working force times distance and if the game of the game is who can create the most Force you can minimize the distance you're going to win that's why they take those funny positions that's why Lane has both of his feet six miles apart and and does it he calls it a deadlift even though it's a fake movement just kidding and Lane and I go back many many years so um he would laugh at that joke I promise so that's the basic Foundation of of the difference here you have a very sport specific application for powerlifting weightlifting is very sport specific but it's a much greater range of motion has those other components and strong man is is kind of I love that you brought that in um before I go into my next question let's put one more little bow on that we've talked a lot about who's the strongest who's the most powerful who has the most functional strength uh you want to throw in a little bit on hypertrophy within the that Trio yeah great so you can actually add a couple more scenarios here hypertrophy would be more of your bodybuilding which lane is also done Holly I think you just had holy on right so Holly can smash with physique whether you want to call it bodybuilding or general physique or any stuff is simply improving um generally leanness and total muscle mass and then there's a component of symmetry and shape things like that that don't really matter for this conversation so if you add that on top of it now you're talking about hoop and optimized muscle size as well as lameness which is really really important with no consideration for function doesn't matter if you're strong or fast or athletic or any of those things it's their effect this is so interesting to see that you started the conversation like this because this is day one of my strength conditioning courses the academic semester I spend the first week actually just on going over these different categories of sport because it does exactly like what you're setting up here's it outlines exactly how to train and the last two pieces just to throw this in there would be actually if you think about the competitive circuit training sports like CrossFit for example totally no offense I'm just meeting it as a sense of they are very strong they have a lot of muscle but they're not nearly as strong as power lifters you know like as a general statement they're not nearly as strong as world's strongest men but they do a lot more repetitions and so a World's Strongest Man is going to win an event doing something like 5 to 15 repetitions like something you know kind of depending and Crossfit you might have to do 90 reps in a given workout like way more and so it's way higher up that scale of number of repetitions they do some of course that are one repetition but you get the point it's just like a very crude explanation of what's Happening a lot of function a lot of different movements and a lot of workouts repeated in the same day and so it's a very different test of recovery over three or four days of just brutal onso um and asked to do things in a lot of different areas and a lot of different Energy Systems and movement patterns and things like that so it's a really interesting test of of Total Physical Fitness and the last one that I like to throw in there is either it's basically track and field and now you have the truest expression of velocity these are the people who are going to be the best at getting you truly fast and so if you think about this now what do you need to have as a functional human being for lifespan and Longevity or sport and if you want to think about this in a spectrum how do I get absolutely fastest how do I get the most powerful how do I get strong how do I add muscle size slash lose body fat how do I improve my muscular endurance and now how do I improve my cardiovascular and metabolic endurance this is now occupied in all of those Sports and so we can just look at them as a model for training and saying the best in the world at getting stronger have been doing this the best in the world of getting faster Peak speed the best in the world um at getting able to recover multiple days in a row okay we have so we have different models of that so that is a nice foundation for all training really yeah I love it and and there's a matrix Brewing right now in my head as you go through that so we're gonna come and kind of start to fill in some of this Matrix as we go um let's um simultaneously go back to the fundamentals but do so with um without any remorse for how rigorous we need to be that's the greatest so let's talk about muscles what is a muscle what is the functional unit how does it generate Force what are the metabolic demands what makes these cells that are so ubiquitous in our body different from say the cells in our liver the cells in our gut the cells in our brain you know what what are these what are these cells that we almost take for granted sometimes all right now you're asking me to do like a two semester course I did ask you to do a week in seven minutes so by that logic we could be here a while but yeah let's see what we can do yeah all right hopefully you're ready for part two three four and five of this uh podcast um I'll give you what I can give you and then we'll come back let's think about it this way um number one I like to play a little trick you ever ask people are kind of like that Jeopardy question of what's the biggest organ in your body and people generally are going to say scan yeah exactly that's what I would have said actually yeah right well us again exercise scientists and if I didn't give you enough of a bias earlier about being an exercise scientist I'm also most a physiologist so I'm going to give all the credit in the world the muscle and none of it to anything else so so basically the brain the heart the liver the lungs but they're just there to support the muscles 100 and if you start talking my worst enemy the nervous system I'm probably going to hit and record and go home those neuroscientists just take credit for everything it's garbage hot garbage right give it all the muscle um so you've heard my biases if you want to stop listening now you can if not understand that that's where we're going here and so in general if you think about it this way against muscle is is going to be the largest organ in your body and you've talked about this a number of times on your show but it's doing everything from supporting function and so Locomotion getting you throughout the world to being your biggest reserve for amino acids what you need for building any cell any functional cell in your body your brain your liver your immune system all that has to come from somewhere to regulating glucose being your biggest dump in reserve for regulating metabolism controlling function I could go sort of on and on and on about the the physiological the Practical the general health benefits of of skeletal muscle and don't be bashful this is a good time to to say those things and to expand on them because I've said everything you've said but I think there's more to it and I think one of the things you've said I don't think probably is as appreciated which is the storage Depot for amino acids um because we don't really think of it that way right we we sort of you know and Lane did a great job talking about this in the podcast which is we're constantly breaking down and constantly adding new so there's this pool of turning over amino acids and it's very difficult to study them from a flux perspective but clearly some of those things getting spun off in the mo you know if you're working out it's at least a plausible scenario that amino acids are being broken down I mean proteins are being broken down amino acids being released they may not be re-synthesized right back into that same piece of skeletal muscle they may be used for another application well it's not even a May it's like yeah it's a pretty much guarantee like that that's going to happen um if you kind of think about it this way if uh so I'll give a quick energetic analogy here so the I have like a Cheesy video I did 10 years ago or a sat in my backyard and shot this and put it on YouTube so we'll we'll link to it if you uh yeah you'll send it to us and we'll link to it in the show notes yeah yeah yeah okay that's we'll find out somewhere buried eight year ago YouTube land or something um so if you think about the very basics of energy if you're going to be out yeah camping um you're an Outdoorsman right yeah 800 yeah you and I okay great so if you're on if you're out hunting which I'm actually even a couple days from my hunting trip so this is front of mine is why this analogy comes up um and you want to you know you may need to create a fire you have a handful of of options and the very first one being if you had a match right A match is very easy to light and if anyone likes a match on fire it's going to give you instantaneous energy the fire and it's going to last some amount of seconds before it burns out I don't know what those seconds are five seconds ten well doesn't matter some some short amount of seconds worst case scenario you need energy great um the downside is you have limited supply of them they're kind of finicky and you better hope they don't get wet and they're just not reliable that best case if none of that happens you're still going to get some amount of seconds um if you need that energy right now though that's where you start in terms of your tissue that's going to be ATP that's going to be your phospho creatine Energy System so the Stoichiometry is one to one there you break down one phosphoryl creatine you're getting one mole of ATP out of that um that's great that's stored internally in your muscle so that's already right there in fact it's generally loaded right up on the myosin head um or close to it and so it can contract tissue we can come back to what all that stuff means well yeah we'll we'll talk about actin myosin in a minute because I want people to actually know what this physically looks like but let's go back to the end great so that's your little energy boost system now if you had a little bit more um forward thinking you would say okay let me use that map to then actually just light a newspaper if you had newspaper or something like that and if you're in the woods papers same thing you get fairly quick light not as fast as a match and it would give you some few minutes of energy it doesn't matter what these members are it's just conceptual stuff here and that's great that's going to be carbohydrate right so carbohydrate is stored both in the cell as well as outside the cell in three major areas but in in the cell it's going to give you a lot more energy that is the most direct fast Stoichiometry is a little bit better but not much actually and so you're going to get a couple of moles of ATP per molecule of carbohydrate and that's not it's better but it's like you're sort of splitting hairs here a little bit if that gets low you can now pull glucose out of the blood and for a little bit of terminology here glycogen in the tissue is what it's called Uh glycogen in the liver that's what it's called if we put that in the blood that's called glucose blood sugar roughly talking the same things here so we can pull that out of the blood and then we can actually if that gets low we can pull that out of the liver so that's the basic like energy pathway and the liver then functions as kind of your backup storage system for glucose to make sure that you can regulate blood glucose while you're changing concentrations of glycogen in tissue that's really what it's doing because you don't want obviously as you've talked about a million times a bunch of instability and blood glucose that's a bad thing it's one of the four things that your body will regulate almost over almost anything else in addition to pH and blood pressure Etc right and electrolyte concentrations like they don't like to mess with those things at all so everything else will move around those things to keep those stable all right so if we're in the tissue now and we've got past our newspaper the next thing it would be a giant piece of wood so if you had firewood or something like that lighting firewood in the wild is very difficult to do it doesn't happen in seconds you need to kind of know what you're doing but it's going to give you exponentially more fire length and you could put a log on a fire and that could literally be on going the next morning when you wake up to give you hours think about that as fat now I like this whole analogy is if you know a little bit about the chemistry of fat versus carbohydrate they're both big long chains of carbon just like a paper is actually made of wood it is sort of just a separate piece of the same thing so you get a small six carbon chain from glucose you can get any number of lengths of chains of of fat right the 18 carbon fatty acid chain you can put three of those on a back one of glycerol and you've gotten yourself 50 carbon molecules per triglyciter something like that um so Stoichiometry gets better here you're going to get something like three or four hundred ATP per molecule of fat and that's where things get actually better okay the fat is actually coming mostly though from outside of the muscle so energy from fat mobilization comes throughout the body somewhat evenly glucose comes mostly from the intra muscle itself and then a little bit from the backup supplies if it gets low phosphor creatinum is directly from the muscle all that energetic background is safe when you start moving and you start trying to create uh exercise where's the last piece we forgot here oh that's protein so protein actually in this analogy would be functioning more like a piece of metal so if you had metal in the woods and you needed a fire and you had absolutely nothing else you can in theory melt metal with the fire you're gonna get some but it is a very very low end proposition the if you absolutely have to do it you can do it to survive but if that's your fueling strategy you're in a big big problem because you're going to run on a metal very quickly in the woods right that you just you're out of it it's also the only thing you have to create shelter and stability and to fend for food and everything else and so it is a plausible way to provide energy it's just a terrible one it's mostly there for you to reconstruct new tools and so if you're in the woods you have metal and you need to make a knife you can fashion that okay now we need to melt that thing down and make a roof we can fashion that now we need to melt that back down and make a shovel it's meant to be kind of broken back down recreated in the same and different forms of the same basic item and so that's really what we're looking at the ability to play back and forth with carbohydrate and fat is different fuel system that's really like probably we don't have time to get to that today it's not really the best thing but the ability and the need and the the point of protein in tissue it is not fuel although it can be for what I explained it's really that it is is taking it and saying we need it mostly for this task right now we did it mostly um for skeletal muscle um we need it mostly for immune system we need it mostly for these other functions and so one of the ways to quickly lose muscle is to put yourself in a compromised position because it's going to say if it if we're choosing between keeping that 24 inch bicep or clearing up something we need immunologically it's going to go towards that um this is also why we see protein redistribution across muscle so if you see like say you spend a bunch of times on your bicep and your biceps get really really big and then you don't train your calf and your calf is actually and let's just say your protein intake is insufficient you'll start redistributing proteins from the calf up to the bicep to actually enable that growth and so you're thinking you're getting bigger but you're really just taking it from other places if protein intake itself is not sufficient and so it really is a Cornerstone and if you look at the research like you're going to see this bear through like very clearly as something if you ever wonder why some of these people are just like so diligent about protein intake and why does it become such a big deal is is this is It's the raw material you really can't get anywhere else and you can get carbohydrates and fat and you can go through that whole thing in a lot of ways you can't fake protein though this is very challenging to do so and the last little piece I'll say there is why this is so important to me is you can't fake muscle most specifically without the protein and when we start losing muscle now we enter a whole Cascade of problems um from physical performance you know your interest is more of like aging and Longevity that whole Cascade it becomes a problem and then we can certainly talk about the specific changes in muscle and past some of the details you've actually covered before um with that but that yeah those are things like it just becomes a really big deal so it just doesn't make any sense to skimp on that one um as a as a place to go yeah I'll just stop there because I can keep going but yeah no I think it does uh it's worth uh repeating right that um when you look at people across their lifetimes and you evaluate for muscle mass and you you know divide people up and categorize them by the amount of muscle mass they have uh and we should talk about this because of course my interpretation of the data is that once you normalize for strength it's the strength wins but it's sort of easier to measure muscle mass we kind of you know all you need to do is put somebody in a dexa and you sort of can figure out their almi and so we tend to look at survival curves based on am almi which for The Listener just means the amount of lean muscle you have in your arms and legs normalized to your height appendicular lean mass index um you know there's no ambiguity about the fact that more muscle means a longer life it's you know it's as it's as clear as high VO2 max means a longer life um so let's now go back and make sure people understand the structure of a muscle because I want to talk about different fiber types as well just to round out some of the physiology um so in an effort to understand the difference between a fast twitch and a low twitch a fast twitch and a slow twitch muscle fiber which has a metabolic difference I'm curious as what the structural difference is and maybe just kind of explaining how myofibrils work and things like that yeah sure so let me go uh back just a little bit to understand whole human function movement um I won't go as deep into this one though if you just think about how you actually create movement it really has three core functions so number one you have to have some sort of direction or signal and this is going to be coming from your nervous system and so whether this is Central or peripheral whether this is autonomic whether this is a controlled somatic action a response it doesn't really matter for this conversation the nerve has to tell it what to do so if nerves you get that one that's it don't take anything else nervous system right you get that control now that nerve then has to go into a muscle fiber until the muscle fiber to contract okay the muscle fiber then is part two so the cell actually has to contract itself but that actually doesn't cause movement muscles are not attached to Bone that's not how it works so muscle fibers are are surrounded by connective tissue all those connective tissue are bundled together and like a package so if you imagine buying a bunch of strips of bacon from The Butcher and they would wrap that up and kind of Saran Wrap together that's actually kind of what a muscle looks like so you've got that saran wrap connecting it so if you pulled on one piece of bacon you'd notice the whole package moves and that's that's sort of the point you're transferring force from muscle through connective tissue that connective tissue comes together um into a tendon and that tendon then attaches to Bone and so the third part for human movement is actually connected tissue and so you have to have a signal you have to have a muscle contract that has to make connective tissue pull on a bone that actually is what generates human movement well if you look at the the front end we'll leave the Neuroscience to other people you look at the connective tissue and it's very difficult to understand what's happening there for a number of reasons but mostly it's it's not plastic when we look at muscle it's tremendously plastic and what I mean by that is it adapts it changes very quickly quickly and rapidly in response to a lot of things connected tissue is doesn't have a blood flow Supply it doesn't have energetic demand it's just it's kind of just there it's there's more to that story but we'll just kind of leave it like that the core of the issue of adaptations whether they are pro or negative uh is going to be in skeletal muscle and so here's what that actually looks like a nerve will come down and actually attach and innervate to a whole host of muscle fibers and so you can imagine skeletal muscle fibers are some of the largest cells in all of biology by diameter they're tremendous in humans in fact what's actually very interesting about humans that makes us special is our muscle fibers are what's called multiply nucleated and so you probably remember this term from like med school or something like that um in fact I whenever I talk to biology people about this that like their head is belongs I forget how lost in exercise science I get both like us nerds but it's very uncommon in nature to see cells that have more than one nucleus the nucleus is the is the the core of the cell if you will that's what holds your DNA that's what controls and tells you when to replicate proteins to grow shrinked eye repair so the whole control center so the fact that skeletal muscle has many of them per cell in fact it's not a few it's not two or three it's thousands per cell so skeletal muscles can be extraordinarily large um you can actually I have a video of this somewhere I can't remember actually I might have made a picture in a men's health thing we did there's a video somewhere um we're actually pick up we'll find that and we'll also put that in the show notes okay um I can actually pick up a single muscle fiber from a human with tweezers and you can see it with your naked eye so we could hold this in fact I could do it right now if I had one I could hold it in front of the camera you'd be able to see an actual whole muscle cell um they're that large in fact they can be very very long so they can be several inches like and let's help folks understand what defines a cell because normally outside of the muscle we kind of Define a Cell by a cell membrane has a single nucleus I mean we kind of know what the constitutive elements here this is defined also by a cell membrane but it's a sort of a longer looking tube as opposed to a sphere and oh yeah just sort of thank you yeah yeah good good distinction there I sort of again get lost in exercise science here um so yeah if you if you remember like you're back to high school biology and you think of a cell as like a circle or an oval um this is more it's like that it's circular but it's a tube so it's a very long tube the way to think about it is like a ponytail so if you think about a ponytail you think about it as one thing it is a ponytail but it's made up of a whole bunch of long tube individual hairs and they all wrapped together to make a ponytail that's what a cell uh skeletal system looks like which is actually quite different than a cardiac cell those are more rectangular if you will that they're shorter and wider skeletal muscle fibers are very long green arrow but still circular they still have a cell membrane they have a bunch of nuclei most of the organelle are the same as any other thing the the contractile units we can get to in a second but yeah that's the basic setup of them and and just is it give me the typical length of a muscle cell a skeletal muscle cell you you can't really give a typical because depending on what you'll see with skeletal muscle is structures function so if you can contrast this to cardiac tissue so cardiac tissue is actually quite interesting because it is what we call the ultimate solitage fiber and so all of cardiac tissue is slow twitch in fact the slow twitch are even more slow twitch than the skeletal and they tend to be fairly uniform so you could give specific numbers in a cross-sectional area a diameter length on those skeletal muscle if you look at like you're Sartorius which is that kind of muscle that goes from that pointy part of the front of your hip down to the inside middle of your knee theoretically those fibers could run the whole line a single cell correct and run that whole length yeah even if it runs half that length that's that's extraordinarily long right you go back though and you go to like an ocular muscle and it's going to be mining it's going to be extremely small and like if you go to um muscles in your digitize your fingers they're going to be very very very very very short so it's sort of there is no like classic range it could be from millimeters to literally inches in length so what so presumably the reason that these cells have multiple nuclei is you know basically two decentralize the actions of uh cellular construction right so you've got DNA making RNA in the proximity of that nucleus coming out onto the Golgi making protein and if you had for example a you know even a one centimeter long cell which is enormous uh outrageous you couldn't simply make all of that work with one nucleus so the question is does that mean these nuclei act independently like what's the where's the Central Command on this it seems like a remarkable problem okay boy remarkable problem remarkable Advantage right it's the same hard to control but amazingly adaptive exactly this is exactly right so if you want to dive down the entire nucleation question uh this gets very very interesting because a handful of things we've actually shown in our lab that a lot of uh professional athletes have more nuclei per volume and so this is one of the things that I pause it is maybe this is why they can adapt so well so why they can handle the volume that they can handle is they just simply have more of these nuclei around and you believe that that is how much genetic and how much adaptation to training boy I would love to give you an answer there we we have like anything that's it's going to be okay so there's going to be a component to both we actually know numerous lifestyle factors are going to influence these things but the more recent data are showing this in general we have thought that nuclei have a couple of things so one um it's not just nuclei count that matters which is what we previously thought the shape matters and so there's different there's like spheres there's ovals um they're all kinds and it looks like the shape determines the function the location determines the function and so it looks like there are subtypes of nuclei that surround for example the mitochondria and they're going to be very specific to mitochondrion repair and it is other types that are more specific to periphery that'll do cell wall damage and then there are some actually that are regulating injury specifically this is what it looks like right now and so there are subtypes this is very very recent understanding and this is probably why some folks recover or respond to injury more than others is they just simply have more of the subtype now to your question nature versus nurture that's what's challenging about that is the measurement Fidelity here is difficult and the tech is moving uh quickly but it is sort of like every couple of years when the the microscopes get better we sort of realize that all the three previous years are now invalidated and so there's just a lot of movement back and forth and in fact if you look at this related to cell growth whether it was hypertrophy there seems to be tremendous confusion about the role of these things in growth or non so there used to be a thing that we refer to as a myonuclear domain limitations so in other words a cell would only grow so this would be your fiber it would only hypertrophy or grow in diameter to the extent at which the nuclei could control it and so in order to gain more growth you actually have to get more satellite cells to come in and add nuclei right and then when you D train that cell goes back down in diameter but you preserve the mountain nuclear number and so then now retraining is easier than it was the first time so I mean this is unbelievable but this is the old adage of you know muscle memory quote unquote it's easier to regain muscle you once had than to put on muscle you never had and I've never heard a molecular uh explanation for that but if that that's a very plausible mechanism right which is yeah it looks like that it looks like that's not correct interesting so there's like it's very um it's very back and forth is the way I'll say it so something is there the story I just outlined to you like it makes intuitive sense I got really hot on it for a number of years and then it was like some more challenged data came out and was like well we don't think so um I'm just gonna have to say like two pieces like like every week another paper comes out and it's just like okay now we're back on it now we're back off and now we realize there's subtypes of my declaring and they're like oh okay but it's really it will lend itself obviously to a um a longitudinal type study I mean in an ideal world you would take relatively young presumably pliable athletes you know in their teens and study them over time under different training demands uh you know obviously the dream case is doing it with with identical twins so that which we've done you have yeah and so I could just totally interrupt you and we can go to that yeah well actually let's put a pin in it because I want to come back to making sure people still understand how these things work so we've now established that muscle cells are kind of unlike any other cell in the body um how hungry are they for energy yeah you know so for example when we look at the liver you know I always think of the liver as a beautiful organ maybe not quite as cool as the muscle but but it has a special place in my heart um because I've always argued that the reason there is no extra corporeal support for the liver is we simply can't replicate its complexity right so for listeners extra corporeal means outside of the body so dialysis is extra corporeal support for the kidney uh you know a vad or an ECMO is extra corporeal support for the heart or heart and lungs combine a ventilator extra corporeal support for lungs we can't do that for a liver right if a patient tragically overdoses on Tylenol in an attempt to take their life and they reach a point of irreversibly damaging the liver you can't put them on liver support until they get a transplant that patient will be dead in about two days if they don't get a transplant and I think it comes down to a lot of the stuff you already talked about I mean glucose homeostasis one of the most important bits of homeostasis in the body is controlled with a level of precision I can't fathom I I can sit and talk about the liver with the same level of excitement that you talk about the muscles um and yet here's what's interesting the liver is not a metabolically greedy organ it really doesn't on its own consume much energy the brain by contrast a very complex organ an incredibly metabolically greedy organ which is probably why we need the liver to support the brain without the liver being so good at maintaining glucose homeostasis our brain would have either needed an adaptation strategy away from glucose where we we wouldn't have brains as large as we do where does the muscle fit into this hierarchy where is the muscle a high maintenance organ yeah so you know what's cool about the liver is uh it's it's kind of like a a professional fighter we're like you can beat it up a lot that's right you can't do much for the kidneys that's right they just don't have sustainability right um so I have like a secondary love for the liver because it's the closest thing in the body too skeletal muscle in terms of like the fact that it is it is listening and it will respond and it can change um and as you said very adaptive right I mean uh you'll appreciate this if you didn't already know it when we when I was in my residency um we would do quite a number of uh live donor lid liver transplants so uh this would be an operation where an individual would donate a a third to a half of their liver to another individual where there was a really good uh HLA match well here's what was really interesting the speed with which that portion of their liver would regenerate was so staggering that if you didn't anticipate it with inhumane doses of intravenous phosphorus they would have an enormous metabolic crisis oh yeah totally that makes sense yeah yeah so so basically we could it just you there was no amount of food you could give this person to allow them to have enough phosphate backbone to go and make you know for for the DNA and RNA and protein synthesis that was going to be necessary to reproduce their liver so um yeah you just had to basically be giving them IV Foss non-stop because they could sounds like what we have to do the fibers when we're doing our single fiber experiments like you have to bathe them we just have to have a permanent path of phosphorus that's right and they could regenerate a third of their liver in two weeks yeah it's simply staggering and now of course the caveat for the person listening is this only works when the architecture of the liver is preserved so once you cross into the path of cirrhosis and inflammation uh it's over so unfortunately that person whose liver has been so beat up for example uh status post nathal D Nash or alcoholic liver disease you get to a point where it no longer has that capacity to regenerate yeah you know the kind of the nice part about the story is though if you fix it before that you you have a good chance absolutely like so you can mess up for a long time and but if you do take that action before you hit that level you can you can get I shouldn't even say it this way but like you can almost get back to scratch like you can get a lot of regeneration yeah you're right and and the kidneys you know being so sensitive to blood pressure so sensitive to the damage of high glucose uh the lungs being so sensitive to smoking and things like that yeah um I I don't know for me I just think the liver is an unsung hero of the body well it's the thing that keeps you like it's the Bonk right like you you know those from endurance supports like when the liver is finished it doesn't matter how much mental strength you have like it's a wrap you are going down uh if you get hit in the liver uh if you've watched any uh Sports you get hit in the liver it instantaneously you're crippled um doesn't matter you could be like mentally you're there but your body will seize and shut you down so it's a very the same thing doesn't happen yeah I feel like that isn't that what happened to Oscar De La Hoya against Bernard Hopkins do you remember that fight um I don't remember that fight but I've seen it 50 times I've seen it 500 times I work a lot with UFC fighters and a number of I've actually um a headline fight this weekend for one of my guys so so yeah I've seen it in those Sports a ton I've seen a little toe just the tip of a toe click the liver and world champions just get locked up and follow the crowd yeah so it does not like being aggregate aggravated like that but it will handle a beating you know for the most part you can you can beat it up pretty good and if you see like any blood chemistry stuff and if you're looking at alt AST stuff and you're like ah you're pretty it'll come back real quick if you take the right steps the kidney is the one you see when you're like oh like we're not coming back to this one so anyway all right so going back to muscle um yeah it is it it's a tremendously responsive to everything you're doing and it's listening so your question of how energetically demanding it is well there's a couple of things to say about this people will talk a lot about hey if you add more muscle mass then that's going to base that's gonna elevate your basal metabolic rate so you'll burn more calories just sitting there that is true but it's not to a level that you actually think it's probably like you're I think the numbers are something like 30 calories with how much increase in muscle mass like per pound per pound okay I think it's like something like that uh it's it's like like it's not actually level and you can make the article hold after three or four years that is that extra five or ten pounds so okay like sure but it's not like I feel like some people think it's gonna go from their basal metabolic rate it's going to go from 1500 calories a day to 2500 because they put on five pounds a muscle like that that's it yeah way outside the realm of what's gonna happen there are many reasons you probably want to put some muscle on but like adding the metabolic boost and that's because the question is how energetically demanding are they it actually think about it the opposite like skeletal muscle is pretty lazy it wants to be as efficient as possible because if you think about functionality of physiology you want your brain running full course as often as you possibly can right you want continual interception of what's happening in your outside world as well as introspection going on it's also making decisions Etc skeletal muscle is simply like a backup system it's thinking more about it was like what do you need done Buffs you need something done to elevate your function or on it if not we're going to sit down and shut up and wait to be sort of pulled a little bit and so what that means is if you need energy now muscle will jump to action it'll get you going um we see this from everything from meat right it's like if you have this energetic need to burn 200 calories your photos start tapping you'll start doing sort of all these things that's skeleton muscle going tell folks what meat is this is non-exercise energy so it's energy you're burning um that's not physical activity or exercise or the energy needed to survive to breathe to digest to go through basic stuff so it is the it is that other 10 or so percent of energy throughout the day that accounts for people losing weight or not losing weight or gaining weight that fluxes pretty well depending on your metabolic Health depending on your total size depending on your other stuff so if you ever see those people who are like man they just can't sit still those are like colloquially the people that probably have a pretty high knee so they're just burning energy kind of sitting here other people are more stoic physically are going to have sort of a lower thing this is also one of the things that explains how people can maintain the same amount of physical training like exercise performance as well as health at tremendously different levels of calorie intakes because we can adjust neat very quickly and your body is it's a it's kind of like a it's a the last bit of Polish last bit of paint yeah so it's a huge there's a huge buffer in there where you can increase yeah yeah and depending on what you're needing to do right um and so we can kind of change our metabolic set point if you will um to keep you at the same body size depend irrelevant of going up and down in calories and I'm sure you guys cover that a thousand times with with Lane um so that's that's generally rare so let's talk about contraction how does a contraction actually work and why why does a contraction require ATP what part of the contraction needs it yeah so if we go back nerve is coming into skeletal muscle right and it would in some instances like the eye actually we have what's called a motor unit so we have a motor unit across all these things so motor unit is the the nerve that's coming in as well as all of these single fibers that that nerve is innervating so what that means is in the eye for example you have motor units as small as almost one to one which means there's a single motor unit coming in and activating a single muscle fiber that gives you extraordinary control of dexterity right and so you have a lot of nerves coming in to control a very small number of fibers that makes you have real high Precision with exactly where you're controlling you contrast that to muscles like the glutes you need a lot of strength forced production out the glutes but very low Fidelity you don't need accuracy of hip extension there's basically just one thing it's contract not contract I mean do it with as much force as possible but we're not yeah but that's basically the only Dimension you have to regulate is what is the force and speed of contraction whereas with the eye which is a great example I'm glad you made that contrast our eyes have insane Fidelity to and and of course you have multiple interocular muscles so it's you know you have a lot all of these muscles above Below on the side of the eyes and the amount of tuning that has to happen to allow humans to be able to do what we do so well which is very subtly pick things up with our eyes um yeah if you contrast that to like your fingers which we need to have it's the second highest level of fidelity we have to have the eyes are still in order of magnitude higher in terms of fidelity and accuracy it's not even close right like I need to be very precise with my fingertips but my eyes are on a whole new level of precision of where we have to be um so yeah if there's one to one or one to two in the eyes it could be thousands per motor unit in the glutes on off on 50 20 so you can stand erect while having some sort of like 20 level of glute contraction to full hip extension vertical jump explosion squat deadlift God that's so that's so fantastic okay continue so nerve comes in so a nerve comes in and does that now here's a couple of other layers um without going too far into nerve you're familiar I'm sure with said principle so you have specific adaptation for closed demand there's another principle in here called henneman's size principle so elbow and one's one of my favorite scientists and his principle basically says there's low threshold and high threshold motor units and what that means is there are some motor units that are very easy to get turned on and some that you have to just aggravate the out of them to get them to turn off let's make sure people understand what that means in terms of what's an action potential how does a nerve actually deliver its signal yeah so it's it's we have this fun interplay between chemistry electricity and chemistry that that's exactly how attraction works right so you have to go from a live electrical signals with chemical signal back for electrical signal so what happens is you've got sodium and potassium okay and chloride are your main players right and chloride is a negative charge uh potassium of course is positives and sodium is positive um the fun way to look up this and pay attention to this if you ever forget here is Peter you're probably more familiar with this than I am but look at patient assisted suicide with Dr Morgan right you give a giant bolus of potassium to somebody and they're just going to slowly stop their heart's going to slowly stop protracting why because the amount of potassium intracellular is going to become fairly equivalent to the amount of extracellular potassium and so the the change in uh gradient electrically between the outside of the cell inside of the cell becomes neutral and so no action potential is what this thing is called no no action potential curves and so what you need to have happen is a change in electrical volt from outside the cell to inside the cell and typically we're talking like negative 30 millivolts intracell and there's this kind of a number and once enough of the sodium potassium start moving in the correct directions then the electricity changes because our positives moves more negatives to move percent you get the idea and boom we hit this flip of this switch and this is what we call all or none and so skeletal muscle fibers can't contract at different levels of force what I mean is once you reflect them on they go on fully and that's the only way they can contract and so the analogy we use here in our undergraduate classes is the light switch so once you hit that certain threshold of metal mold the muscle fiber contracts as hard as it possibly can there is no weight there's no dimmer switch here you can't go 80 85 50. it's a hundred percent once you get to that action potential right you actually see the the millivolts just rock it back up and there's this whole Cascade of recovery this is what your sodium potassium pumps are doing to try to reset that gradient put them back in the right direction so you can have another contraction again this is actually what explains technique so if you contract that fiber multiple times in a row before it gets back to reset then it just feels like it's in an isometric attraction or it's not actually how it works but it's going to feel like that um what actually totally options but what actually happens is you have so many muscle fibers and they're Contracting and relaxing at such a faster rate to your muscle it feels like the whole thing is just locked up but they're actually flicking on flicking off just at a really high rate of turnover but anyways um so that's that's in general how you're getting a muscle by the way just so folks understand uh explain to folks how despite an all or none action potential and an all or none contraction of a single fiber you can still get variable degrees of strength again whether you're talking about yeah at the level of the muscle yep so this is the next part this is why we had to bring up enema size principle so Within These motor units you have uh sizes now what's interesting is most of the time in normal situations all the muscle fibers in that motor unit are of the same fiber type so all your if you had let's say we had two motor units um one of those motor units is slow twitch and one of those motor units is going to be fast stretch fiber instead of interface so if we had five fibers in that motor unit or 500 it doesn't really sort of matter right now we have a couple of factors actually coming on but they're going to be of all like type generally within that same motor unit so the only way that we relegate force production is this we have to know that all five of those muscle fibers once they get turned on are going to contract at full speed so the only way we actually change how much force we're creating a whole muscle is by altering how many of these motor units get turned on so the size principle tells us we're going to turn on the low threshold units first and so if you go to do what you just did so you reach over and grab a glass of water it's probably best we don't turn on our high threshold High Force production generally larger not always but generally larger motor units that have generally fastered fibers that are generally bigger number one or two reasons why you don't want to do that number one is we produce unnecessary Force so instead of slowly touching that glass to your lips you'd smash them off your face because there's no way to Rel you can't go down so if that motor unit can produce five pounds of force and you need two pounds of force there is no way to go backwards so you always start at the smallest unit possible and turn on more motor units to give more forced production required secondarily it just burns energy so fast switch muscle fibers are more metabolically demanding than slows with muscle fibers and so you're going to waste gas doing that this is exactly why your car starts off in first gear second etc etc we lose efficiency as we go up but we gain performance yeah yeah so so far so let's let's get that yeah yeah so let's use that example when you're talking just going back really quickly to the athlete so um how quickly is that response modulated when I want to deadlift something yeah so you you connect you can see this in real life you can actually see this I have a video of a deadlift actually a friend of mine doing this where um so the initial stuff that's going to happen here are you going to activate slow twitch uh sorry lower threshold motor units which are going to be almost as close to the selectric fibers the only way that we really know to increase that is through Force production demands and this is gonna like we're gonna come back to this when we get to fiber type stuff eventually for aging um and some of the stuff that came out even this week that you may have not seen yet but um the challenge with fast switch muscle fibers is they're only then based on this logic activated under high threshold demands which are high Force demands you can do anything to activate and then the data will show this on Aging you see virtually no reduction and slow twitch fibers with aging you see no reduction in size in fact there is some more than a few papers showing a hypertrophic effect of sloted fibers of Aging there is no loss in Velo there's no loss of specific tension which is like force per unit of size there's no loss of power so it just appears to be very easy with any level of activity to maintain a preserved health of salted fibers but because fast fit fibers require Force production and you generally don't get high Force production and activities of daily living then those fibers go unutilized for long stretches of time eventually they go away and so what we see happen is this really interesting thing called fiber type grouping where the nerve will basically say okay that fiber is being like not used and so that that whole motor unit will Decay and the fibers will be preserved the other neighboring motor units will actually grow new extensions activate some of the previously on uh Gone motor units and then convert those fibers into whatever fiber type happens in that previous motor unit so in general what we see Happening Here is slow fibers start absorbing a slow change motor unit start absorbing fast pitch fibers and bringing them to their money unit so we see these large patches of single fiber types throughout the muscle and so the last part of that puzzle is in a motor unit those fibers are connected by the same neuron and they're the same fiber type but they're not laying next to each other you don't want them in the same spot they're sort of dispersed throughout the muscle and so that gives you smoothness of contraction and so one of the things that happens is if you start punching like the entire right side of your bicep is one motor unit the entire left side is when you contract that motor unit alone you get super out of control and you get Twitchy um and unregulated movements and so when we see this fiber type grouping thing occur with aging it's almost exclusively a problem of fastage fibers not loss of slow charge fibers and so that also explains lack of fidelity as well as potentially some problems with fine uh unit movements and what is the heterogeneity of fast and slow twitch mixtures within different areas so presumably the eye is all slow twitch it's not particular it doesn't particularly require much force and it you know it doesn't require much force but it does require a lot of speed yeah interesting so you need to be able to dart back and forth quickly so I actually don't know the okay but let's Okay so let's look at a big skeletal muscle like the lats or the glutes is there is there so we have two things you have to pay attention to here is we have a huge amount of person-to-person variation okay so you you and I within what bracket though give me a sense of like presumably everybody has at least 20 of each I'm making that up but is there yeah so let me do the second part we'll come back to that person so there's actually as you're alluding to a second ago there's also tremendous difference between muscle to muscle and so some muscles if we look at it like if we compare my Soleus to your Soleus um you might be 90 slow twitch in your Soleus I might be 70. and that would be a large variation in that muscle if you look at um animal models cell culture of unimurai like you're going to see 100 slow twitch and the reason is because we walk the Soleus has got to be a majority slow twitch muscle fiber you know we just spent too much time ambulatory to risk any inefficiency in that system 100 if you look at the at the shank in general you've got two primary muscles of movement there the Soleus being the smaller one they both attach to the bottom of your foot that's your territory closer there if you were to take your foot and your toe and like point it towards your face and you reflect your calf that one that pops up that has that kind of U shape if you have a nice calf anyways that big one that pops up to the middle that's your gastroc the one that kind of sits behind it's underneath the very bottom where your calf stuff kind of ends and it goes in that long piece that's the soleiest and the gastroc is is almost the opposite it is almost exclusively fast twitch but not nearly as exclusive as your soul laces so the Soleus is what we call postural or anti-gravity for the exact stuff you mentioned like you it needs to stay up and it needs to be on uh and in fact you can actually have a fully contracted for hours and be totally totally fine and you won't even realize it for the most part it's actually good parabolically but you would not realize it if you contracted your gas rack for more than a few seconds you're probably going to feel the burn like pretty quickly so the variation in something like a Soleus could be that I think probably if you saw somebody who's 30 fast twitch and the Soleus that's a very very high number um I wouldn't be surprised if I saw somebody 95 though if you contrast that to a muscle like the VL so the vessels later else that the quad the outside quad muscle as you know but throughout the audience um now the variation gets extraordinarily large wow so in general the VL is like what we typically say is 50 50 passwords for 12 Church and the record it gets far more complicated than a fast switch slow twitch but we're just kind of keeping it at that level for now um we have shown actually in our lab a couple of things so one we we biopsied a whole bunch of people who are Olympians and World caliber National caliber uh in our lab men and women and um some of those individuals are 80 plus percent 85 fast storage and by the way just did you also do VM and why is there a difference between vlvm and intermediate yeah just due to action generally to access and safety a lot more potential things to hit yeah in the medial yeah nothing out the outside I Nick anything I'm we have problems no so um you could be up to 80 fast which on your VL if you're and by the way is that true across all sports like if you had the Tour de France Champion would you expect him to even though he's the best of the best and his VL is a monstrosity would you expect him to have that high a fast twitch so in the some of the folks with biopsied and then more endurance space they are as high as 90 slow twitch okay so that that's yeah so that's that's what I was like it's basically zero to zero yeah like you you can run the whole gamut of composition in the vo so and we're back to the same question which is if you had a time machine and you could go back and biopsy them as five-year-olds we really don't know what they looked like then well this is what our twin study did rather than five see them five years old yeah we got monozygous twins who presumably had enough differences in what they were doing that you could see a signal if there was about 35 years difference of training and what did you see so and if we compare this now that I can go back into that please you've been in Labs you'll appreciate this um one of our graduate students had been in our lab for probably three or more years was sitting next to my colleague Jimmy Bagley and they're pulling muscle fibers right and sort of like the things that come up when you're staring on a microscope pulling out individual muscle fibers with tweezers for hundreds of hours on time like your brain goes into weird spots so she was sort of just telling him oh yeah like my dad's a twin or whatever oh cool whatever and it's like oh yeah like monozygous are like yeah so monozygous means their DNA is exact so not just brothers that got born at the same time so you have genetic replication so we have that category locked and Jimmy's sort of like oh cool did they exercise and she's like oh yeah well like I think I can't remember which one it's like well my dad doesn't exercise but my uncle has been competing in Iron Man's for 35 years and Jamie was like what it's a dream experiment wait wait so let me get this straight you have identical twin parents or father one of them has been 30 plus years of documented endurance exercise the other what's he do he's like no he's never exercised and we're like and you've been in my lab for three years and this is the first we're hearing about this this is the first we're hearing about this like you're you're fired you're not graduating um so we were able to pull them in the lab and bring them in and so he was one of these classic endurance nerds every workout had been documented for 30 years he's got 50 journals written down so we knew that caloric expenditure we knew that Miles we just had everything and phenotypically how different did they look almost identical even with all the training they still looked I mean I'm saying not in the face of course but just muscularly how did they appear phenotypically no I know what you're saying um they were almost identical The Only Exception was um the the non-exercising twin was a little bit less lean I think he had I can't remember exactly that some like three or four more kilos of body fat no maybe that's kind of amazing too just it really speaks hereditary nature well yeah yeah so I want to come back to that because that's what's important but at the surface think about that right you have these two guys that are genetically identical presumably both looked good right and one is by all intents and purposes a fanatic around exercise the other is a couch potato but on the outside they look relatively equivalent tells you a couple of things one body habitus is remarkably hereditary I mean it is I believe more hereditary than it's certainly on par with height and eye color in terms of how hereditary it is the second is what you're about to tell us I suspect which is that the outside is but a fraction of the story so here's what we did I got super excited and I was basically like I'm going to take every measure possible is this dexa scans this is vertical jump VO2 max blood chemistry muscle biopsies like we we did psychological evaluations with an IQ test we just did everything we could possibly do by the way you you created just a random IRB to do this like what what oh yeah I mean like like we did it we took time to design the study yeah put an IRB through like the whole sort of how long did it take just so people understand the pace at which science moves from the microscope discussion until you've got these guys in your lab maybe eight months oh wow that's really fast you all right you already had the funding I assume yeah I didn't care I'm like I'm paying for this you're paying me regardless we're gonna pay this out of my pocket yeah this is for sure 100 like in fact I literally did pay for their plane flights out of my pocket I didn't want to deal with the stuff I was like just book the flights right now we got to schedule the work like put on my credit card I don't care I I'm not missing this chance so what did you see so the what's interesting was that again body composition wise the untrained person once again five six pounds more fat masks or something like that maybe three kilos was too high I can't remember so I'm like oh that's interesting what was the difference in on dexta what was the difference in muscle mass like a hundred grams they were basically you're at the detection limit of dexa so they're essentially Way Beyond yeah they were almost identical and totally in muscle mass right now interesting the endurance guy did not lift at all no strength train whatsoever strictly running cycling swung like a very classic can you imagine just the the the gdonkan experiment of triplets where you had a third guy here that only lifted weights and you just imagine I can like this was like an hour of her thesis defense this was that question right there oh my God okay all right we we actually did a uh another study in Stockholm Sweden with lifelong skiers um I won't get too around here but these are people who are world champions the 1940s and 50s in cross-country skiing Olympic gold medalists and didn't stop competing now they're in the age of 85 Plus up to 92 years old we're still competitive skiers and compared them to age match healthy folks over here in America so I've spent a little bit of time in this like aging athlete yeah and I I actually wrote a little bit about that that cohort in my book s yeah yeah no it's it's insane that they're capable I could I could tell you a lot more behind the scenes on that one I like I'd love to yeah let's come back walking into the hospital across the street and just like jumping off the curb because there was Ice you're like oh you're in 90. and he's decided to jump that curb for fun like when no one was watching you because we could like see them from the window coming in I was like just so just like uh one guy finishing a video to Max sitting on the chair taking like two breath signals I didn't understand the test let me try it again I'm trying to get back on the bike this is like 12 seconds after YouTube access and a whole bunch of other stuff like that was incredible um okay so back to the Twitter studies so that was that was identical um in general you could categorize some things so I'll kind of make this a little bit shorter if you looked at muscle quality so this is Echo intensity on an ultrasound this is vertical jump this is leg extension strength it was either identical or it favored the non-exercising twin right everything else that you would classically associate is an exercise adaptation favored the exerciser blood lipid panel blood pressure body composition certainly VO2 max was significantly higher resting heart rate like all the classic textbook endurance exercises a b and c is stacked up exactly as you'd think the neutral stuff total muscle mass um that was basically on point and then blood glucose was favored for the exerciser like all that stuff you would predict but just to make sure I understand the non-exercisor was Stronger stronger better jumper um higher quality muscle uh more power again go into go go into the higher quality guns make sure I understand that beyond the metric driven stuff was that is is that is that a subjective assessment of muscle quality no no no no no no no um so there's a you can actually measure this via ultrasound okay and so this is like a measure it's called Echo intensity it's a measure of it's akin to measuring how much intramuscular fat is inside the actual tissue uh so that's what Echo intensity is kind of basically tell you so so you're saying the exercising guy had more uh intramuscular lipid right now but just to play Devil's Advocate isn't that an adaptation to his endurance training where he wants to have more intramuscular lipid because he wants to have more logs near the fire he's burning those logs totally yeah and you wouldn't have to dig hard to find support for that and I think that's different from the intramuscular lipid we see in the diabetic for example or in the insulin resistant there's a level when you cross right when there's no exercise there then there's a different reason that that happens yeah yeah but in terms of functional output but still what's interesting to me is that the strength metrics also favored the non-exercizer yeah it was all favored to neutral yeah like it's like either some of the metrics were similar or not statistically different but like they hedge towards a non-exercisor so you could say at best they were neutral to favoring the non-exerciser is I think the most Fair way but there's not a metric there that favored the exerciser on that side of the house so what is your yeah sorry biopsy related yeah let's talk about the Bible it gets very different so um I'll give you the quick version there's a more interesting version the non-exercisor was almost identical to what you'd see in the literature and what we've done a ton of times where you have something like it you're fairly mixed in terms of phenotype or you know so you've got some percentage of fast which some percentage is slow twitch but in fact he had about if I remember correctly something like 20 of his fibers are in what we call this hybrid format and so I sort of loaded this earlier there's file search fibers or selected fibers but The Story Goes much deeper that's not really how the whole thing plays out um so these hybrid fibers are a single individual cell so one muscle fiber that coexpresses fast and slow twitch and in fact it'll it'll Express that in different areas of the throughout the length of the fiber so it'll be explosively fast twitch in one portion fast and slow in another portion and exclusively slow twitch another portion Etc let's make sure people understand what the difference is between a fast and a slow twitch fiber let's yeah and we'll come I want to come right back to where we are but I just want to make sure we haven't lost that thread yeah in general there's a lot of ways to describe it but the easiest way is to describe it by the name so fast twitch means that the twitch or the speed of contraction is higher and so those these fibers can contract and squeeze together with through the mechanisms we haven't got to yet we'll get there myosin actin um at a much faster rate having said that the file switch fibers tend to be larger though not always and certainly not in endurance training individuals and definitely not with aging um that they tend to be almost they almost always are more glycolytically driven and so they're going to have more of the enzymes responsible for anaerobic glycolysis they're going to have more glucose in the cell they're going to have less intramuscular triglycerides and they're going to be having they generally have more loss for creatine slow twitch fibers are fatigue resistant which means these are the ones that that can contract kind of all day long because they don't use as much glucose so they do use quite a bit still they are much better at using fat as the fuel they are they tend to have more and larger mitochondria and the downside is they don't contract with as much velocity in general so that's the functional that's why we call them twitch and just to be clear the Force difference between them is it doesn't matter it's just velocity or is there a force difference as well so the yeah no well so a couple of things um in in large part forced production for muscle fibers to determine mostly by size cross-sectional area okay so getting the fiber bigger is the play to get it faster having said that power is markedly different and so if you're talking power is based on velocity as well that's yeah you times the multiply the force by the velocity so if you use this metric that we'll use in single fiber experiments called specific tension which is sort of like relative strength so you take the size portion out of the equation um what you're going to see is a true slow twitch so these are also called type 1 fibers if you compare those to a type 2A so that's a fast twitch muscle fiber you're going to see something like 5 to 6X power between these two so it's not when you normalize for size mineralized for crosstalk if you go if you go to the two x fibers which is a special class of fast switch fibers now you're talking 20x that power curve and that is mostly explained by more metabolic apparatus what's enabling the speed why does the 2x fiber go faster yeah it's all has in fact the way that we differentiate muscle fibers in a laboratory is we measure What's called the myosin heavy chain and so if to kind of actually come back to microanatomy here so the way that muscle fibers work is this is all in a 3D sequence right so you can imagine that cylinder I'm going to explain it to you in 2D just so you understand but this is actually occurring in 3D and so what happens is you've got two of these microfilaments called actin and myosin all right now what happens is they're overlapped so they're not touching each other and you've got myosin um kind of laying in the middle and it's this big thick tube and it's got these heads that flick off the top of it right now these heads reach up and they extend again in 3D but they just think about in 2D they reach up and grab on what's called actin all right and so the idea when you contract the muscle is the myosin will reach up and they're going to reach out sort of outward so if you're watching this video you're seeing my hands kind of reach up and away from my body like I'm stretching my arms like I'm doing a big T if you will and my hands would then grab onto the actin and then if I were to squeeze my hands and bring my hands closer to my face that's the myosin is actually then pulling the actin closer together so what actually happens in real life is those start stacking on top of each other and that's why when you squeeze your bicep it actually glows larger vertically because those muscle fibers are stacking on top of each other and that's actually elevating in size and so what determines Force production versus velocity is what we call cross Bridges so the amount of time that these myosin heads grab onto actin that little place of connection is called a cross Bridge the moralist cross Bridges you have the more effectively you can pull the actin closer to each other the more effectively do that the faster the contraction the more forceful the contraction is going to be so primary thing explaining Force production is the amount of cross Bridges so the thicker your myosin the more likely you are to grab actin the faster the stronger the hold if you will so the better connection your hand has to that thing it's grabbing onto rather than you can imagine like a couple of fingertips on it and trying to pull something closer to you versus having your whole hand wrapped around it a strap on it chalk on it and like you're gonna be able to rip that thing down quickly now there are six actin that surround and I Circle each myosin in human skeletal muscle so again a picture that 3D structure so you can imagine if I'm standing up in a room and on myosin and six people are forming a circle around me like they're gonna jump me or celebrate me or whatever that's what it looks like and my arms can sort of reach out and no matter where my arms are there's going to be somebody that I can grab and you only have two arms still in this you only have two myosin filaments and you have a time okay okay you uh so you have one myosin phone I'm sorry you only have um two heads or how many heads do you have the jelly okay so you have billions of heads to grab onto six potential targets so you're always gonna grab a Target you're gonna grab one right now you can't increase the amount of those acting that are around you but we do see that in other animals so this is one of the reasons that explains why like fruit flies spiders and things like that can contract with so much more Force relative to humans is they might have 8 or 10 or 12 or 20 mice or actin per mice and ants which we always think of as like for their size being insanely strong totally they'll do that so so Evolutions tool to make things stronger is give more actin because you already have an infinite number of myosin heads the more things I can give you to grab onto the stronger you are the stronger you're going to be yeah you realize there's somebody out there using crispr right now trying to figure out how to double the number of these things in humans right so I'm not going to say this officially all I'm going to say is well officially the world knows about the bare muscle studies that we've worked on so there have been bear tissue come through and under my microscope put it that way um bear tissue is actually quite unique so they actually have a so humans have that 2A and I have that 2x which is very formerly 2B right incorrectly identified as 2B that's correct most other animals do actually have in fact 2B and the 2B is even faster than the 2X and bearers have a lot of them so this is one of the other reasons why not only do you have that they simply have a simple a fiber type that is much faster than any of the fastest ones we have of cheetahs yeah and um other cats like that have like 20 to 60 percent of these 2p fibers this is extraordinarily high mountain and they said and in those do they have more actin targets I think actually I think cats are pretty close to six to one but we could fact check that one but I'm pretty sure that part of it's fairly it tends to be fairly similar um similar kind of animal mammals it's when you get to the insects and things like that I think where that number jumps off but my comparative physiology is not the sharpest so don't trust me there so um yeah that's a great description of the micro anatomy and I want to remember let me finish the speed thing oh okay yeah yeah so what determines the speed so on those little myosin there where it kind of connects to the actin it's called the myosin head okay now part of that is a bunch of stuff that you guys don't need to know about but a part of that is is called the heavy chain so there's a light chain portion and a heavy chain all right now on the tip there the way that we can get a muscle to contract is ATP so what happens is the myosin are kind of loosely connected to the actin at all times but in order for it to grab and pull you need a strong connection and for that connection to happen and for that to be able to pull it together it requires energy so pardon the somewhat crude analogy but the way that it kind of works is if you imagine caulking a pistol so in order to actually the pistol versus fire the the trigger the squeezing the trigger actually produce it takes a lot less energy than cocking it back if you've ever cocked a thing like they actually you have to pull pretty hard so the energy that we need actually from muscle contraction is not the pulling together that's actually almost passive it is the cocking back part that takes energy right and so that energy comes from ATP so on the little tip of that myosin head is an enzyme called atpase as you know you hear Ace you get kinase like you think like something the enzyme that's going to work that's the molecule that hydrolyzes ATP uh splits ATP rather right so um to make that simple so what you have to do is actually invest in ATP that gives you energy use that energy to that myosin back into place and now it's kind of sitting there but it can't bind strongly until calcium comes into the picture it gets released from the sarcoplasm particulum that has to come to the equation it has to cause this conformational change and act in and move these tubules or that comes from teachables and you have some other things around once those things get moved around by the calcium then the myosin is like oh boom it connects something and then it just almost subconsciously snaps as hard as it possibly can and that's why you can't regulate Force production it's like it's just going to catch and snap catch and snap in order for that to go back you actually have to invest more in ATP this is also side note what explains rigor mortis so this happens it gets contracted you don't have the energy to then pull it back in so then you stay in this lock sort of skeletal muscle contraction position so now the speed at which you can do that that atpase thing that's what determines single muscle fiber contractile speed that's also that myosin heavy chain is what we measure in the lab and that's how we determine fast switch versus slow twitch so if you were to use a technique that we use called gel electrophoresis basically you put a gel between two pieces of glass and you just pour gel in there and it gets like solidified just like hair gel like a little bit thicker and then you put each individual muscle fiber in its own vertical Lane and then you put a little bit of positive charge on the top end a little bit of negative charge in the bottom end or inverse doesn't matter and then you actually put a little bit of chemical bath around muscle fiber that has a charge you turn the electricity on positive goes to negative Etc and so those fibers run down vertically through the gel we hit stop at a certain time point and the smaller ones have gone further because smaller molecular weight will go through the gel faster and so we stop basically we put it we develop it like you would develop a picture like like old school photography stuff literally the same silver nitrate Etc that you use and we can see the ones that have gone further down are slow twitch the ones that want to stay up higher are faster which and of course we use molecular weight markers to confirm and all that but that's effective what we're looking at so what that means is the myosin heavy chain molecular weight determines fiber type and that regulates its twitch ability the the more of those the faster those heavy chains work the faster atpase can operate the faster the whole thing can contract the faster the muscle fiber contracts and there you go and that's why muscle fiber type is not predicated on size it is specific to either metabolic abilities in the old days or now more specifically twitch velocity so I guess all of this now brings us back to a better position in in which we can understand the biopsy studies in these identical twins so if you if you look at the fiber profile of the untrained twin It lines up very close to what you'd see in a textbook right so it's around 50 slow twitch and about 30 of these fast twitch 2A form but then about 20 or so percent a or 2X 2A oh okay so here's one of the things that's interesting when you get into the 2x conversation um there are clearly humans have the ability to express 2x it's just extraordinarily rare and so what tends to happen is this if you find somebody that has what we call Pure 2x fibers so these are single fibers that are expressing only 2X a couple of things have happened they've number one they've probably had that muscle fiber de-innervated for decades that's really the only time we see it in fact if you look at spinal cord injury folks who've you know how to generated thing for decades they're as high as 50 or 60 percent of their total fiber type being 2X and so this seems to be the default strategy of if you don't activate or utilize a muscle it eventually is going to fall to 2X why we have absolutely no idea I could guess yeah we don't seem to know we see it sometimes in older folks and again 2x sorry 2x is the hybrid single single fiber hybrid 2x is a pure fiber type it is the ultra fast oh okay okay it is the one so any hybrid is going to be called something like there's a one two a hybrid there's a 2A 2x hybrid and there's even a triple hybrid one two a 2X it has all three fiber types in the same cell those are those are fairly uncommon a one to a hybrid and a 2a2x hybrid are very very common a pure 2x by itself though is extraordinarily rare in fact we've done hundreds of thousands of individual fibers in my lab and have probably seen in total 20 or 30. Pier 2x fibers you're talking generally something like 0.1 percent a fibers something like that are pure 2x now if you dive in literature here you're going to get confused very quickly because a lot of people don't use detailed enough laboratory methodologies to differentiate these and so they're going to see oh there's all kinds of 2x fibers they're really not they're very clearly to h2x fibers they just didn't run High Fidelity enough to actually differentiate between hybrids so you'll pick up two a2x fibers as having some portion of 2x and so it's a difference between does that fiber contain 2X versus is that a purely 2x5 which is sort of a semantic difference but in all world it's a big deal um if you find somebody with a high percentage of 2x fibers um something odd is going on The Only Exception here is there's no data really on truly fast people we have a lot on powerful people we have a lot on kayakers and bodybuilders and weight lifters but as we discussed at the beginning that's actually not true we don't have data on sprinters no why great question wait it's hard to get these folks in the lab I guess um people haven't been interested in it it's not a thing we just don't have them the only thing we have is people have there was a case study there's a case study done on a guy who's I think he still owns a world record um it's not hard to figure out his name like can't technically say it um 110 meter hurdles I think and 60 meter hurdles at the time had the world record of both I think still has one of them um he's the only one I know and I actually uh I was a graduate student at the time so I didn't run the study but I certainly had my hands on fibers plenty of times um and he had something like 24 percent Pier 2x fibers um so what is that replicated so so the untrained guy was 50 slow 30 to a 20 hybrid ax okay two a two x two a2x yep and then what was the trained cardio only trained twin about 95 pure slow twitch okay so right there you have the explanation for why he was weaker he just couldn't generate the force it's a couple of things so it answers a handful number one do they change yes like we know this is highly malleable now yeah not even close um we actually know that there's data on nutrition there's nutritional aspects that water fiber type composition anything that's going to go activate pgc1 Alpha and that whole Cascade it's going to activate increase assorted fibers like that's just gonna happen right uh there's actually a study came out very recently in Resveratrol doing it not in humans but like a very reasonable dose five grams of Resveratrol I think in in cattle which is like not that much at all for a 2 000 pound animal um caused significant changes in fiber diet profile and there's a whole host of nutritional interventions the question of okay does it change the physical activity like it's been answered so many times for so many decades now it's like very clear and in our case okay how much how much can I really change an important amount well I don't know what these people's default is because one could argue the untrained guy was actually in a in an adaptation State he would have yeah he had a higher state yeah and he he deviated away from his potential right because one thing that seems to be very clear is these two a2x fibers are generally associated with poor health and so we see this concentration go up whereas activity or space flight a 2X by itself is not a 2X is basically irrelevant because they just don't exist okay got it and if you have some if you have them it's generally bad news so you don't want to train into them so the ideal scenario here is 2A those seem to be the place you want to turn into um if you do any sort of physical training those hybrids tend to go down especially to a2x's they kind of go away and so I'm not surprised that the trained individual had none of them um and I'm also not surprised with the Android one so it lined up pretty textbook so the magnitude of change is Meaningful um so it's a case study all that what's what's your hypothesis if you had a third brother a triplet who was a um let's see who was a weight lifter or a power lifter this I don't the distinction actually don't think would matter a ton yeah you're gonna get the same answer I would not be surprised if that third was 70 past twitch 2A um and 30 type one yeah with probably very few hybrids if they're trained now the one distinction is the two a2x fibers tend to be a little more responsive to a little bit of workload and so you have to hit sufficient audience to really get them to go all the way away but it's not that much so if you're just like kind of like a laissez-faire lifter you'll still have something around but if you're training seriously um those things are going to go away yeah so so I don't really think given enough time and exposure I don't really think that there's a limit to the plasticity among fiber types even within a normal human condition now this was 35 years yeah yeah so like do we have a sense about the window in which you are maximally susceptible to it so if someone listening to this is 50 years old and they've kind of been sedentary a lot of their lives but because they listen to this podcast they've now got the motivation to become big time exercisers how much can they you know Bend The Arc of their fiber curve so fiber type is actually really quite cool because it doesn't seem to matter what age you are so training studies of 70 year olds we see dramatic changes in fiber type in six weeks eight weeks certainly and the magnitude of change doesn't seem to differentiate in fact the way that you want to think about this is it's kind of like an asymptote the less trained you are the quicker you learn faster things yeah the faster the initial adaptation the closer to your Edge so if you're a weightlifter in fact we saw this differentiated so with our world caliber lifters compared to national caliber lifters the world caliber lifters had been lifting at a very high level for like eight or so years or the national caliber had been lifting more like four years they were close to fiber type but the national calibers had more fast switch fibers so what this tells you is initial changes happened very quickly but getting from that last few percentage up took years for that second group but we will see this again four to six weeks to see a demonstrable tangent fiber type composition is and it doesn't seem to matter with age in fact as you age it probably gets easier because your your level of untrained is so high if that situation is there um the one other thing I want to ask you about on the micro Anatomy side Andy is explain you you sort of have talked about it indirectly but if a person hasn't maybe caught it can you just explain how hypertrophy fits into this so when a person wants to have bigger muscles what's happening at the cellular level with their muscle fibers right so there's an interesting um discussion here that the easy answer is when we generally say hypertrophy what we're referring to is diameter or cross-sectional area and so if you remember if you think about the muscle fibers being that cylinder the width of the cylinder just expands and so that circle gets larger is the way to think about it um and again a crude analogy is getting fatter means each adipocyte is getting bigger it's taking on and storing more triglyceride yep yep exactly so from a skeletal muscle perspective the diameter gets larger um there's actually interesting work we actually have some tissue on its way to Auburn right now because one of the things that's been interesting it's like a Bro Science thing for years of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy versus contractile hybrid so what this is really positing is is the change really coming from fluid retention basically or is it actually an enhanced of the contractile tissue which in this case would be an uh actin and myosin um seems to have some initial work there that's a little bit of both and it happens the different phases of training um so sorry is the question do different types of training increase sarcoplasmic versus contractile hypertrophy or is the broader question you know hey is a bodybuilder a bodybuilder because they're sarcoplasmic reticulum is huge but their contractile units are not that much bigger than the average person I'm not sure I want to make sure I understand the question yeah so it's close not the sarcoplasmic reticulum it's what we call sarcoplasmic hypertrophy okay so this would just be an increase in diameter with additional fluid impact so it is close to what you're saying okay so in other words does this thing even exist in other words or is all increases in muscle size through strength training assuming it's like a normal positive adaptation that's yeah yeah sort of a weird thing is it actually happening because myosin actin are getting thicker I see okay that's amazing we don't know the answer to that question yet we don't more data have started coming out wow but even a few years ago the the idea that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy was a thing was thought of as like garbage bro science meaning the idea the the the sort of assumed belief was anytime muscles got bigger they were getting bigger in the contractile units correct by the way I'm not I'm not I'm not shocked that that was the default hypothesis I'm shocked that it wasn't definitively known he was a it was a technology issue okay as an assay problem like figuring out how to actually measure this um when you take a muscle fiber even with an electron microscopy you couldn't do this that's not the problem it's the standardization of fluids that's the issue when you sample that when you sample the tissue it's how do you lock the fluid into place basically correct yeah how do you take this cell out of a living human and preserve it into some fluid architecture yep without contaminating it I got it and you couldn't do that with like liquid nitrogen immediately that flash freezes yeah so if you get crystals in there you actually lice you screw the whole thing got it so beautiful so what was just just because I'm such a freaking nerd I can't stand it how did you guys solve this problem uh well I didn't solve it um first of all Mike Roberts out of Auburn um has produced a lot of really interesting work in this area his Labs is extraordinary um but they just figured out they were able to kind of take an assay from the colleague of his uh figure out how to preserve it in liquid nitrogen is actually fine um but then from there you have to thought correctly and you have to do it so he he troubleshot this whole thing for a couple years I see so look when you accept the crystals that'll blow up the size because of course I'm correctly yeah but yes it's how you thought that uh yeah okay so so cool like this so it gets very detailed that Mike yeah and I hope there's some high school college kid listening to this who's studying chemistry who's realizing just how cool and interconnected all of these worlds are you know chemistry biology physics they're just so linked yeah yeah I always joke that like there's only one thing in this world there's only one science it's just math like as much as I hate math the chemistry is math Energy's math like it's all just biomechanics's mouth like it's just it's that math and reductionism but that's it those are two things um yeah so to go back uh what the question is and here's the like where the exercise scientist comes in why is it a bodybuilder can have more muscle yet they're not stronger than a strong man or a weightlifter Like Houses actually happen this is where this whole thing comes about like how is it that my hypertrophy can exceed yours but somehow your strength and and the the easy like sophomore answers all neurological adaptations okay fine sure but like there's there's nothing happening intracellularly well I don't think that's correct um and in fact it doesn't look to be the case and so there is some sort of combination because here's the here's the juxtaposition there's a thing called lattice spacing which is there's an optimal distance between that myosin and actin in other words if I was trying to produce a powerful contraction but I was butted up next to each other I can't actually squeeze that hard because there's nowhere to go I'm too extended then I actually can't yeah so it's the same idea as preload in a heart right which is 100 100 preload is going to determine stroke volume like everything in coming in right so this spacing if you're going to start adding contractile units one way or the other you have to preserve spacing somehow and so the kind of Interest the idea yeah the idea is it will exceed it will expand hypertrophically but if it actually compromises your because they're ha going back to math I promise you there's a mathematical optimization for the exact strike distance between actin and myosin to not be overextended or under extend it and to have that perfect preload for maximum contraction and if you're hypertrophy trained this is now I'm totally making this up but if you're hypertrophy training interfered with that and compromised it you might gain size at the expense of potential strength right or if that high purchase review is coming simply from excessive fluid and not actually contract like it then you would actually have a larger muscle and when I say fluid I'm not talking about like acute fluid retention I'm not saying like you're bloated today you've water loaded I mean just there's there's enhanced fluid in a homeostatic balance inside the tissue because diameter has gotten larger but it wasn't met with an equal amount of increase in contractile units so if that number gets off yeah I think another physiologic Point that's worth explaining to people is how much people are familiar with the idea that two-thirds to seventy percent of our weight right I stood on the scale this morning like that number on the scale two-thirds to seventy percent of it is H2O yeah and then people say okay well wait how can that be because I get that my blood plasma is water that can't be where it all is no most of it is in the cells of our body and the muscle is of course no exception given that it's such a ubiquitous cell totally and in fact given that it occupies the vast majority mass in your body yeah so given the fact that that in order for it to store its primary unit of energy it needs to bring water with it being glucose right and just tell folks how that differs from like what the again going back to bodybuilding you know uh I I love following Jay Cutler on Instagram because I was just such a fan of his as a bodybuilder and he's just one of these guys who in retirement is still like training hard paying attention to his nutrition and uh it was an interesting video so he went into like in and out burger and he was like it's my cheat day today I'm going into in and out burger and he places this monster order but what I what what caught me was how much he said no salt no salt no salt no salt so he was like two burgers here fries here but no salt no salt no salt no salt clearly this guy's nose this guy knows something about the effect of sodium on fluid retention that's a different fluid than what you're what we're talking about now so yeah well yes and no in the sense of like he he probably has neither direct or indirect understanding of if you smash down seven grams of salt right now like bad things are about to happen in a lot of areas um like more specifically if you just look and we're getting sort of maybe after but it can be look at hydration and and dealing with the athletes that I deal with a white cut is a huge deal right like managing um a 15 or more pound reduction in water over a course of 48 hours and then putting that back in if you don't understand being hypoosmotic or hyperosmotic or ISO osmotic like you're going to cause a whole host of problems from kidney issues to diarrhea to bloating to all kinds of problems so you have to actually understand what you put back in them has to be the same thing as what's intracellular or not you can drive fluid you're not going to drive fluid into tissue and and you get into situations where guys are peeing or girls are severely dehydrated they're peeing yet they put very little fluid acid back into tissue because blood volume got so large it expanded so quickly they have a sense to excrete because total volume gets too high quote unquote but they didn't actually balance electrolytes and so nothing goes intracellular which is where you're trying to get it to outside of organs once your organs have um functional organs rather and are there any rules of thumb on that so you know we were talking before the podcast started how you know I had food poisoning um yeah and in a span of like two days I lost seven pounds and my weight is about the most stable metric in my life it just doesn't fluctuate a pound so to lose seven pounds in two days uh basically due to the fluid losses of being sick and having to go to the bathroom about every seven minutes coupled with not really wanting to eat during that period of time um what is your best guess as to how much I mean let's just posit that much of that seven pounds six and a half of it is water what's the ideal strategy to replenish that in terms of um hyper hypo uh or or ISO osmotic if I'm going to try to replenish that in in the form of liquid you have a handful of things number one you need to go slowly yeah right so you got to make sure that you don't get excessive so I don't want to pound four liters of worth of four grams of sodium in the first six six hours I'm feeling better yep so number one you you want to shoot for something like the neighborhood of 110 to 125 of fluid walk weight like that's because you're going to lose somebody around what's going to happen so let's say you lost seven like my brain is like okay we're gonna go to eight and a half nine pounds like something like that like you want to round this and call this a gallon okay like we're going to gallon all right we're gonna bring that in over the course of three hours or two guys maybe four is that I've lost my turn is a pound a quarter gallon well four liters in a gallon yeah ish yeah okay so a couple gallons right so you're gonna be you you don't want to bring that in well yeah I mean a gallon is again a gallon's four liters yeah a liters kilo so if you're talking four kilos yeah so and so you would do that over how many you could do that over two days no no no no like three hours oh you could you can you can oh yeah once once your GI system settles down so you would have Fighters that would I guess they have to if they're going from a way into a competition they've got to bring that no no yeah we for sure like um for sure last week guy in Abu Dhabi 100 waited 136 pounds is 152 pounds within probably five hours and what was the osmolarity with no urine like no no diarrhea no GI what was the what was the osmolarity of the fluid he took in um so it depends the guy going through it this week as well you we actually measure that so we actually will measure run on basic sweat tests and you can figure out sodium concentrations and then the amount that they get back is actually dependent upon them so that number can fluctuate depending on if they're a high salt low salt sort of sweater it also depends on how much salt we've had to pull out the week of or not um so obviously if we don't pull out salt five or six days away or like anything bananas like that but if you have seven to eight percent of your body fat you have to lose or sorry seven eight percent of body fluid of your body weight and fluid you have to lose like we're going to take some salt out for a couple days just to get and salt out tell me how many grams per day they're down to in sodium zero you're gonna get down to zero on those last couple of days so you're gonna get down to like a classic example is we might have them at like uh two and a half grams kind of like fight week per day it's like not unreasonable but the day before like water cut day it's it's zero it's as much as like you're boiling chicken to get as much possible stuff out of there um you're eating as much like as low as as close to zero as we possibly can for that 24 hour period and that's yeah ideally you don't have to go that way sometimes you have that's a bigger impact than cutting calories which you don't really want to do at that point yeah yeah I don't care about cows the calories are irrelevant at that point it is simply physical weight of food and this is a fluid manipulation here if we can keep them at like a gram because that last day like cool but a lot of times you're staring down a barrel of an 8 to 15 pound water cut on a day like you just need every event I'm sorry 8 to 15 pounds of water you can cut in a day oh yeah yeah for sure in a guy that starts out as little as like 160 pounds like if you're taking if you're trying to get 160 to 147 you're doing that in a day you can it's not ideal but you can okay let's make it ideal if you did it would two days be ideal to do that no so ideally in the situations you start off um you you come into fight week in the proper situation so you need to come into fight week hydrated on normal or like even maybe slightly higher salt normal or higher carbohydrate you need to come in healthy you need to come in recovered not over trained all that stuff because you have like you have to play a whole bunch of games here Monday through sort of Thursday you're going to start getting as much of this off passively as you possibly can and so you're going to typically keep carbohydrate very low 50 or less grams sort of depending on what they're doing and you're going to deplete glycogen that alone is going to start helping you pull some water so you're going to passively do it you can play games with fiber and so you have these low residue diets the last couple of days and so you can make sure you're not holding on to food in your gut that can buy you a couple of kilos depending a kilo depending on the size of the person and so ideally for example if you came in Monday a fight week at 170 pounds hopefully we can kind of get you down to like 164 165 by Thursday with like yeah very passive stuff yeah yeah and now you're you're talking like we've got nine to do over 24 hours well you're gonna float a couple throughout the day just urinating and stuff because you've been you're being very hydrated you're gonna float one or so overnight that's because of that so really there goes three right there so now you're talking like we gotta do six or seven of like Active water dropping in that situation so that really is a 15 pound week but it's not that bad okay but where do those six Come Those six come just from taking straight water pure so that that is the sodium complete sodium restriction well you're gonna have to you're gonna have to add in some sort of sweating component okay so you're gonna have to do some sauna or cardio yeah yeah something like that if you're already down the ideal situation is you do a little bit of physical activity maybe to burn any last little bit of glycogen without getting like too terrible feeling and then from there uh ideally it's sort of like well you'll see a lot of what's called a mummy wrap so you basically lay down you put a bunch of blankets on yourself is like very easy to regulate blood pressure and make sure you're okay you're not a risk of passing out you'll sweat like a pretty good amount and then weigh-in is Friday what time morning Friday morning uh nine o'clock in the morning usually a lot of times if we actually do this best you don't do much of that the night before you wake up the next morning and you say four pounds over and you can actually sweat out four pounds pretty easy in Asana 20 30 minutes like something like that is Saturday night so you've got you know 18 hours plus to put it back on oh wait yeah I'm like 30 36. because they're gonna oh sorry yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and typically if we do this again correct um I said all these all these scenarios don't always play out but it's it can get quite chaotic um but yeah you would I do leave it back to your normal Monday weight within four to five hours after that weigh-in so you're only touching that final scale number for a very short amount of time um so you're kind of Faking the scale so you're back to that normal fight number and then um by the next morning like you're certainly well back normal now the only difference the only thing here is like recovering muscle glycogen in 36 hours is close enough like you can get if you if you do this correctly you can get a pretty good way you can actually get body weight back no problem the difficult part is getting brain fluid back um I'm not totally convinced that gets all the way back in 36 hours so that's the like little bit of a challenge that you have but there's just no way around so is there an advantage to be made for a fighter who I'm just making up the weight of 147 but just pick a weight right to live train and show up at 150 instead of 160 so that okay the drawback is he's going to be in the ring at less weight but the advantage is he went through less metabolic fluid shift in the two days prior and maybe he's actually just physiologically better so there's actually a good amount of research on that of looking at exactly what happens than doing performance testing um print post it's not that bad actually from a performance perspective as long as you stay within certain reins if you get excessive then yeah um there's been a number of folks look at uh if you follow the UFC look at Frankie Edgar um he's won multiple World Championships significantly undersized right so that that works in general though it starts to become challenging because in the sport of MMA that the weight classes are so large in boxing you've got a weight class every four to seven pounds so if a guy is really six pounds heavier than you is it that big a deal on boxing you know if a guy is 15 pounds however you get a grappling Sports huge it's it's just and you'll see this like he held him against the cage I could she just held me down she didn't even ideal situation is nobody Cuts away but I think the situation is that's all gone but how do you ever do that because somebody will be like well I'll take that advantage of them so ideally if you do it right and you can come into fight week at six percent over fight weight it should be no problem um performance wise you should get there other than like the pain in the asset is to deal with you start getting the eight percent fight week okay it's ten percent fight week like um all right I guess it's gonna be really really challenging um but yeah all right let's bring this all back because I I I'm guessing you know that that we've gone probably a lot deeper into the physiology the anatomy the micro anatomy of the muscle but I think it's worthwhile I think this was an investment that was worth making because now it becomes a lot easier to talk about some of the things that are effectively the application of this and I really want to kind of go back to um how we started talking about this which was through the lens of different types of athletes that are effectively the beacon of excellence in anything that has to do with muscle so we talked about a power lifter power lifter despite the bad nomenclature is ostensibly the strongest athlete at the all-out max one rep don't care how long it takes movement you then go to that weight lifter who's also doing a one rep but boy he or she is also got to be incredibly coordinated and therefore by definition because of the nature of the movement incredibly explosive but it's just one rep the strong man um he's you know throwing Boulders and having to pick them up and throw them again and again again insane amount of strength but you you're not just relying on one Energy System you've got to also have a little bit of endurance both muscularly cardiovascularly the CrossFit you know athlete also very strong also agile mobile has the explosivity but not you know basically isn't as good at anything as those first three but has something that none of them have which is a greater degree of endurance I think we looped in the bodybuilder which aesthetically looks like you know better than all of them has bigger muscles than all of them but has to meet no other requirement and then I think I like that you brought in finally the Sprinter which is the pure you know you could argue the highest ratio of power to weight and Locomotion optimized okay I will never be half as good as any of those six I think there's six right one two yes there's six of them um and most people listening to this don't need to be but we probably want bits of each of them in us right so let's now talk about hypothetical ways to train and let's I did this with Lane and people really liked this approach um so maybe we'll try to do the same thing let's go through some hypothetical case studies right so person comes to you and says Andy I want you to design a training program for me here's what I look like now here's what my goals are and the goal is a No Holds Barred approach to what they need to do in other words don't don't unless I specify it as part of the problem don't hold back you know all right so we'll start with the easy one which is the untrained individual um who comes to you and says okay I bought it you know I'm all in on this um I'm willing to to go to the gym you know Peter's always already got me doing a couple hours a week of zone two on the bike but I don't even know how to approach this strength training thing I'm willing to I don't know put three hours a week in the gym I want to get bigger because I you know I had a dexa scan and it really showed that my almi was about the 40th percentile and I really you know I looking at the literature I think being at or above the 75th percentile for lean mass is a better place to be so that's where I'd like to be in a year two years three years um but I also want it to matter you know I want to be stronger I want to be able to do stuff when I get older I don't just want to get bigger I want to be able to never enter a competition I'm not here to enter the Strongman Competition but like I never want to hurt I want to be able to chop wood in my backyard I want to be able to carry stuff around I want to be able to travel with a backpack on any any other questions you have for me before you design my program Andy how many days per week did you say um I I could be up to going to the gym like three days a week an hour at a time three days total Okay cool so you've basically described every one of our executive clients and our rapid Health optimization program so I can nail this one um obviously at most of my career with professional athletes but we deal with this problem all the time in Rapid so here's what I would say you've already got zone two stuff yep great copy that um here's what you need to pay attention to you described muscle as insufficient so we got it in our brain automatically thinking we've got to put on muscle mass you also said they're untrained though and one of the things you're going to see is quite clear oh sorry I I sort of left out um like I I was active in high school and college like I it's not like I've never done anything but you know I've been working really hard at my job started a family and so the last 10 years my only exercise has been um like activities of daily living which include sometimes hiking and playing with my kids but yes I have I haven't been in the gym I haven't been in the gym in a decade yeah perfect yeah you still described everybody okay and Rapid Health optimization right no problem so the way that I'm just going to walk you through sort of I'm going to break the fourth dimensional wall here my brain immediately thinking all right we need hypertrophy this is a base and Foundation of everything you're going to get stronger by doing hypertrophy at this stage of your training but like we talked earlier those are not always coupled you can get stronger without getting more muscle mass very clearly and you can get really a lot of muscle without optimizing strength we talked about that at the end of those spectrums you're not you're at this end of the spectrum the opposite those are going to be basically linked at this phase in your training so we don't have to do both we can do one and get both adaptations at the same time because I'm so low on the curve anything is going to give me a bit of both in fact we can get that from not even lifting weights because in fact of our training studies you'll see that you'll see equal adaptations and muscle size hypertrophy from even steady state cycling um initially right first six to eight weeks you'll see equal um all of our concurrent training models and studies show the same thing like not only is there not interference an interference effect at this stage it's a complimentary in fact a study came out more recently showing six weeks of endurance exercise steady state cycling prior to hypertrophy actually enhanced end result muscle growth so spending time initially getting physically fit before trying to add muscle mass for someone like this it's a very fruitful investment great so the fact that I've been doing my zone two for two months actually has you pretty happy super happy okay okay I'm also thinking all right you mentioned longevity physical function as we move down you also mentioned you said three years from now or something which tells me your mind is really thinking about long-term investment that's right Peter has me committed to you know this is not about looking good in my bathing suit in six weeks I'm not in a rush copy that right so one of the things that you'll see very specifically with aging is a loss of physical function and that's more geared for power in fact the rate of you've probably covered this before rate of loss of muscle mass as you age is something like a half to one percent per year loss of muscle strength is double the triple that loss of muscle power is triple that and so what are you saying you see a very precipitous drop in muscle's power and why is that happening a little bit of loss of speed aha so preserving in fact you can do this you can go look at the world records of all sports across age groups so if you look at like track and field what's the world record in the 100 meter dash and what's the world record for the 30 to this what's the world record for the 40 to 50 old range 50 to 60. and what you'll see is strength sports like powerlifting the world record through age doesn't go down that much the world record in speed and jumping Sports just falls off a cliff says preserving speed in addition uh my friend Gregor Sicky just published the paper this week in journal physiology a blue ribbon journal in our field right size you get and this was actually looking specifically at single fiber contractile function changes with aging and the data here are extraordinarily clear have been a long way you see very little loss of function in slow touch fibers through aging regardless of exercise or not I sort of mentioned this earlier but you see a dramatic reduction in fast touch fibers and you actually don't see a drop of power and so there's nothing internal to the muscle fiber that's going down so another way to say this is the problem it's the fiber size the atrophy of fast Rich fibers is the almost exclusive leave the problem with aging and muscle you have got to maintain fast twitch fiber sites now there are some loss of total fibers but that is actually very difficult to find scientifically counting total amount of fiber fibrous in a live human muscle is extraordinarily difficult so what really what we're after here is anytime I'm thinking longevity I'm thinking primarily absolute force and power um has to be preserved and it's this is a faster fiber atrophy issue um this is a tart so these are the things spinning in my head so how is this three day a week combination of the look okay and sorry just to make just to make sure we translate that Andy because I think that was so uh important what you just said you're basically looking I'm 50 and you're looking down the barrel of my life saying you want to live another 40 years and you want to be functioning the most important thing I can do for you in the gym is not focus on the things that you're going to get for free it's focus on the things that are declining so rapidly and and I will as a corollary to that get a bunch of that other stuff for free but I have to focus on the atrophy of your fast twitch muscle fibers because it's already happening and we need to Stave that off and we need to put in the gym systems to support the reversal of that process because if I just ignore that you know I might as well be that highly exercise twin guy who's you know doing all his cardio but at the end of the day he can't jump off the curb he can't you know he's going to be this the hyper cardio athlete who's still a decrepit person in the last decade of their life to make it even better or worse those fibers require specific types of training unless you specifically do that you just don't have any chance of those tissues the other tissues aren't as uh like hypertrophy hypertrophy is pretty non-specific in terms of your training application but if you want to make sure that you're targeting fast twitch fibers like this this requires very specific protocols or or like you have no chance faster slow touch fibers are going to get activated with any activity of daily living they're going to get activated with any amount of physical experience whether you're doing intervals zone two zone six that doesn't matter right Zone 28 pick whatever you want slow touch are good it's the fastest fibers that require intention and that's why I I mix it to the deal of it because you can't accidentally get those yep that's right it's sort of like what we say in fighting is like you can sometimes accidentally knock somebody out there are fluke punches there are no accidental submissions you know like there's no fluke arm bars like you have to know what you're doing there or not so coming back to our our Avatar by the way I love that line because I often say that to especially my female patients who are completely untrained borderlining on cactic um afraid of lifting weights you know they just want to do yoga all day and when I say look we have a problem here you're osteopenic um and you're so weak I am worried for your life and they say I I just don't want to lift weights because I just don't want to get too big and it's like I have good news for you the myth the myth of accidental muscle has been fully debunked fully me and every other guy out there can tell you we're waiting for it to happen it hasn't happened the the odds that you're going to wake up and think God damn it I'm too muscular it's just it just won't happen the vast majority of us sitting around hoping and praying and devoting most of our waking hours and not waking hours to this goal that you think might accidentally happen you're good you're totally safe here um all right so we know we have to preserve password to muscle fibers for the long term we know we have to take care of VO2 max this is another I'm sure you cover this in depth important thing for longevity all right but we got some constraints we also have to be considerate of I have not trained in 10 years I'm going to get very sore very quickly and if I become too sore that it dissuades further training now I'm going to lose you I bought in but that was too hard I was so sore I couldn't even walk blah blah blah blah right I think in your show with Holly she talked about making sure you start with a very low volume like like way lower volume than you think we have time like we just need to move I'm going to be very cautious of eccentric movements because they will um they will generate more soreness than relative and the last part before I gave you some direct answers is we want to start building movement patterns that we're going to need over time and so this is an investment we can get all that done by doing the same sort of training we're practicing movement patterns we're getting that stuff grooved so we don't pick up injuries later we're not getting excessively sore we're building some muscle mass because we're going to get that anyways and we don't either so if this was a six month program because you can't write the same program for the next 50 years right what's the first six months I guess if that's your question right zone two is out of the way um I would probably stick to fairly similar uh to what Holly said initially which was okay something like one to three working sets of probably four exercises a day something like that we want to spread those across upper lower and kind of some different movement patterns and we want to practice the compound movements I'm not going to isolated single joint movements yet I'm going to let's learn how to do a goblet squat okay this is a squat you're going to hold the dumbbell sort of in front of your chest great we're going to learn to do the hip extension we're going to learn to do a basic overhead press or some bent rows things like that and I'm going to spend 30 minutes on those things I don't even really care about tracking progression at this point we're going to track um did you get to get the movement pattern down right did you brace as our spine in the proper position are you breathing through um through your nose and through proper positions is your neck in the right spot great all this foundational stuff that feels like not a big deal at all right now because it shouldn't be but we're making sure boxes are checked so that when we start progressing load later that neck doesn't start getting irritated right we're just being in that position we're going to do that right okay so we're basically completely optimizing movement patterns we're making sure we don't hurt ourselves um we're learning new skills right we're learning skills of exercise let's now go to the next six months so I come back to you Andy and I say um you know this has been great like this is not as difficult as I thought it was going to be I really I've kind of enjoyed going to the gym and honestly like I even see a little more definition in my arms and my legs and I'm a little hungrier so I've been eating a little bit more I haven't lost any weight or anything but my pants fit a little bit better um I'm I'd like to take this up a notch I can't commit more time though Andy so I'm really kind of you know 360 minute spots is all I can get because I still gotta you know get my kids from school and and work is just as demanding as ever um but how do I increase the desire to be even bigger and even stronger and even more functional great so now we have to start investing that 60 Minutes in those three workouts into different sections per workout so we need to start doing something to start addressing power and speed I'm going to give that the first 10 to 15 minutes though we don't need to go nuts now but we need to introduce those movement patterns and those velocities and those that the tissue tolerance that we call it so your ability to land and absorb that's not creation of power but it's the back end how did I stop that movement how do I land from it we're going to continue to invest in in the muscle growth and now we can start pushing the pace a little bit and then we're actually at the end start investing in either muscular endurance and or interval stuff so if we're still continuing to zone two that's great but we haven't worked on getting heart rate up coming back down and regulating that whole piece so what's that look like the first 10 or so minutes of all three workouts per week we're going to do something in basic movement patterns so let's imagine a box jump right we'll do a box jump we're going to jump from the ground and land on a box that's say 18 inches in the air right we're gonna practice that movement pattern I want you landing on the box not on the ground that reduces The Eccentric Landing because you're going to be absorbing way less so you're not going to get out of sore but you're going to have to pop a little bit you have to jump to get up there and we're bracing that movement pattern I want to probably do something how are you determining that height and the 18 inches seems really high to me uh how do I know if I shouldn't be 12 to start what what level of fatigue how many times would I do this so that I can gauge how high it needs to be because there should be no fatigue this is simply about high this is load tolerance this is load tolerance then low tolerance and it's it's introducing power okay so you're going to start learning how to move fast but you're going to do it and it's a safe thing we're not going to pull a hamstring and just to be clear Andy I you know I I I don't I don't need to compete in sports I don't play basketball anymore I'm not are you sure you need me doing this because all I'm trying to do is I just want to be able to pick up my grandkids in 30 years or 20 years yeah 100 okay so in order to pick up your grandkids you need to not be in the hospital right you need to be not living in an assisted living call you know what puts people in assisted living home falling and breaking the hip the connection between morbidity mortality with a hip break is extraordinary after the age of 60. it's not even 90. it is 60. ish um reason large reason people fall is they actually don't have foot speed what do you mean if you catch yourself your toe on the corner or you slip you have to have the foot speed to be able to put your other foot or that foot back out in front of you in their proper position then you have to have the eccentric strength to stop that fall and so I need foot speed to get there and I need eccentric strength to brace the fall so you don't land and break your hip that's what's going to keep you playing with your kids when you're 60. got it so even though yeah so it's not even though I don't want to be a a quote-unquote explosive athlete I still have to kind of train like one in some parts and I'm asking for 10 minutes of your workout okay right so I want to keep you there um you can imagine the I could continue to give you examples and analogies but this is if you want to go for a hike again and you you trip or you need to be able to get up and do a little scramble you know your your 10 year old grandkid is going to want to go up that rock like you gotta have a little pop to get up there too you want to be able to pull yourself like all these things right that's what's going to keep you from going so what are some no I'll just sit down here and wait you go ahead yeah exactly exactly I had a patient once say something that I loved um I asked him kind of what were his goals for aging and he said um to always be able to go to my kids and grandkids and he meant it both micro and macro right meaning I never want to be in the position where I can't get on an airplane and travel and go wherever they are and I never want to not be able to go physically in the moment to where they are I I thought it was just a very elegant explanation the second part is brilliant yeah that's so good because that's the example there I'll wait here versus no I'm going to come with you up that Little Rock yeah it's it's the water slide it's God I don't want to climb up those stairs it's seven of them but like it's all the little stuff right um I have two little kids so I'm very I'm very in the world of like what a four-year-old will do so what are some other things that we would do in that first 10 to 15 minutes so I love the idea of the box jump with landing on top so you don't have that huge eccentric diesel massive deceleration um what about bounds skips things like that would all be in there yep yep medicine ball throws are great medicine ball slams our great medicine ball tosses up in the air high as you can go as far as you can go behind you these are reinforming reinforcing movement patterns you've built the previous six months proper hip extension versus low back extension Etc it is also doing what we call Triple extension so you're simultaneously explosively extending the hip knee and ankle and this is a very important human movement pattern you can do that without jumping and Landing by throwing a medicine ball tossing it um if you go to to plyometrics you have to be a little bit careful here Plyometrics are totally safe for all ages as long as you account for volume you just can't do too many of them at too high of an intensity in this case The Eccentric load so um jump rope a five minute jump rope is just Plyometrics right now when you go single leg to single leg you start increasing risk like so if you're to jump from your right leg and land on your right leg alone risk but too late to too late it's very easy I mean for for pizza you can play hopscotch Hopscotch is just two-legged plyometric to single leg to back to forward progression lateral I could say it's a wonderful little extra isn't it interesting when you go to a playground and watch kids play to realize the they're not being told to do this just the inherent ability that they have to be explosive and as you said how that deteriorates with age like you just can't imagine watching a group of 40 year olds sitting around just deciding let's go play this fun game where we jump around I mean you do that if you're playing a sport you do that if it's part of your pre-programmed workout but it's not the equivalent of neat right where you just so spontaneous yeah it's not spontaneous yeah last one I love is actually don't get thrown off by this word but I love sprinting and I just just give me 70 percent you would be surprised of like whoa it feels like great terrible but if you can get on like a Woodway or or a controlled um situation like that and you could just do some like 70 for just getting through the motion kind of a temple is what you if you're a runner like you've caught that type of stuff for very short distances I'm talking like uh 15 seconds just kind of stride it out okay slowly come back down wait a minute or two fully recover here okay ready roll back into it two three four seconds and then give me pick it up for five seconds six seconds okay slowly back down just getting used to handling movement and being an athlete and moving and not being everything is locked into a position where it's structured and secure and all that stuff so I really really like movement athletic movement and multiple planes um for people the last example I'll give you is just back to like High School Middle School sports give me we're going to play 10 minutes of basketball go to court we're gonna shoot drive it up and down like we're gonna play racquetball is our warm-up today we're gonna play badminton you get over there I get over here like two on too bad like you can do a lot of little different things that are going to be multiplanar it's going to be speed agility and quickness at this point so you're going to change your direction all this stuff is the foundation piece you need to get to when we actually do some speed agility drills next year or wherever we're going to get to right like which is going to be part of your plan so those are all a bunch of examples um I would recommend doing a different one each day of those three so it's Mondays we're going to do medball stuff cool Wednesdays it's going to be pickleball and then Fridays we're gonna do um you know some some jump stuff and some medicine ball horizontal throws like whatever the case is uh maybe or it can be jump rope but it's going to be hopscotch you know things like that some um I'm not against bounding broad jumps I typically want to start here two on two so two leg leaves two leg land to this person but you they can they don't have to be forward they can be lateral jumps they could be combinations they can be all kinds of things um you honestly be surprised like I want to say this too loud in case somebody hears but that stuff's actually kind of fun like it's pretty fun you're gonna get a lot of Giggles you're like I haven't jumped like this you know like yeah it is like to kind of feel weird and it's gonna be way different than what they're thinking this like train thing is like you'll get some giggles um so that would be my that's your opener that's that's 10 to 15 minutes okay now we're hot now we're ready okay now we're gonna move into a strength training and so what I would still do is keep the same structure total body on all three days because here's what's also going to happen once a month you're gonna miss one of those days for more a kid's gonna get sick I got too busy at work if you do body part splits you'll start missing all day yeah you're gonna miss chunks so I like in these situations these people I want whole body every day you're gonna recover just fine um I would do a different rep range so I would do something like Monday it's going to be say three to four sets of five to seven reps you're gonna be able to go heavier you're going to have a minute and a half rest between each one Wednesday what RPG do you do there seven to eight so meaning just just for folks listening at the end of that you're finishing with maybe two reps left in the tank yeah okay yep like I want to like for the working side yeah for Wednesday let's go 15 to 20 reps [Music] right so now you're actually going to have less you're probably going to drive less soreness because you're activating probably less faster fibers you're going to get more of a pump you can actually like push the repetitions and you can work harder and probably get a little bit less sore and you'll feel more of an acute satisfaction for a lot of people right like you feel the feeling and your risk has gone down a little bit and then the third day um you could go really wild and you could do something like isometrics where you're just holding positions very good for joint very good for connective tissue they're very good for just doing something different all three of these are equally effective hypertrophy so your gains and muscle size are going to be identical across the board and now you've introduced three different elements let's talk a little bit about isometric I'm I'm now going to deviate from my patient into back to being Peter and interviewing um we didn't talk about it but everybody's probably heard of an isometric it's fourth generation or muscle contraction without movement big part of my recovery from shoulder surgery I had a labral repair uh you know a while ago and this was the first thing I was permitted to do um was begin uh you know humeral extension and flexion without movement and um you know interestingly I hadn't really spent much time doing isometrics outside of that with a few exceptions through some dedicated a lot of isometric deadlifts I was using as a precursor to deadlifting just a great way to sort of warm up um but I don't think I was actually aware that isometric training could generate or elicit the same hypertrophy response as isotonic or movement-based contraction um why is that the case uh how does one know where to be in the range so for example if I do a bicep curl I can get every range of the bicep but do I know if there's an isometric benefit to being here versus here versus here yeah so are you 10 collection 30 flexion 110 flexion we're at that I have so much to say on this one um are we good for two and a half three we go another three hours good uh I will say this we're clearly gonna do a part two of this podcast so we'll we'll yeah there's a whole a whole show on this area um because because of this so you actually sort of invertedly asked what's actually driving muscle hypertrophy and is it not it's not the workout per se it's the stimuli right so then what are those stimuli that's a whole conversation and the reason I perch fees training wise in terms of what reps to do what type of exercise I consider to be the least scientific interesting is because it takes the least Precision because the mechanisms are so spread across different areas that it's sort of like you can go for a b or c you don't have to have all three you can also have a and b or you can have a and C or B you're going to get there um the muscle is very much listening to that signal it's not so much for other things and so it's very easy to kind of land accidentally in high per tree range as long as a couple of things happen as long as sufficient overload occurs like you're going to get there so this overload can happen over time it doesn't even matter how you achieve the Overlook more volume more reps per set more weight extra range of motion like all these things are different strategies for progression and if that happens you're going to be in a pretty good spot um so like barring the mechanism session is we're just going to get like so far down the road here we're never going to come back and answer your patient question um but that's that's one thing to think about so isometrics this the shorter answer is they're they're going to be activating a number of those same mechanisms so you're going to cause the same amount of virtually where do I be in that range of motion well there's no answer there this is the primary you'll mix it up presumably you certainly mix it up in general muscles respond best to being at the highest stretch so if you can have that thing at the highest level of extension generally but it kind of depends the muscle um you're going to generate there you're putting more in fact you can actually take a muscle fiber and hang it vertically and hang a weight at the end of it and it will grow so being stretched that long is a very strong signal to grow and so when you generally train a muscle over a large range of motion you're putting the muscle on a larger stretch and so that signal alone activates that whole anabolic Cascade for hypertrophy so my default if you're going to do an isometric is to do it closer to the end range of motion of of um where it feels the most tight if you will not the finished position but it very much depends on what what you're after because the thing that gets tricky here is many muscles are single joint and so if you look at the Soleus as we talked about earlier that crosses the ankle joint only but if you look at things like the gastroc It crosses the knee and ankle joint so putting the the Soleus in the right position is only dependent upon the ankle but in the gastroc in the right position is dependent upon the ankle and the knee and so if the knee is flexed um you're never going to get the the gastroc to contract properly you can't get a full contraction of the gastroc in a reflex knee you have to have an extended knee and extended ankle because it's going to just get short on one end of that Spectrum and the same thing happens with so trans translation a seated calf raise only works the Soleus a standing calf raise works both gastric and Soleus correct the same thing with like a tricep push down versus an overhead tricep Etc behind neck right now you're talking the triceps muscles across the shoulder joint are now going to be put on stretch when you go behind the neck and bada bang so that's why I recently saw a study that looked at tricep extension in uh flexed versus extended humeral position and the difference in muscle mass was significant when the arm was up when the humerus was flexed yeah yeah yeah yeah right right um we see this with the hamstrings you see this with the glutes like muscles like to be put on stretch well they don't like it but they respond to it yeah you get the better you get the better compensation yeah now that changes in a situation like what you were dealing with because like the example I use oftentimes like imagine somebody who's kind of like a nagging elbow pain you're like man like every time I do a lot of bicep curls and stuff my elbow just gets me like okay great can we actually train the biceps without aggravating the elbow hard to do because no matter which brachial radialis once it's break like they're all going to cross the elbows what if that's a nagging shoulder problem aha well now if we do like a preacher curl which is when your arm is out in front of you you're shortening the biceps part that cross the shoulder joint and you can still work across the elbow joint and it will not aggravate your shoulder if you were to do like an incline curl where your shoulder and arm is behind you you're putting it on stretch across your shoulder joint and now those bicep curls are going to aggravate your shoulder like theoretically so going back to isometric question it depends on your specific surgery and whoever you're obviously talented therapist or whoever was running that had you on I'm sure they were putting you in a position to get a little bit of activation in the joint that they wanted but not actually aggravate and let the thing recover so that that's the angle you pick is dependent upon a number of factors um it could be Sports specific so if you take the case of like a power lifter like you may just want to train in your final position of your squad and get very used to being strong there going extra depth is only just going to make you worse as a lifter because you're now traveling further distance you've got to do more work so there's no easy answer that's one of the reasons why we generally front on isometrics is they just take a lot of attention where if I generally just say do a normal pull range squat then you don't have to guess so if you were if you but if you had an athlete who said look I'm even at this stage I'm really willing to to do a little bit of isometric um let's say using the squat as an example you're gonna load the bar in a low position they're going to stand under a weight that is much heavier than that they could ever lift and basically push up against them I mean how are you doing an isometric squat for example uh so okay do this in a number of ways so you can do a bench you do squat unit um so typically what we'll do is you'll put the barbell in the rack and so you can imagine like a squat yeah when you raise the rack yep yep and you have safety pins that run horizontal perpendicular to the ground right so instead of putting the bar on top of those you put the bar below them and so you just lift up against the rack and nothing moves so you can set your position whether you're putting it behind your neck the squat whether you're putting a bench below it and you just push up on those we actually have these built in the lab and on the bottom is a force plate and those allows us to do an exercise movement yeah so that's how you can tell how how heavy they're pushing right and so we can measure force produced into the ground at various positions does isometric offer any other advantage over uh safety yeah there's a ton of advantage to it the advantage is you have less degrees of freedom less moving parts so if I get you in a position saying a squat and your spine looks good and everything looks good there's a very low likelihood you're going to get out of position if I ask you to do a back squat is extraordinarily complicated yeah there's a lot of moving parts we have degrees of freedom at the ankle knee hip low back ribs shoulder neck in an isometric nothing moves all we have to deal with this compression sometimes compression is aggravating axial loading being specific but actual loading is also fantastic for momentum so the reason I threw isometrics in for our client kind of working back to is you were talking about you mentioned that as one of the problems it's like okay great we know we can smash actually on these people with very low risk and get a lot of stimuli there and not have to worry about getting a position at different parts we have this thing called the strength curve when you do a typical isoponic movement so same with like a normal lift of a normal dumbbell or something you're only going to be challenged in the areas in the range of motion where you're the weakest so if you look at our study um on lifting with bands like heavy bands from a deadlift you're going to lift at the very very bottom and you're going to have very low load in fact like you could have as much as a 40 reduction in load at the bottom but when you came up and you start crossing the knee joint and you start gaining mechanical advantage it becomes extraordinarily easy but the bands start getting heavier and so the actual tonicity that happens throughout the entire thing is fairly equal if not well certainly greater at the top so you can train that whole area of the strength curve with things like this is why people use bands and chains and things like that is to be able to produce more uh resistance in areas where they're stronger and they're not being held back by the weakest position that they're in to wrap that up then you can actually then train that so then you can go into that weakest position and do an isometric in that weak position without having to put a whole bunch of load on your body like you would need to get getting to and from it yeah yeah right so it's nice because with people like this you could put her in like an RDL position like a hinge position which is a kind of a complicated movement and just be like grab and Pull and nothing moves and they can pull as freely and as hard as they want it's very difficult for people with a low training age to truly Express maximum Force output on a free range motion because there's too many variables I'm in the right position is my back safe am I losing my balance if I just say grab this part pull on this bar as hard as you possibly can and nothing's going to move people can just go so walk me through how you do that for an RDL for example you're going to do kettlebell dumbbell barbell RDL barbell okay barbell yep set the barbell in the squat rack put it underneath and set the height of those safety pins to whatever height feels comfortable for you and so you'll then get in there and do that RDL and you'll pull up against that bar and nothing will move and your back will feel comfortable wherever that range of motion is for you your glutes can be there your feet can be in the right position we get Total Foot big toe activation you're doing this you're doing this two foot down yeah you do one like yeah but you would you would most likely start this thing two-footed just to develop for this person um in this goal we're trying to let them Express Peak Force output and feeling comfortable and how long do they need to stay in that isometric position three seconds to some of the times we with our athletes we'll go up to five minute isometric holds up to what how much five minutes you can do like we'll do a reference with squat hold isometric hold for up to five minutes which presents a tremendous neurological challenge yeah yeah I'm I'm generally up for things that are ridiculous I don't know that I could do it isometric hold for five minutes yeah you've probably done like you've ever done like super high volume lunges or split squats like hundreds yeah like I did a four minute set of split squats the other day yeah okay so just get into that position rear foot elevated just a little bit and just hold it for two minutes to see it's a fun task you'll enjoy it yeah no I'm sure I will um what are they where are you creating the resistance for them you're just again same thing bar over shoulder in that particular scenario you don't need any I see time will be receiving oh in other words it's isometric only in that you're just holding a position yeah correct yeah yeah because you're holding it's like doing a wall spot it's like a better version yeah so you can go for a long time so um to kind of come back here your patient here uh that's what's something yeah because I never so I can really see now how you could create a full day of isometrics if that's if you wanted to go down that rabbit hole it's easy that one of those days is purely isometric oh yeah I mean in this situation too even holding not that I'm you could hold a plank yeah that is an isometric exercise right it's the one that people love um holding a hip extension position and just making sure you can actually continue to have your glutes on utilize um you mentioned a squat earlier so you can do this in a couple of ways you can actually go all the way down and truly hold that bottom position that is challenging though if people don't have the right positioning if you do it's a or you can close it's a great way to build it so I wouldn't be opposed to that if they're close and doing okay 30 seconds but here's the difference I would cap that as failure not when they quit or get fatigued but when they break position yeah when their form changes that's exactly right yeah we this is one of the tests we do with our patients and the the the the the excellent grade is two minutes in a full 90 degree squat um 90 degree yeah uh no better than 90. lower than 90 right so like parallel a thigh parallel squat sorry so Wi-Fi parallel um that's just the standard we picked and yeah but the failure as you said if you you know the goal is two minutes can you go two minutes and you you fail not when you give up you fail when you basically shoot your butt out lunge forward you know make a compensatory movement that is beyond that um yeah but we use that really nice we use that as a great test of strength without having to put people at risk totally yep yep so you could you could easily generate the day you can also do um so one of the things we haven't talked about yet is it's important that you're moving in multiple planes and so there's there's three major planes of movement which is frontal sagittal and transverse right which basically means you need to be moving like up and down like a squat or you need to be moving things away to you and towards you like a bench press and you also need to be moving things laterally so like a lateral lunge as well as twisting and rotation and so you want to pick a few things in these areas the other thing you want to keep in mind is single leg versus either split stance or unilateral and so there's no perfect number you have to hit here but you would want to select something across those three days where you're not doing everything is two foot supported so you mentioned one footed already else you could do step UPS you can do split squats you can do rear foot elevated split squats there's a single leg press single leg extension there's just a lot of ways you can do that so you'd want to keep kind of an eye on that going like all right is everything I'm using barbell and everything I'm using to okay maybe that's not ideal so maybe I'm going to use a kettlebell over here because I can actually do this this movement over here with a rotation or press okay great but now I'm going to pick dumbbell for this movement and this movement over here I'll use a machine lovely great and now you're in a really really a nice position where you're not getting held back so much by technical demands this person is only six months in a train you don't want their whole day being learning how to do a movement and then boom that 60 Minutes goes up but you also don't want to be like wow these are too hard to let's just stand machines the whole time that's right like that's not a long-term investment right so we want to invest a little bit in growth you know 20 60 is in what you need to be here twenty percent long-term development 20 other percent um is fun like that's how we generally think about that 60 20 20 split so that's how we split it so the last piece here at drop this thing up is I would finish every session with something that either gets close to a max heart rate or is a personal pain point so this is this is where my uh my uh I always close off with katsu and there's some intense pain and then it but my last thing is always two minutes of bfr on the air bike which combines two beautiful personal pieces of pain yeah so it is um what's the thing that they love to hate what's the area that they want to grow they hate their their triceps okay great like we're gonna finish the session with a tricep blast we're just gonna smash it they did smell like feel like yep okay I got the thing done one thing people hate is when they're not listened to and when they come in they're like I like I want to get my my glutes in to get stronger or whatever and you're just like they're working them but they're not real so it's the Double Down concentrate on that yep and it's one little session right it could be whatever um we used to do this on Saturdays with the NFL players because Saturdays were mostly a recovery regeneration day which means they would never show up and so it was like Hey Saturdays are a gun show we're doing nothing but biceps and triceps like we would just do and we would be like all right who showed up today you pick one you pick one you pick one you pick a choice if you like everyone got to pick one and we just do these ridiculous made up circuits just like things right and then it would all just get super pumped in their arms and it was like all right I'll go do 45 minutes go see your PT go see your eight athletic trainer like you know your work done right so like people are people that give them a little bit of what they want um and just make sure in one of those days we touch high heart rate one way or the other and when you touch high heart rate um a a classic way that one might do this would be a Tabata type exercise where it's basically four minutes of you know intense work uh what are some what are some ways that you might recommend getting high heart rate in there do you do it do you want to do it with jumping you want to do it on a bike on a rowing machine what do you like to use we typically want to keep away from eccentrics so you know I don't love this is where CrossFit has done very poorly right it's just like you're putting in the position of fatigue in very risky situations in a lot of times right um so something that's for this individual let me again I'm clarifying that comment was regarding this individual you're probably not a great thing right other individuals it's fantastic you should still do it um so yeah air bikes are fine rowers are fine here um if you really want to you can actually do specific breath hold manipulation so if you just alter breathing so this is CO2 tolerance CO2 can get very very high you can deal with the suck without doing any physical work this is all the stuff we've done at xpt live in the pool um you know we've done like you can do a lot of stuff with with weights under water and just changing what you're doing with ventilation and you can get to a level of pain very quickly that requires very little physical trauma so there are lots of ways we can play that um simple examples would be do a 10 second Sprint on the bike and then go into a breath hole like you want to see your heart rate shoot up incredibly fast and then you're going to come back out of that you've got 30 seconds but you're going to go nasal only recovery breath how long breath hold by the way well you're gonna see the the goal is maximum okay in other words yeah so so go 10 seconds all out breath hold until failure 30 second recovery nasal only how many rounds of that let's see if you can get three okay like one might be the answer though like you might go like I'm not even closer ready to do this again two might be there um you can also do that inhale hold prior to the Sprint so you can do an inhale hold breath in hold and then hit that Sprint um yeah that means there's just a ton of ways you can get to playing with CO2 tolerance if that's part of the equation and again you'll see your heart rate get up to damn near maximum and it doesn't require much physical work so if you need to spare a joints you need to spare soreness you can just spare energy but you want to get that see missing um there's lots of tricks that way you can play so Andy and listeners I I think we have some really bad news and some really good news the really bad news is we've probably been talking for three hours and um I think yeah one case study yeah we've got one case study done and we haven't talked about a ton of physiology that I had in my 10 pages of notes here um what's really sad is I had 10 pages of single space notes that I wanted to talk about and we got into the first I'm not being facetious we got into the first half of the first page at which point I threw it over and totally rerouted everything we were going to talk about based on your answer and we have nine and a half pages of notes plus a whole bunch of questions that we got that we didn't get to here so the bad news is there's zero chance we're going to finish this podcast now the the good news is I hope you will come back and we can do this again relatively soon so that listeners can have a part two of this discussion uh you know hopefully within a month or two months of part one is that something you're I'm gonna put you on the spot and ask you this you're willing to give us another another episode here well we I think we can I'll talk about you talk to your people talk to my people and then and then we'll figure it out all right Andy this has been um super interesting uh like literally we'll be putting a few of these things into practice tomorrow for me in the gym and I'm if I'm putting things into practice that are in just the you know purview of the guy who's never exercised I can't wait to get into kind of more my phenotype which is hey I do exercise but how do I take it to the next level so yeah there's um there's a lot of interesting things we can do when we get to that fun conversation about um everything from like if like if you want to see behind the veil of professional athletes you want to see what they really do for sleep you want to see if they really do for nutrition you want to see if they really do for training we can go down that route too yep well Andy this has been amazing thank you very much for your time your expertise and uh I'll see you again in uh hopefully a month or two that was good man thank you all right [Music]

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 618,691

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Id: ED8pq0uBct8

Length: 175min 15sec (10515 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023