Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Guest Series,

00:00:02.440 | where I and an expert guest discuss science

00:00:05.120 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:07.320 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:09.680 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:12.600 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.360 | Today's episode marks the first in a series

00:00:17.140 | with Dr. Andy Galpin.

00:00:18.700 | Dr. Andy Galpin is a professor of kinesiology

00:00:21.240 | at Cal State University, Fullerton,

00:00:23.060 | and one of the foremost world experts

00:00:25.400 | on the science and application of methods

00:00:27.200 | to increase strength, speed, endurance, hypertrophy,

00:00:32.060 | and various other aspects of fitness, exercise,

00:00:35.100 | and sports performance.

00:00:36.360 | Across the six-episode series,

00:00:37.720 | Dr. Andy Galpin pulls from his expertise

00:00:39.680 | working with everything from professional athletes

00:00:41.880 | to recreational exercisers,

00:00:44.080 | and teaches us the mechanisms, logic,

00:00:47.120 | and specific protocols for how to achieve

00:00:49.920 | any of the number of different exercise adaptations

00:00:52.260 | that I mentioned a moment ago,

00:00:53.320 | ranging from strength to endurance, hypertrophy,

00:00:55.520 | and everything in between.

00:00:57.320 | We get really far into details,

00:00:59.460 | but at all times,

00:01:00.680 | paying attention to the macroscopic issues,

00:01:03.540 | that is how to create a program for endurance,

00:01:06.480 | or strength, or hypertrophy, or speed,

00:01:08.360 | or one that combines all of those.

00:01:10.320 | We also talk about supplementation and nutrition

00:01:12.920 | and how to maximize recovery

00:01:14.840 | for each of the different types of exercise adaptations.

00:01:17.500 | During today's episode,

00:01:18.400 | Dr. Galpin teaches us how to assess our level of fitness,

00:01:21.240 | and more generally, how to think about fitness

00:01:23.800 | so that we can best achieve our fitness,

00:01:25.840 | exercise, and performance goals.

00:01:27.920 | Dr. Professor Andy Galpin,

00:01:30.940 | super excited to have you here.

00:01:32.680 | You're such an immense treasure trove of information

00:01:35.340 | on physical training and optimizing for specific goals

00:01:38.840 | and outcomes with physical exercise.

00:01:41.400 | I'm curious, however,

00:01:44.620 | so many people have different levels of fitness.

00:01:47.900 | Some people are professional athletes, of course,

00:01:51.400 | but most people are not.

00:01:53.680 | Many people exercise regularly.

00:01:55.480 | Some people are trying to do that more.

00:01:57.360 | Some people are doing too much of that.

00:01:58.900 | They're over-training, they're not recovering enough.

00:02:02.200 | If we were to take a step back

00:02:03.400 | and each and every one of us ask, "How fit are we?"

00:02:07.880 | With the word fit, of course,

00:02:10.540 | being a very broad encompassing word,

00:02:14.000 | you know, could encompass endurance,

00:02:16.080 | certainly it does, strength,

00:02:18.440 | the ability to run fast, even if for short distances.

00:02:22.360 | It might even include hypertrophy or directed hypertrophy,

00:02:25.660 | trying to balance one's musculature,

00:02:27.960 | to offset asymmetries, recover from injuries, et cetera.

00:02:31.680 | How should I, or anyone else for that matter,

00:02:34.700 | think about their level of fitness?

00:02:38.120 | You know, I know my resting heart rate,

00:02:40.020 | but what do I do in terms of really assessing

00:02:43.960 | whether or not I'm as fit as I could be and should be,

00:02:48.400 | both for sake of health and performance?

00:02:51.400 | And here I'm asking you the question, not as an athlete,

00:02:53.880 | but as somebody who's been pretty consistent as an exerciser,

00:02:56.540 | but if we were to throw our arms around this question

00:02:59.660 | of how do we assess our fitness,

00:03:01.440 | what would be sort of the different levels of assessment

00:03:05.800 | that we should think about and do?

00:03:08.680 | - When it comes to exercise,

00:03:10.160 | people generally have two major goals in mind.

00:03:13.420 | Goal number one is achieving some sort of appearance, right?

00:03:17.000 | This is, I want to be big, or I want to not be too big,

00:03:19.800 | or I want to be lean, something, right?

00:03:21.480 | It doesn't matter what that goal is,

00:03:22.880 | but there is an aesthetic component to almost everybody.

00:03:25.760 | They want to look a certain way or not look a certain way.

00:03:28.120 | The other one is functionality.

00:03:29.840 | So I want to be able to perform a certain way.

00:03:31.360 | Now again, that definition differs per person.

00:03:33.440 | So I want to be better at strength.

00:03:35.760 | I want to be better at mobility.

00:03:37.420 | I want to be able to have energy throughout the day,

00:03:39.840 | whatever it is.

00:03:40.680 | So there's some sort of appeal to aesthetic,

00:03:42.600 | and there's some sort of appeal to functionality.

00:03:44.960 | So within both of those categories,

00:03:46.560 | we want to be in a position where we can understand

00:03:51.560 | where do I need to go with my exercise training

00:03:53.760 | so that I can be as fit and as healthy

00:03:56.280 | and achieve these goals that I want now,

00:03:59.520 | as well as be in a position where I can maintain them

00:04:02.400 | for a long period of time.

00:04:04.000 | So this blends both immediate goals.

00:04:06.440 | So say you're just interested in squatting a lot of weight.

00:04:09.640 | Say you're interested in running a 5K time the best you want.

00:04:12.620 | It doesn't matter.

00:04:13.920 | It blends that with the desire to have a long wellness span,

00:04:18.340 | to be fit throughout life,

00:04:19.560 | to achieve all those things for as long as possible.

00:04:22.000 | So then the question kind of comes back to saying,

00:04:24.240 | how do I know which area I need to focus on the most?

00:04:28.400 | And why am I not achieving these goals

00:04:30.280 | or how can I get there more effectively?

00:04:32.700 | And if we look at the big picture,

00:04:34.460 | we have to understand that there are several major

00:04:36.520 | components to physical fitness that are going to be required

00:04:40.280 | in all of these categories.

00:04:42.520 | And to achieve that, there are a handful of components

00:04:45.160 | that have to happen to be able to hit those goals.

00:04:48.000 | Now, there are infinite methods.

00:04:49.160 | So the saying we actually use here a lot is,

00:04:51.480 | the methods are many, but the concepts are few.

00:04:53.760 | So what I'd love to do today is,

00:04:55.400 | over the course of our discussion,

00:04:56.640 | is hit exactly what those concepts are

00:04:59.200 | and then cover a whole bunch of different methods.

00:05:01.280 | And we could do that for hours,

00:05:03.240 | but we'll cover a number of them for various goals.

00:05:06.120 | - So one of the reasons I went into neuroscience

00:05:08.360 | and not into exercise science

00:05:10.640 | is because of this thing, neuroplasticity,

00:05:13.320 | the nervous system's ability to adapt.

00:05:15.960 | But the more time I spend with you

00:05:17.180 | and the more I learn from you,

00:05:18.560 | I realize that many, if not all of the organ systems

00:05:22.600 | of our body have this incredible ability to adapt.

00:05:25.800 | And when we're talking about physical exercise,

00:05:28.680 | there are incredible adaptations that, of course,

00:05:31.380 | involve the nervous system,

00:05:32.400 | but also involve muscle and connective tissue

00:05:35.760 | and so many other cell types and tissues.

00:05:39.280 | That said, when we talk about fitness,

00:05:43.240 | what are the major types of adaptations

00:05:45.840 | that underlie this thing that we call fitness?

00:05:48.240 | And later, I know we're gonna get into

00:05:51.120 | how different forms of exercise

00:05:53.000 | can trigger different types of adaptations,

00:05:55.500 | but what are the major adaptations

00:05:58.120 | that one can create in their body using exercise?

00:06:02.140 | - There are many reasons why one should exercise,

00:06:04.740 | and we could perhaps cover that later in our chats.

00:06:07.400 | But the physiological adaptations

00:06:09.360 | can be bucketed really into nine areas.

00:06:11.760 | So the very first one is what I call skill or technique,

00:06:14.500 | so just learning to move better, more efficiently,

00:06:17.500 | with a specific position and timing and sequence

00:06:20.440 | or whatever that is.

00:06:21.640 | This could be running more effectively.

00:06:23.760 | This could be practicing a skill

00:06:25.520 | like shooting a ball or an implement,

00:06:28.520 | swinging a golf club, anything like that.

00:06:30.560 | I call that skill development.

00:06:32.680 | The second one is speed.

00:06:34.000 | This is simply moving at a higher velocity

00:06:36.460 | or with a better rate of acceleration, okay?

00:06:39.340 | That's very similar to the next one, which is power,

00:06:41.940 | and power is speed multiplied by force.

00:06:45.720 | The next one then, of course, on top of that

00:06:48.620 | is force or strength.

00:06:50.400 | Those are really synonymous terms, right?

00:06:52.820 | How effectively can you move something?

00:06:55.000 | Now, this is often confused, strength, rather,

00:06:58.240 | as muscular endurance.

00:06:59.520 | So what I mean by that is strength truly is a marker

00:07:02.960 | of what's the maximum thing you can move

00:07:06.080 | or what's the maximum amount of force

00:07:07.380 | you can produce one time.

00:07:09.560 | It's not how many repetitions in a row you can do.

00:07:12.180 | That's actually another one of our adaptations

00:07:14.180 | called muscular endurance, all right?

00:07:16.820 | So that is typically under the order of like,

00:07:20.220 | say, five to 25, maybe 50 repetitions.

00:07:23.340 | Think of a classic, how many pushups can you do in a row?

00:07:26.960 | How many sit-ups can you do in a minute?

00:07:28.660 | Things like that are muscular endurance.

00:07:30.540 | Muscular endurance tends to be localized.

00:07:33.500 | So this is specific to just say your triceps

00:07:35.960 | and your deltoids.

00:07:37.420 | It's not a overall cardiovascular endurance marker

00:07:40.840 | or anything like that.

00:07:41.680 | So that's strength, number four.

00:07:42.980 | Number five is muscle hypertrophy.

00:07:44.940 | And this is the first time now we're talking about

00:07:47.740 | an appearance rather than a functional outcome.

00:07:51.060 | So moving better, moving faster, moving heavier

00:07:53.880 | are indicators of how well you can move.

00:07:57.780 | This is the first one that's just simply

00:07:59.380 | how big is your muscle?

00:08:00.900 | And that's muscle hypertrophy or muscle size.

00:08:03.780 | After that is muscular endurance.

00:08:05.660 | So this is how many repetitions you can typically do

00:08:08.200 | of a movement.

00:08:09.160 | So think of how many pushups in a row you can do,

00:08:12.540 | how many sit-ups in a minute you can do,

00:08:14.060 | things that are typically in like five to 50 repetition

00:08:17.880 | sort of range, and it is often,

00:08:19.860 | or it is almost always local muscle.

00:08:22.720 | So what I mean by that is, it is, I don't know,

00:08:25.340 | a pushup test is really how many reps

00:08:27.420 | that your triceps and pecs and deltoids can do.

00:08:31.000 | It is not a cardiovascular endurance.

00:08:32.820 | It is not a global physiological endurance.

00:08:35.520 | It's specific to typically one or a few muscle groups

00:08:39.620 | at a time.

00:08:40.980 | This is why you have to do multiple tests

00:08:42.500 | for sort of every group there.

00:08:44.540 | After that, now we've moved into number seven,

00:08:46.740 | which is what I call anaerobic capacity.

00:08:49.460 | This is more synonymous with maximum heart rate.

00:08:52.260 | And now we're actually looking at,

00:08:54.000 | rather than a single movement or muscle group,

00:08:57.420 | it is a total physiological limitation.

00:09:01.000 | So it is the maximum amount of work you can do

00:09:03.620 | in say 30 to 45 seconds,

00:09:05.980 | maybe even up to 120 seconds of all out work.

00:09:10.120 | Think of your classic interval type of stuff here.

00:09:13.120 | So how much work can you do at a maximum rate

00:09:16.140 | where you're gonna enter tremendous amounts

00:09:18.100 | of global fatigue?

00:09:19.100 | The next past that is maximal aerobic capacity.

00:09:23.720 | And this is probably something like

00:09:25.380 | in the eight to 15 minute range

00:09:27.900 | where you're going to reach probably both

00:09:30.480 | a maximum heart rate as well as a true VO2 max,

00:09:34.660 | which we'll talk a lot more about what that is later.

00:09:38.940 | So that is different from the previous one

00:09:42.680 | where you can't reach this in a matter of seconds.

00:09:45.280 | It simply takes multiple minutes to get to a position

00:09:48.360 | to where your VO2 max is actually going to be

00:09:51.160 | sufficiently challenged or an indicator there.

00:09:53.440 | And then the last one, number nine,

00:09:54.640 | is what I call long duration.

00:09:55.860 | And this is just your ability to sustain sub-maximal work

00:09:59.740 | for a long period of time with no breaks,

00:10:02.020 | no reduction whatsoever.

00:10:03.580 | This is often called steady state training

00:10:05.500 | or a lot of people just think of this

00:10:06.940 | when they think of quote unquote cardio.

00:10:09.180 | But your ability to continue movement

00:10:11.180 | without any breaks or change or drop

00:10:13.700 | is the last and final adaptation.

00:10:15.640 | - And for long distance steady state,

00:10:17.740 | I'm guessing it exceeds 15 minutes

00:10:20.740 | because the previous one was eight to 15 minutes or so.

00:10:24.540 | What sort of time ranges are we talking about

00:10:29.140 | in terms of this long duration?

00:10:30.860 | - Well, that's actually wonderful.

00:10:31.700 | You're going to be anything past 15 minutes.

00:10:33.620 | So really, if you look at a kind of a minimal number there,

00:10:36.340 | it's generally 20 minutes of what we're looking for,

00:10:39.340 | but a more typical would be 20 to 60 minutes.

00:10:41.780 | But anything past that would still be

00:10:43.820 | limited by your long duration endurance.

00:10:46.160 | So your ability to sustain work over time.

00:10:48.660 | - Okay, so given that there are nine

00:10:50.420 | different major adaptations that can be induced

00:10:53.260 | with exercise of specific types,

00:10:56.340 | is there any one global test or assessment

00:11:00.060 | that people can take or do that allows them to determine

00:11:04.360 | what level of ability of fitness they have

00:11:08.940 | in each and every one of these nine different categories?

00:11:11.420 | - There are probably dozens or more tests

00:11:14.060 | that you can do for each one of those nine categories.

00:11:16.700 | And what I would actually like to do

00:11:17.880 | is walk you through my favorites for each

00:11:20.100 | and giving you both the scientific gold standards.

00:11:22.340 | So if you had the ability, unlimited resources,

00:11:24.860 | what should you go do?

00:11:26.340 | As well as some that are equipment free,

00:11:28.760 | that are cost free, things that anyone can do

00:11:31.480 | across the world.

00:11:32.620 | In addition to that, I wanna walk you through

00:11:34.820 | what those numbers should be,

00:11:36.740 | how do you identify if you're really poor in something

00:11:38.940 | or if you're great, and then if you aren't as good

00:11:41.900 | maybe in a category and you wanna get better at it,

00:11:43.780 | exactly what to do in terms of protocols

00:11:46.520 | for how to achieve optimal results in each of those steps.

00:11:49.220 | - So I noticed in your list of the nine different

00:11:51.380 | adaptations to exercise that you did not mention

00:11:54.600 | fat loss or health promoting benefits,

00:11:57.800 | which are two reasons that a lot of people exercise.

00:12:00.880 | Was there a specific reason that you did not mention those?

00:12:03.860 | - Absolutely, it's because those things

00:12:05.500 | are actually not specific training styles,

00:12:08.600 | they are byproducts of these nine.

00:12:11.560 | So what I mean by that is if you understand

00:12:14.400 | how fat loss occurs, which we can certainly talk about,

00:12:18.060 | you'll realize some of these nine protocols

00:12:21.500 | are effective for fat loss and some are not.

00:12:24.420 | General health is the same thing.

00:12:25.700 | When we understand what it actually means to be healthy

00:12:28.080 | from a physiological perspective,

00:12:30.260 | then the rationale for what to train for

00:12:32.980 | is going to determine itself.

00:12:34.500 | So what I mean is, looking at things like

00:12:37.940 | in order to be healthy, you have to have sufficient strength,

00:12:41.100 | you have to have cardiovascular fitness,

00:12:42.900 | you have to have sufficient muscle, et cetera.

00:12:46.160 | Therefore, training for one's health

00:12:49.020 | is determined by those restrictions.

00:12:51.740 | So for you, Andrew, you may need to do more strength training

00:12:55.220 | to be healthy, where me, because I'm strong already,

00:12:57.500 | way stronger than you,

00:12:58.820 | I may not need to do as much strength training.

00:13:00.820 | So our quote unquote health-based protocols

00:13:03.220 | are based on our current status or limitations

00:13:06.940 | in physical fitness among these nine areas.

00:13:09.760 | So what I would like to do today

00:13:11.580 | is to cover a brief history of exercise science.

00:13:14.940 | And the reason is it's going to explain a lot

00:13:18.280 | about why people are not getting the goals

00:13:20.740 | in their exercise programs that they want,

00:13:22.780 | as well as give you very specific direction

00:13:25.620 | about what to do instead.

00:13:27.100 | - I can't wait to hear all the things

00:13:28.660 | that I'm doing incorrectly

00:13:30.460 | and to have you help me remedy that.

00:13:33.140 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:13:35.540 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:13:38.180 | It is also separate from Dr. Galpin's teaching

00:13:40.300 | and research roles at Cal State Fullerton.

00:13:42.340 | It is, however, part of our desire and effort

00:13:44.260 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:13:46.580 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:13:49.020 | In keeping with that theme, we'd like to thank the sponsors

00:13:51.580 | of today's podcast.

00:13:52.860 | Our first sponsor is Momentus.

00:13:54.860 | Momentus makes supplements of the absolute highest quality.

00:13:58.180 | The Huberman Lab Podcast is proud to be partnering

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00:17:20.380 | Before we get into how the history of exercise science

00:17:23.220 | informs the mistakes that we are all making

00:17:25.520 | and how to remedy those mistakes,

00:17:27.820 | I'm curious as to whether or not you have any favorite

00:17:30.660 | one or two studies that point to a sort of

00:17:34.420 | naturally occurring example of how people can become

00:17:38.840 | very fit in one area and not another.

00:17:41.260 | You know, I'm familiar with seeing endurance athletes

00:17:43.280 | that apparently have terrific endurance,

00:17:46.600 | but at least to my eye don't look like

00:17:48.720 | they are particularly strong.

00:17:50.240 | I'm also familiar with seeing individuals

00:17:52.160 | that are very, very strong, particularly on social media,

00:17:55.420 | but that don't look like they could walk up a flight

00:17:57.760 | of stairs, much less run a mile.

00:18:00.240 | Do you have any examples of studies in or outside

00:18:02.680 | the laboratory that point to that in a concrete way?

00:18:05.460 | - There's a lot to discuss here,

00:18:07.320 | but I'll answer it really clear.

00:18:09.860 | If you look across the literature,

00:18:11.280 | and this is actually back to as early as the mid 1950s.

00:18:14.280 | In fact, it actually goes back to previous to that,

00:18:16.280 | to the Harvard Fatigue Lab, 1927 to 1947 area.

00:18:20.920 | People actually were advocating at that point

00:18:23.960 | a combination of strength training and endurance.

00:18:26.560 | - In the 1920s. - Way back then.

00:18:28.140 | In fact, it actually goes prior to that in the late 1880s.

00:18:31.120 | There's scientific evidence back then.

00:18:33.820 | It became more well developed in the mid 1950s and '60s.

00:18:37.320 | In fact, there was the initial stages

00:18:39.980 | of what's called the exercise as medicine movement,

00:18:42.020 | which is the movement now,

00:18:43.300 | but the initial stages of that

00:18:44.720 | actually root back to the 1950s.

00:18:46.980 | I could actually go into that whole discussion

00:18:48.860 | in the story of how that all came about,

00:18:51.580 | but that's the health as wealth mantra.

00:18:54.180 | That came from the 1950s,

00:18:55.780 | from the scientific community then.

00:18:58.220 | All those data points are going to suggest

00:19:00.820 | you need a combination of some sort of

00:19:02.900 | broad strength training and broad endurance.

00:19:05.220 | Now, if you have a specific goal five months from now,

00:19:08.440 | you wanna compete in a race or hit a certain physique thing,

00:19:11.440 | that's fine to focus on one area of training.

00:19:13.660 | Certainly, if you're an athlete, that's different.

00:19:16.180 | But if you wanna maximize health

00:19:18.020 | and overall functionality throughout time,

00:19:20.300 | it needs to be a combination.

00:19:21.240 | And to really, really highlight this,

00:19:22.400 | I can actually talk about a couple of studies that I've done.

00:19:24.800 | One of them we actually did in Stockholm, Sweden.

00:19:28.080 | So I did this at the Karolinska Institute,

00:19:30.260 | which you probably are aware of.

00:19:32.520 | It's actually one of the founding places

00:19:34.520 | of all of exercise physiology.

00:19:36.740 | Generally, it started there.

00:19:37.780 | It was called something different back then,

00:19:39.460 | but really, our entire field came out of Stockholm

00:19:43.040 | and the Karolinska Institute.

00:19:44.540 | And we worked with a whole bunch of cross country skiers

00:19:47.420 | that were in their 80s and 90s.

00:19:49.220 | And so they were competitive skiers in the 1940s and 50s,

00:19:52.020 | and they had been skiing competitively

00:19:53.740 | for that entire duration.

00:19:55.420 | So you're talking 50 to 60 consecutive years of competing.

00:19:59.520 | So these are 80 to 90 year olds living alone and healthy,

00:20:02.380 | and we compared them to a group of individuals

00:20:05.200 | here in America who are the same age,

00:20:07.520 | but were not exercising.

00:20:09.680 | And what we wanted to do is to see and kind of look at

00:20:11.800 | what are these lifelong endurance individuals?

00:20:14.720 | What do they look like?

00:20:15.960 | When we brought them into the lab,

00:20:17.140 | which is, by the way, amazing,

00:20:18.700 | to do a VO2 max test on a 92 year old,

00:20:22.140 | especially in a language that they don't speak.

00:20:25.000 | You can imagine you're doing this in the hospital, right?

00:20:27.380 | And you're running people through, this is a cycling test,

00:20:29.740 | and so for a VO2 max test,

00:20:31.400 | you have a mask on your face,

00:20:33.040 | you're hooked up to a metabolic cart

00:20:34.400 | so it can collect all the gases

00:20:35.680 | that are coming out of your mouth.

00:20:37.340 | And you're chanting these people on,

00:20:39.120 | and basically every minute,

00:20:40.460 | the workload gets harder and harder and harder

00:20:42.260 | until you can't complete it.

00:20:44.700 | And we're doing this in a cardiology center,

00:20:47.720 | and the cardiologists are usually waiting

00:20:49.860 | for their heart rate to get slightly elevated,

00:20:51.740 | and they stop them 'cause they're 85, 86 years old.

00:20:55.380 | And not only are we not stopping them,

00:20:56.660 | but we are screaming in their ears,

00:20:58.300 | just like, "Go, go, go."

00:20:59.500 | - In Swedish or English?

00:21:00.780 | - In English, right?

00:21:01.940 | And then the translator,

00:21:03.000 | but it doesn't take a lot of translation

00:21:05.040 | when someone's screaming at your face, like, "Go, go, go."

00:21:08.740 | So we ran them through a whole bunch of VO2 max tests,

00:21:11.680 | and we did the same thing

00:21:12.520 | for those folks back here here in America.

00:21:15.260 | And what was incredibly clear from that study

00:21:18.560 | was the VO2 max, you can think about these numbers,

00:21:21.540 | and this is what's called relative.

00:21:22.740 | So, and the relative terms

00:21:24.140 | are milliliters per kilogram per minute.

00:21:26.160 | And so a standard number is about 18,

00:21:28.820 | is what we call the line of independence.

00:21:30.700 | So if your VO2 max is below 18 milliliters

00:21:33.100 | per kilogram per minute,

00:21:33.940 | it's very hard for you to live by yourself.

00:21:36.140 | So your fitness is so low,

00:21:37.880 | you probably are going to need

00:21:39.060 | to have somebody living with you,

00:21:40.260 | or you'll need to be in some sort of assisted living home.

00:21:42.940 | So if you are in like the VO2 max of 20 or 21 or 22,

00:21:47.940 | you're not below that line of independence,

00:21:49.940 | but you're on that threshold.

00:21:51.980 | And so what we found was our folks here in America,

00:21:55.280 | the group average was right around that number.

00:21:57.420 | So they were living at home by definition.

00:21:59.000 | We picked them to be people living by themselves

00:22:01.320 | in their 80s and not in a living room.

00:22:03.520 | But they didn't have any bandwidth.

00:22:04.840 | So if they got a cold or they had anything pop up

00:22:07.840 | where they lost a little bit of fitness,

00:22:09.320 | they were gonna drop below that line

00:22:10.900 | and would probably have to go

00:22:12.700 | to some sort of assisted living situation.

00:22:15.140 | The folks in Stockholm, the cross country skiers,

00:22:18.920 | the group average was most closer to like 35 to 38

00:22:22.520 | milliliters per kilogram per minute.

00:22:24.060 | Now that number is about the VO2 max you would find

00:22:27.600 | for a normal college male.

00:22:29.660 | And so these folks that were literally 80 or 90,

00:22:33.180 | if the joke, if a saber tooth tiger ran in the room

00:22:37.420 | or whatever and it chased it down,

00:22:39.260 | and we all had to run to see who didn't get eaten alive,

00:22:41.860 | the college men would probably have gotten eaten

00:22:44.600 | before the 90-year-olds.

00:22:46.460 | And in one case, we had a 92-year-old individual,

00:22:48.980 | and I think his VO2 max was 38,

00:22:50.460 | which was in our estimation a world record,

00:22:52.860 | the highest VO2 max for somebody over the age of 90.

00:22:56.500 | - May I ask, what is the typical resting heart rate

00:22:59.660 | for somebody very fit like these older Swedish

00:23:04.660 | cross country skiers?

00:23:06.500 | That if somebody has a, let's say their number is

00:23:10.220 | 35 milliliters per kilogram in this VO2 max test,

00:23:14.900 | but since most of us don't have access

00:23:16.320 | to that kind of equipment,

00:23:17.520 | but we can measure our pulse rate,

00:23:19.400 | what was a typical resting heart rate, resting pulse rate?

00:23:23.040 | - Sub 60.

00:23:24.860 | Yeah, I mean, typically that's a good number to go off of

00:23:27.300 | for anybody, regardless of age.

00:23:28.860 | Anytime I see somebody above that,

00:23:31.380 | I'm gonna start asking questions.

00:23:33.060 | Certainly above, you know, you'll see in the literature,

00:23:34.860 | people will say 60 to 80 is normal,

00:23:37.400 | and I don't agree with that at all.

00:23:39.340 | If you're up, if you're resting heart rate

00:23:40.740 | is 75 beats per minute,

00:23:41.960 | there's either something going on or you're not fit.

00:23:45.920 | - How much cross country skiing were they doing on average

00:23:49.240 | in the previous, let's say,

00:23:51.260 | if we take the previous 20 years

00:23:53.500 | since they'd been long-time cross country skiers,

00:23:55.180 | divide that by 20 years.

00:23:57.380 | - Yeah.

00:23:58.220 | - On average, are these people cross country skiing

00:24:00.060 | five hours a day, two hours a day, an hour a day?

00:24:02.420 | - Yeah, that's actually a good question.

00:24:03.500 | I don't remember.

00:24:04.340 | It's been many years,

00:24:06.220 | but they were not doing it every single day,

00:24:07.660 | and the volume would not have shocked you.

00:24:10.100 | It was the consistency over 50 years that got them there.

00:24:13.460 | Now, obviously these people were, again,

00:24:14.860 | world champions and Olympic gold medalists

00:24:16.580 | in the 1940s and '50s, so they were elite.

00:24:19.160 | They just continued consistently over time,

00:24:21.680 | but it wasn't a shocking amount of physical fitness.

00:24:25.040 | They also didn't go out of their way to train hard.

00:24:29.800 | They were busy chopping wood.

00:24:31.240 | They were busy doing a number of other things,

00:24:33.380 | and then they just happened to do some of these races

00:24:35.200 | and ski a long way,

00:24:36.360 | but it wasn't a crazy amount to where you're like,

00:24:38.440 | oh, that's great, but I could never hit that number.

00:24:41.300 | It was something much more reasonable.

00:24:43.420 | - So is the takeaway to be consistent

00:24:45.960 | about getting cardiovascular exercise,

00:24:48.160 | and we can define what consistent means

00:24:50.320 | in terms of days per week a little bit later,

00:24:52.320 | and I know we will, what are some other examples?

00:24:55.560 | I love these examples from the real world.

00:24:58.640 | - So here's the downside, though.

00:25:00.720 | So I only told you about their VO2 max.

00:25:02.820 | What I didn't tell you about

00:25:04.560 | is their leg strength and functionality,

00:25:07.080 | and that part was no more superior

00:25:09.220 | than it was their counterparts who were not exercisers.

00:25:12.880 | So what that showed really, really clearly,

00:25:15.480 | and many other studies have been done since then

00:25:18.660 | that look at the classic what we call

00:25:20.220 | lifelong endurance exercisers.

00:25:22.760 | You will see in general their VO2 max,

00:25:25.460 | their cardiovascular function, their resting heart rate,

00:25:28.020 | their blood pressure.

00:25:29.000 | It will be markedly healthier

00:25:31.980 | than folks who don't exercise.

00:25:33.120 | It is extraordinarily clear that type of exercise

00:25:35.240 | is very important for chronic disease management,

00:25:37.720 | no doubt about it.

00:25:39.040 | However, it is not sufficient for overall global health

00:25:43.480 | because it does almost nothing for leg strength,

00:25:46.460 | for any other marker of health

00:25:47.940 | which we can talk about what are the things

00:25:50.080 | that are actually going to predict mortality

00:25:52.280 | more abated than most.

00:25:53.760 | So that was a big smashing indication

00:25:58.780 | that it's like, hey, this is great.

00:26:00.880 | However, you're leaving things on the table

00:26:03.220 | for your overall health.

00:26:04.200 | Now, one could argue they're 80

00:26:06.120 | and they're doing pretty well,

00:26:08.000 | but they weren't doing as well in these areas.

00:26:09.840 | And so a study we did later actually as a follow-up

00:26:13.440 | was looking at monozygous twins.

00:26:15.840 | So this is actually interesting being a scientist.

00:26:17.880 | This is a classic example of one of my graduate students

00:26:20.420 | who had been in my lab for probably three or four years.

00:26:23.260 | And she was in our single fiber physiology lab

00:26:25.420 | and you imagine she's isolating individual muscle fibers

00:26:30.100 | from an athlete one by one with the tweezer.

00:26:32.700 | And she's going to do several thousand individual cells.

00:26:36.000 | So you're down there for hours

00:26:37.480 | and things happen down there, you kind of lose your mind.

00:26:40.980 | And she was just kind of going on one day

00:26:43.280 | with one of my colleagues, just talking.

00:26:45.720 | And she's like, oh yeah, my uncle is really, really fit

00:26:47.960 | and something or other.

00:26:49.440 | And then, oh yeah, he's a twin.

00:26:51.560 | And it was like, oh, is he monozygous?

00:26:52.920 | And she's like, yeah.

00:26:53.920 | - For those that don't know,

00:26:54.760 | monozygous are identical twins.

00:26:56.360 | - Yeah, which is interesting.

00:26:57.200 | So you basically have, what I'm setting up here is,

00:26:59.100 | this is the perfect exercise scientific experiment.

00:27:02.640 | Monozygous identical twins mean

00:27:04.440 | they have the exact same DNA.

00:27:07.020 | So an egg was fertilized, split,

00:27:09.440 | and then two humans grew out of that

00:27:10.780 | with the exact same DNA.

00:27:12.480 | And so now we can start answering the question,

00:27:14.100 | well, yeah, okay, what about maybe

00:27:15.680 | these cross-country skiers?

00:27:17.660 | Maybe they were just genetic freaks.

00:27:19.260 | Maybe it didn't matter.

00:27:20.380 | It's like some people have,

00:27:21.680 | well, genetics are always a component to it, but how much?

00:27:25.080 | Well, now we have a scenario lining up

00:27:26.860 | where it's like, wait a minute, you have monozygous twins.

00:27:28.620 | So we have a replica of a human being, exact same DNA.

00:27:31.360 | The only differences that we would see

00:27:32.740 | in their physiology now would be due

00:27:34.580 | to lifestyle circumstances.

00:27:36.640 | Interesting.

00:27:37.780 | So monozygous twin, a dad and an uncle, right?

00:27:41.380 | Uh-huh, great.

00:27:42.740 | Do they exercise?

00:27:43.980 | Well, one of them does.

00:27:45.820 | He's a lifelong endurance exercise.

00:27:47.460 | Runner, cyclist, swimmer, iron man, all these things.

00:27:50.940 | What about the other one?

00:27:52.600 | Nope, he doesn't exercise at all.

00:27:55.060 | And at that point, I wanted to kill my graduate student

00:27:57.780 | 'cause I'm like, you've been in my lab for three years,

00:28:01.180 | or more probably, and you've never told me

00:28:03.620 | that in your household is the perfect scientific experiment

00:28:06.980 | for exercise you could ever create.

00:28:09.820 | And the look on her face when my colleague

00:28:13.020 | and I were staring at her, she's just like, oh my God.

00:28:15.340 | So I'm like, call them right now.

00:28:17.920 | They're coming in the lab, fly them in from Chicago.

00:28:19.980 | I don't care what we have to do, we're getting them in.

00:28:22.700 | And so I wanted to actually, going back to the model

00:28:25.820 | that was first developed by the Harvard Fatigue Lab,

00:28:27.620 | one thing that's interesting about that community

00:28:29.160 | is they started off with the concept

00:28:32.220 | of trying to examine human performance

00:28:34.100 | through a holistic lens.

00:28:35.280 | And so it was the antithesis of looking

00:28:37.580 | at either organ by organ.

00:28:39.920 | So we're going to only look at the cardiovascular system.

00:28:42.100 | We're only going to look at skeletal muscle.

00:28:43.620 | And then we're saying, we're looking at this entire picture.

00:28:46.220 | And so that model, we wanted to carry through

00:28:48.060 | in these twins, and I said, all right,

00:28:49.140 | I wanna bring them in the lab,

00:28:50.100 | but I'm not just going to look at one system.

00:28:52.940 | I want to do everything.

00:28:53.840 | So we took stool samples, we took blood,

00:28:56.780 | we did vertical jump tests, we did maximum strength tests,

00:28:59.900 | we did MRIs of muscle mass, we did VO2 max tests,

00:29:04.900 | we did efficiency stuff, we did genetic testing,

00:29:07.900 | we did an IQ test, we did psychological battery.

00:29:09.980 | We wanted to look at everything to figure out,

00:29:11.680 | of these things, what differ between the twins,

00:29:13.380 | and if so, the second key question there is, by how much?

00:29:17.940 | So can I improve my VO2 max?

00:29:21.020 | Sure, everyone knows that, but how much?

00:29:23.660 | Can it change by 5%, 80%, like where's the number?

00:29:27.120 | And so putting some quantification on this

00:29:28.900 | was very important.

00:29:30.460 | And so, again, we had another example

00:29:32.560 | of a classic endurance-only training paradigm

00:29:35.660 | compared to a non.

00:29:37.860 | So this is a person who's, I think he's a truck driver

00:29:40.300 | by vocation, which is, I think he actually drove

00:29:42.080 | for a potato chip company, which is even funnier.

00:29:45.200 | The endurance athlete actually was great,

00:29:47.120 | because like any endurance people, he had physical books

00:29:51.940 | of all of his training mileage for the last 35 years.

00:29:55.240 | And we just went through them.

00:29:56.580 | We calculated the total amount of miles he ran,

00:29:58.680 | his averages, his heart rates per time.

00:30:00.720 | We had this unbelievable thing, like what races he was in,

00:30:03.220 | he had the documentation, he was just totally nuts, right?

00:30:05.220 | Like, something that endurance people are shaking

00:30:07.860 | their head right now going, oh yeah, I got that too.

00:30:09.640 | - And the endurance folks are pretty nerdy.

00:30:11.560 | - Yeah, they're super nerdy, right?

00:30:13.300 | So it was great, because now we could validate,

00:30:15.540 | as close as one could, to actually how much he ran

00:30:19.880 | and things like that.

00:30:20.800 | So they had about a 35-year discord.

00:30:23.120 | They both exercised up through high school, about 18,

00:30:25.300 | they stopped doing it, and by the time they brought them

00:30:26.880 | in the lab, they're in their mid-50s.

00:30:28.000 | So it was about 35 years of difference.

00:30:29.980 | And when we ran them through the testing,

00:30:32.640 | if you look at the measures that were similar

00:30:35.320 | to the Sweden study, it was almost identical.

00:30:37.800 | The exercising twin was significantly better

00:30:42.160 | at things like a lipid panel, resting heart rate,

00:30:44.620 | blood pressure, VO2 max, any of those markers,

00:30:48.020 | as predicted, were much better.

00:30:50.280 | What was very interesting, though,

00:30:51.920 | was the things that were in the middle.

00:30:53.280 | First of all, their total amount of muscle mass

00:30:56.120 | was almost identical, like to the gram,

00:30:59.020 | within the margin of error of a DEXA scan

00:31:01.100 | could possibly ever be.

00:31:02.720 | The non-exerciser, though, was a little bit fatter.

00:31:06.380 | So the difference in actual body weight

00:31:08.240 | was explained almost entirely by body fat,

00:31:11.080 | or non-lean tissue, really, same sort of thing.

00:31:14.260 | So okay, like no one's surprised there

00:31:15.900 | that the exerciser was a little bit leaner,

00:31:17.560 | even though it didn't change

00:31:19.280 | the whole amount of muscle mass at all.

00:31:21.820 | When we looked at some of the more functional tests,

00:31:24.080 | and we looked at things like muscle quality,

00:31:25.800 | so this is a metric you can get from an ultrasound,

00:31:28.160 | you can kind of think about this

00:31:29.360 | as how much fat is inside the tissue,

00:31:32.580 | which is sometimes an advantage for endurance athletes

00:31:35.360 | to have a little bit more of what are called

00:31:36.740 | intramuscular triglycerides,

00:31:37.960 | because it's a fuel directly in the tissue.

00:31:39.920 | But in general, the exercise, or the muscle quality

00:31:43.920 | was not in favor of the exerciser.

00:31:46.960 | If you looked at the performance testing,

00:31:50.200 | and if you looked at strength,

00:31:52.900 | it favored the non-exerciser.

00:31:55.400 | So now again, we have the same finding

00:31:57.440 | we saw in our Sweden study, but in identical twins.

00:32:00.380 | And so it really, really highlighted the fact that

00:32:04.040 | if you want to move forward with optimal health,

00:32:06.560 | simply picking one silo is not gonna get you there.

00:32:09.920 | - One silo, meaning just running, just cycling.

00:32:12.720 | - Right.

00:32:13.640 | - Does this mean that the twin that did not exercise

00:32:16.960 | could jump higher or win an arm wrestling competition?

00:32:21.680 | Not that that's a vital thing to be able to do,

00:32:23.920 | but just in terms of measuring strength,

00:32:25.520 | you know, it's our isometric strength.

00:32:28.080 | Was the non-exercising twin stronger,

00:32:30.760 | or at least as strong as their exercising?

00:32:33.040 | - Yes, particularly in grip strength.

00:32:35.320 | Yep, and any of the measures, like the vertical jump,

00:32:38.360 | leg extension power, and a number of things,

00:32:41.120 | they often favored the non-exerciser,

00:32:43.320 | which you're still a little bit of a chicken and egg.

00:32:45.700 | You don't know if necessarily the endurance training

00:32:47.440 | reduced that other twin's strength,

00:32:49.880 | or it doesn't even really matter per se.

00:32:52.040 | I think the highlight of it is,

00:32:54.440 | can you change some of these metrics of EOTmax?

00:32:57.160 | Yeah, not even close.

00:32:59.400 | These things are very responsive,

00:33:01.100 | regardless of your genetics.

00:33:02.260 | Your genetics will give you a starting place, very clearly.

00:33:05.360 | Even the non-exerciser was a pretty healthy guy.

00:33:08.180 | So they were in a good spot.

00:33:09.240 | Mid-50s, doesn't exercise,

00:33:10.560 | doesn't really pay attention to his diet at all,

00:33:12.520 | and he was in pretty good shape.

00:33:14.320 | However, if you wanna actually move progress

00:33:19.320 | and move for high functionality,

00:33:22.540 | you have to do something besides just run,

00:33:26.240 | just distance run.

00:33:27.100 | Now, I could say the same thing for strength training.

00:33:29.960 | That alone, 'cause I don't wanna make this seem

00:33:31.960 | like I'm saying endurance exercises, it worked.

00:33:34.660 | In both case, in both these studies,

00:33:37.120 | those folks were much better off in metrics

00:33:40.700 | that are incredibly important to mortality,

00:33:42.980 | how long you're going to live, EOTmax, et cetera.

00:33:46.000 | It's just not gonna get there in terms of strength.

00:33:49.300 | We took a look at muscle fiber physiology as well,

00:33:52.120 | which is very interesting.

00:33:53.180 | So what I mean is,

00:33:54.320 | there's generally two types of muscle fibers,

00:33:57.300 | fast twitch and slow twitch.

00:33:58.520 | And one of the things that is a hallmark of aging

00:34:01.500 | is a selective reduction in fast twitch fibers.

00:34:05.420 | And that's because it's difficult to activate them

00:34:07.780 | unless you're doing high force activities.

00:34:10.400 | You're gonna activate slow twitch fibers

00:34:12.040 | doing almost any activity of daily living.

00:34:14.580 | And so they stay around.

00:34:16.220 | Fast twitch fibers,

00:34:17.080 | unless you're doing something of high force

00:34:18.460 | are going to not be used

00:34:19.620 | and they're not gonna be kept around.

00:34:21.420 | And that's a problem because when you look at things like

00:34:24.160 | the need for leg strength through aging,

00:34:26.020 | the ability to catch yourself from a fall,

00:34:28.660 | these things are incredibly important.

00:34:30.560 | If you don't have fast twitch fibers,

00:34:32.080 | you don't have the speed

00:34:32.940 | to get your foot out in front of you on time

00:34:34.580 | and you don't have the eccentric strength

00:34:36.040 | to stop the fall from happening.

00:34:37.940 | And so if you look across again, the aging literature,

00:34:40.020 | they're very clear about the importance

00:34:41.980 | of maintaining strength and fast twitch fibers over time.

00:34:45.520 | So we know that this is an important distinction here

00:34:48.660 | of role and people will often talk about,

00:34:50.940 | okay, how much of that is genetically determined?

00:34:54.460 | Can I change my fiber type?

00:34:55.900 | And the answer there is resoundingly yes.

00:34:58.900 | And can I change it with exercise?

00:35:00.500 | And the answer is absolutely you can.

00:35:02.680 | And then the next question is how much?

00:35:05.220 | So now again, we're gonna see an order of magnitude.

00:35:07.820 | In general, without going too far down an area

00:35:10.960 | maybe we can save for later,

00:35:12.820 | each one of your muscles in your body

00:35:15.680 | has a different percentage of fast twitch and slow twitch.

00:35:18.180 | For example, your calf.

00:35:21.100 | If you look at your soleus,

00:35:22.160 | which is kind of the smaller one that goes in the back,

00:35:25.080 | that's generally mostly slow twitch,

00:35:27.120 | typically 80% or so slow twitch.

00:35:29.920 | The gastroc, which is the other one right next to it.

00:35:31.760 | So if you were to point your toe next to your face

00:35:33.480 | and that part that kind of flexes out in the middle,

00:35:36.300 | pops out, that's your gastroc.

00:35:38.160 | That is almost the inverse.

00:35:40.120 | So it's generally 80% fast twitch, maybe 20% slow twitch.

00:35:43.920 | Generally anything anti-postural

00:35:45.720 | or postural rather, anti-gravity, spinal erectors,

00:35:48.600 | things that are meant to keep you up or moving all day

00:35:50.680 | are going to be slow twitch and things like your hamstrings,

00:35:52.840 | which are for explosion are gonna be fast twitch.

00:35:55.680 | Well, we biopsy the quad in these individuals.

00:35:58.320 | And in that muscle, it's generally about 50/50

00:36:02.120 | fast twitch, slow twitch as a really broad number.

00:36:06.120 | Well, one of the things that we found

00:36:07.280 | was in the non-exerciser,

00:36:09.420 | it was almost textbook what you would predict.

00:36:11.920 | It was about 50% or so slow twitch,

00:36:15.880 | a little bit of percentage of fast twitch

00:36:17.480 | and then about 20% of one of these called hybrid fibers,

00:36:20.780 | which are a hallmark of that activity.

00:36:22.960 | All right, great.

00:36:24.080 | In the exerciser, it was about 95% slow twitch.

00:36:28.200 | And so it's extremely clear.

00:36:29.640 | Again, I don't know if maybe their set point

00:36:32.500 | was a little bit higher towards that

00:36:33.340 | and the non-exerciser devolved down to his place

00:36:37.720 | or the other one, but it doesn't matter.

00:36:39.200 | I mean, you're going from 40% slow twitch in one case

00:36:41.520 | to 95% slow twitch in another case.

00:36:44.380 | It shows you that the limits of physiological adaptation

00:36:48.120 | are darn near boundless given enough exposure.

00:36:51.080 | And in this case, 35 years of extremely consistent training

00:36:54.600 | and his muscle morphology was completely different

00:36:57.380 | than his identical twin with the exact same DNA.

00:36:59.780 | - Those are two beautiful examples

00:37:02.800 | of people doing endurance work for a number of years

00:37:06.780 | and what that gives them in terms of benefits

00:37:10.080 | and functionality.

00:37:11.180 | Has the opposite experiment been done or observed

00:37:16.080 | where somebody just weight lifted

00:37:17.920 | or just sprinted for a number of years?

00:37:20.920 | I don't know that there's a identical twin control.

00:37:25.120 | That's a little-- - No, I wish

00:37:25.960 | we had a third twin.

00:37:27.040 | - Too much to ask for, right?

00:37:27.920 | Triplets, okay, so triplets out there,

00:37:30.320 | if you're exercising in different ways,

00:37:32.680 | or people who have triplets,

00:37:33.780 | maybe you assign one kid to be a runner,

00:37:35.440 | one kid to be a weightlifter,

00:37:36.400 | and the other one to be sedentary.

00:37:37.480 | Please don't do experiments like that.

00:37:39.680 | But the expectation, as I understand it,

00:37:43.320 | would be that the person that sprints

00:37:46.420 | or that does heavy squats, explosive work,

00:37:50.380 | would then have more fast twitch muscle fibers in their quad

00:37:54.700 | and their non-exercising counterpart would have fewer.

00:37:58.260 | That would make sense.

00:37:59.100 | But what happens if you assess the endurance level

00:38:03.620 | in somebody who's just done strength training

00:38:05.640 | or just sprinted?

00:38:07.340 | - Yeah, so we don't have those data specifically.

00:38:10.020 | We're actually just starting to have studies come out

00:38:13.200 | on lifelong strength trainers.

00:38:15.480 | And there's actually a very good reason for this,

00:38:18.020 | which is a whole story we can get into.

00:38:21.300 | But the quick answer is we don't have a lot of people

00:38:24.520 | who've been lifting weights for 30 or plus years.

00:38:27.580 | We have a whole swath of people

00:38:30.240 | who've been doing endurance training for that long.

00:38:31.940 | - Is that because fewer people have been weight training

00:38:34.320 | or are the weight trainers all dead?

00:38:36.040 | - You gotta go back to the 1953, 1954.

00:38:38.240 | You had two major things happen

00:38:39.560 | that changed the entire course of exercise physiology

00:38:42.000 | and exercise science, and really exercise as we know it.

00:38:44.200 | It's important to understand the history of our field.

00:38:47.480 | A lot of the questions I get are based on false assumptions

00:38:53.020 | of what exercise can and can't do.

00:38:56.120 | As an example, questions like momentum.

00:38:59.000 | Should I use momentum or that's cheating, right?

00:39:01.140 | Or it doesn't work, it compromises my results.

00:39:04.860 | It's actually totally untrue.

00:39:06.520 | There are excellent reasons

00:39:08.200 | when you should use momentum when you lift.

00:39:10.380 | There are reasons when you should not.

00:39:12.040 | It is sometimes very beneficial to go fast

00:39:14.600 | with the exercise repetition,

00:39:15.800 | sometimes very slow and controlled is better.

00:39:18.020 | Any question I get, in fact, I'm very infamous

00:39:21.440 | for always responding with it depends.

00:39:24.280 | The reason I say it depends is it depends on the goal.

00:39:27.240 | When you're training for speed or power

00:39:29.200 | or muscular endurance, the answer to some

00:39:31.020 | of these very common question differs.

00:39:33.780 | What people fail to realize is they think

00:39:36.200 | they're asking the right question

00:39:38.260 | because they don't understand this history,

00:39:40.240 | what's being planted in your brain subconsciously

00:39:43.540 | is driving that question,

00:39:44.800 | and it's not necessarily the right one.

00:39:46.400 | So if we walk through that a little bit,

00:39:48.100 | you'll see what that field has led you,

00:39:50.540 | why you think certain things matter

00:39:52.560 | when they actually don't,

00:39:54.020 | or maybe your assumptions are incorrect,

00:39:56.120 | and then exactly what to do about them.

00:39:58.540 | - I'd like to take a brief break

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00:40:50.940 | - So in 1953, 1954, you had Roger Bannister

00:40:54.840 | breaking the four-minute mile, so sub four-minute file,

00:40:57.620 | and then you also had Sir Edmund Hillary

00:40:59.420 | and then his Sherpa Norgay, Summit Everest,

00:41:02.160 | in the same basically two-year span.

00:41:04.320 | That exact same year after that was a formation

00:41:06.760 | of what's called the American College of Sports Medicine.

00:41:09.720 | Now, that is still around today.

00:41:11.620 | It is a preeminent group for this exercise as medicine.

00:41:14.480 | So if you're interested in things like exercise

00:41:17.400 | for obesity prevention, for cancer treatment,

00:41:20.120 | for things like that, it's not really sports medicine.

00:41:22.800 | It's more for clinical exercise.

00:41:24.980 | That's the place to go, American College of Sports Medicine.

00:41:27.600 | So we have this launching of both a ton of people

00:41:31.400 | wanting to start doing endurance exercise

00:41:33.360 | and start swimming and cycling and running,

00:41:35.220 | and then you have a launch of people coming off

00:41:37.160 | of the back of the Harvard Fatigue Lab.

00:41:39.060 | So the Fatigue Lab actually shut down in 1947.

00:41:42.120 | So you have these people interested in physical fitness

00:41:44.800 | but know where to go.

00:41:46.280 | Well, all those people left the Harvard Fatigue Lab

00:41:48.480 | and started their own labs in other places.

00:41:50.880 | So you've launched the careers of people like Dave Costle

00:41:54.720 | and John Halazi and some of these

00:41:56.640 | very famous exercise physiologists,

00:41:59.280 | and they start building laboratories,

00:42:00.720 | and we start, for the first time ever,

00:42:02.480 | studying the science of exercise.

00:42:05.080 | So years go by, and these people happen.

00:42:07.600 | The 1960s and 1970s is what we call the runner's boom.

00:42:10.580 | So people start, in fact, if you look at the numbers

00:42:13.220 | of people who are doing marathons,

00:42:15.100 | it explodes through these two-decade spans, right,

00:42:18.400 | because it's like the, we could do these endurance feats.

00:42:21.560 | Notice both those feats were endurance, right,

00:42:23.680 | running short-term as well as going over there.

00:42:25.800 | No one has thought anything about strength training,

00:42:28.600 | and here's why.

00:42:30.280 | In the late 1880s, there was a very famous physician

00:42:33.440 | named George Winship, I think was his name,

00:42:35.880 | who was a big proponent of strength training.

00:42:37.880 | Well, he died in the age of 50-something of a heart attack,

00:42:41.620 | and that terrified people of strength training for 70 years

00:42:44.540 | because they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa,

00:42:46.020 | that stuff will kill you, 'cause he was a doctor,

00:42:48.540 | he was trying, he was running around the country

00:42:49.880 | doing these exhibitions and purporting it,

00:42:51.500 | and then he died.

00:42:52.340 | - It's sort of like Atkins.

00:42:54.140 | - 100%.

00:42:54.980 | - Dying, although some people say he died of a heart attack,

00:42:57.580 | other people said he fell through the ice into cold water,

00:43:00.420 | that's debated, but the fact that a heavy proponent

00:43:04.340 | of a given nutrition plan dies suddenly?

00:43:07.740 | - Yep.

00:43:08.560 | - Not good for business.

00:43:09.600 | - So now, the little storm is brewing.

00:43:14.260 | 1940s, and I'm going back a little bit,

00:43:16.380 | but bear with me for a second,

00:43:17.900 | there's a guy named Peter Karpovich,

00:43:20.020 | and he's a scientist out of Springfield,

00:43:23.300 | like the Decorative Physical Education, PE,

00:43:26.100 | like that's a legendary place, Springfield College,

00:43:28.120 | and he is anti-strength training

00:43:29.740 | for a lot of the same reasons,

00:43:30.860 | and his entire career talked about, no, do this,

00:43:33.340 | he's the one that launched these ideas

00:43:34.900 | that strength training will make you lose flexibility,

00:43:37.900 | it will be bad for kids,

00:43:39.780 | and all these things that we know now are clearly not true.

00:43:43.580 | He's a proponent of these things,

00:43:45.020 | and there's a show that happened at Springfield College,

00:43:48.860 | and a guy named Bob York,

00:43:50.680 | and if you, York Barbell, that's still around today,

00:43:54.300 | is going around the country

00:43:55.460 | and putting on these exhibitions,

00:43:56.800 | they come to Springfield,

00:43:57.640 | and it's sort of like a new-aged social media thing

00:44:03.180 | where it's like the students know what's about to happen,

00:44:05.060 | 'cause Karpovich shows up to this event,

00:44:08.380 | and everyone knows he hates strength training,

00:44:10.740 | and everyone's like waiting for it to end

00:44:12.420 | just to see what he's gonna say,

00:44:13.720 | so this whole exhibition goes on,

00:44:15.460 | and these people are doing,

00:44:16.660 | you gotta remember back in the time,

00:44:17.540 | like bodybuilding, weightlifting,

00:44:18.580 | powerlifting, strongman, it's like all the same thing,

00:44:21.140 | there's no differentiation yet,

00:44:23.200 | and it finishes, and Karpovich stands up,

00:44:24.900 | and like the crowd goes silent,

00:44:26.840 | and he just asks one question,

00:44:28.740 | and he just points to one of the guys and says,

00:44:30.260 | "Scratch your back,"

00:44:32.240 | and now he's just assuming and waiting for the guy

00:44:34.040 | to be like, "Ah,"

00:44:35.000 | and not be able to put his hand behind his head,

00:44:37.380 | and I think he pointed to John Gimmick,

00:44:38.720 | who's like a famous bodybuilder,

00:44:40.700 | and he reached back and scratched his back, no problem,

00:44:43.460 | and then they proceeded to grab two dumbbells,

00:44:45.080 | I think they were 50-pound dumbbells,

00:44:46.400 | and do a backflip, standing backflip with both in each hand.

00:44:49.240 | They start doing the splits on stage,

00:44:50.700 | and they start performing all kinds

00:44:52.680 | of physical function tests,

00:44:54.700 | and Karpovich is stunned.

00:44:56.180 | He's like, "Holy shit, he has nothing to say."

00:44:59.160 | He leaves there, and his whole life has changed.

00:45:01.060 | All these things he was claiming

00:45:03.100 | were shown in his face to be false.

00:45:05.860 | He does a 180 on his career.

00:45:07.760 | He starts running study after study on strength training,

00:45:10.500 | and starts finding immediately there are no detriments

00:45:14.080 | to strength training in terms of global health, right?

00:45:16.220 | Of course you can do it wrong and things like that.

00:45:18.620 | In fact, here comes a whole bunch of benefits.

00:45:20.980 | So through the 1950s, while this thing's going on

00:45:23.560 | with the endurance folks,

00:45:24.940 | no one's still strength training,

00:45:26.980 | because there's no record to see.

00:45:29.400 | There's no American College of Sports Medicine.

00:45:31.900 | There's no societies.

00:45:32.820 | There's no science.

00:45:33.660 | We're not sure it's safe.

00:45:34.740 | And meanwhile, Karpovich is just hammering

00:45:36.420 | study after study after study,

00:45:37.780 | showing you it's safe, it's safe, it's safe,

00:45:39.180 | but it hasn't picked up yet.

00:45:40.900 | And then everything changed in 1977.

00:45:43.120 | Thank you, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

00:45:45.680 | He came out with "The Trifold."

00:45:47.520 | He hits you with "Pumping Iron,"

00:45:48.820 | which I know you know that movie, right?

00:45:50.700 | "Pumping Iron?" - It's an interesting movie,

00:45:51.780 | even for those not interested in bodybuilding.

00:45:54.260 | It's a very interesting movie

00:45:55.380 | because it really gives a window into not just him,

00:45:58.380 | but the way in which weight training

00:46:00.940 | started to show up as a regular practice.

00:46:05.300 | When I was growing up,

00:46:06.140 | the only people who weight trained

00:46:07.300 | were people preparing for football,

00:46:09.620 | bodybuilders who basically didn't exist

00:46:11.440 | in the town where I grew up.

00:46:12.960 | And the only people who did yoga

00:46:15.300 | were yogis doing Bikram.

00:46:16.940 | But now you drive through any major American city

00:46:20.360 | or European city, and there's yoga studios,

00:46:22.380 | there's gyms with free weights.

00:46:26.400 | - Arnold Schwarzenegger is largely responsible, I think,

00:46:29.080 | for initiating that shift.

00:46:31.960 | - Yep, think about it.

00:46:33.180 | He hit us with "Pumping Iron," "Conan,"

00:46:36.360 | and then "The Terminator,"

00:46:37.500 | almost in back-to-back, like very close within years.

00:46:40.720 | So you've got this whole cascade of the '70s

00:46:43.000 | of people running, cycling and swimming.

00:46:45.640 | Now science is starting to come out

00:46:46.960 | that it's not dangerous and maybe actually some benefit,

00:46:49.060 | and then boom, not only is it not bad for you,

00:46:53.520 | it can make you into a real-world superhero.

00:46:56.980 | I mean, think about the psychology of a child

00:47:00.040 | growing up watching somebody like Conan.

00:47:02.940 | Think about what Batman looked like

00:47:04.740 | in the 1950s and '60s, right?

00:47:06.200 | And then boom, I can look like that?

00:47:10.120 | Now not everyone wants to look like Arnold,

00:47:11.680 | but you see the power that can land in people.

00:47:13.920 | No one had ever seen or thought

00:47:15.680 | you can make your body transform like that.

00:47:17.540 | You could maybe be born like that, but no chance.

00:47:20.560 | That's within the grasp of all of you.

00:47:22.800 | - When I was a kid growing up, one of my favorite books

00:47:24.680 | was "The Guinness Book of World Records."

00:47:26.560 | I still have images in my mind of the coldest animal,

00:47:31.560 | the longest lifespan, et cetera.

00:47:34.640 | And there was a picture in there of Arnold Schwarzenegger,

00:47:37.840 | and you know what his record was?

00:47:39.720 | It said, "Perfectly developed man,"

00:47:42.880 | which is, as you point out, that isn't the physique

00:47:44.940 | that most people aspire to,

00:47:46.740 | but it really did inspire this shift.

00:47:49.840 | The other thing about resistance training

00:47:51.320 | that I think has a certain allure for some people,

00:47:56.320 | men and women, is that it's one of the few forms of exercise

00:48:00.920 | that because of the enhanced blood flow to the muscle

00:48:03.280 | that occurs during the training, the so-called pump,

00:48:05.620 | it gives you a transient but somewhat real window

00:48:09.120 | into what your results will be.

00:48:12.240 | When you run and you're gasping for air,

00:48:13.800 | you aren't experiencing what it's like to be faster

00:48:17.220 | than you are that day, but when you weight train,

00:48:19.360 | you get an aesthetic picture into how your functionality

00:48:22.520 | and aesthetic will change.

00:48:23.720 | It disappears a few hours later

00:48:25.520 | as the so-called pump subsides,

00:48:28.280 | but it's a very interesting form of exercise in that way.

00:48:31.620 | It's almost as if you go in to learn a language

00:48:33.440 | and during the process of learning for brief moments,

00:48:35.900 | you're actually fluent and then it gets taken away.

00:48:38.120 | It sort of puts the dopamine carrot out in front of you.

00:48:40.920 | This is just me hypothesizing as to why weight training

00:48:43.620 | might have taken off the way that it did.

00:48:45.240 | - Yeah, I mean, it's like if you got paid

00:48:47.360 | every hour on the hour when you're working

00:48:49.600 | and then at the end of the day, they take the money back,

00:48:51.360 | but you still, as the time clock is going on in your day,

00:48:53.760 | you're looking up and you're just seeing

00:48:54.960 | why you're watching your bank account grow in real life.

00:48:57.320 | You can see why it's so addicting to those folks.

00:49:00.880 | So to finish the story here,

00:49:02.680 | going back to your actual question to answer it,

00:49:04.620 | this is happening in the late '70s, early '80s,

00:49:07.200 | and so now, Joe Weider, all these gyms,

00:49:10.420 | they're exploding because people wanna look like that

00:49:13.680 | or they realize they have the chance

00:49:15.400 | to change how they physically look.

00:49:17.120 | That had never been a reality before.

00:49:18.780 | - Mostly men at that point I'm guessing.

00:49:20.140 | - Almost exclusively, yet for a large number of reasons,

00:49:23.720 | cultural acceptance, et cetera.

00:49:26.040 | Even with endurance stuff,

00:49:27.160 | you could get fitter and run faster and that's better,

00:49:29.260 | but it wasn't going to change how you looked

00:49:31.960 | unless you were losing fat.

00:49:33.800 | Now you can change how you look,

00:49:35.020 | which is so incredibly addicting.

00:49:36.520 | In fact, there's a very famous quote,

00:49:39.040 | I think it was actually Joe Weider who said,

00:49:40.520 | "Show me one man who wants to be strong

00:49:42.360 | "and I'll show you 10 who wanna look strong."

00:49:45.120 | Right, it's like, that's very, very powerful, right?

00:49:47.600 | There's tons of this history I can go into

00:49:50.800 | which is sort of explaining to you,

00:49:52.160 | but now you're in the mid-'80s

00:49:54.600 | and you have what I call my generation.

00:49:57.140 | So you have my generation who fall in love

00:49:58.880 | with strength training in the 1980s and '90s,

00:50:02.160 | but there's really no scientific field for it.

00:50:04.620 | It's not really come about yet.

00:50:05.960 | The science of endurance and exercise physiology

00:50:08.520 | is now humming along at a massive rate

00:50:10.720 | because these people came up in the '70s and '80s

00:50:12.880 | and they're five, 10, 15 years in their career,

00:50:15.740 | they're producing, they're generating graduate students,

00:50:18.580 | they're starting their own labs,

00:50:19.600 | and the exercise physiology still to this day

00:50:21.840 | is 80% endurance, steady state stuff almost exclusively.

00:50:25.760 | Well now, my generation, you love sports,

00:50:29.800 | you love lifting, you love all these things.

00:50:31.780 | And now what we see happen is the Chicago Bulls.

00:50:35.020 | Michael Jordan starts picking up strength training.

00:50:36.800 | Ooh, that's on TV, he's on Sports Center

00:50:39.040 | in the mid-1990s lifting weights.

00:50:41.160 | And we go back actually to the late 1970s,

00:50:43.520 | and I'm not sure if you're a football fan,

00:50:45.640 | but any football fan will recognize

00:50:47.280 | the Nebraska Cornhuskers in the 1970s and '80s,

00:50:50.540 | changed how football's played.

00:50:52.160 | Well, the reason is because they started strength training

00:50:54.760 | and they started doing it with a guy named Boyd Epley,

00:50:57.120 | who was the founder of the NSCA.

00:50:59.240 | So the National Strength and Conditioning Association

00:51:01.440 | is formed in the late 1970s as well.

00:51:04.000 | So just like ACSM was developed

00:51:05.880 | the year after those two events happened,

00:51:08.000 | 1978, the year after Arnold comes out, boom, NSCA is formed,

00:51:11.800 | and now you have a scientific organization

00:51:14.800 | dedicated to strength and conditioning.

00:51:16.840 | You've got NFL strength and conditioning coaches

00:51:19.200 | that are starting to come on board,

00:51:20.760 | you've got scientists that are starting to come into labs,

00:51:22.760 | and strength and conditioning becomes the scientific field.

00:51:25.800 | Well, everything swings now,

00:51:28.580 | from an exercise perspective, into bodybuilding.

00:51:31.280 | And so almost all of the things,

00:51:33.480 | in fact, we were sort of talking before,

00:51:35.840 | I could run a whole bunch of tricks on you,

00:51:37.960 | and I could ask you a whole bunch of questions

00:51:39.480 | about things that you think are absolute standards

00:51:41.400 | or guarantees about training.

00:51:43.440 | I'm supposed to do this, I'm never supposed to do that.

00:51:45.760 | - For instance?

00:51:46.800 | - For instance, is it okay to train a muscle group

00:51:49.680 | on back-to-back days?

00:51:51.680 | Most people are at home thinking,

00:51:52.960 | no, you're not supposed to train a muscle group.

00:51:54.600 | - It needs to recover.

00:51:55.640 | - And that's total nonsense, right?

00:51:57.820 | Other things like body part split training, right?

00:52:02.120 | Training one muscle group per day.

00:52:04.200 | Other things like cardio, endurance training,

00:52:08.520 | influencing, will it ruin my gains from my lift?

00:52:10.880 | All of these things are on at a base of assumptions

00:52:14.800 | that come from bodybuilding.

00:52:16.880 | Now that's a fantastic world,

00:52:18.260 | but because everything started in the late 1970s

00:52:20.800 | as bodybuilding, in terms of basically,

00:52:22.120 | strength training was that.

00:52:23.720 | Weightlifting and powerlifting were not at all around, right?

00:52:27.840 | They were, but nobody cared.

00:52:28.920 | Again, show me someone who wants to be strong,

00:52:31.080 | I'll show you 10 who want to look strong.

00:52:33.340 | The physique thing just dominated

00:52:34.960 | and we're not getting out of that yet.

00:52:37.380 | We're not all the way out of it.

00:52:38.420 | We're starting to though, because here's why.

00:52:40.400 | People started to realize,

00:52:42.200 | this bodybuilding thing is fantastic.

00:52:44.040 | I can change my physique, I'm getting better.

00:52:47.400 | But damn, these workouts take an hour and a half, two hours.

00:52:52.400 | And I'm gonna spend that whole time

00:52:53.840 | on one or two body parts,

00:52:55.240 | which means I'm gonna have to lift six days a week.

00:52:58.160 | And I'm gonna have to do that consistently, right?

00:53:00.800 | Now all of a sudden, boom, two hours on my elbow flexors.

00:53:04.220 | Damn, my elbow's starting to hurt.

00:53:05.620 | - And yet, my understanding is that

00:53:07.620 | it doesn't really require two hours a day

00:53:10.060 | of training in order to get benefits,

00:53:12.100 | even just for hypertrophy.

00:53:13.700 | - Totally.

00:53:14.700 | But a lot of the times,

00:53:15.980 | you're gonna have to get some amount of time in

00:53:17.980 | because you're spending so much isolation.

00:53:20.780 | So we've gone away from training movement,

00:53:23.220 | running as a movement, cycling as a movement,

00:53:26.200 | training my biceps as a muscle or muscle group,

00:53:30.060 | training my hamstrings as a muscle group.

00:53:31.560 | That's not a human movement.

00:53:32.880 | So we've done a 180 in terms of selecting the exercises

00:53:35.840 | from movement-based prescription

00:53:39.200 | to now muscle-group-based training.

00:53:41.180 | So when you're isolating muscle groups,

00:53:42.560 | that means a whole chunk of your body

00:53:44.300 | is really not doing much throughout the day.

00:53:47.060 | So what happens if you're doing, say, legs on Monday

00:53:49.840 | and you miss Monday 'cause you're on a flight?

00:53:52.700 | Now your legs have to wait a whole 'nother week, right?

00:53:55.860 | That's the solution to that.

00:53:58.300 | So this starts to become problematic.

00:53:59.660 | People start getting beat up.

00:54:00.820 | People start realizing, I actually don't feel that great.

00:54:04.420 | I'm not super fit.

00:54:05.380 | I'm sweating just walking up the stairs.

00:54:07.220 | I'm out of breath.

00:54:08.060 | Why?

00:54:08.880 | Because all that training,

00:54:09.720 | you've done nothing for your cardiovascular fitness.

00:54:11.780 | You've done nothing to improve heart rate,

00:54:14.260 | oxygenation, blood flow.

00:54:15.860 | And so that paradigm swing way too hard

00:54:18.340 | into the exercising, especially lifting weights,

00:54:21.140 | is single joint, often machine, often slow,

00:54:25.680 | often high volume, isolation stuff.

00:54:29.240 | And that left a giant opening of people going,

00:54:31.300 | well, wait a minute.

00:54:32.380 | What if you could get in the gym?

00:54:34.100 | I could promise you the same or better results

00:54:36.380 | in under 30 minutes.

00:54:37.940 | And in fact, you'll also feel better.

00:54:39.380 | You'll lose more weight.

00:54:40.860 | And that opened up group exercise classes,

00:54:43.740 | kettlebell stuff, CrossFit type of stuff, circuit training,

00:54:46.940 | because you can come in.

00:54:48.720 | You won't get so beat up 'cause the volume's lower.

00:54:50.820 | The time is much lower.

00:54:52.260 | You get multiple adaptations at the same time.

00:54:55.500 | Great.

00:54:56.340 | The problem with that though, fast forward 10 years,

00:54:58.460 | is it started burying people

00:55:00.120 | because you've now de-emphasized movement quality

00:55:05.120 | and you've overemphasized scores, right?

00:55:08.260 | So this is a classic example.

00:55:09.480 | If you go and you watch "Pumping Iron,"

00:55:11.540 | you'll see, or any bodybuilder,

00:55:12.860 | you'll see if they're doing a bicep curl.

00:55:14.900 | They don't even really pay attention to the rep range.

00:55:17.500 | They don't really pay attention to the load.

00:55:18.700 | They are looking at their muscle.

00:55:19.840 | They're trying to figure out,

00:55:20.680 | how do I get that thing to fire?

00:55:22.180 | They're squeezing, they're flexing, they're posing.

00:55:23.900 | At the end of every set, they're trying to figure out,

00:55:25.420 | am I getting enough pump?

00:55:26.540 | It is exclusively founded on exercise quality.

00:55:30.740 | The rep range, the numbers, almost irrelevant.

00:55:34.060 | When you go to the other model,

00:55:36.600 | exercise technique, it doesn't matter.

00:55:38.740 | Just get the most amount of weight up

00:55:40.280 | or the amount of reps or the fastest time,

00:55:42.020 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:55:42.860 | High intensity- - This should be CrossFit.

00:55:43.860 | I've walked past some CrossFit studios.

00:55:45.460 | I've done two CrossFit classes.

00:55:46.300 | - I don't wanna get sued, so you said CrossFit, I didn't.

00:55:48.300 | - Oh, I don't know.

00:55:49.140 | I enjoyed them.

00:55:50.060 | I definitely felt like I was working hard.

00:55:52.140 | - Oh, you will.

00:55:52.980 | - I observed a lot of people in very close proximity

00:55:56.460 | doing Olympic lifts and doing kipping.

00:55:59.300 | That's where you kick your legs, folks say,

00:56:00.940 | sort of like bucking and kipping type pull-ups.

00:56:03.660 | No, I enjoyed it.

00:56:06.360 | It wasn't for me for the longterm,

00:56:08.960 | but it did seem that there was a lot of ballistic movement

00:56:13.180 | in close proximity to other people.

00:56:15.460 | So the hazard to me seemed more about that

00:56:17.660 | than the actual movement.

00:56:19.080 | - Well, again, the point I'm setting up here is

00:56:22.020 | that was actually a really brilliant solution

00:56:24.500 | for a lot of the problems the classic bodybuilding

00:56:26.660 | hypertrophy introduced.

00:56:28.220 | So it got away from isolation movements

00:56:30.000 | and got people doing big movements,

00:56:31.820 | which are more effective, generally better.

00:56:34.340 | It got people doing things fast and explosive.

00:56:36.840 | That's more athletic.

00:56:37.860 | That is more important for longevity.

00:56:39.460 | It solved a lot of the problems.

00:56:41.740 | Joint health wasn't getting crashed.

00:56:43.340 | The issue they went with is they just pushed the pace

00:56:46.960 | on score rather than quality.

00:56:49.860 | They pushed the pace on how many people can be in here

00:56:51.940 | at the same time.

00:56:52.780 | Now you're doing higher risk movements, higher intensity,

00:56:56.240 | higher fatigue, and with a total,

00:56:58.980 | not that they don't care about technique,

00:57:00.500 | but it's not the thing that they're most concerned about.

00:57:02.900 | It's getting the number and the thing done.

00:57:05.180 | They solved the time issue though.

00:57:06.660 | You can get tremendous results in three days a week,

00:57:09.660 | under 45 minutes each session, et cetera.

00:57:12.700 | Burn people out though, way too much high intensity,

00:57:15.220 | way too often.

00:57:16.460 | And the other problem, safety concerns,

00:57:18.700 | all kinds of orthopedic issues and other stuff.

00:57:21.900 | - Can I interrupt you for a moment and just ask a question

00:57:24.340 | as we go through this arc of the history

00:57:26.100 | of why endurance training predominated or strength training

00:57:30.700 | or bodybuilding type training or CrossFit type training?

00:57:33.820 | 'Cause I think this is fascinating.

00:57:35.140 | I know we're about to arrive at where we are today

00:57:37.500 | and what the future looks like for people

00:57:39.940 | and what they should focus on and do.

00:57:41.780 | At what point, if any, do you think resistance training

00:57:46.800 | started to become adopted by women?

00:57:50.580 | There was no equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

00:57:53.620 | There was Linda Hamilton in "The Terminator."

00:57:56.580 | There are some impressive physiques certainly

00:57:59.940 | on female actresses and athletes.

00:58:03.900 | The Williams sisters, very impressive musculature

00:58:07.260 | and physiques and of course their tennis playing

00:58:08.820 | speaks for itself.

00:58:09.820 | Has that happened yet?

00:58:13.900 | I mean, what I mean is, do you think,

00:58:17.420 | since you work with both men and women,

00:58:20.060 | do you think that most women understand

00:58:22.760 | that weight training done properly

00:58:25.860 | is going to be extremely beneficial for them,

00:58:28.020 | maybe even especially for them

00:58:29.940 | in terms of offsetting bone density loss

00:58:32.760 | and things of that sort?

00:58:34.300 | Or are we still waiting for the stimulus,

00:58:36.700 | the popular stimulus for getting 80% of young women thinking,

00:58:41.700 | I want to lift weights?

00:58:44.420 | - Yeah, hard for me to answer 'cause I'm not,

00:58:48.620 | like I'm not a woman, right?

00:58:49.680 | Now I have a daughter, she's four, so we'll see.

00:58:52.900 | What I can say is I've probably worked with,

00:58:56.060 | I don't know how many professional athletes in total, a lot.

00:58:58.620 | I've worked with them probably 14 professional sports.

00:59:01.380 | I've worked with Cy Young winners, MVPs,

00:59:04.520 | like the whole, all the credentials, right?

00:59:06.820 | I bet 35, 40% of the athletes I've worked with are female.

00:59:10.940 | So I've worked with Olympic gold medalists.

00:59:12.500 | I've worked with bronze medalists in multiple sports.

00:59:14.900 | I've worked with the most decorated powerlifter of all time.

00:59:17.940 | So in a number of these areas, fighters,

00:59:20.440 | world championship, all these things.

00:59:23.040 | For me, I feel like that burst has already happened.

00:59:26.500 | My students, if you look at my classroom,

00:59:29.920 | I don't know what the numbers are,

00:59:32.140 | but there is no small number of females

00:59:33.960 | in exercise science and exercise physiology.

00:59:36.580 | If you look at our laboratories,

00:59:38.120 | that's one thing you will see.

00:59:39.100 | There are very few female exercise scientists.

00:59:42.200 | There are very few female strength conditioning coaches,

00:59:45.760 | but that number is coming down at an astronomical rate.

00:59:49.980 | You have people that are being hired in every sport.

00:59:54.080 | You pick the NFL, you pick Major League Baseball.

00:59:56.380 | Every few months, we're hearing first female hired for this,

00:59:59.620 | first female hired for that.

01:00:01.080 | The Yankees, Rachel, Rachel Belkovich, fantastic.

01:00:05.940 | You know, yeah-

01:00:06.780 | - Yeah, Rachel's been out to my lab.

01:00:07.780 | She's terrific.

01:00:08.620 | - Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, she's fantastic.

01:00:10.420 | I mean, she's now being hired as the,

01:00:12.140 | I think she's a hitting coach now, actual sport coach.

01:00:14.460 | She's gonna be a GM, right?

01:00:15.660 | That's just her goal.

01:00:16.500 | She's a terminator.

01:00:17.900 | So that's already happening,

01:00:19.120 | and my students that are coming through our program

01:00:20.820 | are getting placed in these roles.

01:00:22.500 | They haven't gotten through yet a lot

01:00:25.340 | in terms of being an actual scientist,

01:00:27.700 | but they're getting there.

01:00:29.000 | Sports scientists in the NBA are being hired,

01:00:31.700 | females in terms of like big data collection,

01:00:33.580 | sports science and tech we'll cover in another discussion.

01:00:37.660 | But I think it's happening,

01:00:39.220 | whether or not the cultural and social,

01:00:42.300 | I can't speak to that end of the equation.

01:00:44.380 | What I can speak to, though,

01:00:46.020 | is one of the things I think is most fun

01:00:48.820 | coming forward scientifically is,

01:00:51.500 | you know, a number of years ago,

01:00:52.620 | the NIH came through with their mandates

01:00:55.580 | of saying it's no longer acceptable to exclude women

01:00:58.760 | from scientific research, right?

01:01:00.220 | 'Cause we just did that for decades.

01:01:03.020 | - Well, what happened, just to fill this in,

01:01:05.900 | 'cause I think it's worth noting,

01:01:07.060 | is that for many years, studies even on rodents

01:01:11.420 | were mainly carried out on male rodents

01:01:13.960 | because the assumption,

01:01:15.760 | and the assumption turned out to be wrong,

01:01:17.300 | but the assumption was that the physiology of female rodents

01:01:21.420 | because they don't have a menstrual cycle,

01:01:22.820 | it's not 28 days, they have an estrus cycle,

01:01:24.380 | it's four days, a different type of cycle,

01:01:27.220 | that that would somehow disrupt the data.

01:01:29.420 | It turns out that that's entirely wrong.

01:01:31.300 | Now it's actually required.

01:01:33.780 | When you sit on a grant study panel,

01:01:35.580 | which is the people who evaluate grants,

01:01:37.540 | they ask, they literally say,

01:01:39.180 | did they meet the criteria for sex as a biological variable?

01:01:42.660 | Here, we're not talking about sex as the verb,

01:01:43.980 | we're talking about biological sex.

01:01:46.500 | And if you don't say yes,

01:01:48.260 | that's a strong hit against the grant.

01:01:50.240 | And if you say yes, then it checks off that box.

01:01:53.380 | So it's now required that both male and female rodents

01:01:56.360 | and humans be studied in a given study,

01:01:58.160 | unless the study is specifically geared

01:02:00.100 | toward understanding that it only exists

01:02:01.380 | in one or the other populations,

01:02:03.820 | such as menopause, for instance,

01:02:06.220 | menstrual cycle, andropause, for instance.

01:02:09.660 | But this is extremely important.

01:02:11.700 | I'm excited to hear that.

01:02:13.740 | - So where I was gonna go with that is actually,

01:02:15.660 | so that was step one, which is cool.

01:02:17.580 | You gotta include 'em.

01:02:18.540 | Where we haven't gotten to yet,

01:02:20.460 | but I've seen more and more grant applications

01:02:22.500 | come through for this.

01:02:23.420 | It's just the funding hasn't hit yet,

01:02:24.680 | which is it's one thing to let women be in the same studies.

01:02:28.880 | That's great.

01:02:29.780 | It's another thing, though,

01:02:30.660 | to start performing high-performance research

01:02:33.620 | specifically for female questions.

01:02:35.940 | That has not happened yet.

01:02:37.040 | And that's just like a funding issue, right?

01:02:38.460 | We haven't gotten money yet.

01:02:39.980 | People aren't supporting that.

01:02:41.160 | We don't get a lot of financial support for sports science.

01:02:43.780 | But we can't track down the money yet

01:02:45.340 | of me going, I wanna do a study in female athletes

01:02:48.120 | that answers female athlete questions.

01:02:50.540 | These won't help men.

01:02:51.660 | These are questions specific to the female.

01:02:53.980 | That's the next step, right?

01:02:55.100 | That's where we gotta get to so we can say,

01:02:57.340 | maybe we should do things differently

01:02:59.300 | around training and recovery,

01:03:01.780 | or we shouldn't, or it doesn't matter.

01:03:03.580 | There's a handful of, not lower quality,

01:03:06.980 | but some studies, I don't love them yet.

01:03:10.780 | There just needs to be a ton of work.

01:03:12.400 | Birth control is a very good example, right?

01:03:15.540 | The information for women at female athletes,

01:03:19.040 | or even just like hard exercises,

01:03:20.800 | you don't have to be a competitive athlete,

01:03:22.460 | around what is birth control doing?

01:03:24.260 | What types?

01:03:25.100 | How should I manage that?

01:03:25.980 | What conversations should I be having with my doctor?

01:03:28.580 | Almost nothing.

01:03:30.260 | Like women have nothing to go on for high-performance stuff.

01:03:32.700 | So what if I'm trying to compete in an event or run a race?

01:03:36.460 | Like all those types of questions should be answered.

01:03:39.940 | Normative value, normative data, performance testing,

01:03:43.540 | like it's just not there on the female.

01:03:45.180 | So that's an area I think,

01:03:46.460 | like if somebody really wanted to make a change,

01:03:49.020 | the scientists wanna do it.

01:03:50.060 | I know, I've talked to so many in our field

01:03:52.060 | that would really love to explore it,

01:03:54.280 | because it's getting there.

01:03:56.140 | Like I said, the coaching side is getting there.

01:03:58.460 | They're seeing it, they're hiring these people.

01:04:00.000 | I've seen it in my students.

01:04:01.480 | You know, my following is not all men.

01:04:05.660 | Like it's a very large percentage of females,

01:04:07.520 | and all I do is post about exercise science.

01:04:09.780 | I'm like, this is all I do.

01:04:11.140 | - Well, this podcast is very,

01:04:13.140 | we know very clearly the audience is 50% women, 50% men.

01:04:17.340 | - That's right. - Which is great.

01:04:19.140 | - So just to jump back on our history discussion

01:04:21.420 | and to finish that point of where we're at now

01:04:23.380 | and where I think we're going to go, or should go.

01:04:26.500 | So we walked through the bodybuilding,

01:04:29.300 | kind of running everything,

01:04:30.260 | and people walking into a gym,

01:04:31.660 | anytime they lift weights,

01:04:32.820 | they're making all of their choices

01:04:35.520 | based on the assumption that maximizing muscle size

01:04:37.940 | is the goal.

01:04:39.000 | And clearly that's not the case.

01:04:40.380 | There are other adaptations you may be after.

01:04:43.760 | So we talked about how that had problems,

01:04:45.660 | and then we talked about how some of these other forms

01:04:48.000 | of exercise filled those gaps,

01:04:50.580 | and then what problems those things introduced.

01:04:53.780 | Well, I think we're actually at a point

01:04:55.060 | where that pendulum is kind of slowly shifting

01:04:57.360 | into the middle.

01:04:58.380 | What I mean by that is,

01:04:59.580 | if you want to maximize muscle strength,

01:05:01.100 | we look towards the powerlifting community.

01:05:02.860 | If you want to maximize muscle power,

01:05:05.100 | we're going to look to the weightlifting community.

01:05:06.780 | If you want to look for muscular endurance,

01:05:08.960 | or well-roundedness,

01:05:09.800 | maybe we look into the CrossFit communities

01:05:11.460 | and some of these obstacle course races,

01:05:13.500 | or functionality things.

01:05:14.420 | So what we can do now is generate protocols

01:05:18.100 | that get us the exact adaptations we want,

01:05:20.900 | and not ones we don't want,

01:05:22.740 | because we can look back at each of these different styles

01:05:25.820 | of training and pick and choose optimal protocols

01:05:29.120 | or combinations for them.

01:05:30.100 | So if somebody simply wants to get healthy,

01:05:32.620 | like we talked about when we listed the nine adaptations,

01:05:35.540 | and I mentioned health wasn't one of them,

01:05:37.580 | that's because what determines your health

01:05:39.980 | versus what determines my optimal health differs.

01:05:42.380 | So if I need more hypertrophy,

01:05:44.280 | I can look towards bodybuilding concepts.

01:05:46.200 | But if I have enough,

01:05:47.440 | or maybe for personal reasons,

01:05:48.860 | I decide I have too much,

01:05:50.180 | or I don't want to add any more,

01:05:52.040 | then I can say,

01:05:52.880 | "Hey, how can I get stronger without getting bigger?"

01:05:55.460 | And boom, I look towards powerlifting concepts.

01:05:57.620 | How can I get more powerful?

01:05:58.860 | How can I get faster,

01:06:00.540 | but I don't, again, want to lose fat?

01:06:03.080 | Okay, great.

01:06:03.920 | Or if I want physique changes.

01:06:05.020 | So we have all these different areas

01:06:06.580 | we can pick and choose from

01:06:08.860 | that have expertise in specific adaptations

01:06:11.620 | and develop ourselves perfect protocols

01:06:14.500 | based on that information.

01:06:16.020 | - I'd like to take a brief break

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01:06:38.540 | One issue with a lot of blood tests

01:06:39.860 | and DNA tests out there, however,

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01:06:57.160 | but then also what sorts of behavioral do's and don'ts,

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01:07:18.180 | So with the understanding in mind as to how we all,

01:07:21.360 | myself included, arrived at such lopsided fitness,

01:07:26.300 | too much endurance, not enough strength,

01:07:27.740 | too much strength, not enough endurance,

01:07:29.860 | and it's really hard to imagine

01:07:30.740 | that anyone's perfect in this regard,

01:07:34.140 | can you walk us through the nine different adaptations

01:07:36.500 | that you mentioned earlier

01:07:37.980 | and give us a way to assess our level of ability

01:07:42.980 | or our level of adaptation in each of those nine?

01:07:47.380 | - All right, the very first one we wanna talk about

01:07:48.860 | is movement skill.

01:07:50.340 | Now, set aside sport specific,

01:07:53.200 | so I'm not gonna give you an assessment

01:07:54.580 | for optimal golf technique, swing,

01:07:57.060 | is this really about human movement

01:07:58.660 | so that you stay injury-free

01:08:00.500 | and you can continue to train for as long as possible?

01:08:02.720 | So what are the minimum requirements?

01:08:03.980 | Now, if you can have access

01:08:06.100 | to a highly qualified physical therapist

01:08:08.820 | or movement specialist, that's the best route, right?

01:08:11.620 | Go to them, have them identify

01:08:14.700 | all of your movement patterns, overhead pressing,

01:08:16.700 | squatting, running, all these things,

01:08:19.340 | that's your gold standard.

01:08:20.580 | If you wanna do it yourself though,

01:08:22.100 | here's a very simple four-step solution.

01:08:25.660 | So the way that I teach this is I go joint by joint.

01:08:28.620 | And so I think of this just as the major ones,

01:08:30.860 | your shoulder, your elbow, your low back,

01:08:34.340 | hip, knee, and ankle, okay?

01:08:36.780 | Now, what you can do is do a representative movement for you.

01:08:39.980 | So if you bench a lot, use the bench.

01:08:41.940 | If you do pull-ups, use the pull-up.

01:08:44.260 | If you squat, do that.

01:08:45.580 | I would recommend doing an upper body press,

01:08:48.020 | an upper body pull, a lower body press, lower body pull.

01:08:51.340 | An example would be a push-up, a pull-up or a bent row,

01:08:56.020 | a squat, and then a deadlift.

01:08:58.460 | That would be a very, very well-rounded approach.

01:09:01.700 | What you're going to do is do that movement,

01:09:03.220 | and I would record it for yourself,

01:09:05.420 | and record a frontal view and a side view.

01:09:09.260 | Probably do three to 10 repetitions per angle, okay?

01:09:13.940 | Slow and controlled, you don't need any body weight.

01:09:16.620 | What you wanna do is move,

01:09:17.740 | and you wanna look for four key things at every joint.

01:09:21.740 | So again, imagine I'm doing a squat.

01:09:24.180 | I'm gonna do a squat, and I'm gonna focus on just my ankle.

01:09:26.780 | And I'm gonna look for these four things at the ankle.

01:09:28.980 | And then I'm gonna go back and watch my knee,

01:09:31.220 | and look for these same four things at the knee,

01:09:33.500 | through the hip, et cetera, all right?

01:09:35.380 | So what are these four things?

01:09:36.580 | Number one is you wanna look for symmetry.

01:09:39.020 | So symmetry is front to back, left to right,

01:09:42.220 | and your right limb and your left limb, all right?

01:09:45.480 | And so what we wanna look for are,

01:09:47.780 | if they aren't moving perfectly, that's fine.

01:09:49.880 | But you wanna see,

01:09:50.720 | is one moving further ahead than the other one?

01:09:52.780 | Is one turning to the side and one's not?

01:09:55.660 | Is one fidgeting and twitching around differently?

01:09:59.060 | So you wanna look just to check,

01:10:00.820 | to see and make sure that they're stable, that's one.

01:10:03.340 | Number two, you wanna look for stability.

01:10:05.900 | So key indicators here are things like,

01:10:07.780 | if you can't control a squat,

01:10:10.920 | a controlled squat where your knees don't start shaking,

01:10:14.060 | like that would be an instability issue.

01:10:15.540 | So can you do the movement slow?

01:10:17.900 | Can you pause at the bottom, maybe three seconds,

01:10:19.880 | maybe five seconds or 10?

01:10:21.260 | You should have complete control

01:10:23.580 | of that movement at all of these joints.

01:10:25.580 | Are your hips sliding to one side when you stand up?

01:10:29.060 | Is one elbow closer to your body when you're benching

01:10:32.660 | and the other one's more flared out?

01:10:33.800 | These are the things I'm talking about, right?

01:10:35.620 | I'm not worried about what angle they should be at or not.

01:10:39.140 | You're simply looking for asymmetries or instabilities.

01:10:41.980 | All right, so again, as you're pushing up,

01:10:43.540 | does one elbow start flipping and twitching

01:10:45.500 | and going all over the place?

01:10:47.020 | The third one is what I call awareness.

01:10:49.440 | So there are a lot of movement technique issues

01:10:52.940 | that are simply people don't know.

01:10:54.580 | And so you'll watch them squat.

01:10:55.860 | I do this in my classes all the time.

01:10:57.280 | I'll have 100 kids out there squatting

01:10:59.460 | and you'll see some horrible squat technique.

01:11:01.060 | And then when you just tell them,

01:11:02.400 | hey, did you realize your heels are supposed to be

01:11:04.620 | on the ground at all times when you squat?

01:11:06.260 | Like, oh, okay.

01:11:07.340 | And they can correct it.

01:11:08.180 | It's not actually a movement flaw.

01:11:09.460 | It was just simply an awareness.

01:11:11.020 | I didn't know and then I actually didn't realize

01:11:13.280 | that that was happening in that position.

01:11:15.220 | So we want all of our joints to be going

01:11:16.960 | through a general full range of motion, which is number four.

01:11:19.940 | So the ankles during like a squat,

01:11:22.300 | your knees should be able to go

01:11:23.260 | as far over your toe as possible

01:11:25.160 | while maintaining good position,

01:11:26.620 | your feet flat on the floor, your three points of contact,

01:11:30.180 | your whole foot foot,

01:11:31.500 | and you're not compromising another joint.

01:11:33.440 | So that's all you're going to look for, those four things.

01:11:35.700 | Symmetry, stability, awareness, and range of motion

01:11:40.700 | through each joint, through each movement.

01:11:42.820 | It sounds difficult and time consuming.

01:11:46.420 | It's really not, right?

01:11:47.380 | You can generally kind of clear these things

01:11:49.220 | in one or two repetitions in a couple of seconds.

01:11:51.700 | And what you're really going to look for,

01:11:53.100 | there's lots of scoring schemes.

01:11:54.660 | You can test that your physical therapist will sort of you.

01:11:57.860 | I just look for absolutely terrible.

01:12:01.420 | Like can't do it at all.

01:12:03.040 | Minor flaw or pretty close to good.

01:12:05.600 | But that's really all I'm looking for.

01:12:06.820 | So my scoring system is zero, one, three.

01:12:08.380 | Zero is like, you're not going to do this exercise

01:12:10.580 | 'cause you're at a very high acute risk.

01:12:12.340 | You might get hurt on rep one tomorrow.

01:12:14.660 | Number one, like a score of one is like,

01:12:17.560 | there's a minor flaw here.

01:12:18.860 | We can probably do it, but we need to be cautious of load

01:12:21.740 | and volume.

01:12:22.600 | The other one is maybe it's perfect, maybe it's not,

01:12:25.780 | but go ahead and sort of do it on a reasonable protocol.

01:12:29.140 | You'll be fine.

01:12:30.220 | So that's generally what you would need to do

01:12:32.340 | is a cost-free method of identifying good movement technique

01:12:36.140 | within any of the things that you would do.

01:12:38.660 | - What about speed?

01:12:40.140 | - I actually don't think this is one

01:12:41.340 | most people should test.

01:12:42.580 | If you're a high performance athlete,

01:12:43.980 | we can run a 40-yard dash or we can do some different things

01:12:47.820 | with a velocity transducer on a barbell,

01:12:50.700 | if you're a weightlifter or something.

01:12:52.100 | For most people, pure speed is really maximum velocity

01:12:56.180 | or acceleration or kind of the two ways we break it down.

01:12:59.720 | It's generally not that necessary to test.

01:13:02.300 | - What about number three, power,

01:13:04.640 | which I believe before you told me was speed times force.

01:13:08.420 | - So the reason why I don't worry too much about speed

01:13:10.480 | is because you can infer a lot of it from a power test

01:13:13.100 | and a power test is easier to do

01:13:15.300 | as well as easier to train for for most people.

01:13:17.500 | So the cost-free version here is a simple broad jump.

01:13:21.700 | So this is stand with normal position,

01:13:25.420 | jump out as far in front of you as you possibly can

01:13:27.660 | and measure the distance between where you started

01:13:29.800 | and the back of your heel where it lands.

01:13:31.940 | A super basic number to look for there is your height.

01:13:36.200 | So you should be able to broad jump how tall you are.

01:13:38.540 | If you're five foot five, you should have five foot five,

01:13:40.700 | six foot five, et cetera.

01:13:42.220 | It's not perfect.

01:13:43.580 | That's gonna ratchet down a little bit,

01:13:45.860 | about 15% for females.

01:13:48.100 | They just simply don't have the power in general

01:13:50.780 | that men have.

01:13:51.620 | And so you're gonna wanna bring that down a little bit,

01:13:53.180 | but that's a very crude number.

01:13:54.980 | If you were to look at like a high performance NFL player,

01:13:58.700 | if they're six feet tall,

01:13:59.860 | they're gonna be jumping like nine to 10 to 11 feet.

01:14:02.880 | If you can jump your body height,

01:14:05.220 | we're not looking for optimization in this particular test,

01:14:07.580 | what you are looking for red flags.

01:14:09.380 | If you can jump your body height, you're gonna be just fine.

01:14:13.740 | - That's incredibly straightforward.

01:14:15.460 | And yet I have one question.

01:14:17.300 | I'm assuming that I can squat down as low as I need to

01:14:20.020 | before I jump.

01:14:20.920 | I can swing my arms from back to front as harder

01:14:25.340 | with as much momentum as I can muster.

01:14:28.820 | And when I land, you said I'm gonna take the measure

01:14:30.940 | from where the back of my heels.

01:14:32.720 | - You wanna measure the distance you actually covered.

01:14:34.620 | So to clarify, there's no running approach here.

01:14:37.420 | There's no steps into it.

01:14:39.540 | You're gonna stand at a still.

01:14:41.100 | Yeah, you can swing, bounce as much as you'd like to do.

01:14:44.020 | You're gonna projectile off.

01:14:45.060 | So you're gonna measure the distance

01:14:45.940 | from the tip of your toe.

01:14:46.760 | So basically stand behind the line

01:14:49.340 | and then the furthest point back where you land.

01:14:52.660 | So basically the worst possible score, not the best possible

01:14:56.580 | 'cause your feet won't land symmetrically.

01:14:58.500 | One's probably gonna be a little bit farther.

01:15:00.700 | Now, technically, if you fall backwards

01:15:02.620 | and your hand touches the ground, we mark that number.

01:15:04.580 | But in this case, just use the furthest point back

01:15:08.680 | of your back heel and go from there.

01:15:10.860 | - I'll be drawing it tomorrow morning.

01:15:12.380 | - Now, if you have access to a little bit more technology

01:15:15.340 | or you just really wanna know a better number,

01:15:17.660 | a classic vertical jump is a good starting place.

01:15:21.060 | So you can actually do this in a simple cost-free way.

01:15:23.840 | You can just measure two of your hands, put them together

01:15:26.480 | so that both of your middle fingers are touching.

01:15:29.100 | Overlap them and put them directly over your head, okay?

01:15:31.900 | And then you kinda wanna reach up as high as you can get.

01:15:33.820 | And you mark that on the wall.

01:15:36.000 | My brother and I used to do this all the time.

01:15:37.500 | We would take a highlighter, the yellow ones,

01:15:40.920 | and color as much as we can on our fingertips,

01:15:43.180 | touch the wall so that the highlighter

01:15:45.020 | would stay in the wall.

01:15:46.240 | If you actually go back to my house from my childhood,

01:15:48.620 | you'll see these markers all over our house.

01:15:51.660 | - I'm sure your parents were thrilled.

01:15:53.000 | - My dad didn't care.

01:15:54.240 | Single, he didn't care.

01:15:55.220 | He's just like, "Whatever you guys do, whatever you want."

01:15:57.380 | So you wanna measure that.

01:15:58.260 | And then, of course, you're gonna jump

01:15:59.740 | with those two hands and touch as high as you can up.

01:16:02.620 | And you're gonna measure the distance

01:16:03.540 | between your standing reach

01:16:05.520 | and the actual height that you jumped there.

01:16:08.300 | Now, the reason you're doing it two-handed, by the way,

01:16:10.100 | is because if you do one-handed,

01:16:11.620 | you can actually reach pretty high

01:16:13.160 | by offsetting your shoulders.

01:16:15.100 | And now you're getting into differences

01:16:16.740 | of who has more shoulder mobility,

01:16:18.980 | who has the ability to kinda get up there.

01:16:20.780 | A two-handed standard approach is there.

01:16:24.080 | Same thing, no running approach here.

01:16:26.420 | You can dip, you can drive, and do all those things.

01:16:28.660 | You can swing your arms,

01:16:29.520 | but you're gonna be a two-handed touch

01:16:31.700 | is a general way to do that.

01:16:33.100 | You wanna look for a number

01:16:35.340 | of something like 24 inches or higher.

01:16:38.200 | If you're past the age of 50,

01:16:40.280 | that number can come down a little bit to closer to 20.

01:16:43.120 | And again, for females,

01:16:44.240 | it's gonna be ratcheted down about 15%

01:16:47.200 | everywhere you wanna go.

01:16:48.040 | If you're a middle-aged female

01:16:51.000 | and you're jumping 20 inches,

01:16:53.240 | you're in a pretty good spot.

01:16:54.640 | You're gonna be looking really nice there.

01:16:55.920 | So now, if you can do that on a force plate,

01:16:58.800 | that's even better.

01:16:59.880 | So these are very, basically, scales

01:17:02.640 | that will go out to multiple digits,

01:17:04.460 | sometimes five to nine digits past zero.

01:17:07.040 | And you're gonna stand on these things,

01:17:08.000 | you can do the exact same test.

01:17:09.200 | And these are very interesting

01:17:10.180 | because they'll tell you not only how high you jump,

01:17:12.420 | but they'll tell you how much force you put into the ground.

01:17:14.680 | They can also tell you how long it took you.

01:17:16.920 | This is called your rate of force development,

01:17:19.180 | as well as impulse and speed and a bunch of other stuff,

01:17:21.720 | which are important to help you understand

01:17:24.040 | where on the power spectrum you need to be.

01:17:27.600 | So you would do that in addition

01:17:29.600 | to using some sort of velocity transducer on a barbell.

01:17:32.900 | So a very classic thing to do would be,

01:17:35.620 | let's say you're gonna do a squat

01:17:37.280 | and you're gonna put this device on the barbell,

01:17:40.000 | and that's gonna measure the speed at which the barbell moves

01:17:42.920 | and you're gonna do that at 40%

01:17:44.200 | of your one repetition max, 50%, 60%, 70, 80, 90, up to 100.

01:17:49.160 | And that allows you to create

01:17:50.400 | what's called a force velocity curve.

01:17:52.720 | And you can start to see at what point

01:17:54.540 | when you start loading things heavy,

01:17:56.440 | do you start slowing down too much?

01:17:58.800 | And that'll tell you what part of the force velocity curve

01:18:01.480 | that you wanna train to optimize your power.

01:18:04.040 | Why that's important?

01:18:05.480 | A lot of people will do things like when I'm training

01:18:07.400 | for power, how heavy should I lift?

01:18:09.360 | Well, the general answer people say is 30%

01:18:11.820 | of your one rep max, but that's actually not true at all.

01:18:14.320 | What's most optimal for power development,

01:18:16.320 | which we'll discuss more much later,

01:18:19.400 | is depending on where you're flawed

01:18:21.080 | in the force velocity curve.

01:18:22.300 | So if you have access to technology like that,

01:18:25.280 | that can give you a lot more insight and information.

01:18:27.220 | If not, do the broad jump test

01:18:29.400 | or the highlighter on your fingertips

01:18:31.780 | and jump and touch the wall test.

01:18:33.800 | - At Andy Yalpin's house.

01:18:35.520 | - Hey, just, you know what, come along.

01:18:36.720 | There's already, the walls are already messed up.

01:18:38.640 | Just go ahead and come up to Washington and we'll do it.

01:18:41.200 | - Fantastic.

01:18:42.040 | What about strength?

01:18:44.840 | - Right, so strength is really important.

01:18:46.160 | You need to measure this in multiple areas

01:18:48.360 | and we'll start off with grip strength.

01:18:50.200 | Okay, so you can do this in two ways.

01:18:52.140 | You can buy a hand grip dynamometer.

01:18:53.940 | Now these are anywhere between 20 to $100 anywhere.

01:18:58.340 | These actually used to be like when I was in school,

01:19:00.440 | like hundreds of dollars.

01:19:01.600 | Now you can literally buy them on any website for 25 bucks.

01:19:04.760 | So my honest recommendation is technically

01:19:06.560 | that's not cost-free.

01:19:07.900 | I know your whole thing about the cost-free protocols,

01:19:10.000 | but 25 bucks, I'm calling that basically cost-free.

01:19:13.640 | You can bring that in and test that

01:19:14.680 | and that's just a little device where you're gonna squeeze

01:19:16.640 | and you're gonna do, and I would do your right hand

01:19:18.140 | and your left hand.

01:19:19.560 | You wanna look for asymmetries there,

01:19:21.660 | but you wanna look for something like,

01:19:23.520 | typically those are, they're gonna give you a value

01:19:25.660 | in kilograms.

01:19:27.520 | And you wanna look for something like a minimum score here

01:19:31.080 | of 40 kilograms.

01:19:32.540 | Ideally you're up past 60,

01:19:34.280 | would be a really good spot to be in.

01:19:36.620 | You wanna make sure that there's no less than 10% variation

01:19:39.080 | between your left and right hand.

01:19:40.400 | Your non-dominant hand actually shouldn't be

01:19:42.440 | that much weaker in this test.

01:19:44.040 | So what you'll actually see a lot of times

01:19:45.520 | is the non-dominant can be oftentimes stronger

01:19:47.920 | because the dominant hand is more for movement,

01:19:50.800 | precision, writing, things like that.

01:19:53.060 | So you want them to be close.

01:19:54.660 | If you are a male and you're under 40 kilograms

01:19:57.280 | on a hand grip dynamometer,

01:19:59.620 | like we're gonna need to train that.

01:20:01.640 | If you're a female, it's not that much lower,

01:20:03.660 | but about 35 kilograms is the cutoff point.

01:20:07.220 | If you're above 55, we can add it to your training,

01:20:11.320 | but I'm not worried about leaving it out of your training.

01:20:13.020 | If you're a female, if it's above 50,

01:20:14.500 | that's my sort of cutoff of where we wanna go.

01:20:17.180 | So that's a fairly cheap one.

01:20:18.880 | Another one that you can actually do is just a dead hang.

01:20:21.680 | So you can hold onto any bar,

01:20:23.160 | ideally one that is thin enough

01:20:25.680 | to where you can wrap your whole hand around it.

01:20:27.340 | So you don't wanna be using a giant fat grip.

01:20:30.940 | You're gonna have a false reading here.

01:20:32.540 | So something like going to the gym

01:20:34.680 | and jumping on any pull-up bar or pull-up rack.

01:20:38.740 | And you wanna hang, and this is a simple time test.

01:20:40.860 | So in general, we should be able to hang

01:20:43.480 | for a minimum of 30 seconds is what we're looking for.

01:20:47.640 | 30 to kind of 50 seconds is my like good,

01:20:51.580 | but we could probably get better here.

01:20:53.580 | If you're cruising above 60 seconds,

01:20:55.200 | I'm generally pretty happy.

01:20:57.780 | This is actually a good example

01:20:59.020 | of when females tend to be better.

01:21:02.060 | Grip strength in women tends to be strong

01:21:03.780 | and they can hang for quite a long time.

01:21:05.720 | So those standards don't really change that much for women.

01:21:09.620 | Now, if you are exceptionally large,

01:21:12.440 | this thing doesn't scale perfectly.

01:21:14.500 | If you're 240 pounds and even if you're lean,

01:21:17.260 | it's just hard to hang and hold 240 pounds.

01:21:20.180 | Conversely, if you're 145 pounds, even if you're unhealthy,

01:21:25.020 | you're gonna be able to hang for a long time.

01:21:26.300 | It's just not that much weight to carry.

01:21:27.680 | So just rough numbers to start off with.

01:21:30.980 | - So that's grip strength.

01:21:32.180 | What about strength elsewhere in the body?

01:21:34.280 | - The primary ones,

01:21:35.560 | you can do an upper body strength test if you would like,

01:21:37.720 | although it's not technically something we do very often.

01:21:41.380 | Happy to do one on max bench press

01:21:43.040 | or something like that, that's great.

01:21:44.500 | The more, one I'm generally more interested in

01:21:46.360 | is a leg extension test.

01:21:47.980 | And the reason I like this is a back squat is better.

01:21:51.260 | A barbell back squat is, look, that's my like,

01:21:53.780 | that's my jam, that's my life, right?

01:21:55.740 | It's just very technically demanding.

01:21:57.700 | And it's challenging, you need spotters, you need comfort.

01:22:01.060 | A lot goes into this.

01:22:03.300 | So for the average person,

01:22:04.580 | a leg extension test is fairly standardized.

01:22:07.540 | You don't have to worry about technique

01:22:08.680 | and people can just get into it and go.

01:22:10.900 | And so what you wanna look for there

01:22:13.340 | is a couple of standards you wanna hit.

01:22:15.820 | Again, a very simple answer here is body weight.

01:22:19.100 | Can you do a leg extension with your body weight?

01:22:21.380 | - One repetition?

01:22:23.380 | - One repetition.

01:22:24.540 | - I can answer that right now.

01:22:25.820 | - Can you? - No.

01:22:26.900 | - You can?

01:22:27.740 | - No, I can hack squat a reasonable amount of weight,

01:22:30.220 | but I was on the leg extension this morning

01:22:32.580 | and I was a Nautilus machine

01:22:34.820 | and I certainly could not leg extension my body weight.

01:22:37.820 | - Let me clarify, were you doing a single leg?

01:22:40.800 | - No.

01:22:41.640 | - So by ladder, you can't leg extension your body weight?

01:22:43.340 | - No, but I certainly can hamstring curl my body weight.

01:22:46.580 | - Oh, okay.

01:22:47.420 | So we maybe have some deficiencies in our quads

01:22:50.540 | that we need to go after here.

01:22:52.080 | But that's a pretty good number you wanna be at.

01:22:53.940 | If you go up in age past age 40,

01:22:56.200 | every decade that can come down about 10%

01:22:59.580 | and you'll still be in a pretty good slot.

01:23:01.080 | So if you're 50 years old and you're 170 pounds,

01:23:05.740 | if you can do 160, you're in a pretty good sort of spot.

01:23:08.240 | And then you can just, again, take it down about 10%

01:23:10.940 | every decade after 40.

01:23:12.360 | But prior to 40, there's really no change in strength,

01:23:16.360 | but certainly somebody in their 40s to 50s

01:23:19.140 | should be able to leg extension their body weight.

01:23:21.860 | - Noted.

01:23:23.080 | (laughing)

01:23:23.920 | I look forward to our discussion a bit later,

01:23:26.500 | talking about how to build strength.

01:23:28.040 | - Any of these strength tests,

01:23:29.820 | they don't have to be done to a technical true one rep max.

01:23:32.900 | You can use what are called repetition conversion equation.

01:23:36.260 | So put on a load that you think is kind of close

01:23:39.880 | to your maximum and just do it for as many reps as you can.

01:23:42.620 | As long as it's under five reps total,

01:23:44.980 | you can then actually go online

01:23:46.420 | and enter that into any number of calculators anywhere.

01:23:49.300 | And it will tell you, okay, you did three repetitions

01:23:51.860 | at 200 pounds, your one rep max is probably 215, whatever.

01:23:56.660 | So there's estimate equations.

01:23:57.900 | So if you don't wanna spend the time

01:23:59.700 | or you're not truly comfortable,

01:24:00.780 | like absolutely going to your true one rep max,

01:24:03.820 | just get to a number that's fairly close

01:24:05.980 | and do as many as you can, and then go online.

01:24:08.060 | Again, one rep max estimator equations are everywhere.

01:24:12.060 | If you get past five repetitions or so,

01:24:14.860 | the accuracy of those equations starts going down.

01:24:18.160 | So don't put on something and go, I did 12 reps of it,

01:24:21.620 | and then try to figure out your one rep max.

01:24:23.020 | It'll get close.

01:24:23.860 | You start moving past that,

01:24:24.820 | you're just getting worse and worse and worse accuracy.

01:24:26.980 | So I wanna make sure whether you're doing

01:24:28.660 | the leg extension test or a front squat test,

01:24:31.540 | you don't technically have to do an absolute one rep max.

01:24:35.200 | If neither of those are an option.

01:24:36.900 | Another one I like a lot here is simply a front squat

01:24:41.040 | or a goblet squat hold.

01:24:42.900 | So you're gonna hold a weight in front of your chest,

01:24:44.880 | whether a kettlebell is great here,

01:24:46.380 | a dumbbell is fine here,

01:24:47.800 | and you wanna hold about half of your body weight,

01:24:51.140 | go all the way to the bottom position

01:24:52.540 | and try to hold that for about 45 seconds.

01:24:55.820 | So it's a pretty good indicator of,

01:24:58.960 | number one, your position.

01:25:00.140 | It's hard to be in a bad position for that long at that load

01:25:02.660 | as well as core strength and low back stability.

01:25:05.140 | So it's a very different indicator

01:25:07.620 | than say the leg extension test, but it's a really nice one.

01:25:10.300 | So it doesn't require many moving parts.

01:25:13.120 | It's more difficult than the leg extension,

01:25:15.040 | but it's quite a bit more functional

01:25:16.800 | and it's gonna give you insight into a lot more areas

01:25:19.500 | than just the quadriceps.

01:25:20.840 | - So 45 seconds down at the bottom of the squat

01:25:23.540 | and then returning to a standing position.

01:25:25.180 | - Yep.

01:25:26.300 | And if you can't do the return,

01:25:28.260 | I actually, I'm not that worried,

01:25:29.860 | but as long as you can hold that good position

01:25:31.620 | without a technical breakdown in that 45 seconds,

01:25:34.260 | that's a really good spot.

01:25:36.400 | As an intro, I want a third of your body weight

01:25:38.820 | for 30 seconds.

01:25:40.080 | - Terrific.

01:25:40.920 | I plan to attempt all of those strength tests very soon.

01:25:45.340 | What about hypertrophy?

01:25:46.800 | - Sure.

01:25:47.700 | Actually, before we get into that,

01:25:48.680 | I wanna jump back really quickly.

01:25:50.020 | It's important to add a couple of caveats

01:25:51.900 | to the strength training stuff.

01:25:53.020 | So there's two that I wanna do.

01:25:54.800 | Number one,

01:25:55.640 | these are assuming you are technically proficient.

01:25:59.820 | So I don't want you to do any exercise to exhaustion

01:26:03.420 | or to maximum strength

01:26:05.080 | if you're not comfortable with your technique.

01:26:06.880 | So adjust these accordingly.

01:26:08.660 | If you're not comfortable with the front squat,

01:26:10.340 | do the leg extension.

01:26:11.180 | If you're not uncomfortable with that,

01:26:12.220 | do something different.

01:26:13.060 | So we never want to utilize maximum testing

01:26:16.120 | if it's gonna come with a consequence

01:26:18.940 | of serious acute injury.

01:26:20.260 | So that's the most important flag.

01:26:22.900 | The second one is your warmup protocol

01:26:26.100 | will have a huge effect on your actual results.

01:26:29.980 | And so whenever you do these tests,

01:26:31.440 | especially if you're gonna do a test

01:26:33.220 | and then a test again down the line,

01:26:34.900 | you wanna make sure that that warmup protocol

01:26:36.740 | is standardized.

01:26:38.180 | Now, again, the NSCA, and I can give you resources,

01:26:41.380 | has specific guides for exactly what to do

01:26:43.780 | for your warmup protocol prior to one rep max testing.

01:26:46.580 | So we can go there and you can look that stuff up.

01:26:48.800 | We could add that to show notes or something.

01:26:50.560 | - Yeah, and I think when we get into a deeper discussion

01:26:53.420 | about strength and hypertrophy

01:26:54.780 | and resistance training in general,

01:26:56.440 | if we could touch into the best warmup protocol.

01:26:58.660 | I know I have mine

01:26:59.540 | and I'm certain it's gonna be suboptimal

01:27:01.940 | based on everything.

01:27:03.460 | - Maybe that's causing a lot of problems.

01:27:04.300 | - Based on every conversation we've ever had

01:27:05.620 | where I learned all the things I'm doing incorrectly,

01:27:07.480 | but I do make changes on the basis of what you tell me.

01:27:09.700 | It's not incorrectly so much as it is like suboptimal.

01:27:13.620 | - That's a very kind way of telling me it's incorrect.

01:27:15.380 | Thank you.

01:27:16.980 | What about hypertrophy?

01:27:18.580 | - So the thing you wanna pay attention to here is

01:27:21.020 | you have the aesthetic portion of hypertrophy.

01:27:25.600 | That's entirely up to you.

01:27:26.980 | There is no rationale.

01:27:28.040 | You can decide what you feel like looks good

01:27:29.760 | or doesn't look good.

01:27:30.600 | That's irrelevant.

01:27:31.820 | There is a sufficient amount you need to have

01:27:34.900 | where below that is detrimental to your health,

01:27:37.260 | regardless of your outcomes.

01:27:38.620 | And so the best way to do this is a couple of ways.

01:27:41.580 | Any sort of body composition test can do this.

01:27:44.660 | So whether this is a scan through like a DEXA scan,

01:27:48.540 | which is a gold standard,

01:27:50.100 | or other ways of bioelectrical impedance or other ways.

01:27:55.020 | So there's a ton of different tests you can get

01:27:56.460 | that are pretty close.

01:27:57.940 | So what you wanna pay attention to

01:28:00.100 | when you get like a DEXA scan is a number called FFMI.

01:28:05.100 | And so that stands for fat-free mass index.

01:28:07.340 | So you can look at, again, any number of online calculators.

01:28:10.100 | These are all standard.

01:28:10.940 | So it doesn't actually matter where you pull them up.

01:28:12.460 | You don't have to worry about looking it up

01:28:14.340 | and whether or not it's right or not or something.

01:28:16.800 | And so that's gonna actually tell you

01:28:19.060 | if you have sufficient muscle math.

01:28:20.540 | And so a number you wanna look for in general

01:28:23.300 | is something like if you're a man,

01:28:24.580 | your FFMI should be something like 20 or higher.

01:28:28.580 | If you're a woman, you wanna look for something like 18.

01:28:31.420 | So those are the targets.

01:28:32.700 | If you get past like 24, 25 for a man,

01:28:36.380 | that's a lot of muscle mass, assuming you're reasonably lean.

01:28:39.340 | Now, if your FFMI is like 24, 25,

01:28:42.360 | but your body fat is like 40%,

01:28:44.760 | you're actually just a very, very large individual.

01:28:47.460 | You're not in a great spot.

01:28:49.540 | So when we say these sort of numbers,

01:28:51.340 | it's the assumption that you're probably sub 30% body fat

01:28:55.420 | for a man and sub 35 for a woman.

01:28:57.460 | So those are the numbers.

01:28:59.300 | There are online calculators.

01:29:00.620 | All you really need to know is your total body weight,

01:29:03.460 | your body fat percentage, and then your height.

01:29:05.860 | You can enter those three numbers

01:29:07.500 | and then they'll tell you your FFMI score

01:29:09.300 | and it'll correct for an adjusted value.

01:29:11.460 | And most of those will actually tell you

01:29:12.820 | the grading rubric and then say good, average, bad, et cetera.

01:29:16.100 | But those are the numbers we look at.

01:29:18.220 | If you are as a man sub 17, as a woman sub 15,

01:29:23.220 | now we're in an area of pretty severe

01:29:26.820 | physiological detriment for insufficient muscle.

01:29:29.620 | And some of our later discussions

01:29:31.300 | we'll talk about why that matters.

01:29:32.540 | - So that's not sub 17% body fat.

01:29:35.300 | That's just specifically the FFMI.

01:29:37.620 | - That's correct, yeah.

01:29:38.740 | - What about muscular endurance?

01:29:40.720 | Is this where you're gonna tell me I need to do walsets?

01:29:43.780 | - So this is really nice.

01:29:44.980 | You can do any number of tests here.

01:29:47.420 | A standard plank is a good testament of muscular endurance.

01:29:52.420 | So can you hold a front plank for 60 seconds?

01:29:55.940 | Can you hold a side plank for 45 seconds?

01:29:59.280 | Pretty easy.

01:30:00.300 | If you're able to do a pushup.

01:30:02.380 | So if you can't, that sort of tells you alone.

01:30:04.040 | It's actually interesting.

01:30:05.200 | If you can't do a single pushup,

01:30:06.540 | that's not a muscular endurance issue.

01:30:08.420 | That's actually now a strength issue.

01:30:09.940 | 'Cause that's a one or at max problem.

01:30:12.280 | So we want to be able to do, again, for a general male,

01:30:15.920 | we should have no problem doing

01:30:17.180 | 25 plus consecutive pushups.

01:30:19.900 | - I apologize for interrupting you,

01:30:21.220 | but as long as we're talking about pushups,

01:30:23.680 | you just mentioned form.

01:30:25.180 | Are we talking chest touching the ground?

01:30:28.100 | Elbows breaking right angles?

01:30:29.400 | What is a proper pushup according to your laboratory?

01:30:33.220 | - Unless you have a very specific reason

01:30:35.000 | to limit range of motion,

01:30:36.760 | I want all my testing done

01:30:37.980 | through a full joint range of motion.

01:30:40.600 | This is different for the person.

01:30:42.500 | So it's individualized to them.

01:30:43.940 | But in general, for a pushup,

01:30:45.220 | this would be a full complete lockout

01:30:47.400 | of the elbows on the top

01:30:48.660 | and a full chest touch or close to it at the ground.

01:30:52.780 | You can do it different.

01:30:53.900 | It doesn't really matter,

01:30:54.760 | but just keep it standard from your pre-test,

01:30:56.580 | your post-test, if you're trying to mark progress.

01:30:59.140 | But for us, unless we have a very specific reason,

01:31:01.300 | we're going full range of motion for all of these tests.

01:31:04.180 | - So 25 pushups for a male?

01:31:06.580 | - 25 pushups for a male is a standard.

01:31:08.820 | And even something like 10 is a number we're looking for.

01:31:11.280 | Again, it's kind of minimum categories

01:31:14.420 | for an upper body muscular endurance.

01:31:16.340 | - And not to get too down in the weeds,

01:31:17.980 | but I have observed other people,

01:31:20.700 | of course, never myself, no, I'm kidding,

01:31:22.220 | but observed other people pausing maybe at repetition 15,

01:31:26.160 | catching their breath and then continuing.

01:31:27.760 | Or are you saying continue like a piston?

01:31:31.380 | - That would be a failed test.

01:31:32.220 | - So no pauses. - Correct.

01:31:33.700 | - Just up, down, up, down,

01:31:35.500 | trying to hit at least 10, but ideally 25.

01:31:38.340 | - I learned this lesson in one of our studies

01:31:40.620 | probably nine years ago, where we didn't clarify that.

01:31:44.140 | And so we actually had an individual,

01:31:45.460 | he wasn't being nefarious.

01:31:47.700 | He just figured out if I do a couple,

01:31:50.400 | take a quick break and do a couple,

01:31:51.900 | he quadrupled his post-test results from his pre-test result

01:31:56.420 | because he figured out that little hack there.

01:31:59.280 | So you want to standardize it.

01:32:00.780 | It's not that I'm against

01:32:02.060 | or have some sort of strong belief.

01:32:03.780 | It's just trying to keep protocol standardized

01:32:06.060 | and which means any break, failed test.

01:32:08.560 | - So 10 to 25 pushups minimum for males.

01:32:12.400 | What about for females? - Yeah, so I'll clarify.

01:32:14.200 | If it's sub 10 for a man,

01:32:16.340 | that's again in your like very severe red flag problem.

01:32:19.900 | We really, really like to see a number above 25.

01:32:22.460 | Okay, that's where we're anchoring.

01:32:23.700 | Anything between 10 and 25 is like, yeah, but not severe.

01:32:28.700 | - It means they have work to do.

01:32:31.180 | - We have work to do.

01:32:32.300 | - And for females?

01:32:33.980 | - For a female, you're going to scale that sort of back.

01:32:35.540 | So a female, the answer could be as little as zero, right?

01:32:38.540 | So you're going to see that, can you do a full position?

01:32:41.160 | If they're in that position,

01:32:42.120 | we're generally not going to do

01:32:43.300 | a muscular endurance test from the knees.

01:32:45.500 | We already know the answer is you're zero.

01:32:48.180 | We'll actually default to another test,

01:32:49.500 | which I'll talk about in a second here.

01:32:51.700 | So for those folks,

01:32:53.260 | that's going to scale down a little bit, right?

01:32:54.500 | So basically you're looking at 15 is that marker,

01:32:56.820 | like 25 was for the male where I want to see above 15.

01:33:00.220 | And if I do, we're good.

01:33:01.260 | Anything between five to 15 is a number of like, okay.

01:33:05.180 | If you're sub five, like we generally have some problems.

01:33:10.500 | And if that is different between one and zero,

01:33:13.600 | then like now zero is a problem.

01:33:16.620 | So we should be able to do that.

01:33:17.920 | - So if a female cannot do 10 full pushups.

01:33:21.880 | - Yeah, 10 full pushups is hard

01:33:23.940 | for a female depending on size.

01:33:26.180 | - Okay, let's say a female can't do five full pushups.

01:33:28.680 | You said rather than go to a knees down version,

01:33:32.120 | what would you do to assess their muscular endurance?

01:33:35.600 | And would you then also encourage them

01:33:38.900 | to work on their strength?

01:33:40.480 | - Well, absolutely.

01:33:42.060 | So again, if they can do anything less than three,

01:33:45.300 | you're going to be a strength.

01:33:47.560 | In fact, if you want to look at muscular endurance in general

01:33:49.660 | so this is a bit of a off topic,

01:33:51.740 | but I promise I'll keep it short and I'll come right back.

01:33:55.080 | When I was a doctoral student, I had two lab mates.

01:33:58.780 | One of them was a runner female, 120 pounds,

01:34:02.160 | something like that, small.

01:34:03.320 | And the other one was a male.

01:34:04.280 | And he was basically like a straight bro.

01:34:06.520 | Like he lifts weights, doesn't do any other sort of training

01:34:09.120 | does like a very classic, not training program,

01:34:11.840 | but kind of training.

01:34:12.880 | And they were sort of bantering back and forth for a while.

01:34:15.240 | And basically she was saying, you're so unfit,

01:34:17.280 | you can't run at all.

01:34:18.120 | And he's saying, you're so weak, you can't do a pull up.

01:34:20.000 | And so they challenged each other to a competition.

01:34:21.580 | They said at the end of the year,

01:34:23.560 | the girl is going to do 26 pull ups

01:34:27.320 | and the guy had to run a marathon, so 26 miles.

01:34:30.440 | So that was the thing.

01:34:31.440 | And then there was some sort of consequence

01:34:34.160 | for whoever sort of failed it.

01:34:36.240 | So the guy quickly tried to figure out

01:34:37.320 | how the hell am I gonna run 26 miles

01:34:38.560 | when I have not run a mile in like many, many, many years.

01:34:41.580 | So he just started running, you know,

01:34:42.760 | three miles, four miles or whatever.

01:34:44.440 | She, well of course they,

01:34:45.920 | both of them ran immediately to me, right?

01:34:48.040 | And then she was like, how the hell, I can't do a pull up.

01:34:50.520 | And I was like, great.

01:34:51.600 | And I gave her a very specific maximal strength protocol.

01:34:54.400 | And she was like, whoa,

01:34:55.280 | I wanna go to the assisted pull up machine

01:34:58.120 | and work on doing like sets of 25,

01:34:59.920 | 'cause I've got to get my muscular endurance up.

01:35:02.080 | And I tried to explain to her,

01:35:03.040 | your muscular endurance is irrelevant if you can't do one.

01:35:06.160 | It's never going to matter.

01:35:07.640 | She did the muscular endurance protocol, the entire thing,

01:35:10.500 | didn't listen to me.

01:35:11.340 | At the end of the year came,

01:35:12.400 | she still produced exactly zero pull ups.

01:35:15.700 | So point is, if you look at muscular endurance,

01:35:19.760 | where is it strength and where is it actually

01:35:21.920 | muscular endurance?

01:35:22.760 | The general sort of number that you're looking for

01:35:25.160 | is under like 80%, right?

01:35:27.540 | That's gonna tell you,

01:35:28.380 | is this a muscular endurance problem

01:35:29.740 | or is this an absolute strength problem?

01:35:31.160 | - Under 80% of a one repetition maximum.

01:35:33.760 | - Yep, so what I mean by that is this.

01:35:36.400 | In fact, this actually leads into your question.

01:35:39.300 | The other way to assess muscular endurance

01:35:41.000 | is take the exact strength test you did

01:35:43.700 | from the talk five minutes ago.

01:35:45.840 | What, which one did you do?

01:35:47.000 | Load that to 75% and then do that

01:35:50.180 | for as many repetitions as you can.

01:35:51.880 | And that is a tremendous barometer of muscular endurance.

01:35:55.320 | So if you were able to do 200 pounds

01:35:57.040 | on your leg extension test,

01:35:58.000 | put 75% on that and do that as many reps as you can.

01:36:00.640 | You want to look for more than eight repetitions.

01:36:03.280 | If you are below eight repetitions,

01:36:05.460 | then we have a muscular endurance problem, right?

01:36:08.160 | If it is higher than that, if you've got 15 or 20,

01:36:12.140 | then we know we have probably some problems

01:36:14.440 | in your peak strength or the test itself.

01:36:17.120 | So that is a good eight to 12 sort of number

01:36:19.400 | is where you want to be looking at for there.

01:36:22.240 | - What about anaerobic capacity?

01:36:26.440 | - This one's more challenging.

01:36:28.140 | You either have to go to a laboratory

01:36:30.360 | and do something like a Wingate test.

01:36:32.240 | So this is a 30 second maximal test

01:36:36.400 | where you're going to see how much work

01:36:37.560 | can you possibly do in that 30 seconds.

01:36:41.360 | If you don't have a lab-assisted laboratory,

01:36:43.480 | you can do this on any protocol you want.

01:36:47.160 | This could be sprinting, this can be on an air bike,

01:36:50.520 | this could be on a rower, anything like that.

01:36:53.000 | Anything where you can exert maximal effort

01:36:55.160 | and you don't have to worry about technical problems.

01:36:57.400 | So I generally don't like to do things

01:36:59.480 | like a kettlebell swing or something like that.

01:37:02.380 | There's just too many other variables.

01:37:03.560 | You need to be able to go as hard as you possibly can

01:37:05.760 | knowing you're going to get to a place

01:37:07.360 | of tremendous fatigue.

01:37:09.840 | Now in the lab, we often use what's called

01:37:11.700 | a Bosco protocol and you're going to stand

01:37:14.140 | on a force plate and you're going to do

01:37:15.180 | as many vertical jumps as fast as you can,

01:37:17.540 | as high as you can for 60 seconds

01:37:19.820 | and you're absolutely destroyed by like second 45.

01:37:23.680 | So we either use that Wingate protocol

01:37:25.340 | or that Bosco protocol.

01:37:26.940 | If you want though, again, take any of those other places,

01:37:31.280 | 30 seconds or so, up to 45 seconds,

01:37:34.240 | up to a minute if you want, it doesn't really matter,

01:37:35.920 | and you just mark down the distance you cover.

01:37:38.500 | That's all you're, we don't really have standards

01:37:40.420 | for these things because it's going to be different.

01:37:42.420 | How far you can travel in 30 seconds on a treadmill

01:37:45.980 | is just going to be so different than sprinting in the field

01:37:49.960 | or on the assault bike or whatever.

01:37:52.080 | So what you really want to worry about there

01:37:54.440 | is can you complete it?

01:37:56.740 | And then how awful do you feel afterwards?

01:37:59.620 | So what you really want to think about here

01:38:02.960 | is not those protocols, but this.

01:38:05.140 | You want to think about can you get close

01:38:08.260 | to your predicted maximum heart rate?

01:38:11.340 | So the number we throw out is 220 minus your age.

01:38:16.060 | So if you're 50 years old, 220 minus 50,

01:38:18.980 | you should be able to get to a maximum heart rate

01:38:20.880 | of around 170 beats per minute.

01:38:22.820 | Now, that number is extremely generic.

01:38:26.040 | If you don't get there,

01:38:26.980 | that doesn't have any indication of your fitness.

01:38:29.180 | If you get higher, that doesn't mean you're any more fit.

01:38:31.500 | It's just a rough number.

01:38:32.740 | So here's what I want you to do.

01:38:34.780 | In this case, your heart rate recovery is the better metric.

01:38:38.220 | So I want you to get up to a maximum heart rate

01:38:41.280 | and then test your heart rate recovery.

01:38:43.580 | And what you should be looking for there

01:38:45.060 | is about half a beat recovery per second.

01:38:48.900 | So you're going to get up to a place

01:38:50.700 | where you reach absolute terrible exhaustion,

01:38:53.340 | maximum fatigue, test your heart rate,

01:38:58.460 | and then count, have a timer going.

01:39:00.620 | Within 60 seconds, you should have, again,

01:39:03.320 | at half a beat per second,

01:39:05.020 | you should have a heart rate recovery of 30 beats per minute.

01:39:07.580 | Within the next minute, so two minute recovery,

01:39:11.500 | it should begin half that, so 60 beats.

01:39:13.140 | Those are rough numbers to go by.

01:39:14.540 | And your three minute recovery is, again,

01:39:16.580 | half of that again.

01:39:17.620 | So that is the closest way.

01:39:19.820 | If your heart rate recovery is worse than that,

01:39:22.000 | then we know we have a problem in your anaerobic capacity

01:39:24.780 | or your cardiovascular capacity.

01:39:26.520 | - I love it.

01:39:29.420 | What about number eight, maximal heart rate?

01:39:31.900 | Because what you just described

01:39:32.940 | sounds a lot like maximal heart rate.

01:39:34.340 | - So this is your VO2 max.

01:39:35.780 | So the gold standard here is to actually go

01:39:37.640 | into a laboratory and get this thing done.

01:39:40.400 | So we can actually run a VO2 max test

01:39:42.380 | where you put a mask on, collect all your gases,

01:39:44.260 | and run you to there.

01:39:45.500 | And there's a very specific protocol

01:39:47.840 | for completion of a true maximum test.

01:39:50.460 | And any of the scientists will know that.

01:39:52.860 | If you don't have access to that,

01:39:54.420 | you can do a couple of tests.

01:39:55.860 | One of them is called a 12 minute Cooper's test.

01:39:59.840 | So this is simply time.

01:40:00.860 | You're going to run for 12 minutes as far as you can,

01:40:02.860 | and you're going to record the distance you covered.

01:40:04.780 | Again, you can go online to any number of calculators,

01:40:09.200 | enter that distance in,

01:40:10.700 | and that will tell you your estimated VO2 max.

01:40:14.160 | - So that's a 12 minute sprint?

01:40:16.020 | - 12 minute sprint.

01:40:17.320 | Maximum distance you can cover in 12 minutes.

01:40:19.840 | - Keeping a steady pace the whole time?

01:40:21.380 | - Do whatever you want.

01:40:23.120 | The goal is to get maximum distance covered in 12 minutes.

01:40:26.740 | So that's anywhere between a mile to two plus miles,

01:40:30.620 | depending on how fit you are.

01:40:32.020 | But you just do that Cooper 12 minute test.

01:40:34.860 | - Got it.

01:40:36.880 | - I told you.

01:40:37.820 | All right, so if you remember,

01:40:38.820 | aerobic capacity is eight to 12 sort of minutes

01:40:41.220 | where you're going to see a real true test of that VO2 max.

01:40:44.340 | You simply can't get that in under a few minutes.

01:40:48.780 | So it is a, if you want,

01:40:51.460 | you can do a little gentler version of that.

01:40:55.180 | So there are a number of submaximal tests there.

01:40:57.780 | In fact, there is a one mile walk test you can do.

01:41:00.800 | So again, all you're going to do is in this case,

01:41:03.000 | you have to have some sort of either a stopwatch

01:41:05.720 | or ideally a heart rate monitor.

01:41:07.800 | And all you have to do is this is a Rockport one mile

01:41:10.580 | submaximal test.

01:41:11.420 | So you're going to walk a mile, record the time,

01:41:14.000 | record your heart rate at the end, enter those in,

01:41:17.040 | and those will give you, again, estimates of your VO2 max.

01:41:19.660 | So that's the like, oh my gosh,

01:41:22.380 | I can't run for 12 minutes as hard as I possibly can,

01:41:25.380 | or I don't want to do it.

01:41:26.380 | Or we have a lot of these in our executive program.

01:41:30.140 | It's like, my knee hurts too bad.

01:41:31.560 | I've got back pain when I run or whatever.

01:41:33.160 | Can I, okay.

01:41:34.220 | And you do the walk test and it's pretty accurate

01:41:35.720 | if you do it correctly.

01:41:36.560 | So technically, all you have to actually do

01:41:38.940 | is measure your heart rate on your, you know,

01:41:41.000 | and I can count 60 seconds,

01:41:42.220 | but it's just easier to work with everyone's watches

01:41:44.340 | and stuff now, just wear the heart rate monitor,

01:41:46.820 | plug in those numbers.

01:41:48.640 | And again, those are all standard calculations.

01:41:52.820 | So anywhere you find those,

01:41:54.840 | you don't have to worry about the source.

01:41:56.040 | So you just enter your stuff in

01:41:57.140 | and they're going to be running off the same equation.

01:41:59.360 | - I like the idea of the 12 minute run.

01:42:01.680 | I'm going to give it a shot.

01:42:02.800 | See what happens. - We did for years,

01:42:04.160 | we did a one mile version of this

01:42:06.640 | and there's just a lot more science

01:42:08.360 | on the 12 minute Cooper test.

01:42:09.680 | So we did that.

01:42:10.520 | It's pretty good.

01:42:12.220 | And it is not even remotely close to fun.

01:42:14.640 | - It sounds like fun for other reasons.

01:42:18.800 | - Yeah, yeah, well, it is.

01:42:20.880 | - Fun in the sense that it reveals a lot.

01:42:23.160 | - Yep. - Powerful, potent.

01:42:24.700 | - Super.

01:42:25.540 | There's no hiding.

01:42:28.720 | You can hide with a leg extension test.

01:42:30.480 | It doesn't hurt that pad,

01:42:31.780 | but you cannot feel anything but the 12 minute run

01:42:35.420 | as far as you can test.

01:42:36.480 | - So these are really actually psychiatric diagnostic tests.

01:42:39.720 | - They are.

01:42:41.560 | - Of sorts. - For sure.

01:42:42.960 | - Number nine, long duration steady state exercise.

01:42:47.740 | I think of this as AKA endurance,

01:42:50.420 | but as you mentioned before,

01:42:51.940 | there are other forms of endurance.

01:42:53.200 | So long duration steady state exercise.

01:42:56.000 | - Yep, so you really wanna think about this

01:42:59.360 | as not a standard number.

01:43:01.920 | This is you should maintain consistent work output

01:43:05.680 | for over 20 plus minutes.

01:43:07.920 | Okay, and this one, I want you to just pick something

01:43:10.720 | that it was in your lifestyle.

01:43:12.100 | So is there a loop around your house that you can do?

01:43:15.260 | Is there some protocol that you like to use before?

01:43:18.760 | And you're simply going to test your ability.

01:43:20.720 | Can you maintain work without stopping?

01:43:23.040 | That's all it needs to be.

01:43:24.240 | Now, ideally, I personally like

01:43:26.560 | to throw a little twist in here,

01:43:27.540 | which is can you do this with nasal breathing only?

01:43:30.240 | That's when I feel really good.

01:43:31.300 | If you can go 30 straight minutes

01:43:32.600 | without needing to take a break,

01:43:34.400 | walking doesn't really cut it

01:43:35.740 | unless you're very, very unfit.

01:43:37.760 | In which case, if walking 30 minutes without a break

01:43:40.440 | is a challenge, okay, like there.

01:43:43.440 | But if you can, I want you moving at a non-walking pace.

01:43:47.400 | I don't care what zone this is,

01:43:48.920 | two, three, four, five, I don't care.

01:43:51.240 | Show me you can maintain minimum of 20 minutes

01:43:54.040 | of work with no breaks, no intervals, no downtime.

01:43:57.300 | And again, ideally breathing through your nose only.

01:44:00.360 | - I love this list, but it worries me a bit.

01:44:03.720 | Not because any one of these tests

01:44:05.640 | is necessarily that overwhelming,

01:44:08.260 | but because I'm unclear about how to arrange performance

01:44:13.080 | of these different tests.

01:44:14.720 | For instance, do I separate them?

01:44:16.700 | So I'm doing one test like long duration output on one day

01:44:20.440 | and I'm doing strength on another day.

01:44:22.000 | Those seem pretty obvious to me,

01:44:23.840 | but are there ones that one can combine on different days?

01:44:26.440 | How much time should one give oneself

01:44:28.120 | in between these tests

01:44:29.320 | and how often should one do an assessment?

01:44:32.400 | Just as we don't want to necessarily

01:44:34.160 | evaluate body weight changes

01:44:35.560 | by getting on the scale three times a day,

01:44:38.300 | maybe once a day at the same time,

01:44:40.040 | each day is more practical.

01:44:42.560 | How often should we be assessing our fitness

01:44:45.220 | for each and every one of these?

01:44:46.400 | - Well, the way that I would say this is

01:44:48.000 | you want to pick the one that is the worst

01:44:50.880 | and do that more frequently.

01:44:52.520 | So if, for example, you do the upper body strength test

01:44:56.880 | and you are fantastic,

01:44:58.260 | if you can bench press double your body weight,

01:45:00.600 | I don't need to test your bench very often

01:45:04.000 | for the average person.

01:45:05.280 | You're not a power lifter, maybe once a year or so,

01:45:07.480 | maybe not even that.

01:45:08.480 | We just don't need to get there.

01:45:09.840 | However, if we then test your VO2 max

01:45:14.000 | and in your 12 minutes you cover a total of a half a mile,

01:45:17.680 | then we might want to test that every month.

01:45:20.120 | And so we're going to let our priorities emphasize

01:45:22.920 | which one we're going to do more often.

01:45:24.600 | I would recommend doing this full battery once a year.

01:45:27.520 | - Full battery mean the entire list on one day?

01:45:29.640 | - The entire, no, not on one day, but within a week.

01:45:32.280 | So you could take a week.

01:45:33.120 | Now you could do these technically all in two days.

01:45:35.980 | Three day split here is probably best.

01:45:38.180 | So if you were to just say, hey, this is like testing week.

01:45:40.440 | I actually love this for beginning of the year

01:45:43.120 | or whenever it is that you sort of change your training.

01:45:46.120 | But I think once a year, just like once a year,

01:45:48.460 | you should probably go to a physician

01:45:49.840 | and get full blood work, a full heart scan

01:45:54.600 | and everything like that.

01:45:55.840 | And then if maybe you had a heart issue,

01:45:58.340 | they would come back and test you more frequently,

01:46:00.280 | whatever the case is, right?

01:46:01.240 | You should probably run through this.

01:46:02.380 | And you're going to be thinking, yeah,

01:46:04.320 | but I don't want to like give up

01:46:05.440 | on my exercise routine that week.

01:46:06.760 | Well, I promise you you're not going to finish this week

01:46:09.080 | and think I didn't do very much work this week.

01:46:11.840 | It's going to feel great.

01:46:12.820 | And then you're going to have a very nice barometer

01:46:15.220 | of exactly where you need to change

01:46:16.840 | and prioritize your training for the next quarter

01:46:19.240 | or half a year or wherever you want to go.

01:46:21.440 | If you want to actually do this every six months,

01:46:23.140 | that's really, we end up actually doing this

01:46:25.280 | quite honestly like more like every six months

01:46:27.280 | as a general test.

01:46:29.880 | That's a really good way to do it.

01:46:31.000 | But if minimum of, if you're arguing with me,

01:46:33.280 | give me once a year you want to do this.

01:46:35.000 | So which order to do them in?

01:46:37.540 | The non fatiguing tests you can do whenever.

01:46:40.080 | So this is the body composition scan,

01:46:42.520 | the FFMI, the body fat composition,

01:46:44.320 | all this stuff can be done wherever.

01:46:46.320 | I generally like to do that though

01:46:48.360 | as your very first activity.

01:46:50.120 | The reason is we know that acute exercise

01:46:53.520 | can heavily influence things

01:46:54.760 | like body composition measurements

01:46:56.040 | because of inflammation, water storage, et cetera.

01:46:58.860 | So it's easiest to just sort of get that

01:47:00.640 | off of a 48 hour rest.

01:47:02.200 | You want to make sure you don't do any hard exercise

01:47:04.640 | the day before a body composition test

01:47:06.240 | and probably 48 hours before that.

01:47:08.600 | So just start yourself off with that.

01:47:10.880 | Your movement test can be the same thing.

01:47:13.180 | You don't want to try to do a assessment

01:47:15.480 | of how well you're squatting

01:47:17.360 | if you're incredibly sore from your brutal squatting test.

01:47:20.060 | So tend to do those things when you're the most fresh.

01:47:22.480 | Then what you want to do is any skill

01:47:24.640 | or maximum strength or power

01:47:27.000 | goes at the very beginning of the day.

01:47:29.120 | Any fatiguing thing happens at the end.

01:47:31.640 | And so you could easily do this.

01:47:33.740 | All right, I'm going to do my power test, my broad jump.

01:47:37.820 | Great, you're not going to be fatigued at all from that.

01:47:41.280 | And on the same day, since I'm already pretty warmed up,

01:47:43.800 | now I'm going to roll right into my leg strength test.

01:47:47.720 | And since I'm really warmed up,

01:47:48.960 | I'm going to do my leg muscular endurance test right there.

01:47:52.220 | So this is a very common strategy we use.

01:47:53.920 | We do our one rep max leg extension,

01:47:56.520 | five minutes, seven minutes, whatever we need to do.

01:47:58.580 | Come back, load it to 75%, do as many reps as you can.

01:48:02.320 | Boom.

01:48:03.160 | You could roll right into then your upper body test

01:48:05.180 | or your grip strength test or anything else

01:48:06.900 | that you want to do there.

01:48:08.160 | Is there a little bit of influence?

01:48:11.280 | Yeah, but really for most people, it's not that bad.

01:48:15.440 | What influence I mean, if you do a leg strength test,

01:48:18.200 | coming back and doing that upper body strength test

01:48:20.120 | afterwards, it's not that big a deal.

01:48:22.560 | Give yourself 15, give yourself 20 minutes.

01:48:25.360 | Give it plenty of time.

01:48:26.920 | So you can knock out your strength testing

01:48:28.360 | and muscular endurance testing all in one day.

01:48:30.640 | That could be, you could do your performance,

01:48:33.360 | your skill diagnostic, your power jump test,

01:48:36.560 | your strength and your muscular endurance

01:48:38.280 | and all that stuff is knocked out.

01:48:40.060 | You're gonna have to come back on a separate day

01:48:42.340 | and do your anaerobic test.

01:48:44.080 | This is 30 seconds maximum endurance, things like that.

01:48:47.500 | You could though, if you wanted,

01:48:49.280 | do that after your long duration tests.

01:48:52.440 | Your long duration test is again,

01:48:53.620 | is just gonna function as like a big warmup

01:48:56.960 | or you could flip those things

01:48:57.920 | or you could do them on separate days.

01:48:59.740 | You're gonna have to do your VO2 max test

01:49:02.760 | on its own day for the most part,

01:49:04.480 | unless you wanted to do again your movement

01:49:06.640 | or your body composition sort of before those things.

01:49:09.580 | So you really have the ability to kind of mix and match.

01:49:12.400 | Ideally, this most realistically probably takes three days.

01:49:16.040 | If you wanna separate them into four or five,

01:49:18.560 | the more separation you do,

01:49:19.740 | the better data you're gonna get.

01:49:21.800 | It's just a question of like,

01:49:22.720 | how pedantic are you really trying to get here?

01:49:25.260 | And are you willing to lose 5% to then save a whole day?

01:49:29.760 | Then you can do sort of these things in multiple stacks.

01:49:31.940 | So that's how I would break it up.

01:49:34.040 | - So what I'm hearing is better to do it than to not do it.

01:49:37.480 | - Most definitely.

01:49:38.360 | - And be rational, don't try and do your strength output

01:49:42.800 | late in the day when you're fatigued.

01:49:45.080 | If you're gonna combine some of the steady state endurance

01:49:48.040 | and maximal heart rate, fine.

01:49:50.580 | Understand there might be a slight deficit there,

01:49:52.620 | but test it the same way each time

01:49:54.500 | and what you're really looking for is improvement.

01:49:56.460 | - Yep, and you could also do the heart rate recovery

01:49:58.880 | under any of the modalities.

01:49:59.760 | So you could do the heart rate recovery

01:50:01.620 | after your VO2 max as well.

01:50:03.320 | So you finish that thing and then just again,

01:50:05.860 | do the same test for up to three minutes.

01:50:08.900 | - These are fantastic tools.

01:50:10.160 | I'm almost tempted to say

01:50:11.520 | that I'm willing to post my numbers,

01:50:12.860 | but that actually violates the core principle

01:50:15.580 | that I think we're getting at here,

01:50:16.560 | which is that it's highly unlikely

01:50:19.300 | that anybody is going to be phenomenal across the board.

01:50:22.400 | I mean, certainly there will be individuals that are,

01:50:24.800 | but based on everything we talked about earlier,

01:50:27.060 | specificity of training and how extensively

01:50:30.420 | somebody's been training a certain way will,

01:50:32.360 | without question, lopside them, if you will,

01:50:36.660 | toward being better in some of these assessments

01:50:39.480 | and less good in others.

01:50:41.200 | And that's just simply the way that these adaptations work.

01:50:43.780 | - Yep, and it's not, you don't need to be optimal

01:50:47.440 | in all of these areas to be quote unquote "optimal health"

01:50:51.040 | from this perspective.

01:50:52.240 | You just want to make sure, again,

01:50:53.340 | there's no severe performance anchors.

01:50:56.640 | This is what we call them, right?

01:50:57.880 | We don't want any of these severe constraints

01:50:59.760 | 'cause you're going to get limited by that thing.

01:51:03.120 | And so what you want to do is move that up

01:51:05.220 | to just sufficient or concerning and get it away from that.

01:51:09.220 | If you do that, that thing's not going to catch you.

01:51:11.440 | You're going to be able to continue to pursue optimization

01:51:14.000 | in any of the one things that you have

01:51:15.440 | a specific passion for,

01:51:17.240 | which is generally what moves people, right?

01:51:19.000 | You train so that you feel better.

01:51:22.080 | You train because you know there are all these benefits to it

01:51:25.360 | and, geez, this audience probably

01:51:27.120 | could list hundreds of them.

01:51:29.360 | But you also train because you generally

01:51:31.040 | like to get better at something.

01:51:32.400 | A lot of us have something.

01:51:34.760 | And so you want to make sure that you're not going,

01:51:36.240 | "Hey, I know you're good at endurance,

01:51:38.140 | "but you really shouldn't train anymore."

01:51:39.600 | We don't want that message, not at all.

01:51:41.320 | I want you to love your training.

01:51:43.840 | We just want to make sure that you're not loving that so much

01:51:46.960 | that you're not taking some blinders off

01:51:48.560 | and missing another area which would actually,

01:51:51.340 | again, you pull that performance anchor,

01:51:53.940 | this whole ship sails faster

01:51:56.040 | with less effort and less friction.

01:51:59.300 | - What I love about this is also that,

01:52:01.980 | as you've described it, it's not just for athletes

01:52:04.660 | or people that are super into fitness.

01:52:06.540 | It's also for people that just want to be healthy

01:52:09.020 | and want aesthetic changes,

01:52:10.300 | and that's why they're exercising,

01:52:11.540 | which I think accounts for a really large percentage

01:52:13.900 | of people out there.

01:52:15.020 | So I think what you described is incredibly well-structured,

01:52:19.420 | incredibly clear, and incredibly actionable.

01:52:22.400 | So I want to thank you for that.

01:52:25.740 | I'm serious about my willingness to do this

01:52:29.340 | and at least share those numbers with you.

01:52:31.660 | And I think for most people that are seeking

01:52:34.980 | what you listed off before,

01:52:36.180 | aesthetic changes, functionality, and longevity,

01:52:39.260 | it's clear that all nine of these are going to be important

01:52:42.220 | in some regard or another.

01:52:43.740 | - So before we close out,

01:52:44.720 | I want to go back and finish off the metrics for VO2 Max

01:52:48.780 | 'cause I don't actually think I gave you numbers on that.

01:52:51.220 | So in general, for men,

01:52:52.860 | a minimum number we want to look at here is 35 milliliters

01:52:56.100 | per kilogram per minute.

01:52:57.020 | And for women, that'd be about 30.

01:52:59.460 | So we can actually push a lot higher on those things.

01:53:02.840 | In reality, I want to see men above 50.

01:53:05.700 | - If I could just interrupt you for a second.

01:53:08.060 | When you say 40 milliliters per kilogram,

01:53:11.340 | milliliters of what specifically?

01:53:14.280 | - Yeah, so what actually those metrics mean is,

01:53:16.500 | the first one, milliliters, is oxygen.

01:53:18.620 | So it's amount of oxygen.

01:53:20.020 | Kilograms is body weight.

01:53:22.340 | So it's how much oxygen can you bring in

01:53:24.420 | per kilogram of body weight per minute?

01:53:27.260 | So it is a volume of oxygen per your size

01:53:30.420 | in a time duration.

01:53:32.020 | In fact, the way that you calculate it

01:53:34.500 | is you multiply your cardiac output

01:53:37.020 | by what's called your AVO2 difference.

01:53:38.680 | Your cardiac output is your heart rate

01:53:40.660 | times your stroke volume.

01:53:41.740 | So how much blood you're pumping out per pump

01:53:44.780 | is your stroke volume.

01:53:45.720 | How many times you're pumping or you're beating,

01:53:48.860 | you multiply that by your AVO2 difference.

01:53:50.740 | AVO2 difference is artery minus vein difference.

01:53:54.340 | So it's the amount of oxygen in your arteries

01:53:56.420 | minus the amount of oxygen in your vein,

01:53:58.520 | which is going to tell you how much you took up

01:54:00.460 | in your capillaries in your muscles.

01:54:02.020 | So you take those two factors, multiply them together,

01:54:04.220 | and there's your VO2 max.

01:54:05.620 | - You know, as you were describing that,

01:54:06.940 | I imagine you getting to an fMRI machine

01:54:09.140 | and seeing that equation lighting up in your brain,

01:54:12.100 | because clearly it's committed to memory very well.

01:54:14.520 | Thank you for that clear description.

01:54:16.260 | - Yep, so to finish those numbers,

01:54:18.320 | I really truly want to see a man above 50,

01:54:21.760 | and I'm not even really stoked until I get above 55.

01:54:24.760 | In fact, it's sort of funny, Dave Costell,

01:54:27.440 | whose lab I did my PhD in, he was retired by the time,

01:54:29.880 | but he's, again, one of these legendary figures

01:54:32.200 | in exercise physiology, started in the '70s.

01:54:35.040 | He would always say, "There's no human excuse

01:54:37.200 | "to be below 60," which I was always like,

01:54:40.120 | "Damn, that's really actually pretty hard to get to."

01:54:42.720 | - Was he at 60 or above? - Oh, yeah.

01:54:45.080 | He's still actually setting world records

01:54:47.280 | in these last couple of years,

01:54:48.480 | in his, like all the master's records for swimming

01:54:51.080 | and cycling and stuff.

01:54:52.560 | So he was a super, super fit guy.

01:54:55.280 | So he was always above 60.

01:54:56.720 | He's probably like 50-something now,

01:54:58.940 | even though he's 80 or whatever.

01:55:00.840 | - 80 years old. - Yeah.

01:55:02.240 | - With a VO2 max of 50.

01:55:03.640 | - He's probably really not 50.

01:55:04.720 | He's probably, but he's probably going to,

01:55:07.040 | remember that earlier in the, we talked about

01:55:09.720 | how I had the 92-year-old via the VO2 max of 38.

01:55:12.320 | Dave's probably gonna break that record

01:55:13.960 | when he gets there, I'm sure.

01:55:15.560 | In fact, I guarantee you he has that number in his brain.

01:55:18.640 | I haven't talked to him in 15 years,

01:55:20.280 | but I guarantee you that number is in his brain,

01:55:22.440 | and he's probably training for it.

01:55:23.840 | - I love it.

01:55:24.680 | And I love it because it proves that exercise pays off.

01:55:29.060 | - Oh, yeah. - It's one of the few things

01:55:30.400 | in life where there's a direct relationship

01:55:32.560 | between work and outcome.

01:55:34.640 | - Yeah, that's, as Henry Rollins described

01:55:37.240 | in his wonderful essay, if you're familiar with that.

01:55:40.320 | Oh my gosh, you're a punk rock guy.

01:55:41.920 | You know Henry, I'm sure.

01:55:42.840 | - I mean, I certainly know who he is,

01:55:44.600 | and I know his work. - Yeah, he has

01:55:46.320 | an incredible one-page paper,

01:55:49.200 | sort of something to do with the iron,

01:55:51.320 | and he basically describes that as like,

01:55:52.820 | this is the one thing where it's truth.

01:55:55.760 | Like, it is the most true thing you'll ever do,

01:55:58.240 | which is, I love for that.

01:56:00.320 | - It's almost like a principle of nature.

01:56:02.000 | - 100%, yeah.

01:56:03.360 | So with the women, I really want to see the women.

01:56:07.280 | If I want to see men above 55,

01:56:08.760 | I really want to see women above 50 as the target,

01:56:11.840 | and it'd be like, you're there, I'm pretty good.

01:56:13.440 | So you can do the math on then the middle ground

01:56:15.500 | of what's like, okay, but we need to work on it.

01:56:17.220 | In fact, if you look across the literature

01:56:20.820 | at different athletes, you're gonna see like

01:56:22.760 | the really high level endurance folks.

01:56:26.500 | You know, they may pass 70 or 80.

01:56:28.320 | In fact, there was talk a few years ago

01:56:30.880 | of a guy breaking 100, as like an 18 or 19 year old,

01:56:34.480 | but I actually don't think it was ever

01:56:35.880 | fully confirmed or repeated,

01:56:38.060 | but certainly you'll see plenty of people

01:56:39.440 | like 95 in those extremes.

01:56:43.160 | If you look at other sports like football or basketball,

01:56:45.720 | they're probably going to be in the 55, 65 sort of range.

01:56:48.840 | So if you as an average person are 55,

01:56:51.660 | that's a really good marker to be in.

01:56:53.720 | If you get even close to that, you're in a good spot.

01:56:56.200 | I'm sorry if I let you down, Dave.

01:56:58.480 | - I just love how, as you're describing this average person,

01:57:00.800 | you're looking at me with just a little bit of sympathy.

01:57:02.440 | Like if you reach the standard of average, Andrew,

01:57:06.260 | listen, you're giving me prompts all over the place

01:57:08.640 | to try and improve my metrics, whatever they happen to be.

01:57:11.620 | And I think that's one of the great values

01:57:13.580 | of getting objective numbers,

01:57:15.620 | even if they have to be measured

01:57:16.800 | by some of these back of the envelope techniques

01:57:19.340 | that I guess we always teach people in the laboratory, right?

01:57:24.220 | That a tool can be not extremely precise,

01:57:28.500 | but as long as it's reliable, there is still value there.

01:57:31.700 | I mean, of course you'd love to have the most precise

01:57:33.860 | and most reliable tool, but if you can't,

01:57:36.400 | then at least go for a reliable tool

01:57:38.380 | and measure for consistency.

01:57:40.340 | Yet for the real world, reliability beats validity

01:57:43.380 | as much as we can.

01:57:44.220 | For a lot of things we're talking about,

01:57:45.300 | especially if we're using it as a metric of,

01:57:47.160 | did I get better?

01:57:48.420 | As long as that tool is reliable, body composition,

01:57:50.980 | just all of these things have inherent error in them.

01:57:54.140 | Some of them are smaller, some of them are larger,

01:57:56.220 | but as you mentioned, having standardization

01:57:58.060 | within the testing protocol is gonna allow you

01:58:00.860 | to measure progress and that's gonna tell you

01:58:02.460 | sort of where you're at.

01:58:04.460 | Now that we sort of covered all these areas of adaptation,

01:58:07.840 | we walked through the history and we walked through

01:58:10.020 | a bunch of the explanations for why people

01:58:12.620 | are maybe not getting the results

01:58:13.820 | that they wanna get through their training.

01:58:16.420 | The way I would like to go with the rest

01:58:17.780 | of our conversations would be to just go through

01:58:20.100 | each of those adaptations step by step

01:58:21.660 | and make sure I cover very specific protocols

01:58:24.100 | for if you have run through this testing

01:58:26.420 | and identified an area of weakness.

01:58:28.160 | So maybe you've sort of been lifting a lot

01:58:30.540 | 'cause you like lifting and you maybe realize

01:58:33.400 | that your cardiovascular fitness or your heart rate recovery

01:58:35.580 | is not where it really should be.

01:58:37.160 | Or the opposite, like we've talked about.

01:58:38.740 | Maybe you're doing a lot of that type of work

01:58:41.060 | and your strength isn't there,

01:58:42.160 | your movement quality is not there.

01:58:43.840 | So you've identified a problem.

01:58:46.040 | How do I specifically solve it?

01:58:47.900 | What are the evidence-based and most effective protocols

01:58:52.460 | that I could put myself in for each one of these categories?

01:58:54.820 | And I think that would give people a lot of take-home value,

01:58:59.300 | but it's gonna take us some time to cover.

01:59:00.680 | So it's gonna have to come across

01:59:02.460 | over multiple conversations between you and I.

01:59:05.140 | - Great, well, I'm looking forward to each

01:59:06.680 | and all of those conversations.

01:59:08.580 | And I want to add just one more metric

01:59:12.220 | to our discussion today,

01:59:13.700 | which is really just my way of saying thank you,

01:59:16.740 | because if there were a metric

01:59:18.420 | for amount of useful information per sentence spoke,

01:59:23.420 | you would be at the upper level of that metric.

01:59:26.460 | You have this amazing ability to provide so much knowledge

01:59:30.860 | in a clear and concise and today listed out format

01:59:34.980 | that is both interesting, grounded in science,

01:59:38.460 | and actionable.

01:59:39.380 | So on behalf of everyone listening,

01:59:41.940 | and certainly for myself as well,

01:59:43.700 | I just want to say thank you.

01:59:45.180 | - Well, I appreciate the compliments,

01:59:46.660 | and I'm looking forward to the next conversation,

01:59:49.900 | jumping right into speed, strength, and hypertrophy training,

01:59:53.260 | and what are the evidence-based and best practices

01:59:56.060 | for protocols in those areas.

01:59:57.860 | - If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

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02:01:03.980 | Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion

02:01:06.240 | about fitness, exercise, and performance

02:01:08.200 | with Dr. Andy Galpin.

02:01:09.700 | And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

02:01:12.680 | (upbeat music)

02:01:15.260 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness | Huberman Lab Guest Series

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