How to Build Muscle | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | Okay, let's talk about hypertrophy, the topic that occupies the minds of so many youth,
00:00:09.560 | young men, but also a lot of women.
00:00:12.000 | I think one of the really interesting progressions that's taken place in the last decade or so
00:00:17.320 | is that far more men and women are using resistance training in order to evoke hypertrophy, growth
00:00:24.760 | of muscles for aesthetic reasons and for all sorts of reasons.
00:00:30.520 | What are the ways that people can induce hypertrophy?
00:00:34.160 | So not to correct you or insult you, but probably a better way to think about that question
00:00:38.400 | is really what stimuli do I need to give the muscle to induce hypertrophy?
00:00:44.720 | Now there are hormonal factors that are important, there are nutritional factors, but just to
00:00:49.500 | stick with the context of training.
00:00:52.240 | This is really gonna frame a lot of our answers and as you'll see, it's one of the reasons
00:00:56.680 | why I call hypertrophy training kind of idiot-proof in terms of programming.
00:01:01.520 | Now the work is hard, difficult and all that, but the precision needed is a lot less than
00:01:08.600 | what we saw in power and strength.
00:01:11.640 | And so if you note there, like it's very important that you do it in this style, with this intent
00:01:15.500 | and within these parameters and if you're outside the parameters, it's not gonna be
00:01:19.240 | it.
00:01:20.240 | So the CV has a very broad range in terms of your actual applications and this is why
00:01:27.080 | you have and will continue to see countless styles of training that all work.
00:01:32.560 | I mean, I know you were mentored earlier in life by one of my favorite people in this
00:01:37.260 | entire field, Mike Mencer, like just an absolute character.
00:01:41.000 | His style was completely different than what you would see in a classic textbook or any
00:01:47.040 | number of different influencers or coaches or individuals.
00:01:52.560 | And if you've ever thought to yourself like, "Why is it all these programs work?"
00:01:56.120 | And people love to jump to things like, "Well, it's the steroids."
00:01:59.560 | Just get that out of the equation for now.
00:02:01.840 | Independent of that, that's not even part of the equation, you're still going to see
00:02:04.760 | results.
00:02:05.760 | And the question is like, "Why?"
00:02:06.760 | Well, that's because what's driving changes in strength and power are the adaptations
00:02:14.480 | of specificity.
00:02:15.920 | What's driving changes in hypertrophy is much more well-rounded and so you have options
00:02:22.080 | to get there.
00:02:23.080 | Remember, you're training a movement and now you're training a response and a muscle
00:02:28.640 | that cause the growth.
00:02:29.640 | That's very, very different.
00:02:31.120 | So if we look at like the classic dogma, we have to basically challenge the muscle to
00:02:37.400 | need to come back in this case specifically bigger and the nutrients need to be there
00:02:41.240 | to support that growth.
00:02:42.800 | Okay, the nutrients aside perhaps we can come in a few more minutes and talk about that.
00:02:48.440 | So all we really have to do is going back to our dogma of activation of something on
00:02:52.720 | the cell wall.
00:02:53.720 | We've talked about this earlier.
00:02:55.000 | That's got to induce that signaling cascade.
00:02:57.200 | That's got to be strong enough to cause the nucleus to react to it, to go to the ribosomes,
00:03:02.720 | to initiate this entire cascade of protein synthesis.
00:03:05.280 | Okay, so that signal has to be one of a couple of things.
00:03:08.280 | Either it has to be strong enough one time, it has to be frequent enough, or it has to
00:03:15.440 | be a combination of these things.
00:03:17.160 | All right, so I can get there with a lot of frequency and a moderate signal.
00:03:22.960 | I can get there with very low frequency and a large signal like more akin to what you
00:03:27.360 | did with Mike back in the day I'm sure.
00:03:29.240 | DAN: And still train that way.
00:03:30.440 | DR.
00:03:31.440 | JUSTIN MARCHEGIANI: Still train that way.
00:03:32.440 | DAN: Each muscle group mainly once a week directly and once a week indirectly.
00:03:35.880 | DR. JUSTIN MARCHEGIANI So all you have to do there to not fail is
00:03:39.400 | to make sure the training is hard enough and it's going to work.
00:03:42.440 | If you choose the frequency path, then you actually have to make sure you're not training
00:03:45.960 | too hard to where you can actually maintain the frequency.
00:03:48.920 | The only wrong combination here is infrequent and low intensity and low volume.
00:03:53.840 | That's it.
00:03:54.840 | As long as one of those three variables is high, you're going to get there because the
00:03:58.400 | mechanisms that are needed to activate that signaling cascade are wide ranging.
00:04:02.920 | And this is why when we even see things like blood flow restriction training, right?
00:04:07.640 | This is when you put like a cuff on your arm or your leg and you block blood flow and you
00:04:11.380 | use no load or as low as say 30% of your maximum and you take it to fatigue failure.
00:04:17.600 | That actually is an equally effective way of inducing hypertrophy despite the fact that
00:04:22.240 | you know, you're using 3, 5, 10, maybe most 20 to 30% of your max.
00:04:27.880 | Why?
00:04:28.880 | Because you went through the route of metabolic disturbance, okay?
00:04:31.880 | Other ways, say a higher load, maybe as heavy as you can for say eight repetitions is going
00:04:37.480 | to get through what's called mechanical tension.
00:04:40.360 | And so there's these different paths that we can get to the same spot.
00:04:42.760 | Now eventually these things have a saturation point.
00:04:45.680 | So you don't need all three of these mechanisms.
00:04:48.100 | The third one of course being muscle damage or breakdown.
00:04:51.820 | And I know we want to chat a little bit about that, but none of these three are absolutely
00:04:56.080 | required.
00:04:57.160 | You can have multiple of them in a session.
00:05:00.000 | You don't have to have breakdown at all.
00:05:01.680 | That's a complete, well really it's a flat out lie that you have to break a muscle down
00:05:08.040 | to cause it to grow.
00:05:09.040 | That's just not needed at all.
00:05:10.320 | You have to have one of these three things though.
00:05:12.500 | And so again, this allows you a lot of flexibility, which is why crafting your program, which
00:05:16.800 | is best for you, is actually fairly simple when it comes to hypertrophy.
00:05:21.280 | You just have to make sure you do the work and you want to make sure you have a few standards
00:05:25.480 | in place with the exercise choice and some other things that we'll hit in just a second.
00:05:30.720 | But that's really the fundamental way of getting to it.
00:05:33.680 | Making sure either that signal is loud enough or frequent enough to give the nuclei a convincing
00:05:41.640 | enough reason to spend the resources, because you have to remember two things.
00:05:45.400 | In order to grow new skeletal muscle, you need amino acids, which are your supply.
00:05:50.680 | And then you need primarily carbohydrates as the energy source to power that synthesis
00:05:54.840 | process.
00:05:55.840 | You remember basic chemistry, it says if you're going to take two atoms and you're going to
00:06:00.400 | pull them apart or put them together, right?
00:06:02.800 | That's going to take energy.
00:06:04.160 | Typically, and most of actually metabolism, when you split a bond, you're going to get—it's
00:06:09.680 | called exergonic.
00:06:10.680 | You're going to get energy from that.
00:06:11.680 | But when you put them together, that's going to take energy.
00:06:14.960 | This is why we call that protein synthesis, right?
00:06:17.520 | So you have to convince your nucleus that one, invest those resources in energy, primarily
00:06:23.600 | carbohydrate.
00:06:24.600 | But number two and more importantly, invest that supply.
00:06:27.640 | There's a ton of possible ways to get energy, but there's a very low amount of amino acids
00:06:31.440 | available and you need them for many more things than just taking your biceps from 17
00:06:36.760 | inches to 18 inches, right?
00:06:38.800 | It's not going to do that if you're in a position where, again, you can't sustain immune function.
00:06:43.680 | If red blood cell turnover needs to be higher or any of the other main like tons of things
00:06:47.760 | that you need proteins for.
00:06:49.720 | So you have to be able to say like, "Are you sure?"
00:06:52.080 | You really want to spend these resources and build it into muscle because once we do that,
00:06:56.600 | it's very difficult to go backwards.
00:06:59.000 | Break them back down and bring the amino acids back into that availability pool, so we can
00:07:03.520 | use them for either another function entirely or even another muscle group.
00:07:09.200 | That's called protein redistribution.
00:07:10.680 | By the way, when you say, maybe you don't do a lot of upper body work in your training
00:07:16.600 | and you're not eating enough protein or a minimal amount and you're doing a lot of lifting
00:07:20.360 | in your legs, you'll notice your legs will get larger, but that's actually a lot of times
00:07:24.480 | you're pulling the protein from, say your upper body in this case, and redistributing
00:07:28.560 | it back down to the quad.
00:07:30.920 | So that's what you have to get to.
00:07:33.600 | [music]