Get Stronger with Grease the Groove Training | Pavel Tsatsouline & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | - I'd like to talk about neural drive.
00:00:06.420 | I attribute you with popularizing, maybe you invented it, but certainly popularizing the
00:00:12.360 | term like greasing the groove.
00:00:13.860 | - Thank you.
00:00:14.860 | - But this notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength training.
00:00:20.560 | - Thank you.
00:00:21.560 | - Because I was weaned more or less trying to run cross country during the cross country
00:00:26.400 | season only ran it once, but I greatly enjoyed it and continued that sort of training or
00:00:30.840 | trying to put on strength and size and kind of a numbskull young male approach to things,
00:00:36.580 | but it served me reasonably well.
00:00:39.120 | I'm grateful that I included both.
00:00:41.600 | However, I was so tuned to this notion of training a body part, creating an adaptation,
00:00:50.240 | then waiting for the adaptation to occur and then training the body part again.
00:00:54.120 | You know, the arguments are all over the internet two times a week, three times a week.
00:00:57.240 | And then I came across this concept of greasing the groove, which as a neuroscientist felt
00:01:02.280 | so intuitively correct and turns out to be correct, you'll explain what it is, but the
00:01:08.280 | idea that more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number
00:01:13.680 | of opportunities for development of strength, of size hypertrophy if one wants.
00:01:19.520 | And I would say just generally more flexibility over one's total fitness program.
00:01:24.160 | Once one understands this concept, you no longer look at this split or that split or
00:01:28.520 | this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume, all that is important, but
00:01:32.560 | you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous system.
00:01:35.920 | And to me, it was like water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together
00:01:41.580 | all these different concepts.
00:01:43.480 | So could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is?
00:01:47.480 | And then I think the implications of it will become obvious, but we'll also spell out
00:01:50.520 | what some of those are.
00:01:51.520 | Andrew, please interrupt me because this is about to become a, this might get really long,
00:01:55.020 | so please interrupt me at any time.
00:01:56.440 | So first I'll talk about the neural component, then we're going to talk about the frequency
00:01:59.800 | and the morphological adaptation, structural adaptations as it leads.
00:02:03.720 | So ladies and gentlemen, grease the groove, we are talking about, let's use an analogy.
00:02:10.480 | Let's imagine that you are a bow hunter and you're working in your garage and then you
00:02:17.360 | walk out of your garage and you shoot an arrow and you just go back to going about your business,
00:02:22.800 | just working in your garage.
00:02:25.200 | Or let's say you're a kid who practices martial arts and every, on every break between classes
00:02:33.120 | you just go in the corner and you practice your kata.
00:02:35.880 | This is the best way to practice your skill.
00:02:38.960 | In small portions, in a spaced out manner.
00:02:42.640 | What's really fascinating is traditional education and traditional strength training is based
00:02:50.640 | on the cramming model.
00:02:52.320 | So remember cramming for an exam.
00:02:54.480 | So you're studying at night and you somehow squeak by and you pass it.
00:02:59.440 | Okay, great.
00:03:00.640 | And then a couple of days later you happily forget everything.
00:03:04.000 | So in contrast, imagine that you are, let's say you're studying a foreign language.
00:03:08.620 | You write words on cards and at every opportunity you're standing in line in the bank.
00:03:14.800 | So the lesser mortals are fooling around on their phones.
00:03:17.720 | You're just going through your deck like, oh, can I translate this word?
00:03:20.160 | I go, put it back in the deck, flip it over.
00:03:22.640 | The next time you're in some other place, you do this again.
00:03:26.060 | So this is an example of space practice versus the traditional mass practice.
00:03:31.320 | And the evidence of the superiority of space practice is just overwhelming.
00:03:38.240 | It goes back to the 19th century and there's at least like more than a thousand papers
00:03:43.040 | published on that.
00:03:44.540 | And still very few people do that, which is really sad.
00:03:47.920 | And strength is a skill.
00:03:51.560 | So two interesting things happened in the '50s.
00:03:54.640 | One is Thomas Rush.
00:03:56.320 | He was an American exercise physiologist.
00:03:59.420 | He proposed that strength adaptation was largely skill.
00:04:06.520 | And he looked at pretty much the adaptations.
00:04:08.360 | He noticed that there's no correlation between the muscle growth and strength.
00:04:12.760 | Then at the same time, a Soviet scientist, Stepanov was his last name, he was measuring
00:04:20.120 | the electrical activity in the muscles of weightlifters who are pressing overhead.
00:04:25.100 | And back then the press was one of the competition events.
00:04:28.960 | And what he found is as the athletes got stronger after some months, the EMGs started dropping
00:04:36.360 | off when they're lifting the same weights.
00:04:39.060 | So pretty much he found out that the neural system activity became more economical.
00:04:44.640 | They were able to try less hard, yet still lift the same weights.
00:04:50.440 | Or pretty much they could try harder and lift even heavier weights.
00:04:55.160 | And hypertrophy could not explain that because in the '50s, the Soviets were very anti-hypertrophy.
00:04:59.960 | They were just doing doubles, triples, singles pretty much.
00:05:03.120 | So if we look at what's going on, it's the Hebbian mechanisms.
00:05:11.200 | So pretty much every time that you activate a particular connection, synaptic connection,
00:05:16.640 | you know, between the neurons, that connection becomes stronger.
00:05:21.360 | So if you did over and over and over.
00:05:23.300 | So the grease, the groove is the analogy is that command that's coming in from your brain
00:05:29.200 | to your muscles, that's the groove.
00:05:31.320 | That's that pathway.
00:05:33.040 | And the more you use it, pretty much the more grease it becomes, so it becomes a superconductor.
00:05:37.280 | So in the future, you don't have to try as hard to lift the same amount of weight, or
00:05:40.920 | you can try the same amount and you can lift harder.
00:05:43.000 | So we haven't even addressed the neural drive yet.
00:05:45.880 | We just pretty much made the motor neurons more responsive to it.
00:05:50.840 | And it's a very easy and very simple way to train.
00:05:56.680 | And strength comes very easily and very, very unexpectedly.
00:06:01.360 | To make sure that it does happen, you have to address the issue of specificity.
00:06:08.200 | So specificity pretty much means without getting too much into the weeds, to get stronger,
00:06:13.520 | first of all, you need to lift weights that are heavy enough.
00:06:16.600 | And if you're looking about percentages of one rep max, we're looking at like 75 to 85,
00:06:22.360 | typically.
00:06:23.360 | If you go too light, you don't make the impression on your nervous system, and it's just not
00:06:28.240 | specific enough.
00:06:29.480 | If you go too heavy, very quickly, you're just going to burn yourself out.
00:06:33.600 | And so pretty much like it's a weight that's heavy enough to respect and light enough not
00:06:38.440 | to fear.
00:06:40.380 | And the second of all, and this is very surprising, is you only do about half or fewer reps that
00:06:46.000 | you possibly could do.
00:06:47.700 | So for example, let's say that you're lifting 80% of your one rep max.
00:06:52.120 | And let's say that you're able to do eight reps maximum with it.
00:06:57.720 | That's your-- we're just fairly common.
00:07:00.320 | Well, you're only going to do about three to four reps per set.
00:07:05.680 | And that's it.
00:07:07.280 | And the gym bros at this point go crazy, like, where's the intensity?
00:07:11.600 | Well, intensity in strength training is just how heavy the weight is.
00:07:15.880 | It has nothing to do with the effort.
00:07:17.920 | And it's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard you're exerting
00:07:22.280 | yourself.
00:07:23.280 | There are times for that.
00:07:24.280 | There are absolutely times for that.
00:07:25.280 | But if the weight is heavy enough, and if you do half the repetitions that you possibly
00:07:29.480 | could do, you're going to get stronger.
00:07:32.520 | It's very safe.
00:07:34.760 | And you're not going to burn out psychologically.
00:07:38.840 | And it's also very easy on your body.
00:07:41.080 | So also, that builds muscle as well, purely because you're able to do a very high volume
00:07:48.640 | of work.
00:07:49.640 | I'm not able to explain the mechanism why it builds muscle.
00:07:53.280 | But as the Soviets found out in weightlifting research, there's a correlation between the
00:07:58.920 | volume and-- Robert Trollman-- between the volume and the hypertrophy, everything else
00:08:04.940 | being equal, you're going to get bigger.
00:08:07.680 | So almost every day, you're doing the sets of three, four reps, maybe even five, and
00:08:12.080 | they start adding up.
00:08:14.040 | And before you know it, you're stronger.
00:08:15.900 | And at the same time, you have developed muscle.
00:08:18.240 | So to summarize the grease, the groove, you're trying to train moderately heavy as often
00:08:25.760 | as possible, while staying as fresh as possible.
00:08:31.000 | And if you decide to do it in the gym, a very simple protocol would be a set every 10 minutes.
00:08:37.640 | It sounds really bizarre.
00:08:38.640 | Like, why?
00:08:39.640 | Why would you rest for so long?
00:08:43.060 | This apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation.
00:08:46.760 | Because so much is still unknown.
00:08:48.540 | So we do know the grease, the groove works great.
00:08:51.200 | But we speculate that some of it has to do with some of the same phenomena related to
00:08:56.000 | learning in other fields.
00:08:58.400 | So if you're doing something over and over, like you're saying two plus two is four, two
00:09:02.680 | plus two is four, you're just using your short-term memory.
00:09:05.760 | You're not memorizing anything.
00:09:07.440 | But if you say two plus two is four, you go get a coffee, you come back, and you try two
00:09:12.440 | plus two, four.
00:09:14.240 | So there's that desirable difficulty that you have in there.
00:09:16.840 | And you have to process that instead of just go through the groove.
00:09:22.480 | That apparently helps this adaptation.
00:09:24.440 | So rest for at least 10 minutes.
00:09:26.840 | Do sets of about the repetitions of half of what you're possibly able to do.
00:09:32.440 | And you know, listen to your body.
00:09:34.280 | Typically train two, three days in a row, and then take a day off, but listen to your
00:09:37.840 | body.
00:09:38.840 | Incidentally, this grease-the-groove is the topic of my next book.
00:09:43.600 | I have completed it.
00:09:44.600 | It's not published yet.
00:09:46.620 | If you look at-- I can't pronounce the Hungarian professor's last name.
00:09:50.800 | Csikszentmihalyi.
00:09:51.800 | Thank you.
00:09:52.800 | Thank you.
00:09:53.800 | I appreciate that.
00:09:54.800 | So he's talking about that perfect challenge, perfect practice lies in that channel between
00:09:59.240 | boredom and anxiety.
00:10:00.840 | So if you put yourself in that channel, and if you keep lifting this moderately heavy
00:10:05.000 | weights, with a moderate effort over and over and over, you're going to get strong.
00:10:09.840 | That's one of the many ways to get stronger.
00:10:11.800 | Are you doing anything in the rest periods between these 10 minutes?
00:10:15.600 | So is it, let's say, bench press, wait 10 minutes till you bench press again.
00:10:21.560 | But in the meantime, you're doing Zercher squat five minutes after the first bench press?
00:10:25.000 | That's one of the ways to do that.
00:10:26.640 | You can do up to three exercises at the same time.
00:10:30.540 | So let's say, like, Zercher squat and a bench press, and maybe a third thing.
00:10:33.960 | Let's say those two are enough.
00:10:36.120 | And another option is you can do that.
00:10:37.900 | You can incorporate this into, if you would do only one exercise, you can squeeze it into
00:10:42.840 | your lifestyle or your athletic practice.
00:10:45.360 | So for example, in, let's say, you're teaching a track practice or martial arts class.
00:10:55.720 | And every 10 minutes on the clock, you just have the class do, drop and do three hard,
00:11:01.440 | let's say, three one-arm push-ups, and then get back to the class.
00:11:04.700 | So there's no interference whatsoever.
00:11:06.000 | In fact, it's better than no interference.
00:11:09.000 | Back in the '60s, Soviets found out something called the strength after effect.
00:11:14.320 | So if you do strength work that's not exhausting in nature and that's not novel to you, it
00:11:19.680 | has a tonic effect just for anything that you can do with your brain or with your body,
00:11:28.200 | anything.
00:11:29.200 | And they would even do some coaches, they would do so-called strength warm-up.
00:11:32.640 | They would warm up, as usual, for a track class, let's say, track practice.
00:11:37.160 | Then they would do, let's say, three sets of three of something, like with 80% max,
00:11:41.920 | which is not much.
00:11:43.880 | And they start their practice.
00:11:46.640 | Then the coach noticed that the athletes are starting to droop a little.
00:11:49.880 | He'll repeat that, you know.
00:11:51.800 | He might repeat that up to three times.
00:11:53.740 | So what you have is by having this short, very small dose, like a nanopractice of strength,
00:12:01.380 | you rejuvenate yourself and your productivity increases so much.
00:12:04.600 | So whether you want to just do the strength exercise, several of them in that one hour
00:12:08.840 | period, or whether you want to combine that with writing a great American novel, that's
00:12:14.700 | your business.
00:12:15.700 | I suppose if someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home, you could incorporate grease
00:12:20.200 | the groove into your entire day.
00:12:22.800 | That's ideal, yes.
00:12:24.020 | And obviously it's difficult with some equipment, but what you could do, you could use the heavy-duty
00:12:27.980 | grippers.
00:12:28.980 | You could do one-arm push-ups.
00:12:31.520 | You could keep a kettlebell under your desk and press it at every opportunity.
00:12:37.740 | And again, the idea is really just practice.
00:12:39.460 | You just try to hit a perfect, perfect trap.
00:12:42.980 | And notice that if you have some issues, if you're a warm-up-dependent person for orthopedic
00:12:51.300 | issues, I'm talking about warm-up and very much in the body, not the mind in this particular
00:12:56.460 | case, then it might not be appropriate for you.
00:12:59.740 | Although, you know, with 10-minute rest, it might still be okay.
00:13:03.260 | But practicing a skill without the warm-up, that means rehearsal, is very powerful for
00:13:11.140 | improving that skill.
00:13:12.840 | People think they automatically equate performance with improvement, with learning, but it's
00:13:16.660 | not so, not at all.
00:13:18.540 | When you're doing something that's just out of the blue, it's, you know, the way a sniper
00:13:24.900 | would take a cold shot.
00:13:26.840 | That's so much harder because you have to have produced that solution.
00:13:30.760 | Or maybe an example that's closer to most viewers, golf.
00:13:36.640 | You go to the driving range, you start hitting it, and like, wow, you're amazing.
00:13:41.260 | You just get yourself fine-tuned, you hit, you're perfect.
00:13:45.400 | Then you go and you play the game, and you cannot replicate that.
00:13:50.020 | Because suddenly, different club, different topography, everything's different, and you
00:13:54.560 | didn't have the luxury of that tuning yourself up right there.
00:13:58.280 | So it feels, it doesn't feel like you're stronger, but you are going to get much stronger.
00:14:02.200 | [Music]