- I'd like to talk about neural drive. I attribute you with popularizing, maybe you invented it, but certainly popularizing the term like greasing the groove. - Thank you. - But this notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength training. - Thank you. - Because I was weaned more or less trying to run cross country during the cross country season only ran it once, but I greatly enjoyed it and continued that sort of training or trying to put on strength and size and kind of a numbskull young male approach to things, but it served me reasonably well.

I'm grateful that I included both. However, I was so tuned to this notion of training a body part, creating an adaptation, then waiting for the adaptation to occur and then training the body part again. You know, the arguments are all over the internet two times a week, three times a week.

And then I came across this concept of greasing the groove, which as a neuroscientist felt so intuitively correct and turns out to be correct, you'll explain what it is, but the idea that more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of opportunities for development of strength, of size hypertrophy if one wants.

And I would say just generally more flexibility over one's total fitness program. Once one understands this concept, you no longer look at this split or that split or this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume, all that is important, but you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous system.

And to me, it was like water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together all these different concepts. So could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is? And then I think the implications of it will become obvious, but we'll also spell out what some of those are.

Andrew, please interrupt me because this is about to become a, this might get really long, so please interrupt me at any time. So first I'll talk about the neural component, then we're going to talk about the frequency and the morphological adaptation, structural adaptations as it leads. So ladies and gentlemen, grease the groove, we are talking about, let's use an analogy.

Let's imagine that you are a bow hunter and you're working in your garage and then you walk out of your garage and you shoot an arrow and you just go back to going about your business, just working in your garage. Or let's say you're a kid who practices martial arts and every, on every break between classes you just go in the corner and you practice your kata.

This is the best way to practice your skill. In small portions, in a spaced out manner. What's really fascinating is traditional education and traditional strength training is based on the cramming model. So remember cramming for an exam. So you're studying at night and you somehow squeak by and you pass it.

Okay, great. And then a couple of days later you happily forget everything. So in contrast, imagine that you are, let's say you're studying a foreign language. You write words on cards and at every opportunity you're standing in line in the bank. So the lesser mortals are fooling around on their phones.

You're just going through your deck like, oh, can I translate this word? I go, put it back in the deck, flip it over. The next time you're in some other place, you do this again. So this is an example of space practice versus the traditional mass practice. And the evidence of the superiority of space practice is just overwhelming.

It goes back to the 19th century and there's at least like more than a thousand papers published on that. And still very few people do that, which is really sad. And strength is a skill. So two interesting things happened in the '50s. One is Thomas Rush. He was an American exercise physiologist.

He proposed that strength adaptation was largely skill. And he looked at pretty much the adaptations. He noticed that there's no correlation between the muscle growth and strength. Then at the same time, a Soviet scientist, Stepanov was his last name, he was measuring the electrical activity in the muscles of weightlifters who are pressing overhead.

And back then the press was one of the competition events. And what he found is as the athletes got stronger after some months, the EMGs started dropping off when they're lifting the same weights. So pretty much he found out that the neural system activity became more economical. They were able to try less hard, yet still lift the same weights.

Or pretty much they could try harder and lift even heavier weights. And hypertrophy could not explain that because in the '50s, the Soviets were very anti-hypertrophy. They were just doing doubles, triples, singles pretty much. So if we look at what's going on, it's the Hebbian mechanisms. So pretty much every time that you activate a particular connection, synaptic connection, you know, between the neurons, that connection becomes stronger.

So if you did over and over and over. So the grease, the groove is the analogy is that command that's coming in from your brain to your muscles, that's the groove. That's that pathway. And the more you use it, pretty much the more grease it becomes, so it becomes a superconductor.

So in the future, you don't have to try as hard to lift the same amount of weight, or you can try the same amount and you can lift harder. So we haven't even addressed the neural drive yet. We just pretty much made the motor neurons more responsive to it.

And it's a very easy and very simple way to train. And strength comes very easily and very, very unexpectedly. To make sure that it does happen, you have to address the issue of specificity. So specificity pretty much means without getting too much into the weeds, to get stronger, first of all, you need to lift weights that are heavy enough.

And if you're looking about percentages of one rep max, we're looking at like 75 to 85, typically. If you go too light, you don't make the impression on your nervous system, and it's just not specific enough. If you go too heavy, very quickly, you're just going to burn yourself out.

And so pretty much like it's a weight that's heavy enough to respect and light enough not to fear. And the second of all, and this is very surprising, is you only do about half or fewer reps that you possibly could do. So for example, let's say that you're lifting 80% of your one rep max.

And let's say that you're able to do eight reps maximum with it. That's your-- we're just fairly common. Well, you're only going to do about three to four reps per set. And that's it. And the gym bros at this point go crazy, like, where's the intensity? Well, intensity in strength training is just how heavy the weight is.

It has nothing to do with the effort. And it's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard you're exerting yourself. There are times for that. There are absolutely times for that. But if the weight is heavy enough, and if you do half the repetitions that you possibly could do, you're going to get stronger.

It's very safe. And you're not going to burn out psychologically. And it's also very easy on your body. So also, that builds muscle as well, purely because you're able to do a very high volume of work. I'm not able to explain the mechanism why it builds muscle. But as the Soviets found out in weightlifting research, there's a correlation between the volume and-- Robert Trollman-- between the volume and the hypertrophy, everything else being equal, you're going to get bigger.

So almost every day, you're doing the sets of three, four reps, maybe even five, and they start adding up. And before you know it, you're stronger. And at the same time, you have developed muscle. So to summarize the grease, the groove, you're trying to train moderately heavy as often as possible, while staying as fresh as possible.

And if you decide to do it in the gym, a very simple protocol would be a set every 10 minutes. It sounds really bizarre. Like, why? Why would you rest for so long? This apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation. Because so much is still unknown. So we do know the grease, the groove works great.

But we speculate that some of it has to do with some of the same phenomena related to learning in other fields. So if you're doing something over and over, like you're saying two plus two is four, two plus two is four, you're just using your short-term memory. You're not memorizing anything.

But if you say two plus two is four, you go get a coffee, you come back, and you try two plus two, four. So there's that desirable difficulty that you have in there. And you have to process that instead of just go through the groove. That apparently helps this adaptation.

So rest for at least 10 minutes. Do sets of about the repetitions of half of what you're possibly able to do. And you know, listen to your body. Typically train two, three days in a row, and then take a day off, but listen to your body. Incidentally, this grease-the-groove is the topic of my next book.

I have completed it. It's not published yet. If you look at-- I can't pronounce the Hungarian professor's last name. Csikszentmihalyi. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. So he's talking about that perfect challenge, perfect practice lies in that channel between boredom and anxiety. So if you put yourself in that channel, and if you keep lifting this moderately heavy weights, with a moderate effort over and over and over, you're going to get strong.

That's one of the many ways to get stronger. Are you doing anything in the rest periods between these 10 minutes? So is it, let's say, bench press, wait 10 minutes till you bench press again. But in the meantime, you're doing Zercher squat five minutes after the first bench press?

That's one of the ways to do that. You can do up to three exercises at the same time. So let's say, like, Zercher squat and a bench press, and maybe a third thing. Let's say those two are enough. And another option is you can do that. You can incorporate this into, if you would do only one exercise, you can squeeze it into your lifestyle or your athletic practice.

So for example, in, let's say, you're teaching a track practice or martial arts class. And every 10 minutes on the clock, you just have the class do, drop and do three hard, let's say, three one-arm push-ups, and then get back to the class. So there's no interference whatsoever. In fact, it's better than no interference.

Back in the '60s, Soviets found out something called the strength after effect. So if you do strength work that's not exhausting in nature and that's not novel to you, it has a tonic effect just for anything that you can do with your brain or with your body, anything. And they would even do some coaches, they would do so-called strength warm-up.

They would warm up, as usual, for a track class, let's say, track practice. Then they would do, let's say, three sets of three of something, like with 80% max, which is not much. And they start their practice. Then the coach noticed that the athletes are starting to droop a little.

He'll repeat that, you know. He might repeat that up to three times. So what you have is by having this short, very small dose, like a nanopractice of strength, you rejuvenate yourself and your productivity increases so much. So whether you want to just do the strength exercise, several of them in that one hour period, or whether you want to combine that with writing a great American novel, that's your business.

I suppose if someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home, you could incorporate grease the groove into your entire day. That's ideal, yes. And obviously it's difficult with some equipment, but what you could do, you could use the heavy-duty grippers. You could do one-arm push-ups. You could keep a kettlebell under your desk and press it at every opportunity.

And again, the idea is really just practice. You just try to hit a perfect, perfect trap. And notice that if you have some issues, if you're a warm-up-dependent person for orthopedic issues, I'm talking about warm-up and very much in the body, not the mind in this particular case, then it might not be appropriate for you.

Although, you know, with 10-minute rest, it might still be okay. But practicing a skill without the warm-up, that means rehearsal, is very powerful for improving that skill. People think they automatically equate performance with improvement, with learning, but it's not so, not at all. When you're doing something that's just out of the blue, it's, you know, the way a sniper would take a cold shot.

That's so much harder because you have to have produced that solution. Or maybe an example that's closer to most viewers, golf. You go to the driving range, you start hitting it, and like, wow, you're amazing. You just get yourself fine-tuned, you hit, you're perfect. Then you go and you play the game, and you cannot replicate that.

Because suddenly, different club, different topography, everything's different, and you didn't have the luxury of that tuning yourself up right there. So it feels, it doesn't feel like you're stronger, but you are going to get much stronger.