A Simple Test for Gauging Recovery & Workout “Readiness” | Jeff Cavaliere & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | If the goal is to challenge muscles and one is dividing their body into, let's say, you
00:00:09.320 | know, three or four day a week split or so, or maybe up to six.
00:00:14.460 | How do you know when a muscle is ready to be challenged again?
00:00:18.200 | I've heard, okay, every 48 hours is, you know, protein synthesis increases and then we'll
00:00:22.780 | get into this and then it drops off.
00:00:25.000 | But frankly, if I train my legs hard, I can get stronger from workout to workout, or at
00:00:32.040 | least better in some way, workout to workout, leg workout to leg workout, training them
00:00:36.880 | once every five to eight days.
00:00:39.740 | If I train them more often, I get worse.
00:00:43.240 | So whatever that 48 hour to 72 hour thing is, somehow my legs don't obey that, but,
00:00:49.680 | you know, or maybe something else is wrong with me, but I'm sure there are many things
00:00:53.060 | else wrong with me, but how do you assess recovery at the local level, meaning at the
00:00:58.680 | level of the muscles?
00:00:59.680 | So we'll talk about soreness and getting better, stronger, more repetitions, et cetera.
00:01:04.320 | And then the systemic level, the level of the nervous system.
00:01:07.180 | And I'd love for you to tell us about the tool that, again, I learned from you, which
00:01:11.220 | is actually using a physical scale, because it turns out this is that it will let you
00:01:16.180 | tell what the tool is, but that tool is also actively being used for assessing cognitive
00:01:22.360 | decline and cognitive maintenance and cognitive function in people with Alzheimer's and dementia.
00:01:27.500 | Dr. Justin Marchegiani Makes total sense, makes total sense.
00:01:31.120 | I, alright, so regarding the first part of the question, like, you know, how do you,
00:01:37.340 | how would you kind of dictate when a muscle's recovered?
00:01:39.860 | So I do think that what you're experiencing is totally real, that different muscles recover
00:01:46.140 | at different rates.
00:01:47.580 | And I've always been so fascinated by this concept, I've talked about internally with
00:01:52.640 | my team, but like, I feel like what we really need, the holy grail to training is going
00:01:59.200 | to be when we're able to crack the code on an individual basis when a muscle is recovered,
00:02:05.120 | and that is going to dictate its training schedule.
00:02:07.920 | And the fact that you might have a bicep that could be trained, you know, via a pulling
00:02:13.840 | workout, a regular bicep dedicated workout, forget the split at the moment.
00:02:16.960 | You might have a bicep that's able to be trained that can be trained again the next day, you
00:02:22.740 | know, and then the next day, and then maybe you need a day off after that, but like, you
00:02:26.300 | know, and that can vary from person to person for sure, and it can vary from muscle to muscle
00:02:31.020 | in that person over the course of time, as you mentioned, because the systemic recovery
00:02:35.660 | is going to impact all those muscles anyway, but let's say you're systemically recovering,
00:02:40.660 | every muscle itself is going to have a, you know, a recovery rate, and I think what's
00:02:45.080 | fascinating is that when you talked about before we like to train in this week or we
00:02:49.620 | have like the way our mind looks at training, well, if that was the case with the biceps,
00:02:54.940 | that bicep is a slave to the rest of your training split, you know, where it's like,
00:02:59.540 | why does it have to be also at the end of every eighth day or, you know, or whatever
00:03:04.540 | when it might respond better to something much more frequently, and your legs are also
00:03:09.220 | being thrown into that mix.
00:03:11.060 | There's a Mike Mencer concept where he's like, you know, training, you know, one set
00:03:14.760 | and be done for 14 days.
00:03:16.200 | I mean, you know, there's such variability between muscle groups, and you're linking
00:03:22.240 | them all together.
00:03:24.280 | I think that coming back and using muscle soreness as a guideline for that is one of
00:03:32.040 | the only tools we have in terms of the local level, you know.
00:03:35.720 | We don't really have, you know, being able to measure, let's say, CPK levels inside
00:03:40.040 | of a muscle would be amazing, you know, at a local level to see how recovered that muscle
00:03:45.920 | is, but that becomes fairly invasive, at least to my knowledge, it becomes fairly invasive.
00:03:50.280 | So what are our tools?
00:03:52.120 | I mean, I think that at the basic level, that's the one that most people can relate to and
00:03:55.480 | easily identify and then use that as a guideline, and if you're training when you're really
00:03:59.240 | sore, it's probably not a great idea, and it's probably a good indication that that
00:04:04.000 | muscle is not recovered, but at least hearing what you and I are saying here might be a
00:04:07.680 | comfort to the person to say, "Yeah, it is possible that it's not recovered, just
00:04:11.360 | because 48 hours is the recommendation, and just because research points to muscle protein
00:04:15.680 | synthesis needing a restimulation, well, maybe not.
00:04:18.360 | Maybe you're not necessarily there yet, and for that muscle, you're not there yet."
00:04:23.680 | So it's all really interesting stuff, but as far as the systemic, you know, recovery,
00:04:29.240 | I think there's a lot of ways, you know, people talk about resting heart rate measured
00:04:32.360 | in the morning, all different kinds of, you know, core temperature and things like that
00:04:38.240 | that might become altered in a state of non-recovery, but grip strength is very, very much tied
00:04:45.340 | to performance and recovery, and when I was at the Mets, we used to actually take grip
00:04:51.560 | strength measurements as a baseline in spring training all the time.
00:04:54.400 | Now, obviously, as a baseball player, you're gripping a bat, you're a pitcher, you're gripping
00:04:57.440 | a ball.
00:04:58.440 | You know, having good grip strength is important, so if we've noticed somebody had a very weak
00:05:01.800 | grip, it's just a good focal point of a specialized training component for the program.
00:05:05.760 | Dr. Justin Marchegiani Would you do this every day with those guys?
00:05:07.000 | Dr. Tim Jackson No.
00:05:08.000 | We would do—in spring training, we'd do sort of a baseline entry-level measurement,
00:05:11.520 | and then we would measure it throughout the season, maybe once every two weeks or three
00:05:15.080 | weeks, and, you know, the idea there was to, you know, manage the recovery, measure the
00:05:20.760 | recovery.
00:05:21.760 | But I just gave it away, you know, to determine overall recovery, your grip strength is pretty
00:05:28.280 | highly correlated, so we have found that with one of those scales, those old-fashioned bathroom
00:05:33.400 | scales at like Bed Bath & Beyond or wherever you can get, which, by the way, almost impossible.
00:05:37.920 | I believe Jesse and I were searching for the last scale to put in that video, and we almost
00:05:41.640 | couldn't find one because everything is like digital, and everything, you know, it's like
00:05:44.960 | this.
00:05:45.960 | I'm looking at the old-fashioned dial controls.
00:05:46.960 | Dr. Justin Marchegiani It's like old Macintosh computers.
00:05:49.200 | There's a huge market for them, and old phones.
00:05:52.120 | Kids, keep your phones now.
00:05:54.040 | In 30 years, the lame phone now will be worth a lot of money.
00:05:57.560 | So, you know, I wound up, you know, finding one and it's a great tool for just squeezing
00:06:05.160 | the scale with your hands and seeing what type of output you could get.
00:06:11.580 | I think we all can relate to this when you just visualize.
00:06:15.880 | Imagine the last time you were sick or just try this, you know, the next time you wake
00:06:19.120 | up in the morning.
00:06:20.120 | When you first wake up in the morning, you're still groggy, try to squeeze your hand.
00:06:23.040 | Try to make a fist as hard as you can.
00:06:24.760 | You're going to sit there angry at your fist because it won't contract as hard as you know
00:06:28.840 | it can.
00:06:29.960 | You don't have the ability to just create the output, and that is because in that state,
00:06:35.640 | you're still sleepy.
00:06:36.640 | You're still fatigued.
00:06:37.640 | You know, you're not even awake at the whole level at this point.
00:06:43.320 | Well, that is still an actual phenomenon that happens that, you know, a lack of recovery
00:06:51.080 | or lack of wakefulness or whatever you want to say is going to lead to a decreased output
00:06:55.240 | there.
00:06:56.240 | So, when you start to measure that on a daily basis, you can get a pretty good sense of
00:06:59.400 | where you're at.
00:07:00.400 | I think when people start to see a drop off of 10% or so or even greater of their grip
00:07:05.840 | output, you really should skip the gym that day because I don't think there's much you're
00:07:10.400 | going to do there that's going to be that beneficial, even if it is the day to train
00:07:15.080 | legs or whatever day it is.
00:07:17.320 | I love this tool.
00:07:18.320 | It's simple.
00:07:19.320 | It's low cost.
00:07:20.320 | You can't find such a scale.
00:07:21.320 | I guess you could also find one of those grippers that, and you can do this in a very nonquantitative
00:07:25.640 | way, but better would be a scale where you could actually measure how hard you can squeeze
00:07:30.160 | this thing at a given time of day.
00:07:32.960 | It draws to mind just a little neuroscience factoid.
00:07:35.320 | In the world of circadian neurobiology, one of the consistent findings is that in the
00:07:40.480 | middle of your nighttime, you know, they'll wake people up and they'll say, "Do this test."
00:07:45.000 | In the laboratory, they use a different apparatus, but it's essentially the same thing.
00:07:48.920 | In the middle of the night, grip strength is very, very low.
00:07:52.040 | Mid-morning, grip strength is high, and as the body temperature goes up into the afternoon,
00:07:56.000 | grip strength goes higher and higher and higher, and then it drops off.
00:07:58.200 | There's a circadian rhythm in grip temperature, so you probably want to do this at more or
00:08:01.480 | less the same time each day if you're going to use it, but I think it's brilliant in its
00:08:06.240 | simplicity and its directness to these upper motor neurons because that's really what it's
00:08:10.040 | assessing.
00:08:11.040 | Your ability, again, it's about the ability to contract the muscles hard.
00:08:13.880 | If you can't do that, you're not going to get an effective workout.
00:08:16.040 | They also, I mean, there certainly are more sophisticated tools, too, as a PT.
00:08:20.600 | We have hand-grip dynamometers, and we can measure one side at a time, too.
00:08:26.840 | I'm getting a little bit blinded by the fact that both hands are squeezing into that scale,
00:08:30.960 | and I don't get really a left-right comparison, but even at that level, that could give you
00:08:34.480 | a little bit more detail, but that comes with a cost.
00:08:36.200 | Those are pretty expensive devices, but if it's, listen, if you were an athlete, you
00:08:40.000 | know, the 200, 300 bucks it costs to have one of those would be well worth, you know,
00:08:44.680 | the added investment.
00:08:45.680 | You know?
00:08:46.680 | And I'm sure some of our listeners are going to want one, too, because there are a lot
00:08:48.600 | of tech geeks out there.
00:08:51.240 | Not tech industry geeks, but people who like tech gear.
00:08:54.760 | What's it called again?
00:08:55.760 | It's a hand-grip dynamometer.
00:08:56.760 | Hand-grip dynamometer.
00:08:57.760 | Dynamometer.
00:08:58.760 | Dynamometer.
00:08:59.760 | Said by Jeff with a great East Coast accent and by me in a terrible botched West Coast
00:09:05.600 | version.
00:09:07.000 | Thank you.