Avoid Weight Training Plateaus & Helping Nonresponders | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | >> Yeah, I've always noticed that there are certain muscle groups that are very easy to
00:00:08.080 | isolate when under load and those are almost always the same muscle groups that are easy
00:00:14.800 | to contract very hard without any load whatsoever.
00:00:20.040 | >> Bingo.
00:00:21.040 | That's actually really insightful.
00:00:23.740 | You can use this heuristic of if you can contract your lats just standing here, you're probably
00:00:28.900 | going to contract them very well when you lift.
00:00:30.780 | If you can't, you can probably assume about the same thing's going to happen.
00:00:34.380 | So yeah, you'll know.
00:00:37.820 | The lats are actually really interesting because they tend to be one of the more difficult
00:00:42.140 | muscle groups to learn how to activate.
00:00:44.580 | So if you're in your journey and you're just like, I have no idea and you can look up like
00:00:48.660 | a lat pose.
00:00:50.260 | So how do you like, how do you puff your lats up?
00:00:51.740 | How do you show it?
00:00:52.740 | And if you do that and you're like, wow, there's no movement here, just recognize that's extremely
00:00:57.520 | common and that it's probably going to take you many, many, many months of trying before
00:01:02.300 | you start to see some movements and probably even a few years before you really start to
00:01:05.500 | see activation.
00:01:06.500 | So you're not some sort of like specific, like special genetic anomaly.
00:01:11.140 | It's very, very common.
00:01:12.340 | It's uncommon to not be able to activate your biceps, right?
00:01:16.560 | Everyone can do that.
00:01:17.560 | But if you're just like, man, I can't get this here.
00:01:19.980 | I'm just going to stop doing it.
00:01:21.260 | Do not do that.
00:01:22.260 | Just keep at it and just keep concentrating and thinking about that muscle group.
00:01:25.560 | It will take some time.
00:01:26.560 | But it's very common to have challenges activating lats.
00:01:29.740 | Yeah.
00:01:30.740 | I've noticed that many of the muscle groups that were responsible for a large fraction
00:01:36.580 | of the work in the various sports that I played as a young child are muscles that are very
00:01:42.780 | easy for me to selectively isolate and induce hypertrophy in.
00:01:47.820 | I suppose I'm one of those mutants where my lats happen to be one such of those muscle
00:01:52.420 | groups.
00:01:53.420 | I think that's because I swam a lot when I was a kid.
00:01:54.820 | Literally going to ask me a swimmer.
00:01:56.660 | Yeah.
00:01:57.660 | It's like a telltale sign.
00:01:58.660 | Yeah.
00:01:59.660 | Every kid in my town swam and played soccer.
00:02:00.660 | There you go.
00:02:01.660 | And then later I skateboarded and did some boxing and things of that sort.
00:02:04.740 | You generally hear that answer is you either were a swimmer or you were a wrestler.
00:02:09.380 | So it's like that pulling and pull toward you is thousands of repetitions allowed you
00:02:14.100 | to get very good at contracting.
00:02:15.780 | But because I also played soccer and skateboarding, but I didn't do any baseball, basketball or
00:02:22.340 | anything, muscle groups like deltoids are very challenging to activate and isolate.
00:02:26.820 | So I do think that early development is superimposed on a genetic template that sort of predicts
00:02:33.180 | which muscle groups are going to be easier or harder to isolate and train.
00:02:36.660 | It's also a very good case for why it's important to do as many different athletic activities
00:02:41.780 | as you can in your youth.
00:02:43.380 | Yeah.
00:02:44.380 | And if you do skateboard, definitely learn to ride switch because every skateboarder
00:02:49.180 | I know has one leg that's larger than the other and one calf that's larger than the
00:02:52.500 | other.
00:02:53.500 | And actually for that matter, people that do martial arts that don't learn to, if they're
00:02:57.300 | not southpaw, if they don't learn to switch up and do their work southpaw, you see the
00:03:01.580 | same thing.
00:03:02.580 | I mean, you're building an asymmetry into the system and it's not just muscular, it's
00:03:06.380 | neural.
00:03:07.380 | Oh, for sure.
00:03:08.380 | It's strongly neural.
00:03:09.380 | Yeah.
00:03:10.380 | So yeah, kids, parents, get your kids doing a bunch of different things.
00:03:14.060 | I suppose gymnastics would probably be the best sport all around in terms of movement
00:03:18.660 | in multiple planes and activating all the different muscle groups.
00:03:21.620 | Yes and no.
00:03:23.380 | There's a lot of benefit, no question about it.
00:03:26.660 | There's a lot of other things though that it has limited ability.
00:03:29.260 | So almost everything in, not like gymnastics is great, but almost everything in that is
00:03:33.540 | pre-planned, which is a major downfall, right?
00:03:36.420 | So the joy of skating is there's so much proprioceptive input that you have to make decisions very
00:03:41.300 | quickly in small windows.
00:03:43.580 | Now you have a little bit of that when you're flipping in the air and you have to land,
00:03:46.020 | but you, gymnastics, gymnasts tend to have a very specific routine that they're working
00:03:49.500 | on and they work on that routine for years.
00:03:52.380 | So skateboarding for me was transportation.
00:03:55.180 | It was freedom and it didn't require any coaches or parental oversight.
00:03:58.460 | Yeah, yeah.
00:03:59.460 | Ball sports have the beauty of reaction and things like that.
00:04:01.500 | So all of them are wonderful.
00:04:03.900 | Yeah.
00:04:04.900 | Good to do a lot of them.
00:04:06.500 | You've established that 10 really to 20 sets per week is the kind of bounds for maintaining
00:04:14.060 | and initiating hypertrophy.
00:04:16.100 | Yep.
00:04:17.100 | If I were to like flag one of them, I would say 15 to 20 is the sets that you want to
00:04:20.980 | get working now.
00:04:23.180 | It gets complicated when you ask, well, how many reps per set do I have to get to?
00:04:28.580 | Okay.
00:04:29.580 | Well, we also can complicate that by repetition type and tempo.
00:04:33.740 | Just sort of let all that go for now and just think if you're getting close to that range,
00:04:39.420 | you're in the spot and all you have to do now is balance two things, recovery and continued
00:04:44.780 | training.
00:04:45.780 | Okay.
00:04:46.780 | So if you're somewhere in this 10 to 20 working sets range and you're in a position where
00:04:51.540 | you can continue to do that, you're not so sore and so damaged and beat up that you can't
00:04:56.700 | maintain that volume for, you know, eight weeks at a time or at least six weeks at a
00:05:00.740 | time, then I'd probably say either the style of repetitions, the amount of repetitions
00:05:05.180 | per set you're doing are too much.
00:05:06.660 | The volume is getting to you.
00:05:07.940 | However, if you're not seeing adaptations, then I'd say maybe the repetitions aren't
00:05:11.860 | enough.
00:05:13.220 | And so that's the kind of game you're running.
00:05:15.180 | Now there could be plenty of other factors.
00:05:17.180 | Intensity.
00:05:18.180 | Of course.
00:05:19.180 | Yeah, intensity, intent, and then of course the other things, sleep, nutrition, et cetera.
00:05:25.500 | All these other things that go into our visible stressor category that we always analyze.
00:05:30.900 | This sort of brings up this idea of responders and non-responders.
00:05:33.660 | So we get this one a ton.
00:05:35.780 | So why is it some people, my gym buddy, my roommate, we go to sleep at the same time,
00:05:40.740 | we're on the same nutrition plan, we work out together, she triples in muscle size and
00:05:45.300 | I don't have like no gain whatsoever.
00:05:48.060 | Well there's a lot of work that we're trying to do to identify the molecular mechanisms
00:05:51.660 | behind responders and non-responders because they clearly exist.
00:05:55.020 | In fact, this is one of the reasons why every paper I basically will ever publish again
00:05:59.820 | if I, you know, if I do, always reports individual person data.
00:06:04.500 | So rather than group averages, you get to see, you know, if there's 10 subjects in it,
00:06:07.620 | you get to see how each of the 10 responded.
00:06:10.380 | Because the group average can get confusing, what you really want to see is how many actually
00:06:14.860 | people got better, how many got worse, how many maybe changed and if so.
00:06:20.240 | So we'll always report those individual data because when you go to train, you're you,
00:06:24.580 | you're not the group average.
00:06:25.820 | That's very important to know.
00:06:27.700 | So if you do that, you can see a beautiful line of these hyper-responders, the bell curve
00:06:33.140 | in the middle of the normal responders and those folks who like through any training
00:06:36.480 | study just won't get any better.
00:06:39.260 | If you can tease out what you can't, but let's say in science you could tease out all the
00:06:42.420 | extra factors, total stress load, hydration, sleep, etc.
00:06:46.860 | What you often see is non-responders a lot of the time, it's not that they have a physiological
00:06:51.340 | inability, it's just that they need a different protocol.
00:06:54.660 | And a lot of times it's they just need more volume.
00:06:57.100 | So if they can handle that and they're not excessively beat up, just give them more volume
00:07:00.020 | and they tend to see a lot of breakthroughs.
00:07:02.700 | And you see the same thing with plateaus.
00:07:05.380 | So typically it's sort of just like, okay, the routine you're on, you've been on it for
00:07:07.980 | too long.
00:07:09.240 | We need to either go to the other end of the hypertrophy spectrum for intensity, which
00:07:12.900 | means like if you've been in the like 60 to 70% of your one repetition max range, maybe
00:07:18.460 | we actually need to go heavier.
00:07:21.140 | Take our repetitions down, maybe even our total volume down and go heavier.
00:07:24.160 | Try that.
00:07:25.160 | A great way to break through plateaus of grand if all the other boxes are checked.
00:07:29.900 | The other one is do the opposite, which is like, okay, we're going to go higher.
00:07:33.020 | We're going to go set to 20, set to 25, very high repetition range and really get after
00:07:38.420 | it.
00:07:39.420 | Not to do as much damage because you don't tend to get as sore from those really high
00:07:42.700 | repetition ranges.
00:07:44.140 | You'll get more sore from the lower repetition, higher intensity range than you will typically
00:07:48.740 | the other ones and see if we can bust through some plateaus there.
00:07:52.420 | So it just generally means you need to do something a little bit different than your
00:07:55.700 | training partner.