ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab Guest Series, where I and an
expert guest discuss science and science-based
tools for everyday life. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Andrew Huberman
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode marks
the first in a series with Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Andy Galpin is a professor
of kinesiology at Cal State University Fullerton and
one of the foremost world experts on the science
and application of methods to increase strength, speed,
endurance, hypertrophy, and various other aspects of
fitness, exercise, and sports performance. Across this six episode
series, Dr. Andy Galpin pulls from his expertise
working with everything from professional athletes
to recreational exercisers and teaches us the mechanisms,
logic, and specific protocols for how to achieve any of the
number of different exercise adaptations that I mentioned
a moment ago, ranging from strength to
endurance, hypertrophy, and everything in between. We get really far into details,
but at all times paying attention to the
macroscopic issues. That is, how to create
a program for endurance or strength or
hypertrophy or speed, or one that combines
all of those. We also talk about
supplementation and nutrition and how to maximize recovery
for each of the different types of exercise adaptations. During today's
episode, Dr. Galpin teaches us how to assess
our level of fitness and, more generally, how to
think about fitness so that we can best achieve our fitness
exercise and performance goals. Dr. Professor Andy Galpin. Super excited to have you here. You're such an
immense treasure trove of information on physical
training and optimizing for specific goals and outcomes
with physical exercise. I'm curious, however--
so many people have different levels of fitness. Some people are professional
athletes, of course, but most people are not. Many people exercise regularly. Some people are trying
to do that more. Some people are doing too much
of that; they're overtraining, they're not recovering enough. If we were to take a step back
and each and every one of us ask how fit are we, with
the word fit, of course, being a very broad
encompassing word, could encompass endurance,
certainly it does, strength, the
ability to run fast, even if for short distances, it
might even include hypertrophy or directed hypertrophy, trying
to balance one's musculature to offset asymmetries, recover
from injuries, et cetera. How should I, or anyone
else for that matter think about their
level of fitness? I know my resting
heart rate, but what do I do in terms of really
assessing whether or not I'm as fit as I could be
and should be both for sake of health and performance? And here I'm asking you the
question not as an athlete, but as somebody
who's been pretty consistent as an exerciser. But if we were to throw our
arms around this question of how do we assess our
fitness, what would be the different
levels of assessment that we should
think about and do? ANDY GALPIN: When it
comes to exercise, people generally have
two major goals in mind. Goal number one is achieving
some sort of appearance. Right? This is I want to be big,
or I want to not be too big, or I want to be lean. Something, right? It doesn't matter
what that goal is, but there is an aesthetic
component to almost everybody. They want to look a certain
way or not look a certain way. The other one is functionality. So I want to be able to
perform a certain way. Now, again, that definition
differs per person. So I want to be
better at strength, I want to be better
at mobility, I want to be able to have energy
throughout the day, whatever it is. So there's some sort
of appeal to aesthetic and there's some sort of
appeal to functionality. So within both of
those categories, we want to be in a position
where we can understand, where do I need to go with
my exercise training so that I can be as
fit and as healthy and achieve these
goals that I want now, as well as be in a position
where I can maintain them for a long period of time. So this blends both
immediate goals. So say you're just interested
in squatting a lot of weights. Say you're interested in
running a 5K time the best run. It doesn't matter. It blends that with the desire
to have a long wellness span, to be fit throughout life,
to achieve all those things for as long as possible. So then the question
kind of comes back to saying, well, how do
I know which area I need to focus on the most, and why
am I not achieving these goals, or how can I get there
more effectively. And if we look at
the big picture, we have to understand that there
are several major components to physical fitness that
are going to be required in all of these categories. And to achieve that, there
are a handful of components that have to happen to be
able to hit those goals. Now there are infinite methods. So the saying we actually use
here a lot is, the methods are many, but the concepts are few. So what I'd love to do
today is, over the course of our discussion is hit
exactly what those concepts are and then cover a whole
bunch of different methods. And we could do that for hours. But we'll cover a number
of them for various goals. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So
one of the reasons I went into neuroscience and
not into exercise science is because of this thing
neuroplasticity, the nervous system's
ability to adapt. But the more time
I spend with you and the more I learn from you,
I realize that many, if not all of the organ systems of our body
have this incredible ability to adapt. And when we're talking
about physical exercise, there are incredible
adaptations that, of course, involve
the nervous system, but also involve muscle and
connective tissue and so many other cell
types and tissues. That said, when we
talk about fitness, what are the major
types of adaptations that underlie this thing
that we call fitness? And later, I know
we're going to get into how different
forms of exercise can trigger different
types of adaptations, but what are the major
adaptations that one can create in their body using exercise? ANDY GALPIN: There
are many reasons why one should exercise,
and we could perhaps cover that later in our chats. But the physiological
adaptations can be bucketed really
in a nine areas. So the very first one is what
I call skill or technique. So just learning to move
better, more efficiently with a specific position
and timing and sequence, or whatever that is. This could be running
more effectively, this could be practicing
a skill like shooting a ball or an implement,
swinging a golf club. Anything like that, I call
that skill development. The second one is
speed, so this is simply moving at a higher
velocity or with a better rate of acceleration. That's very similar to the
next one, which is power. And power is speed
multiplied by force. The next one then, of
course, on top of that, is force or strength. So those are really
synonymous terms. How effectively can
you move something? Now, this is often
confused-- strength, rather-- as muscular endurance. So what I mean by
that is strength truly is a marker of what's the
maximum thing you can move or what's the maximum amount of
force you can produce one time. It's not how many repetitions
in a row you can do. That's actually another
one of our adaptations called muscular endurance. So that is typically under
the order of say five to 25, maybe 50 repetitions. Think of a classic how many
push-ups can you do in a row? How many sit-ups can
you do in a minute? Things like that are
muscular endurance. Muscular endurance
tends to be localized, so this is specific
to just, say, your triceps and your deltoids. It's not a overall
cardiovascular endurance marker or anything like that. So that's strength, number four. Number five is
muscle hypertrophy. And this is the
first time now we're talking about an
appearance rather than a functional outcome. So moving better, moving
faster, and moving heavier are indicators of how
well you can move. This is the first one
that's just simply how big is your muscle? And that's muscle
hypertrophy or muscle size. After that is
muscular endurance. So this is how many
repetitions you can typically do of a movement. So think of how many
push ups in a row you can do, how many sit
ups in a minute you can do, things that are
typically in five to 50 repetition sort of range. And it is often or it is
almost always local muscle. So what I mean by
that is a push-up test is really how many
reps that your triceps and pecs and deltoids can do. It is not a
cardiovascular endurance. It is not a global
physiological endurance. It's specific to, typically,
one or a few muscle groups at a time. And this is why you have to do
multiple tests for every group there. After that, now we've moved
into number seven, which is what I call anaerobic capacity. This is more synonymous
with maximum heart rate. And now we're actually
looking at, rather than a single movement
or muscle group, it is a total
physiological limitation. So it is the maximum
amount of work you can do in, say,
30 to 45 seconds, maybe even up to 120
seconds, of all-out work. Think of your classic
interval type of stuff here. So how much work can you
do at a maximum rate, where you're going to
enter tremendous amounts of global fatigue? The next past that is
maximal aerobic capacity. And this is probably
actually something like in the eight to 15
minute range, where you're going to reach probably
both a maximum heart rate as well as a true
VO2 max, which we'll talk a lot more about
what that is later. So that is different
from the previous one, where you can't reach this
in a matter of seconds. It simply takes multiple
minutes to get to a position to where your VO2
max is actually going to be
sufficiently challenged or an indicator there. And then the last
one, number nine, is what I call long duration. And this is just your ability
to sustain submaximum work for a long period of
time with no breaks, no reduction whatsoever. This is often called steady
state training or a lot of people just think of
this when they think of, quote, unquote, "cardio,"
but your ability to continue to move without
any breaks or change or drop is the last and
final adaptation. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And for
long distance steady state, I'm guessing it exceeds
15 minutes because-- ANDY GALPIN: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--the previous one was eight to 15 minutes or so. What sort of rate ranges are
we talking about in terms of this long duration? ANDY GALPIN: Well, that's
actually wonderful. You're going to be
anything past 15 minutes. So really, if you look at
a minimal number there, it's generally 20 minutes
of what we're looking for, but a more typical would
be 20 to 60 minutes. But anything past
that would still be limited by your
long-duration endurance, so your ability to
sustain work over time. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. So given that there are nine
different major adaptations that can be induced with
exercise of specific types, is there any one global
test or assessment that people can take or do
that allows them to determine what level of ability, of
fitness they have in each and every one of these
nine different categories? ANDY GALPIN: There are
probably dozens or more tests that you can do for each one
of those nine categories. And what I would
actually like to do is walk you through
my favorites for each and giving you both the
scientific gold standard-- so if you have the ability,
unlimited resources, what should you go do? As well as some that
are equipment-free, that are cost-free, things that
anyone can do across the world. In addition to that,
I want to walk you through what those
numbers should be, how do you identify if you're
really poor in something or if you're great. And then if you aren't as
good, maybe, in a category and you want to
get better at it, exactly what to do
in terms of protocols for how to achieve optimal
results in each of those steps. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So I noticed
in your list of the nine different adaptations to
exercise that you did not mention fat loss
or health-promoting benefits, which are two reasons
that a lot of people exercise. Was there a specific reason
that you did not mention those? ANDY GALPIN: Absolutely. It's because those things are
actually not specific training styles. They are byproducts
of these nine. So what I mean by that is if you
understand how fat loss occurs, which we can
certainly talk about, you'll realize some of
these nine protocols are effective for fat
loss and some are not. General health is
the same thing. When we understand
what it actually means to be healthy from a
physiological perspective, then the rationale
for what to train for is going to determine itself. So what I mean is,
looking at things like, in order to be healthy, you have
to have sufficient strength, you have to have
cardiovascular fitness, and you have to have sufficient
muscle and et cetera. Therefore, training
for one's health is determined by
those restrictions. So for you, Andrew, you may need
to do more strength training to be healthy, where me,
because I'm strong already, way stronger than you, I may
not need to do as much strength training. So our, quote, unquote,
"health-based protocols" are based on our current status
or limitations in physical fitness among these nine areas. So what I would
like to do today is to cover a brief history
of exercise science. And the reason is it's going to
explain a lot about why people are not getting the goals
in their exercise programs that they want as
well as gives you very specific direction
about what to do instead. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I can't wait
to hear all the things that I'm doing incorrectly and to
have you help me remedy that. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is also separate from Dr.
Galpin's teaching and research roles at Cal State Fullerton. It is, however, part of
our desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that
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history of exercise science informs the mistakes
that we are all making and how to remedy those
mistakes, I'm curious as to whether or not you have
any favorite one or two studies that point to a
naturally occurring example of how people can become
very fit in one area and not another. I'm familiar with seeing
endurance athletes that apparently have
terrific endurance but, at least to my eye, don't
look like they are particularly strong. I'm also familiar with seeing
individuals that are very, very strong, particularly
on social media, but that don't look
like they could walk up a flight of stairs,
much less run a mile. Do you have any
examples of studies in or outside the
laboratory that point to that in a concrete way? ANDY GALPIN: There's
a lot to discuss here, but I'll answer really clear. If you look across the
literature-- and this is actually back to as
early as the mid 1950s. In fact, it actually goes
back previous to that, to the Harvard Fatigue
Lab, 1927 to 1947 area. People actually were
advocating, at that point, a combination of strength
training and endurance. ANDREW HUBERMAN: In the 1920s? ANDY GALPIN: Way back then. In fact, it actually
goes prior to that. In the late 1880s, there is
scientific evidence back then. It became more well-developed
in the mid 1950s and '60s. In fact, there was
the initial stages of what's called the Exercise
As Medicine Movement, which is the movement now, but the
initial stages of that actually route back to the 1950s. And I could actually go
into that whole discussion and the story of how
that all came about, but that's the Health
Is Wealth mantra that came from the 1950s, from
the scientific community then. All those data points
are going to suggest you need a combination of
some sort of broad strength training and broad endurance. Now, if you have a specific
goal five months from now, you want to compete in a race
or hit a certain physique thing, that's fine to focus
on one area of training. Certainly, if you're an
athlete, that's different. But if you want
to maximize health and overall functionality
throughout time, it needs to be a combination. And to really, really
highlight this, I can actually talk
about a couple of studies that I've done. One of them we actually
did in Stockholm, Sweden. So I did this at the Karolinska
Institute, which you probably are aware of. It's actually one of
the founding places of all of exercise physiology. Generally, it started there. It was called something
different back then, but really, our
entire field came out of Stockholm and the
Karolinska Institute. And we worked with a whole
bunch of cross-country skiers that were in their 80s and 90s. And so they were competitive
skiers in the 1940s and '50s, and they had been
skiing competitively for that entire duration. So you're talking 50 to 60
consecutive years of competing. So these are 80 to 90-year-olds,
living alone and healthy. And we compared them to
a group of individuals here in America who are the same
age but were not exercising. And what we wanted
to do is to see and of look at, what are these
lifelong endurance individuals? What do they look like? And when we brought them into
the lab, which is, by the way, amazing, to do a VO2 max
test on a 92-year-old, especially in a language
that they don't speak, you can imagine, you're
doing this in the hospital. And you're running
people through, this is a cycling task. And so for a VO2 max test,
you have a mask on your face, you're hooked up
to a metabolic cart so we can collect
all the gases that are coming out of
your mouth, and you're chanting these people on. And basically, every
minute, the workload gets harder and
harder and harder until you can't complete it. And we're doing this
in a cardiology center, and the cardiologists are
usually waiting for their heart rate to get slightly
elevated and they stop them because they're
85, 86 years old. And not only are we
not stopping them, but we are screaming in
their ears, just go, go, go. ANDREW HUBERMAN: In
Swedish or English? ANDY GALPIN: In English. And then the translator--
but it doesn't take a lot of translation
when someone's screaming at your face, go, go, go. So we ran them through a
whole bunch of VO2 max tests. And we did the same
thing for those folks back here in America. And what was incredibly
clear from that study was the VO2 max-- you can think about
these numbers, and this is what's
called relative. And the relative
terms are milliliters per kilogram per minute. And so a standard
number is about 18, is what we call the
line of independence. So if your VO2 max is below
18 milliliters per kilogram per minute, it's very hard
for you to live by yourself. So your fitness is
so low, you probably are going to need to have
somebody living with you or you'll need to be in some
sort of assisted living home. So if you are in a VO2
max of 20 or 21 or 22, you're not below that
line of independence, but you're on that threshold. And so what we found was
our folks here in America, the group average was
right around that number. So they were living at
home, by definition. We picked them to be
people living by themselves in their 80s and not
in a living home, but they didn't
have any bandwidth. So if they got a cold or
they had anything pop up where they lost a
little bit of fitness, they were going to
drop below that line and would probably have to go
to some sort of assisted living situation. The folks in Stockholm, the
cross-country skiers, the group average was much closer
to 35 to 38 milliliters per kilogram per minute. Now, that number is
about the VO2 max you would find for a
normal college male. And so these folks that
were literally 80 or 90-- the joke, if a sabertooth tiger
ran in the room or whatever and it chased it
down and we all had to run to see who
didn't get eaten alive, the college men would
probably have gotten eaten before the 90-year-olds. And in one case, we had
a 92-year-old individual. And I think his VO2
max was 38, which was, in our estimation,
a world record, the highest VO2 max for
somebody over the age of 90. ANDREW HUBERMAN: May I ask what
is the typical resting heart rate for somebody very
fit, like these older Swedish cross-country skiers? If somebody has-- let's
say their number is 35 millimeters per kilogram
in this VO2 max test, but since most of
us don't have access to that kind of equipment, but
we can measure our pulse rate. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: What was
a typical resting heart rate, resting pulse rate? ANDY GALPIN: Sub 60. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Sub 60. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. I mean, typically
that's a good number to go off of for anybody,
regardless of age. Any time I see
somebody above that, I'm going to start
asking questions. Certainly above-- you'll see
in the literature people will say 60 to 80 is normal, and I
don't agree with that at all. If your resting heart rate
is 75 beats per minute, there's either something
going on or you're not fit. ANDREW HUBERMAN: How
much cross-country skiing were they doing, on
average, in the previous, let's say, if we
take the previous 20 years since they'd been
longtime cross-country skiers. Divide that by 20 years. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah, ANDREW HUBERMAN: On average,
are these people cross-country skiing five hours a day, two
hours a day, an hour a day? ANDY GALPIN: Yeah, that's
actually a good question. I don't remember. It's been many years,
but they were not doing it every single day. And the volume would
not have shocked you. It was the consistency over
50 years that got them there. Now, obviously, these
people were, again, world champions and Olympic
gold medalists in the 1940s and '50s, so they were elite. They just continued
consistently over time, but it wasn't a shocking
amount of physical fitness. They also didn't go out of
their way to train hard. They were busy chopping wood. They were busy doing a
number of other things. And then they just happened
to do some of these races and ski along the way, but
it wasn't a crazy amount too where you're like,
oh, that's great, but I could never
hit that number. It was something
much more reasonable. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So is the takeaway to be consistent about getting
cardiovascular exercise? And we can define what
"consistent" means in terms of days per
week a little bit later, and I know we will. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: What
are some other examples? I love these examples
from the real world. ANDY GALPIN: So here's
the downside, though. So I only told you
about the VO2 max. What I didn't tell you
about is their leg strength and functionality. And that part was
no more superior than it was their counterparts
who were not exercisers. So what that showed really,
really clearly-- and many other studies have been
done since then that look at the classic,
what we call lifelong endurance exercisers. You will see, in
general, their VO2 max, their cardiovascular function,
their resting heart rate, their blood pressure. It will be markedly healthier
than folks who don't exercise. It is extraordinarily
clear that type of exercise is very important
for chronic disease management, no doubt about it. However, it is not sufficient
for overall global health because it does almost
nothing for leg strength, for any other marker
of health, which we can talk about, what are
the things that are actually going to predict mortality,
morbidity than most. So was a big smashing
indication that's like, hey, this is great. However, you're leaving
things on the table for your overall health. Now, one could
argue, they're 80, and they're doing pretty well,
but they weren't doing as well in these areas. And so a study we
did later, actually, as a follow-up was looking
at monozygous twins. So this is actually interesting. Being a scientist, this
is a classic example of one of my graduate students
who had been in my lab for probably three
or four years. And she was in our single
fiber physiology lab. And you can imagine, she's
isolating individual muscle fibers, from an athlete,
one by one with a tweezer. And she's going to do several
thousand individual cells. So you're down there for hours,
and things happen down there. You kind of lose your mind. And she was going on one day
with one of my colleagues and just talking, and
she's like, oh yeah, my uncle is really, really
fit and something or other and then. Oh yeah, he's a twin. And I was like, oh,
is he a monozygous? And she's like, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: For
those that don't know, monozygous are identical twins. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah,
which is interesting. So you basically have--
what I'm setting up here is this is the perfect
exercise scientific experiment. Monozygous, identical twins mean
they have the exact same DNA. So an egg was fertilized,
split, and then two humans grew out of that with
the exact same DNA. And so now we can
start answering the question, well, yeah, OK. What about, maybe, these
cross-country skiers? Maybe they were
just genetic freaks. Maybe it didn't matter. It's like some
people have-- well, genetics are always a
component to it, but how much? Well, now we have a
scenario lining up where it's like, wait a minute. You have monozygous twins. So we have a replica of a
human being, exact same DNA. The only differences that we
would see in their physiology now would be due to
lifestyle circumstances. Interesting. So monozygous twin
dad and uncle, right? Uh-huh. Great. Do they exercise? Well, one of them does. He's a lifelong endurance
exercise, runner, cyclist, swimmer, Ironman,
all these things. What about the other one? Nope. He doesn't exercise at all. And at that point, I wanted
to kill my graduate student because I'm like, you've been in
my lab for three years or more, probably, and
you've never told me that in your household is the
perfect scientific experiment for exercise you
could ever create. And Jesus, the look on her
face when my colleague and I were staring at her. She's just like, oh my god. So I'm like, call
them right now. They are coming into the lab. Fly them in from Chicago. I don't care what we have to do. We're getting them in. And so I wanted to--
actually, going back to the model that was first
developed by the Harvard Fatigue Lab, one thing
that's interesting about that community is
they started off with the concept of trying
to examine human performance through a holistic lens. And so it was the antithesis
of looking at either organ by organ, so we're
going to only look at the cardiovascular system. We're only going to
look at skeletal muscle. And then we're saying, we're
looking at this entire picture. And so that model, we wanted to
carry through in these twins. And I said, all right, I want
to bring them in the lab, but I'm not just going
to look at one system. I want to do everything. So we took stool samples. We took blood. We did vertical jump tests. We did maximum strength tests. We did MRIs of muscle mass. We did VO2 max tests. We did efficiency stuff. We did genetic testing. We did an IQ test. We did psychological battery. We wanted to look at
everything to figure out of these things, what
differ between the twins? And if so, the second key
question there is, by how much? So can I improve my VO2 max? Sure. Everyone knows
that, but how much? Can it change by 5%, 80%? Where is the number? And so putting some
quantification on this was very important. And so again, we
had another example of a classic endurance-only
training paradigm compared to a non. So this is a person
who's, I think, he's truck driver by vocation. I think, actually, he drove for
a potato chip company, which was even funnier. The endurance athlete
actually was great because, like any
endurance people, he had physical books of
all of his training mileage for the last 35 years. And we just went
through them, and we calculated the total
amount of miles he ran, his averages, his
heart rates per time. We had this unbelievable
thing, what races he was in. He had the documentation. He was just totally nuts,
something that endurance people are like shaking their head
right now going, oh, yeah. I got that too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And endurance
folks are pretty nerdy. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. Super nerdy, right? So it was great because now we
could validate, as close as one could, to actually how much
you ran and things like that. So they had about
a 35-year discord. They both exercised up
through high school. About 18, they stopped
doing it, and by the time I got them in the lab,
they're in their mid-50s. So it was about 35
years of difference. And when we ran them
through the testing, if you look at the measures
that were similar to the Sweden study, it was almost identical. The exercising twin was
significantly better at things like a lipid
panel, resting heart rate, blood pressure, VO2 max. Any of those markers, as
predicted, were much better. What was very
interesting, though, was the things that
were in the middle. First of all, their total
amount of muscle mass was almost identical,
to the gram, within the margin of error of
a DEXA scan could possibly ever be. The non-exerciser, though,
was a little bit fatter. So the difference in
actual body weight was explained almost entirely
by body fat or non-lean tissue, really, same sort of deal. So OK. No one's surprised
there that the exerciser was a little bit
leaner, even though it didn't change total amount
of muscle mass at all. When we looked at some of
the more functional tests and we looked at things
like muscle quality-- so this is a metric you
can get from an ultrasound. You can kind of think
about this as how much fat is inside the tissue,
which is sometimes an advantage for an endurance
athlete to have a little bit more of what are
called intramuscular triglycerides because it's a
fuel directly in the tissue. But in general,
the muscle quality he was not in favor
of the exerciser. If you looked at the
performance testing and if you looked at strength,
it favored the non-exerciser. And so now, again, we
have the same finding we saw in our Sweden study,
but in identical twins. And so it really, really
highlighted the fact that if you want to move
forward with optimal health, simply picking one silo is
not going to get you there. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
One silo meaning just running, just cycling? ANDY GALPIN: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Does this
mean that the twin that did not exercise could jump higher
or win an arm wrestling competition? Not that that's a
vital thing to be able to do, but just in
terms of measuring strength, it's our isometric strength. Was the non-exercising twin
stronger or at least as strong as their exercising twin? ANDY GALPIN: Yes,
particularly in grip strength. Yeah. And any of the measures like
the vertical jump, leg extension power, and a number
of things, they often favored the non-exerciser,
which you're still a little bit of a
chicken and egg. You don't know if, necessarily,
the endurance training reduced that other twin's strength. It doesn't even
really matter, per se. I think the highlight
of it is, can you change some of these
metrics of VO2 max? Yeah, not even close. These things are very responsive
regardless of your genetics. Your genetics will give you a
starting place very clearly. Even the non-exerciser
was a pretty healthy guy. So they were in a good spot. Mid-50s, doesn't
exercise, doesn't really pay attention to
his diet at all, and he was in a
pretty good shape. However, if you want to actually
move progress and move forward high functionality, you have
to do something besides just run, just distance run. Now, I could say the same
thing for strength training. That alone--
because I don't want to make this thing like I'm
saying endurance exercises. It worked. In both cases,
both these studies, those folks were much
better off in metrics that are incredibly
important to mortality, how long you're going to
live, VO2 max, et cetera. It's just not going to get
there in terms of strength. We took a look at
muscle fiber physiology as well, which is
very interesting. So what I mean is
there's generally two types of muscle fibers,
fast-twitch and slow-twitch. And one of the things that
is a hallmark of aging is a selective reduction
in fast-twitch fibers. And that's because it's
difficult to activate them unless you're doing
high-force activities. You're going to activate
slow-twitch fibers doing almost any activity of daily living. And so they stay around. Fast-twitch fibers,
unless you're doing something of high
force or going, not be used. And they're not going
to be kept around. And that's a
problem because when you look at things like
the need for leg strength through aging, the ability to
catch yourself from a fall, these things are
incredibly important. If you don't have
fast-twitch fibers, you don't have the speed to get
your foot out in front of you on time, and you don't
have the eccentric strength to stop the fall from happening. And so if you look across,
again, the aging literature, they're very clear
about the importance of maintaining strength and
fast-twitch fibers over time. So we know that this is
an important distinction here overall. And people will often talk
about, how much of that is genetically determined? Can I change my fiber type? And the answer there
is resoundingly yes. And can I change
it with exercise? And the answer is,
absolutely you can. And then the next
question is, how much? So now, again, we're going
to see an order of magnitude. In general, without going
too far down an area that maybe we can
save for later, each one of your
muscles in your body has a different percentage of
fast-twitch and slow-twitch, for example, your calf. If you look at your soleus,
which is the smaller one that goes in the back, that's
generally mostly slow-twitch, typically 80% or so slow-twitch. The gastroc, which is the
other one right next to it. So if you were to point your toe
next to your face and that part that kind of flexes out
in the middle pops out, that's your gastroc. That is almost the inverse. So it's generally 80%
fast-twitch, maybe 20% slow-twitch. Generally, anything anti
postural or postural, rather, anti gravity,
spinal erectors, things that are meant to keep
you up or moving all day, are going to be slow-twitch. And things like your hamstrings,
which are for explosion, are going to be fast-twitch. Well, we biopsied the
quad in these individuals. And in that muscle, it's
generally about 50/50, fast-twitch, slow-twitch,
as a really broad number. Well, one of the things that we
found was in the non-exerciser, it was almost textbook
what you would predict. It was about 50%
or so slow-twitch, a little bit of percentage of
fast-twitch, and then about 20% or what are these
called hybrid fibers, which are a hallmark
of an activity. All right. Great. In the exerciser, it was
about 95% slow-twitch. And so it's extremely
clear-- again, I don't know if maybe their set
point was a little bit higher towards that, and the
non-exerciser devolved down to his place or the other
one, but it doesn't matter. I mean, you're going from
40% slow-twitch in one case to 95% slow-twitch
in another case. It shows you that the limits
of physiological adaptation are darn near boundless
given enough exposure. In this case, 35 years of
extremely consistent training, and his muscle
morphology was completely different than his identical
twin with the exact same DNA. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Those are two
beautiful examples of people doing endurance work
for a number of years and what that
gives them in terms of benefits and functionality. Has the opposite experiment
been done or observed, where somebody's
just weight lifted or just sprinted for
a number of years? I don't know that there's
a identical twin control. That's a little-- ANDY GALPIN: No. I wish we had a third twin. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--too much to ask for. Right, triplets. So triplets out there, if you're
exercising in different ways or people who have
triplets, maybe you assign one kid to be a runner,
one kid to be a weightlifter, and the other one
to be sedentary. Please don't do
experiments like that. But the expectation,
as I understand it, would be that the person
that sprints or that does heavy squats, explosive
work, would then have more fast-twitch
muscle fibers in their quad. And their non-exercising
counterpart would have fewer. That would make sense. But what happens if you assess
the endurance level in somebody who's just done strength
training or just sprinted? ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. So we don't have those
data specifically. We're actually just starting
to have studies come out on lifelong strength trainers. And there's actually
a very good reason for this, which is a whole
story we can get into, but the quick
answer is, we don't have a lot of people
who've been lifting weights for 30-plus years. We have a whole swath
of people who've been doing endurance
training for that long. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Is that
because fewer people have been weight training or are
the weight trainers all dead? ANDY GALPIN: You've got
to go back to 1953, 1954. You had two major things
happen that changed the entire course of exercise
physiology and exercise science and, really, exercise
as we know it. It's important to understand
the history of our field. A lot of the questions
I get are based on false assumptions of what
exercise can and can't do. As an example,
questions like momentum. Should I use momentum or
that's cheating, right? Or it doesn't work. It compromises my results. It's actually totally untrue. There are excellent reasons
when you should use momentum when you lift. There are reasons
when you should not. It is sometimes very
beneficial to go fast with the exercise repetitions. Sometimes very slow and
controlled is better. Any question I
get-- in fact, I'm very infamous for always
responding with, "It depends." The reason I say it depends
is it depends on the goal. When you're training for speed
or power or muscular endurance, the answer to some of these
very common question differs. What people fail
to realize is they think they're asking the right
question because they don't understand this history, what's
being planted in your brain subconsciously, is
driving that question. And it's not necessarily
the right one. So if we walk through
that a little bit, you'll see what
that field has led. Why you think
certain things matter when they actually don't or
maybe your assumptions are incorrect and then exactly
what to do about them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim this special offer. ANDY GALPIN: So
in 1953, 1954, you had Roger Bannister breaking
the four-minute mile, so subfour-minute mile. And then you also had Sir Edmund
Hillary and then his sherpa, Norgay, summit Everest in the
same, basically, two-year span. That exact same year after
that was the formation of what's called the American
College of Sports Medicine. Now, that is still around today. It is the preeminent group
for this Exercise As Medicine. So if you're interested
in things like exercise for obesity prevention, for
cancer treatment, for things like that-- it's not
really sports medicine. It's more for
clinical exercise-- that's the place to go, American
College of Sports Medicine. So we have this
launching of both a ton of people wanting to start
doing endurance exercise and start swimming and
cycling and running. And then you have a launch
of people coming off of the back of the
Harvard Fatigue Lab. So the fatigue lab
actually shut down in 1947. So you have these people
interested in physical fitness, but nowhere to go. Well, all those people left
the Harvard fatigue. lab and started their own
labs at other places. So you've launched
the careers of people like Dave Costill
and John Holloszy and some of these very famous
exercise physiologists. And they start
building laboratories. And we start, for
the first time ever, studying the
science of exercise. So years go by, and
these people happen. The 1960s the 1970s is what
we call the runner's boom. So people start--
in fact, if you look at the numbers of people
who are doing marathons, it explodes through
these two-decade spans because it's like, we could
do these endurance feats. Notice both those feats were
endurance, running short term as well as going over there. No one has thought anything
about strength training and here's why. In the late 1880s, there was a
very famous physician named-- George Winship, I
think was his name, who was a big proponent
of strength training. Well, he died in the age of 50
something of a heart attack. And that terrified people of
strength training for 70 years because they're like,
whoa, whoa, whoa. That stuff will kill you
because he was a doctor, he was trying-- he was
running around the country, doing these exhibitions and
reporting it, and then he died. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's
sort of like Atkins-- ANDY GALPIN: 100%. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --dying. Although some people say
he died of a heart attack. Other people said he
fell through the ice into cold water. That's debated, but the
fact that a heavy proponent of a given nutrition
plan dies suddenly. ANDY GALPIN: Yep. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Not
good for business. ANDY GALPIN: So now the
little storm is brewing. 1940s-- and I'm going
back a little bit, but bear with me for a second-- there's a guy named
Peter Karpovich, and he's a scientist
out of Springfield, the decorated
physical education, PE, that's a legendary
place, Springfield College. And he is anti strength training
for a lot of the same reasons. In his entire career, he
talked about, don't do this. He's the one that launched these
ideas that strength training will make you lose
flexibility, it will be bad for kids,
all these things that we know now are
clearly not true. He's a proponent
of these things. And there is a
show that happened at Springfield College,
and a guy named Bob York-- and if you-- York Barbell,
that's still around today-- is going around the country and
putting on these exhibitions. They come to
Springfield, and it's sort of like a
new-age social media thing, where it's
like, the students know what's about to happen
because Karpovich shows up to this event. And everyone knows he
hates strength training. And everyone is like
waiting for it to end, just to see what he's going to say. So this whole
exhibition goes on, and these people are doing-- you've got to remember back
at the time, bodybuilding, weightlifting, power
lifting, strength, strongman, it's all the same thing. There's no differentiation yet. And it finishes, and
Karpovich stands up, and the crowd goes silent. And he just asks one question. And he just points
to one of the guys and says, scratch your back. And now he's just assuming
and waiting for the guy to be like, ah and
not be able to put his hand behind his head. And I think he pointed
to John Grimek, who's a famous bodybuilder. And he reached back and
scratched his back, no problem. And then they proceeded
to grab two dumbbells-- I think they were 50-pounds
dumbbells-- and do a backflip, standing backflip with
both in each hand. They started doing
the splits on stage, and they start performing all
kinds of physical function tests. And Karpovich is stunned. He's like, holy-- he
has nothing to say. He leaves there, and his
whole life has changed. All these things he was claiming
were shown, in his face, to be false. He does a 180 on his career. He starts running study after
study on strength training and starts finding
immediately there are no detriments
to strength training in terms of global health. Of course, you can do it
wrong and things like that. And in fact, here comes a
whole bunch of benefits. So through the 1950s,
while this thing is going on with
the endurance folks, no one's still strength
training because there's no record to see. There's no American
College of Sports Medicine. There's no societies. There's no science. We're not sure it's safe. And meanwhile, Karpovich is
just hammering study after study after study showing you it's
safe, it's safe, is safe, but it hasn't picked up yet. And then everything
changed in 1977. Thank you, Arnold
Schwarzenegger. He came out with the trifold. He hits you with pumping
iron, which I know you know that movie, right? Pumping Iron. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's
an interesting movie. Even for those not
interested in bodybuilding, it's a very interesting
movie because it really gives a window into not
just him, but the way in which weight training
started to show up as a regular practice. When I was growing up, the
only people who weight trained were people preparing for
football, bodybuilders, who basically didn't exist
in the town where I grew up. And the only people who did
yoga were yogis doing Bikram, but now you drive through
any major American city or European city and
there is yoga studios, there's gyms with free weights. ANDY GALPIN: Yup. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Arnold Schwarzenegger is largely responsible, I think,
for initiating that shift. ANDY GALPIN: Yup. Because think about it. He hit us with Pumping Iron,
Conan, and then The Terminator, almost in back-to-back--
very close, within years. So you've got this whole
cascade of the '70s of people running, cycling, and swimming. Now, science is starting to
come out that it's not dangerous and maybe, actually,
some benefit. And then boom. Not only is it not
bad for you, it can make you into a
real world superhero. I mean, think about the
psychology of a child growing up, watching
somebody like Conan. Think about what Batman looked
like in the 1950s and '60s. And then boom. I can look like that? Now, not everyone wants
to look like Arnold, but you see the power
that can land in people. No one had ever seen
or thought you can make your body transform like that. You could maybe be born
like that, but no chance. That's within the
grasp of all of you. ANDREW HUBERMAN: When
I was a kid growing up, one of my favorite books was The
Guinness Book of World Records. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
still have images in my mind of the
coldest animal. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah, sure. ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
longest lifespan, et cetera. And there was a picture in
there of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And you know what
his record was? It said, perfectly
developed man. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Which
is, as you point out, that isn't the physique
that most people aspire to. ANDY GALPIN: It
doesn't matter, though. ANDREW HUBERMAN: But it
did inspire this shift. The other thing about
resistance training that I think has a certain
allure for some people, men and women, is that it's one
of the few forms of exercise that because of the enhanced
blood flow to the muscle that occurs during the training,
the so-called "pump," it gives you a transient
but somewhat real window into what
your results will be. ANDY GALPIN: 100% ANDREW HUBERMAN: When you run
and you're gasping for air, you aren't
experiencing what it's like to be faster
than you are that day. ANDY GALPIN: That's correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: But
when you weight train, you get an aesthetic picture
into how your functionality and aesthetic will change. It disappears a
few hours later-- ANDY GALPIN: Sure. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --as the
so-called "pump" subsides, but it's a very interesting
form of exercise in that way. It's almost as if you go
in to learn a language and during the process of
learning, for brief moments, you're actually fluent, and
then it gets taken away. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So it puts
the dopamine carrot out in front of you. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: This
is just me hypothesizing as to why weight training
might have taken off the way that it did. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah, I
mean, it's like if you got paid every hour on the
hour when you were working. And then at the end
of the day, They take the money back,
but you still-- as the time clock is going on
in your day, you're looking up, and you're watching your bank
account grow in real life. You can see why it's so
addicting to those folks. So to finish the
story here, going back to your actual question answer. This is happening in the
late '70s, early '80s. And so now Joe Wieder,
all these gyms, they're exploding because
people want to look like that or they realize
they have the chance to change how they
physically look. That had never been
a reality before. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Mostly men
at that point, I'm guessing. ANDY GALPIN: Almost
exclusively, yeah, for a large number of reasons,
cultural acceptance, et cetera. Even with endurance stuff, you
could get fitter and run faster and that's better,
but it wasn't going to change how you looked
unless you were losing fat. Now you can change
how you look, which is so incredibly addicting. In fact, there's a
very famous quote. I think it was
actually Joe Wieder who said, "Show me one man
who wants to be strong, and I'll show you 10 who
want to look strong." It's like, that's
very, very powerful. There's this a whole-- there's tons of this
history I can go into, which is sort of
explaining to you. But now you know you're
in the mid- '80s, and you have what I
call my generation. So you have my generation,
who fall in love with strength training in the 1980s and
'90s, but there's really no scientific field for it. It's not really come about yet. The science of endurance
and exercise physiology is now humming along
at a massive rate because these people came
up in the '70s and '80s, and they're five, 10, 15
years in their career. They're producing. They're generating
graduate students. They're starting their own labs. And they exercise physiology,
still to this day, is 80% endurance, steady state
stuff almost exclusively. Well, now my generation,
you love sports. You love lifting. You love all these things. And now what we see happen
is the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan starts
picking up strength training. Ooh. That's on TV. He's on SportsCenter in the
mid 1990s, lifting weights. And we go back, actually,
to the late 1970s. And I'm not sure if
you're a football fan, but any football fan will
recognize the Nebraska Cornhuskers in
the 1970s and '80s changed how football's played. Well, the reason is because
they started strength training. And they started doing it with
a guy named Boyd Epley, who was the founder of the NFCA. So the National Strength
Conditioning Association is formed in the
late 1970s as well. So just like ASCM was developed
the year after those two events happened, 1978, the year
after Arnold comes out, boom, NFCA is formed. And now you have a scientific
organization dedicated to strength and conditioning. You've got NFL strength
conditioning coaches that are starting to come on board. You've got scientists that are
starting to come into labs. And strength conditioning
becomes a scientific field. Well, everything swings now,
from an exercise perspective, into bodybuilding. And so almost all
of the things-- in fact, we were sort of
talking before, I could run a whole bunch of tricks on you. And I could ask you a whole
bunch of questions about things that you think are
absolute standards or guarantees about training. I'm supposed to do this. I'm never supposed to do that. ANDREW HUBERMAN: For instance? ANDY GALPIN: For instance,
is it OK to train a muscle group on back-to-back days? Most people are at
home thinking, no, you're not supposed
to train a muscle-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: It
needs to recover. ANDY GALPIN: And
that's total nonsense. Other things like body part
split training, training one muscle group per day,
other things like cardio, endurance training
influencing, will it ruin my gains for my lift? All of these things are on
at a base of assumptions that come from bodybuilding. Now, that's a fantastic world,
but because everything started in the late 1970s
as bodybuilding, in terms of-- basically
strength training was that. Weightlifting and powerlifting
were not at all around. They were, but nobody cared. Again, show me someone
who wants to be strong. I'll show you 10 who
want to look strong. The physique thing
just dominated, and we're not getting
out of that yet. We're not all the way out of it. We're starting to, though,
because here's why. People started to realize,
this bodybuilding thing is fantastic. I can change my physique. I'm getting better, but
damn, these workouts take an hour and
a half, two hours. And I'm going to spend that
whole time on one or two body parts, which means I'm going to
have to lift six days a week, and I'm going to have
to do that consistently. Now all of a sudden, boom. Two hours on my elbow flexors. Damn, my elbow's
starting to hurt. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And
yet, my understanding is that it doesn't really
require two hours a day-- ANDY GALPIN: Not at all. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --of
training in order to get benefits, even
just for hypertrophy. ANDY GALPIN: Totally. But a lot of the
times, you're going to have to get
some amount of time in because you're spending
so much isolation. So we've gone away from
training movement, running as a movement,
cycling as a movement, training my biceps as a
muscle or muscle group, training my hamstrings
or a muscle group. That's not a human movement. So we've done a 180 in terms
of selecting the exercises from movement-based
prescription to now muscle group-based training. So when you're
isolating muscle groups, that means a whole
chunk of your body is really not doing
much throughout the day. So what happens if you're
doing, say, legs on Monday and you miss Monday
because you're on a flight? Now your legs have to
wait a whole other week, So this starts to
become problematic. People start getting beat up. People start realizing, I
actually don't feel that great. I'm not super fit. I'm sweating just
walking up the stairs. I'm out of breath. Why? Because all that
training, you've done nothing for your
cardiovascular fitness. You've done nothing to improve
heart rate, oxygenation, blood flow. And so that paradigm swung way
too hard into the exercising, especially lifting
weights, is single joint, often machine, often slow, often
high-volume isolation stuff. And that left a giant
opening of people going, well, wait a minute. What if you could
get in the gym, I can promise you the
same or better result in under 30 minutes? And, in fact, you'll
also feel better. You'll lose more weight. And that opened up
group exercise classes, kettlebell stuff, CrossFit
type of stuff, circuit training because you can
come in, you won't get so beat up because
the volume is lower, the time is much lower. You get multiple adaptations
at the same time. Great. The problem with that,
though, fast forward 10 years, is it started burying
people because you've now de-emphasized movement
quality, and you've overemphasized scores. So this is a classic example. If you go and you watch Pumping
Iron or any bodybuilder, you'll see if they're
doing a bicep curl, they don't even really pay
attention to the rep range. They don't really pay
attention to the load. They are looking
at their muscle. They're trying to
figure out, how do I get that thing to fire? They're squeezing. They're flexing. They're posing at
the end of every set. They're trying to figure out,
am I getting enough pumps? It is exclusively founded
on exercise quality. The rep brains, the
numbers, almost irrelevant. When you go to the other
model, exercise technique, it doesn't matter. Just get the most
amount of weight up or the amount of reps
or the fastest time, et cetera, et cetera. High-intensity. ANDREW HUBERMAN: This
would be CrossFit. I've walked past some CrossFit. I've done two CrossFit classes. ANDY GALPIN: I don't
want to get sued. So you said "CrossFit." I didn't. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Oh,
no I enjoyed them. I definitely felt like
I was working hard. ANDY GALPIN: Oh, you will. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
observed a lot of people in very close proximity
doing Olympic lifts and doing kipping-- that's where you kick
your legs, folks, say, sort of like bucking and
kipping type pull-ups. No. I enjoyed it. It wasn't for me
for the long term, but it did seem that there was
a lot of ballistic movement in close proximity
to other people. So the hazard to me
seemed more about that than the actual movement. ANDY GALPIN: Well, again,
the point I'm setting up here is, that was actually a
really brilliant solution for a lot of the problems
the classic bodybuilding hypertrophy introduced. So it got away from
isolation movements and got people doing
big movements, which are more effective,
generally better. It got people doing
things fast and explosive. That's more athletic. That is more important
for longevity. It solved a lot of the problems. Joint health wasn't
getting crashed. The issue they went with is they
just pushed the pace on score rather than quality. They pushed the pace
on how many people can be in here at the same time. So now you're doing higher-risk
movements, higher intensity, higher fatigue,
and with a total-- not that they don't
care about technique, but it's not the thing that
they're most concerned about. It's getting the number
and the thing done. They solved the
time issue, though. You can get tremendous
results in three days a week, under 45 minutes
each session, et cetera. Burn people out, though. Way too much high
intensity, way too often. And the other problem,
safety concerns, all kinds of orthopedic
issues and other stuff. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I
interrupt you for a moment and just ask a question,
as we go through this arc of the history of why
endurance training predominated or strength training or
bodybuilding type training or CrossFit type
training because I think this is fascinating, and I
know we're about to arrive at where we are today-- ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --and what the
future looks like for people and what they should
focus on and do. At what point, if
any, do you think resistance training started
to become adopted by women? There was no equivalent
of Arnold Schwarzenegger there was Linda Hamilton
in The Terminator. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: There are
some impressive physiques, certainly, on female
actresses and athletes. The Williams sisters,
very impressive musculature and physiques. And, of course, their tennis
playing speaks for itself. Has that happened yet? What I mean is, do you think,
since you work with both men and women, do you think
that most women understand that weight training,
done properly is going to be extremely
beneficial for them, maybe even especially for them, in terms
of offsetting bone density loss and things of that sort? Or are we still waiting
for the popular stimulus for getting 80% of
young women thinking, I want to lift weights? ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. Hard for me to answer
because I'm not a woman. Now, I have a daughter. She's four, so we'll see. What I can say is, I've
probably worked with-- I don't know how many
professional athletes in total. A lot. I've worked with them probably
14 professional sports. I've worked with
Cy Young winners, MVPs, all the credentials. I bet 35%, 40% of the athletes
I've worked with are female. So I've worked with
Olympic gold medalists. I've worked with bronze
medallists in multiple sports. I've worked with the most
decorated powerlifter of all time in a number
of these areas, fighters, world championship,
all of these things. For me, I feel like that
burst has already happened. My students, if you
look at my classroom, I don't know what
the numbers are, but there is no small number
of females in exercise science and excess physiology. If you look at our laboratories,
that's one thing you will see. There are very few female
exercise scientists. There are very few female
strength conditioning coaches, but that number is coming
down at an astronomical rate. You have people that are
being hired in every sport. You pick the NFL. You pick Major League Baseball. Every few months we're
hearing, first female hired for this, first
female hired for that. The Yankees, Rachel
Balkovec is fantastic. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah,
Rachel's been out to my lab. She's terrific. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. Oh, yeah. She's fantastic. I mean, she's now
being hired as the-- I think she's a hitting coach
now, actual sport coach. She's going to be a GM. This is her goal. She's a terminator. So that's already happening. And my students that are
coming through our program are getting placed
in these roles. They haven't gotten
through yet a lot in terms of being
an actual scientist, but they're getting there. Sports scientists in the NBA
are being hired, females, in terms of big data collection. And sports science
and tech, we'll cover in another discussion,
but I think it's happening. Whether or not the
cultural and social-- I can't speak to that
end of the equation. What I can speak
to, though, is one of the things I think is
most fun coming forward scientifically is a
number of years ago, NIH came through
with their mandates. They're saying, it's no longer
acceptable to exclude women from scientific research because
we just did that for decades. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
what happened-- just to fill this in because
I think it's worth noting is that for many
years, studies even on rodents were mainly carried
out on male rodents because the assumption--
and the assumption turned out to be wrong--
but the assumption was that the physiology
of female rodents-- because they don't
have a menstrual cycle. It's not 28 days. They have an estrus cycle. It's four days, a
different type of cycle-- that would somehow
disrupt the data. It turns out that's
entirely wrong. Now it's actually required. When you sit on a grant study
panel, which are the people who evaluate grants, they ask. They literally say, did they
meet the criteria for sex as a biological variable? Here we're not talking
about sex as the verb. We're talking about
sex as biological sex. And if you don't say yes, that's
a strong hit against the grant. And if you say yes, then
it checks off that box. So it's now required that
both male and female rodents and humans be studied
in a given study unless the study is specifically
geared toward understanding that only exists in one
or the other population-- ANDY GALPIN: Reproductive
study, things like that. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --such as
menopause, for instance, ANDY GALPIN: Yup, totally. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--menstrual cycle, andropause, for instance. But no, this is
extremely important. I'm excited to hear that. ANDY GALPIN: So where I
was going to go with that is actually, so that was
step one, which is cool. You've got to include them. Where we haven't gotten to yet,
but I've seen more and more grant applications
come through for this, it's just the funding
hasn't it yet, which is, it's one thing to let
women be in the same studies. That's great. It's another thing,
though, to start performing high-performance
research specifically for female questions. That has not happened yet. And that's just a funding issue. We haven't gotten money yet. People aren't supporting that. We don't get a lot of financial
support for sports science, but we can't track down
the money yet of me going, I want to do a study
in female athletes that answers female
athlete questions. These won't help men. These are questions
specific to the female. That's the next step. That's where we've got
to get to so we can say, maybe we should do
things differently around training or recovery
or we shouldn't or it doesn't matter. There's a handful of-- not lower-quality,
but some studies. I don't love them yet. There just needs to
be a ton of work. Birth control is a very
good example the information for women at female athletes
or even just hard exercisers-- you don't have to be a
competitive athlete-- around what is
birth control doing? What types? How should I manage that? What conversations should
I be having with my doctor? Almost nothing. Women have nothing to go on
for high-performance stuff. So what if I'm trying to compete
in an event or run a race? All those types of questions
should be answered. Normative value, normative
data, performance testing. It's just not there
on the female. So that's an area. I think-- if somebody really
wanted to make a change, the scientists want to do it. I know it. I've talked to so
many in our field that would really
love to explore it because it's getting there. Like I said, the coaching
side is getting there. They're seeing it. They're hiring these people. I'm seeing it in my students. My followings is not all men. It's a very large
percentage of females, and all I do is post
about exercise science. This is all I do. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
this podcast is very-- we know very clearly the
audience is 50% women, 50% men-- ANDY GALPIN: That's nice. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--which is great. ANDY GALPIN: So just to jump
back in our history discussion and to finish that point
of where we're at now and where I think we're
going to go or should go. So we walked through the
bodybuilding running everything and people walking into a gym. Any time they lift
weights, they're making all of their choices
based on the assumption that maximizing muscle
size is the goal. And clearly, that's
not the case. There are other adaptations
you may be after. So we talked about
how that had problems, and then we talked
about how some of these other forms of
exercise filled those gaps and then what problems
those things introduced. Well, I think we're
actually at a point where that pendulum is slowly
shifting into the middle. What I mean by that
is, if you want to maximize muscle strength, we
look towards the power lifting community. If you want to
maximize muscle power, we're going to look to the
weightlifting community. If you want to look for muscular
endurance, well-roundedness, maybe we look into the
CrossFit communities and some of these obstacle
course races or functionality things. So what we can do now
is generate protocols that get us the exact
adaptations we want and not ones we don't want,
because we can look back at each of these different
styles of training and pick and choose
optimal protocols or combinations for them. So if somebody simply
wants to get healthy, like we talked about when we
listed the nine adaptations and I mentioned health
wasn't one of them, that's because what
determines your health versus what determines my
optimal health differs. So if I need more hypertrophy,
I can look towards bodybuilding concepts, but if I
have enough or maybe for personal reasons, I
decide I have too much or I don't want to add any
more, then I can say, hey, how can I get stronger
without getting bigger? And boom, I look towards
powerlifting concepts. How can I get more powerful? How can I get faster but I
don't, again, want to lose fat? OK, great. Or if I want physique changes. So we have all these
different areas we can pick and choose
from that have expertise in specific adaptations
and develop ourselves perfect protocols based
on that information. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
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mind as to how we all, myself included, arrived at
such lopsided fitness, too much endurance, not enough
strength, too much strength, not enough endurance,
it's really hard to imagine that anyone's
perfect in this regard. Can you walk us through the
nine different adaptations that you mentioned
earlier and give us a way to assess our
level of ability or our level of adaptation
in each of those nine? ANDY GALPIN: All right. The very first one we want to
talk about is movement skill. Now, set aside sport specific. So I'm not going to give you
an assessment for optimal golf technique swing. This is really
about human movement so that you stay
injury free and you can continue to train
for as long as possible. So what are the
minimum requirements? Now, if you can have access
to a highly-qualified physical therapist or
movement specialist, that's the best route. Go to them. Have them identify all of
your movement patterns, overhead pressing, squatting,
running, all these things. That's your gold standard. If you want to do it
yourself, though, here is a very simple
four-step solution. So the way that I teach
this is I go joint by joint. And so I think of this as the
major ones, your shoulder, your elbow, your low back,
hip, knee, and ankle. Now, what you can do is do
a representative movement for you. So if you bench a
lot, use the bench. If you do pull-ups,
use the pull-up. If you squat, do that. I would recommend doing
an upper-body press, an upper-body pull, a lower-body
press, a lower-body pull. An example would be a push-up,
a pull-up, or a bent row, a squat, and then a deadlift. That would be a very, very
well-rounded approach. What you're going to
do is do that movement. And I would record
it for yourself. And record a frontal
view and a side view. Probably do three to 10
repetitions per angle, slow and controlled. You don't need any body weight. What you want to do is move, and
you want to look for key things at every joint. So again, imagine
I'm doing a squat. I'm going to do a
squat, and I'm going to focus on just my ankle. And I'm going look for these
four things of the ankle. And then I'm going to go
back and watch my knee and look for these same
four things of the knee through the hip, et cetera. So what are these four things? Number one is you want
to look for symmetry. So symmetry is
front to back, left to right, and your right
limb and your left limb. And so what we want to
look for are if they aren't moving perfectly, that's fine. But you want to see
is one moving further ahead than the other one? Is one turning to the
side and one's not? Is one fidgeting and
twitching around differently? So you want to
look just to check, to see and make sure
that they're stable. That's one. Number two, you want
to look for stability. So a key indicators
here are things if you can't get through
Squat, a controlled squat, where your knees
don't start shaking. That would be an
instability issue. So can you do the movement slow? Can you pause at the bottom,
maybe three seconds, maybe five seconds or 10? You should have complete
control of that movement and all of these joints. Are your hips sliding to
one side when you stand up? Is one elbow closer to your
body when you're benching and the other one's
more flared out? These are the things
I'm talking about. I'm not worried about what
angle they should be at or not. You're simply looking for
asymmetries or instabilities. So again, as you're
pushing up, does one elbow start flipping
and twitching and going all over the place? The third one is what
I call awareness. So there are a lot of
movement technique issues that, simply, people don't know. And so you'll watch them squat. I do this in my
classes all the time. I'll have 100 kids
out there, squatting. And you'll see some
horrible squat technique. And then when you
just tell them, hey, did you realize your heels are
supposed to be on the ground all times when you squat? They're like, oh, OK. And they can correct it. It's not actually
a movement flaw. It was just simply an awareness. I didn't know, and
then I actually didn't realize that was
happening that position. So we want all of
our joints to be going through a general
full range of motion, which is number four. So the ankle-- during
a squat, your knees should be able to go as far
over your toe as possible while maintaining good
position, your feet flat on the floor, your
three points of contact, your whole flat foot, and you're
not compromising another joint. So that's all
you're going to look for are those four things,
symmetry, stability, awareness, and range of motion through each
joint, through each movement. It sounds difficult
and time-consuming. It's really not. You can generally clear
these things in one or two repetitions in
a couple of seconds. And what you're really
going to look for-- there's lots of scoring schemes you can
test, that physical therapists will sort of do. I just look for
absolutely terrible, can't do it at all, minor
flaw, or pretty close to good. That's really all
I'm looking for. So my scoring system
is zero, one, three. Zero is like, you're
not going to do this exercise because you're
at a very high acute risk. You might get hurt
on rep one tomorrow. Number one, a score of
one is like, there's a minor flaw here. We can probably
do it, but we need to be cautious of
load and volume. And the other one is,
maybe it's perfect, maybe it's not, but go ahead
and it on a reasonable protocol. You'll be fine. So that's generally
what you would need to do as a cost-free method
of identifying good movement technique within any of the
things that you would do. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
What about speed? ANDY GALPIN: I actually
don't think this is one most people should test. If you're a
high-performance athlete, we can run a 40-yard dash or
we can do some different things with a velocity
transducer on a barbell, if you're a weightlifter
or something. For most people,
pure speed is really maximum velocity
or acceleration are the two ways we break it down. It's generally not
that necessary to test. ANDREW HUBERMAN: What
about number three, power, which I believe before you
told me was speed times force. ANDY GALPIN: So the reason
why I don't worry too much about speed is because
you can infer a lot of it from a power test. And a power test is easier to
do as well as easier to train for for most people. So the cost-free version
here is a simple broad jump. So this is stand
with normal position, jump out as far in front
of you as you possibly can, and measure the distance
between where you started and the back of your
heel, where it lands. A super basic number to look
for there is your height. So you should be able to
broad jump how tall you are. If you're 5' 5," you should
hit 5' 5," 6' 5," et cetera. It's not perfect. That's going to ratchet down
a little bit, about 15%, for females. They just simply
don't have the power, in general, that men have. And so you're going to want to
bring that down a little bit, but it's a very crude number. If you were to look at a
high-performance NFL player, if they're six
feet tall, they're going to be jumping
nine to 10 to 11 feet. If you can jump
your body height-- we're not looking
for optimization in this particular test. You are looking for red flags if
you can jump your body height, you're going to be just fine. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
incredibly straightforward and yet, I have one question. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'm assuming
that I can squat down as low as I need
to before I jump, I can swing my arms from
back to front as harder, with as much momentum
as I can muster. And when I land,
you said I'm going to take the measure from
where the back of my heels. ANDY GALPIN: You want to measure
the distance you actually covered. So to clarify, there's
no running approach here. There's no steps into it. You're going to
stand at a still. Yeah, you can swing, bounce
as much as you'd like to do. You're going to projectile off. So you're going to
measure the distance from the tip of your
toe-- so basically, stand behind the line and
then the furthest point back where you land. So basically, the
worst possible score, not the best possible
because your feet won't land symmetrically. One's probably going to
be a little bit farther. Now, technically, if you fall
backwards and your hand touches the ground, we mark that
number, but in this case, just use the furthest point
back over your back heel, and go from there. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'll be
trying it tomorrow morning. ANDY GALPIN: Now,
if you have access to a little bit more technology
or you just really want to know a better number,
a classic vertical jump is a good starting place. So you can actually do this
in a simple, cost-free way. You can just measure
two of your hands. Put them together so that
both of your middle fingers are touching. Overlap them, and put them
directly over your head. And then you want to reach
up as high as you can get. And you mark that on the wall. My brother and I used
to do this all the time. We would take a highlighter,
the yellow ones, and color as much as we could
on our fingertips, touch the wall so that
the highlighter would stain the wall-- if you actually go back to
my house from my childhood, you'll see these markers
all over our house. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'm sure
your parents were thrilled. ANDY GALPIN: My dad didn't care. Single dad, he didn't care. He's just like,
whatever, you guys. Do whatever you want. So you want to measure that. And then, of
course, you're going to jump with those two hands
and touch as high as you can up. And you're going to measure the
distance between your standing reach and the actual height
that you jumped there. Now, the reason you're doing
it two-handed by the way, is because if you
do one-handed, you can actually reach pretty high
by offsetting your shoulders. And now you're getting
into differences of who has more shoulder
mobility, who has the ability to get up there. A two-handed standard
approach is there. Same thing, no
running approach here. You can dip. You can drive. You can do all those things. You can swing your
arms, but you're going to be a two-handed touch,
is a general way to do that. You want to look for
a number of something like 24 inches or higher. If you're past the
age of 50, that number can come down a little
bit, to closer to 20. And again, for females, it's
going to be ratcheted down about 15% everywhere you go. If you're a middle-aged female,
and you're jumping 20 inches, you're in a pretty good spot. You're going to be
looking really nice there. Now, if you can do
that on a force plate, that's even better. So these are,
basically, scales that will go out to multiple digits,
sometimes five to nine digits past zero. And you're going to
stand on these things, you're going to do
the exact same test. And these are very interesting
because they'll tell you not only how high
you jump, but they'll tell you how much force
you put in the ground. They can also tell you
how long it took you-- and this is called your
rate of force development-- as well as impulse and speed and
a bunch of other stuff, which are important to help you
understand where on the power spectrum you need to be. So you would do that in addition
to using some sort of velocity transducer on a barbell. So a very classic
thing to do would be, let's say, you're
going to do a squat. And you're going to put
this device on the barbell, and that's going to
measure the speed at which the barbell moves. And you're going to do that at
40% of your one repetition max, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%,
90%, up to 100%. And that allows you
to create what's called a force-velocity curve. And you can start to
see at what point, when you start
loading things heavy, do you start slowing
down too much. And that will tell you what
part of the force-velocity curve that you want to train in
to optimize your power. Why that's important,
a lot of people will do things like, when
I'm training for power, how heavy should I lift? Well, the general
answer people say is, 30% of your one-rep
max, but that's actually not true at all. What's most optimal
for power development-- which we'll discuss
more much later-- is depending on
where you're flawed in the force-velocity curve. So if you have access
to technology like that, that can give you a lot more
insight and information. If not, do the broad jump
test or the highlighter on your fingertips and jump
it up and touch the wall test. ANDREW HUBERMAN: At
Andy Galpin's house. ANDY GALPIN: Hey,
just come along. The walls are already messed up. Just go ahead and come up to
Washington, and we'll do it. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fantastic. What about strength? ANDY GALPIN: Right. So strength is really important. You need to measure
this in multiple areas. And we'll start off
with grip strength. So you can do this in two ways. You can buy a hand
grip dynamometer. Now, these are anywhere
between $20 to $100, anywhere. These actually used
to be, when I was in school, hundreds of dollars. And now you can literally buy
them on any website for $25. So my honest recommendation
is technically, that's not cost-free. I know your whole thing about
the cost-free protocols, but $25, I'm calling
that basically cost-free. You can bring that
in and test that. And that's just a little device
where you're going to squeeze, and you're going to do it. And I would do your right
hand and your left hand. You want to look for
asymmetries there, but you want to look
for something like-- typically, they're going to
give you a value in kilograms. And you want to look for
something like a minimum score here of 40 kilograms. Ideally, you're up past 60 would
be a really good spot to be in. You want to make sure that
there's no less than 10% variation between your
left and right hand. Your non-dominant hand
actually shouldn't be that much weaker in this test. So what you'll actually
see, a lot of times, is the non-dominant can
be oftentimes stronger because the dominant hand is
more for movement precision, writing, things like that. So you want them to be close. If you are a male and you are
under 40 kilograms on a hand grip dynamometer, we're
going to need to train that. If you're a female, it's
not that much lower, but about 35 kilograms
is the cutoff point. If you're above 55, we can
add it to your training, but I'm not worried
about leaving it out of your training. If you're a female,
if it's above 50, that's my cut off of
where we want to go. So that's a fairly cheap one. Another one that
you can actually do is just a dead hang. So you can hold on
to any bar, ideally, one that is thin
enough to where you can wrap your whole hand around it. So you don't want to be
using a giant fat grip. You're going to have
a false reading here. So something like
going to the gym and jumping on any pull-up
bar or pull-up rack. And you want to hang, and
this is a simple time test. So in general, we
should be able to hang for a minimum of 30 seconds
is what we're looking for. 30 to 50 seconds is my
good, but we could probably get better here. If you're cruising
above 60 seconds, I'm generally pretty happy. This is actually a
good example of when females tend to be better. Grip strength on women
tends to be strong, and they can hang for
quite a long time. So those standards don't really
change that much for women. Now, if you are
exceptionally large, this thing doesn't
scale perfectly. If you're 240 pounds
and even if you're lean, it's just hard to hang
and hold 240 pounds. Conversely, if
you're 145 pounds, even if you're
unhealthy, you're going to be able to hang
for a long time. It's just not that
much weight to carry. So just rough numbers
to start off with. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So
that's grip strength. What about strength
elsewhere in the body? ANDY GALPIN: The primary
ones, you can do an upper body strength test if you would like,
although it's not technically something we do very often. I'm happy to do it one at
max bench press or something like that. That's great. What I'm generally
more interested in is a leg extension test. And the reason I like this
is, a back squat is better. A barbell back squat
is-- look, that's my jam. That's my life. It's just very
technically demanding, and it's challenging. You need spotters. You need comfort. A lot goes into this. So for the average person,
a leg extension test is fairly standardized. You don't have to
worry about technique, and people can just
get into it and go. And so what you want to look for
there is a couple of standards you want to hit. Again, a very simple
answer here is body weight. Can you do a leg extension
with your body weight? ANDREW HUBERMAN: One repetition? ANDY GALPIN: One repetition. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I can
answer that right now. ANDY GALPIN: Can you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. ANDY GALPIN: You can't? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. I can hack squat a
reasonable amount of weight, but I was on the leg
extension this morning, and it was a Nautilus machine. And I certainly could not
leg extension my body weight. ANDY GALPIN: Let me clarify. Were you doing a single leg? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. ANDY GALPIN: So
bilateral, you can't leg extension your body weight? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. But I certainly can hamstring
curl my body weight. ANDY GALPIN: OK. So we maybe have some
deficiencies in our quads that we need to go
after, but that's a pretty good number
you want to be at. If you go up in age past
age 40, every decade that can come down about
10%, and you'll still be in a pretty good slot. So if you're 50
years old and you're 170 pounds, if you can do 160,
you're in a pretty good spot. And then you could just,
again, take it down about 10% every decade after
40, but prior to 40, there's really no
change in strength, but certainly, somebody
in their 40s to 50s should be able to leg
extension their body weight. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Noted. I look forward to
our discussion a bit later, talking about
how to build strength. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. Any of these
strength tests, they don't have to be done to a
technical true one-rep max. You can use what are called
repetition conversion equation. So put on a load
that you think is kind of close to your
maximum and just do it for as many reps as you can. As long as it's under
five reps total, you can then actually
go online and enter that into any number of calculators
anywhere, and it will tell you, OK, you did three
repetitions at 200 pounds. Your one-rep max is
probably 215, whatever. So there's estimate equation. So if you don't want
to spend the time or you're not truly
comfortable absolutely going to your true
one-rep max, just get to a number that's fairly
close and do as many as you can and then go on line, again,
one-rep max estimator equations are everywhere. If you get past five
repetitions or so, the accuracy of those
equations starts going down. So don't put on something and
go, oh, I did 12 reps of it and then try to figure
out your one-rep max. It'll get close. You start moving past that,
you're just getting worse and worse and worse accuracy. So I want to make sure whether
you're doing the leg extension test or a front squat
test, you don't technically have to do it in
absolute one-rep max. If neither of those
are an option, another one I like a lot
here is simply a front squat or a goblet squat hold. So you're going to hold a
weight in front of your chest. A kettlebell is great here. A dumbbell is fine here. And you want to hold about
half of your body weight, go all the way to
the bottom position, and try to hold that
for about 45 seconds. So it's a pretty good indicator
of number one, your position. It's hard to be in a bad
position for that long at that load as well as
core strength and low back stability. So it's a very
different indicator than, say, the leg
extension test, but it's a really nice one. It doesn't require
many moving parts. It's more difficult
than the leg extension, but it's quite a
bit more functional. And it's going to
give you insights into a lot more areas
than just the quadriceps. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So 45 seconds
down at the bottom of the squat and then returning to
a standing position. ANDY GALPIN: Yep. And if you can't do the
return, actually, I'm not that worried, but as long as
you can hold that good position without a technical breakdown
in that 45 seconds, that's a really good spot. As an intro, I want
a third of your body weight for 30 seconds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Terrific. I plan to attempt all of those
strength tests very soon. What about hypertrophy? ANDY GALPIN: Sure. Actually, before
we get into that, I want to jump back
really quickly. It's important to add
a couple of caveats to the strength training stuff. So there's two
that I want to do. Number one, these are assuming
you are technically proficient. So I don't want you to do
any exercise to exhaustion or to maximum
strength if you're not comfortable with your technique. So adjust these accordingly. If you're not comfortable
with the front squat, do the leg extension. If you're uncomfortable with
that, do something different. So we never want to
utilize maximum testing if it's going to come
with a consequence of serious acute injury. So that's the most
important flag. The second one is,
your warm-up protocol will have a huge effect
on your actual results. And so whenever
you do these tests, especially if you're going to
do a test and then a test again down the line, you want to make
sure that warm-up protocol is standardized. Now, again, the NFCA-- and I can give you resources--
has specific guides for exactly what to do for your
warm-up protocol prior to one-rep max testing. So we can go there, and
you can look that stuff up. We can add that to show
notes or something. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I think when we
get into a deeper discussion about
strength and hypertrophy and resistance
training in general, maybe we could touch into
the best warm-up protocol. I know I have mine,
and I'm certain it's going to be suboptimal
based on everything-- ANDY GALPIN: Maybe that's
causing the problems. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --based
on every conversation we've ever had, where I
learned all the things I'm doing incorrectly. But I do make changes on the
basis of what you tell me. ANDY GALPIN: It's not
incorrectly so much as it is suboptimal. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
That's a very kind way of telling me it's incorrect. Thank you. What about hypertrophy? ANDY GALPIN: So
the thing you want to pay attention to here is,
you have the aesthetic portion of hypertrophy. That's entirely up to you. There is no rationale. You can decide what you feel
like looks good or doesn't look good. That's irrelevant. There is a sufficient
amount you need to have, where below that, it's
detrimental to your health, regardless of your outcomes. And so the best way to do
this is a couple of ways. Any sort of body composition
tests can do this. So whether this is a scan
through like a DEXA scan, which is a gold
standard or other ways of biological, bioelectrical
impedance or otherwise. So there's a ton
of different tests you can get that
are pretty close. So what you want
to pay attention to when you get a DEXA scan
is a number called FFFMI. And so that stands for
"fat-free mass index." So you can look at again, any
number of online calculators. These are all standard,
so it doesn't actually matter where you pull them up. You don't have to worry
about looking it up and whether or not it's
right or not or something. And so that's going
to actually tell you if you have sufficient
muscle mass. And so a number you want to look
for, in general, is something like if you're a
man, your FFMI should be something like 20 or higher. If you're a woman, you want
to look for something like 18. So those are the targets. If you get past
24, 25 for a man, that's a lot of muscle
mass, assuming you're reasonably lean. Now, if your FFMI is like 24,
25 but your body fat is 40%, you're actually just a
very, very large individual. You're not in a great spot. So when we say these
sort of numbers, it's the assumption
that you're probably sub 30% body fat for a man
and sub 35% for a woman. So those are the numbers. There are online calculators. All you really need to know
is your total body weight, your body fat percentage,
and then your height. And you can enter
those three numbers, and then they'll tell
you your FFMI score, and it'll correct for
an adjusted value. And then most of
those will actually tell you the grading
rubric and then they'll say, good, average,
bad, et cetera, but those are the
numbers we look at. If you are, as a man, sub
17, as a woman, sub 15, now we're in an area of pretty
severe physiological detriment for insufficient muscle. And in some of our
later discussions, we'll talk about
why that matters. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So that's
not sub 17% body fat. That says
specifically, the FFMI. ANDY GALPIN: That's
correct, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: What
about muscular endurance? Is this where you're going to
tell me I need to do wall sits? ANDY GALPIN: So
this is really nice. You can do any
number of tests here. A standard plank it is a good
test of muscle endurance. So can you hold a front
plank for 60 seconds? Can you hold a side
plank for 45 seconds? Pretty easy. If you're able to do a push-up. So if you can't, that
sort of tells you alone. It's actually interesting. If you can't do
a single push-up, that's not a muscular
endurance issue. That's actually now
a strength issue because that's a
one-rep max problem. So we want to be able to-- again, for a general male, we
should have no problem doing 25 plus consecutive push-ups. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I apologize
for interrupting you, but as long as we're
talking about push-ups, could you just mention form? Are we talking chest
touching the ground? Elbows breaking right angles? What is a proper push-up,
according to your laboratory? ANDY GALPIN: Unless you
have a very specific reason to limit range of motion,
I want all my testing done through a full
joint range of motion. This is different
for the person. So it's individualized to them,
but in general, for a push-up, this would be a full
complete lockout of the elbows on the top
and a full chest touch or close to it at the ground. You can do it different. It doesn't really
matter, but just keep it standard from your
pretest to your post-test if you're trying
to mark progress, but for us, unless we have
a very specific reason, we're going full range of
motion for all of these tests. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. So 25 push-ups for a male. ANDY GALPIN: 25 push-ups
for a male is the standard. And even something
like 10 is a number we're looking for, again,
as minimum categories for an upper body
muscular endurance. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And not to
get too down in the weeds, but I have observed
other people-- of course, never myself. No, I'm kidding-- but
observed other people pausing maybe at repetition
15, catching their breath and then continuing. ANDY GALPIN: That
would be a fail test. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So
continue like a piston. ANDY GALPIN: That
would be a fail test. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So no pauses. ANDY GALPIN: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Just
up down, up down, and trying to hit at
least 10, but ideally 25. ANDY GALPIN: I learned this
lesson in one of our studies, probably nine years ago,
where we didn't clarify that. And so we actually
had an individual-- he wasn't being nefarious. He just figured out, if I do
a couple, take a quick break and do a couple, he quadrupled
his post-test results from his pre-test result
because he figured out that little hack. So you want to standardize it. It's not that I'm
against or have some sort of strong belief. It's just trying to keep
protocol standardized, which means any break, failed test. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So 10 to 25
push-ups, minimum, for males. What about for females? ANDY GALPIN: So I'll clarify. If it's sub 10 for
a man, that's again, and you're like, very
severe red flag problem. We really, really like
to see a number above 25. That's where we're anchoring. Anything between 10 and 25 is
like, yeah, but not severe. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It means
they have work to do. ANDY GALPIN: We have work to do. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And for females? ANDY GALPIN: For
a female, you're going to scale that back. So a female, the answer
could be as little as zero. So you're going to see that,
can you do a full position? If they're in that
position, we're generally not going to do
a muscular endurance test from the knees. We already know the
answer is you're zero. We'll actually default to
another test, which I'll talk about in a second here. So for those folks, that's going
to scale down a little bit. So basically, you're looking
at 15 is that marker, like 25 was for the male, where
I want to see above 15. And if I do, we're good. Anything between five to
15 is the number of, OK. If you're sub five, we
generally have some problems. And if that is different,
between one and zero, then zero is a problem. So we should be able to do that. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So if a female
cannot do 10 full push-ups. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. 10 full push-ups hard for a
female, depending on size. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. Let's say a female can't do
five full push-ups. You said, rather than go to a
knees-down version, what would you do to assess
their muscular endurance? And would you then
also encourage them to work on their strength? ANDY GALPIN: Well, absolutely. So again, if they
can't do-- they can do anything less than three,
you're going to be strength. In fact, if you want to look at
muscular endurance in general-- so this is a bit
of an off topic, but I promise I'll
keep it short, and I'll come right back. When I was a doctoral
student, I had two lab mates. One of them was a runner,
a female, 120 pounds, something like that, small. The other one was a male,
and he was basically like a straight bro,
he lifts weights, doesn't do any other
sort of training. Does a very classic not training
program, but kind of training. And they were bantering
back and forth for a while. And basically she was
saying, you're so unfit. You can't run at all. And he's saying, you're so weak. You can't do a pull-up. And so they challenged each
other to a competition. They said, at the
end of the year, the girl is going
to do 26 pull-ups, and the guy had to run
a marathon, so 26 miles. So that was the thing. And then there was some sort of
consequence for whoever failed. So the guy quickly tried
to figure out, how the hell am I going to run 26
miles when I have not run a mile in many,
many, many years? So he just started running,
three miles, four miles, whatever. Well, of course, both of
them ran immediately to me. And then she was
like, how the hell? I can't do a pull-up. And I was like, great. And I gave her a very specific
maximal strength protocol. And she was like, whoa. I want to go to the
assisted pull-up machine and work on doing sets of
25 because I've got to get my muscular endurance up. And I tried to explain to
her, your muscle endurance is irrelevant if
you can't do one. It's never going to matter. She did the muscular endurance
protocol, the entire thing. Didn't listen to me. The end of the year came. She still produced
exactly zero pull-ups. So the point is, if you
look at muscular endurance, where is it strength
and where is it actually muscular endurance? The general number that you're
looking for is under 80%. That's going to tell you,
is this a muscular endurance problem or is it an
absolute strength problem? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Under 80%
of a one-repetition maximum? ANDY GALPIN: Yup. So what I mean by that is this. In fact, this actually
is in your question. The other way to assess
muscular endurance is take the exact strength
tests you did from the talk five minutes ago,
which one did you do? Load that to 75%, and then do
that for as many repetitions as you can. And that is a
tremendous barometer of muscular endurance. So if you were able to do 200
pounds in your leg extension test, put 75% on that and do
that as many reps as you can. You want to look for more
than eight repetitions. If you are below
eight repetitions, then we have a muscular
endurance problem. If it is higher than that,
if you've got 15 or 20, then we know we have
probably some problems in your peak strength
or the test itself. So that is a good--
eight to 12 number is where you want to be
looking at for there. ANDREW HUBERMAN: What
about anaerobic capacity? ANDY GALPIN: This
one's more challenging. You either have to
go to a laboratory and do something
like a Wingate Test. So this is a
30-second maximal test where you're going to see how
much work can you possibly do in that 30 seconds. If you don't have
access to laboratory, you can do this on
any protocol you want. This could be sprinting. This can be on an air bike. This could be on
a rower, anything like that, anything where
you can exert maximal effort and you don't have to worry
about technical problems. So I generally don't like to do
things like a kettlebell swing or something like that. There's just too
many other variables. You need to be able to go
as hard as you possibly can, knowing you're going to get to
a place of tremendous fatigue. Now, in the lab, we often use
what's called a Bosco Protocol. And you're going to
stand on a force plate, and you're going to do
as many vertical jumps as fast as you can, as high
as you can, for 60 seconds. And you are absolutely
destroyed by second 45. So we'll either use that
Wingate Protocol or that Bosco Protocol. If you want, though, again,
take any of those other places, 30 seconds or so,
up to 45 seconds, up to a minute if you want,
it doesn't really matter. And you just mark down
the distance you cover. That's all. We don't really have
standards for these things because it's going
to be different. How far you can travel in
30 seconds on a treadmill is just going to be so different
than sprinting in the field or on the assault
bike or whatever. So what you really want
to worry about there is, can you complete it? And then how awful do
you feel afterwards? So what you really want
to think about here is not those
protocols, but this. You want to think
about can you get close to your predicted
maximum heart rate? So the number we throw
out is 220 minus your age. So if you're 50 years
old, 220 minus 50, you should be able to get
to a maximum heart rate of around 170 beats per minute. Now, that number is
extremely generic. If you don't get there,
that doesn't have any indication of your fitness. If you get higher, that doesn't
mean you're any more fit. It's just a rough number. So here's what I want you to do. In this case, your heart rate
recovery is the better metric. So I want you to get up
to a maximum heart rate and then test your
heart rate recovery. And what you should
be looking for there is about a half a beat
recovery per second. So you're going to
get up to a place where you reach absolute
terrible exhaustion, maximum fatigue, test your
heart rate, and then count. Have a timer going. Within 60 seconds, you
should have, again, that half a beat per second. You should have a
heart rate recovery of 30 beats per minute. Within the next minute,
so two-minute recovery, it should be, again,
half that, so 60 beats. Those are rough
numbers to go by. And your three-minute recovery
is, again, half of that again. So that is the closest way. If your heart rate recovery
is worse than that, then we know we have a problem
in your anaerobic capacity or your cardiovascular capacity. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love it. What about number eight,
maximal heart rate? Because what you
just described sounds a lot like maximal heart rate. ANDY GALPIN: So this
is your VO2 max. So the gold standard here is to
actually go into a laboratory and get this thing done. So we can actually run a VO2 max
test, where you put a mask on, collect all your gases,
and run you to there. And there is a very specific
protocol for completion of a true maximum test. And any scientist
will know that. If you don't have
access to that, you can do a couple of tests. One of them is called a
12-Minute Cooper's Test. So this is simply time. You're going to run for 12
minutes as far as you can, and you're going to record
the distance you covered. Again, you can go online to
any number of calculators, enter that distance in. And that will tell you your
proximal or estimated VO2 max. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So
that's a 12-minute sprint. ANDY GALPIN: 12-minute
sprint, maximum distance you can cover in 12 minutes. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Keeping a
steady pace the whole time or going-- ANDY GALPIN: Do
whatever you want. The goal is to get maximum
distance covered in 12 minutes. So that's anywhere between
a mile to two plus miles, depending on how fit
you are, but you just do that Cooper 12-Minute Test. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Got it. ANDY GALPIN: I told you. So if you remember,
aerobic capacity is eight to 12
minutes where you're going to see a real true
test of that VO2 max. You simply can't get that
in under a few minutes. So if you want, you can do a
little gentler version of that. So there are a number
of submaximal tests. In fact, there is a one-mile
walk test you can do. So again, all you're going
to do is-- in this case, you have to have of either a
stopwatch or, ideally, a heart rate monitor. And all you have to do is--
this is a walk for one mile submaximal test. So you're going to walk
a mile, record the time, record your heart rate at
the end, enter those in. And those will give you, again,
estimates of your VO2 max. So that's the like, oh my gosh,
I can't run for 12 minutes as hard as I possibly can
or I don't want to do it. We have a lot of these
in our executive program. It's like, my knee
hurts too bad. I've got back pain
when I run or whatever. Can I-- OK. And you do the walk test. And it's pretty accurate
if you do it correctly. So technically, all
you have to actually do is measure your heart rate on
you neck and count 60 seconds, but it's just easier to-- with everyone's
watches and stuff now, just wear the heart rate
monitor, plug in those numbers. And again, those are all
standard calculations. So anywhere you find
those, you don't have to worry about the source. So you just enter your
stuff in, and they're going to be running
off the same equation. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I like the
idea of the 12-minute run. I'm going to give it a
shot, see what happens. ANDY GALPIN: For years, we did
a one-mile version of this, and there's just a lot more
science on the 12-Minute Cooper Test. So we did that. It's pretty good, and it is
not even remotely close to fun. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It sounds
like fun for other reasons. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah, yeah. Well, it is it. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fun in the
sense that it reveals a lot. ANDY GALPIN: Yup. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's
powerful, potent. ANDY GALPIN: Super. There's no hiding. You can hide with the
leg extension test. It doesn't hurt that bad. But you cannot feel anything
but the 12-minute "run as far as you can" test. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So these
are really, actually, psychiatric diagnostic tests-- ANDY GALPIN: They are. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --of a sort. ANDY GALPIN: For sure. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Number nine,
long-duration, steady-state exercise. I think of this as a.k.a. endurance, but as you
mentioned before, there are other forms of endurance. So long-duration,
steady-state exercise. ANDY GALPIN: Yep. So you really want
to think about this as not a standard number. You should maintain
consistent work output for over 20 plus minutes. And this one I want you
to just pick something that it was in your lifestyle. So is there a loop around
your house that you can do? Is there some protocol that
you like to use before? And you're simply going
to test your ability. Can you maintain work
without stopping? That's all it needs to be. Now ideally, I personally
like to throw a little twist in here, which is, can you do
this with nasal breathing only. That's when I feel really good. If you can go 30
straight minutes without needing
to take a break-- walking doesn't really cut it
unless you're very, very unfit, in which case, if walking
30 minutes without a break is a challenge, OK. There. But if you can, I want you
moving at a non-walking pace. I don't care what zone this
is, two, three, four, five. I don't care. Show me you can maintain
minimum of 20 minutes of work with no breaks, no intervals,
no downtime and, again, ideally breathing
through your nose only. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love this
list, but it worries me a bit. Not because any one of
these tests is necessarily that overwhelming,
but because I'm unclear about how to
arrange performance of these different tests. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: For
instance, do I separate them so I'm doing one test, like
long-duration output on one day and I'm doing strength
on another day? Those seem pretty obvious
to me, but are there ones that one can combine
on different days? How much time should one give
oneself in between these tests? And how often should
one do an assessment? Just as we don't want
to necessarily evaluate body weight changes by getting
on the scale three times a day, maybe once a day
at the same time each day is more practical. How often should we be
assessing our fitness for each and every one of these? ANDY GALPIN: Well, the way
that I would say this is, you want to pick the one
that is the worst and do that more frequently. So if, for example, you do
the upper body strength test and you are fantastic, if
you can bench press double your body weight, I don't need
to test your bench very often, for the average person. If you're not a powerlifter,
maybe once a year or something. Maybe not even that. We just don't need to get there. However, if we then test your
VO2 max and in your 12 minutes, you cover a total
of a half a mile, then we might want to
test that every month. And so we're going to let our
priorities emphasize which one we're going to do more often. I would recommend doing this
full battery once a year. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Full battery,
meaning the entire list on one day. ANDY GALPIN: No, not on
one day, but within a week. So you could take a week. Now, you could do these,
technically, all in two days. Three-day split here
is probably best. So if you were to just say,
hey, this is testing week. I actually love this for
beginning of the year or whenever it is that
you change your training, but I think once a year,
just like once a year you should probably
go to a physician and get full bloodwork, a
full heart scan and everything like that. And then if maybe you
had a heart issue, they would come back in and test
you more frequently, whatever the case is. You should probably
run through this. And you're going to
be thinking, yeah, but I don't want to give up on
my exercise routine that week. Well, I promise you, you're
not going to finish this week and think, I didn't do
very much work this week. It's going to feel great. And then you're going to
have a very nice barometer of exactly where you need
to change and prioritize your training for the next
quarter or half a year or wherever you want to go. If you want to actually
do this every six months, we end up, actually, doing
this, quite honestly, more like every six
months as a general test. That's a really
good way to do it, but minimum, if you're
arguing with me, give me once a year that
you want to do this. So which order to do them in? The non-fatiguing tests,
you can do whenever. So this is the body composition
scan, the FFMI, the body fat composition. All this stuff can
be done whenever. I generally like
to do that, though, as your very first activity. The reason is we know that
acute exercise can heavily influence things
like body composition measurements because of
inflammation, water storage, et cetera. So it's easiest to just get
that off of a 48 hour rest. You want to make sure you don't
do any hard exercise the day before a body composition
test and probably 48 hours before that. So just start yourself
off with that. Your movement tests
can be the same thing. You don't want to try to do a
assessment of how well you're squatting if you're incredibly
sore from your brutal squatting test. So tend to do those things
when you're the most fresh. Then what you want to do is
any skill or maximum strength or power goes at the very
beginning of the day. And any fatiguing thing
happens at the end. And so you could easily do this. All right, I'm going to do
my power test, my broad jump, great. You're not going to be
fatigued at all from that. And on the same day, since
I'm already pretty warmed up, now I'm going to roll right
into my leg strength test. And since I'm really
warmed up, I'm going to do my leg muscular
endurance test right there. So this is a very
common strategy we use. We do our one-rep max leg
extension, five minutes, seven minutes, whatever we
need to do, come back, load it to 75%, do as many
reps as you can. Boom. You could roll right into,
then, your upper body test or your grip strength
test or anything else that you want to do there. Is there a little
bit of influence? Yeah, but really, for most
people, it's not that bad. What influence I mean. If you do a leg strength
test, coming back and doing an upper body strength
test afterwards, it's not that big a deal. Give yourself 15, give
yourself 20 minutes. Give it plenty of time. So you can knock out
your strength testing and muscular endurance
testing all in one day. You could do your performance,
your skill diagnostic, your power jump
test, your strength, and your muscular endurance, and
all that stuff is knocked out. You're going to have to
come back on a separate day and do your anaerobic tests. This is 30-seconds maximal
endurance, things like that. You could, though, if
you wanted, do that after your long duration tests. You're long duration
test again, is just going to function
as a big, warm up. Or you could flip
those things or you can do them on separate days. You're going to have to do your
VO2 max test on its own day, for the most part, unless
you wanted to do, again, your movement or
your body composition before those things. So you really have the
ability to mix and match. Ideally, this most realistically
probably takes three days. If you want to separate
them into four or five, the more separation
you do, the better data you're going to get. It's just a question of how
pedantic are you really trying to get here? And are you willing to lose
5% to then save a whole day? Then you can do these
things in multiple stacks. So that's how I
would break it up. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So what I'm hearing is, better to do it
than to not do it. ANDY GALPIN: Most definitely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And be rational. Don't try and do
your strength output late in the day when
you're fatigued. If you're going to combine
some of the steady state endurance and maximal
heart rate, fine. Understand there might be a
slight deficit there, but test it the same way each time. And what you're really
looking for is improvement. ANDY GALPIN: Yep. And you can also do
the heart rate recovery under any of the modalities. So you could do the heart rate
recovery after your VO2 max as well. So you finish that
thing, and then just, again, do the same
test for up to three minutes. ANDREW HUBERMAN: These
are fantastic tools. I'm almost tempted to say that
I'm willing to post my numbers, but that actually violates the
core principle that I think we're getting at here,
which is that it's highly unlikely that anybody is
going to be phenomenal across the board. I mean, certainly there will
be individuals that are, but based on everything
we talked about earlier, specificity of training and
how extensively somebody has been training a certain way
will, without question, lop side them, if you
will, toward being better in some of these
assessments and less good in others. And that's just simply the way
that these adaptations work. ANDY GALPIN: Yep. You don't need to be optimal
in all of these areas to be, quote, unquote, "optimal
health" from this perspective. You just want to
make sure, again, there's no severe
performance anchors. This is what we call them. We don't want any of
these severe constraints because you're going to
get limited by that thing. And so what you want
to do is move that up to just sufficient or concerning
and get it away from that. If you do that, that thing's
not going to catch you. You're going to be able to
continue to pursue optimization in any of the one
things that you have a specific
passion for, which is generally what moves people. You train so that
you feel better. You train because you know there
are all these benefits to it. And jeez, this audience probably
could list hundreds of them. But you also train
because you generally like to get better at something. A lot of us have something. And so you want to make
sure that you're not going, hey, I know you're
good at endurance, but you really
shouldn't train anymore. We don't want that
message, not at all. I want you to love
your training. We just want to make sure
that you're not loving that so much that you're not taking
some blinders off and missing another area, which
would actually-- again, you pull that performance
anchor, this whole ship sails faster, with less effort
and less friction. ANDREW HUBERMAN: What I love
about this is also that, as you've described
it, it's not just for athletes or people that
are super into fitness. It's also for people that just
want to be healthy and want aesthetic changes. And that's why they're
exercising, which, I think, accounts for a fairly large
percentage of people out there. So I think what you described
is incredibly well-structured, incredibly clear, and
incredibly actionable. So I want to thank
you for that I'm serious about my willingness
to do this and at least share those numbers with you. And I think for most people that
are seeking what you listed off before aesthetic
changes, functionality, and longevity, it's clear
that all nine of these are going to be important
in some regard or another. ANDY GALPIN: So
before we close out, I want to go back and finish
off the metrics for VO2 max because I don't actually think
I gave you numbers on that. So in general, for
men, a minimum number we want to look at
here is 35 milliliters per kilogram per minute. And for women, that
would be about 30. So we can actually push a
lot higher on those things. In reality, I want
to see men above 50. ANDREW HUBERMAN: If I could
just interrupt you for a second. When you say 40 milliliters per
kilogram, milliliters of what, specifically? ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. So what, actually,
those metrics mean is the first one,
milliliters, is oxygen. So it's amount of oxygen.
Kilograms is body weight. So it's, how much oxygen can
you bring in per kilogram of body weight per minute? So does a volume of oxygen per
your size in a time duration. In fact, the way
that you calculate it is you multiply your
cardiac output by what's called your a-vO2 difference. Your cardiac output is your
heart rate times your stroke volume, so how much blood
you're pumping out per pump is your stroke volume. How many times you're
pumping or you're beating. You multiply that by
your a-vO2 difference. Your a-vO2 difference is
artery minus vein difference. So it's the amount of
oxygen in your arteries minus the amount of
oxygen in your vein, which is going to tell you
how much you took up in your capillaries,
in your muscles. So you take those two factors,
multiply them together, and there's your VO2 max. ANDREW HUBERMAN: As you
were describing that, I imagine you getting
to an fMRI machine and seeing that equation
lighting up in your brain because clearly, it's
committed to memory very well. Thank you for that
clear description. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. So to finish those
numbers, I really, truly want to see a man above 50-- and I'm not even really
stoked until I get above 55. In fact, it's sort of funny. Dave Costill, whose lab
I did my PhD in-- he was retired by the
time, but he's, again, one of these legendary figures
in exercise physiology, started in the '70s. He would always say,
"There's no human excuse to be below 60," which
I was always like, damn. That's really, actually,
pretty hard to get to. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Was
he at 60 or above? ANDY GALPIN: Oh, yeah.
he's still, actually, setting world records in
these last couple of years, all the Masters records for
swimming and cycling and stuff. So he was a super,
super fit guy. So he was always above 60. He's probably like
50 something now, even though he's 80 or whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: 80 years old. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
With a VO2 max of 50. ANDY GALPIN: He's
probably really not 50. He's probably--
but he's probably going to-- remember
earlier on we talked about how I had
the 92-year-old who had VO2 max of 38. Dave's probably going to break
that record when he gets there, I'm sure. I'm sure. In fact, I guarantee you he
has that number in his brain. I haven't talked
to him in 15 years, but I guarantee you that
number is in his brain, and he's probably
training for it. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love it. And I love it because it
proves that exercise pays off. ANDY GALPIN: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's one
of the few things in life where there's a direct
relationship between work and outcome. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. As Henry Rollins described
in his wonderful essay, if you're familiar with that. Oh my gosh, you're
a punk rock guy. You know Henry, I'm sure. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I mean, I
certainly know who he is, and I know his work. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. He has incredible
one-page paper. It's something to
do with the iron. And he basically
describes that as, this is the one thing where it's truth. It is the most true thing you'll
ever do, which I love that. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's almost
like a principle of nature. ANDY GALPIN: 100%. Yeah. So with the women, I really
want to see the women-- if I want to see men
above 55, I really want to see women
above 50 as the target. And if you like, you're
there, I'm pretty good. So you can do the math on, then,
the middle ground of what's like OK, but we
need to work on it. In fact, if you look
across the literature, at different
athletes, you're going to see the really
high-level endurance folks, they may pass 70 or 80. In fact, there was talk a few
years ago of a guy breaking 100 as an 18 or 19-year-old,
but I actually don't think it was ever
fully confirmed or repeated, but certainly, you'll
see plenty of people 95, in those extremes. If you look at other sports,
like football or basketball, they're probably going to
be in the 55, 65 range. So if you, as, an
average person are 55, that's a really good
marker to be in. If you get even close to
that, you're in a good spot. I'm sorry if I let
you down, Dave. ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. I just love how you're
describing this average person, you're looking at me with
just a little bit of sympathy, like if you reach the
standard of average, Andrew. Listen, you're giving me
prompts all over the place to try and improve my metrics,
whatever they happen to be. And I think that's one of
the great values of getting objective numbers, even if they
have to be measured by some of these back-of-the-envelope
techniques that, I guess, we always teach people
in the laboratory, that a tool can be
not extremely precise, but as long as it's reliable,
there is still value there. I mean, of course, you'd love to
have the most precise and most reliable tool, but
if you can't, then at least go for a reliable tool
and measure for consistency. ANDY GALPIN: Yeah. For the real world,
reliability beats validity as much as we can. For a lot of the things
we're talking about, especially for using it as a
metric of did I get better, as long as that tool is reliable. Body composition, just
all of these things have inherent error in them. Some of them are smaller,
some of them are larger, but as you mentioned,
having standardization within the testing
protocol is going to allow you to measure progress. And that's going to tell
you sort of where you're at. Now that we've covered all
these areas of adaptation, we walked through
the history, and we walked through a bunch
of the explanations for why people are maybe not
getting the results that they want to get through
their training, the way I would like to go with
the rest of our conversations would be to just go through
each of those adaptations step by step and make sure I cover
very specific protocols for, if you have run
through this testing and identified an
area of weakness. So maybe you've been lifting a
lot because you like lifting, and you maybe realize that
your cardiovascular fitness or your heart rate recovery is
not where it really should be or the opposite, like
we've talked about. Maybe you're doing a lot
of that type of work, and your strength isn't there. Your movement
quality is not there. So you've identified a problem. How do I specifically solve it? What are the evidence-based
and most effective protocols that I can put
myself in for each one of these categories? And I think that
would give people a lot of take-home
value, but it's going to take us
some time to cover. So it's going to
have to come across over multiple conversations
between you and I. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great. Well, I'm looking
forward to each and all of those conversations. And I want to add
just one more metric to our discussion
today, which is really just my way of saying thank
you because if there were a metric for amount of useful
information per sentence spoke, you would be at the upper
level of that metric. You have this amazing ability
to provide so much knowledge in a clear and concise and,
today, listed-out format that is both interesting, grounded
in science, and actionable. So on behalf of
everyone listening, and certainly for
myself as well, I just want to say thank you. ANDY GALPIN: Well, I
appreciate the compliments. And I'm looking forward
to the next conversation, jumping right into speed,
strength, and hypertrophy training and what are
the evidence-based and best practices for
protocols in those areas. ANDREW HUBERMAN: If you're
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performance with Dr. Andy Galpin. And as always, thank you for
your interest in science. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Very excited for this one
Here's a transcript
why are they all attractive
I’m a huge fan of people who take the history of their field seriously, as Andy does. I think it’s very important in science because it gives you a firm grounding in how things evolve culturally/politically as well as scientifically and makes it clear that nothing is ever set in stone. If you understand where we came from, you better understand that where we are is only temporary and have a better shot at judging where the future lies. I think it takes a humble scientist to study the past with an open mind, rather than just assume we have everything right and there’s nothing to learn in the history books.
Here is another transcript of this episode with timestamps and speakers: https://podscript.ai/podcasts/huberman-lab-podcast/guest-series-dr-andy-galpin-how-to-assess-improve-all-aspects-of-your-fitness/
The leg extension machine at my gym only goes up to 150 lbs. I feel like that test is off.