Science of Muscle Growth, Increasing Strength & Muscular Recovery

Chapters

0:0 Introduction
10:58 Protocol For Fat Loss: (Zero-Cost) PDF Available At: thecoldplunge.com
12:45 Muscle Is A Slave To the Nervous System
16:22 Why We Have A Brain
17:38 Flexors, Extensors, & Mutual Inhibition
20:0 How Muscles Move, Making & Using Muscle Energy: Making ATP
23:29 The “Burn” Is Not Lactic Acid. Lactate: A Buffer (Prevents Acidity), Fuel, & Hormone
26:11 Feeling the Burn For 10% of Workouts Is Good For Brain, Heart, Liver
27:30 Leveraging Lactate To Enhance Brain Function
29:40 Breathing Properly Through “The Burn”— For Sake of Performance & Brain Function
30:47 Neurogenesis (New Neurons) & Exercise: Not Much, In Humans… Which Is Good.
33:39 How To Contract Muscles, Make Them Bigger and/or Stronger: Henneman’s Principle
36:58 A Large Range of Weight (30-80% of One Repetition Maximum) Can Be Used
38:58 What Makes Muscles To Grow? Stress, Tension, & Damage; Myosin Balloons
45:22 Figuring Out Which of Your Muscles Will Grow & Get Stronger Easily (Or Not)
48:11 Getting Stronger Versus Muscle Growth: Distributed Versus Local Effort
50:47 How Much Resistance Should (Most) People Use? (30-80% Range) & Specific Goal
54:25 How Many Sets Per Week To Maintain Or To Grow Muscle & Get Stronger
56:43 10% Of Resistance Training Should Be To “Failure”, the Rest Should End “Near” Failure
58:23 Number of Sets: Inversely Related To the Ability to Generate High Force Contractions
60:9 How Long Should Weight Training Sessions Last
61:35 Training Duration & Volume
63:51 Range of Motion & Speed of Movement; The Key Role of (Upper Motor) Neurons
68:10 Customizing Training; 1-6 Month Experiments; Key Elements Summarized
69:28 Focal Contractions Between Sets To Enhance Hypertrophy, Not Performance
71:26 The Optimal Resistance Training Protocol To Optimize Testosterone Release
76:0 How Quickly To Complete Repetitions; Interset Rest Times & Activities; Pre-Exhaustion
80:43 Tools To Determine If You Have Recovered From Previous Training: Local & Systemic
86:33 Carbon Dioxide Tolerance Test For Assessing Recovery
92:43 The Way To End Every Training Session. How To Breath Between Sets For Performance
94:46 How & When To Use Cold Exposure To Enhance Recovery; When To Avoid Cold
96:37 Antihistamines & Anti-Inflammatory Drugs: Can Be Problematic/Prevent Progress
98:42 Foundational Supplements For Recovery: EPA, Vitamin D3, Magnesium Malate
101:8 Ensuring Proper Nerve-Muscle Firing: Sodium, Potassium, Magnesium
105:0 Creatine: Good? How Much? Cognitive Effects. Hormonal Considerations: DHT
110:12 Beta-Alanine, Beet Juice; Note About Arginine & Citrulline & Cold Sores
112:0 Nutrition: Protein Density: Leucine Thresholds; Meal Frequency
115:54 Why Hard Workouts Can Make It Hard To Think/Do Mental Work
117:25 Leveraging Weight Training & Rest Days To Optimize Cognitive Work
118:58 What Time Of Day Is Best To Resistance Train?
119:40 More Information Resources, Subscribing (Zero-Cost) To Support

Whisper Transcript | Transcript Only Page

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.740 | [upbeat music]

00:00:08.320 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.400 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.400 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.300 | This podcast is separate from my teaching

00:00:17.060 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:00:18.880 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:00:21.000 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:00:23.040 | about science and science-related tools

00:00:25.180 | to the general public.

00:00:26.760 | In keeping with that theme,

00:00:27.960 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:00:30.880 | Our first sponsor is InsideTracker.

00:00:33.640 | InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform

00:00:36.180 | that analyzes data from your blood and DNA

00:00:38.640 | to help you better understand your body

00:00:40.220 | and reach your health goals.

00:00:42.160 | I've long been a fan of getting blood work done

00:00:44.840 | for the simple reason that many of the things

00:00:47.440 | that impact our immediate and long-term health

00:00:49.820 | can only be analyzed from a quality blood test.

00:00:52.840 | And now, with the advent of modern DNA tests,

00:00:55.800 | we can also get insight into things like metabolic factors

00:00:59.320 | that tell us whether or not we metabolize caffeine well

00:01:02.420 | or certain proteins well,

00:01:04.320 | what our fat metabolism genes are like.

00:01:07.640 | Things of that sort can only be analyzed

00:01:09.540 | from quality blood and DNA tests.

00:01:12.240 | In addition, many of the factors that impact our hormones,

00:01:15.500 | our metabolism, our brain health,

00:01:17.760 | those come back in a blood and DNA test,

00:01:20.240 | and there are many blood and DNA tests out there,

00:01:22.220 | but with InsideTracker,

00:01:23.800 | they give you a lot of clear insight

00:01:26.320 | into what those markers mean and how to adjust them.

00:01:29.500 | They have this terrific platform

00:01:31.280 | that doesn't just give you the numbers back

00:01:33.240 | and tell you if you're high or low in some factor,

00:01:35.520 | but rather it tells you what your levels are

00:01:38.040 | of all those factors

00:01:39.080 | and gives you very simple and clear directives

00:01:42.080 | of changes you might make in your diet,

00:01:44.360 | changes that you might make in your exercise regimen

00:01:47.740 | or sleep, et cetera,

00:01:48.980 | in order to get those markers where they ought to be

00:01:51.640 | and where you would like them to be

00:01:52.920 | in order to optimize yourself.

00:01:55.180 | So they make everything very easy, start to finish.

00:01:57.320 | They can even come to your home

00:01:58.300 | to take the blood and DNA tests if you like.

00:02:00.760 | If you'd like to try InsideTracker,

00:02:02.320 | you can go to insidetracker.com/huberman,

00:02:05.440 | and if you do that,

00:02:06.460 | you'll get 25% off any of InsideTracker's plans.

00:02:09.560 | Use the code Huberman at checkout.

00:02:12.020 | Today's podcast is also brought to us

00:02:13.760 | by Belcampo Meat Company.

00:02:15.920 | Belcampo is a regenerative farm in Northern California

00:02:18.480 | that raises organic, grass-fed,

00:02:20.100 | and finished certified humane meats.

00:02:23.040 | While I don't eat a lot of meat,

00:02:24.420 | when I do, I insist that that meat be of very high quality.

00:02:28.300 | How the animals were cared for is extremely important to me,

00:02:31.820 | and the life that the animal had and what it consumed

00:02:34.900 | is very important to me.

00:02:36.300 | So the way that I eat,

00:02:37.280 | I've discussed on this podcast before, but very briefly,

00:02:39.660 | I basically fast until about noon,

00:02:41.420 | then I eat a piece of beef or chicken with lunch

00:02:44.580 | and a salad.

00:02:45.620 | So that's basically my lunch.

00:02:46.620 | That's what optimizes my levels of alertness

00:02:48.740 | for work throughout the day.

00:02:50.400 | Then in the evening,

00:02:51.380 | I shift over to eating primarily carbohydrates.

00:02:54.060 | That's what allows me to sleep very well.

00:02:56.480 | So I'm not eating huge volumes of meat,

00:02:58.720 | but I am eating meat every day.

00:03:01.540 | Conventionally raised animals are confined to feedlots

00:03:03.820 | and eat a diet of inflammatory grains,

00:03:05.620 | which is bad for them,

00:03:06.540 | and it's bad for us when we eat their meat.

00:03:09.140 | Belcampo's animals graze on open pastures

00:03:11.320 | and seasonal grasses,

00:03:12.300 | resulting in meat that is higher in nutrients

00:03:14.140 | and healthy fats.

00:03:15.040 | And I've talked before about the importance

00:03:16.980 | of omega-3 fatty acids for both brain and body health.

00:03:20.340 | And Belcampo meats are high in omega-3 fatty acids.

00:03:23.880 | The way Belcampo raises its animals

00:03:25.940 | isn't just better for your health.

00:03:27.140 | It also has a positive impact on the environment.

00:03:29.660 | It's what's called climate positive and carbon negative,

00:03:32.060 | which means good for the planet and good for us.

00:03:35.460 | My favorite meats from Belcampo

00:03:37.020 | are the ribeye and the flank steaks.

00:03:39.180 | That's typically what I eat.

00:03:40.320 | I think I probably eat about three or four of those

00:03:43.100 | across the week,

00:03:43.940 | and then I'll eat chicken on some other days.

00:03:46.140 | They're really delicious.

00:03:47.100 | And as I mentioned, they're very good for us.

00:03:49.540 | You can order Belcampo sustainably raised meats

00:03:51.860 | to be delivered straight to your door

00:03:53.080 | using my code Huberman at belcampo.com/huberman.

00:03:57.860 | If you do that, you'll get 20% off first time order.

00:04:01.380 | That's belcampo.com/huberman for 20% off your first order.

00:04:06.100 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Headspace.

00:04:09.260 | Headspace is a meditation app backed by 25 published studies

00:04:13.100 | and has over 600,000 five-star reviews.

00:04:16.780 | So I've been meditating on and off

00:04:18.780 | since I was about 15, 16 years old, mostly off at first.

00:04:23.340 | What I've found is that

00:04:25.020 | I'll sometimes start a meditation practice,

00:04:26.940 | but it's very hard to stay with.

00:04:28.800 | And then a few years ago, I discovered Headspace

00:04:31.400 | and I started meditating more regularly.

00:04:33.140 | In fact, very recently,

00:04:34.940 | because I've had an exorbitant amount of work on my plate

00:04:38.040 | and I've been getting less sleep than I would like

00:04:40.540 | in order to complete that work,

00:04:41.740 | I've brought back a regular meditation practice twice a day,

00:04:45.420 | not just my usual once a day.

00:04:47.380 | Headspace makes it really easy.

00:04:49.000 | They have so many meditations on there

00:04:51.100 | and they guide you into the meditation

00:04:52.940 | and out of the meditation in a way

00:04:54.580 | that just makes it very simple

00:04:56.580 | and makes maintaining the practice really straightforward.

00:04:59.920 | Right now, if you want to try Headspace,

00:05:01.660 | you can go to headspace.com/specialoffer.

00:05:04.740 | And if you do that, you'll get a free one month trial,

00:05:07.860 | so that's totally free,

00:05:09.180 | with their full library of meditations for every situation.

00:05:12.180 | So there's no meditations

00:05:13.840 | that you can't get access to with this offer.

00:05:15.700 | You can get access to everything they've got.

00:05:17.680 | You just go to headspace.com/specialoffer.

00:05:20.680 | You get a free one month trial

00:05:22.300 | and hopefully you'll decide to stay with it.

00:05:23.900 | I've found that staying with meditation

00:05:25.780 | has been immensely beneficial for all aspects of my life.

00:05:29.100 | Today's episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast

00:05:31.200 | is our fourth and final episode in this month,

00:05:33.500 | which is all about skills and athletic performance.

00:05:37.740 | Now, in a previous episode,

00:05:39.360 | we talked about science-based,

00:05:41.340 | in particular neuroscience-based tools

00:05:43.680 | for accelerating fat loss.

00:05:46.220 | Previous to that,

00:05:47.060 | we talked about ways to improve skill learning,

00:05:49.900 | motor movements, which also included things like music

00:05:53.120 | and piano playing, not just athletic performance.

00:05:56.720 | And we've also been exploring other aspects

00:05:59.220 | of physical performance throughout the entire month.

00:06:02.140 | Today, I want to talk about something

00:06:03.880 | that is vitally important for not just athletic performance,

00:06:07.840 | but for your entire life and indeed for your longevity,

00:06:11.620 | and that's muscle.

00:06:13.440 | Now, many of you, when you hear the word muscle,

00:06:15.240 | think muscle growth and building big muscles.

00:06:17.960 | And while we will touch on muscle hypertrophy,

00:06:20.280 | muscle growth today,

00:06:21.760 | and science-based protocols to enhance hypertrophy,

00:06:26.080 | we will mainly be talking about muscle

00:06:28.400 | as it relates to the nervous system.

00:06:30.800 | And I can't emphasize this enough.

00:06:33.440 | The whole reason why you have a brain

00:06:36.480 | is so that you can move.

00:06:38.200 | And one of the things that's exquisite

00:06:40.520 | and fantastic about the human brain

00:06:43.240 | is that it can direct all sorts

00:06:44.980 | of different kinds of movement,

00:06:46.840 | different speeds of movement,

00:06:48.760 | movement of different durations.

00:06:50.800 | We can train our musculature

00:06:53.080 | to lift heavier and heavier objects,

00:06:55.120 | or we can train our musculature

00:06:56.800 | to take us further and further, so-called endurance.

00:06:59.720 | We can also build smoothness of movement, excuse me,

00:07:03.700 | smoothness of movement,

00:07:05.600 | as well as speed of movement, suppleness of movement.

00:07:09.960 | All of that is governed by the relationship

00:07:13.760 | between the nervous system, neurons,

00:07:16.400 | and their connections to muscle.

00:07:19.040 | So when you hear the science of muscle

00:07:21.120 | and muscle hypertrophy,

00:07:22.840 | you might think, oh, well,

00:07:23.800 | I'm not interested in building muscle,

00:07:25.720 | but muscle does many critical things.

00:07:28.600 | It's important for movement.

00:07:30.560 | It's important for metabolism.

00:07:32.800 | The more muscle you have, and not just muscle size,

00:07:36.160 | but the quality of muscle, that's a real thing,

00:07:39.480 | the higher your metabolism is,

00:07:41.740 | and indeed the healthier you are.

00:07:44.120 | It turns out that jumping ability

00:07:47.860 | and ability to stand up quickly

00:07:49.680 | and to get up off the floor quickly

00:07:51.480 | is one of the most predictive markers of aging

00:07:54.540 | and biological aging, and no surprise,

00:07:56.960 | that is governed by the brain to muscle connection.

00:08:00.720 | In addition, muscle and musculature is vital for posture,

00:08:05.280 | and we don't talk about posture enough.

00:08:08.260 | We all have been told we need to sit up straight

00:08:10.180 | or stand up straight,

00:08:11.880 | but posture is vitally important

00:08:14.860 | for how the rest of our body works.

00:08:17.520 | It's vital to how we breathe.

00:08:19.280 | It's actually even vital to how alert or sleepy we are.

00:08:23.440 | So we're going to talk about the musculature for posture.

00:08:26.440 | We also are going to talk about muscle

00:08:28.340 | as it relates to aesthetic things.

00:08:30.640 | Now, these are all linked.

00:08:32.080 | Muscle for metabolism, movement, posture, and aesthetics,

00:08:35.120 | of course are linked, right?

00:08:36.520 | As our posture changes, our aesthetic changes.

00:08:38.860 | As our posture and aesthetic changes, how we move changes.

00:08:42.520 | And as we improve muscle quality,

00:08:45.600 | whether or not that's increasing muscle size or not,

00:08:48.680 | that changes the way that our entire system,

00:08:51.280 | not just our nervous system and our muscular system,

00:08:53.960 | but our immune system and the other organs of the body work.

00:08:57.640 | So today, as always,

00:08:58.940 | we're going to talk a little bit of mechanism.

00:09:01.360 | I'm going to explain how neurons control muscle,

00:09:04.920 | and then we're going to look at muscle metabolism,

00:09:08.120 | how muscle uses energy.

00:09:09.760 | I promised to make all of this very simple.

00:09:11.700 | I'm actually going to keep it very brief,

00:09:14.040 | probably about 10 minutes total.

00:09:16.000 | And by the end of that 10 minutes,

00:09:17.380 | you will understand a lot

00:09:19.000 | about the neuromuscular connection,

00:09:21.020 | how your brain and nervous system control your muscle,

00:09:23.540 | and how those muscles work.

00:09:25.680 | Then we are going to talk about how muscles use energy

00:09:29.680 | and can change how they use energy

00:09:32.200 | for sake of getting stronger, if you like,

00:09:35.000 | for also increasing the size,

00:09:36.800 | so-called hypertrophy of muscle,

00:09:38.860 | and for improving endurance,

00:09:40.760 | as well as for improving posture and how you move generally.

00:09:45.760 | We will touch on some nutritional themes

00:09:48.460 | and how that relates to muscle,

00:09:49.560 | in particular, a specific amino acid

00:09:52.000 | that if it's available in your bloodstream frequently enough

00:09:55.380 | and at sufficient levels can help you build

00:09:58.740 | and improve the quality of muscle.

00:10:01.740 | And we'll talk about specific exercise regimes,

00:10:04.600 | as well as, of course, supplementation

00:10:07.580 | and things that can enhance neuromuscular performance

00:10:11.220 | overall.

00:10:12.280 | We are also going to talk about recovery.

00:10:14.920 | Recovery, as everybody knows, is when things improve.

00:10:18.820 | That's when neurons get better at controlling muscle.

00:10:23.320 | That's when muscle grows.

00:10:24.640 | That's when muscle gets more flexible.

00:10:27.040 | None of that actually happens during training.

00:10:29.180 | It happens after training.

00:10:30.840 | And there is a lot of confusion

00:10:32.480 | about how to optimize recovery

00:10:34.220 | and how to measure whether or not you are recovered

00:10:37.240 | and ready to come back in

00:10:38.880 | for another neuromuscular training session.

00:10:41.700 | So we'll talk about that as well.

00:10:43.780 | Today is going to have a lot of protocols,

00:10:46.360 | and you're going to come away with a lot of understanding

00:10:48.340 | about how you move, how you work,

00:10:49.920 | and these incredible organs that we call the nervous system

00:10:54.320 | and the musculature, the so-called neuromuscular system.

00:10:58.520 | Before we dive into today's topic,

00:11:00.760 | I want to just take about three minutes

00:11:03.120 | and cover some essential summary of the previous episode.

00:11:07.740 | In the previous episode, we talked about fat loss,

00:11:10.800 | talked about shiver-induced fat loss.

00:11:12.600 | We talked about neat non-exercise activity thermogenesis

00:11:16.080 | for increasing caloric burn and fat oxidation.

00:11:19.780 | And we talked about how to use cold

00:11:22.200 | specifically to enhance fat loss.

00:11:25.120 | I described a protocol involving

00:11:27.360 | getting into cold of some sort,

00:11:29.320 | whether or not it's ice bath, cold shower,

00:11:31.940 | some form of cold, it could even be a river or an ocean

00:11:34.480 | if you have access to that,

00:11:35.960 | and inducing shiver and then getting out,

00:11:38.780 | not crossing your arms or huddling,

00:11:41.100 | but allowing that cold to evaporate off you

00:11:43.340 | and continuing to shiver

00:11:44.360 | and then getting back into the colder environment

00:11:46.780 | of water or stream or shower, et cetera.

00:11:49.000 | All of that is described in a beautifully illustrated

00:11:52.880 | protocol that I didn't illustrate,

00:11:55.840 | that's why it's beautifully illustrated,

00:11:57.520 | at thecoldplunge.com.

00:11:59.440 | They've made that protocol for you

00:12:02.100 | and they've made it available free of charge for you.

00:12:05.040 | So there's no obligation there of any kind financially.

00:12:07.720 | You can go to thecoldplunge.com.

00:12:09.980 | There's a little tab that says protocols

00:12:11.760 | and you can download that protocol.

00:12:13.280 | There's someone there, I don't know who exactly

00:12:14.960 | illustrated it, and you can come away with a PDF

00:12:17.520 | of what I described in the previous episode.

00:12:19.280 | So I just wanted to make sure

00:12:20.220 | that you're aware of that resource.

00:12:22.520 | The other announcement I'd like to make

00:12:24.080 | is that many of you have asked

00:12:25.820 | how you can help support the podcast,

00:12:27.520 | and there's a very straightforward,

00:12:29.460 | zero cost way to do that,

00:12:31.000 | and that's to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

00:12:33.560 | So if you go to YouTube,

00:12:35.200 | if you're not already there watching this now,

00:12:37.400 | hit the subscribe button.

00:12:39.040 | That helps us tremendously to get the word out more broadly

00:12:42.000 | about the podcast, and we thank you for your support.

00:12:45.500 | Most people, when they hear the word muscle,

00:12:47.660 | they just think about strength.

00:12:49.440 | But of course, muscles are involved in everything that we do.

00:12:53.080 | They are involved in speaking.

00:12:54.260 | They're involved in sitting and standing up.

00:12:56.280 | They're involved in lifting objects, including ourselves.

00:13:00.140 | They are absolutely essential for maintaining how we breathe.

00:13:05.140 | They're absolutely essential for ambulation, for moving,

00:13:08.960 | and for skills of any kind.

00:13:11.900 | So when we think about muscle,

00:13:14.180 | we don't just want to think about muscle,

00:13:16.400 | the meat that is muscle, but what controls that muscle.

00:13:20.240 | And no surprise, what controls muscle is the nervous system.

00:13:25.000 | The nervous system does that

00:13:26.520 | through three main nodes of control, areas of control,

00:13:29.840 | and I've talked about these before on a previous podcast,

00:13:32.120 | so I will keep this very brief.

00:13:33.900 | Basically, we have upper motor neurons in our motor cortex,

00:13:38.240 | so those are in our skull,

00:13:40.240 | and those are involved in deliberate movement.

00:13:42.260 | So if I decide that I'm going to pick my pen up

00:13:44.440 | and put it down, which is what I'm doing right now,

00:13:46.500 | my upper motor neurons were involved

00:13:48.200 | in generating that movement.

00:13:49.920 | Those upper motor neurons send signals

00:13:51.940 | down to my spinal cord,

00:13:53.300 | where there are two categories of neurons.

00:13:56.040 | One are the lower motor neurons,

00:13:58.860 | and those lower motor neurons send little wires

00:14:01.880 | that we call axons out to our muscles

00:14:04.620 | and cause those muscles to contract.

00:14:06.360 | They do that by dumping chemicals onto the muscle.

00:14:08.620 | In fact, the chemical is acetylcholine.

00:14:12.100 | I've talked before about acetylcholine in the brain,

00:14:15.220 | which is vitally important for focus

00:14:17.620 | and actually can gate neuroplasticity,

00:14:19.940 | the brain's ability to change in response to experience.

00:14:23.160 | But in the neuromuscular system,

00:14:25.480 | acetylcholine released from motor neurons

00:14:27.960 | is the only way that muscles can contract.

00:14:32.960 | Now, there's another category of neurons in the spinal cord

00:14:36.280 | called central pattern generators or CPGs,

00:14:38.960 | and those are involved in rhythmic movements.

00:14:41.940 | Anytime we're walking or doing something

00:14:43.980 | where we don't have to think about it to do it deliberately,

00:14:47.240 | it's just happening reflexively,

00:14:48.840 | that central pattern generators and motor neurons.

00:14:51.300 | Anytime we're doing something deliberately,

00:14:53.460 | that the top-down control, as we call it,

00:14:56.020 | from the upper motor neurons comes in

00:14:57.940 | and takes control of that system.

00:15:00.040 | So it's really simple.

00:15:00.880 | You've only got three ingredients.

00:15:02.120 | You've got the upper motor neurons, the lower motor neurons,

00:15:04.220 | and for rhythmic movements that are reflexive,

00:15:06.340 | you've also got the central pattern generators.

00:15:08.800 | So it's a terrifically simple system at that level.

00:15:11.880 | But what we're going to focus on today

00:15:15.300 | is how that system can control muscle

00:15:17.960 | in ways that make that system better.

00:15:20.960 | Now, when I say better, I want to be very specific.

00:15:24.240 | If your goal is to build larger muscles,

00:15:27.800 | there's a way to use your nervous system

00:15:30.220 | to trigger hypertrophy,

00:15:32.600 | to increase the size of those muscles.

00:15:35.100 | And it is indeed controlled by the nervous system.

00:15:38.320 | So you can forget the idea that the muscles have memory

00:15:41.120 | or that muscles grow in response to something

00:15:43.820 | that's just happening within the muscle.

00:15:45.760 | It's the nerve to muscle connection

00:15:47.500 | that actually creates hypertrophy.

00:15:50.080 | I'll talk exactly about how to optimize that process.

00:15:53.240 | In addition, if you want to improve endurance

00:15:55.580 | or improve flexibility or suppleness or explosiveness,

00:15:59.440 | that is all accomplished by the way

00:16:02.300 | that the nervous system engages muscles specifically.

00:16:05.700 | And so what that means is we have to ask ourselves,

00:16:08.400 | are we going to take control of the upper motor neurons,

00:16:10.940 | the central pattern generators,

00:16:12.520 | or the lower motor neurons or all three

00:16:15.480 | in order to get to some end point

00:16:17.680 | of how the nervous system controls muscle.

00:16:20.160 | So neurophysiology 101.

00:16:23.320 | I'll give you one piece of history

00:16:24.840 | because it's important to know.

00:16:27.040 | Sherrington, who won the Nobel Prize,

00:16:30.000 | called movement the final common path.

00:16:33.300 | Why did he say that?

00:16:34.860 | Well, the whole reason for having a nervous system,

00:16:38.040 | the whole reason for having a brain

00:16:39.460 | is so that we can control our movements

00:16:42.000 | in very dedicated ways.

00:16:43.700 | That is one of the reasons, perhaps the predominant reason

00:16:47.580 | why the human brain is so large.

00:16:50.280 | You might think, oh, it's so large for thinking

00:16:52.020 | and for creativity.

00:16:53.300 | Ah, no, when you look at the amount of real estate

00:16:55.980 | in the brain that's devoted to different aspects of life,

00:16:59.380 | it's mainly vision, our ability to see,

00:17:03.160 | and movement, our ability to engage

00:17:05.800 | in lots of different kinds of movements,

00:17:07.740 | slow movements, fast movements, explosive, et cetera.

00:17:10.700 | Other animals don't have that ability

00:17:14.800 | because they don't have the mental real estate.

00:17:17.740 | They don't have the neural real estate in their brain.

00:17:20.840 | They have neuromuscular junctions.

00:17:22.420 | They have central pattern generators.

00:17:23.700 | What they don't have are these incredible upper motor neurons

00:17:26.700 | that can direct activity to muscles in very specific ways.

00:17:30.100 | So we can all feel blessed that we have this system.

00:17:32.700 | And today I'm going to teach you how to use that system

00:17:35.620 | toward particular end points.

00:17:37.700 | So if we decide that we are going to direct our muscles

00:17:40.020 | in some particular movement of any kind,

00:17:42.660 | whether or not it's a weightlifting exercise

00:17:44.780 | or whether or not it's a yoga movement,

00:17:46.380 | or simply picking up and putting down a pin,

00:17:49.520 | we are engaging flexors and extensors.

00:17:52.100 | And our body is covered with flexors and extensors all over.

00:17:55.580 | So for instance, our bicep is a flexor

00:17:57.720 | and our tricep is an extensor.

00:17:59.100 | Those are what are called antagonistic muscles.

00:18:01.900 | They move the limbs in opposite directions.

00:18:04.420 | So if you bring your wrist closer to your shoulder,

00:18:06.500 | that's flexion using your bicep.

00:18:08.640 | If you move your wrist further away from your shoulder,

00:18:11.140 | that's extension using your tricep.

00:18:13.580 | And without getting into a lot of detail,

00:18:15.820 | the way that the nerves and brain are wired up to muscle

00:18:19.180 | make it such that when a flexor is activated,

00:18:22.920 | when the nerve dumps chemical acetylcholine

00:18:26.020 | onto the muscle to activate the biceps,

00:18:28.620 | the triceps is inhibited.

00:18:31.200 | It's prevented from engaging.

00:18:34.720 | There are ways to bypass this,

00:18:35.980 | but that's the typical mode of action.

00:18:37.880 | The converse is also true.

00:18:40.860 | When our tricep is inactivated, okay?

00:18:44.100 | When we move our wrist away from our shoulder,

00:18:46.400 | our bicep is inhibited.

00:18:48.240 | And we have flexors like our abdominal muscles

00:18:51.080 | and we have extensors in our lower back.

00:18:54.060 | Many of you probably know this,

00:18:55.460 | but some of you probably don't that your spine has flexors

00:18:58.420 | to move basically your chin toward your waist.

00:19:01.080 | And it has, those are your abdominal muscles among others.

00:19:04.840 | And you have extensors that move your chin basically back

00:19:08.660 | like looking up toward the ceiling

00:19:09.940 | and those are your extensors.

00:19:11.460 | You have other muscles that are stabilizing muscles

00:19:13.820 | and things of that sort,

00:19:14.660 | but those movements of flexion and extension

00:19:17.020 | and the fact that they are what we call

00:19:19.520 | reciprocally innervated or mutual inhibition,

00:19:22.100 | you hear different language around this,

00:19:23.740 | is characteristic of most of our limb movements, okay?

00:19:28.740 | So hamstring and quadricep.

00:19:30.580 | The hamstring brings the ankle

00:19:32.580 | closer back towards the glutes.

00:19:34.980 | Basically it's lifting your heel up, right?

00:19:38.660 | Which is almost always done toward the back.

00:19:40.780 | Whereas your quadriceps is the extensor

00:19:43.540 | opposite to the hamstrings.

00:19:44.780 | So you get the idea.

00:19:45.700 | So there's flexors and extensors

00:19:47.120 | and it's the neurons that control those flexors and extensors

00:19:51.220 | that allow us to move in particular ways.

00:19:53.620 | So now you have heard neuromuscular physiology

00:19:57.220 | in its simplest form, but I do want this to be accessible.

00:19:59.940 | I want to get just briefly, just briefly

00:20:03.140 | into some of the underlying metabolism

00:20:05.140 | of how muscles use and create energy

00:20:08.620 | because in doing that we will be in a great position

00:20:10.900 | to understand all the tools that follow

00:20:13.100 | about how to optimize the neuromuscular system

00:20:15.340 | for your particular goals.

00:20:16.820 | So in the previous episode about fat loss

00:20:18.860 | we talked about lipolysis,

00:20:20.340 | the breakdown of fat into fatty acids

00:20:22.880 | so it can be used as fuel.

00:20:24.860 | And it ended in a step where we got ATP

00:20:27.840 | which is the bottleneck and final common path

00:20:30.940 | for all energy producing functions in the body.

00:20:34.960 | There are other ways

00:20:35.960 | but basically ATP is the key element there.

00:20:39.520 | Now with muscles, they don't function on fats normally.

00:20:43.780 | What they are going to function on,

00:20:45.380 | their ability to move and their ability to do things

00:20:48.460 | and allow us to move in any way that we want to

00:20:51.420 | is based on a process of glycolysis,

00:20:53.880 | the breakdown of things like glycogen

00:20:57.140 | and glucose into energy.

00:20:59.440 | And it's a very simple process.

00:21:01.580 | You don't have to know any chemistry.

00:21:03.000 | So if I say the words carbon or hydrogen

00:21:05.000 | or something like that, don't freak out.

00:21:06.440 | You don't have to understand any chemistry.

00:21:09.060 | But basically what happens is you've got this

00:21:12.180 | available sugar resource that's stored in muscle.

00:21:17.100 | And that's glucose.

00:21:18.940 | And that glucose has six carbons and six waters basically.

00:21:23.940 | That can be broken down into two sets of three carbons.

00:21:30.620 | So basically you take glucose and you break it

00:21:34.400 | into these two little batches of carbons

00:21:37.100 | that we call pyruvates.

00:21:38.380 | So six divided by two is three.

00:21:39.900 | So you get three and three pyruvates.

00:21:41.660 | And that generates a little bit of ATP of energy,

00:21:44.540 | but just a little bit.

00:21:46.420 | Now, if there's oxygen available, okay,

00:21:49.580 | if there's sufficient oxygen there,

00:21:52.360 | what can happen is that pyruvate can be brought

00:21:56.020 | to the mitochondria and through a whole set of things

00:21:59.180 | that you probably don't want to hear about right now,

00:22:01.340 | like the electron transport chain and citric acid cycle,

00:22:05.140 | what happens is it's broken down and you get 28 to 30 ATP,

00:22:10.560 | which is a lot of ATP.

00:22:12.060 | So the only things you need to know,

00:22:13.780 | the only things you need to know about this process

00:22:15.540 | is that glucose and glycogen are broken down into pyruvate.

00:22:19.420 | You get a little bit of energy from that.

00:22:21.380 | And when I say energy, I mean the ability to move.

00:22:23.720 | It's fuel, it literally just gets burned up.

00:22:26.460 | But if there's oxygen available, and that's key,

00:22:29.900 | then within the mitochondria,

00:22:31.220 | you can create 28 to 30 ATP, which is a lot of ATP.

00:22:35.980 | Now, what does this mean?

00:22:37.020 | This means that movement of muscle is metabolically expensive

00:22:41.760 | and indeed compared to other tissues,

00:22:43.780 | compared to fat, compared to bone,

00:22:46.120 | compared to almost all other tissues except brain tissue,

00:22:49.540 | muscle is the most metabolically demanding,

00:22:52.440 | which is why people who have more muscle

00:22:54.920 | relative to adipose tissue to fat,

00:22:57.900 | they can eat more and they're more of a furnace.

00:23:00.000 | They just kind of burn that up, okay?

00:23:02.840 | So even if you didn't understand anything that I just said,

00:23:05.800 | what you probably did hear and that I hope you heard

00:23:08.800 | is that if you have oxygen around,

00:23:11.000 | you can create energy from this fuel source

00:23:13.200 | that we call glycogen and glucose.

00:23:16.220 | But what if there isn't oxygen around?

00:23:18.940 | And what is that like?

00:23:20.240 | Well, you've experienced that.

00:23:22.520 | I'm not talking about oxygen in the environment,

00:23:24.400 | I'm talking about oxygen in the muscle.

00:23:26.180 | So if you've ever carried a box while moving,

00:23:29.080 | or you were carrying heavy groceries to the car,

00:23:32.240 | or you were exercising particularly hard

00:23:34.360 | and you felt the burn,

00:23:36.200 | well, that burning, which most people think is lactic acid

00:23:40.600 | is actually a process by which pyruvate,

00:23:44.920 | which as I said before, normally could be converted into ATP

00:23:47.680 | if there's oxygen.

00:23:48.640 | Well, if there's not enough oxygen,

00:23:50.320 | 'cause that muscle is working too hard or too long,

00:23:53.220 | what ends up happening is that a hydrogen molecule

00:23:56.240 | comes in there and you get something called lactate.

00:23:59.120 | So believe it or not, humans don't make lactic acid.

00:24:01.560 | That's in other species.

00:24:02.640 | We make lactate and we think,

00:24:05.520 | and we hear that lactate is bad.

00:24:07.640 | We need to buffer the burn or avoid the burn,

00:24:10.960 | that lactic acid and lactate are what prevent us

00:24:14.180 | for performing as well as we ought to be able to,

00:24:17.600 | or for going as far as we possibly could

00:24:20.340 | in an endurance event.

00:24:22.000 | Guess what?

00:24:22.840 | That's not true at all.

00:24:24.200 | Lactate has three functions,

00:24:25.960 | all of which are really interesting and really important.

00:24:28.520 | First of all, it's a buffer against acidity.

00:24:32.760 | You don't want muscle to get too acidic

00:24:34.600 | because it can't function.

00:24:35.640 | You don't want any body tissue to get too acidic.

00:24:37.880 | So that burn that you feel is acidity in that environment

00:24:41.720 | that, and lactate, what most people call lactic acid,

00:24:45.320 | but again, we don't make lactic acid,

00:24:46.800 | lactate is there to buffer that

00:24:49.040 | to reduce the amount of burn.

00:24:51.920 | So most people have this exactly backwards.

00:24:54.700 | So when you feel that burn, that is not lactic acid.

00:24:57.580 | That is lactate that's present to suppress the burn,

00:25:02.080 | to suppress acidity.

00:25:03.640 | It's also a fuel.

00:25:06.480 | When you feel that burn,

00:25:08.120 | lactate is shuttled to those areas of the muscle,

00:25:11.500 | and there's an actual fuel burning process

00:25:14.340 | where in the absence of oxygen,

00:25:16.120 | you can continue to generate muscular contractions.

00:25:18.980 | Now, this is informative

00:25:19.980 | 'cause it also tells us that that burning,

00:25:21.900 | that acidity that we feel

00:25:24.200 | can inhibit the way that our muscles work,

00:25:27.400 | but that lactate comes in

00:25:28.680 | and allows our muscles to continue to function.

00:25:31.760 | So we'll talk a little bit more

00:25:33.100 | about what this whole lactate thing and the burn means,

00:25:36.520 | but it's a really important process,

00:25:38.000 | and it's amazing to me that most people understand it

00:25:40.880 | in exactly the incorrect way.

00:25:42.840 | They think, oh, lactic acid is bad and the burn is bad.

00:25:45.440 | No, it reveals a number of really important things

00:25:47.960 | are going on with this vital molecule lactate,

00:25:50.720 | which can reduce acidity, reduce the burn,

00:25:53.660 | as well as act as a fuel.

00:25:55.960 | Now, here's where it gets really, really cool,

00:25:58.200 | and if you don't have enough of an incentive to exercise

00:26:01.800 | based on all the information out there

00:26:03.340 | about how it'll make you live longer

00:26:05.100 | and make your heart better, et cetera,

00:26:07.200 | here's a reason that regardless

00:26:10.760 | of what kind of exercise you do,

00:26:12.180 | if it's weight training or running or cycling or swimming,

00:26:15.800 | that every once in a while, about 10% of the time,

00:26:19.920 | you should exercise to the point of intensity

00:26:22.840 | where you start to feel that so-called burn

00:26:25.920 | right?

00:26:26.840 | The reason for that is that lactate shows up

00:26:31.340 | to the site of the burn, so to speak,

00:26:34.540 | and it acts as a hormonal signal for other organs

00:26:37.840 | of the body in a very positive way, okay?

00:26:41.200 | As you may recall from a very early episode

00:26:43.880 | of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:26:45.040 | I talked about what a hormone is and how it works.

00:26:47.660 | We have lots of different kinds of hormones,

00:26:49.800 | but hormones are chemicals that are released

00:26:51.900 | in one location in the body and travel have effects

00:26:55.400 | on lots of other organs of the body.

00:26:57.540 | So when I say that lactate acts as a hormonal signal,

00:27:02.240 | what I mean is that it's in a position to influence tissues

00:27:06.480 | that are outside of the muscle.

00:27:09.620 | And basically it can send signals to the heart,

00:27:14.240 | to the liver and to the brain,

00:27:16.840 | and it can have effects on the heart,

00:27:18.360 | the liver and the brain that are very positive, okay?

00:27:21.640 | So just to zoom out for a second,

00:27:23.160 | I promise we won't get any more technical than this.

00:27:25.420 | We will get into tools and protocols

00:27:27.200 | that are really straightforward.

00:27:28.820 | But what I'm telling you is that if you feel a burn

00:27:33.460 | from a particular exercise or movement,

00:27:35.760 | that burn is going to be buffered

00:27:40.240 | by this molecule we call lactate.

00:27:42.780 | Lactate will then provide additional fuel

00:27:44.860 | for additional work.

00:27:45.960 | So this is a good incentive provided you can do it safely

00:27:48.720 | to quote unquote work through the burn.

00:27:51.020 | That burn acts as a beacon to the lactate,

00:27:56.020 | which comes in and allows you to do more work.

00:27:58.480 | It's not a signal to stop necessarily.

00:28:00.800 | I mean, stop if you're doing something unsafe,

00:28:02.540 | but it's a signal that lactate should come in

00:28:05.480 | and allow you to continue to do work.

00:28:07.780 | And it can act as a hormonal signal.

00:28:10.860 | Lactate can then travel to the heart

00:28:14.140 | and to the liver and to the brain

00:28:16.020 | and can enhance their function in positive ways,

00:28:18.420 | not just in those moments, but in the period of time

00:28:21.540 | that follows.

00:28:22.740 | So many people are curious about how they can exercise

00:28:25.920 | to make their brain better.

00:28:27.260 | That's one of the most common questions I get.

00:28:29.780 | What I'm telling you is that provided you can do it safely

00:28:32.620 | by engaging the so-called burn,

00:28:36.460 | which is a different threshold for everybody, right?

00:28:39.020 | Your hill run will be different than my hill run

00:28:41.620 | to generate the burn.

00:28:43.000 | But provided you can do that for about 10% of your workouts

00:28:47.180 | or of an individual workout or activity of any kind,

00:28:52.140 | you are generating the activity

00:28:54.160 | of this lactate-based hormonal signal

00:28:56.700 | that can improve the function of neurons.

00:29:00.340 | And it does that, if you want to know for the aficionados,

00:29:02.740 | by improving the function of another cell type

00:29:04.620 | called the astrocytes, which are a glial cell type, okay?

00:29:07.500 | Which are very involved in clearance of debris

00:29:09.440 | from the brain.

00:29:10.360 | They're involved in the formation of synapses,

00:29:12.580 | connections between neurons in the brain.

00:29:14.420 | So put simply, if you're an exerciser,

00:29:18.340 | if you're doing movement of any kind,

00:29:19.940 | and you're interested in allocating some of that movement

00:29:23.040 | toward enhancing brain, heart, and liver health,

00:29:27.020 | there is a nice set of scientific data

00:29:30.700 | that points to the fact that getting lactate

00:29:32.980 | shuttled to the muscles by engaging this burning sensation

00:29:37.060 | is advantageous for the health of those other tissues.

00:29:40.940 | So as I mentioned, that burn is present from lack of oxygen

00:29:44.960 | being present and then the hydrogen comes in

00:29:47.300 | and you get this lactate.

00:29:49.160 | But this process of lactate acting as a buffer of fuel

00:29:53.420 | and a positive hormonal signal for other tissues

00:29:55.980 | occurs only if there's oxygen.

00:29:59.060 | So if you feel the burn, you definitely want to focus

00:30:03.700 | on your breathing at that point.

00:30:05.280 | That would be the time to take deep inhales

00:30:07.920 | and try and bring more oxygen into your system.

00:30:10.620 | It's definitely not a time to hold your breath.

00:30:12.500 | And if ever you've run to the point of feeling the burn

00:30:15.060 | and then you were exercising in any way on the treadmill

00:30:17.840 | or on the bike or whatever, and felt that burn,

00:30:19.940 | and then you held your breath, it feels much more intense.

00:30:22.780 | By breathing, you bring lactate to the site

00:30:26.860 | and you are able to allow lactate to act more as a buffer,

00:30:31.780 | a fuel, and a hormonal signal.

00:30:33.900 | And the reason I brought this up today is because,

00:30:36.540 | as I mentioned, so many people are interested

00:30:38.220 | in using exercise, not just for sake of improving

00:30:40.840 | physical health and wellbeing and performance,

00:30:43.900 | but also for enhancing their brain.

00:30:46.300 | And there are a lot of data out there speaking

00:30:49.260 | to the findings that exercise of various kinds

00:30:53.660 | can increase neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons.

00:30:57.600 | Well, the unfortunate news is that while that's true in mice,

00:31:01.900 | there is very little evidence for enhanced neurogenesis

00:31:05.620 | from exercise or otherwise in humans.

00:31:08.020 | There's a little bit, and there are a few sites

00:31:09.740 | within the brain, such as the dentate gyrus

00:31:11.540 | of the hippocampus, which may be involved

00:31:13.820 | in the formation of new memories.

00:31:15.660 | To be clear, the dentate gyrus is definitely involved

00:31:17.860 | in the formation of new memories.

00:31:19.180 | Whether or not the new neurons that are added there

00:31:21.340 | in humans are involved in new memories is,

00:31:24.660 | the evidence for that is weak at best, frankly,

00:31:27.940 | whereas in animals, the data are quite strong.

00:31:30.660 | But most of the data point to the fact

00:31:32.940 | that hormonal signals, things that are transported

00:31:36.500 | in the blood during exercise are what are beneficial

00:31:40.740 | for the brain, excuse me.

00:31:42.100 | And that those signals are not causing the increase

00:31:46.200 | in the number of neurons in the dentate gyrus or otherwise.

00:31:49.500 | That it's more about the health of the connections

00:31:51.440 | between the neurons, growth factors of various kinds,

00:31:53.980 | things like IGF-1, there's a long list of these things.

00:31:56.840 | So if you've heard that exercise increases the number

00:31:59.140 | of neurons in your brain, well, that's not true.

00:32:01.660 | And that probably is a good thing, frankly,

00:32:03.560 | because we always hear more neurons,

00:32:05.580 | more neurons as if it's a good thing.

00:32:07.320 | But the brain doesn't do so well

00:32:09.800 | with bringing in entirely new elements.

00:32:12.240 | It has a hard time negotiating that

00:32:14.620 | and making use of those new elements.

00:32:16.080 | We know about this from things like the cochlear implant

00:32:19.300 | where deaf people are given a device

00:32:20.920 | where they suddenly can hear.

00:32:22.340 | Some people really like that.

00:32:24.580 | Deaf people really like that and can benefit from it.

00:32:26.700 | Other deaf people find that it's very intrusive,

00:32:29.620 | that it's hard to take an existing neural circuit

00:32:33.900 | in the brain and incorporate a lot

00:32:35.840 | of new information into it.

00:32:37.100 | So new neurons, as great as that sounds,

00:32:39.000 | more neurons, more neurons,

00:32:40.460 | it actually might not be the best way for the nervous system

00:32:43.420 | to change and modify itself

00:32:44.900 | and to promote its own longevity.

00:32:46.500 | So when I tell you not such great evidence

00:32:50.260 | for new neurons past puberty,

00:32:52.460 | that's what the data really show in humans.

00:32:55.400 | And I sort of knock back the data

00:32:57.320 | on exercise and neurogenesis.

00:32:59.320 | Don't let that depress you.

00:33:00.580 | If you have dementia in your family,

00:33:01.920 | don't translate that into necessarily

00:33:06.680 | that you will develop dementia.

00:33:08.340 | Understand that exercise is still beneficial

00:33:10.780 | for the brain and other aspects of the nervous system,

00:33:13.460 | but that it's going to be doing it

00:33:14.680 | through these hormonal signals, things like IGF-1,

00:33:17.840 | things like this lactate pathway

00:33:20.560 | when you experience the burn from exercise.

00:33:22.560 | And again, you don't want to try and get this feeling

00:33:24.920 | of a burn throughout the entire episode of exercise.

00:33:28.600 | That would be far too intense

00:33:29.680 | and would inhibit your recovery.

00:33:31.360 | I don't think it'd be good for performance either.

00:33:33.200 | It's only about 10% of your total effort

00:33:36.340 | in any one exercise bout

00:33:38.120 | that's going to give you this positive effect.

00:33:40.060 | So now you know how to devote

00:33:41.280 | a small portion of your exercise, 10%,

00:33:44.080 | in order for muscle and lactate to benefit other tissues,

00:33:48.600 | namely your heart, your liver, and your brain.

00:33:51.660 | I'd now like to shift our attention

00:33:53.160 | to how to use specific aspects of muscular contraction

00:33:57.320 | to improve muscle hypertrophy, muscle growth,

00:34:00.400 | as well as improving muscle strength.

00:34:03.240 | There are a lot of reasons to want to get stronger.

00:34:05.480 | And I should just mention that it's not always the case

00:34:09.300 | that getting stronger involves muscles getting bigger.

00:34:12.240 | There are ways for muscles to get stronger

00:34:14.280 | without getting bigger.

00:34:15.440 | However, increasing the size of a muscle

00:34:19.200 | almost inevitably increases the strength of that muscle,

00:34:22.360 | at least to some degree.

00:34:24.140 | Reasons why most everyone

00:34:26.160 | should want to get their muscles stronger

00:34:28.240 | is that muscles are generally getting progressively weaker

00:34:32.020 | across the lifespan.

00:34:33.620 | So when I say getting stronger,

00:34:34.860 | it's not necessarily about being able to move

00:34:37.860 | increasing amounts of weight in the gym,

00:34:40.560 | although if that's your goal,

00:34:41.920 | what I'm about to discuss will be relevant to that,

00:34:44.920 | but rather to offset some of the normal decline

00:34:49.080 | in strength and posture and the ability to generate

00:34:52.720 | a large range of movement safely that occurs as we age.

00:34:56.540 | As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode,

00:34:57.880 | we just tend to lose function in this neuromuscular system

00:35:01.400 | as we get older and doing things to offset that

00:35:04.860 | has been shown again and again to be beneficial

00:35:07.520 | for the neuromuscular system, for protection of injury,

00:35:11.420 | for enhancing the strength of bones and bone density.

00:35:14.800 | So there are a lot of reasons to use resistance exercise

00:35:17.960 | that extend far beyond

00:35:19.520 | just the desire to increase muscle size,

00:35:22.320 | because I know many of you

00:35:23.400 | are interested in increasing muscle size,

00:35:25.720 | but many of you are not.

00:35:27.820 | So there's an important principle of muscle physiology

00:35:30.420 | called the Henneman size principle.

00:35:32.760 | And the Henneman size principle essentially says

00:35:35.380 | that we recruit what are called motor units.

00:35:40.060 | Motor units are just the connections

00:35:41.800 | between nerve and muscle in a pattern that staircases

00:35:46.800 | from low threshold to high threshold.

00:35:50.220 | What this means is when you pick up something that is light,

00:35:54.840 | you're going to use the minimum amount of nerve to muscle

00:35:57.780 | energy in order to move that thing.

00:36:00.060 | Likewise, when you pick up an object that's heavy,

00:36:03.740 | you're going to use the minimum amount

00:36:05.520 | of nerve to muscle connectivity and energy

00:36:08.240 | in order to move that object.

00:36:10.780 | So it's basically a conservation of energy principle.

00:36:14.800 | Now, if you continue to exert effort of movement,

00:36:19.400 | what will happen is you will tend to recruit

00:36:21.720 | more and more motor units with time.

00:36:24.840 | And that process of recruiting more neurons,

00:36:27.620 | more lower motor neurons,

00:36:29.720 | as if you recall from the beginning of the episode,

00:36:31.440 | these lower motor neurons are in our spinal cord

00:36:33.200 | and they actually dump a chemical acetylcholine on muscle,

00:36:36.720 | cause the muscles to contract.

00:36:38.480 | As you recruit more and more of these motor units,

00:36:41.840 | these connections between these lower motor neurons

00:36:43.940 | and muscle, that's when you start to get changes

00:36:47.580 | in the muscle.

00:36:48.720 | That's when you open the gate for the potential

00:36:52.000 | for the muscles to get stronger and to get larger,

00:36:54.820 | if that's what your goal is.

00:36:56.400 | And so the way this process works

00:36:59.960 | has been badly misunderstood

00:37:02.700 | in the kind of online literature of weight training

00:37:05.160 | and bodybuilding and even in sports physiology.

00:37:08.060 | The Henneman size principle is kind of

00:37:10.040 | a foundational principle within muscle physiology,

00:37:14.440 | but many people have come to interpret it by saying

00:37:18.160 | that the way to recruit high threshold motor units,

00:37:21.680 | the ones that are hard to get to

00:37:23.240 | is to just use heavy weights.

00:37:25.760 | And that's actually not the case.

00:37:27.960 | As we'll talk about, the research supports

00:37:30.240 | that weights in a very large range

00:37:33.580 | of sort of a percentage of your maximum,

00:37:37.800 | anywhere from 30 to 80%.

00:37:40.180 | So weights that are not very light,

00:37:42.480 | but are moderately light, too heavy,

00:37:45.320 | can cause changes in the connections between nerve and muscle

00:37:48.680 | that lead to muscle strength and muscle hypertrophy.

00:37:52.480 | Put differently, heavy weights can help build muscle

00:37:57.260 | and strength, but they are not required.

00:37:59.840 | What one has to do is adhere

00:38:01.680 | to a certain number of parameters,

00:38:03.400 | just a couple of key variables that I'll spell out for you.

00:38:06.600 | And if you do that,

00:38:07.860 | you can greatly increase muscle hypertrophy, muscle size,

00:38:12.160 | and/or muscle strength if that's what you want to do.

00:38:15.760 | And you don't necessarily have to use heavy weights

00:38:18.640 | in order to do that.

00:38:19.720 | Now, I'm sure the power lifters

00:38:21.200 | and the people that like to move heavy weights around

00:38:24.300 | will say, "No, if you want to get strong,

00:38:26.460 | you absolutely have to lift heavy weights."

00:38:28.580 | And that might be true if you want to get very strong,

00:38:31.600 | but for most people who are interested

00:38:33.800 | in supporting their muscular such

00:38:36.400 | that they offset any age-related decline in strength

00:38:39.920 | or in increasing hypertrophy and strength to some degree,

00:38:44.160 | there really isn't a need to lie

00:38:46.800 | about the Henneman size principle,

00:38:48.360 | which many people out there are doing,

00:38:50.040 | and claiming that you absolutely need

00:38:52.220 | to use the heaviest weights possible

00:38:53.700 | in order to build strength and muscle.

00:38:55.400 | So I'm going to explain how all of this works

00:38:57.440 | in simple terms.

00:38:58.920 | So first of all, let's just talk about what hypertrophy is

00:39:02.360 | and what strength changes in the muscle are.

00:39:05.680 | We can make this very simple as well.

00:39:07.760 | If this were a muscle physiology class,

00:39:09.520 | we would talk all about myofibrils and sarcomeres

00:39:13.240 | and all that stuff.

00:39:14.080 | We're not going to do that.

00:39:14.900 | That's not the purpose of today's conversation.

00:39:17.080 | But if you're interested in that,

00:39:18.620 | as well as a lot of the other information

00:39:20.580 | that I'm going to discuss in more detail,

00:39:23.480 | I highly encourage you to check out the YouTube channel

00:39:27.300 | and the writings of Dr. Andy Galpin.

00:39:30.240 | He's a PhD and a full professor in exercise physiology.

00:39:33.520 | He's extremely knowledgeable in this entire area

00:39:36.760 | of science-based tools for hypertrophy,

00:39:39.560 | how strength and hypertrophy really work.

00:39:41.680 | His lab does everything from biopsy on muscles,

00:39:44.100 | working with athletes and typical folks as well.

00:39:46.840 | A lot of the information that you're going to hear from me

00:39:48.780 | in the next 15 minutes or so

00:39:50.380 | comes from an extensive exploration of the work

00:39:53.920 | that he and his colleagues have done,

00:39:55.620 | as well as folks like Brad Schoenfield,

00:39:57.840 | another academic who's superb in this whole space

00:40:00.400 | of muscle physiology,

00:40:01.560 | and from a lengthy conversation that I had with Andy,

00:40:05.280 | Dr. Galpin, prior to this episode.

00:40:08.160 | So if we want to think about muscle hypertrophy,

00:40:11.620 | we have to ask what is changing

00:40:13.400 | when muscles get larger or stronger?

00:40:15.220 | And there are really just three ways

00:40:17.800 | that muscles can be stimulated to change.

00:40:20.480 | So let's review those three ways

00:40:21.820 | and talk about what happens inside the muscle.

00:40:24.320 | So there are three major stimuli

00:40:26.320 | for changing the way that muscle works

00:40:29.400 | and making muscles stronger, larger, or better in some way.

00:40:33.560 | And those are stress, tension, and damage.

00:40:37.900 | Those three things don't necessarily all have to be present,

00:40:42.360 | but stress of some kind has to exist.

00:40:44.640 | Something has to be different

00:40:46.500 | in the way that the nerve communicates with the muscle

00:40:49.000 | and the way that the muscle contracts or performs

00:40:51.860 | that makes the muscle need to change.

00:40:54.980 | So this is very reminiscent of neuroplasticity in the brain.

00:40:58.040 | Something needs to happen.

00:41:00.120 | Certain chemicals need to be present.

00:41:01.760 | Certain processes need to happen,

00:41:03.760 | or else a tissue simply won't change itself.

00:41:06.560 | But if those processes and events do happen,

00:41:09.660 | then the tissue has essentially no option

00:41:12.300 | except but to change.

00:41:14.680 | So muscles move, as I mentioned,

00:41:17.920 | because nerves dump chemical onto the muscles,

00:41:20.660 | but they move because they have these things

00:41:23.700 | called myosin and actin filaments.

00:41:25.540 | And if you want to read up on this,

00:41:27.020 | you can look on the internet.

00:41:29.320 | You can put the sliding filament theory

00:41:31.180 | of muscle contraction

00:41:32.220 | if you really want to go deep down that rabbit hole.

00:41:34.340 | It's interesting.

00:41:35.300 | You can learn about this in a muscle physiology class.

00:41:38.060 | But basically, along the length of the muscle,

00:41:41.580 | you have what's called myosin.

00:41:43.180 | And just think of myosin as kind of like a wire.

00:41:46.660 | It's like a bunch of beads and wires

00:41:49.560 | that extend across the muscle.

00:41:51.180 | I think that's the simplest way to describe it.

00:41:53.420 | And the myosin is surrounded

00:41:55.060 | by these little beads called actin.

00:41:57.260 | The way muscles get bigger

00:42:00.380 | is that basically the myosin gets thicker.

00:42:04.740 | It's a protein, right?

00:42:06.140 | And it gets thicker.

00:42:07.460 | So put this in your mind.

00:42:09.340 | If you're listening to this,

00:42:10.300 | or even if you're watching it on YouTube,

00:42:12.300 | the way to think about this whole actin, myosin thing,

00:42:14.480 | and muscles getting bigger

00:42:15.480 | is imagine that you're holding a bouquet of balloons,

00:42:18.900 | a bunch of balloons by their strings,

00:42:21.100 | except you're not holding the strings all at their bottom.

00:42:23.700 | So the bouquet isn't nicely arranged.

00:42:25.360 | It's not like some balloons that are all up at the top

00:42:28.020 | and you're holding the strings down at the bottom.

00:42:30.500 | Imagine that one of the balloons

00:42:32.480 | is very close to your hand.

00:42:33.620 | Another one is a little bit higher up.

00:42:35.340 | And so this bouquet is very disorganized.

00:42:37.300 | In other words, the string extending out of your hand,

00:42:39.700 | the strings, rather, extending out of your hand

00:42:41.580 | are all different lengths.

00:42:43.020 | And so the balloons are all over the place.

00:42:45.900 | That's essentially what myosin looks like in the muscle.

00:42:49.260 | And those strings are what we call the filaments.

00:42:51.900 | And then the myosin head is the balloon.

00:42:56.020 | When you stress a muscle properly,

00:42:58.580 | or you give it sufficient tension,

00:43:00.900 | or you damage the muscle just enough,

00:43:04.300 | there's an adaptive response that takes place

00:43:06.620 | where protein is synthesized,

00:43:08.420 | and it's a very specific protein, it's myosin.

00:43:11.360 | The myosin gets thicker.

00:43:12.900 | In other words, the balloons get bigger.

00:43:16.400 | So the way to think about muscle growth

00:43:18.820 | and the way to think about muscles getting stronger

00:43:21.960 | is that those balloons get bigger

00:43:24.580 | and the muscle gets thicker.

00:43:26.900 | Now, the question then should be, as always,

00:43:30.180 | how does that happen?

00:43:31.340 | I mean, the muscle doesn't really know anything

00:43:33.660 | about what's happening in the outside world.

00:43:36.340 | The way it happens is the nerve,

00:43:38.540 | the neuron has to tell the muscle to get stronger.

00:43:42.180 | And it does that through what we call a signaling cascade.

00:43:45.280 | It talks to the muscle in terms of chemicals.

00:43:47.020 | It doesn't whisper to it or shout out, "Hey, get bigger."

00:43:49.600 | What it does, it releases certain chemicals

00:43:51.860 | that within the muscle,

00:43:53.620 | there are certain chemicals released rather

00:43:55.120 | that make those balloons, as I'm referring to them,

00:43:57.900 | the myosin gets thicker.

00:43:59.520 | So let's talk about the stimulus for doing that.

00:44:02.240 | And if already in your mind, you're imagining,

00:44:04.720 | oh my goodness, these balloons of muscle

00:44:06.500 | are going to get thick, thick, thick, thick, thick,

00:44:07.920 | and it's just going to spiral out of control.

00:44:10.720 | Don't worry about that.

00:44:11.680 | People invest a ton of time and energy

00:44:13.600 | into trying to make their muscles larger.

00:44:15.660 | It's actually much harder for people to do

00:44:17.800 | than you might think.

00:44:19.040 | But I do want to give one exception

00:44:20.860 | because it illustrates an important principle

00:44:22.940 | of where we're headed next.

00:44:24.900 | Everybody has imbalances in how muscles can grow,

00:44:32.440 | how well muscles can grow or how poorly

00:44:35.200 | or how challenging it is for their muscles to grow.

00:44:37.820 | Now, many people who are afraid of like getting too bulky,

00:44:41.720 | for instance, are afraid of lifting weights.

00:44:43.720 | But I think the research shows now

00:44:45.680 | that everyone of pretty much every age

00:44:48.040 | should be doing some sort of resistance exercise,

00:44:50.140 | even if that's body weight exercises

00:44:52.480 | in order to offset this age-related decline

00:44:55.560 | in muscle contractile ability, muscle strength, et cetera,

00:44:58.960 | improve bone density.

00:45:00.560 | There's nothing good about getting frail and weak over time.

00:45:05.060 | And people who invest the effort

00:45:07.680 | into doing resistance exercises of some kind,

00:45:10.920 | whether or not it's with bands or with weights

00:45:12.560 | or with body weight really benefit tremendously

00:45:15.780 | at a whole body level, at a systemic level,

00:45:18.220 | as well as in terms of muscle strength.

00:45:20.340 | There is a good predictor of how well

00:45:25.460 | or how efficient you will be in building the strength

00:45:28.600 | and or if you like the size of a given muscle.

00:45:32.200 | And it has everything to do with those upper motor neurons

00:45:34.800 | that are involved in deliberate control of muscle.

00:45:37.240 | You can actually do this test right now.

00:45:39.440 | You can just kind of march across your body mentally

00:45:42.640 | and see whether or not you can independently contract

00:45:46.400 | any or all of your muscles.

00:45:48.320 | So for instance, if you are sitting in a chair

00:45:50.780 | or you're standing,

00:45:52.600 | see whether or not you can contract your calf muscle

00:45:55.600 | just using those upper motor neurons,

00:45:57.560 | sending a signal down

00:45:58.520 | and deliberately isolating the calf muscle, okay?

00:46:01.740 | If you can contract the calf muscle hard

00:46:05.060 | to the point where that muscle

00:46:06.980 | almost feels like it's starting to cramp,

00:46:08.340 | like it hurts just a little bit,

00:46:10.840 | it's not going to be extremely painful

00:46:12.240 | nor is it going to have no sensation whatsoever,

00:46:15.640 | chances are you have very good upper motor neuron

00:46:18.640 | to calf control.

00:46:20.320 | And chances are, if you can isolate that,

00:46:23.700 | what they call the brain or mind muscle connection

00:46:26.560 | and you can contract the muscle

00:46:27.720 | to the point where it cramps a little bit,

00:46:29.800 | that you hold a decent to high potential

00:46:33.040 | to change the strength and the size of that muscle

00:46:36.320 | if you train it properly.

00:46:37.940 | Now, if you have a hard time doing that,

00:46:39.980 | chances are you won't be able to do that.

00:46:43.300 | If, for instance, you focus on your back muscle,

00:46:47.680 | like we all have these muscles called the lat,

00:46:50.140 | the latissimus dorsi muscles,

00:46:51.440 | which basically are involved in chin ups

00:46:53.460 | and things like that,

00:46:54.300 | the function from more of a kinesiology standpoint

00:46:58.200 | is to move the elbow back behind the body, okay?

00:47:01.500 | So it's not about flexing your bicep,

00:47:02.860 | it's about moving your elbow back behind your body.

00:47:05.300 | If you can do that mentally,

00:47:08.560 | or you can do that physical movement

00:47:10.340 | of moving your elbow back behind your body

00:47:12.220 | and you can contract that muscle hard,

00:47:14.120 | chances are that you have the capacity

00:47:16.700 | to enhance the strength and or size

00:47:19.540 | of that particular muscle

00:47:21.260 | because you have the neural control of that muscle.

00:47:24.540 | This is a key feature of the neuromuscular system

00:47:27.740 | to appreciate as we begin to talk more

00:47:30.260 | about specific protocols,

00:47:32.500 | because everything about muscle hypertrophy,

00:47:36.180 | about stimulating muscle growth

00:47:38.860 | is about generating isolated contractions,

00:47:42.260 | about challenging specific muscles in a very unnatural way.

00:47:47.260 | Whereas with strength,

00:47:49.620 | it's about using musculature as a system,

00:47:51.940 | moving weights, moving resistance, moving the body.

00:47:55.640 | The specific goal of hypertrophy

00:47:58.800 | is to isolate specific nerve to muscle pathways

00:48:02.260 | so that you stimulate the chemical

00:48:04.340 | and signaling transduction events in muscles

00:48:06.500 | so that those muscles respond by getting larger.

00:48:09.340 | So there's a critical distinction

00:48:11.000 | in terms of getting stronger

00:48:12.780 | versus trying to get muscles to be larger,

00:48:15.940 | hypertrophy per se.

00:48:17.820 | And it has to do with how much you isolate those muscles.

00:48:21.340 | Muscle isolation is not a natural phenomenon.

00:48:24.460 | It's not something that we normally do.

00:48:25.800 | When we walk, we don't think,

00:48:27.140 | okay, right calf contract, left calf contract.

00:48:29.900 | No, you just generate those rhythmic movements.

00:48:32.080 | And of course, there's no reason for them

00:48:33.500 | to get stronger or larger in response to those movements.

00:48:36.700 | Let's say you were to do a kind of strange experiment

00:48:39.380 | of attaching 30 pound weights to your ankles

00:48:41.620 | and you were to do those movements.

00:48:43.620 | Well, if you weren't specifically contracting your calves

00:48:46.880 | in each step, there's no reason for the calves

00:48:49.260 | to take on the bulk of the work.

00:48:51.460 | And you would distribute that work across your hip flexors

00:48:54.100 | and other aspects of your musculature.

00:48:55.520 | Your whole nervous system seeks to gain efficiency.

00:48:58.500 | It seeks to spread out the effort.

00:49:01.180 | So you can nest this as a principle for yourself,

00:49:04.700 | which is if you want to get stronger,

00:49:06.760 | it's really about moving progressively greater loads

00:49:10.540 | or increasing the amount of weight that you move.

00:49:13.080 | Whereas if you're specifically interested

00:49:15.220 | in generating hypertrophy,

00:49:17.540 | it's all about trying to generate those really hard,

00:49:20.780 | almost painful localized contractions of muscle.

00:49:24.180 | Now, of course, how much weight you use

00:49:25.780 | in order to generate those contractions

00:49:27.520 | will also impact hypertrophy.

00:49:29.820 | But I think most people don't really understand

00:49:31.900 | the mind muscle connection.

00:49:33.100 | It sounds like a great thing,

00:49:34.620 | but it's actually one of the things you want to avoid

00:49:37.620 | if your goal is simply to become more supple

00:49:40.420 | or to become stronger.

00:49:42.820 | You want to do the movements properly and safely, of course,

00:49:45.900 | but it's the opposite of hypertrophy

00:49:48.820 | where with hypertrophy,

00:49:49.860 | you're really trying to make that particular muscle,

00:49:52.660 | sometimes two muscles, do the majority, if not all the work.

00:49:56.580 | Whereas in moving force loads,

00:49:58.360 | in trying to generate activity of any kind,

00:50:02.060 | like lifting a bar or doing a chin up or something,

00:50:04.500 | those so-called compound movements

00:50:06.020 | that involve a lot of muscle groups,

00:50:07.900 | if your goal is to be better at those,

00:50:10.900 | you want to avoid isolating any one particular muscle.

00:50:14.660 | Now, I know this probably comes across

00:50:15.980 | as a kind of a obvious duh,

00:50:18.380 | especially to the folks that have spent a lot of time

00:50:21.020 | in the gym aimed at getting hypertrophy,

00:50:24.180 | but I think most people don't appreciate

00:50:25.720 | that it's the nerve to muscle connections

00:50:27.660 | and the distinction

00:50:28.740 | between isolating nerve to muscle connections

00:50:31.220 | versus distributing the work of nerve to muscle connections

00:50:34.740 | that's vital in determining

00:50:36.280 | whether or not you generate hypertrophy,

00:50:38.180 | isolated nerve to muscle contractions,

00:50:40.280 | versus strength and offsetting strength loss,

00:50:44.160 | which would be distributed nerve to muscle connections.

00:50:47.400 | If ever there was an area of practical science

00:50:49.820 | that was very confused, very controversial,

00:50:53.280 | and almost combative at times,

00:50:55.540 | it would be this issue of how best to train.

00:50:58.240 | I suppose the only thing

00:50:59.080 | that's even more barbed wire of a conversation than that

00:51:02.100 | is how best to eat for health.

00:51:04.040 | Those seem to be the two most common areas of online battle.

00:51:09.220 | And the scientific literature has a lot to say

00:51:12.040 | about both of those things.

00:51:13.700 | Again, my sources for what I'm about to tell you

00:51:16.420 | are Professor Andy Galpin and colleagues.

00:51:19.540 | I know there are other excellent people

00:51:20.940 | out there in the field, but I really trust his work.

00:51:23.580 | He does very controlled studies.

00:51:26.380 | He spent a lot of time in this space.

00:51:27.760 | And what's really exciting

00:51:29.140 | is that in just the last three years or so,

00:51:32.380 | there's been a tremendous amount of information

00:51:34.300 | to come out about the practical steps that one can take

00:51:37.060 | in order to maximize the benefits

00:51:40.380 | of resistance exercise of any kind.

00:51:43.280 | So I'm going to talk about those,

00:51:44.720 | and I'm going to talk about the research.

00:51:46.300 | I will provide some links,

00:51:48.060 | both to a couple of the more in-depth tutorials

00:51:50.960 | from Dr. Galpin, as well as some of the papers

00:51:54.160 | that the information I'm about to tell you stems from.

00:51:56.820 | There's a lot of information saying

00:52:00.820 | that you need to move weights that are 80 to 90%

00:52:05.100 | of your one rep maximum or 70%

00:52:07.100 | or cycle that for three weeks on

00:52:08.620 | and then go to more moderate weights.

00:52:09.800 | There are a lot of paths, as some people say,

00:52:12.660 | there are a lot of ways to add up numbers to get 100.

00:52:16.180 | There's a near infinite number of ways

00:52:17.740 | to add up different numbers to get to 100.

00:52:20.220 | And what's very clear now

00:52:22.280 | from all the literature that's transpired,

00:52:24.700 | and especially from the literature

00:52:25.660 | in this last three years,

00:52:27.200 | is that once you know roughly your one repetition maximum,

00:52:32.240 | the maximum amount of weight that you can perform

00:52:36.520 | and exercise with for one repetition in good form,

00:52:39.720 | full range of motion,

00:52:41.920 | that it's very clear that moving weights

00:52:46.340 | or using bands or using body weight, for instance,

00:52:51.140 | in the 30 to 80% of one rep maximum,

00:52:54.740 | that is going to be the most beneficial range

00:52:57.420 | in terms of muscle hypertrophy and strength,

00:52:59.640 | so muscle growth and strength.

00:53:01.500 | And there will be a bias.

00:53:02.880 | If you're moving weights that are in the 75%, 80% range,

00:53:07.000 | or maybe even going above that 85 and 90%,

00:53:09.760 | you're going to bias your improvements

00:53:12.420 | towards strength gains, this is true.

00:53:14.960 | And if you use weights that are in the 30%

00:53:17.440 | of your one repetition maximum or 40% or 50%

00:53:20.940 | and doing many more repetitions, of course,

00:53:23.340 | then you are biasing towards hypertrophy

00:53:25.720 | and what some people like to call muscle endurance,

00:53:27.940 | but that's a little bit of a complicated term

00:53:29.960 | because endurance we almost always think of

00:53:32.360 | as relating to running or swimming

00:53:34.200 | or some long bouts of activity.

00:53:36.500 | So 30 to 80% of one repetition maxims,

00:53:39.440 | it doesn't really seem to matter for sake of hypertrophy,

00:53:43.320 | except at the far ends

00:53:44.760 | when you're really trying to bias for strength.

00:53:47.340 | Now, it is clear, however,

00:53:50.320 | that one needs to perform those sets to failure

00:53:55.320 | where you can't perform another repetition

00:53:58.080 | in good form again or near to failure.

00:54:01.720 | And there's all sorts of interesting nomenclature

00:54:03.680 | that's popping up all over the internet,

00:54:05.440 | some of which is scientific,

00:54:06.600 | some of which is not scientific

00:54:07.940 | about how you are supposed to perceive

00:54:10.660 | how close you were to failure, et cetera.

00:54:13.020 | But there are some very interesting principles

00:54:15.920 | that relate to how the nerves connect to the muscles

00:54:18.320 | that strongly predict whether or not this exercise

00:54:20.760 | that you're performing will be beneficial for you or not.

00:54:23.480 | So here's how it goes.

00:54:24.920 | For individuals that are untrained,

00:54:27.440 | meaning they have been doing resistance exercise

00:54:30.240 | for anywhere from zero, probably out to about two years,

00:54:35.100 | although for some people it might be zero to one year,

00:54:37.880 | but those are the so-called beginners.

00:54:39.540 | They're sort of untrained.

00:54:41.320 | For those people, the key parameter

00:54:43.460 | seems to be to perform enough sets

00:54:46.460 | of a given exercise per muscle per week.

00:54:50.360 | The same is also true for people that have been training

00:54:52.640 | for one or two years or more.

00:54:54.640 | What differs is how many sets to perform

00:54:57.440 | depending on whether or not you're trained or untrained.

00:55:00.080 | So let's say you're somebody

00:55:00.920 | who's been doing some resistance exercise

00:55:03.520 | kind of on and off over the years,

00:55:06.440 | and you decide you want to get serious about that

00:55:08.200 | for sake of sport or offsetting

00:55:09.720 | age-related declines in strength.

00:55:11.840 | The range of sets to do in order to improve strength,

00:55:16.640 | to activate these cascades in the muscle

00:55:19.300 | ranges anywhere from two, believe it or not,

00:55:21.960 | to 20 per week.

00:55:23.560 | Again, these are sets per week

00:55:25.080 | and they don't necessarily all have to be performed

00:55:27.520 | in the same weight training session.

00:55:29.100 | I will talk about numbers of sessions.

00:55:31.240 | So it appears that five sets per week

00:55:35.660 | in this 30% to 80% of the one repetition maximum range,

00:55:40.320 | getting close to failure

00:55:42.080 | or occasionally actually going to full muscular failure,

00:55:46.800 | which isn't really full muscular failure,

00:55:48.380 | but the inability to generate a contraction of the muscle

00:55:51.840 | or move the weight in good form.

00:55:53.520 | I'll go deeper into that in a moment.

00:55:54.820 | But about five sets per week

00:55:56.440 | is what's required just to maintain your muscles.

00:55:58.920 | So think about that.

00:55:59.840 | If you're somebody who's kind of averse

00:56:01.200 | to resistance training,

00:56:02.480 | you are going to lose muscle size and strength.

00:56:05.320 | Your metabolism will drop, your posture will get worse.

00:56:08.080 | Everything in the context of nerve to muscle connectivity

00:56:11.200 | will get worse over time

00:56:12.840 | unless you are generating five sets

00:56:17.960 | or more of this 30% to 80% of your one repetition maximum

00:56:22.800 | per week.

00:56:24.100 | So what this means is for the typical person

00:56:26.380 | who hasn't done a lot of weight training,

00:56:27.800 | you need to do at least five sets per muscle group.

00:56:31.560 | Now that's just to maintain.

00:56:33.440 | And then there's this huge range

00:56:35.080 | that goes all the way up to 15

00:56:36.400 | and in some case, 20 sets per week.

00:56:38.660 | Now, how many sets you perform is going to depend

00:56:41.840 | on the intensity of the work that you perform.

00:56:45.100 | This is where it gets a little bit controversial,

00:56:47.160 | but I think nowadays most people agree

00:56:50.000 | and Dr. Galpin confirmed that 10%,

00:56:54.220 | not to be confused with the 10% we discussed earlier,

00:56:57.020 | but 10% of the sets of a given workout

00:57:01.380 | or 10% of workouts overall

00:57:05.320 | should be of the high intensity sort

00:57:07.520 | where one is actually working to muscular failure.

00:57:09.740 | Now, I say not true muscular failure because in theory,

00:57:12.960 | you have a concentric movement,

00:57:14.460 | which is the kind of lifting of the weight

00:57:15.920 | and then you have the eccentric portion

00:57:17.360 | of muscle contraction, which is the lowering.

00:57:19.240 | And the eccentric movements

00:57:20.640 | because of the way that muscle fibers lengthen

00:57:22.960 | and that sliding actin myosin that we talked about before,

00:57:26.520 | you're always stronger in lowering something

00:57:28.880 | than you are in lifting it.

00:57:31.520 | But the point being that most of your training,

00:57:34.600 | most of your sets should be not to failure.

00:57:38.720 | And the reason for that is it allows you

00:57:40.680 | to do more volume of work

00:57:43.640 | without fatiguing the nervous system

00:57:46.080 | and depleting the nerve to muscle connection

00:57:48.640 | in ways that are detrimental.

00:57:50.680 | So we can make this simple.

00:57:52.900 | Perform anywhere from five to 15 sets

00:57:56.060 | of resistance exercise per week.

00:57:58.280 | And that's per muscle.

00:58:01.460 | And that's in this 30 to 80%

00:58:03.720 | of what your one repetition maximum.

00:58:05.480 | That seems to be the most scientifically supported way

00:58:08.800 | of offsetting any decline in muscle strength.

00:58:12.520 | If you're working in the kind of five set range

00:58:14.520 | and in increasing muscle strength

00:58:17.080 | when you start to get up into the 10 and 15 set range.

00:58:21.360 | Now, the caveat to that is everyone varies

00:58:24.400 | and muscles vary in terms of their recoverability.

00:58:27.480 | Depending on how well you can control the contraction

00:58:31.360 | of muscles deliberately.

00:58:33.600 | And you can actually figure that out by sort of marching.

00:58:35.960 | You might take five minutes

00:58:36.960 | and just kind of march across your body

00:58:38.320 | and mentally try and control the contractions of muscles

00:58:42.280 | in a very deliberate way

00:58:43.360 | to the point where you can generate a hard contraction.

00:58:45.600 | And you may have to move a limb

00:58:46.720 | in order to do this by the way.

00:58:47.800 | I'm not talking about just mentally contracting your bicep

00:58:50.760 | without moving your wrist.

00:58:51.680 | I'm talking about doing that without any weight in hand

00:58:54.640 | or any band or any resistance.

00:58:56.800 | If you can generate a high intensity contraction

00:58:59.400 | using these upper motor neuron

00:59:00.720 | to lower motor neuron pathways to muscle,

00:59:03.800 | you might think, well, I should perform many more sets.

00:59:09.320 | But actually the opposite is true.

00:59:12.380 | If you can generate high intensity muscular contractions

00:59:15.480 | using your brain, using your neurons,

00:59:17.740 | it will take fewer sets in order to stimulate the muscle

00:59:22.260 | to maintain itself and to stimulate the muscle

00:59:25.500 | in order to grow or get stronger.

00:59:28.160 | So the more efficient you are in recruiting motor units,

00:59:32.220 | remember Henneman's size principle,

00:59:33.980 | the recruitment of more motor units

00:59:36.140 | which isn't just muscles, it's nerve to muscle connections.

00:59:39.140 | The better you are at doing that,

00:59:40.940 | the more you will recruit

00:59:41.980 | these so-called high threshold motor units,

00:59:43.900 | the ones that are hard to get to,

00:59:45.460 | the more you will kick off the cascades of things

00:59:47.620 | within muscle that stimulate muscle growth and strength.

00:59:52.220 | So if you have muscles that are challenging to contract,

00:59:56.280 | it's going to take more sets in order to stimulate

01:00:00.500 | the desired effect in those muscles, not fewer, okay?

01:00:04.420 | If you have muscles that you are very good

01:00:06.280 | at generating force within, it's going to take fewer sets.

01:00:09.540 | Now, how many sets? You are going to have to determine that.

01:00:12.580 | It's going to depend.

01:00:13.420 | For those of you that are using like 50%

01:00:15.300 | of your one repetition maximum,

01:00:17.480 | because you're doing a lot of repetitions,

01:00:19.300 | you might find that three or four, five sets

01:00:22.140 | will maintain the muscle.

01:00:24.120 | You might decide to do that once at one point in the week

01:00:26.860 | and then do it again, right?

01:00:28.500 | So if you're going for 10 sets a week,

01:00:29.740 | you can divide that among two sessions.

01:00:31.180 | You can do that all in one session.

01:00:32.940 | The data really show it doesn't matter.

01:00:36.760 | There are some differences in terms of whether or not

01:00:40.280 | you're trying to generate maximum intensity within a workout

01:00:43.060 | or whether or not you want to spread that out.

01:00:44.240 | But in general, resistance workouts of any kind

01:00:46.760 | tend to be best favored by workouts that are somewhere

01:00:50.480 | between 45 minutes and 60 minutes.

01:00:53.720 | And generally not longer than 60 minutes,

01:00:55.680 | because that's when all the things like cortisol

01:00:58.520 | and some of the inflammatory pathways really start

01:01:00.680 | to create a situation in the muscle and in the body

01:01:04.040 | that's not so great for you.

01:01:05.400 | So it's not a hard and fast rule, you know,

01:01:07.460 | that the acts doesn't drop at 60 minutes,

01:01:10.120 | but it's pretty clear that performing this five to 15 sets

01:01:13.520 | per week, whether or not it's in one workout

01:01:15.660 | or whether that's divided up across multiple workouts

01:01:17.980 | is really what's going to be most beneficial.

01:01:19.520 | And please do keep in mind Henneman's size principle

01:01:22.760 | and the recruitment of motor units.

01:01:24.060 | And remember the better you are at contracting

01:01:26.320 | particular muscles and isolating those muscles,

01:01:28.700 | the fewer sets likely you need to do

01:01:30.880 | in order to get the desired effect.

01:01:33.260 | Now, what about people who have been training for awhile?

01:01:35.420 | If you're somebody who's been doing weight training

01:01:37.180 | for awhile, the data points to the fact

01:01:40.460 | that more volume can be beneficial,

01:01:43.120 | even for muscles that you are very efficient at contracting.

01:01:47.180 | Now, the curve on this, the graph on this begins again

01:01:51.280 | at about five sets per week for maintaining

01:01:53.540 | a given muscle group and extends all the way out

01:01:55.820 | to 25 or 30 sets per week.

01:01:59.140 | However, there are individuals who for whatever reason

01:02:03.660 | can generate so much force,

01:02:05.260 | they're so good at training muscles

01:02:07.860 | that they can generate so much force

01:02:09.620 | in just four or six or eight sets

01:02:12.700 | that doing this large volume of work

01:02:14.460 | is actually going to be counterproductive.

01:02:16.640 | So everyone needs to figure out for themselves,

01:02:19.180 | first of all, how often you're willing

01:02:20.680 | to do resistance exercise of any kind.

01:02:23.200 | And again, it doesn't matter if you're using bands

01:02:25.180 | or weights or body weight.

01:02:26.500 | For instance, if you're doing chin ups,

01:02:28.700 | chances are, unless you are very strong,

01:02:31.100 | that you're not using weights.

01:02:32.500 | You're just using something that you can hold onto.

01:02:34.780 | Or if you're doing pushups, some of you will be working

01:02:37.980 | in that 30 to 80% of your one repetition maximum range.

01:02:41.660 | It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be moving

01:02:44.140 | weights in a gym, for instance.

01:02:46.220 | So the purpose here is to figure out

01:02:49.140 | what muscles you're trying to train.

01:02:50.900 | That's an issue that we'll talk about in a moment.

01:02:53.140 | And then it does appear that somewhere between five

01:02:56.580 | and 15 sets per week is going to be what's the thing

01:03:00.480 | that's going to work for most people.

01:03:01.860 | Now, this is based on a tremendous amount of work

01:03:03.900 | that was done by Andy Galpin and colleagues,

01:03:05.680 | Brad Schoenfield and colleagues and others.

01:03:08.380 | Mike Roberts, there's a huge group of people out there

01:03:14.020 | doing exercise physiology and a small subset of them

01:03:17.300 | that are linking them back to real world protocols

01:03:20.220 | that don't just pertain to athletes.

01:03:22.180 | So that's mainly what I'm focusing on today.

01:03:23.980 | And surely there will be exceptions.

01:03:26.160 | Now, if you're going to divide the sets across the week,

01:03:30.500 | you're not going to do all 10 sets, for instance,

01:03:32.540 | for a given muscle group in one session,

01:03:34.540 | then of course it's imperative that the muscles recover

01:03:37.320 | in between sessions.

01:03:38.200 | And we are going to talk about recovery

01:03:40.040 | both at the systemic level, the whole nervous system,

01:03:43.240 | and at the local level, the nerve to muscle

01:03:46.040 | and local even muscle level.

01:03:47.780 | We'll talk about that in about 10 minutes

01:03:49.700 | when we talk about recovery.

01:03:51.540 | I do want to mention something very important,

01:03:53.560 | which is that everything I'm referring to here,

01:03:55.700 | it has to do with full range of motion, okay?

01:03:58.780 | And you might ask, well, what about the speeds of movements?

01:04:02.120 | This is actually turns out

01:04:03.060 | to be a really interesting data set.

01:04:05.180 | For generating explosiveness and speed,

01:04:08.000 | so for sprinters or throwing sports,

01:04:10.600 | or for people that want to generate a lot of jumping power,

01:04:13.640 | it does appear that learning to move weights

01:04:16.180 | as fast as you safely can,

01:04:18.660 | especially under moderate to heavy loads,

01:04:21.460 | can increase explosiveness and speed

01:04:24.860 | and most of that effect is from changes in the neurons.

01:04:29.860 | It's not from changes in the muscle,

01:04:31.940 | it's from changes in the way

01:04:33.500 | that the upper motor neurons communicate

01:04:35.860 | with the lower motor neurons

01:04:37.220 | and generating a pathway, a neural circuit as we call it,

01:04:41.080 | that is very efficient at generating action potentials,

01:04:44.440 | which are the electricity within neurons

01:04:46.340 | to trigger the muscle.

01:04:47.280 | Now, of course there are events

01:04:48.240 | that happen from nerve to muscle,

01:04:49.880 | but the takeaway from that enormous literature frankly,

01:04:53.620 | is that if you want to get faster,

01:04:56.440 | yes, it can be beneficial to get stronger,

01:04:59.520 | but if you want to dedicate resistance training

01:05:02.340 | specifically to jumping higher, to running faster,

01:05:07.340 | to throwing further and these sorts of things,

01:05:10.660 | that learning to generate force

01:05:13.340 | with increasing speed is going to be beneficial.

01:05:15.820 | On the flip side of that,

01:05:17.940 | for people that want to get stronger,

01:05:19.660 | it appears that the slowing down of the weight

01:05:21.980 | as things get harder is a key parameter

01:05:24.500 | in recruiting those high threshold motor units.

01:05:27.020 | So let me phrase that a little bit differently.

01:05:29.420 | Think about a set in the gym

01:05:31.000 | or think about a set of pushups or a set of pull-ups.

01:05:33.580 | Initially, you can move very fast if you like.

01:05:36.740 | If you want to generate hypertrophy,

01:05:38.260 | the goal really is not necessarily to move super slow,

01:05:40.820 | but to isolate the muscle

01:05:41.940 | and therefore not to use momentum

01:05:43.360 | rather than lift weights as they say, challenge muscles.

01:05:46.860 | If you want to get stronger,

01:05:48.060 | you're going to be distributing that effort

01:05:49.660 | over more muscles and more of your nervous system.

01:05:52.280 | For generating explosiveness and speed,

01:05:55.680 | it's very clear that learning to generate forces quickly

01:05:59.180 | and to move heavy or moderately heavy loads quickly

01:06:03.040 | is going to be beneficial

01:06:04.200 | because of the way that you train the motor neurons

01:06:07.220 | and of course changes in the muscle.

01:06:09.280 | But this could look different for different sports

01:06:12.260 | and obviously you want to make safety paramount.

01:06:14.260 | If you're injured, you're not going to be able to train

01:06:16.300 | at all for sport or for any purpose that is.

01:06:19.680 | And so what this would involve is something like 60 to 75%

01:06:23.580 | of a one repetition maximum.

01:06:24.980 | And then in a controlled way,

01:06:26.500 | moving that as quickly as one can throughout the entire set

01:06:30.280 | and certainly not going to failure

01:06:32.440 | because as you approach failure,

01:06:33.940 | the inability to move the weight with good form,

01:06:36.140 | the weight inevitably slows down.

01:06:38.220 | In fact, there are a lot of new technologies now

01:06:41.100 | that are focused on informing people

01:06:43.840 | of how quickly the bar or weight is moving.

01:06:46.420 | I saw an advertisement for this the other day.

01:06:48.900 | There are things that people can attach to bars

01:06:51.420 | that will literally speak to you as you're doing a set

01:06:53.560 | and inform you whether or not you're moving

01:06:55.840 | four times more slowly per rep

01:06:58.340 | than you were at the beginning

01:06:59.480 | and trying to hone in on the exact speed of movement.

01:07:02.420 | In talking to these experts prior to this episode,

01:07:05.540 | it does appear that for sake of hypertrophy,

01:07:08.520 | as long as you're not moving the muscle so quickly

01:07:11.360 | that you start to distribute the effort

01:07:12.940 | to lots of other muscles, it doesn't really matter

01:07:16.760 | because as the set gets harder,

01:07:20.280 | the motor units that you recruit will increase.

01:07:23.380 | The number of neurons that you recruit

01:07:24.960 | and the number of muscle fibers

01:07:26.080 | and particularly these high threshold muscle fibers

01:07:27.800 | will increase.

01:07:28.640 | And so it's really only for purposes of hypertrophy

01:07:31.780 | that you really need to be concerned about

01:07:34.420 | how quickly the weight is slowing down.

01:07:37.080 | However, if you're trying to get faster, more explosive

01:07:39.860 | and generate more speed and jumping power, throwing power,

01:07:44.280 | things of that sort,

01:07:45.720 | you never really want to use a weight

01:07:47.480 | or get to a portion of the set

01:07:49.180 | where you're moving the bar very, very slowly.

01:07:51.360 | And I'm sure as I say that some of the exercise physiologists

01:07:53.760 | and advanced trainers out there

01:07:55.320 | will come after me with pitchforks, which is fine.

01:07:57.280 | I'd love to see the literature that shows that low gear,

01:07:59.760 | slow movements with very heavy weights

01:08:01.840 | can indeed improve explosiveness.

01:08:04.720 | And that may in fact be the case,

01:08:06.440 | but the data that I was able to access

01:08:08.620 | was essentially as I described just a moment ago.

01:08:10.960 | So as you're probably starting to realize,

01:08:12.480 | you need to customize a resistance practice

01:08:16.280 | for your particular needs and goals.

01:08:18.320 | And I certainly am not the first to suggest

01:08:21.040 | that people periodize their training,

01:08:23.100 | that they do things from anywhere from one month

01:08:25.000 | to six months and to see how it goes

01:08:27.120 | and to make modifications as they go.

01:08:29.360 | Because the nervous system,

01:08:30.760 | in particular the neuromuscular system,

01:08:32.800 | changes very quickly at the beginning of training.

01:08:35.340 | In fact, some of the changes that one can see

01:08:37.880 | when they first embrace or start resistance training

01:08:42.880 | can be very remarkable, but they tend to slow over time.

01:08:46.400 | So we've talked about a few principles.

01:08:47.860 | The fact that you need to get sufficient volume,

01:08:49.780 | you need at least five sets to maintain,

01:08:51.400 | and you probably need about 10 sets per muscle group

01:08:53.540 | in order to improve muscle.

01:08:55.360 | That moving weights of moderate to moderately heavy weight

01:08:58.660 | quickly is going to be best for explosiveness.

01:09:00.600 | That isolating muscles and really contracting muscles hard,

01:09:04.380 | something that you can test

01:09:05.560 | by just when you're outside the training session,

01:09:08.160 | seeing whether or not you can cramp the muscle hard

01:09:09.600 | will tell you your capacity to improve hypertrophy

01:09:14.600 | or to engage strength changes in that muscle.

01:09:18.040 | That your ability to contract a muscle hard

01:09:20.800 | is inversely related to the number of sets

01:09:23.180 | that you should do in order to isolate

01:09:25.300 | and stimulate that muscle.

01:09:27.600 | And there are some other things

01:09:29.480 | that can enhance the whole process

01:09:31.520 | of building nerve to muscle connections,

01:09:34.220 | making them more efficient and generating, if you like,

01:09:36.760 | more strength and hypertrophy.

01:09:39.080 | One of them, I loathe to say,

01:09:42.680 | I was told is in-between set contractions.

01:09:46.580 | The other name for this is the people in the gym

01:09:49.540 | does typically seem to be guys in the gym

01:09:52.260 | flexing their muscles in between sets.

01:09:54.420 | And indeed, the research supports the fact

01:09:57.620 | that contractions of about 30 seconds

01:10:00.220 | in between the actual work sets,

01:10:02.240 | they're not going to favor better performance

01:10:05.280 | on the work sets.

01:10:06.120 | If anything, they're going to compromise them,

01:10:07.840 | but those hard contractions in between sets

01:10:10.780 | for a variety of reasons related to local muscle metabolism,

01:10:14.400 | as well as what we talked about before,

01:10:16.060 | which are stress, tension, and damage,

01:10:18.040 | they seem to improve stress, tension, and damage

01:10:20.880 | and the nerve to muscle contraction

01:10:22.440 | in ways that facilitate hypertrophy.

01:10:24.440 | In other words, you see that person flexing

01:10:26.980 | in between sets in the gym,

01:10:28.680 | provided that they're really isolating that muscle

01:10:31.440 | and provided it's one that they ought to be improving.

01:10:35.220 | Not one of these people

01:10:36.340 | that always skips leg day type of people.

01:10:38.020 | These people are highly asymmetric,

01:10:41.140 | although that's up to them.

01:10:42.500 | That process of flexing in between sets

01:10:45.380 | does seem to improve the nerve to muscle connection

01:10:48.860 | and enhance hypertrophy.

01:10:51.020 | And I say I was loathe to say it

01:10:52.420 | because nowadays with phones,

01:10:54.020 | it seems like the end of every set includes a selfie.

01:10:58.280 | And that's sort of like the 11th rep of every set.

01:11:00.300 | I like to joke, it seems like very few people are capable

01:11:03.000 | of actually going into the gym and doing a workout

01:11:05.860 | without taking a picture of themselves,

01:11:07.100 | which I think is fine if that's your thing.

01:11:10.000 | Although I must say that the athletes that I know,

01:11:12.960 | and even the recreational athletes that I know

01:11:15.220 | who seem to get the most out of their training

01:11:17.500 | and who also seem to get the most

01:11:18.900 | out of other aspects of their life

01:11:20.280 | seem to be able to control their phone behavior

01:11:22.140 | both in the gym and outside of the gym.

01:11:24.100 | But that's more of an editorial point there.

01:11:26.880 | In an earlier episode,

01:11:28.000 | I talked about estrogen and testosterone.

01:11:30.720 | And during that discussion,

01:11:31.840 | I talked about the use of resistance exercise

01:11:34.220 | specifically for increasing testosterone

01:11:37.360 | both in men and in women.

01:11:39.440 | And indeed that is a powerful effect of resistance exercise.

01:11:44.080 | And indeed it's mediated by the nerve to muscle connections.

01:11:48.640 | We talked about that in that earlier episode.

01:11:51.220 | I just want to briefly mention that protocol

01:11:53.100 | since it's distinctly different

01:11:54.600 | from the other protocols I've talked about today.

01:11:57.000 | The protocols I've talked about today thus far

01:11:59.820 | of explosive movements or of hypertrophy-based training

01:12:04.440 | provided the training is 60 minutes or less

01:12:07.480 | will cause increases in serum testosterone

01:12:10.400 | that's been shown over and over again.

01:12:12.960 | And if the session extends too long past 75 minutes

01:12:16.560 | and is of sufficiently high intensity,

01:12:18.620 | chances are testosterone levels will start to drop

01:12:21.960 | and cortisol levels will go up

01:12:24.400 | in ways that can be detrimental to recovery

01:12:26.460 | and the goals of the training.

01:12:28.680 | But that's different than training

01:12:31.100 | that's specifically geared toward increasing testosterone.

01:12:34.760 | Duncan French, who's one of the directors

01:12:36.780 | of the UFC Performance Center,

01:12:38.720 | when he was a graduate student

01:12:40.220 | at University of Connecticut stores,

01:12:42.020 | did some beautiful work.

01:12:43.060 | He and his colleagues found the ideal training protocols

01:12:46.640 | for stimulating testosterone release,

01:12:48.780 | which is something that many people want to do

01:12:50.880 | for a variety of reasons.

01:12:52.580 | And that involved doing six sets of 10 repetitions,

01:12:57.580 | even if it requires lightening the weight

01:13:02.240 | on one set to the next,

01:13:04.880 | with about two minutes, 120 seconds rest in between sets,

01:13:08.260 | which if you think about it is pretty short rest

01:13:12.540 | and is pretty darn hard work.

01:13:15.480 | Now what's interesting is that

01:13:16.800 | there's a very limited threshold for increasing testosterone.

01:13:20.120 | That protocol of six sets of 10 repetitions

01:13:24.840 | led to these big increases in serum testosterone.

01:13:27.980 | But if people did 10 sets of 10,

01:13:29.880 | so just four more repetitions per set,

01:13:32.260 | then testosterone did not increase.

01:13:34.440 | In fact, you got more

01:13:35.280 | of this catabolic cortisol-like pathway.

01:13:37.280 | You get other benefits

01:13:38.440 | from the so-called 10 sets of 10 protocol,

01:13:41.160 | but not the testosterone increase

01:13:43.040 | and maybe even reductions in testosterone.

01:13:45.960 | Now it's important to point out that that six sets of 10

01:13:48.040 | was done with big compound movements.

01:13:50.320 | So things like squats or deadlifts or chin ups

01:13:53.040 | or things of that sort.

01:13:54.080 | And those were done as single sessions,

01:13:56.360 | not in concert with a bunch of other exercise.

01:13:59.720 | Although if athletes are doing that,

01:14:02.400 | there's no reason why they couldn't also do

01:14:03.960 | other types of training elsewhere in the week.

01:14:06.740 | I asked Duncan about this,

01:14:07.740 | and he mentioned that that done twice a week

01:14:09.820 | is probably the maximum amount that anyone could do that

01:14:14.160 | and still maintain this increase in testosterone.

01:14:16.520 | It's a very interesting protocol

01:14:18.600 | because as a neuroscientist,

01:14:21.800 | it's amazing to me that six sets of 10 repetitions

01:14:24.840 | with something causes a distinctly, excuse me,

01:14:27.880 | causes a distinctly different result

01:14:30.320 | in terms of hormone output than 10 sets of 10

01:14:33.000 | of the exact same movement.

01:14:34.900 | And it speaks to the exquisite way

01:14:37.840 | in which nerve to muscle connections

01:14:40.140 | dictate the whole physiology of your entire system.

01:14:43.960 | If there's a theme that I really want to bring forward today

01:14:46.520 | is that weight training or resistance training of any kind

01:14:50.360 | is really used for either systemic effects, right?

01:14:53.720 | 10% of training done where you're feeling that burn,

01:14:56.140 | which means lactate will be present

01:14:57.800 | and sending signals to your brain

01:14:59.400 | and to your heart and to your liver that are beneficial

01:15:01.960 | or isolating muscles,

01:15:03.880 | which may also generate a kind of a lactate

01:15:07.380 | or which is associated with the burn result,

01:15:10.520 | but that isolation of muscles is distinctly different.

01:15:13.040 | So systemic versus isolated.

01:15:15.240 | Those are the two general ways

01:15:17.000 | in which resistance training can be applied.

01:15:19.560 | So I just wanted to mention that earlier protocol

01:15:21.460 | because it's well supported by the literature.

01:15:24.340 | If you were to incorporate that protocol,

01:15:26.680 | you might ask, well then can you do

01:15:28.000 | any other weight training during the week?

01:15:29.620 | And sure, of course you can provided you're recovering.

01:15:32.360 | So let's talk about how you know if you're recovering,

01:15:35.320 | how you know if a muscle is recovered

01:15:36.960 | and how you know if your whole system is recovered

01:15:39.480 | because recovery is what dictates

01:15:41.320 | whether or not you can come back

01:15:43.040 | and do more work of a different kind,

01:15:44.760 | meaning, I don't know, you do leg training one day,

01:15:48.380 | can you and should you come back

01:15:49.900 | and do upper body training the next day?

01:15:52.320 | And it dictates whether or not you'll see any improvement

01:15:55.100 | from session to session at all.

01:15:57.000 | Before I talk about recovery,

01:15:58.280 | I just want to make sure I nail down the details

01:16:00.440 | that I was able to extract from the literature

01:16:03.160 | and from my conversation with Dr. Galpin.

01:16:05.560 | If you're wondering how quickly to perform repetitions

01:16:08.900 | for sake of hypertrophy or strength gains,

01:16:11.480 | anywhere from a half a second per repetition

01:16:14.080 | all the way up to eight seconds per repetition,

01:16:16.140 | it doesn't seem to matter.

01:16:18.220 | Again, if you're thinking about explosiveness

01:16:20.140 | or building speed,

01:16:21.360 | or you're specifically using resistance training

01:16:23.280 | to build endurance, that's a separate matter.

01:16:25.380 | We talked about explosiveness and speed,

01:16:27.180 | I'll talk about endurance in a few moments.

01:16:29.380 | We also talked about in-between set contractions,

01:16:32.700 | the so-called selfie effect

01:16:34.760 | of people flexing a particular muscle,

01:16:36.920 | isolating a particular muscle between sets.

01:16:39.240 | Just want to mention that would be a terrible thing to do

01:16:42.000 | if your goal is performance on sets.

01:16:44.200 | So moving a particular amount of weight,

01:16:46.900 | that's actually going to diminish the amount of weight

01:16:49.020 | that you can move.

01:16:49.960 | It's going to enhance muscle growth

01:16:51.980 | and it's going to enhance the nerve to muscle isolation

01:16:55.500 | of that particular pathway.

01:16:57.040 | So again, that flexing between sets

01:16:59.640 | is going to favor hypertrophy, not performance.

01:17:03.780 | If you're trying to get stronger,

01:17:06.200 | you're trying to move more weights,

01:17:07.560 | you're trying to distribute work

01:17:09.100 | and you're trying to do maybe skill training

01:17:11.040 | with resistance, then flexing between sets

01:17:13.560 | is absolutely the wrong thing to do for obvious reasons,

01:17:16.500 | you're fatiguing the muscle further.

01:17:18.160 | Just remaining still or walking around a little bit

01:17:21.100 | has been shown to be beneficial

01:17:23.060 | in terms of moving some of the lactate out of the muscle

01:17:25.860 | as well as just recovering between sets.

01:17:28.100 | Now, how long to recover between sets?

01:17:30.060 | There's a question for the testosterone protocol,

01:17:32.580 | Duncan French and colleagues found

01:17:33.900 | that it was about two minutes,

01:17:35.060 | keeping that really on the clock, two minutes, not longer.

01:17:38.540 | For hypertrophy and for strength gains,

01:17:41.080 | it does seem that resting anywhere from two minutes

01:17:43.780 | or even three or four, even five or six minutes

01:17:47.140 | can be beneficial.

01:17:48.160 | And if you're interested in expanding the volume of work

01:17:51.460 | that you can do in a given session

01:17:53.860 | at high capacity, at high intensity with a given weight,

01:17:57.220 | please see the episode that I did on cold and performance

01:18:00.720 | about supercharging performance,

01:18:02.080 | which is based on the work of my colleague Craig Heller

01:18:04.540 | in the biology department at Stanford,

01:18:06.180 | which talks about palmer cooling,

01:18:07.820 | about how you can cool the core of the body

01:18:10.140 | best through the palms

01:18:11.480 | using these particular venous portals

01:18:14.120 | that are only present in your hands.

01:18:16.680 | People are now doing this with ice packs or with gel packs.

01:18:20.020 | There are a number of different ways one can do this.

01:18:21.460 | I talk all about that in that episode.

01:18:23.220 | It allows you to do more repetitions and more work

01:18:27.380 | at a given weight over time.

01:18:29.100 | So rather than getting 10 repetitions

01:18:31.540 | and then eight and then seven and then six

01:18:33.780 | through proper use of palmer cooling,

01:18:35.820 | one can do 10, 10, 10, 10, and even add sets.

01:18:39.300 | And that's one way that one can accomplish

01:18:41.340 | higher volume work

01:18:43.040 | without having to drop the weight considerably.

01:18:45.500 | So that's where you can hit that really sweet spot

01:18:48.020 | if that's your goal of getting strong

01:18:50.220 | and generating some hypertrophy.

01:18:52.180 | Because as soon as you have to drop to lighter weights,

01:18:55.380 | excuse me, then you're shifting more towards hypertrophy

01:18:58.500 | and endurance and less toward strength in a given muscle.

01:19:01.420 | So check out that episode.

01:19:03.240 | The last thing besides between set contractions

01:19:06.660 | and whether or not you're distributing work

01:19:08.740 | or whether or not you're really trying to isolate muscles

01:19:11.320 | is this notion of pre-exhausting muscles.

01:19:14.340 | It's been shown over and over again that for instance,

01:19:17.580 | if you want to generate force in a given muscle

01:19:21.020 | and really isolate that,

01:19:22.460 | doing the isolation work before a compound movement.

01:19:25.140 | So this would be leg extensions,

01:19:28.060 | the thing where you sit

01:19:28.880 | and you extend your toes up toward the ceiling,

01:19:31.360 | leg extensions before squats will allow the squats

01:19:35.060 | to target that muscle group more effectively.

01:19:37.460 | And that makes perfectly good sense

01:19:39.260 | based on the Henneman size principle

01:19:41.620 | and fatiguing motor units.

01:19:43.040 | It should be obvious why that's the case.

01:19:44.780 | But of course that's going to be anti-performance

01:19:48.300 | in terms of how much weight you can lift

01:19:50.020 | and maybe even the form that you can maintain

01:19:51.720 | when you move to the bigger compound movement.

01:19:53.780 | So you really have to ask yourself a number of questions.

01:19:56.140 | How good are you at isolating a given muscle?

01:19:58.980 | Therefore, how many sets do you want to do?

01:20:01.140 | How often are you willing to train?

01:20:03.700 | Therefore, how many sets are you going to do

01:20:05.500 | in a given session versus how many are you going

01:20:07.700 | to distribute across the week?

01:20:09.460 | Are you aiming for performance?

01:20:10.860 | Are you going to distribute that work

01:20:12.440 | across the nervous system and musculature?

01:20:14.500 | Are you trying to move weights

01:20:15.680 | or are you trying to challenge muscles?

01:20:17.160 | If you're trying to challenge muscles,

01:20:18.800 | then you really want to focus on things

01:20:20.620 | like this pre-exhausting, the isolation of a muscle

01:20:22.960 | before the compound movement.

01:20:24.540 | Your performance on compound movements

01:20:26.360 | will absolutely suffer,

01:20:28.500 | but your ability to isolate that muscle

01:20:30.540 | and generate hypertrophy through the accumulation

01:20:32.980 | of larger myosin, those bigger balloons, will benefit.

01:20:36.900 | And once again, if you're trying to get faster,

01:20:39.500 | then the speed of the movement really matters.

01:20:42.440 | So how do we know if we've recovered?

01:20:43.940 | How can we test recovery?

01:20:45.560 | And this is not just recovery from resistance training.

01:20:47.900 | This is recovery from running, recovery from swimming.

01:20:51.260 | Up until now, I've been talking about resistance training

01:20:53.180 | more or less in a vacuum.

01:20:54.680 | I haven't even touched on the fact

01:20:56.740 | that many people are running

01:20:57.940 | and they're doing resistance training

01:20:59.400 | or they're swimming and they're doing resistance training.

01:21:02.520 | It's not simply the case that if a given muscle is fatigued,

01:21:06.060 | you can just work other muscles

01:21:07.580 | because even if you've beautifully isolated a muscle,

01:21:11.400 | let's say you have incredible abilities

01:21:13.380 | to isolate just your quadriceps, for instance,

01:21:16.980 | and you do a workout where you isolate your quadriceps,

01:21:19.300 | you do your six sets of intense work,

01:21:21.020 | or maybe use palmar cooling

01:21:22.240 | and you're able to do 12 sets of intense work

01:21:24.800 | and you're done, and that muscle group,

01:21:28.660 | the next day is certainly not going to be recovered

01:21:30.640 | unless you're somebody who's extraordinary at recovery

01:21:33.220 | or you're enhancing your recovery through chemical means,

01:21:36.020 | which we'll talk about at the end.

01:21:38.040 | Well, you can assess systemic recovery,

01:21:41.580 | meaning your nervous system

01:21:43.660 | and your nervous system's ability to generate force,

01:21:46.940 | both distributed and isolated, through three main tests.

01:21:51.260 | And fortunately, these tests are very simple

01:21:54.260 | and two of them are essentially zero cost,

01:21:57.420 | require no equipment.

01:21:58.700 | HRV, heart rate variability,

01:22:02.460 | has made its way finally into the forefront

01:22:05.900 | of exercise physiology and even into the popular discussion.

01:22:09.380 | I've talked about HRV before,

01:22:11.280 | how when we exhale, our heart rate slows down

01:22:13.420 | because of the way that our diaphragm

01:22:14.660 | is connected to our heart and to our brain

01:22:16.460 | and the way our brain is connected to our heart.

01:22:18.380 | Excuse me, when we inhale, our heart rate speeds up

01:22:21.380 | and that is the basis of heart rate variability.

01:22:23.980 | Heart rate variability is good.

01:22:26.180 | It means that you're breathing properly.

01:22:28.480 | And when I say it's good,

01:22:29.900 | it means you want a lot of heart rate variability.

01:22:32.300 | You don't want a heart rate

01:22:34.060 | that is high or low consistently over time.

01:22:37.240 | That might come as a bit of a surprise

01:22:38.820 | for you endurance athletes

01:22:40.320 | who probably are trying to accomplish your endurance work

01:22:43.100 | at a steady cadence and really hit that nice sweet spot

01:22:45.660 | where you're breathing rhythmically,

01:22:47.060 | your heart rate's going rhythmically,

01:22:48.300 | you're in that steady heart rate,

01:22:49.820 | and then away from exercise,

01:22:50.980 | you have a nice low heart rate, as they say.

01:22:53.220 | Well, nice low heart rate

01:22:54.780 | isn't necessarily always so nice.

01:22:56.880 | Turns out that introducing bouts

01:22:58.540 | of increasing your heart rate during exercise

01:23:00.540 | and even through your waking day,

01:23:02.360 | through stressful events even is provided they're brief,

01:23:05.260 | is beneficial.

01:23:06.420 | A good nerve to heart system

01:23:10.160 | benefits from being able to increase heart rate

01:23:12.480 | and decrease heart rate.

01:23:13.440 | Heart rate variability is good.

01:23:15.780 | So you don't want high heart rate,

01:23:16.980 | you don't want low heart rate all the time.

01:23:19.940 | But heart rate variability

01:23:21.260 | is difficult for a lot of people to measure.

01:23:23.260 | There are some devices that will allow you to do that,

01:23:25.380 | various watches and devices.

01:23:27.940 | There are more devices becoming available all the time.

01:23:31.100 | Hopefully soon, some that are integrated with your phone

01:23:33.500 | that involve no contact or anything on your body.

01:23:36.660 | But those do carry some costs and they are not perfect yet.

01:23:41.280 | The measures of heart rate variability

01:23:42.780 | that one can use while in movement

01:23:45.080 | are still in the phase, I would say,

01:23:48.220 | of technology development where everyone isn't using them.

01:23:50.980 | Let's leave it at that.

01:23:52.320 | There are two measures, however,

01:23:53.580 | whether or not you recovered that you can use

01:23:55.480 | first thing in the morning when you wake up,

01:23:57.660 | maybe after five, 10 minutes if you like,

01:23:59.640 | but ideally right when you wake up

01:24:02.020 | in order to assess how well recovered you are

01:24:04.720 | and therefore whether or not you should train

01:24:06.680 | your whole system at all that day.

01:24:09.000 | The first one is grip strength.

01:24:11.440 | Grip strength, the ability to generate force

01:24:15.460 | at the level of squeezing the fist

01:24:17.220 | or squeezing down on something

01:24:19.480 | might seem like kind of a trivial way to assess recovery,

01:24:22.540 | but it's not because it relates to your ability

01:24:25.140 | to use your upper motor neurons

01:24:26.700 | to control your lower motor neurons

01:24:28.260 | and to generate isolated force.

01:24:30.700 | And so that's really what you're assessing when you do that.

01:24:33.520 | Some people will use one of these grip tools

01:24:37.620 | or there's a Costello has this toy

01:24:39.940 | that shaped like a donut and it's this hard rubber.

01:24:43.720 | And I've tried this before.

01:24:45.100 | If I've been working really hard, not sleeping very well,

01:24:47.660 | or I've been training a lot, any one or combination

01:24:49.800 | of those things, my grip suffers.

01:24:51.540 | I can't actually squeeze that thing down

01:24:53.280 | as much as I can.

01:24:54.120 | Costello, because he was born with like a 24 inch neck

01:24:57.360 | and even though he's never touched a weight,

01:24:59.260 | somehow he can just clamp down on that thing

01:25:01.340 | and he can turn it into a pancake with ease

01:25:03.680 | and he likes to chuckle while I struggle with this thing.

01:25:06.040 | But on a good day, I can squeeze this thing

01:25:07.640 | so that I eliminate the hole in the donut, so to speak.

01:25:10.240 | You can also take a floor weight and, excuse me,

01:25:13.700 | a floor scale and squeeze the scale

01:25:16.360 | and see how much force you can generate.

01:25:18.460 | I would do that as a baseline to establish

01:25:20.780 | what you can do when you're well rested.

01:25:22.980 | And then if you do that in the morning,

01:25:24.180 | you can see whether or not you're able to generate

01:25:26.100 | the same amount of force,

01:25:27.400 | or you could use the rubber donut or something.

01:25:29.360 | A lot of this is very subjective.

01:25:30.780 | With the scale, you're really trying to assess

01:25:32.760 | whether or not you can generate the same amount of force.

01:25:35.080 | If you start seeing a 10% or 20%,

01:25:37.320 | certainly reduction in that, that's concerning.

01:25:39.840 | It means that your system, your nervous system as a whole,

01:25:43.200 | it's not necessarily fatigued.

01:25:45.420 | It's that the pathways from nerve to muscle

01:25:48.500 | are still in the process of rewiring themselves

01:25:51.160 | in order to generate force.

01:25:52.700 | And you might think, well, I trained one muscle group one day

01:25:55.120 | why am I having a hard time doing this

01:25:56.580 | for a completely different muscle group?

01:25:58.160 | It doesn't make any sense.

01:25:59.340 | But there's something about the upper motor neuron

01:26:01.440 | to lower motor neuron pathway generally

01:26:04.020 | that allows you to use something like grip strength

01:26:06.380 | as a kind of a thermometer, if you will,

01:26:09.780 | of your ability to recover.

01:26:11.100 | So look for your ability to generate force in grip

01:26:13.540 | when you first wake up.

01:26:14.820 | It's not going to be as good as it is at 3 p.m.

01:26:17.340 | after a cup of coffee and a couple meals,

01:26:19.720 | but the point isn't performance overall.

01:26:22.640 | The point is to assess whether or not

01:26:24.060 | you're getting better, worse, or the same from day to day.

01:26:27.180 | The other one that's really terrific

01:26:28.520 | and that Andy Galpin's group is using,

01:26:30.620 | and I'm delighted about this

01:26:31.820 | because it relates to something that my lab

01:26:33.420 | is very excited about as well, is carbon dioxide tolerance.

01:26:36.900 | So this is a really interesting tool

01:26:38.680 | that endurance athletes, strength athletes,

01:26:41.700 | I think can all benefit from.

01:26:43.140 | In fact, athletes and people of all kinds,

01:26:45.460 | even if you're not an athlete,

01:26:46.580 | even if you're not exercising at all,

01:26:48.340 | there's a good question of whether or not

01:26:49.600 | your system as a whole is doing okay or not.

01:26:53.500 | We rely on the thermometer.

01:26:54.820 | Do we have a fever or not?

01:26:56.060 | We rely on subjective things.

01:26:58.000 | Do I feel good or not?

01:26:59.380 | Am I digesting well or not?

01:27:00.700 | Those are all subjective.

01:27:02.880 | The carbon dioxide tolerance test is it's objective

01:27:07.880 | in that it measures your capacity to engage

01:27:10.680 | the so-called parasympathetic arm of your nervous system,

01:27:13.000 | which is the calming aspect of your nervous system,

01:27:15.440 | and it measures your ability to consciously control

01:27:18.720 | a particular skeletal muscle, which is your diaphragm.

01:27:21.840 | So here's how you do the carbon dioxide tolerance test.

01:27:24.520 | You wake up in the morning.

01:27:25.740 | If you have to use the restroom first, do that,

01:27:27.800 | but try and stay away from your phone.

01:27:30.240 | If you have your phone, put it on airplane mode,

01:27:32.380 | go to the timer or use a handwatch

01:27:34.760 | or some other way of measuring time.

01:27:37.760 | Stay off social media for just a few seconds.

01:27:40.500 | It'll be okay.

01:27:41.760 | And what you're going to do is you're going to inhale

01:27:43.960 | through your nose as deeply as you can.

01:27:45.860 | You can do this lying down, sitting, whatever.

01:27:49.320 | Inhale through your nose and then exhale all the way.

01:27:52.700 | So that's one.

01:27:54.900 | You're going to repeat that four times, okay?

01:27:57.280 | So inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale,

01:28:02.280 | inhale, exhale, four times.

01:28:05.100 | And ideally you're inhaling through the nose

01:28:07.520 | and you're exhaling through the mouth.

01:28:09.040 | That's just the beginning of this carbon dioxide

01:28:11.640 | tolerance test.

01:28:13.340 | Then you take a fifth inhale as deep as you can

01:28:16.560 | through your nose.

01:28:17.400 | Fill your lungs as much as you can.

01:28:19.400 | And if you can try and expand your,

01:28:22.280 | make your stomach go out while you do that,

01:28:23.880 | that means that your diaphragm is really engaged.

01:28:26.000 | So you're inhaling as much as you possibly can.

01:28:29.060 | Then hit the timer and your goal is to release that air

01:28:33.440 | as slowly as possible through your mouth.

01:28:36.880 | So it looks like you have a tiny, tiny little straw

01:28:39.520 | in your mouth and you're letting it go

01:28:41.320 | as slowly as you possibly can.

01:28:46.960 | Measure what we call the carbon dioxide blow off time

01:28:50.680 | or discard rate.

01:28:52.020 | I know you can all sit with lungs empty

01:28:55.680 | after you eliminate all that air, but don't lie to yourself.

01:28:59.860 | Don't stop the timer when you've been sitting

01:29:02.560 | with your lungs empty for a while.

01:29:04.060 | Stop the timer when you are finally no longer able

01:29:07.780 | to exhale any more air.

01:29:09.860 | Okay, so you do inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale,

01:29:13.300 | inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale slowly.

01:29:15.980 | I just said it quickly for sake of time.

01:29:17.960 | Then you do this fifth big inhale through your mouth

01:29:20.600 | and then,

01:29:22.440 | and I'm not going to do it for the full duration.

01:29:28.400 | And then you're measuring that time.

01:29:30.500 | Your carbon dioxide discard rate will be somewhere

01:29:34.840 | between one second and presumably two minutes.

01:29:39.320 | Two minutes would be a heroic carbon dioxide discard time.

01:29:42.520 | 30 seconds would be more typical.

01:29:45.400 | 20 seconds would be fast.

01:29:47.760 | If your carbon dioxide discard time

01:29:51.200 | is 20 or 25 seconds or less,

01:29:55.520 | you are not necessarily recovered

01:29:58.600 | from your previous day's activities, okay?

01:30:01.520 | There's ways to push through this,

01:30:02.860 | but hold onto that thought for a moment.

01:30:05.140 | If your carbon dioxide discard time is somewhere

01:30:07.860 | between about 30 seconds and 60 seconds,

01:30:12.020 | you are in what we would call kind of the green zone

01:30:16.800 | where you are in a position to do more physical work.

01:30:21.200 | And if your carbon dioxide discard time is somewhere

01:30:24.560 | between 65 and 120 seconds,

01:30:28.480 | well then you have almost certainly

01:30:31.080 | recovered your nervous system.

01:30:33.160 | I'm not talking about the individual muscles,

01:30:34.600 | but your nervous system is prepared to do more work.

01:30:37.680 | And Andy's lab has great data on this

01:30:40.080 | as it relates to exercise physiology.

01:30:41.880 | I think that story should be out

01:30:43.040 | in the not too distant future.

01:30:44.800 | My lab has been using carbon dioxide discard time

01:30:47.360 | to look at anxiety and recovery from bouts of anxiety.

01:30:50.640 | So two totally independent projects,

01:30:52.920 | but using the same measure.

01:30:54.680 | So you've got HRV, which requires some technology usually.

01:30:58.080 | You've got grip strength,

01:30:59.680 | which you can assess subjectively,

01:31:02.520 | or you can use a floor scale.

01:31:04.560 | And now you have carbon dioxide tolerance.

01:31:06.760 | You want to do this in the morning when you wake up

01:31:09.880 | and keep track, just write down in a little book,

01:31:12.420 | or maybe just keep track in your mind

01:31:13.860 | of your carbon dioxide discard time.

01:31:15.840 | If you find that your discard times are dropping,

01:31:19.120 | even if they're in the 40 second range or 50 second range,

01:31:22.760 | but normally you can do 75 seconds or 120 seconds,

01:31:26.380 | if they're starting to drop by anywhere from 15 to 20%,

01:31:30.840 | you're veering in the direction of not recovering.

01:31:33.420 | And I'm really keen on this tool

01:31:35.660 | because everybody has different recovery abilities.

01:31:38.820 | Some people are eating really well and sleeping really well.

01:31:41.240 | Some people have minimal stress

01:31:42.560 | or can buffer stress really well.

01:31:44.820 | Other people, they dissolve into a puddle of tears

01:31:48.840 | if they read one text message that's troubling or whatever.

01:31:53.520 | And I realize, and I say that with sympathy,

01:31:55.440 | I realize people have varying levels of stress

01:31:57.220 | and demand in their life.

01:31:58.520 | It's just impossible to prescribe an entire protocol

01:32:02.380 | that says, okay, yes, you should train today

01:32:04.200 | and this is exactly what you should do.

01:32:05.460 | No, you shouldn't.

01:32:06.300 | Use carbon dioxide discard rate

01:32:08.160 | because A, it's valuable, it's informative.

01:32:10.900 | B, it's zero cost.

01:32:14.140 | And C, it's something you can track objectively over time.

01:32:17.420 | And that's really the key.

01:32:18.740 | And I just should, I'd be remiss if I didn't say

01:32:21.780 | that what carbon dioxide discard rate is tapping into

01:32:25.000 | is your ability to mechanically control your diaphragm.

01:32:27.980 | Certainly that's one aspect of it.

01:32:30.100 | But that relates in a very direct way

01:32:32.340 | to your ability to put the brake on your stress system,

01:32:36.700 | to engage the so-called parasympathetic or calming arm

01:32:40.060 | of your autonomic nervous system.

01:32:41.900 | And another thing that Andy Galpin's group is testing

01:32:45.500 | is at the offset of training, after your run,

01:32:48.980 | after your weight training session,

01:32:50.840 | maybe even after your plyometrics session,

01:32:53.540 | we didn't really talk about jumping and throwing

01:32:55.900 | and that sort of thing.

01:32:57.180 | Maybe we'll talk about it in a future episode.

01:32:59.620 | But they and other groups, including some elite athletes

01:33:04.620 | and other groups that are very interested

01:33:06.640 | in physical performance are using a tool

01:33:10.180 | where they deliberately disengage for five minutes

01:33:13.560 | at the end of training.

01:33:14.740 | They deliberately engage this calming

01:33:17.300 | or parasympathetic arm of the nervous system.

01:33:19.620 | And you can do that through any number of different tools.

01:33:22.040 | I'm a big fan of respiration tools

01:33:24.460 | 'cause they're always available to you.

01:33:25.740 | Your breathing is always there.

01:33:27.480 | I talk about some of these tools in previous episodes

01:33:29.820 | but you could use things like non-sleep deep rest and SDR

01:33:32.800 | at the end of a training session.

01:33:34.240 | You could do 10 physiological size,

01:33:37.260 | double inhales through the nose, followed by long exhales.

01:33:40.180 | That will definitely engage

01:33:41.340 | the parasympathetic nervous system at the end of training.

01:33:44.660 | So rather than finish your training session

01:33:46.580 | and then just hop onto your phone,

01:33:48.600 | serious athletes and people who are serious

01:33:51.680 | about recovery initiate that recovery

01:33:54.660 | at the very end of their training.

01:33:56.660 | And they start to kickstart that recovery process rather

01:34:00.500 | and they measure CO2 tolerance in the morning.

01:34:02.420 | So there are several groups that are doing that.

01:34:04.160 | In fact, I know several groups because I'm working with them

01:34:07.740 | that are using physiological size between sets

01:34:10.980 | in order to recover their nervous system

01:34:12.860 | and maintain nerve to muscle contractibility,

01:34:16.340 | maintain focus throughout their training session,

01:34:18.900 | enhance their focus by doing a few physiological size.

01:34:22.200 | So double inhale, exhale in between sets.

01:34:25.140 | So they're getting very focused and very intense

01:34:27.760 | about their strength work or explosiveness work

01:34:29.640 | or muscle isolation work during their sets.

01:34:31.400 | And then in between sets,

01:34:32.960 | they're deliberately disengaging the nervous system

01:34:35.280 | and then they're re-engaging it again.

01:34:37.600 | So I just wanted to emphasize that.

01:34:39.480 | So recovery is a complex process.

01:34:41.520 | It's got a lot of things

01:34:42.960 | but the CO2 tolerance test should be a valuable tool.

01:34:46.120 | Now, another tool for recovery that people are very excited

01:34:48.960 | about is the use of cold and the ice bath.

01:34:51.540 | And this is important.

01:34:52.980 | If you are somebody who uses cold through cold shower

01:34:56.460 | or ice bath or jumping in a lake or a river,

01:34:59.300 | whatever it is that you use to generate cold

01:35:01.260 | as a recovery tool, you should be aware

01:35:03.620 | that there are data starting to emerge

01:35:05.540 | that if your goal is recovery or strength improvements,

01:35:09.040 | using cold within the four hours following a workout.

01:35:13.500 | I'm not talking about polymer cooling.

01:35:14.620 | I'm talking about whole body cooling or cooling

01:35:16.220 | from the neck down.

01:35:17.940 | Yes, it will reduce inflammation.

01:35:19.840 | Yes, it will reduce the amount

01:35:21.700 | of delayed onset muscle soreness.

01:35:23.680 | One readout of how intense or damaging a given workout was,

01:35:27.060 | not the only readout, but it does seem to interfere

01:35:30.580 | with some of the things like mTOR pathways,

01:35:32.640 | the mammalian targeted rapamycin pathway

01:35:34.760 | and other pathways related to inflammation

01:35:38.060 | that promote muscle repair, remember, and muscle growth.

01:35:41.440 | Remember, stress, tension, and damage are the stimulus

01:35:44.780 | for nerve to muscle connections to change

01:35:46.760 | and for muscles to get bigger, stronger, and better.

01:35:49.180 | And so if you're getting into the ice bath after training

01:35:52.140 | or taking a really cold shower

01:35:53.560 | after doing resistance training,

01:35:55.320 | you are likely short circuiting the improvements

01:35:58.020 | that you're trying to create.

01:35:59.580 | Now, athletes who are trying to recover quickly

01:36:03.160 | so that they can get back into more training sessions,

01:36:06.100 | or let's say you're somebody who doesn't really want

01:36:08.840 | to gain much strength or hypertrophy,

01:36:12.040 | and you're mainly focused on endurance,

01:36:13.860 | and you want to do more endurance work,

01:36:15.300 | and you've been weight training,

01:36:16.180 | well, then exposing yourself to cold can be beneficial,

01:36:19.020 | but you're not going to get as great of benefits

01:36:21.700 | from the resistance training.

01:36:23.480 | In other words, cold after resistance training

01:36:25.660 | seems to short circuit some of the benefits

01:36:27.540 | of that resistance training.

01:36:29.080 | There are some other things that can short circuit

01:36:31.060 | the benefits of resistance training as well.

01:36:33.260 | One of those is antihistamines.

01:36:36.980 | Some interesting data were published recently,

01:36:39.260 | I believe it was in Scientific Reports, yes,

01:36:41.900 | that showed that antihistamines can prevent

01:36:45.900 | some of the benefits of cardiovascular exercise

01:36:48.860 | of endurance type work,

01:36:50.000 | so running, swimming, fairly long duration,

01:36:52.620 | or even sprint type work,

01:36:53.860 | as well as inhibit some of the processes

01:36:55.960 | associated with resistance training.

01:36:59.180 | Remember, resistance training or endurance training,

01:37:01.840 | that's a stimulus for stress,

01:37:04.240 | and the adaptation to that stress

01:37:06.200 | is how you get better,

01:37:07.380 | that you can run further, faster, lift more weight,

01:37:11.300 | hypertrophy the muscle, et cetera.

01:37:12.700 | So antihistamines can be a problem.

01:37:14.320 | Obviously, don't compromise your ability

01:37:16.020 | to breathe completely,

01:37:17.340 | but antihistamines generally work

01:37:19.820 | by blocking what are called mast cells, M-A-S-T.

01:37:22.920 | Mast cells are really interesting cells

01:37:24.580 | that we'll talk about in our month on neuroimmune function.

01:37:27.900 | They travel in the bloodstream

01:37:29.180 | and they're these little packets

01:37:30.260 | that burst open at sites of inflammation.

01:37:32.440 | Muscle damage and inflammation

01:37:35.020 | is a signal that something needs to change.

01:37:37.620 | And so taking antihistamines, it appears,

01:37:40.160 | can disrupt some of that inflammatory process.

01:37:42.620 | So you actually want inflammation

01:37:44.140 | during and immediately after a workout,

01:37:46.060 | then you want to bring inflammation down later,

01:37:48.900 | and I'll mention how to do that.

01:37:50.260 | The other thing are non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs.

01:37:52.940 | You know their trade names.

01:37:54.220 | These are painkillers that many people take.

01:37:56.460 | Those, as I've mentioned in a previous episode,

01:37:58.320 | can interfere with the benefits of endurance training

01:38:01.940 | and the benefits of resistance training.

01:38:03.960 | In addition to that, they block pain signals,

01:38:06.180 | and pain is a very good signal

01:38:09.040 | that you might be doing something wrong.

01:38:11.140 | And so while nobody likes to be in pain,

01:38:13.500 | I suppose there are probably a few people out there

01:38:14.840 | like to be in pain, but that's a different story,

01:38:16.560 | but nobody likes to be in pain,

01:38:18.380 | the non-steroid anti-inflammatories,

01:38:20.300 | the NSAIDs as they're called,

01:38:22.220 | and the antihistamines seem to prevent a lot of the gains,

01:38:25.360 | the improvements in endurance, strength, and size

01:38:28.320 | that people are specifically using exercise for.

01:38:31.620 | So be cautious about your use of non-steroid

01:38:34.320 | anti-inflammatory drugs,

01:38:35.920 | especially within the four hours preceding

01:38:38.480 | or the four hours following exercise.

01:38:41.520 | So I hope you're starting to get the picture.

01:38:43.300 | In order to change the nerve to muscle connectivity

01:38:46.020 | in ways that will better serve you,

01:38:48.160 | you need a stressor during the actual training.

01:38:51.820 | Which particular stressor depends on your training goals,

01:38:54.740 | but that stressor is almost always going to be associated

01:38:58.520 | with inflammation, and then after the training,

01:39:00.740 | you want to try and get into a state of reduced inflammation.

01:39:03.600 | And that's why you would do some sort of protocol,

01:39:06.980 | non-sleep deep rest, which we will link to in our caption,

01:39:09.760 | or perhaps you would use the hypnosis app

01:39:12.300 | that we've talked about before, Reveri, R-E-V-E-R-I.com.

01:39:16.800 | There's a great app for accessing deep rest states

01:39:20.460 | or the physiological side to try and get the system,

01:39:23.440 | your system to calm down after training.

01:39:27.080 | There are also tools that one can use

01:39:29.440 | to reduce inflammation at a kind of foundational level

01:39:32.620 | away from training.

01:39:33.820 | And these are tools that I've talked about

01:39:35.780 | many times before, but I'll just restate them again.

01:39:39.520 | The kind of golden three, according to Andy Galpin

01:39:42.120 | and the ones that he recommends are sufficient omega-3s.

01:39:45.160 | Again, that can be accomplished through diet,

01:39:47.560 | through whole food intake,

01:39:48.540 | or through supplementation or both.

01:39:50.360 | So in general, getting above a thousand milligrams

01:39:52.860 | of EPA per day to keep inflammation low or relatively low.

01:39:57.580 | Vitamin D, and in some cases, magnesium malate.

01:40:01.940 | Magnesium malate seems to be particularly effective

01:40:04.320 | in offsetting delayed onset muscle soreness.

01:40:07.580 | Soreness itself is not required

01:40:10.060 | for improvements in strength,

01:40:12.240 | improvements in explosiveness,

01:40:13.840 | improvements in hypertrophy.

01:40:15.680 | That's a myth.

01:40:16.520 | Now, if you do experience delayed onset muscle soreness,

01:40:19.240 | chances are you stressed that particular muscle pretty well,

01:40:23.240 | or even maybe too well, maybe you stressed it too much

01:40:26.240 | and you need longer recovery.

01:40:28.420 | There's a total debate out there

01:40:30.860 | about whether or not you should train again

01:40:32.240 | when a muscle is still sore.

01:40:33.380 | I think the general takeaway is no,

01:40:34.900 | that means it's not recovered.

01:40:36.180 | And there are things of course, like massage,

01:40:38.680 | like fascial release and things of that sort, sauna, cold,

01:40:42.720 | that can perhaps accelerate the movement

01:40:47.080 | from soreness to not sore.

01:40:49.360 | But in general, the omega-3 vitamin D

01:40:51.620 | and magnesium malate, excuse me, trio

01:40:54.740 | seem to be an effective way to reduce inflammation

01:40:57.000 | at kind of a systemic level.

01:40:58.500 | But remember you want inflammation

01:41:00.120 | provided you're not damaging the muscle

01:41:01.520 | so much that you're injured during the training session

01:41:04.160 | because that's the stimulus for change in those muscles.

01:41:08.320 | I want to talk about a few other things

01:41:10.200 | that support the process of nerve to muscle communication

01:41:13.580 | and touch on some of the things

01:41:15.440 | that a lot of people are doing

01:41:16.800 | to try and quote unquote enhance their workouts

01:41:19.200 | and evaluate whether or not those are in fact

01:41:21.200 | enhancing workouts or not,

01:41:23.440 | because weight training,

01:41:25.440 | unlike a lot of other forms of exercise,

01:41:28.500 | has a unique aspect to it,

01:41:30.920 | which is this feature that I guess

01:41:32.940 | some people call it the pump,

01:41:34.040 | which is the fact that blood goes into the muscle

01:41:36.520 | when you train.

01:41:37.560 | It's the only kind of training

01:41:38.760 | where you actually get a window

01:41:39.980 | into what the result might actually look like

01:41:42.720 | before you actually accomplish that result.

01:41:44.520 | So if you think about when you go out for a hard run

01:41:46.680 | and let's say you go out for a two mile run,

01:41:49.240 | let's say your goal is to break,

01:41:50.920 | you want to do a sub 10 two mile.

01:41:52.480 | Actually, when I went to university,

01:41:54.720 | I was running cross country my senior year of high school,

01:41:57.900 | and I wanted to walk on for the cross country team.

01:42:01.400 | And so I went out there

01:42:02.840 | and it turned out you had to do a sub 10 two mile.

01:42:06.400 | And I think the best mile I ever ran in high school

01:42:09.360 | was a 457, which isn't terrible.

01:42:11.320 | I can't do that now.

01:42:12.640 | It's not even close to what high school athletes,

01:42:15.120 | the best high school athletes can do now,

01:42:17.120 | but that would have meant doing it back to back.

01:42:19.680 | So sub 10 minute two mile.

01:42:21.800 | They even come close.

01:42:22.900 | I told Costello this story the other day

01:42:24.540 | and he just kind of laughed at me.

01:42:25.960 | He was like, why would you even want to run two miles?

01:42:28.840 | Because Costello is built almost exclusively

01:42:31.560 | of these type two fast twitch muscles

01:42:33.420 | that are designed for moving objects.

01:42:35.000 | He's incredibly strong.

01:42:36.560 | He has been since he was a puppy.

01:42:38.580 | I mean, that dog could probably drag a tractor

01:42:41.080 | if he wanted to, but he can't really go far.

01:42:45.320 | Whereas a greyhound or a whippet

01:42:47.000 | or some of these other site hounds or scent hounds

01:42:48.760 | can go, go, go.

01:42:49.600 | They have a higher percentage of the so-called slow twitch

01:42:52.120 | muscle fibers.

01:42:52.940 | They are much better at endurance.

01:42:54.980 | So a sub 10 two mile would have been very, very challenging.

01:42:58.800 | No chance I could have done that, I don't think,

01:43:01.920 | even with a lot of training.

01:43:03.320 | But let's say that you want to improve your performance

01:43:08.240 | in a given type of exercise.

01:43:09.740 | Let's talk about some of the things that seem to work

01:43:12.320 | across the board to improve strength, improve hypertrophy,

01:43:17.000 | and improve nerve to muscle communication and performance.

01:43:20.680 | The first thing that's absolutely key for nerve to muscle

01:43:23.660 | communication and physical performance of any kind

01:43:27.100 | might not sound that exciting to you,

01:43:28.600 | but it is very exciting and that's salt.

01:43:32.480 | Nerves, nerve cells, neurons communicate with each other

01:43:36.520 | and communicate with muscle by electricity.

01:43:39.800 | But that electricity is generated by particular ions

01:43:43.120 | moving into and out of the neuron.

01:43:45.120 | And the rushing in of a particular ion, sodium, salt,

01:43:50.120 | is what allows nerve cells to fire.

01:43:52.840 | If you don't have enough salt in your system,

01:43:55.860 | your neurons and your brain and your nerve to muscle

01:43:58.280 | communication will be terrible.

01:44:00.580 | If you have sufficient salt, it will be excellent.

01:44:03.680 | How much salt will depend on how much water you're drinking,

01:44:06.280 | how much caffeine you're drinking,

01:44:07.580 | and how much food you're ingesting.

01:44:09.820 | So, and whether or not you're taking any diuretics,

01:44:11.920 | how hot it is, et cetera, how much you're sweating.

01:44:14.240 | So you want to make sure that you have enough salt,

01:44:16.000 | potassium, and magnesium in your system

01:44:18.120 | if you want to perform well.

01:44:19.660 | I realize that salt isn't a very glamorous performance tool,

01:44:23.340 | but it is vital.

01:44:24.760 | It is absolutely vital.

01:44:26.000 | And the endurance athletes and the people that train

01:44:27.960 | in high heat can speak to the fact that when your

01:44:31.500 | electrolytes are low, your brain doesn't function,

01:44:34.320 | your body doesn't function nearly as well.

01:44:36.040 | In fact, even for mental work, for studying and for writing

01:44:40.240 | and for doing math and coding,

01:44:42.480 | doing analytic work of any kind,

01:44:43.840 | even a hard conversation that's important to you,

01:44:46.840 | having sufficient electrolytes is really going to help

01:44:48.800 | and being low on electrolytes won't help.

01:44:51.000 | And just drinking water won't help

01:44:52.320 | because you need electrolytes.

01:44:54.600 | The other thing that's been shown over and over again,

01:44:57.760 | numerous well-controlled studies to improve

01:45:00.960 | muscle performance is creatine.

01:45:03.320 | Early on, there was a lot of controversy about creatine,

01:45:06.100 | but there are many studies.

01:45:07.600 | If you want, you can go to this website

01:45:09.500 | that everyone now knows I love,

01:45:10.880 | which is this free website, examine.com,

01:45:13.860 | that there are no fewer than 18 studies there, 66 studies.

01:45:18.860 | So 18 studies supporting that muscle creatine content

01:45:22.240 | can be increased by ingesting creatine.

01:45:24.240 | How much creatine?

01:45:25.200 | Well, I asked the experts and they tell me

01:45:28.400 | that for somebody who's about 180 pounds,

01:45:31.760 | five grams a day should be sufficient or so.

01:45:35.120 | Heavier than 180, so if you've got like,

01:45:36.840 | if you're a 220 pound or 230 pound person,

01:45:39.700 | 10 to 15 grams of creatine, people lighter than 180 pounds,

01:45:43.060 | maybe three to five grams of protein, excuse me, creatine,

01:45:45.860 | or even one to three grams.

01:45:47.320 | Creatine is a fuel source for early in bouts of activity,

01:45:52.320 | for high intensity activity.

01:45:54.760 | It is also a fuel source for neurons in the brain

01:45:57.940 | and it can have some cognitive enhancing effects.

01:46:01.560 | So creatine is a very interesting molecule.

01:46:03.320 | Early on, when it was released as a supplement,

01:46:06.220 | it was thought that you had to load it in higher dosages

01:46:10.520 | for a few days and then maintain it at lower dosages.

01:46:14.160 | So you'd take 20 or 30 grams a day,

01:46:16.000 | then back off to five or 10.

01:46:17.880 | It doesn't seem to be the case that you can get

01:46:19.380 | all the benefits from taking the dosages at the low level.

01:46:22.920 | I just mentioned a few moments ago

01:46:24.920 | as they relate to body weight throughout.

01:46:26.960 | So salt and electrolytes, absolutely key.

01:46:30.260 | You need those present, you need to be well hydrated.

01:46:33.420 | Creatine seems to have a performance enhancing effect.

01:46:36.520 | There are 66 studies, 66,

01:46:39.340 | showing that power output is greatly increased

01:46:42.840 | anywhere from 12 to 20%.

01:46:46.160 | And this is sprinting and running and jumping

01:46:48.080 | as well as weightlifting by creatine.

01:46:50.620 | The ability to hydrate your body is improved by creatine

01:46:55.060 | because of the way that it brings more water

01:46:58.080 | into cells of various kinds.

01:47:00.380 | As an indirect effect, it can help increase lean mass

01:47:03.560 | because of the way that it brings more water into muscle

01:47:05.560 | and probably also because of the way that if you get

01:47:08.000 | stronger, you can generate more force

01:47:09.820 | and generate more hypertrophy.

01:47:11.500 | It reduces fatigue.

01:47:12.980 | Seven studies have shown that it reduces fatigue.

01:47:15.560 | There are even some interesting effects

01:47:18.460 | on improving cognition after traumatic brain injury.

01:47:20.600 | Although that's a serious medical condition in situations,

01:47:23.000 | you absolutely should talk to a board certified physician

01:47:25.820 | before adding anything or taking anything out

01:47:28.840 | of your current regimen.

01:47:30.960 | There are a few other effects

01:47:31.840 | that are interesting and notable,

01:47:34.460 | but the big ones are the ones that I referred to before

01:47:36.600 | about increased power output, et cetera.

01:47:39.080 | And I just want to emphasize that creatine

01:47:41.660 | can increase this hormone that we talked about

01:47:43.800 | in the testosterone episode, dihydrotestosterone,

01:47:46.760 | which is testosterone converted by 5-alpha reductase

01:47:50.960 | into dihydrotestosterone.

01:47:52.660 | It's the more dominant androgen in humans,

01:47:56.200 | leads to increases in strength and libido and so forth.

01:47:59.240 | It also can increase male pattern baldness.

01:48:01.640 | Some people, not everybody, experience some hair loss

01:48:04.820 | with creatine, other people don't.

01:48:06.480 | Some people experience accelerated beard growth

01:48:08.560 | because basically DHT has the opposite effect

01:48:11.440 | on hair follicles on the face as it does on the scalp.

01:48:13.880 | Some people don't.

01:48:15.380 | Women who ingest creatine, there are essentially no data

01:48:19.880 | showing that it increases hair loss or facial hair growth,

01:48:23.880 | but of course everyone is different.

01:48:25.520 | So you can go to examine.com, you can explore those studies.

01:48:28.360 | So creatine, definitely a powerful

01:48:30.500 | performance enhancing molecule.

01:48:32.240 | The other one, one that personally I've never tried,

01:48:35.080 | but that seems to have a very strong

01:48:37.800 | and well-supported effects is beta-alanine.

01:48:41.180 | Now, beta-alanine is interesting

01:48:43.560 | because when you hear about weight training,

01:48:45.160 | you think about heavy deadlifts and bench presses,

01:48:47.160 | all that kind of stuff that people are doing,

01:48:49.080 | but beta-alanine seems to support exercise

01:48:53.000 | that is of slightly longer duration.

01:48:55.040 | So a mix of anaerobic and aerobic type movement.

01:48:59.960 | So things, these are physical performance

01:49:01.680 | in the 60 to 240 second range.

01:49:04.300 | So you can use your mind and kind of figure out

01:49:06.800 | like things that weights of the,

01:49:09.240 | that limit you to eight to 15 repetitions.

01:49:11.940 | Cardiovascular exercise of the sort like rowing or sprinting.

01:49:16.080 | So interval work, it seems to help with that kind of work.

01:49:18.900 | So we're not talking about long runs,

01:49:20.060 | we're not talking about heavy deadlifts.

01:49:21.840 | The standard dose is somewhere between two and five grams.

01:49:24.200 | Again, as always, check with a doctor,

01:49:26.340 | make sure these things are safe for you.

01:49:28.260 | I'm not responsible for your health.

01:49:29.520 | You are, I don't say that just to protect me,

01:49:31.440 | I'd say that also to protect you.

01:49:34.240 | But it really seems to improve muscular endurance,

01:49:38.120 | improve anaerobic running capacity, reduce fatigue.

01:49:41.940 | There are even some interesting effects

01:49:43.040 | on reduction of body fat and improvements in lean mass.

01:49:45.980 | So creatine, beta-alanine, electrolytes,

01:49:49.320 | these are kind of the core three things

01:49:51.920 | that seem to improve performance and are well supported

01:49:54.800 | by the scientific literature.

01:49:56.880 | And in the earlier episode on supercharging performance,

01:49:59.720 | we talked about palmar cooling.

01:50:01.180 | That's certainly a performance enhancing tool.

01:50:03.860 | It's nothing you ingest,

01:50:04.720 | you're cooling your palms in a very specific way.

01:50:06.960 | That's very powerful.

01:50:07.920 | Now, what about for longer duration bouts of exercise?

01:50:10.420 | We've mainly been focusing on resistance training,

01:50:12.600 | but what about for long runs, long swims,

01:50:14.900 | these kinds of things?

01:50:16.040 | Well, it does seem that beet juice

01:50:18.200 | and ingesting things like arginine and citrulline

01:50:21.280 | can improve performance for those long bouts of exercise.

01:50:25.280 | That's mainly going to be due to effects

01:50:27.360 | of those compounds on vasodilation.

01:50:29.680 | It's going to open up the vasculature

01:50:31.280 | and allow more blood flow.

01:50:33.700 | Do note that things like citrulline and arginine

01:50:36.200 | can have some side effects, if you will.

01:50:39.920 | They can increase the likelihood

01:50:42.080 | of having herpes cold sore outbreaks on the mouth.

01:50:45.800 | The arginine is in the pathway by which,

01:50:48.360 | I don't know if people know this,

01:50:49.200 | but the herpes virus lives on neurons of the trigeminal nerve

01:50:52.460 | that innervate the lips and the eyes

01:50:55.200 | and the mucous membranes of the face.

01:50:57.540 | So this is the herpes type one simplex virus.

01:51:00.040 | The virus lives on those neurons

01:51:03.280 | and then periodically inflames those neurons

01:51:05.880 | and that's what leads to the cold sore.

01:51:07.080 | It seems like arginine and citrulline

01:51:09.480 | can lead to increases in cold sores and canker sores

01:51:13.600 | and outbreaks of those kinds.

01:51:15.640 | So you want to be aware of that.

01:51:18.700 | That's not everybody, and not everybody is carrying HSV-1.

01:51:23.700 | Just be aware that I think it's now 80 or 90% of people,

01:51:28.320 | by time they are 12 years old, they've contracted HSV-1.

01:51:31.800 | It's very contagious and typically people will get

01:51:35.060 | one outbreak and then only under conditions of stress

01:51:37.900 | or heightened arginine or citrulline ingestion

01:51:39.920 | will have them later.

01:51:41.380 | Again, this is not necessarily a sexually an STI.

01:51:46.920 | This is a sexually transmitted infection.

01:51:49.820 | This is an infection that is passed very easily

01:51:52.800 | from mucous membranes, just in terms of touching objects

01:51:55.100 | and things of that sort.

01:51:56.100 | Very common in the general population.

01:51:58.960 | Any discussion about muscle and muscle performance

01:52:03.160 | would not be adequate if we didn't mention something

01:52:05.280 | about nutrition, but rather than have a whole discussion

01:52:07.820 | about nutrition, 'cause there's lots of information

01:52:09.640 | about that online.

01:52:11.020 | Like for instance, if you want to gain muscle

01:52:12.740 | that you need to have a caloric surplus

01:52:15.180 | of about 10 to 15%, you could have a caloric surplus

01:52:19.180 | of more if you want to avoid gaining weight,

01:52:22.120 | then you would not create a caloric surplus, et cetera.

01:52:24.680 | You can find all that information online.

01:52:26.260 | That's not what this podcast is really about.

01:52:28.740 | We had a month where we talked a lot about hormones

01:52:32.160 | and food and moods.

01:52:33.380 | We talked about foods, but more as they relate

01:52:35.660 | to the nervous system.

01:52:36.780 | When it comes to supporting muscle,

01:52:40.080 | to supporting the synthesis of larger,

01:52:43.340 | what I call myosin balloons,

01:52:45.260 | it does seem that ingesting 700 to 3000 milligrams

01:52:50.080 | of the essential amino acid leucine

01:52:52.340 | with each meal is important.

01:52:53.620 | Now that does not necessarily mean from supplements.

01:52:56.820 | In fact, most people recommend that you get your protein,

01:53:01.620 | you get your amino acids, including your essential amino

01:53:04.520 | acids and your leucine from whole foods.

01:53:06.620 | High quality proteins, high density proteins.

01:53:10.220 | What do you mean by that?

01:53:11.060 | Well, it is true that a lot of sources of protein

01:53:14.200 | are found in things like beans and nuts

01:53:17.060 | and things like that, that all the essential amino acids

01:53:19.060 | can be found there.

01:53:20.780 | But per unit calorie, if it's in your practice,

01:53:25.440 | if it's in your ethics to ingest animal proteins,

01:53:28.100 | it's true that for instance, 200 calories of steak

01:53:32.180 | or chicken or fish or eggs will have a higher density

01:53:35.840 | of essential amino acids than the equivalent amount

01:53:38.240 | of calories from nuts or plants.

01:53:40.840 | That's just simply the way it works.

01:53:42.500 | So I'm not, for the vegans and vegetarians,

01:53:44.280 | I'm certainly not saying there's no way

01:53:46.480 | that you can support muscle growth.

01:53:48.140 | You absolutely can.

01:53:49.380 | Some of them might want to supplement leucine,

01:53:51.680 | but this 700 to 3000 milligrams of leucine per meal

01:53:55.900 | is one of the best ways that's been shown

01:53:57.800 | to support the synthesis of more myosin

01:54:00.960 | if your goal is hypertrophy.

01:54:02.900 | And it's also the way that you would support muscle repair

01:54:05.700 | if your goal is strength.

01:54:07.320 | So that's specifically geared towards muscle hypertrophy

01:54:10.020 | and strength.

01:54:10.940 | And I encourage you to think

01:54:12.340 | about this protein density issue

01:54:15.400 | and whether or not you ingest animal proteins

01:54:19.460 | or you don't to think about whether

01:54:21.740 | or not you're getting sufficient essential amino acids,

01:54:25.560 | especially leucine.

01:54:27.000 | Now, many people have addressed the question

01:54:30.400 | of whether or not you need to eat six or seven times a day.

01:54:33.380 | It turns out that you don't.

01:54:34.580 | That's kind of the old school thinking

01:54:35.920 | that you need to eat very frequently.

01:54:37.340 | I think for certain athletes who are very active

01:54:40.560 | for drug assisted,

01:54:41.900 | meaning people that are enhancing their testosterone levels

01:54:44.380 | to super physiological levels

01:54:45.780 | where they are experiencing very heightened levels

01:54:48.040 | of protein synthesis and they can utilize all that,

01:54:50.340 | that might make sense.

01:54:51.220 | Again, I'm not supporting the use

01:54:52.620 | of those performance enhancing drugs,

01:54:54.220 | but there are people doing that.

01:54:55.500 | And that's one of the reasons why they eat so frequently

01:54:59.000 | and so much protein.

01:55:00.340 | For typical people who are not doing that,

01:55:02.200 | I imagine most of you are not,

01:55:04.300 | then it does appear that you need to eat,

01:55:08.000 | but you don't need to eat six or seven times a day.

01:55:10.380 | It does seem like not eating once a day is also important.

01:55:13.200 | So somewhere between one meal a day and six meals a day

01:55:16.300 | lies the more reasonable two or three

01:55:18.260 | or maybe four times a day.

01:55:20.520 | I think that a whole discussion about this is warranted

01:55:23.820 | and we'll have this discussion with Dr. Galpin

01:55:25.940 | at a future time of whether or not eating protein

01:55:29.600 | more frequently can enhance this myosin synthesis.

01:55:33.020 | But I think the simple takeaway from the literature

01:55:35.380 | that I was able to extract and from my discussion

01:55:37.700 | with him is eating two to four times a day,

01:55:39.960 | making sure you're getting sufficient amino acids

01:55:42.980 | in a way that's compatible with your ethics

01:55:45.100 | and with your nutritional regimen

01:55:46.660 | is going to support muscle repair, muscle growth,

01:55:50.460 | strength improvements, et cetera, just fine.

01:55:53.520 | There's one more thing that I'd like to cover,

01:55:55.640 | which is the relationship between particular kinds

01:55:58.160 | of exercise and our ability to think

01:56:00.660 | and perform cognitive functions.

01:56:03.480 | We all hear that exercise is so vital for our brain

01:56:06.660 | that it supports our brain health and our body health.

01:56:08.620 | And indeed that's true provided it's done correctly.

01:56:12.380 | However, many of us are familiar with the experience

01:56:16.020 | of going for a run or going for a swim

01:56:18.220 | or working out hard in the gym

01:56:19.780 | and then not being able to use our brain

01:56:21.620 | to be essentially useless for cognitive functions

01:56:24.240 | for the rest of the day.

01:56:26.220 | I discussed this with Dr. Galpin this morning

01:56:29.420 | and I learned something very interesting,

01:56:30.780 | which is that hard bouts of exercise of the sort

01:56:34.220 | where you're training near failure

01:56:35.740 | or you're generating focused muscular contractions

01:56:39.580 | for obsession that lasts anywhere from,

01:56:42.340 | I don't know, 30, 45 minutes, maybe 60 minutes

01:56:44.940 | or a long run where you're engaging

01:56:46.860 | in some interval training during that run.

01:56:49.540 | After exercise, there's a reduction

01:56:52.440 | in oxygenation of the brain.

01:56:54.340 | So there's actually a quite significant dip

01:56:56.140 | in the amount of oxygen that your neurons are getting

01:56:58.600 | and therefore your ability to think.

01:57:00.420 | So it's important that you control the intensity

01:57:03.080 | and the duration of your training sessions

01:57:05.040 | so that you're still able to do well in life

01:57:07.600 | and lean in to life the way you need to,

01:57:09.880 | because I'm guessing most of you are not in a position

01:57:12.580 | to just prioritize your physical training.

01:57:14.340 | You also need to use your minds.

01:57:16.740 | I'm certainly familiar with wanting to get exercise

01:57:19.060 | but also the requirement of needing

01:57:20.460 | to perform cognitive work throughout the day.

01:57:23.580 | It also turns out that you can leverage something

01:57:27.220 | interesting about exercise and nerve to muscle work

01:57:30.480 | in ways that can benefit cognitive function and focus.

01:57:33.880 | And it has to do with the way that your body

01:57:36.280 | and your nervous system predict bouts

01:57:38.540 | of intense focused effort.

01:57:40.320 | So let's say you're doing resistance training two

01:57:42.640 | or three times a week, maybe even four times a week,

01:57:44.740 | and you're doing it consistently at a given time.

01:57:47.240 | There are clocks, literally biological clocks

01:57:51.800 | within the liver and within the brain

01:57:54.020 | that learn to predict that focus and that intense work.

01:57:57.920 | If you are trying to get intense cognitive work done,

01:58:02.800 | you might try scheduling that cognitive work

01:58:06.440 | on the days when you don't do physical training

01:58:09.320 | at the same time when you normally would do

01:58:11.600 | that intense focused physical training.

01:58:14.700 | Because the systems of the body

01:58:16.520 | that generate acetylcholine release

01:58:18.120 | and other neuromodulators,

01:58:19.560 | the systems of the body and brain

01:58:21.000 | that generate focused effort,

01:58:23.540 | those are on this sort of clock mechanism

01:58:26.200 | in a way that you likely will find

01:58:28.760 | that after just a week of training at regular times,

01:58:31.120 | you will be able to focus readily on other things

01:58:34.740 | when you're not training,

01:58:35.960 | provided you do it during the period of time of day

01:58:38.960 | when you normally would train.

01:58:40.880 | So this is kind of an indirect positive effect.

01:58:43.400 | You're harnessing the focus and the expectation of focus

01:58:46.360 | in your nervous system for that particular time of day.

01:58:48.920 | And of course, we'd be remiss

01:58:50.720 | if we didn't talk about time of day for training.

01:58:53.200 | Turns out that whether or not you train in the morning

01:58:56.760 | or in the afternoon doesn't really seem to matter

01:58:59.420 | for sake of things like hypertrophy and strength, et cetera.

01:59:02.740 | Everyone seems to have a time of day

01:59:04.160 | that they prefer to train.

01:59:05.980 | I've said before, and there are reasons

01:59:07.780 | based on body temperature rhythms and cortisol release

01:59:12.260 | that training 30 minutes, three hours or 11 hours

01:59:16.500 | after your normal waking time can be very beneficial

01:59:18.980 | and can provide a sort of predictability or regularity

01:59:21.840 | to when your body will be ready to train

01:59:25.280 | and best apt to train well.

01:59:27.800 | There is some evidence that training in the afternoon

01:59:30.080 | is better for performance,

01:59:31.400 | whereas training for body composition changes

01:59:33.920 | and strength changes, et cetera,

01:59:35.600 | doesn't really matter when you train.

01:59:37.120 | So you also want to make it compatible with sleep,

01:59:38.880 | compatible with work.

01:59:39.960 | That really gets down into the weeds of optimization.

01:59:42.560 | But I think it's interesting to note

01:59:44.080 | that if you're going to train at a regular time,

01:59:47.160 | you can take the days when you don't train

01:59:50.220 | and use that to enhance your cognitive focus

01:59:52.880 | for things that have nothing to do with exercise.

01:59:55.340 | So this might be writing or reading or music or math,

01:59:57.500 | et cetera.

01:59:58.720 | Typically, I restrict these podcast episodes

02:00:01.280 | to about 90 minutes,

02:00:02.700 | so-called ultradian cycle for learning.

02:00:04.620 | Today was a bit longer,

02:00:06.240 | and I admit that I tried to pack a lot into this.

02:00:09.540 | It is the last episode in this month on physical performance.

02:00:12.860 | I figured in this case, more is better,

02:00:15.340 | especially since everything is timestamped for you.

02:00:18.180 | You certainly don't have to watch it all at once,

02:00:20.400 | and you can come back to it over and over again

02:00:22.440 | into the precise locations in the episode that you like

02:00:25.120 | in order to take notes

02:00:26.640 | or extract the information that you need.

02:00:29.220 | I'd like to point you to Dr. Andy Galpin's page.

02:00:32.760 | I highly recommend looking into the work that he's doing

02:00:36.100 | if you want more details.

02:00:37.680 | He's very, very skilled, excellent communicator.

02:00:40.280 | He's superb at what he does.

02:00:41.440 | He's a professor.

02:00:42.280 | He works with athletes.

02:00:43.280 | He works with typical folks

02:00:44.960 | in the exercise and muscle physiology world.

02:00:47.320 | Brad Schoenfield's work, I also have a lot of respect for.

02:00:49.580 | I've never met him.

02:00:50.420 | I don't know him.

02:00:51.240 | There's no paid endorsement here.

02:00:52.520 | They're not sponsors or related to the podcast in any way.

02:00:55.240 | I just think the work is of very high quality,

02:00:57.780 | and they are both on the academic side

02:00:59.240 | and the practical side,

02:01:00.360 | and of course, there are other people out there

02:01:02.740 | doing fabulous work in this area as well.

02:01:04.960 | If you like this podcast

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02:02:07.840 | So the episodes on sleep, for instance,

02:02:09.480 | that were way back in January,

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02:02:13.420 | are still every bit as relevant today as they were

02:02:16.460 | back in January for somebody that has challenges with sleep

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02:02:46.860 | I really do read through all those comments.

02:02:49.520 | It takes me some time, but I do read through those.

02:02:51.520 | I reply to as many of them as I can,

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02:03:06.420 | we still appreciate that you come here

02:03:08.060 | to digest the information about science

02:03:10.020 | and science-related tools.

02:03:11.580 | In today's episode, I mentioned various supplements,

02:03:15.020 | various compounds that if you deem it right and safe for you

02:03:19.520 | can benefit athletic performance

02:03:21.700 | and muscle physiology, et cetera.

02:03:24.740 | We've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E,

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02:03:42.420 | If you go to Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E,

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02:03:50.260 | and you can get 20% off any of those supplements,

02:03:53.140 | as well as 20% off any of the other supplements

02:03:56.340 | that Thorne sells.

02:03:57.540 | So if you go to thorne.com/u/huberman,

02:04:02.540 | any of those supplements listed there,

02:04:04.400 | and then if you navigate through their site

02:04:05.860 | and you find something else that you like,

02:04:07.340 | will be 20% off at checkout.

02:04:09.360 | Last but not least,

02:04:10.320 | I want to thank you for your time and attention today,

02:04:12.540 | and as always, thank you for your interest in science.

02:04:15.440 | [upbeat music]

02:04:18.020 | you