The Peter Attia Drive - #250 ‒ Training principles for longevity

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.500 my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.840 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and

00:00:24.780 wellness full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.920 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.320 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level at

00:00:37.340 the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.760 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's

00:00:48.100 today's episode. My returning guest this week is Dr. Andy Galpin. Andy was a previous guest back on

00:00:55.800 episode 239, not that long ago in January of 2023, where we discussed the structure of muscle fibers,

00:01:02.220 the difference between the different types of muscle fibers, hypertrophy, and how to start

00:01:06.480 strength training. I wanted to have Andy back because we never really got to finish what we

00:01:12.100 started in our first discussion. And the reason for that, frankly, is because we went a little

00:01:16.000 deeper than either of us expected into the basic physiology of muscle. And I want to be clear,

00:01:21.580 I have no regrets about doing that. I think that's an obligation that I feel is imperative

00:01:26.620 through our podcast. Our podcast is known for going deeper into subject matter than you'll

00:01:31.440 typically find in other podcasts. And so we did that. But the price you have to pay for that is

00:01:35.140 sometimes you have to spend a little bit more time talking about things. So that's what we needed to do

00:01:39.120 in this discussion. So we start here by providing a very quick but important recap of the first

00:01:44.100 conversation around muscle cells, functions, types of fibers, hypertrophy, things like that. But then we use

00:01:49.440 that to go into the rest of the discussion, which gets into the construction of a matrix. Now you may

00:01:54.800 remember if you heard the first discussion, we talk about the different phenotypes, the powerlifters,

00:01:59.220 the weightlifters, the strongmen, the CrossFit athletes, sprinters. And what we do here is we build

00:02:04.620 out the principles of training in terms of frequency, intensity, volume, rest, recovery,

00:02:10.680 everything that has to do with it. We then organize all of that information and ask the question,

00:02:16.400 how would you tie that in for someone who's training for the centenarian decathlon? Because

00:02:20.740 as you'll recall, at least for me personally and for my patients, we're really less interested in

00:02:25.860 becoming powerlifters, weightlifters, strongmen, CrossFit athletes, et cetera. What we're really

00:02:30.060 interested in doing is becoming centenarian decathletes. We're interested in being the most

00:02:36.100 strong, physically fit, able people who in the final decades of their life are functioning like

00:02:42.420 people who are two decades younger. As a reminder, Andy earned his master's in health

00:02:47.580 movement sciences from the University of Memphis, followed by a PhD in human energetics from Ball

00:02:51.980 State University. Andy's a professor of kinesiology at California State University Fullerton, where his

00:02:57.040 research spans adaptations from whole muscle to cellular level changes, which he has applied to his

00:03:02.720 work with professional athletes for more than 15 years. So without further delay, please enjoy my

00:03:08.200 follow-up conversation with Andy Galpin, which will surely not be our last.

00:03:17.700 Andy, awesome to have you back for what is very unlikely to be part two of two. This will just be

00:03:24.540 part two of N, where N is an integer greater than two, and it'll be TBD on what that looks like.

00:03:29.760 In our first discussion, which I think truthfully was pretty technical, but I still think formed a very

00:03:35.440 important basis for what we're going to talk about today. So I predict that today's discussion will

00:03:40.060 be a little less technical, but we'll assume that the viewer slash listener has some familiarity with

00:03:47.300 what we've talked about. But for those maybe who A, listened to it a couple of months ago and have

00:03:53.000 forgotten, or B, are not listening to it, I think it's probably worth investing a little bit of our time

00:03:59.180 in going over some of the major concepts. So feel free to diverge from the line of questioning,

00:04:06.160 but everything I want to talk about right now is just to give people enough background so that we

00:04:09.720 can get into the meat of a discussion that you and I have already spent some time planning. So let's

00:04:14.960 start by explaining what the cells of muscles look like and how they function. When we say the term

00:04:21.540 muscle, what we're typically referring to is a collective group. So when you think about like

00:04:25.580 your quadricep or your thigh, that's actually four muscles there. That's why we call it a quad.

00:04:30.700 We say bicep, how do you do bicep? So it's actually multiple bicep muscles and orientation insertion.

00:04:35.720 So in general, the way that humans move is muscles will contract and muscles actually at the end of

00:04:41.420 them will come together to form a tendon. Those tendons actually connect to bone. So when you contract

00:04:46.160 muscle, it pulls that connective tissue, the tendon that pulls the bone and you move. And so you've got

00:04:52.200 muscles throughout your body, up and down, they have different orientations and they have different

00:04:56.820 responsibilities. So some are meant to be what we call anti-gravity. So this is to keep you up all day

00:05:02.640 and they don't produce a lot of force or speed, but they're meant to be non-fatigable. And others

00:05:07.260 are the opposite. So explosion, power, propulsion. If you just look at like the lower shank, so the calf

00:05:13.340 muscles there, the gastrocnemius, that big one in the middle, if you point your toe to your face,

00:05:18.200 that pops out at you, that's meant to be for power and sprinting and jumping. And the one that's

00:05:23.040 actually lower in your soleus is meant to be on all day so that you can stand and walk all day and

00:05:28.280 not get fatigued. Despite the fact that both of them come together to form the Achilles that wraps

00:05:33.080 around the bottom of your heel, inserts the bottom of your foot, and that's what makes your foot go

00:05:36.920 sort of up and down. So in general, muscle is meant to create movement. Muscle actually does a lot of

00:05:42.640 other things, though, that are vital to health, including pumping fluid up and down. So blood

00:05:47.600 will pool because of gravity towards the lower part of your body. Muscle contraction is, in large

00:05:52.640 part, what squeezes the blood back up into your heart and into your lung. It is the amino acid reserve.

00:05:59.480 So that's the place where you store amino acids so that you can use them to create red blood cells or

00:06:04.800 immune cells or anything else. And it's also the primary place, actually, where you regulate blood

00:06:10.440 glucose storage and all carbohydrates. So I could go on and on, but muscle in general has a very

00:06:16.240 important function in your body for movement there and as well as signaling. So the last part

00:06:21.540 to acknowledge here is we typically will call muscle an endocrine organ, meaning it'll actually send

00:06:26.540 signals out through the body through what are called mild kinds or what some people will call

00:06:30.740 exerkines if they're coming out as a responsive exercise. And that's sending a signal to your liver

00:06:35.640 or kidney or brain or lung or anywhere else. So at the big whole muscle level is what we call it.

00:06:41.440 That's the general function. Now, within that, each individual muscle, so pick the soleus or whatever

00:06:47.840 one you want, is actually made up of billions, if not more, individual muscle fibers. And those fibers

00:06:54.000 or cells, that's the same actual term, myofiber, cell, fiber, I'll use those interchangeably.

00:06:59.180 Those are actually just basically long cylinders. And so if you think about this like a ponytail,

00:07:04.880 so if I don't have much hair left, you know, I'm in the same boat as you there, Peter. But

00:07:08.480 if I had some, you'd see a big, long ponytail and you would call that one ponytail.

00:07:12.780 Really, a ponytail is nothing but a collective whole bunch of individual hairs. And actually,

00:07:17.180 you can think of skeletal muscle at least. Cardiac and smooth muscle are quite different. But skeletal

00:07:22.280 muscle looks very similar to a hair. So it is a long, long cylinder. It's very strong.

00:07:27.020 In this case, it actually contracts where hair doesn't, but that's the basic function of that.

00:07:32.120 And so within that, you have a whole bunch of organelle that do things. So if you look at the

00:07:37.160 whole muscle, what actually happens is that's surrounded by a bed of capillaries. If you talk

00:07:42.820 about blood going into a muscle, and it comes in, be a big artery, going to go through a bunch of

00:07:47.500 capillaries. And those capillaries are really surrounding and mixing in and out that whole ponytail.

00:07:52.760 So they're kind of all over. And so they're circulating around the individual fibers.

00:07:56.340 And that's going to get you nutrients in, like glucose or anything else, and get you

00:08:01.440 waste products out, like carbon dioxide, etc. Within that big, long cylinder, the capillaries

00:08:07.560 are around it. You've got a whole bunch of things. And probably the most pertinent

00:08:10.140 is you've got what are called nuclei. So these are myonuclei. And so if you remember basic biology,

00:08:15.620 the nucleus is what controls any cell. So most cells in the world have one nucleus. Skeletal muscle

00:08:21.520 is unique because you've got infinite number of them, basically, spread throughout the duration

00:08:26.280 of the muscle. And that gives you a lot of what we call plasticity. And so the more nuclei you have,

00:08:31.280 the more control centers you have, the easier it is to respond to stressors, damage, adaptations,

00:08:37.260 etc. That's why skeletal muscle is so, again, adaptable to various, whether this is good stimuli

00:08:43.320 or bad stimuli, like in the case of spaceflight or physical inactivity or whatever you want to be.

00:08:48.220 So in addition to that, you've got, of course, your mitochondria, which you've spoken at length

00:08:52.360 out over your career. And that's what's going to be able to use a lot of your, or produce a lot of

00:08:56.520 your cellular energy. And then finally, you've got what we call the contractile units. And so the

00:09:02.200 things that make your muscle fibers contract together and squeeze on top of each other are

00:09:06.940 actin and myosin. And so these are two molecules that kind of reach up. The myosin grabs the actin,

00:09:11.880 it pulls it together, smashes it literally on top of itself. And that's why when you flex,

00:09:15.800 say, a bicep muscle, it actually gains height because you're stacking things on top of each

00:09:20.820 other. And that requires the muscle to go vertically. So that's, I guess, the big picture

00:09:25.360 of what muscles are and then what they actually look like at the cellular level.

00:09:29.480 That was much more efficient than I would have done it. Let's layer on another question. You

00:09:34.060 drew a contrast between the soleus and the gastrocnemius. And although you didn't use the

00:09:39.760 exact terms, you alluded to it, that one is sort of slow to fatigue and one is fast to fatigue,

00:09:46.720 which of course is now part of another division we would layer on this. So can you explain at that

00:09:53.220 cellular level, what the difference is between the gastrocnemius and the soleus?

00:09:58.360 We call muscle fibers one-on-one, but really there's distinction between them. So maybe we'll just

00:10:03.340 take a quick jaunt back into history and I won't make this too long, although I'd love to. So all

00:10:09.240 the way back to the invention of the microscope, Anton von Lievenhoek, many people discover things,

00:10:13.580 but you get it. He gets the credit. Well, one of the first things he actually used that microscope

00:10:16.720 for was he started looking at individual cells. He started looking at muscle actually in whales and

00:10:22.380 codfish and a bunch of other stuff. And he started to notice that some of these cells are really small

00:10:26.640 and some of them are really big. And that's the very first time we really started to functionally

00:10:30.100 distinguish between, at that time it was just sort of big fibers and small fibers. And then pretty

00:10:34.940 quickly after that, he started to realize, well, some of them are really red and some of them are

00:10:38.920 more white. And so for a big number of centuries, really, we kind of distinguish muscle as these

00:10:45.740 fiber type, they're these fibers, these cells are either red cells or white cells. And it took a long

00:10:51.340 time to figure out why that mattered or what that meant. But eventually it became clear that the ones

00:10:55.240 that are red are red because they have more of those capillaries. They have more blood flow. They have

00:10:59.920 more mitochondria. They have more iron. All those things go into it. So they give an actual

00:11:03.480 look of being red. The other ones have less of it. We didn't know for a long time after that,

00:11:08.480 though, functionally what that meant. If you were to look back in some old textbook or had an old

00:11:12.920 professor one from anatomy or something a long time ago, they might call fibers white or fibers and

00:11:18.000 red fibers. And so you'll hear them distinguished based on color. That's the first distinction.

00:11:22.180 Well, as soon as histology came around and we started getting better microscopes and technology,

00:11:26.060 we started to realize that, wait a minute, we can actually test the individual muscle fibers

00:11:30.420 for their power output. So this is their contraction. So this is, you take them out of

00:11:34.780 the muscle, you put them in a Petri dish, you tie one end to a force transducer, you tie the other

00:11:38.980 end to a fixed unit, and you put it in a whole bunch, a bath of calcium and ATP and a bunch of other

00:11:43.480 stuff. And those fibers just start contracting unlimited. And you can actually measure how much

00:11:47.920 force is being produced. And so now we went from distinguishing these fibers via color,

00:11:52.460 red versus white, to now distinguishing them by their contractile properties. That's what that

00:11:57.280 term means. So are you contracting with a lot of force or a small amount of force? And in fact,

00:12:01.620 force wasn't really the distinguishing factor, it was speed. And so because of that, we started the

00:12:05.980 nomenclature evolved to now describe them as fast twitch or slow twitch. And that really specifically

00:12:11.620 describes the twitch or the contraction speed. So two ways to distinguish the fibers now, color or

00:12:17.400 contractile speed. And then eventually we started to figure out their enzymatic differences.

00:12:21.780 And so the ones that had more mitochondria were better at using aerobic metabolism. So this is

00:12:26.960 carbohydrate and fat metabolism. Those are both aerobically needed. And the ones that were white

00:12:33.480 or fast were much better at using glycolysis from the anaerobic part of the equation. So this is in

00:12:39.060 the cytoplasm outside of the mitochondria. And so now we can distinguish these things via enzymatic

00:12:44.380 properties. And so you can call them a fast twitch fiber, you can call them a white or red fiber,

00:12:48.720 or you can call them aerobic or anaerobic or oxidative or glycolytic. Again, depending on

00:12:54.980 if you ever had maybe some of this stuff in high school or college class, you might've heard them

00:12:59.300 described as fast oxidative or fast glycolytic. And there's like, why is all this nomenclature

00:13:04.560 exists? And that's exactly why it all happens. And so to come back to the beginning here, this is

00:13:10.180 where it's going to really matter. Initially, when this distinction was drawn, it looked like there

00:13:14.560 was two types. There's type one and type two. That's just what they called them. And type one

00:13:19.000 is the slow twitch, the red fibers, the oxidative fibers. Type two were the fast twitch. All the

00:13:25.200 opposite, right? Well, in the 1950s-ish area, we started to figure out, well, wait a minute,

00:13:30.720 there's actually a third distinct fiber type. And that fiber type was more closely aligned

00:13:35.920 to the fast twitch fibers than the slow twitch. And so we started to delineate a little bit more.

00:13:41.220 So you have your type one, and they'll stay way over here. And then over here, you have a type 2A

00:13:45.820 and a type 2B. Again, they are distinct and different enough from each other that they need

00:13:50.960 to be called their own thing, but they're closer together than they are close to the slow twitch

00:13:55.680 fiber. So instead of why they called it type one and type two and not type three, it's because they

00:14:01.580 wanted to make sure people recognize they're really close to each other, but they're distinct. So we'll

00:14:05.600 call them 2A and 2B. Well, some years passed and we actually eventually realized that humans don't have

00:14:10.880 2B. So again, depending on the exercise physiology book you might currently be using,

00:14:16.020 they might still be using the nomenclature of type 2B, despite the fact that we've had genetic

00:14:20.900 information since 1990, that humans don't even have the gene to express 2B. So like 2B is just a

00:14:26.260 non-starter with humans. However, we do have what's called a 2X. And it's actually, this is

00:14:33.000 foundation stuff that you're going to need later in the conversation when we talk about the second

00:14:35.980 map. So humans, to summarize, have type one, type 2A and type 2X. Well, felines and animals and bears

00:14:43.900 and stuff, we've done biopsies and stuff on bears, do have the 2B. Muranes have 2B. And so most other

00:14:49.820 animals have four distinct ones. They have really, really fast when these bees are ultra fast. 2X is

00:14:55.320 pretty fast. 2A is slower, but fast. And then one is slower. So if you run the entire continuum,

00:15:02.880 it pretty much lines up. So the ones that are pure type 1 have generally more mitochondria and they

00:15:09.740 are less fatigable. They don't produce as much force. Well, they do relative size, but they're

00:15:15.120 slower. And they do that. As you move to 2A and to 2X, they become faster, but they become more

00:15:21.660 fatigable because they're more reliant upon glycolysis and carbohydrate metabolism. So that's

00:15:27.200 generally what we're looking at with fiber types. So when you ask the distinction between how does the

00:15:31.820 soleus and the gastroc compare, the gastroc in most humans is something like 60 to 70, or maybe

00:15:39.500 even up to 80% 2A fibers. And so they are very, very fast. So the gastroc will again cause a fast

00:15:46.680 contraction, but they won't hold on for very long because it gets fatigable. The soleus can be up to

00:15:51.320 90% slow twitch. And so this is a great comparison because most muscles in your body are some combination

00:15:59.160 of fast and slow twitch. But the soleus and the gastroc are probably the best example of the two

00:16:03.320 extremes. If you look in animals like mice, you can see a soleus that is 100% slow twitch. For a number

00:16:09.620 of reasons, humans never get that far down the line. If I biopsied somebody in the soleus and they were

00:16:14.420 80% slow twitch, I'd be like, well, that's pretty high. And if they were 70% fast twitch in the gastroc,

00:16:19.060 I would say that's pretty high. That's what you can sort of expect in terms of muscle physiology

00:16:24.500 differences between the soleus and the gastroc. And again, why that functionally matters.

00:16:29.160 If you have a compromised soleus, you're probably less likely to be standing. You're going to sit.

00:16:34.880 You're probably going to be less generally physically active. If the soleus is compromised,

00:16:38.200 it's hard to move fast and powerfully. How modifiable is that distribution? Is it purely

00:16:44.900 genetic or is there a trainable component to the ratio of fast to slow twitch fiber in a given muscle?

00:16:53.360 It's extremely trainable. It just comes down to exposure, which means stimuli and time. And the

00:16:59.720 more stimuli you give it, the more time you give it, the more it will change. Now, like anything else,

00:17:05.420 an asymptote exists here. So if you are very untrained and you're pretty inactive physically,

00:17:10.840 maybe even take nude extreme, you go into a cast for two months or spaceflight and you're literally

00:17:16.500 inactive, that movement happens faster. If you are pretty trained and well-trained and months and

00:17:21.360 years go on, you start changing really, really slowly because you get closer at the end of the

00:17:24.600 spectrum. But there is really, I mean, functionally no limit to how far they'll go given enough total

00:17:30.120 exposure. To put you into like some realistic numbers, the soleus is kind of hard, actually.

00:17:35.000 The gastroctis is a better one. If you were, say, completely untrained and you had an exercise for,

00:17:39.640 say, five plus years, and then you did eight weeks of exercise, I don't even care what it is. It

00:17:44.600 really doesn't matter that much. I would bet 10 to 15% change in fiber type in that kind of a time

00:17:49.880 span. It wouldn't be that crazy. Sorry, just to make sure I understand what's actually happening

00:17:54.040 there, Andy, is it turnover? Meaning are you literally just expressing more type two and

00:18:01.980 expressing less type one so that if you compare the muscle biopsies across those eight weeks, you've

00:18:08.400 actually just displaced two into one due to making new cells and apoptosis of the old cells?

00:18:15.860 Really good question. Generally, no. There's this idea called hyperplasia. So hyperplasia is when you

00:18:21.420 would grow a new cell. And that is very, very uncommon in normal human situations. It can happen

00:18:27.920 with extreme eccentric training. Looks like it probably happens with a lot of exogenous testosterone

00:18:32.780 use over many, many years. But outside of like sort of extreme examples, you can get it in cell culture

00:18:38.040 and you can get it in animal models. But in human, like normal situations, hyperplasia is very

00:18:42.560 uncommon. So what more happens is the current fiber type itself will transition its type, which is sort

00:18:50.440 of tricky because this, I'm not sure how far you want to go here, but the reality of it is, remember

00:18:55.420 how I said there's three fiber types? That's not actually true either. There's a whole combination of

00:19:00.240 what we call hybrids. And so if you were to take any one individual muscle cell, it might be entirely,

00:19:06.280 say 2A on one end of the cell, but it might be what we call a 1-2A. So this is a single muscle

00:19:12.800 fiber that expresses both type 1 and type 2. Depending on the length of the cell, there may

00:19:17.920 be different spots. So they're not always the same type. So the same thing can happen with 2A2X,

00:19:22.740 by the way. In fact, you can have a triple hybrid. You can have a 1-2A2X. So you can have all three

00:19:27.040 being co-expressed.

00:19:28.700 So they're kind of pluripotent and they basically have the potential to

00:19:32.040 differentially express themselves based on stimulus.

00:19:35.480 Okay. Let's talk a little bit about how everything you just said factors into some of the metrics

00:19:43.020 we're going to talk about vis-a-vis different types of performance in athletes. Let's start

00:19:49.520 with hypertrophy. If you took a biopsy of my biceps, and then you took a biopsy of a professional

00:19:59.920 bodybuilder's biceps, how do our muscle fibers look different? Are his significantly at the level

00:20:08.160 of the cell and the fiber significantly that much bigger? Does he have more of them, but they're

00:20:14.000 about the same size, but in aggregate, they're bigger in cross-section, of course. Is it a combination

00:20:18.580 of both?

00:20:19.880 Well, this is a lot of really interesting questions. Let's use the VL, the vastus lateralis,

00:20:23.520 the outside quad muscle as a better example, just because we have thousands of biopsy studies from

00:20:27.980 there. So you asked a lot of really cool questions. Okay. A couple of things to understand.

00:20:33.020 Number one, counting muscle fibers total is a very challenging thing because the only true way to

00:20:38.840 do it is I need to take your entire muscle, cut half and count it. Now we can do some estimates.

00:20:44.560 You can take a whole muscle size, take the average size of the muscle fibers, and then account for

00:20:51.020 our fluid and stuff, but that's sort of tricky at best. So we have good data on these from animal

00:20:55.540 models, cats, actually dogs and things like that. Humans, it's challenging. In general, fast twitch

00:21:02.080 fibers, let's just keep it fast and slow for now. I'm not confused people, are generally bigger than

00:21:07.560 slow twitch fibers by diameter. So they're generally wider. But when you throw training into the equation,

00:21:13.180 that all goes out the window. I have analyzed, I can't tell you how many thousands of slow twitch

00:21:17.220 fibers and they are bigger than fast twitch fibers in that individual person. Now, does that tell us

00:21:22.740 anything about that individual? For example, if you look at an extreme athlete, you know, like an

00:21:28.080 endurance athlete who is getting as much potential out of their slow twitch muscle fibers as possible,

00:21:34.060 is that generally the scenario where you will see remarkable hypertrophy of the type one fiber?

00:21:39.380 That's exactly what it is. And so one of the things we see happen is fiber

00:21:42.980 type specific hypertrophy with your classic endurance training. So throw kind of intervals

00:21:48.320 and other things out the window for now, just because scientifically it's hard to do. But if

00:21:52.620 you were to your steady state runner, cyclist, swimmer, rower, things like that, I would generally

00:21:56.920 be looking for their slow twitch fibers to be very large. If not the same size as their fast twitch

00:22:00.700 fibers, oftentimes larger. When you're actually pulling out one muscle fiber at a time, you'll see

00:22:05.820 some really wild stuff. So that can happen individually, but on an average, that would be your answer.

00:22:10.700 If you were to invoke any kind of strength training, you can distinguish between power lifters or bodybuilders

00:22:16.040 or any of these things. It won't actually really matter because at the level of the cell,

00:22:20.100 while we're going to distinguish between all those probably here pretty soon, at the level of cell,

00:22:24.020 it's not that different. It's close enough to being the same thing. If you compare it to how

00:22:28.280 different it is than steady state cycling or something. And so in both those cases, I would

00:22:33.440 basically say, hey, the 2A fiber is going to be very large, but you wouldn't be able to pull a 2A fiber

00:22:37.600 and be like, oh, that's a bodybuilder and that's a power lifter. And that's a weight lifter. You

00:22:41.100 would have absolutely no chance to do that. The only thing that kind of throws a wrench here is

00:22:45.940 specifically exogenous testosterone. That will change the game in a number of important ways.

00:22:51.980 Specifically, satellite cells are going to be changed and total muscle fiber size is probably

00:22:56.560 going to get exceptionally large, which will throw it out there.

00:22:58.820 So again, just to make sure I understand, if you're going to compare my VLO to the VLO of

00:23:04.900 Jay Cutler, so world-class bodybuilder, if you do an ultrasound, there's no question that the total

00:23:12.140 size of his muscle is so much bigger than mine. If you can start yanking fibers out, it sounds like

00:23:18.900 he probably has more fibers, probably because he's using exogenous testosterone and I'm not,

00:23:24.200 but it also sounds like his type 2 fibers are bigger than my type 2 fibers.

00:23:27.660 I would be very comfortable with that prediction. They will be very, very large.

00:23:31.500 We biopsied one individual power lifter slash bodybuilder. Some of his fibers were so large,

00:23:36.780 the closest comparator we had were rhinoceros muscle fibers. They were so, not all of them,

00:23:43.140 but a handful of them were, they were so large.

00:23:44.860 Can you give me a sense of scale? How many microns are we talking about here as a fiber?

00:23:49.200 Or compare it to a hair, if that's easier.

00:23:51.440 It would be honestly fairly similar to a hair.

00:23:53.480 So meaning you can see it with your naked eye, it's so big.

00:23:55.660 Oh, a hundred percent. If I had it right now on camera, if you're watching this at home,

00:23:58.900 and if I had my tweezers out, I could pick one up on my petri dish and hold it in the camera and

00:24:01.940 you would be able to see it in this camera. No question. They can be very, very large. Even

00:24:06.160 the smaller ones in human skeletal muscle, like the VL, especially, you would see all the smallest

00:24:10.520 one, no doubt.

00:24:11.880 All right. So now let's talk about another component of hypertrophy, which is, you know,

00:24:16.980 this is sort of funny taking a step back. There is no other cell in the body that we spend so much

00:24:21.480 time thinking about the actual size of the cellular unit. We don't really care about the

00:24:26.440 size of your hepatocytes. We care about the functional units and how they integrate. We

00:24:31.840 care about the function of the hepatocytes individually and collectively, but we're not

00:24:36.440 really sitting there specifically thinking about it. And therefore, I don't think I've ever given

00:24:41.000 much thought to, are my hepatocytes the same size as your hepatocytes? And if mine get bigger or

00:24:46.840 smaller, what's happening? And I'm guessing in the case of, you know, NAFLD, there's going to be

00:24:52.240 some changes where there's both intra and extracellular fat accumulation. But when we now

00:24:58.120 think about a given individual who undergoes hypertrophy training, and so objectively their

00:25:04.800 muscles have gotten bigger, let's keep this quote unquote simple and not assume the use of exogenous

00:25:11.080 testosterone. So we're not really talking about hyperplasia and the creation of de novo cells.

00:25:17.960 By definition, of course, now we know that the myofibril has gotten larger. It has expanded in

00:25:23.700 diameter. What has actually led to that? How much of that is water, intracellular water? How much of that

00:25:31.480 is the synthesis of new organic matter vis-a-vis the amino acids or something else?

00:25:38.140 So there's two main ways that a muscle would hypertrophy, and we're going to distinguish

00:25:42.420 chronic hypertrophy or permanent hypertrophy from acute hypertrophy being, you know, you just left the

00:25:47.420 gym right now and your muscles are bigger, full of fluid. This is what that would be caused. So

00:25:51.880 you've got sustained muscle growth over time. This is either going to be a result of what we call

00:25:56.060 contractile hypertrophy or sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. In either case, the muscle cell got larger. The

00:26:02.600 diameter is expanded. It's going to happen that way. The question now is what actually changed

00:26:07.600 inside that cell that caused it or allowed it to be permanently larger? Well, in the case of

00:26:13.200 sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, this is very new that we even thought it existed. Folks have been talking

00:26:18.220 about this from the bodybuilding perspective in those communities for a very long time.

00:26:22.080 And we always called it sort of pro science. And then it turns out some folks at Mike Roberts and

00:26:26.380 his lab at Auburn and stuff started looking into it and found that actually was happening. And so

00:26:30.320 there's just another vindication for you pro scientists out there that sometimes those guys are

00:26:34.360 on the things. Just because science isn't there yet, it doesn't mean it's wrong. It's like a very

00:26:39.060 good example, right? Just hadn't really been studied. So that actually happens. A contractile

00:26:43.860 hypertrophy happens as a result of increasing proteins on those myosin and actin. And so it's

00:26:49.100 maybe important, maybe not. But the myofilaments here, you don't add more actin or myosin. You just

00:26:54.040 add more protein globulins to them and actually just sort of increases their diameter. What happens

00:26:58.400 then is you can imagine myosin acting working almost like you got a circle of friends and you were to reach

00:27:03.880 your arms, extend your arms out to the side, grab your friend's hand. And when you brought your

00:27:08.060 hands closer to your midline, your friends would then come closer to you. And if everybody get it

00:27:12.040 at the same time, the entire diameter of that circle would get really small and expand. Okay,

00:27:16.020 great. Well, if I were to double my size, but my friend stayed the same distance away from me,

00:27:21.560 and then my friend doubled her size, what you can actually see happen is all of a sudden when I go

00:27:25.840 to reach my hand out to grab them, I'm already touching them because we're so much larger if the

00:27:30.260 whole circle didn't expand. And so this is called lattice spacing. So the spacing between these

00:27:34.740 actin and myosin is very, very important. So if I just continue to get larger, what I would

00:27:38.060 eventually do is tell my friend next to me, hey, you scoot over a few inches because you're sort of

00:27:42.540 crowding on my personal space. And then that friend would say, hey, friend over, same thing,

00:27:47.000 same thing. So what happens is just the standing circle starts to expand. And so probably the biggest

00:27:53.160 explanation for why muscle increases in its diameter is exactly that. You've put more proteins in the

00:27:57.480 contractile units in order to maintain optimal spacing so they can reach out and grab each

00:28:01.640 other and pull in for contraction. The whole thing needed to space out a little bit. It's like you

00:28:06.080 invited a few too many friends to the party. Everyone's uncomfortable now. We have to knock

00:28:09.980 down a wall, make the whole thing bigger. And if we bring in more friends, we got to continue to knock

00:28:14.060 the wall down and expand the size or else we just get too uncomfortable next to each other.

00:28:17.720 When you experience contractile hypertrophy based on everything you've just described,

00:28:22.200 it sounds to me like that comes with contractile force as well, because you're putting more hooks,

00:28:29.700 basically. You're basically creating more anchors, i.e. actin-myosin filaments to grab

00:28:34.480 and contract. Is that essentially, to a first order approximation, a true statement?

00:28:39.320 Yeah. And this is actually true, easily explainable for a number of ways. Number one,

00:28:43.260 in general, especially early in someone's exercise and career, as you get stronger,

00:28:48.020 you will add more muscle mass. And those are very highly linked. That R-score is not 100%. It's not

00:28:52.600 99. It's not 100% the same thing. And we'll differentiate that later. Optimizing for muscle

00:28:57.220 growth is not the same as optimizing for strength. Optimizing for strength is not the same for

00:29:01.840 optimizing for muscle growth. So at some point, they start to diverge more and more and more.

00:29:06.620 But at the very beginning, they're very tightly linked. And so if somebody just wanted to be

00:29:10.420 economical in their training, you could probably get a little bit of both. Well, you certainly would get

00:29:14.680 a little bit of both. If you wanted to optimize for one, then that is a little bit different.

00:29:18.940 And we'll distinguish all that later. Now, as you continue on with your training career,

00:29:23.440 and you get stronger and stronger and stronger, then the link between muscle size and strength

00:29:28.200 does start to go away. But it never goes away entirely because of exactly what you mentioned.

00:29:32.460 If you're tacking on more contractile units, it's not maybe optimizing strength, but it's going to come

00:29:37.260 with some increases in force. And the easy way to think about this is just look at whether it's

00:29:42.280 powerlifting, strongman, wrestling, MMA, you're generally going to see people, as you go up in

00:29:49.400 physical size, you go up in strength, right? Now, it doesn't mean you couldn't find a 155-pound

00:29:53.620 athlete who's stronger than 170-pound athlete. You clearly could. But if you look at world record

00:29:58.520 scores, go higher and higher and higher. And so there's an intrinsic length there, or a connection

00:30:03.080 between mass and strength, although it's not 100%. So yeah, you're going to put those things on.

00:30:09.840 And I guess one important note here is early in your training career, you really don't even need

00:30:14.320 to distinguish between the two because both is going to come along for the ride. You add on some

00:30:17.600 muscle, you're going to get stronger. And if you just strength train, you're probably going to

00:30:20.680 tack on some muscle as well. They're both going to come along for the ride. So you can be a little

00:30:24.960 economical that way. Andy, go back to the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy for a moment. Just give

00:30:29.420 me the background story on that. I was totally unaware of that. When I was in high school, of course,

00:30:33.020 all I did was read muscle and fitness and bro science was my life. I've been a little away from it.

00:30:37.480 Tell me what it was that the bodybuilding community was proposing that science basically only really

00:30:43.860 came to recognize. In general, for a long time, myself and many other exercise scientists were

00:30:50.740 sort of purporting that if you wanted to get muscle hypertrophy, eight to 12 repetitions per set is the

00:30:57.360 optimal range. But yet, if you look at bodybuilders, they're doing all kinds of other stuff. They'll do

00:31:01.860 sets of 20 or 30 or different styles of training. And according to us scientists, that was not

00:31:07.500 hypertrophy. That was muscular endurance or that was strength and those would not result in hypertrophy.

00:31:11.420 And then eventually, more and more research came out and Brad Schoenfeld did much of this work.

00:31:16.640 He's incredibly prolific. And Brad showed, well, actually, hypertrophy is pretty much equal from

00:31:22.960 anywhere between five repetitions per set to up to 30 repetitions per set if other things are

00:31:26.980 equated for. Provided the RPE gets to the same point, right? The reps in reserve has to basically,

00:31:32.820 you have to get pretty close to failure, not failure necessarily, but at the end of 30,

00:31:37.720 you need to be hurting as much as you would be at the end of seven.

00:31:40.440 Yeah. And it's very hard because you're going to start hurting at like 15.

00:31:44.280 Much sooner. Yeah, exactly.

00:31:45.740 You got to just bear with it.

00:31:46.920 It's much more time under tension. And in some ways, it's also more taxing to your cardiovascular

00:31:50.780 system, depending on the lift.

00:31:52.240 It certainly can be. Certainly can be. So what the bodybuilding community would say

00:31:57.100 are things like, hey, if you lift in this fashion, five to 10 reps, you might increase

00:32:02.620 contractile units and that's why you're getting stronger. However, if you were to go higher

00:32:06.140 repetition ranges, it's going to be coming from sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. And why that matters

00:32:11.300 is that's almost exclusively explained by increases in fluid retention. And so it is non-contractile

00:32:17.540 hypertrophy. So this is why you can get bigger, but you're not getting stronger.

00:32:20.960 That's the functional distinction. And again, that's like something that we were just like,

00:32:25.800 no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't happen. There had been like a couple of papers, but the technology

00:32:29.960 wasn't there, honestly, to measure it. Until some assays came around and Mike really got that stuff

00:32:34.280 going and it was like, oh crap. And now it looks like the story is actually pretty clear.

00:32:38.320 Mike has a wonderful review paper on this stuff and you can actually see a graph he's developed

00:32:42.480 and you can look at when psychoplasmic hypertrophy happens, when contractile happens and what

00:32:47.200 happens over the course of your training experience. And I think it actually explains

00:32:51.220 what's happening pretty nicely. I think that was the perfect intro to what I think would be

00:32:59.340 a really elegant framework for now, how to talk about a series of rows and a series of columns that

00:33:06.580 make up a matrix. In our first podcast, we spoke about the different types of athletes. And then

00:33:13.400 we talked about the different variables that go into training stress. What we didn't do because

00:33:19.040 there simply wasn't enough time was fill in that matrix. And that's what I'd love to do today.

00:33:24.700 So I went back to is what are the different phenotypes of interest? So we're going to go with a power

00:33:30.200 lifter, an Olympic weightlifter, a strong man, a bodybuilder, a CrossFit athlete, a track and field

00:33:38.520 athlete. And then we're going to look at them according to the following. If you're training

00:33:44.440 to be specifically that athlete, what's your frequency of training? What's your intensity,

00:33:49.540 for example, as a percent of one RM or VO2 max? What's the volume you're doing? How are you thinking

00:33:54.840 about sets and reps? What's the rest recovery? And is there any other sort of skill-based training

00:34:00.500 adaptation that's necessary? I acknowledge this might take us a while, but I think this is a very

00:34:06.560 elegant way to synthesize so many of the concepts that were in the first episode of our sit-down.

00:34:13.200 And I think in many ways, this is kind of the rubber hitting the road. Now I'll tell you that

00:34:17.000 my ultimate goal in doing this, Andy, is to now extract from each of those phenotypes,

00:34:23.460 the learnings for what I consider personally the most important phenotype, which is not power lifter,

00:34:29.440 Olympic weightlifter, strongman, bodybuilder, et cetera, but rather what I call the centenarian

00:34:33.160 decathlete. In other words, even though I'm only 50, so much of how I think about training

00:34:39.120 is for the 90-year-old version of me. What do I want to be able to do at 90? I have a pretty good

00:34:44.360 sense of what it is. It's quite audacious. What do I need to do for the next 40 years to make sure

00:34:50.040 that at 90, I'm functioning, to be honest with you, like a very fit 70-year-old? That's the aspiration.

00:34:57.040 So we'll end with that if we have time. If not, that'll easily be part three. But let's start with

00:35:02.820 the order that you presented them in, which was starting with the power lifter. So again, just for

00:35:06.860 folks listening, power lifting is a very, very specific sport. It consists of three and only

00:35:11.580 three lifts, and you are scored on the basis of the total amount of weight you move in a deadlift,

00:35:17.900 a bench press, and a squat. And that's it. Nobody cares what you look like. Nobody cares how fast you can

00:35:24.100 do that. Nobody even cares how many reps you can do, right? There's nothing that goes into it,

00:35:29.160 except it's a number. A plus B plus C equals total, and that's it. Now those guys are strong as hell

00:35:36.560 for what they do. Maybe give people a sense of numbers. Pick two different weight classes and

00:35:42.180 explain to people just how strong a power lifter is in those three lifts. To really clarify, when we say

00:35:49.020 strength, you could also think about force. I'll say those interchangeably. And while in the real

00:35:54.760 world, if somebody were to be able to drag a train or something, I'd be like, well, that's a strong

00:36:00.560 person. But technically, maximal strength is what's the maximal amount you can do one time.

00:36:06.980 And I know you said that a second ago, but I really wanted to make sure that the audience heard

00:36:10.300 that correctly. Yeah, because the name power lifter is a bit misleading here, which I think you're about

00:36:15.000 to explain why. That's exactly right. Power, the difference between force and power is speed.

00:36:20.300 And so another way to say this is if you take speed, multiply that by force or strength. That's

00:36:26.160 how you get power. And so implicit in that is power is comprised of both strength and speed. So there's

00:36:32.020 a speed component to it. In the case of the exercises you listed in power lifting, there's no

00:36:36.980 speed component to it, really. They're trying to move as fast as they can, but they're not scored on

00:36:40.420 speed. There's no clock. It doesn't matter at all how fast they move. It is explicitly

00:36:44.660 a test of pure and absolute strength. What is the most amount you can lift one time? There are

00:36:50.480 three different exercises we tried in, but you don't get to do it for three or four reps or it's

00:36:55.440 not, you know, who completed the fastest. It is who's the maximum thing you can lift. So to give you

00:36:59.520 some examples, I've worked with Steffi Cohen a little bit, not much, but just a little bit in my

00:37:04.420 career. And she has 25 or 27 world records. One of her competitions, I think she weighed 119 pounds

00:37:11.920 and I think she deadlifted 525 in that competition. She's deadlifted 585, I believe. So getting in the

00:37:19.780 stratosphere of five, well over 5X body weight here, which is absurd. She probably deadlift is her

00:37:26.680 thing. So, but she's still probably benching 200 something and squatting well over the 400s.

00:37:31.460 So as 120 pound female, that's pretty strong. It's simply unbelievable.

00:37:36.920 It's totally unbelievable. I was deadlifting today, right? Today just happens to be deadlift day for

00:37:42.560 me. And because I no longer can, like I peaked at 18, it's a little depressing, right? Like I just,

00:37:48.940 that was my peak in deadlifting. Well, I mean, I don't know that I even care to lift as much as I

00:37:53.800 did, but now I do different things. So today the main set was four rounds of one minute,

00:38:00.780 as many reps as possible with 350. It's a different stress. Make no mistake about it. It hurts in a

00:38:06.540 totally different way. Yeah. Do three 15 as many times as you can in 60 seconds, rest three minutes

00:38:11.780 and keep doing that over and over again. I hope Beth got a raise or got fired for that. One of the

00:38:15.980 two, whoever programmed that for you. There's no way I'm doing, no, actually I told Beth after and

00:38:21.120 she was like, what was your intention with this? And I was like, actually, uh, yeah, anyway, but like

00:38:26.400 even at my strongest, I couldn't do 525, but my strongest, I weighed 160 pounds. So that's a

00:38:33.980 staggering amount of movement. And you've got good levers for pulling. You got long arms. You're

00:38:38.600 probably like pretty efficient at deadlifting. I would assume that lifting was my best of the

00:38:42.000 three by far. Yeah. Bench is probably your worst. I would assume based on it is. I will embarrass

00:38:46.620 myself by saying how much I could bench. I guess I should finish the story. 270 was my best bench at a

00:38:51.740 weight of one 60, which is not that good. I mean, let's be honest. It's not that good. It's not that

00:38:55.940 terrible though, either. It's okay. So if you want to look at like the crazy top end of the scale,

00:39:00.500 I'm unfamiliar. Yeah. Let's tell people more about like what, and I guess in powerlifting,

00:39:04.900 it is a little complicated because you do have to consider tested versus untested athletes. It's a

00:39:09.960 pretty big difference. Yeah. Let's just give you the maximum human potential on all the steroids.

00:39:15.040 Who cares? All the gear, all the squat suits, whatever. My friend, AJ Roberts, I think his best

00:39:20.940 squat was 1250, 1240. It's just hard to believe that's possible. I think he was 308 pounds for that

00:39:29.060 meet. So this is, you know, 4X squat. I don't know what the like all time, all time, all time

00:39:33.880 record is right now because it's so hard, but I think it is north of 1300 at this point. It's not

00:39:39.780 common, but people have pulled, deadlifted 1000 and people have benched 1000. There's a lot more

00:39:46.440 people who have squatted like 1100 plus. There's a decent number of those people, but there are a

00:39:51.440 handful of people who have deadlifted 1000 and a handful that have benched 1000 with all the gear and

00:39:56.140 all this stuff, but who cares? It's like half a ton. They're taking off the bar, holding it,

00:39:59.640 touching it. It's absurd. It's simply absurd. Okay. So we've established that despite the hiccup

00:40:08.220 in the nomenclature, these people are insanely strong. Again, I would encourage everyone who's

00:40:14.600 listening or watching, you may never desire to do a maximum rep, deadlift, bench presser squat.

00:40:21.640 I personally have no desire to ever do it again, ever. There's never a day I'm going to put enough

00:40:27.040 weight on a bar in any of those three lifts to even come close to that. That said, the principles

00:40:32.940 of how they train matter a lot to me. So let's start with, well, you can take them in any order

00:40:38.400 you want, Andy, but let's just talk about frequency. What are the sort of the guiding principles for how

00:40:43.000 you take an athlete who comes to you? And I guess maybe for the purpose of this discussion, Andy,

00:40:48.020 let's assume that all of the guidance we're going to provide is not for a world-class athlete with an

00:40:56.200 enormous training age. Conversely, let's also assume it is not for someone who has never lifted

00:41:03.760 a finger. Again, I think just for the sake of simplicity, why don't we assume that in every

00:41:08.440 situation you're taking a person who has some exercise exposure, but not specific to this endeavor.

00:41:15.520 So in this case, you're talking about a person who grew up playing sports, maybe they're reasonably

00:41:20.620 fit. They still muck around, they play some pickup basketball. Maybe they do a little bit of this and

00:41:25.600 that. They're no stranger to the gym. They understand what lifts and things are, but truthfully, they've

00:41:31.920 never been to a powerlifting meet and they're coming to you saying, Hey, I would really, I'd like to

00:41:35.380 compete in the 50 and up, or 50 to 55 powerlifting thing. So guy shows up with that. Tell me how you're

00:41:41.680 walking about his training program. I want to make two slight distinctions inside of that. Distinction

00:41:46.780 one is what is theoretically technically optimal. Distinction two is what's probably more realistic and

00:41:52.360 practical. Okay. Let's always feel free to give both of those. I distinguish these in my world as

00:41:56.960 efficacy versus effectiveness. So max efficacy is exactly the former there. Theoretically, if you can do

00:42:03.440 everything to perfection, you will have the best results. Effectiveness is in the real world when you stay up

00:42:08.940 late at night because your kids are sick and you got a little extra deadline at work and that's

00:42:13.440 going to cut into your training. What's the best you can do? You just described last night for me.

00:42:19.640 So one thing that's going to hold true throughout all of this matrix we're going to cover is

00:42:24.040 specificity is always your answer. If you want to get better at writing, you need to write. If you

00:42:30.260 want to get better at sprinting, you need to sprint. If you want to get stronger and you want to get

00:42:34.620 better at picking up a weight one time, the heaviest you can pick it up, that is by far the most direct

00:42:40.660 route to go. Meaning in this case, you should practice every single day picking up 100% of your

00:42:48.320 max. Wow. Theoretically, that's what specificity would tell you. Distinction two, that's not realistic.

00:42:54.440 The injury for this person you described, injury frequency is too high. Now, if you are a truly elite

00:43:00.280 athlete, you might do something close to that. If you look at the Bulgarian method, this would be

00:43:05.920 weightlifters, not powerlifters, but similar. They're going to do a one rep max in the snatch,

00:43:09.980 clean, jerk, and squat every day. This is what they do. Now, again, these are people probably on

00:43:14.780 assistance. They are five, six, seven, eight, nine years into their training career. And in between,

00:43:20.560 they're getting massages. So in theory, if you really wanted to maximize specificity, you could do

00:43:26.940 that. And many have done that. A Neon Suleimanoglu, one of the pocket Hercules, if you want to Google

00:43:30.600 that guy. Now, he didn't do it for all of his training, for all year round, but certain phases

00:43:34.600 of his training, that's what you would do. High specificity, you're going to get better at those

00:43:38.920 things, no question. So to peel that back, anything besides that is less specific. But you have to then

00:43:46.020 start hedging towards, okay, am I going to get hurt? That's not realistic for the avatar you described,

00:43:51.340 and all the practical implications. So what you want to do, though, is get as close to that as you can,

00:43:55.800 while not inducing overload injury, all that other stuff. So realistic scenario, probably something

00:44:02.180 like one to five days per week, you work that movement pattern. So realistically, two would be

00:44:09.420 good for a lot of people. So if you want to get stronger at squatting, squat twice a week. If you

00:44:13.720 recover well, and you squat well, your mechanics are well, three days a week, that would be a really,

00:44:18.140 really, really good program. But you could get very strong, very strong doing two days a week in that

00:44:23.380 movement. So if you wanted to do all three, like in powerlifting, maybe bench twice a week, maybe

00:44:29.000 deadlift once a week, maybe squat once a week, something like that. Maybe if you wanted to squat

00:44:33.700 twice a week and deadlift twice a week, you could maybe get away with that, depending on other

00:44:37.460 variables. So it could be as little as two days a week of training, because you could do a bench

00:44:41.700 squat day and a bench deadlift day, potentially? It could. And for a lot of people, the person you're

00:44:46.300 describing, they would get stronger. It wouldn't be optimal, but it would be certainly effective

00:44:49.580 for a lot of folks. If they said, Andy, I'm willing to be in the weight room four days a week.

00:44:53.860 I'm really optimizing on this. If I'm going to be in the weight room four days a week, are you

00:44:57.280 basically going to figure out a split where you get three of each in those eight sessions or

00:45:02.860 something to that effect? I'll tell people to look into what's called a conjugate. There's many

00:45:07.020 forms of this, but this would be the Westside barbell, Louis Simmons form of conjugate. And that's

00:45:10.880 almost exactly what they describe, right? So it's a little bit of pure strength work at the

00:45:14.780 beginning. There's a muscular endurance phase, basically. There's a speed phase to it,

00:45:19.440 and there's a strength phase to it. And they just build that in and they actually just sort

00:45:22.720 of rotate it through. Bench squat, deadlift, bench squat, and they just power it through that way.

00:45:26.640 So that's a very easy model. And so you're saying that they would do that in any given workout or

00:45:30.980 across the week, it's spread out that way? Sorry. Yeah. Across the week. So basically you'd

00:45:35.320 walk in the gym, you're going to do a max deadlift, and then you're going to do some assistance work

00:45:39.040 in your low back or your glutes, your hamstrings, or whatever is needed. The next day you come in,

00:45:43.220 it's maybe a max bench and then tricep work, shoulder work, rear delts, neck, or whatever, et cetera.

00:45:48.160 And then the day you come in, you kind of follow it that way.

00:45:51.560 The next question is, is the only time you're going to have this athlete moving insanely heavy

00:45:56.620 weights in the three formal lifts, or do you have them do very heavy things that are accessories?

00:46:03.500 So I'll give you an example. Do you have them do very heavy hip thrusters or very heavy incline

00:46:09.180 bench press or very heavy military press or very heavy front squats, i.e. things that they are not

00:46:14.620 going to compete in, but have a high degree of overlap with what they're competing in?

00:46:19.540 Specificity wins here.

00:46:20.760 So you're going to say no, because you're not a professional athlete who has all the time in the

00:46:23.980 world, just do the lift. I would say stick mostly to the lift. Now, even for this person,

00:46:31.180 it's not because they're not a professional athlete. You could make the argument,

00:46:33.920 they need variation more actually, because who really cares if they optimize their strength gain?

00:46:38.800 I'd rather push it a little bit more towards overall safety and variation will give you that

00:46:43.880 because it's less overuse of the same movement pattern, the same loading pattern. The more

00:46:47.880 variation you get, the less specificity, so the less direct adaptation, but the less likelihood of

00:46:52.420 overuse. So in this particular person, I would probably, but if we really said this, I would say

00:46:56.820 here, maybe I'll say it this way. The core of our day when we come in is going to be that exact

00:47:01.400 movement. It's going to be a barbell back squat in your stance, the way that you're going to compete.

00:47:05.200 Great. Certainly within maybe the eight weeks prior to this competition. Outside of that,

00:47:11.380 though, when we call off season, we would introduce variation, do other stuff. While they're in that

00:47:15.960 specificity phase, though, we might do our primary lift is what we kind of call it. And then after

00:47:20.360 that, we would do a ton of accessories. So we might do our hard work on our barbell back squat. And then

00:47:25.180 maybe we go to a goblet squat. Maybe we do split squat. Maybe we do lateral lunges and we would do

00:47:30.060 other stuff, reverse hypers and things like that. So you would, we want to use all those, but those would be

00:47:34.120 what we call accessories or supporting stuff. And you would probably go to higher repetition ranges

00:47:38.500 for those. You wouldn't do a max effort step up. You might do set to five, eight, something like that

00:47:44.080 to really support the joints and make everything feel good. But you keep your pure, pure strength work

00:47:48.800 to that core lift. And when you're in that, let's just pick one. Let's just pick the deadlift,

00:47:53.380 for example. What's the rep range you're going to have them working in? Is there a number of reps that

00:47:57.860 is so high that it's getting you too far away from max strength?

00:48:01.240 Five is sort of the number. Five and less. You get starting past five, you start losing

00:48:05.700 horse production. I used to know these tables off by heart from when I was younger. I believe

00:48:10.900 five reps, is that 85% of typically one RM that you do five for?

00:48:16.600 It totally depends. Actually, it depends a lot on fiber type. It's actually sort of funny,

00:48:21.240 but it depends on the movement. The same is not true for deadlift versus a bench. Those numbers go

00:48:25.440 way off. So it's a rough-ish number. There's actually a chart called Prolipin chart.

00:48:30.820 We'll put it in the show notes.

00:48:31.740 What the chart does is it tells you, there's been a handful of studies on it out of New Zealand

00:48:35.380 of some power lifters and stuff, but this is from the Russian literature, I believe, originally.

00:48:40.640 But anyways, it tells you how many reps to do throughout the week total at a given percentage.

00:48:46.140 So in other words, hey, between 70% to 80% accumulate this many reps. Between 80% to 90%

00:48:51.660 accumulate this many reps, accumulate 90, 95, et cetera. And it gives you a range

00:48:55.700 of reps to stay within in terms of total per week. And that's pretty good because it'll tell

00:48:59.920 you sort of like, here's the amount of max effort you can get away with. And then here's how much

00:49:03.980 supporting work you need to do to make sure that stuff can happen. It's generally pretty effective

00:49:08.220 to get you close.

00:49:09.620 Now to do this, you need to know your one RM.

00:49:12.780 Okay. So this is a bit of an aside, but it might be relevant. There are these devices. I forget the name

00:49:18.460 of it. I actually have one and I enjoy using it. I can't remember the name of it though. It's a

00:49:21.680 little thing that sits on the ground and it has a strap that goes on the bar.

00:49:25.180 Oh, velocity transducers. Yeah.

00:49:26.920 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can't remember the name of the one I have, but I quite fancy the thing.

00:49:30.060 Probably gym aware.

00:49:31.140 No, I have a different one. It starts with a V, I think. But anyway, if I do a set,

00:49:35.740 let's say I'm doing a set of fives. If I want to do five sets of five one day,

00:49:39.540 it's measuring the speed in feet per second or meter per second of each rep. It knows the weight. So I

00:49:45.140 tell it how much weight I'm putting on and it's measuring the velocity. And it's telling me based

00:49:49.120 on each rep, two things that matter to me, right? One is what's my projected one RM based on the

00:49:53.800 speed that I'm moving that. And what's my level of fatigue. As I've learned, the lower the weight,

00:49:59.660 the less accurate it is. If you have 135 pounds on the bar and you're warming up, there's no amount

00:50:04.060 of speed you can put on that that will get you anywhere within what its prediction is. But once you

00:50:08.380 get into that five rep range, it's pretty accurate. Do you think that's accurate enough for someone

00:50:14.320 like me who doesn't actually want to do a one RM? Or do you think I'm just being a wussy?

00:50:19.820 You are being a wussy. Yeah. But the other thing you can do is just do a rep max test.

00:50:25.420 So there's any number of online calculators, put a weight on that you're comfortable with and do it

00:50:29.280 anywhere between three to 10 reps. And then you can say, okay, I did 200 pounds for eight reps.

00:50:34.760 And it'll say that's your one RM and then go off that.

00:50:37.140 Yep. Now one caveat I'll give you there. Those estimates will go up to like 20 reps per set,

00:50:42.420 but the accuracy is awful. So if you're going to do a rep max test, I generally recommend staying

00:50:46.880 below eight reps. If you can stick between like three to eight range, that's going to give you

00:50:51.000 a pretty accurate score for most people. You said something earlier that I now I think

00:50:55.060 kind of resonates. I have never found those calculators to work for me.

00:50:59.900 Oh, you're a slow twitch guy. Yeah. There's no way. No way.

00:51:02.200 I think I'm a slow twitch guy and therefore I can do way more reps than you would expect.

00:51:07.120 And therefore it tells me I should be able to lift more at one RM and I can't.

00:51:11.180 Yeah. There's no chance. Whatever you're doing for at your 85%, you're doing 15 reps. I'm going

00:51:16.480 to do four. So I'm a super fast twitch guy. That's the other thing I think that is you

00:51:19.960 need to couch that with your own genetics and training history as well. Okay. How many sets

00:51:24.400 are we talking about here? So if I'm coming into the gym saying, okay, well, today's the deadlift

00:51:28.800 day. And let's just say I'm doing the kind of the West side barbell approach where the main set of

00:51:33.120 the day, the working sets are around my deadlift. And then I'll do the accessory and endurance stuff

00:51:36.740 later. We've established, you don't want me going above five reps. Once I've done my warmup,

00:51:42.540 how many working sets would you have for me in that day?

00:51:45.520 Yeah. So maybe I could answer the very beginning. You can answer this whole matrix

00:51:48.700 for strength with just this thing called three to five. So the three to five concept,

00:51:54.120 three to five days per week, three to five exercises, three to five reps per set, three to five total

00:52:00.320 sets, and then three to five minutes rest between each set. It's pretty universal. That can take you

00:52:07.020 as low as three days a week. You're going to do three exercises for three sets of three. Now the

00:52:13.400 intensity has got to be high, got to be a lot of load, right? It could take you all the way to five

00:52:17.540 days a week, five exercises, five sets of five. And that volume is going to be really taxing. Again,

00:52:23.060 if you're loading it appropriately, since we're under the power lifting category.

00:52:26.760 But just to be clear, Andy, that's the strength matrix. That's the strength column here is

00:52:32.340 regardless of which of those athletes you are, when you want to focus on your strength part of

00:52:38.100 what you do, which every one of those athletes has to be strong, including the sprinter,

00:52:41.640 you've got to be in the three to five. Yeah. And now you could also say, again,

00:52:45.660 I already said earlier, one to five. So it's great. But this just makes kind of the rule super easy

00:52:50.060 for people to understand. I certainly didn't invent this. This has been around for a very, very,

00:52:53.860 very long time. You'll find this in books in the 1990s and well earlier than that. But it's an easy

00:53:00.000 one kind of one-liner for people to remember for strength. So it's days, exercises, reps, rest.

00:53:06.940 Sets. Sets. All that, right? So again, since we're in power lifting and since we're in strength,

00:53:12.760 that three to five only works though, if you're loading that heavy. If you're going light,

00:53:18.260 that's not going to work. And just to be clear, let's explain to people what that means.

00:53:21.680 Do you prefer RPE or reps in reserve? Either way.

00:53:25.140 You want to just explain to people what those two mean and how they can use it to think about this?

00:53:29.480 RPE, rating of perceived exertion, how hard is it? You could do this scale of six to 20. It's

00:53:34.360 original Borg scale. You could do it one to 10. You could do it one to five. Whatever the top end of

00:53:38.440 the scale is the hardest repetition you could ever do. And you scale back. So you don't technically need

00:53:43.400 to always be at the high end of the scale there, but you can't be, if you're going on a scale one to

00:53:48.300 five, you can't be at two on this thing. Four is probably the sweet spot. RPEs in reserve is

00:53:54.820 another similar idea where it says like, if you thought you could do 10 reps on this, and I want

00:54:00.660 you to do two reps in reserve, that means I want you to stop at eight reps, right? So you left two

00:54:06.020 repetitions in reserve. You left them on the table there. Same thing would be strength, right? So

00:54:10.280 like, Hey, we're going to do a set of four here. And I want you at a one rep in reserve.

00:54:14.300 So you're going to get to the end of four and go, I would have one left, but I wouldn't have had two.

00:54:19.220 I certainly wouldn't have had three. I would have one left, but I'm going to stop right there. So

00:54:22.640 similar idea, just a different way to express it. Yeah. Rep in reserve for me has always made a

00:54:27.480 little more sense. I think it's easier to explain to people, but at the same time, you have to know

00:54:32.040 what failure is. It's not something you can figure out by yourself. You have to have the experience of

00:54:38.100 dropping a bar on your chest and having the guys run across the gym to pick it up. Like you've got to

00:54:42.420 know what they're easier ways to learn, but that's one of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what I

00:54:46.280 mean? Like you sort of have to have been through the ringer of, I think I have one more and you do

00:54:52.600 versus I think I have one more and you don't. And obviously it's much safer to figure that out on a

00:54:58.240 deadlift than on a squat, for example. I mean, honestly, like just go on a machine.

00:55:02.460 Who cares? Like just get a rough idea, right? You want to get super safe. If you're not familiar

00:55:06.340 with all this stuff, go on a leg press machine, go on a leg extension machine as much as like,

00:55:10.120 we don't love that. Just get close because you're right. RPE and RER both fail epically when people

00:55:16.600 are not highly trained. They think, oh, that's probably close. And really you thought that was

00:55:20.600 a two RER, but that was like a seven RER. Like you're not even close to where you're at.

00:55:24.420 Most people are just stronger than they realize. Way stronger.

00:55:26.960 They have much more in reserve. Okay. So we're assuming that for everything we're talking about

00:55:31.860 with respect to strength, the individual will get to the point where they truly understand how many reps

00:55:38.180 they have in reserve. And now for the three to five system to work, are you talking one to two

00:55:43.780 reps in reserve are needed? That's probably pretty close, probably closer to one, the less comfortable

00:55:48.900 you are fine. But remember, you're not going to get stronger by going at sub maximum weights.

00:55:55.760 You're not going to optimize it. So like the whole idea of getting stronger, you got to test the limits of

00:56:00.760 sort of where you're at within a safe range, of course. And if you're just starting, take your

00:56:06.220 time, ramp up, take six weeks, takes eight weeks. Like you have a lot of time, you know, you've got

00:56:11.140 50 more years, Peter, like we're not in a rush here, but yeah, eventually we got to, I only have 40 years,

00:56:16.360 but you get it though. Like, so do all the caveats aside, be smart with this stuff. We already put one

00:56:23.240 other caveat that I always make sure to say here earlier in the conversation, which is, Hey, if you want to

00:56:28.280 get stronger and you're really untrained, you don't have to go this heavy. You can get very strong

00:56:33.460 doing sets of 20, you'll get there. But this avatar was someone who he said is past that point a little

00:56:38.300 bit. So they needed to really get closer to optimal strength. So this is why we're going a little bit

00:56:42.280 heavier in regard there. Before we leave the power lifter, I want to bring a few other things into

00:56:46.780 this. So again, we're not in this discussion specifically optimizing on total health. Correct.

00:56:52.680 Correct. We're really optimizing around this person being a power lifter. So, so now I come back and I say,

00:56:57.720 Andy, okay, I got it, man. I'm all in on this. You know, I'm going to basically do three to five

00:57:01.620 exercises, sets, reps, et cetera. Um, but I said, Hey, look on the other three days a week,

00:57:06.560 is it cool if I do a bunch of cardio? And again, I'm not talking about this through the lens of

00:57:10.480 health. I'm saying, will it make me a better power lifter? Make you a better power lifter? No.

00:57:14.500 Yeah, exactly. So what would you advise that I do on my off days? If the objective is maximizing my

00:57:20.060 strength? When I was kicking around these scenes a lot, power lifters were notorious for being the

00:57:25.700 laziest sons you've ever seen in your life. If they're not lifting one at max, they're going to

00:57:29.920 be circling Walmart for two and a half hours to get a closer parking spot. No, that is not a joke.

00:57:37.180 I've been in that Jeep. I've been in that Jeep and just driving around. You're just like, Oh my God,

00:57:41.500 it's just like saving every calorie. Okay, great. I think more recently people in that community

00:57:46.660 started to realize like, I need some level of fitness because I can't handle the training volume.

00:57:50.560 If you're pouring sweat, getting through your warmup and tying your shoes, you probably shouldn't

00:57:55.220 be doing one rep maxes all day. Like we need to get fit first. They have to have some level of

00:57:59.880 fitness. So what I would say is this, do the stuff we talked about, maybe finish each one of those

00:58:05.460 workouts with a set of eight to 10 or 12, just to pump a little bit of volume in there. That'll get

00:58:12.040 you in a little, a tiny bit of fitness will be achieved kind of from that stuff on your off days.

00:58:17.060 If you truly want to maximize strength and you're fit enough, then just rest, do other stuff,

00:58:22.660 maintenance, you know, mobility, you know, breath work, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all the other

00:58:26.720 recovery stuff, just hedge heavy. You can, if you're just antsy, got to move, got to move, got to move

00:58:33.000 fine. But this is be like a zone two or lower movement, right? Just don't do much work because

00:58:40.060 every amount of work you're doing is just contributing to systemic fatigue. And remember, it's not just about

00:58:46.060 doing things like preserving muscle glycogen, which you have to do, but it's not a huge deal. If we're

00:58:50.480 doing say three sets of three, it's not going to drain you that much muscle glycogen, but your

00:58:55.460 nervous system requires carbohydrates for metabolism. Everything else has got to be optimized here.

00:59:01.480 And that stuff takes a long time to recover. We've got to restore muscle glycogen and phosphocreatine

00:59:05.500 and ATP, all that happens to them. So there's just no reason it would give you an advantage

00:59:11.660 to do more endurance work in between as long as you have some baseline fitness. And that's the one

00:59:18.220 time where people do see gains from it is again, because they're so untrained, so out of shape,

00:59:23.040 if you will, that they feel better. They can train more. They can train harder. They can recover

00:59:26.620 faster because they have an aerobic system. So that caveat aside, rest. I remember when I was in high

00:59:32.020 school, the gym I worked out in, which was a powerlifting gym, which is why I got into it. But really my

00:59:37.060 primary goal was training for boxing. So I was doing infinitely more volume. And the powerlifters,

00:59:43.020 they would mainly train in the evenings. So I think it was Tuesday, Friday evenings or something.

00:59:46.500 It's exactly as you described. First of all, the two things that stand out to me, even to this day,

00:59:50.360 you know, 50 years later, I'm being a bit facetious. It was only 32 years ago. One is the obvious,

00:59:55.300 how incredibly and insanely strong these men were. And two was how little they did.

01:00:01.620 I couldn't believe how little they did. They would come in, they would put their slippers on,

01:00:10.080 put their suits on, chalk up, do a set, rest for what seemed like an hour, do another set,

01:00:17.560 rest for what seemed like an hour, do another set and leave. And admittedly, they were lifting cars in

01:00:24.240 there. They were so damn strong. But I just remember thinking like, how can you do so little? But I think

01:00:31.160 you're answering that question. And what they were doing, that's every single match has to go into

01:00:37.920 burning for that flame.

01:00:39.420 Has to. I mean, think about this. You're trying to put a thousand pounds on your back. There's just

01:00:46.380 no room for a percentage of fatigue. There's nothing. I mean, the consequences are quite dire

01:00:52.260 here. I'll think about it this way. Even though say a thousand pounds represents their one rep max,

01:00:57.300 it's a hundred percent. And you could do 250 pounds and that's your one rep max. This is not the same

01:01:02.500 thing. It's not the same thing because even though it's both 100% of your one rep max, there's an

01:01:07.900 absolute load that is on a physical human body that is not, does not scale. And so like there is a

01:01:13.820 major difference. That's right. The connective tissue is not scaling linearly at all here,

01:01:18.780 right? They still have tendons and bones that are not that much different from mine.

01:01:23.320 Correct. They're a little bit, but not that much different. And so when they go do their

01:01:27.440 Yeah. When they go do their heavy squat day or their deadlift day, remember if they can squat a

01:01:33.100 thousand pounds, do you know what they're doing for 70%? That's a 700 pound squat day. And so like,

01:01:39.400 those are their light reps. Those are their maintenance reps. So that load is, it just takes

01:01:44.320 so much more rest than when you do your 70% and you can come back tomorrow and squat and be fine.

01:01:48.820 Cause it was 220 pounds. So that relativeness doesn't scale. Even if you're talking about

01:01:53.380 people that aren't like crazy strong, let's say they're a 700 pound squatter. That's still absurdly

01:01:58.260 heavy. Their practice reps are 520 pounds. That's just a ton of load on a human body. And that takes

01:02:03.800 a lot to recover from. Before we go on to the Olympic weightlifter, let's pause for a moment here and

01:02:09.600 just ask the question. What do you think is the long-term consequence in a powerlifter? Is it the case

01:02:18.220 that look, if your mechanics are great, you can live a perfectly long, healthy life that is free

01:02:24.880 of orthopedic disability in the final decade of your life? Or do you believe that at some point,

01:02:30.600 if you're really putting 500 plus pounds on your back repeatedly, the probability of injury is high

01:02:37.660 enough? And I don't mean acute injury. I just mean the chronic wear and tear. You know what? The

01:02:42.880 likelihood that you're going to make it into the last decade of your life without significant

01:02:47.500 limitations brought on by either spine or joint injury are pretty high. What's your take on that,

01:02:54.000 having watched a number of athletes go through this? So scientifically, we don't have really

01:02:58.400 any data to speak of. So this is all anecdotal. We just don't have enough to walk on that. I don't

01:03:02.980 think you would find a very highly competitive powerlifter who is under the illusion that this

01:03:06.900 is great for their health. That's just not a thing really. And they sort of either ignore it or

01:03:11.160 accept it. Having said that, I could name you a ton of people who feel fine. You know, world record

01:03:15.760 holders, multiple world records or close. I can name you a ton of people who just lift kind of

01:03:21.440 recreationally in the gym who are all beat to hell too. So it's a little bit of a, well, okay,

01:03:27.540 I can find examples on both sides here. It depends on how they train.

01:03:31.360 And because we don't have randomization, we don't know if the people who are just doing great would be

01:03:37.460 doing great no matter what they did. And the people who are all beat up to hell are going to be beat up

01:03:42.820 regardless of what they do. And there's also a level of insanity. So you have the people like

01:03:46.720 Louis Simmons and you're like, well, okay, you trained with a broken back, a known broken bone

01:03:51.960 in your back. Like, so like, I don't even count you guys like that. That's not the normal, you know,

01:03:57.120 response. If you're trying to break world records, all those people are training hurt. I can say the

01:04:00.940 same thing about professional fighters. It's a hurt sport. Like that's yeah. But then I could tell you a

01:04:05.900 bunch of them who are wrecked their whole life afterwards. And then a bunch that are like feel okay.

01:04:09.880 Like it's hard to say, I'll put it this way. You take any sport, you take cycling, you take swimming

01:04:15.660 and you push it to the extremes like that. I mean, you're asking not be able to use your shoulders

01:04:19.840 rest your life. So it's not the sport per se. It's the extremity really that I think is probably the

01:04:24.460 issue. I completely agree. Anything you want to add to the training requirements of this athlete

01:04:32.080 before we move on to weightlifters? I could, but just in the sake of time, let's we've covered the

01:04:36.560 big stuff. Okay. Remind people what Olympic weightlifting is. Again, the nomenclature here

01:04:41.880 gets very unhelpful, but why is it that these are probably among the most powerful athletes in the

01:04:49.280 world? Sure. So this is now similar to powerlifting. This is what most people think of when they think

01:04:54.200 of powerlifting. And that's because they're going to do two exercises. One of them is called the power

01:04:59.120 clean. So I have great sympathy for you people who get all these confused. The difference here is

01:05:04.240 similarly to powerlifting. Olympic weightlifting is a competition of who can lift the most amount of

01:05:09.680 weight one time. That's it, right? There are two exercises. One's called the snatch. One's called

01:05:13.980 the clean and jerk. The clean and jerk has two parts. So it has sort of two names, but it's one

01:05:17.180 exercise in competition. Whoever lifts the most snatch, whoever lifts the most in the clean and jerk,

01:05:22.220 you add those two up and that's who gets our gold medal. It's one rep, your best score in one

01:05:26.420 repetition, and it's the most amount of weight you can put on the bar. That's it. The difference is,

01:05:30.640 so why is this not powerlifting? Why is this not truly a maximum strength test? It's because both

01:05:36.500 movements require you to take the bar from the ground and throw it over your head and catch it.

01:05:40.900 Because you're doing that, there is a speed requirement that has to happen. You simply can't

01:05:45.560 throw a maximum weight over your head and catch it slowly. You can absolutely deadlift slowly. It

01:05:51.120 doesn't really matter. You can bench slow and you can squat slow. You don't want to try to go fast,

01:05:54.720 but it's not required for anything. So if you look at the sport of powerlifting, that in order to take

01:06:00.020 a, especially a snatch, which is apples to apples, the snatch is the single highest power producing

01:06:06.300 exercise that has ever been studied. So nothing else produces more power per exercise than a snatch.

01:06:14.020 And that's because you have to take the bar from the ground and throw it over your head and try to

01:06:18.440 catch it. You just can't do it slowly. Your feet get to leave the ground so you don't have to worry

01:06:23.660 about staying in contact, but the bar doesn't crash down on you. Like if you do a speed squat

01:06:27.860 and jump and you jump in the air, the bar would smash you in the back of your neck and your head

01:06:30.820 and that hurts. Bench press, you can't accelerate through the end of the range of motion because

01:06:34.520 the bar would leave you. So you actually decelerate towards the end of a bench. Anything where you're

01:06:38.840 holding on to the implement, it's going to slow down. Things like throwing a medicine ball are great

01:06:43.360 and they are very powerful, but they're not as powerful as a snatch because the load gets so low.

01:06:48.360 So let's remember power is force times velocity. So a medicine ball throw has a high velocity,

01:06:53.640 but it's a six or eight or maybe 20 pound ball. With a snatch, you might have 300 pounds on there.

01:06:59.900 You might have a hundred pounds. It's just a lot heavier. So the force component's higher. So the

01:07:03.680 power output is significantly higher. It is the best way to produce force. So because of that,

01:07:08.840 those athletes are again, quote unquote, the most powerful because they're doing the most powerful

01:07:13.980 movement. So if you were to look at like the vertical jump height on these individuals,

01:07:18.360 it's absurd how high they can jump while still being exceptionally strong. So you're still talking

01:07:24.120 about people who aren't squatting a thousand pounds, but at the same weight, they might be

01:07:28.440 squatting seven or 800, 900 pounds. And also they're doing it at a speed that's not as high as, say,

01:07:34.360 they're not jumping as high as like a basketball player, but they're doing it with 600 pounds,

01:07:38.220 400 pounds, 500 pounds. So that's why it is quote unquote, more powerful. So you could find higher

01:07:43.800 jumpers, you could find higher squatters, but they have this wonderful combination of really strong

01:07:49.720 and really fast. And that's why they produce so much power. Now, going back to what we said earlier,

01:07:55.700 they have to be strong. And so presumably they still have to follow the exact same principles we

01:08:01.140 just talked about for strength. They're not going to optimize their strength doing 12 reps. They're

01:08:06.400 going to have to be in sub five. I guess here, my question is same thing, right? We've got the same

01:08:11.540 avatar as you describe it. The middle-aged woman now, let's just say, who was an athlete in college

01:08:17.320 and wants to try a new sport. This is the sport she wants to do. She's trained. She's not a stranger to

01:08:23.080 exercise, but she's never done weightlifting, meaning Olympic weightlifting. She's never done these two

01:08:28.660 movements. I'm assuming that you're doing a lot of the movement learning with very light load.

01:08:34.880 You're doing a broomstick, perhaps the first time you do a clean and jerk or a snatch.

01:08:38.860 Totally.

01:08:39.280 How is she training her strength in those movements?

01:08:44.400 When you talk about Olympic weightlifting or weightlifting, of all the top things we're going

01:08:48.200 to talk about, this is by far the most technical component. And so we have to, I'm going to almost

01:08:53.800 kind of leave that part of the conversation. We're just going to get bogged down there, but we do

01:08:57.280 acknowledge it, right? It is a ton of technical work to get there because your point is right.

01:09:01.540 If you are simply snatching a PVC pipe, you're not going to generate any strength. That's pretty

01:09:06.640 easy to understand. You're not even going to produce any power really because the load is

01:09:09.520 way too light. It's super fast. It's honestly hard. You can't actually throw a PVC pipe over

01:09:13.420 your head very fast. It's very awkward. Trust me. You can't jerk it over your head like it's

01:09:16.880 super awkward. So once the technical component is sort of acquired, what you'd have to do to

01:09:21.360 answer your question is build the technical skills and then get strength doing, say, a front

01:09:26.440 squat and doing a push press or an overhead press and stuff like that. A more traditional

01:09:30.600 why you're building the technical ability, because what's going to happen is you won't

01:09:34.620 have the technical ability to even get heavy enough on the snatch and clean and jerk for

01:09:40.380 quite some time because you're going to be so limited by technique rather than strength

01:09:44.280 or speed. So that's going to hold you back for a long time. And this is why a lot of folks

01:09:48.300 will frankly not use these movements, which I think is a mistake. But if you were the classic

01:09:53.380 kind of personal trainer and you've got a client coming in once a week, geez, are you really

01:09:58.680 going to invest three months in a teaching about a snatch before they actually burn any

01:10:02.020 calories, gain any muscle or get stronger? Well, it's probably a losing endeavor. But

01:10:07.200 if you have somebody for a year, more importantly, have somebody who says, I'm committed to doing

01:10:11.340 this. I'm going to invest, okay, five years, 10 years, this type of stuff. Then it's probably

01:10:16.540 a worthwhile endeavor there because it is total body. It's a deadlift mixed with a vertical

01:10:21.860 jump, mixed with an overhead press and a catch, mixed with an overhead squat. You're moving,

01:10:27.060 you're jumping up and then down, and then you're catching yourself. So balance and proprioception

01:10:30.460 are also there. Your lats are going to go to keep your position in the back. Core has to be there to

01:10:34.980 overhead squat it. It's very, very well rounded. With the exception of horizontal pressing, it covers

01:10:40.600 just about everything else. And so it's a very economical movement. And also it's peak concentric

01:10:47.860 and eccentric because the amount of deceleration you have to do in that movement is insane.

01:10:53.340 Whereas for example, in powerlifting, you don't really get to test the eccentric phase to the

01:10:59.460 same extent. Yep. There's no landing, there's no absorption, and there's no movement in space,

01:11:04.340 which is very important for neural control brain, keeping your brain healthy and everything like

01:11:08.200 that, catching yourself in a fall. So yeah, super productive. My brother at one point became obsessed

01:11:13.000 with setting his school record when he was in law school and he had a year of eligibility left.

01:11:18.220 So he played football for another year. And for some reason, one of the tests that they were putting

01:11:22.140 the team through was like a clean and jerk. And he won. I forget how much he moved. It was a lot for,

01:11:27.300 he was about 185 pounds and it was about twice his body weight or close to it. But here's what was

01:11:33.120 interesting. And what you said is what reminded me of this. All he did was the following to train.

01:11:38.080 He would put 135 on the bar as the max amount and do that as perfectly and quickly as possible.

01:11:46.560 You know, he would be filming himself, making sure elbow, you know, bar travel was perfectly straight

01:11:51.280 and then do insanely heavy front squats and shrugs and all sorts of other accessory movements. And then

01:11:56.620 on the day of the competition, he just went up, they've got three and a half plates on the bar and

01:12:01.580 he just did it that one time and that was it. But he never had trained above 135. I was amazed by that,

01:12:07.180 but it sounds like that's not an unreasonable strategy here.

01:12:10.180 Yeah, it wouldn't be my strategy. It wouldn't at all. But in his particular case-

01:12:13.300 Meaning you would have pushed more in training-

01:12:14.960 Oh yeah.

01:12:15.240 Higher and higher weight. But he got kind of lucky, I guess. It worked for him.

01:12:18.820 No, I wouldn't say that. I would say this. Let's say he did, he's 185 pounds and let's say he did-

01:12:23.500 350 or something. It was probably around 350.

01:12:25.540 350. Great. Okay. He probably could front squat 450 at that time. It was probably a back squat in 500. I don't

01:12:31.300 know. He was probably so limited by his technique though, rather than his strength. It was a smart idea to

01:12:36.600 invest a lot in technical proficiency. So that's probably why he got so many more strides in

01:12:42.920 technique because that was so far behind in terms of the two things you have to have to do that

01:12:47.240 movement. You have to have technique and then you have to have horsepower. He had way more horsepower

01:12:50.820 than he had technique. So he invested heavily there. That's probably why he would have got away

01:12:54.320 for it. To give you some numbers here, like we did with powerlifting, if you want to look at a good

01:12:58.460 clan jerk, like a really good one at the lower weight classes, triple body weight is where we're

01:13:03.240 after. Triple body weight. Oh my God. Now this thing, and this doesn't scale with size. So if

01:13:10.000 you look at like Lasha, the best guy in the planet for the last six or eight years, the kind of the

01:13:14.660 number we always throw over there is like 265, that'd be kilos. So like five, I think that's 570

01:13:19.560 ish range, something like that. But he probably weighs 350. So like if you're 350 pounds, you're never

01:13:26.400 going to double body weight. Sorry, 585. Like 585 is the pounds. No one's ever- But the guys that are

01:13:33.520 like 140 pounds can actually get to three times their body weight. Yeah, for sure. For example,

01:13:38.500 I was able to clean a jerk double body weight and that got me like seventh in the nation. Now it

01:13:44.140 wouldn't even get you to the competition, not even close. You want to get to a national level competition

01:13:49.140 as a male, you're probably doing, you know, certainly double body weight. Two, two and a half,

01:13:53.380 you want to like place internationally, probably much closer to that three. There's not a lot of

01:13:57.560 people who do triple, just to be clear. There's not a lot. So how are we going to train this woman

01:14:01.200 now? So it sounds to me like we're not going to load her up on the clean and jerk and on the snatch.

01:14:08.440 She's going to be using more weight than a PVC pipe and an empty bar, but we're using 10 pound bumpers

01:14:14.160 for most of the time here until we get that working just right. How are you training her strength

01:14:20.380 so that you're building up the horsepower to match the technique you're building?

01:14:24.660 I know how we're doing it in terms of reps and sets based on the three to five.

01:14:28.400 What exercises are you doing to most meet the needs of what she's ultimately going to do when

01:14:33.560 her technique is good enough? So think about it this way. If you look at peak power production,

01:14:38.940 when I say this, you take the force, so how much load is on the bar and you take the velocity

01:14:42.900 and we plot it against each other. At some point, if it's too light, but very, very heavy,

01:14:48.520 it's not powerful. Opposite end of the spectrum, same thing happens. So the question is, where

01:14:52.340 is that crossover point, which there's enough power or there's enough velocity and enough

01:14:56.780 mass? Well, this is actually hyper-specific to the exercise. And since we're on the weightlifter

01:15:02.460 and we're kind of getting on power, if you do an exercise like a bench press or even like

01:15:07.340 a tricep extension, that's probably going to happen at somewhere like 30 to 40% of your

01:15:11.640 one rep max. You'll have peak power. So if you can bench press 200 pounds and you want to

01:15:17.120 train power on the bench press, you should probably put 80 pounds on the bar, something

01:15:20.600 like that, 30%. If you move up to a more compound movement, like a squat, instead of being at

01:15:26.280 30 to 40%, it's more like 40 to 50% for most people of your peak. So if you're, again, if

01:15:30.920 your max is 200 pounds in the squat, maybe you put a hundred pounds in. If you go to a clean

01:15:35.480 jerk or a snatch, that number gets much higher to like 80 to 90%. So a lot of folks won't hit

01:15:40.160 peak power in a snatch until they get to like 90% of their one rep max. If you do 90% of your

01:15:44.720 one rep max on a bench press, you are going to be moving super slow and you will not be producing

01:15:48.940 any power. So the optimal number, and by the way, the more trained you are, the more that curve gets

01:15:53.580 shifted to the right. So you can produce more power at a higher load, relative load. How heavy

01:15:59.100 to put it on the bar to maximize power is very dependent upon the movement. In the question you

01:16:03.840 asked, like, how are we going to get this person stronger? It's not going to come from these

01:16:07.720 exercises if that's the technical limitation. You may have to get a kettlebell and do like a heavy

01:16:12.360 kettlebell swing. Maybe you want to do an RDL, maybe a deadlift, maybe a step up, any number

01:16:18.040 of exercises like that until they can get to a technical proficiency to where they can get 50,

01:16:23.620 60, 70%, or probably even higher. Then you're not really going to be truly testing strength

01:16:29.420 because you're still going to be super limited by technique because you're not even at the peak

01:16:33.900 power yet. And you'd put, again, just going back to that, that's a super interesting. And I've never

01:16:38.460 thought of it through the lens of how that varies so much by exercise, but bench press,

01:16:43.100 tricep press down, maybe bicep curl, you're going to hit peak power lower in that range,

01:16:47.380 30 to 40%. Super low load. Yeah. You go to a leg press or squat or deadlift, you're 40 to 50.

01:16:53.320 Depending on the person. Yep. Percent of 1RM. And once you move to something so insanely technical,

01:16:58.980 you got to get close to 80, maybe even 90% of 1RM. Yeah. And that's because of the nature of the

01:17:04.280 exercise. You get to explode. It's what we call a triple extension, right? So it's an explosive

01:17:08.320 hip, knee, and ankle extension there. It's going to be so limited by the skill that you got to go

01:17:13.200 heavy before you're getting to peak power, let alone peak strength. Last year, I swapped out my

01:17:17.740 leg press machine for one of the Kaiser ones. So it's the pneumatic device. And I love it because it's

01:17:23.320 giving me power by rep. And it's so funny. Now I haven't been able to figure out the exact formula for

01:17:29.280 max power, but that's generally what I'm trying to hit, right? I usually use power as the metric I'm

01:17:33.400 training to. And then I look at the fall off and fatigue. So now I'm going to pay more attention

01:17:38.040 to that, which is, am I truly hitting peak power at, am I 50% of 1RM and that kind of stuff? So

01:17:44.860 that's so cool. I can't wait. If you're pretty trained, you might even be closer to 60%. And

01:17:48.600 is it like a front squat machine? No, it's the seated leg press machine. It's like-

01:17:52.780 Oh, seated leg press. Yeah. Yeah. You might even be higher. You'd probably be somewhere

01:17:56.620 in that range. Kind of just depends. I'll look for that. That's cool.

01:17:59.120 Since we're here 20 plus years ago, I was in a facility training professional athletes and we

01:18:04.460 had some of those machines. And I went probably personally, I don't know, six, maybe eight

01:18:08.520 weeks straight just using that Kaiser machine. And all I did for training was try to hit the highest

01:18:13.860 watt output I could do. Didn't care how many reps it took. Didn't care how many sets. I would take a

01:18:17.920 break. I would rest. I'd try it again. And I would go until I got a higher number, come back the next

01:18:23.060 week. And I went up for eight weeks just by trying to optimize power output. The thing you talked

01:18:30.220 about earlier, the velocity transducer, there's another way of training here for strength or for

01:18:34.880 power. That is velocity based training, which is almost exactly what we're talking about, which is

01:18:39.500 instead of worrying about the weight or the rep ranges, we're simply trying to hit the largest

01:18:43.940 power output possible. We're going to do as many reps as we can there with brakes. And that's how

01:18:49.420 we're going to maximize power output. It's a very, very effective method. Rather than just putting

01:18:53.500 an arbitrary number of reps down, you're going to go peak power output. That's sort of how I use the

01:18:58.380 device now, right? Which is I say for this load, I should be this many meters per second. And when I

01:19:05.100 can't do that twice consecutively, the set's over. And sometimes that means the set ends at five.

01:19:10.660 And sometimes that means the set ends at eight. But you agree that, and I don't know, this sort of

01:19:14.720 stems from my belief, which might be totally unfounded that I'm quote unquote, sort of wasting

01:19:20.080 reps. If I'd be better off resting and coming back and doing it again, faster and harder in three

01:19:25.160 minutes than eking out more slow reps. Is there any validity to that? Oh, it's not unfounded at all.

01:19:31.000 There's strong science on that. Brian Mann at the university of Miami has done a ton of great stuff on

01:19:35.560 velocity based training. You can check out a lot of his work, but there's a training concept called

01:19:39.300 cluster sets. And so clusters have been shown to be highly effective for strength, power, and even

01:19:46.340 hypertrophy, surprising enough. But what a cluster is, is this. Let's say you were going to do six

01:19:50.820 repetitions in your set. Let's say five, just keep it consistent. Five reps. You could do one, two,

01:19:56.220 three, four, five, no breaks in between. Or a cluster set says you're going to do one rep. You're going to

01:20:01.320 take a five to 20 second rest. You'll do the next rep, five to 20, five to 20, five to 20. So you're still

01:20:08.080 doing quote unquote five, but you might accumulate it. But you have micro breaks. Micro breaks. That's

01:20:13.200 what clusters are. And they are extremely effective because they do exactly what you just mentioned.

01:20:17.860 The quality, and by quality here, I mean power output, velocity output, et cetera. It goes up

01:20:24.880 because you reduce fatigue in specifically reps three, four, and five. Those will be a much higher

01:20:31.400 quality. So the old way we would say it is instead of getting five reps, you get five first reps,

01:20:36.380 which is much more important, right? So you get five higher quality ones. So the aggregate quality,

01:20:41.260 force output, total, achieved, velocity, whatever is much higher. So it's very, very effective. Now

01:20:46.300 what's funny is weightlifters, Olympic weightlifters have done this naturally for 50 years. So when they

01:20:52.220 do a set of like say triples of a clean or a snatch, no one ever goes boom, boom, boom. You drop it,

01:20:59.360 kind of reset, shake your hands, re-grip, take a breath, reset. And it takes five to 10 seconds and you do.

01:21:05.400 So your three reps like takes a minute. He's like PR triple. It's like, you got a sandwich in

01:21:09.400 between reps. It's not a triple. Like, what are you doing? It's not a PR double. You need two

01:21:17.160 sets of one. But there's a reason now may not be optimal for other. May not be optimal for

01:21:24.020 hypertrophy. It may not be optimal for pure strength, but here we're talking about the most powerful

01:21:28.460 movement. Super effective for pure strength. Super effective. It is. So just to be clear, would you

01:21:33.680 even advocate this? If you're trying to increase your deadlift, do you think it, if you're saying,

01:21:37.920 I'm going to do five reps on this deadlift, you would actually say it might be better to do five

01:21:43.160 ones with 10 second break in between? If you're going for pure strength, no doubt about it. Good

01:21:47.820 research on that. Okay. So that's super interesting to know. Again, the little caveat here, we're getting

01:21:52.120 a little deep. Exactly like what your coach said earlier. What was the goal here? Because if the goal

01:21:56.160 was pure, pure, pure strength, great. If the gear was though like some strength, but we need to

01:22:01.060 accumulate- With a bit of muscular endurance. Then you would not, maybe not want to take that

01:22:04.460 break. So everything matters, I guess is one way to say it. So I love that by the way. It's just like,

01:22:09.400 what was the goal here? That's like the best coaching thing ever. Like, what are we trying to do

01:22:12.500 here today? It's great coaching advice. Suffer. So how often do you want this woman in the gym?

01:22:19.480 So here's the fun part. Oh, this is really good. Because the total load is low, you can do this

01:22:24.940 every day, right? You're talking about a small number of reps, not to fatigue, not at all to

01:22:30.160 fatigue. You're talking about a lightweight. You could go every day. There's no reason why you

01:22:34.600 couldn't go do some power training. Pick any power sport, basketball. Yeah, I was just about to say,

01:22:39.200 this is no different than saying, I'm going to go play basketball every day.

01:22:41.380 It's better because there's even less fatigue than you, because there's a lot of fatigue in a

01:22:44.060 basketball game. So as long as you keep these high quality. Now, if you are doing these two fatigues,

01:22:47.940 set to 20, five seconds rest in between, then that's the whole different thing. But if you're doing

01:22:52.240 these non-fatiguing, which is what you need to have for power and skill. So this is a very

01:22:56.120 important point for power and skill development. They need to be non-fatiguing. If you're getting

01:23:00.520 to fatigue, you're not doing either one of those things. Now you can get to fatigue if you're trying

01:23:03.760 to produce a different adaptation, which is maintenance of power through fatigue, which is

01:23:09.040 fine, but that's not the same thing. You're not going to improve your peak power by fatigue. It

01:23:14.620 doesn't happen. So these sessions are kind of like, quote unquote, boring. You're not going to get a

01:23:19.400 big sweat. You're not going to get a big pump. You're not going to throw up on the floor

01:23:22.200 afterwards. It's sort of like, okay. And you go home. I'm like, damn. And this is honestly why

01:23:26.480 they're generally not very popular. Like I got powerful, but I don't look any different. I'm losing

01:23:30.040 weight. I don't have any of these other feedback mechanisms that says, suggest I got a good workout

01:23:34.380 in, despite the fact it is very high quality training. You're just not getting that feedback.

01:23:39.100 So in power training, power development stuff, very, very low fatigue. That's the goal.

01:23:44.980 Which type of athletes that are not weightlifters do you have doing these exercises?

01:23:51.560 Oh, basically every one. It's hard to pick a sport where power development

01:23:55.140 is not important. Caveats here. If you're a heavyweight champion of Bellator, you're a

01:24:01.060 professional UFC fighter. Am I throwing maximum weight over your head and catching it all the

01:24:04.820 time? I wouldn't hesitate to do it. But a lot of times they just simply have trauma. It's not

01:24:09.160 going to happen. I don't hesitate to do it with professional baseball players. Don't hesitate

01:24:12.480 to do it with pitchers, though many of them don't have shoulder without getting too technical.

01:24:17.280 Your shoulder needs to slide and move in a very specific way, especially when you're pitching.

01:24:20.840 And if they don't have that, then we would walk away from this. Or if they don't want

01:24:23.920 to, it's fine. You can get away from it. Other than that, football player, wrestlers,

01:24:29.680 skiers, tennis players, same thing. If you're a shoulder athlete and you have any number of

01:24:33.920 reasons you don't want to, great. We can walk away from it. But there's really anyone else

01:24:37.900 can really go after these things. If it's all done appropriately, it's a fantastic exercise

01:24:42.260 or set of exercises rather.

01:24:44.700 I want to talk about something that ties into both weightlifting and powerlifting that I used

01:24:48.500 to do. I don't remember if it was just bro science, but empirically it seemed to be true.

01:24:54.460 I used to have this set that I really enjoyed doing. So it was a heavy deadlift. So it was either

01:25:00.560 a two, three, or four rep deadlift. And it was supersetted with, I'm trying to think,

01:25:07.220 would I do it as a jump plyo or a drop? But basically it was a plyometric in between.

01:25:12.240 And the empirical observation was both helped each other. So it doesn't sound like that should

01:25:19.360 be the case. It doesn't sound like my rest between deadlifts are plyometrics, but yet it did seem to

01:25:26.960 make me stronger. Now, maybe that was psychological, but there was a sort of bro science belief I had

01:25:31.860 that that was doing something to the muscle fiber to get it ready to lift heavy. It sounds like there

01:25:36.440 might be some validity here.

01:25:37.300 No, there's a lot of science here. So what you're referring to is a phenomenon we call

01:25:40.780 post-activation potentiation.

01:25:42.920 That's right. Post-activation potentiation.

01:25:44.500 It's been around for a long time. Very classic Eldred Henneman science principle. So 1950s,

01:25:50.280 54, 56, 58, sort of a series of papers back then. But basically, remember I heard earlier in the

01:25:55.900 conversation, we talked about fast twitch and slow twitch fibers. Well, there are things called

01:26:00.640 motor units. So when a nerve comes down and goes into a muscle, it has a whole bunch of muscle fibers

01:26:05.420 in that. So the nerve and all the fibers collected together, it's called the motor unit. All of the

01:26:10.640 fibers in that motor unit are of the same fiber type. So all the fast twitch ones, all the slow

01:26:14.720 twitch ones, whatever. And these are spread throughout the muscle. So what happens is when

01:26:18.020 you do low velocity movement, like right now, I'm doing all these things, I'm using low threshold

01:26:22.440 motor units. And these tend to be slow twitch ones. So it makes sense if I go to scratch my eyeball,

01:26:28.140 I don't want to be producing max force. Not a good strategy, right? The best strategy is you start

01:26:33.820 with the lowest force output humanly possible. And then you work your way up. And that's because

01:26:39.160 this principle, another one called all or none, which means when a muscle fiber contracts, it

01:26:43.660 contracts with 100% effort. You can't regulate it up and down. There's no dimmer switch. It goes on

01:26:48.540 off, on off. So the only way you regulate force production is to increase or decrease the total

01:26:54.260 amount of motor units that are activated. Because when you activate a motor unit, all the fibers get

01:26:59.280 activated and all of them get activated at 100% contraction. So what happens is I go to scratch

01:27:04.320 my eyeball and I activate the motor units that are the smallest and weakest. It's not necessarily

01:27:09.460 like that, but it's proof of concept here. And now I realize, oh, I'm not scratching my eyeball this

01:27:13.920 time. Now I'm actually picking up a medicine ball. Okay. I'll activate those same initial motor units

01:27:18.820 and I'll activate some other ones and some more ones. And then I realize I'm not picking up a medicine

01:27:22.680 ball. I'm picking up a car off the ground. Now I'll activate more and more and more and more

01:27:26.960 of these higher threshold motor units. And those tend to be the more of the fast twitch

01:27:30.280 fibers. So in the case of post activation potentiation, what's happening is you're doing

01:27:35.100 that deadlift. I think you said deadlift and then a plyo. You do that deadlift. And because

01:27:40.900 of the size principle and you're requiring force production, you are activating higher threshold

01:27:45.360 motor units. Then when you put the barbell down and you go to do your jump, those are still engaged

01:27:50.840 and activated. So now you can actually jump with more force and velocity because you've sort of

01:27:55.200 turned them on initially. You've activated them. And so it's a hundred percent. And there's a lot

01:28:00.560 of science. Lee Brown, whose lab I sort of run now brought me over to Cal State Fullerton has done

01:28:04.840 legendary. He's a lifetime achievement award winner. Legendary work in this area. It also goes the other

01:28:10.040 way. So this is fun. When it comes to power training or speed training, people tend to think

01:28:15.000 about things like resistance. So in other words, if you've ever done sprinting and you've like

01:28:19.120 drug a sled or had a parachute on, great. You've done vertical jump training. You've had like the

01:28:24.180 bands that hold you down. This is all added resistance. And that's fine for teaching you

01:28:29.420 acceleration, which is moving over inertia quickly. However, the other side of the equation

01:28:35.400 is if you want to get fast, I'm sort of jumping the gun here. We're kind of moving into our

01:28:38.900 speed one, but it's fun, right? You actually want to also practice moving faster than you can

01:28:44.180 currently move. This is what we call over. Yeah. I had a friend who was a sprinter in college

01:28:48.440 and they would do downhill sprints. Like they would do 40 yard dash down an incline of 6%.

01:28:55.100 Six is pretty aggressive. Either way, it's over speed. Maybe it was four. It was like,

01:28:59.440 basically their legs were turning over at a speed that they would normally not even be used to

01:29:02.720 turning over. Yep. So instead of dragging the parachute, you turn around and have the bungee

01:29:07.000 cord pull you a little bit, or you run downhill, or you do something with... We actually had a device in

01:29:11.400 our lab that is a harness that came down to you and we could reduce your body weight by 5,

01:29:15.760 10, 15, 20%. And you could do all your vertical jump training, which we did with the volleyball

01:29:19.560 team for one semester. And you're jumping higher than you've ever jumped. So it's the same sort of

01:29:24.580 post-activation potentiation or PAP in reverse. So you're actually learning to move faster than you

01:29:30.180 could possibly move. So then when you go to actually do your work, you move faster. And the best example

01:29:34.940 of this with Lee's work was you've seen baseball players swing a baseball bat. And before they go up to

01:29:40.680 play or they go up to the right bat, a lot of times they'll put what's called a donut.

01:29:44.300 That weighted thing on it.

01:29:45.620 Yeah. Donut on there, right? And so you swing that thing and it feels heavy

01:29:48.000 and you take it off and your baseball bat feels light. And that's great. Awesome. Well,

01:29:52.440 he actually looked at whether or not if you swing a wiffle ball bat, so this is a plastic bat,

01:29:56.820 super light, which you can swing really, really, really fast prior to. That actually improved

01:30:01.140 baseball bat velocity more so than the donut did. So PAP, that's the donut. Great. Super effective,

01:30:07.880 but also unloaded super, super fast is equally effective as well. So if you want to maximize

01:30:13.760 you probably should play with a little bit of both in the spectrum, you can do this with bands

01:30:18.020 and chains. Like a lot of the times we'll do, just take like a heavy band that you deadlift with

01:30:21.860 and you can put it underneath your lats and hook it to a thing above you. And you can do assisted

01:30:26.040 vertical jump training and just start flying and lots of other ways you could do it. Yeah,

01:30:30.160 that's a very real phenomenon. And the reason I brought that up is because you mentioned

01:30:33.760 you felt like the deadlifts helped the plyo and I explained to you, it did.

01:30:38.620 They both seem to make each other better. But that's the point. So the plyo helped

01:30:41.540 the deadlift because of the overspeed thing. This is called complex training, not complex as in like

01:30:47.100 multiple body parts and things like- Complicated.

01:30:50.080 And not a complex as in like a stack of different exercises, which is a kind of a different term here.

01:30:55.920 So there's a different kind of strategy you can do called contrast training, but this specifically

01:31:00.140 refers to like a complex where you would do, if you're going to do this, you need to stick within

01:31:04.020 the same principles. So your total reps per set should still be around three to five. So in other

01:31:08.840 words, you could do like two deadlifts and then three vertical jumps or whatever, but don't do

01:31:13.040 five deadlifts and then five vertical jumps. Your total set is now like 10. You're starting to fatigue.

01:31:17.300 Yeah. You can do this all kinds of ways. So we'll do this bench press and then medicine ball put

01:31:21.520 or rotational movements, tons. I mean, the thought that I had at the time was this is so ridiculous,

01:31:27.300 but why does a sprinter not 30 seconds or a minute before they hit the blocks do a heavy

01:31:34.700 set of three deadlifts? Well, first of all, they do. Do they? Oh, okay. When they can. Okay.

01:31:39.380 The reason why they don't see it as often is because logistically you have to have a bunch

01:31:43.340 of dumbbell barbers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not uncommon depending on what facility

01:31:46.560 they're in. They'll be in the back. They'll hit those deadlifts and then they'll walk right out and

01:31:49.760 going. You got to put your spikes on all that stuff. Yeah. Which is so counterintuitive, right? Yeah. Yeah. So

01:31:54.180 you can't do this and then an hour and a half later go around and go faster. So you have a window you

01:31:59.180 can do it in, you get your spikes and like, so there's some like logistics things, but it's very

01:32:02.660 common in training when it's easier to weigh with. So it's super, super effective. Let's move on to

01:32:06.620 strong man. We don't have to focus specifically on like an actual strong man competition, but maybe

01:32:11.760 focus on feats of strength that also tend to require a lot of stamina. I don't know. Would the

01:32:18.460 classic strong man activity be like an enormous sled pull or something like that? Pulling a

01:32:24.160 truck, picking up a barrel and throwing it and walking over and picking it up again and throwing

01:32:28.580 it. I mean, there's a lot I can think of. My favorite was tire flipping. There was a 450 pound

01:32:33.140 tire at the gym I used to belong to and how long it would take you to do 25 flips was a metric of

01:32:38.740 your. I love it. Yeah. Farmers carries. There's tons of rope pulls, all kinds of good stuff. Yeah.

01:32:43.900 Now we're starting to get from highly, highly specific where powerlifter, you've got three things,

01:32:50.200 weightlifter. You've got two things. Now we're really getting into more breadth. There's almost

01:32:56.120 no limit to what a quote unquote strong man, strong woman can do. And maybe one would argue

01:33:02.060 this is more functional. This is more versatile. This is more engaging. You're also probably now

01:33:09.080 starting to expand the interest of the gen pop into what we're talking about. So you at the outset said

01:33:15.840 the three things that mattered most were specificity, specificity, and specificity.

01:33:20.300 When you're dealing with something that has so many components, how do you wrap your mind around

01:33:25.200 specificity versus generality? Yeah. So this is why strong man is great. I mean,

01:33:30.620 probably like you a little bit. One of the reasons I got in this field is because of

01:33:34.440 the strong man being played on ESPN at three in the morning in the 1990s. Thank you, Bill Casimir.

01:33:40.340 This is a whole generation of us who are like, what is this stuff? This is incredible, right?

01:33:44.120 So there still is some specificity, like when you get to those competitions, because you kind

01:33:48.180 of know what you're going to do. But yeah, this is why they're dope, right? Like someone who's

01:33:51.040 optimized for grip strength, you know, hold the Atlas stones or something. It's not going to be the

01:33:54.440 person who's optimized for the deadlift carry, the deadlift competition or the overhead press or

01:33:59.000 whatever, right? You'll see people who win three straight events and they'll get dead last in another

01:34:03.260 one. CrossFit has a very similar feel here. So we're going to test you in a bunch of different

01:34:07.220 planes here. And if you're great at deadlifting, you're probably going to be poor at pressing.

01:34:10.820 That's just sort of how it goes. So in this particular case, you have real strong men who

01:34:16.200 are in fact, based on the definitions we said earlier, not technically quote unquote, the

01:34:20.160 strongest in the world, because the way you win in strong man or woman is how many reps

01:34:25.320 typically can you do at a very heavy load? It's a global feat of strength, but it's not

01:34:30.420 to the same level of high precision. So if you were to then technically take everyone from

01:34:35.460 a strong woman competition and the same weight class as everyone from the same equivalent level

01:34:40.220 of powerlifting competition, the squat would probably be higher on aggregate and the powerlifting

01:34:44.720 competition. However, if you said, let's put on 95% of your winner at max and see how many reps you

01:34:49.320 could do, the strong woman would absolutely smash again on aggregate. You can pick one individual

01:34:54.280 person or something, but as an average. And so what we're doing here is saying, we're going to take

01:34:59.180 extremely heavy loads and we're going to ask you to do it to fatigue, but we're probably going to do a

01:35:04.340 little bit safer than we would typically do. So you don't generally see like a bench press to fatigue

01:35:08.900 on a strong man. You don't see a deadlift to fatigue often. You're going to see something like

01:35:13.120 a car lift. And the reason they do that is because you can actually load the bar a lot higher

01:35:17.500 in the air. And so it ends up being almost closer to like an RDL. So you take that knee cross

01:35:23.240 out of it and it allows you to do a lot more reps. It's still brutal. It's still like insane.

01:35:27.480 That's why they do some funky stuff like that. A farmer's carry. You can do that as heavy as

01:35:31.200 possible and drop it when you're done. They kind of hedge in that direction. Same thing why you

01:35:36.720 would never see a snatch or a clean jerk. Way, way, way too risky. It's going to be a log press

01:35:41.340 overhead. Awkward and weird. And that's why like even the tire flip, like I remember people would

01:35:46.620 say like, come on, how can you flip a tire that's 450 pounds? And it's like, well, remember,

01:35:50.300 you're never fully lifting a 450 pound thing off the ground. Like when the first movement of the

01:35:55.800 deadlift, it might be 250 pounds that you're lifting up. And then by the time you're pushing it,

01:36:01.080 you've got the momentum helping you. So yes, it's infinitely safer. And ultimately you're

01:36:06.800 fatiguing, at least for me, my cardiorespiratory and muscular fatigue hit almost at the same time.

01:36:13.640 100%. You're going to feel blown up. Your forearms will be gone. In fact, you know,

01:36:16.760 what's actually really cool is maybe five or six years ago, they started putting heart rate monitors

01:36:20.640 on people in these competitions and then they'll broadcast them. They're just pegged the whole time.

01:36:25.000 They're like 180 the entire time. Max heart rate. It's lovely.

01:36:28.600 It truly is. Which is actually one of the, another reason why one could argue if you wanted to look

01:36:33.240 at something that is generally better for global health, it's a pretty good endeavor here. You're

01:36:38.260 going to get a lot. It is human movement. It is varied. It requires stabilization and all kinds of

01:36:43.560 random movements, but it is super heavy and to the high levels of fatigue. So yeah, it's just a great

01:36:49.020 movement. So now let's talk about this one again through the training of a person who is new to this.

01:36:56.020 So guy comes to you and he's never power lifted. He's never weight lifted. He's never done a strong

01:37:03.040 man. You know, he goes to the gym to do a little bit of cardio and do a little bit of strength

01:37:08.020 training, but there's never been specificity to the training. He doesn't have any injuries that we

01:37:12.300 need to worry about. Let's just put that in there at the moment. So there's nothing that's truly off

01:37:16.200 limits, but he has no technique. He's not coming in on a foundation of, he knows what it's like to

01:37:24.060 deadlift at least twice his body weight or something like that. Just assume he doesn't

01:37:27.420 have that. But he says, Andy, I'm interested in this both because I think it would be a fun

01:37:31.540 competition to do, but also I think it's more in line with my long-term health goals. So I don't

01:37:37.320 want to get injured. I definitely do not want to get injured doing this and I want to be able to do it

01:37:41.700 for quite some time. Cool. So what you want to do is build a week of frequency and what exercises

01:37:48.880 you do throughout the week so that you are not doing too many things too often in the

01:37:54.200 same movement. So for example, if you're going to work on your farmer's carries, that's great

01:37:58.860 today, but you then probably wouldn't want to work on a movement like a deadlift maybe the next day

01:38:03.360 because you're going to be fatigued with your grip. Okay, great. So then maybe you pick a non

01:38:06.940 fatigue, maybe that's yoke lock or something like that the next day loaded up there. So you just want

01:38:11.840 to kind of be a little conscious of that. How many days in a row are you hinging? How many days in a row

01:38:16.140 are you holding or pressing directly overhead? And just kind of move or vary the movement patterns

01:38:21.260 is the first step I'd say. Repetition range, I would probably stick in the like five to eight

01:38:27.980 window initially for this person because you can get enough little fatigue. You can also bail pretty

01:38:33.860 easy. It's heavy and you're practicing. This is a big distinction. You want to practice perfect

01:38:39.900 repetition. And so what I mean by that is instead of going to like an RER or RPE, I'm going to

01:38:46.120 go to technical failure. So we're going to do a goblet squat and we're going to do a hundred pound

01:38:50.460 sandbag or 150 pound medicine ball in front of you. And we're going to do front squats and we're

01:38:56.460 going to do, the goal here is to do eight or so. But as soon as I see you break technical, you're

01:39:02.140 done. And that's going to get that person a lot of fatigue, a lot of strength, but also keeping

01:39:06.220 them very, very safe. And they're going to learn to feel, I don't get to win anymore when I break

01:39:10.540 technique. So they're just going to continue to learn hold technique, hold technique, hold position.

01:39:14.580 And I would do the same for their overhead pressing, all that stuff, right? We start to

01:39:18.200 get into bad positions in our low bat. All right, we're done. And so getting them to technical

01:39:21.800 failure is the phrase that we would use here is the way I'd go about it. And you can actually

01:39:25.800 do these more frequently than the average, same exact avatar could in powerlifting because

01:39:31.320 the movements are more varied. See, the recovery is probably going to be a little bit higher

01:39:34.840 rather than getting the same exact locked in position and just sort of moving in one plane.

01:39:39.600 Like you're going to get sore, but there's also not as much of a typically like eccentric

01:39:45.460 landing demand. Like there is a weightlifting. There's eccentric, but it's typically controlled

01:39:49.700 or it's intentionally uncontrolled.

01:39:52.100 Dropping or something.

01:39:52.960 Right. So you can get away with more volume because your recovery is going to be a little

01:39:56.080 bit higher there.

01:39:57.000 Tell me, going back to our weightlifter and powerlifter, why would we not also, or maybe

01:40:02.380 we do and we just didn't state it explicitly. Why would we not also force technical failure into

01:40:07.140 the mix? Is there ever a time when we would tolerate a break in form where we see more

01:40:14.180 lumbar kyphosis or lower doses than we think is actually healthy, but we want to learn how

01:40:20.260 to grit through that because sometimes I'm single rep max sucks no matter what.

01:40:24.900 With the case of Olympic weightlifting, it almost takes care of it for you. So if you have a break

01:40:28.940 in position, you're probably going to miss the lift. So it's self-limiting that way a little bit,

01:40:32.760 especially when you get past a certain load, like you could do 30% of your one or max with very

01:40:37.100 poor technique. But as you start getting up higher and higher, it becomes, again, a little

01:40:41.200 bit more self-limiting. You definitely want to make sure you're holding position in all of them,

01:40:45.080 but the technical demands of something like a bench press are fairly low. There's only a couple

01:40:49.620 of joints that really need to be taken care of. As long as they're okay, you're there. When you get

01:40:54.160 into something like a snatch, every joint has to be in the right spot or you're thinking wonky.

01:41:00.040 A deadlift is the same thing. Like a deadlift is not as complicated. A squat is fairly complicated

01:41:05.120 though. But there's also variations you're going to do probably. You're going to do

01:41:08.220 some sort of box squat or chair squat. You're going to limit the range of motion. And so the

01:41:12.460 last thing I want to say about that is since the goal of powerlifting is to achieve a one rep max,

01:41:17.920 you're actually not trying to achieve optimal range of motion. In fact, you go the opposite. So

01:41:22.680 physics wise, work is force multiplied by distance. So if you're trying to maximize force,

01:41:27.840 you minimize distance because you minimize the amount of work you have to do. And so they are

01:41:30.860 intentionally at limiting range of motion. So they're actually doing this like pseudo technique,

01:41:34.920 which is not to maximize actual human strength. It's to maximize the score on the barbell,

01:41:41.640 which is not necessarily the same thing. And so you're probably going to be working so hard on

01:41:46.100 that technique that it almost keeps you out of the squirrely areas because you're trying to just,

01:41:51.360 instead of getting this like big, long range of motion things, like you're just trying to

01:41:54.700 get through the stuff. You're going to go all the way down and touch, but you're going to set

01:41:57.420 yourself up in a position that minimizes range of motion, which is actually putting your joints

01:42:01.280 in the right spot. So it's a little bit there taken care of. What percentage of power lifters

01:42:06.740 deadlift with a traditional narrow grip versus a sumo? I don't know an actual number there.

01:42:12.020 Is that simply a leg length to arm length difference? Like for me, sumo is so much more

01:42:16.600 comfortable than narrow. Generally it's going to be, it just gets easier on the back, but

01:42:21.200 it depends on three factors. It depends on your shank to femur ratio. It depends on your femur to

01:42:28.000 upper back basically. And then it depends on your arm. So all three of those things get wonky.

01:42:32.140 And then it depends really on your hip versus back strength. So strong hips do well with sumo.

01:42:37.740 Weak hips are going to get smashed with sumo. A lot of ways you can go about it. There's a whole

01:42:42.140 argument we could have here, but we'll probably skip it.

01:42:43.900 I'll save that for the next one. Okay. So our strong man is training very frequently.

01:42:51.720 It's highly varied. We're in more reps and we're training to technical failure,

01:42:58.300 meaning we're not pushing low quality reps. When we break technique, the set is over.

01:43:03.840 Okay. Let me differentiate. The reason why I brought technical failure up in this one is because you're

01:43:07.700 doing a combination of high load and high fatigue. It's just too risky to break form.

01:43:11.460 If you break form a little bit and you're doing two reps, okay, the load is high. So that's the

01:43:17.240 danger. But now you're combining both danger, which is load and fatigue. And so that's why I wanted to

01:43:22.860 plant that distinction for that avatar. This is also an athlete who just talked to me about volume.

01:43:28.280 How many hours a day are they training? This is not the guy who's driving around Walmart for two

01:43:32.980 hours trying to find the parking spot. This person's fit. They're burning matches all day.

01:43:36.540 They're going to have to be to get to this kind of training. No science here. You're going to walk

01:43:39.980 completely away from science, unlike the previous ones. We could talk about, which we didn't get

01:43:43.400 into, number of reps in terms of total volume to hit per month for like a weightlifter,

01:43:48.340 things like that. You're going to have any science on this because like, how do you quantify

01:43:52.820 holding a hundred pound medicine ball in your chest and taking how many steps,

01:43:56.680 seeing how many steps you can take? Like, how do you quantify all these things?

01:43:59.640 If you do something like weightlifting and I can say, how many reps did you do over 70% of your

01:44:04.540 one rep max? And that's the number we're going to quantify because there's two exercises.

01:44:07.700 It's very easy. With this one, like how do I equate time? How do I equate the fact that you

01:44:12.680 did one exercise and you did it for 40 yards with the other exercise you did it for seven reps?

01:44:17.320 I don't know. So I would give you basic progression recommendations here, which is 10%.

01:44:23.220 So in general, regardless of physical exertion, if you increase your total volume by more than 10%

01:44:29.900 per week, you tend to start getting into problems. That's the thing I would flag is like,

01:44:33.840 keep it below a 10% progression per week and start lower than you think. And then just add that up.

01:44:39.320 And again, how are we even thinking about here? It's not because in lifting, like I'm keeping a

01:44:46.460 mental tally of sets and reps per body part sort of thing or whatever. Right. How are you doing that

01:44:53.640 with a hundred pound medicine ball for seven steps versus 50 pound medicine ball for 25 steps? They both

01:45:00.240 heard about the same. What does that mean? This is the problem we have in exercise science comparing

01:45:05.300 lifting to endurance. How do I compare a three sets of 10 at 70% to 45 minutes at 65% VO2 max? I don't

01:45:13.320 know. You have no comparator there. This is sort of where in cycling, as I'm sure you know,

01:45:17.780 we use something called the TSS, right? So the training stress score, and then we have a chronic and

01:45:22.620 acute training stress score. So as a cyclist, I used to have a dashboard basically that take the data from my

01:45:30.240 power meter. So every day I'd come in from my training and I'd hook the power meter up to the

01:45:33.960 computer. I'm sure this is all done via Bluetooth now, but it would take a lot of data that was

01:45:39.140 really relevant. So it knows a couple of things about me. It knows my maximum heart rate and it

01:45:44.060 knows what's called my FTP, my functional threshold power, which is the highest number of wattage I can

01:45:50.640 average for 60 minutes. It's a super important number. Everything, as you know, in cycling is metriced on

01:45:56.520 that FTP number. When I come in from a ride, that ride might say, well, Peter, you went and rode

01:46:01.020 for three and a half hours. You utilized this many kilojoules of energy. Your average power was this

01:46:08.840 many watts and your normalized power was this many watts. And normalized power, it's a power function

01:46:13.840 calculation that takes into account the variability. So the more the normalized power is different from the

01:46:19.800 average power, the more up and down spiky you had. So normalized power gives you more of a

01:46:24.860 physiologic sense of what you did. Well, these algorithms now were so good when you had that

01:46:32.040 data at telling you where you are in terms of overtraining, undertraining. And so if there was

01:46:38.460 just some way we could get that out of more complicated movements, and again, I'm just thinking

01:46:45.140 like, obviously you could get that out of heart rate. You could probably get that out of heart rate

01:46:48.580 variability. You could probably get that out of ventilation. So if there was some way to capture

01:46:54.400 ventilatory rate, but other than that, we're missing power. I mean, that's the bottom line

01:46:59.400 is we just don't have the metric for power. That output is what's making that, I guess,

01:47:03.360 so difficult, right? Yeah. In this particular case, you would jump to physiology. You would go

01:47:07.460 to HRV, certainly heart rate would probably not be a great one, but you would have to go to what's

01:47:11.700 the physiological response rather than the actual metric, which is one could argue better. It's like,

01:47:16.420 who cares if you're at X amount of reps per week if your physiology is fantastic?

01:47:20.800 The other thing is, I'm sure people who spend their career coaching in this area probably

01:47:25.740 have better answers for you. If it was me coaching, I would go to physiology. We're taking physiology

01:47:29.640 metrics and we're going to see what happens. Yeah. It's interesting. I think one of the

01:47:32.840 things we used to do before we had our HRV to look at was look at resting heart rate in the morning

01:47:38.280 and look at, I forget what the term was for it, but it was basically willingness to train.

01:47:42.940 Oh yeah, yeah. Sounds silly, but it turns out to be very highly correlated with burnout.

01:47:46.440 It still is. It's still like the single best metric you can take.

01:47:49.840 We only used a score of zero to three, if I recall. It wasn't like rocket science, right?

01:47:54.000 Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be crazy at all. We will take this metric still to the day I die.

01:47:58.500 Yeah, there's manipulation that can happen there, of course. And we always do something else,

01:48:02.980 but it's going to tie very, very tightly, typically to even something like HRV. Resting heart rate's

01:48:08.320 okay. It's just too slow. And the magnitude of change is too little. And so HRV is much more

01:48:14.320 sensitive that way. You're not going to see a change in resting heart rate until you get

01:48:18.960 far down the road, like you're getting cooked here. You can see them very quickly, a matter of days,

01:48:24.000 certainly within a week with HRV, where you may or may not necessarily see the heart rate.

01:48:28.000 But nonetheless, mood, how much do you want to train? Any number of ways you can ask that.

01:48:31.820 How do you feel today? That's a good one. Just like, how do you feel today? Don't give me any

01:48:34.780 context. What do you mean feel? No, no. Just like, how do you feel? That's it. Track that down and

01:48:38.340 you're going to see that thing. In fact, you can actually do this. We've done this with giant data sets.

01:48:42.560 That number alone, it basically is going to run the same as HRV over a big enough thing. You're

01:48:47.380 going to see the same number for the most part. So if you're working with a big group of people and

01:48:51.520 you don't have HRV, say middle school kids or something like that, just ask that. Again,

01:48:56.140 there'll be some outliers day to day and some squirrely people and all that, but you're going

01:48:59.380 to get a pretty good sense of- Yeah. I mean, the takeaway here for someone listening is knowing how you

01:49:03.840 feel the day of and listening to how you feel the day of is really important. If you do not feel

01:49:10.460 like pushing yourself hard in the gym on a given day, that's a really good sign that you shouldn't

01:49:14.600 be. You have to be a little bit careful here. I say, sort of give it the warmup, give it the

01:49:18.400 warmup phase and then make the decision before you get to the working sets. Anyone who's ever,

01:49:22.560 well, exercise knows plenty. Well, some of the days you feel awful are PR days. You're going to

01:49:27.840 eventually set a record that day. And there's a little bit of like on the Jocko scale of like,

01:49:32.840 okay, like you just suck it up, mental toughness, all that stuff. But then there's also like,

01:49:37.020 you don't want to just go nuts, you know? But I would say just because you feel crappy

01:49:40.420 doesn't mean you don't exercise that day. It's a question of how hard are you pushing that day?

01:49:45.380 There are days you're going to push and there are days you're not going to push. I would argue

01:49:49.700 there's no day you shouldn't be doing something. You got to get through the warmup phase before you

01:49:53.580 make the distinction of whether it's a hard day or not. This is where auto-regulation training

01:49:57.360 becomes so awesome. If you use things like, say you have your velocity transducer and you know that

01:50:01.860 when you're at 50%, you're typically at one meter per second, blah, blah, blah. And if all of your metrics

01:50:06.840 are down, it's a pretty good indicator of like, all right, it's just not today. You feel terrible.

01:50:11.380 You don't want to be there. You're truly giving an effort, but all the numbers are down. Okay.

01:50:15.900 We're bagging it today. That's a nice way to do it. Okay. Let's talk about CrossFit. Obviously,

01:50:20.260 there's a pretty decent overlap between CrossFit and Strongman in that CrossFit is there are events

01:50:25.820 that take a really long time. There are certain sets that can take 20 minutes that are metabolically

01:50:32.460 as demanding as what most people could barely do in an hour. Tell folks a little bit about how

01:50:37.760 CrossFit works. I don't know if we distinguish between CrossFit with a capital C and CrossFit

01:50:41.880 with a little C because there's a lot of CrossFit-like stuff that isn't maybe branded CrossFit,

01:50:46.740 but I think for our purposes, let's just make it all the same.

01:50:49.800 We'll call it, and I don't mean this as any pejorative, but we'll just call it like competitive

01:50:53.980 circuit training and just anything like that. This is one actually thing that's really cool about sports

01:50:58.640 is we get to invent new ones all the time, and we get to continue to test human capability in a lot

01:51:03.280 of ways. It's really, really fun. So CrossFit is scored a little bit differently. It's a nice

01:51:07.780 combination. There are some weightlifting movements, so you might see one of the competitions being

01:51:11.700 a one-rep max snatch. That's it. Whole thing, right? You might see it as an endurance event,

01:51:16.800 so you might have to run a marathon or cycle a marathon or something like that, right? Then you might

01:51:22.260 see some of these more circuit training type of 20 kettlebell swings plus three snatches plus a vertical

01:51:27.040 jump and 20 pull-ups and many rounds that you can do in 10 minutes, you know, some things like that.

01:51:31.500 So the idea is you try to combine a bunch of these things, and every event gets scored just like

01:51:35.380 strongman, and at the end of the three or days or whatever it is, we'll raise the highest amount

01:51:39.780 of points just like strongman. So similar to strongman like that, it's not one of them, it's many.

01:51:43.880 It's not one single structured exercise. It's a lot. It's typically a combination of exercises

01:51:49.120 in the same exact one. Similar to weightlifting and technically use barbell movements. It's typically

01:51:54.060 big complex movements and all that. And it's similar to powerlifting in terms of like, hey,

01:51:58.740 sometimes max strength matters. So it's a little bit of like a combination of all these things. So

01:52:02.460 one thing that they do though, if we compare this to strongman, is the absolute loads are lower.

01:52:09.780 And so when you see a strongman, it's probably going to be doing something where the winner of

01:52:13.220 the competition might win with like five to 15 reps. Not always, but something like that, right?

01:52:19.060 So if it's a log press, you're probably not doing 100 reps in the log press. Some people might

01:52:24.000 not even be able to press the log once or twice, and the winner typically has five or six or 10 or

01:52:28.520 12 reps, roughly here. CrossFit competition volume tends to be way higher. It is hundreds of

01:52:34.320 repetitions per event sometimes. And so what we've done is it's still very, very strong. It's still

01:52:40.580 very, very powerful, but it is less, you won't see anybody ever touch 600 pounds in a CrossFit

01:52:45.940 competition. Every event in strongman is 600 pounds plus. You might see 1600 pounds. It's

01:52:51.020 way, way, way higher, but you won't see strongman ever reach 65 reps in an exercise. It just never

01:52:57.780 happens. So it's hedged that way. If you look at the avatar for a highly competitive male CrossFitter,

01:53:03.020 5'9 to 5'11, 190 to 210 pounds. Strongest men, it's 6'6, it's 6'2, it's 330, 380, 400.

01:53:13.020 So there's no weight class in strongman. There's no weight class. Is there a weight class in CrossFit?

01:53:17.980 There are some weight classes in strongman now. It's kind of like big, medium, little.

01:53:21.280 Okay. And what about in CrossFit besides the gender difference?

01:53:24.700 Gender and age is the only distinction that you have in those ones.

01:53:27.920 And I guess the reason CrossFit can get away with that is you're going to get punished the

01:53:32.140 heavier you are in some of the endurance events, and you're going to get punished the

01:53:35.680 lighter you are in some of the strength events. So the idea is that's probably why everybody

01:53:39.000 kind of coalesces around 200 pounds or 190 pounds. The other part of it is they have a

01:53:44.300 lot of gymnastics-based movements and a lot of hanging and pulling things, and you're going

01:53:48.700 to get hammered if you're over 200 pounds and you have to do 100 pull-ups in five minutes.

01:53:53.520 You're just going to get crushed on that stuff. Now, CrossFit is wonderful, and this is actually

01:53:57.760 a nice point to talk about another point. If you were to take an elite athlete in any of

01:54:01.440 these categories, there's a misconception here because I got a lot of, from our first conversation,

01:54:05.900 a lot of people were like, oh my gosh, you're disregarding CrossFitters. Their VO2 maxes

01:54:10.600 are elite. They're blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, no, they're not. They're unbelievable athletes,

01:54:15.000 and they are way more cardiovascularly fit than strongmen, and certainly way more than

01:54:19.380 powerlifters and weightlifters. But you're not going to find the average CrossFitter that has

01:54:23.640 the same VO2 max as the average equivalently high-level cyclist. No chance. What you're misrepresenting

01:54:29.400 here is not that they have done something that we have never seen before. It's the fact that they are

01:54:32.580 just phenomenal athletes, like just absolutely phenomenal athletes. The reason I'll say this is

01:54:38.200 you know these numbers better than I. You can maybe correct me here. But if you were to take

01:54:42.820 a high-level cyclist, their peak power is astronomically high, despite the fact that these

01:54:48.960 are, you know, quote-unquote pure endurance athletes, that the wattage that they can kick

01:54:52.860 out on a 20-second peak burst on a bike would torch anything any of you have ever seen. Like,

01:54:58.200 it's insanely high, the wattage. My greatest regret in speaking about this stuff is that I have yet

01:55:04.860 to come up with a way to explain to people what wattage feels like. You see, I think people have

01:55:11.340 an intuitive understanding of what 500 pounds feels like. Because you've been to Home Depot,

01:55:16.780 you picked up the 50-pound bag of salt, and you can sort of say, wow, deadlifting 500 pounds would

01:55:23.600 sort of be like picking up 10 of these at once. However, when I try to explain to somebody that

01:55:29.820 when Bradley Wiggins- What a thousand watts feels like. Well, even when Bradley Wiggins

01:55:33.180 absolutely smashed the one-hour record, which is generally regarded as the most pain a human being

01:55:41.920 can endure in any sport, the one-hour record in cycling is that mark. And he held 440 watts for

01:55:52.800 one hour, crunched in a tuck position with his iliac vessels folded on top of each other. I can't tell

01:56:01.940 you what that's like if you've never pedaled. I have to say, look, come and sit on a bike. I'm going to

01:56:08.120 set the ERG to 440 watts. Let's see how long you can go. And the average person is going to not make

01:56:15.420 it one minute, not even close. They will not come close to lasting a minute. The average person is

01:56:21.660 going to be dead at 20 seconds. They will fail. And by the way, they might weigh 180 pounds. And I'm

01:56:27.560 going to say he weighed 138 pounds or whatever he weighed. He might've weighed 145. Wiggins was tall.

01:56:35.400 He was probably 6'1". But the point is he looked like a beanpole and the force he could generate

01:56:42.560 for 60 minutes is more than you can generate for 30 seconds. I don't have a way to explain what that

01:56:48.300 feels like because shy of doing it, shy of putting watts to pedals, you can't feel it.

01:56:54.260 I mean, a thousand, like you put a thousand up there, that's a big, big number. I mean,

01:56:59.220 that wouldn't be a crazy number for a cyclist if you did a 20 second burst or whatever.

01:57:02.140 Not only that, a cyclist is doing that after riding six hours. And after riding six hours at

01:57:07.780 an average wattage of 250 watts, which again, for most people, they can't hold 250 watts for two

01:57:14.800 minutes. No way. So this is a good example of this is not suggesting cycling training is great for power

01:57:20.680 development. What it's suggesting is when you take really world caliber athletes, they're really good

01:57:25.940 at a lot of things. They're just really, really athletic. And so when you're comparing your power

01:57:32.740 output to that person, you're thinking, oh my God, that guy's so powerful. And he is. But I promise

01:57:38.620 you, I could put a whole bunch of athletes on there that can kick 1,200, 1,300, for sure. Way higher

01:57:43.960 than if you had a highly power trained person. So when you say like these CrossFitters are miracle,

01:57:49.080 they're not. They're just so fit. They're so strong. They're unreal.

01:57:51.940 I think what makes them special is they're great generalists. There's nothing that they're the best

01:57:58.340 at. The gymnast is better at gymnastics. The weightlifter is better at weightlifting. The

01:58:02.560 powerlifter is better at powerlifting. The strongman is better at strongman. And the endurance athlete

01:58:07.060 is better at endurance. There's no question. Yeah. Cause we hear the comment too about, well,

01:58:11.120 they could do this CrossFit competition and then they could go do a weightlifting competition the next

01:58:14.700 day. Like, yeah, but they're not winning medals. Not at national events. They're not going to,

01:58:18.800 occasionally they might make a world team or something like that, but that's one person.

01:58:21.940 What makes them special and it's worth acknowledging is how good they are at so many

01:58:26.700 things. They're so good. So, so good. I don't know if you probably didn't follow, but like

01:58:31.640 back in the original days, like the stuff that they would come up with to try to get Rich Froning to

01:58:35.560 lose, it just didn't matter. They made up all kinds of stuff and he smashed everything. You can't come

01:58:40.980 up with enough accolades to describe how talented these people are. You can't. It's not that at all.

01:58:45.600 The men, the women, like what they can do is phenomenal. It just comes back to what you said at the

01:58:49.540 outset, right? Which is ultimately specificity wins. And I actually write about this in my book.

01:58:53.600 I was like, look, when I was cycling and it was all I was doing, I was a really one dimensional athlete.

01:59:00.040 My upper body was useless. Well, you wanted to be, you know, I wanted it to atrophy away.

01:59:04.360 I was not good at running even, even though I had the engine running was hard for me. The impact

01:59:12.060 was not pleasant. If I was sprinting, I couldn't get my heart rate over 130 because I didn't have the

01:59:17.780 leg pounding strength to cope with it. No lateral movement, no flexibility, no balance. Like there

01:59:23.180 is no other dimension to it other than turning pedals over quickly. Again, not to take anything

01:59:27.820 away from the best cyclists in the world. They're marvels of human physiology, but it's super,

01:59:33.540 super specific. And again, I think that's true for every athlete we're talking about. Once we get into

01:59:37.580 these strong men and CrossFit athletes though, you start to see what in some ways impresses me a little

01:59:42.860 bit more, which is just broad, remarkable feats of strength and endurance across a great range.

01:59:49.640 Think about last examples. Just think about an elite marathon time. Let's call it two hours to

01:59:53.680 make math easy because it's getting there. Technically it's been broken, right?

01:59:56.600 Tipchoge sort of did it once. Yeah. Unofficially.

01:59:58.680 With some caveats and stuff there. You break that down, what, four minute?

02:00:03.520 440.

02:00:04.120 440 mile?

02:00:04.940 Yeah, maybe even quicker. Maybe 434 or something like that. It's insane.

02:00:07.700 We'll call it four and a half. I don't know of hardly any people in my life who could do that once.

02:00:10.980 Most people couldn't hold that pace for a quarter mile.

02:00:13.640 Well, that's what I was going to get at. So you break it down even further. You're talking 65

02:00:17.680 second, 400 meter dash. You will not find many people on this earth that can run a 65 second,

02:00:23.240 400 meter dash one time. You walk that down even further. That's a 12 second, 100 meter dash.

02:00:28.440 That's like a number that you might be a little more familiar with. The best marathoners in the world

02:00:33.660 would smash almost everyone you know in a 100 meter dash. They're blazingly fast.

02:00:38.920 Virtually everybody in a 400. In a quarter mile, it's insane. It's the same thing as the

02:00:43.800 Bradley Wiggins example or any of the cyclist thing. It's like, we just don't understand how

02:00:47.880 far we are. I think the difference is in the running. I think most people can understand

02:00:50.920 because they can remember back to high school gym class, how hard it was to run 66 seconds for a

02:00:55.440 quarter mile. I always tell people all the time, go run a 400 meter dash. Next time, go time. It's not

02:00:59.340 hard. Everyone's like, oh yeah, I can be 60. They come in 85 seconds. You're very far off this

02:01:05.040 number. Don't conflate world class, the best we've ever known athletes to thinking these concepts are

02:01:11.380 then wrong because we're talking about general concepts with, in this case, not CrossFit.

02:01:16.020 Going back to this CrossFit athlete, how are they able to balance the volume? Because they're now

02:01:22.140 pushing the envelope so much between strength, power, and endurance that at some point, you're

02:01:28.920 robbing Peter to pay Paul. I mean, you have to. Is the trade-off that you have to make in that

02:01:33.600 training a function of your incoming athleticism, your genetics, and maybe your goals? You might say,

02:01:39.980 look, I'm going to index to be better at these events than that events. Is that the only way you

02:01:43.960 can basically do it? And there is no true way to have a global optimization strategy?

02:01:48.560 We don't have any science on any of this stuff, and I've never coached CrossFitters. So having said

02:01:55.120 that there are some really, really, really smart, really smart people that are coaching CrossFitters.

02:02:00.040 So they could probably walk you through what's going on here, but I don't have any science

02:02:03.380 to go off of. In general, though, if you just look at physiology, specificity, it does matter,

02:02:10.000 right? So if you were going to optimize somebody for strength, you could have one of two philosophies.

02:02:14.520 You could say, look, we're really, really, really strong, and we're good at this stuff,

02:02:17.240 and we recover well from it. So we're going to stay doing more of these strength type things

02:02:21.160 because we can actually get more total volume in because you recover well from it.

02:02:24.800 As an example. Or you can do the opters. You can say, hey, look, we're going to go and do a lot

02:02:28.820 of strength because that's the weakest part we have, and we're going to try to bring our weakness

02:02:32.060 up. So it's kind of a coaching philosophy of maximize strength or try to minimize your biggest

02:02:37.660 limitation. In terms of actual total volume to get per week and stuff, again, I don't have any

02:02:43.300 actual numbers on that. Everyone does this quite differently. What I can say is it's so beautiful

02:02:49.460 CrossFit in the sense that you need to have a ton of baseline aerobic capacity. You need to have

02:02:54.740 some peak power. You need to have some strength, and you need to be highly anaerobic, and you need

02:02:58.800 to have real high recovery from anaerobic efforts. You have to find some sort of combination, which

02:03:05.360 to me, one of the most, if not the most fascinating part of the whole thing is like, well, what do you

02:03:09.440 do? And nobody has an answer. It's just strategy. We're going to try to go here. The other strategy

02:03:14.540 they have is just, we're just going to hammer everyone, see who's left, and you're going to be ready

02:03:18.760 to go there. So what do we know about heart rate recovery as a model of fitness? I'm guessing within

02:03:24.600 the CrossFit athlete, that's a very important part of it. As you pointed, the anaerobic recovery is

02:03:29.880 essential. It's a strong metric. It is very good. In fact, you'll see this, there's a number of

02:03:34.280 different places around the country where you can just go and get a VO2 max test done. Like you'd go

02:03:38.500 in and pay $100 or something, which is great. A lot of the times they'll actually, if they're good,

02:03:43.220 they'll look at one, two, and three minute heart rate recovery as well, because you can glean a lot

02:03:47.060 of insight from there. Do you know off the top of your head what the metrics are that we care about

02:03:51.080 for 30, 60, 120 second recovery? 80% in two minutes. You mean within 20% of baseline?

02:03:57.260 Say you're at 200. There's no reason you should be above 160 two minutes in. So two minutes recovery,

02:04:02.620 you should be well below 160 beats if your max was 200. So that'd be 80% of your max. You should be

02:04:09.660 well below that by the two minute mark. Oh, that's much slower than I would have thought. I would have

02:04:13.460 expected within two minutes you'd need. That would be like minimum. Minimum. Okay.

02:04:17.060 What's considered excellent? 60. So in functional case, you're going to be down to, in this thing,

02:04:22.680 120 beats, which is like almost is going to feel like you're resting. After that, you're going to

02:04:26.840 feel like you're barely even ventilating, but that would be a solid number to be at. If you're above

02:04:31.880 80 though, it's like sound the alarm. This is a real big problem. And then you can walk yourself down.

02:04:36.620 Do we care what an athlete's maximum heart rate is in particular, or do we care much more about,

02:04:42.240 for example, heart rate recovery and what they can do at their max heart rate? In other words,

02:04:48.060 I'll give you an example, right? So VO2 max surprisingly is not that correlated with speed.

02:04:54.300 It's VVO2 max that is right. So velocity at VO2 max matters much more in running than VO2 max in cycling.

02:05:02.000 Turns out VO2 max, not nearly as important as PVO2 max power at VO2 max. But at least when I was

02:05:10.040 training, we were not looking at heart rate recovery, meaning I wasn't and my coach wasn't,

02:05:14.400 but I wonder if like, that's a metric that we should have been paying more attention to in addition to

02:05:19.340 kind of PVO2 max and FTP and all those other metrics.

02:05:23.820 If you look at VO2 max specifically, I can't come on a cycling. I don't know those

02:05:27.180 data that literature. Well, I do know the running literature. You're going to have three main

02:05:31.360 components that are going to predict endurance running and VO2 max is only one of them.

02:05:35.040 Running economy is very, very important as the other one. So they're all three in lactate

02:05:38.680 threshold, of course, it's like the sort of triangle of things. Any one of them on its face

02:05:42.460 is not going to get you anywhere. And all three of them are still not going to get you everywhere.

02:05:47.340 So movement economy on a bike, it's probably similar, probably more of your power ratio.

02:05:51.760 On a bike, it's actually less, believe it or not. On a bike, it's FTP to weight.

02:05:55.960 Which is effectively efficiency. Like how far can you travel on a bike per push?

02:05:58.880 So that's what makes cycling to me, such a remarkable feat of engineering. It's basically

02:06:03.220 just machines. It's take your functional threshold power, divide by how many kilograms you are.

02:06:07.380 That's a number. If you line up everybody at the beginning of the Tour de France and rank them in

02:06:11.560 that order, that is the order they will finish barring an accident or a strategic blunder.

02:06:17.260 And you can make strategic blunders.

02:06:18.520 Yeah. Because efficiency on a bike is super high where efficiency in human movement,

02:06:21.520 it's like 20% or something like super, super low, whatever that number is.

02:06:24.720 When you actually start to pay attention and like what metrics do you pay attention to,

02:06:28.440 max heart rate, are you going to find that as a predictor of any kind of performance?

02:06:32.180 No, with the exception of whether people stop way prior to hitting a max heart rate.

02:06:37.200 So that would be like, if you're going to do a VO2 max test, one of the five metrics you look forward

02:06:40.840 to identify to make sure it was an actual max test is whether or not they get close to their

02:06:44.620 predicted heart rate max. And so you will see this occasionally. People stop at 150, 155

02:06:48.920 heart rate, 160 maybe or something. And they're not-

02:06:51.540 When they should have been 175 or something. Correct. That's also like, can this happen

02:06:54.780 normally? I've had a lot of high level athletes, max heart rate, 170, two, 175. And you're like

02:07:00.140 very fit fighters, the championship fighters kind of thing, five, five minute rounds are going to

02:07:04.260 fight in the UFC. And they're like, it's just sort of where you are, but they can also cruise at 168

02:07:09.060 for a whole round, like one minute rest and do that for five. Where you're like, holy crap. Okay.

02:07:13.380 So their ability to hang on at 95%, in this case, it's like 98%. And they can just hang there for

02:07:18.620 minutes where most people get to 98% and you have seconds of life before you're gasping for

02:07:23.440 something. So it is a little bit of crude. I've also had people myself included. I'm still well

02:07:28.700 over 200 as a max heart rate. Wow.

02:07:31.140 My R&R too, like it's nothing. If I do a VO2 max test and I am like lower than 1.3, I know it was

02:07:36.960 not a max test. Like technically you're not supposed to get over 1.1, 1.35, 1.38. Those are not crazy

02:07:42.720 numbers for me to hit. I just handle that stuff super well. What's your resting RER? Is it still

02:07:48.040 close to 0.7, 0.75? 75 typically. I mean, those numbers are like kind of over the place. Like my

02:07:54.000 CO2 tolerance is also very, very high. I can handle a large buildup of waste. My VO2 max overall is not

02:08:00.840 particularly high relative to these things. 55, 58, depending, probably lower than that right now,

02:08:06.640 but I've never crossed 60. It's kind of relative, but it's also not. So the problem is, as you're very

02:08:11.980 aware, I'm sure when heart rate gets too high, you start limiting time to fill.

02:08:16.180 Yeah. Your preload is low and your stroke volume goes down.

02:08:18.500 Super low. So stroke volume gets super low. So it's not always the best thing to be super high.

02:08:23.800 And there's some other factors here in terms of like accuracy of measure and some other things

02:08:28.040 to pay attention to, but in general, it's not a proxy. I don't know if we talked about the study I

02:08:33.440 did in Sweden with the cross-country skiers in their 80s and 90s, but I can't remember. I think our

02:08:37.840 average max heart rate was like 150, 148. And these are 80 and 90 year olds and they didn't care at

02:08:43.100 all. They were at 150 and they were like. That's amazing. Now lifelong athletes though,

02:08:48.120 these guys never got out of shape, right? These guys were fit from their teams and never stopped.

02:08:53.000 Totally. World champions in the 1940s and 50s and are still competing every year in cross-country

02:08:57.140 skiing. So never stopped. Just savages.

02:08:59.400 These guys have VO2 maxes in the mid thirties probably still.

02:09:02.560 Yep. 92 year old. I think his VO2 max was 38. I remember correctly. Something like that.

02:09:08.860 Several of them over 40, 86, 88 plus year olds crushing. We had such a long conversation that

02:09:14.080 the first time I can't remember if I told the story, so I apologize if I did, but I'm going

02:09:16.800 to tell it again. But one of them in particular, so we were over in Stockholm doing this and these

02:09:20.620 guys, I don't speak Swedish and they didn't speak English. And we're in a hospital. So there's

02:09:23.980 cardiologists there and we're trying to like, as you do VO2 maxes, like you're yelling and encouraging

02:09:27.500 to go, go, go, right. Whatever. And one of them got done. We were cycling. He got off and he sat next

02:09:32.420 to the hospital bed. He took like three breaths. He's like, he said something. I asked what they

02:09:36.780 said. And they like, he said, he didn't understand the instructions. He wants to try again. And he

02:09:39.700 got up and he started getting back on the bike. And we were like, whoa, like, and I'm talking 15

02:09:44.540 seconds, whatever it takes to take three breaths. He's just like, got back on the bike again.

02:09:48.500 We're here to go. I was like this guy. And they're like, no, no. And I was like, let's

02:09:51.820 go. Let's see what he has. I love it. Cardiologist said no. Again, I think the CrossFit athlete in

02:09:56.520 some ways is of all of the athletes we're talking about here, the one that is most representative

02:10:01.240 of maybe what our long-term realistic goal is. Not necessarily at that extreme, because

02:10:06.880 obviously I think when people think CrossFit, they think of stuff that they're never going

02:10:10.340 to do. But in terms of being a generalist, I think that's the closest one we're going

02:10:15.160 to see. So is there anything that is off limits? In other words, if you exclude preexisting

02:10:22.380 injury, so we're not talking about somebody with a labral injury that can't be doing power

02:10:27.000 cleans and snatches, how much of your time and energy is going to go into max rep, power

02:10:34.180 lifting movements, relatively heavy weightlifting movements, given that you need to do so much

02:10:40.500 other stuff and build that base of endurance. And let's just assume for the purpose of this

02:10:44.440 discussion, you're optimizing around being the most well-rounded, not being a spike in one

02:10:50.260 particular domain over another.

02:10:51.620 Okay, 70-20-10. This is the number, 70-20-10. I got this from my friend, Kenny Kane, who ran

02:10:59.340 CrossFit LA. I think it was like the eighth or ninth CrossFit, or one of the original ones. Still

02:11:04.500 coaching to this day, so been long in it. And the way that he programs it, he's in Santa Monica,

02:11:09.800 so he doesn't have a lot of CrossFit competitors. The avatar you explained is pretty much his client.

02:11:15.300 It's people that are 30 to 50 and all those things. His model works perfectly here. So what he

02:11:20.380 says is 70% of the time you're in the gym. You're there for practice. And what I want to point out

02:11:25.920 here is that doesn't mean we're like practicing barbell only and things like that. You're going

02:11:30.720 to go through a full workout. You're going to sweat. You're going to get tired. But the core of

02:11:34.120 what we're after here is practicing. So we're getting better at, say, technical proficiency with a

02:11:38.920 little bit of fatigue. We're getting better at hip hinging. We're getting better at breath mechanics.

02:11:43.540 We're getting better at pressing overhead. And we're going to use fatigue and load to get better at

02:11:47.960 something. 70% of the time we're practicing. 20% of the time we're going to compete, which is you're

02:11:54.660 going to try to get your best score on that workout, right? So we're going to put it up there, you know,

02:11:58.420 in 10 minutes, how many rounds you can get to, whatever. And you're going to try to get the best

02:12:01.960 number you can in that workout, which is very different. And I noticed the shift here. Practice

02:12:06.080 is 100% emphasis on quality. Who cares about the score? 20% of the time, though, it's the opposite.

02:12:12.460 It doesn't mean we're going to let technique go. It's just the mind frame is different. We're out here.

02:12:15.640 We're trying to conserve our efficiency. So if we're doing, say, box jumps for reps,

02:12:20.120 we're not jumping up as high as we can every time. We're actually kind of doing the minimum

02:12:22.620 amount we can to get up, get back down. We're being careful and calm. And we're trying to get

02:12:27.320 the highest score on this workout we can. 10% of the time we go to death, basically, which is like,

02:12:33.240 we're going balls to the wall. We're not trying to hold back. We're not trying to like be strategic.

02:12:38.920 We're trying to get to death's door as fast as we can and just live in the suck, basically.

02:12:43.400 So if you do that in your brain, let's say the average person per month is going to work

02:12:47.740 out 12 times. So that means, all right, three times a week, I'm going to go to the gym for

02:12:52.380 weeks. That's 12. All right. So then like maybe eight of those workouts, which is twice

02:12:57.540 a week, I'm going to be practicing. Again, you're going to get a good sweat. You're going to get

02:13:01.100 stronger. You're going to build some muscle, but the intention there, then maybe three of the

02:13:05.380 workouts left are going to be those competition ones. And then one of them per month, we go

02:13:09.540 absolutely nuts. Again, we're trying to not hold back or get after it. And we're going

02:13:14.160 to lay on the ground for an hour afterwards because it was just sort of awful. I think

02:13:17.940 that's a very, very good way to think about how you would want to train for a sport like

02:13:21.580 CrossFit because the movements are what they are. You're going to get better in a lot of

02:13:25.880 ways. You're going to stay safe. You're going to get a little bit of that. Like, oh shit,

02:13:30.020 this is going to be crazy today. Like I better not drink tonight. Go to bed early because

02:13:34.440 tomorrow is that comp. And then there's enough of the 20 percenters where it's like, it's

02:13:37.720 really, really hard this week. One day a week is super, super hard because the other

02:13:41.200 big problem we see with the people that train like this, that also have real jobs is how

02:13:46.180 much time they spend in sympathetic drive. And they end up just torching themselves

02:13:50.240 because it's too much high intensity too often. And they don't understand when to

02:13:54.160 like dial it back. So if you kind of have this model, it's sort of like two days a

02:13:58.000 week, you're working out and blood pumping, you're getting feeling good. It's

02:14:00.800 recovery. Like you're going to feel great. One day a week though, you're going to push it

02:14:03.480 harder. And then one of those four weeks, that one hard day is really,

02:14:07.720 really, really hard. And that's enough for most people that have other life

02:14:12.600 stressors. You'll be able to recover from that stuff, but also then feel you're not

02:14:16.160 just sort of like not getting anything out of your training. So 70, 20, 10, I

02:14:19.560 think is the perfect model for this. So I'm glad you brought that point up. It's

02:14:23.300 so important when I think about the difference between my life today and my

02:14:26.320 life when I was 18, you know, there are a lot of things that were better when I was

02:14:29.180 18, just physiologically, you're so much stronger and fitter and all the rest of it. But

02:14:33.080 also a big part of it is there was no other sympathetic drive to your point. Anyone who's

02:14:37.040 got a teenager knows they're like the singularly most selfish creatures on the

02:14:40.720 face of the earth. They're incapable of caring about anything that is not

02:14:44.600 themselves. So everything in my life revolved around my workouts. I'll tell you a

02:14:49.060 funny story. One day when I was coming home from school to do the third of my

02:14:52.980 four workouts for the day, because every day had four workouts in it, I forgot my

02:14:56.780 key and I couldn't get in the house. So I actually broke into the house, like

02:15:00.340 actually smashed a window to break into my house to make sure I could do the

02:15:04.000 workout. And that didn't strike me as a weird thing to do. Putting, I can't

02:15:08.980 remember if I used my fist or a brick, but I literally just broke the window, got

02:15:14.220 into the house, didn't bother to clean it up and was in the basement hammering the

02:15:18.860 weights when my mom came home and thought there was like a break in. Didn't

02:15:22.800 occur to me as a random thing. So again, there's no other stress in my life.

02:15:25.960 There's nothing else that matters other than training. But then you're 50 and all of a

02:15:30.080 sudden life is stressful. Is there a way to quantify and help people think about

02:15:36.480 that as it factors into the training load equation, if you want to think of it that

02:15:41.360 way? Scientifically, there's a name for it called allostatic load or allostasis.

02:15:45.460 That's what it means scientifically of sort of all stressors combined. Lots of ways you

02:15:50.440 can do this. We have our own algorithm that I use that we actually factor in

02:15:53.920 everything. We actually break it up into what we call visible and hidden stressors. So

02:15:58.500 visible stressors are visible because you see them or feel them. You know, if you

02:16:02.720 didn't sleep well last night, you know, if you're thirsty right now, you know, you

02:16:05.960 ate that food that visibly was probably not the best choice, alcohol, cigarettes, like

02:16:10.280 sort of all these things. Hidden stressors are things that you won't necessarily

02:16:13.580 feel in the moment. So maybe your carbohydrate to protein ratio is off or you're way

02:16:19.260 too high in carbs or too low in carbs or something like that. Maybe you've got some

02:16:22.940 medical conditions, some pathogens, some micronutrient deficiency, excessive

02:16:28.000 inflammation, like something else where you're just like, my recovery sucks, but I'm

02:16:31.380 doing all the right things. So we put all that stuff together. We measure all of it

02:16:34.920 and then we actually can kind of score them. And then we base our programming

02:16:37.440 based on those scores. It's how we do it. How would one do it if they didn't have

02:16:41.320 blood work and saliva and urinary and kind of the whole thing that we have? You can't

02:16:45.440 just go from the visible side and just try to put a score. If you did something as

02:16:49.520 simple as how was your sleep on a 10, how was your psychological and mental stress? How

02:16:55.500 well did you eat? And then like overall recovery, you feel like those four alone

02:16:59.440 will get you like somewhat close because think about it this way. Adaptation in the

02:17:03.540 body happens because of stress, but because we just talked that stress bucket can be

02:17:07.740 overfilled. What you want to do is dump as much stress in from the type of stress

02:17:11.300 you want and have as much of the other stress you don't want out. So if you're

02:17:14.820 already pre-filled with other stuff and you put a little bit of training stress

02:17:18.180 on there, you're already, you're overfilling here. If I can dump that other stuff out

02:17:21.940 of the equation though, I can dump more and more and more training in before we

02:17:25.620 start overfilling. So that's why it's very, very important to keep that

02:17:28.780 allostatic load, not down. You don't want it low because remember you have to have

02:17:32.840 stress to cause adaptation. You just want it filled with the right stresses that go

02:17:36.500 in the right direction. Specificity, right? The more specific the stress can get, the

02:17:40.180 more specific the outcome can get. So those are the big rocks I'm sure you've

02:17:43.600 talked about a trillion times, but that's why that stuff is very, very

02:17:47.100 important. Paying attention to the total allostatic load. I'm going to skip the

02:17:51.000 track athlete at this point. So this is, we can do it in two minutes if you want.

02:17:55.340 Right. Let's do it. And should we just limit it to not the field side, but just

02:17:58.860 the track side. So we're talking sprinters. So these guys are insanely strong. If

02:18:03.080 you put them on a force plate treadmill, I've heard Usain Bolt is literally

02:18:07.460 hitting at four times his body weight on a force plate treadmill. I don't know if

02:18:11.340 that's true, but I would believe it. So what are we saying here? This is highly

02:18:15.700 technical, meaning technique really, really matters. Efficiency really, really

02:18:19.360 matters. And then it's force to wait, I assume.

02:18:22.340 Close. There's some more factors at play here because force is not the real driver

02:18:26.680 here. Speed is. You have absolute acceleration and then you have peak

02:18:30.140 velocity. When Usain comes out the gates, that's acceleration. He's not particularly

02:18:33.720 strong relative to his other folks in acceleration, probably because his force

02:18:37.540 production is not like exceptionally high relative to the other ones. However, once he

02:18:42.460 gets vertical, his peak velocity is so outrageous and his ability to maintain peak

02:18:48.240 velocity. In fact, if you go look, that's the thing that really separated him. He

02:18:52.060 maintained that peak velocity so much longer than anyone else did. So it looked

02:18:55.700 like he was passing everybody. He wasn't.

02:18:57.840 They were just slowing down.

02:18:58.740 Field is slowing down. So you have peak velocity and you have acceleration. For

02:19:02.920 other field sports, you have change of direction and agility. The difference there

02:19:06.780 being your determination versus reacting to stimulus and changing direction that way.

02:19:12.960 Okay. So that's where we're at. In terms of, are they strong too? Yeah. You have

02:19:16.560 legendary stories of 100 meter dash sprinter squatting 600 pounds, 700. Like it's the same

02:19:21.980 thing we talked about earlier, a fallacy of like when you're an elite athlete, you're

02:19:24.840 probably good at a lot of things, but doesn't mean you're optimized for it. So they

02:19:28.840 need to be strong because they have to overcome force. What are 100 meter dash, 200

02:19:33.180 meter dash, boom, acceleration piece. But then they have to have true elite speed, which

02:19:37.340 is a function of how fast you can turn your feet over and running as well as your stride

02:19:42.240 length. And so there's like a technical component to it as well. But training for

02:19:46.280 peak speed is just those two components. So you use a little bit of resistance, fairly

02:19:51.720 light, lighter than power, or at the low end of the power spectrum, 30% or less to

02:19:55.920 train the acceleration part. And then you move as fast as you can. You either use normal

02:20:00.500 or over speed training to train peak velocity, which should make intuitive sense now that

02:20:06.360 we sort of walk that conversation. So you train those two aspects of speed. And depending

02:20:10.480 on where the end of the little athlete is, they may need a little more force or they

02:20:13.680 may need a little more actual peak velocity stuff. And then you use that on your force

02:20:18.240 velocity profile to figure out where that athlete needs to train. And then just to finish

02:20:21.800 quickly, if you go back to the entire matrix, speed training and power training are almost

02:20:27.280 identical. You can do them at a very high frequency. You want to do complex movements.

02:20:33.140 You don't want to do typically isolation, single joint movements. You want to do things

02:20:36.760 you can move as fast as you can. You can do them very frequently. If you're a very elite

02:20:41.460 sprinter, you've got to be careful of your hamstring and stuff like that. But for the most

02:20:44.880 part, physiologically, it's low fatigue. It's low total volume. It's high quality. And

02:20:51.120 you just now are going lighter so that you can move faster. That's really the only difference.

02:20:58.200 Just to be clear, are you saying that the workout of actual running, like for example,

02:21:03.360 using an assisted, like a slight tug run, that type of workout could be done frequently?

02:21:09.520 Yeah. There's no fatigue really. There's no joint beat up. There's no systemic fatigue. So

02:21:13.440 just to contrast this to like one distinction we made across that's very important. The reason why we

02:21:18.420 talked about only doing high intensity stuff so often in CrossFit, it's because it's the first

02:21:23.360 one we've talked about and the only one really of this group, maybe some strong man, but it's the

02:21:27.740 one that has the most systemic fatigue associated with it. The rest of them are pretty much localized.

02:21:32.800 Your back might get tired because you had a heavy load on your back for a back squat and your

02:21:37.300 hamstrings might be tired because you sprinted maximally right now, but you're not going to see your

02:21:41.120 HRV get tanked. You're not going to see a global total body fatigue like you would in a CrossFit

02:21:46.760 scenario because it is whole muscle. It is cardiovascular driven. There's an endocrine

02:21:51.160 response that's massive and that doesn't happen. So because of that, you have systemic fatigue.

02:21:54.980 So that's, that distinction is why I made that distinction earlier.

02:21:58.280 And you also at the, I think it was on the powerlifter, weightlifter, we talked about sort

02:22:01.820 of the neurologic component of this. Can you say a bit more about that?

02:22:04.880 So when we get into powerlifting a little bit and now really into weightlifting and certainly in,

02:22:10.840 as we've gone down the spectrum here into true speed stuff, there is such a high component

02:22:15.760 to neural activation to make sure that we're not only optimizing all the motor units we need,

02:22:20.720 but in the case of speed, you have to do them in the right sequence. And so movement mechanics and

02:22:26.160 being smooth and the rhythm that you have to have to move actually fast as a human is very,

02:22:32.080 very challenging. And so that rhythm is very important. So this is called synchronization.

02:22:36.200 You have to be firing the right muscles in the right group in the right order throughout your

02:22:40.860 gait if it's say running. And that's not necessarily the case in powerlifting or even so much,

02:22:45.740 a little bit weightlifting, but more, not much in powerlifting because kind of everything's on

02:22:49.280 a maximum and you're just sort of controlling everything. But like rhythm, the common word

02:22:54.100 you'll hear in like sprinters or running, like you got to be in the right rhythm and you might get

02:22:57.380 faster without actually improving your velocity ability by just getting in better rhythm. And

02:23:02.080 what they're meaning by that is learning what to fire, what to relax and having that fire,

02:23:06.040 relax, fire, relax. So a joint can move and then be ready to strike again and be ready to strike

02:23:10.060 again.

02:23:10.320 But is this autonomic or conscious?

02:23:12.180 It can be both. The idea would be to make this as subconscious as possible. So you're just in the

02:23:17.920 moment, relaxed and moving and everything is understanding when to contract and when to relax.

02:23:22.300 Initially though, when you learn it, it's going to be very conscious.

02:23:25.240 What is the most taxing workout that the sprinter is doing during the week?

02:23:28.560 What is the workout from which they need a recovery?

02:23:30.520 Probably their true peak speed stuff, really going true peak speed. There's a little bit of risk there,

02:23:35.720 but the fatigue and then being able to come back and reproduce peak speed,

02:23:38.360 because here's the distinction. If you did a CrossFit workout and you were able to maintain

02:23:42.840 95% of your peak speed from today to tomorrow to the next day. So let's say you did a workout today

02:23:48.680 and you had a little bit of residual fatigue. Tomorrow when you came back, if you're 5% reduced,

02:23:53.920 you could still probably do your workout because you could use other components. You could use your

02:23:58.580 strength. You could use recovery. You could use all kinds of things. If you're trying to train

02:24:02.340 maximum speed and you're 5% slower tomorrow, then we're not trying maximum speed anymore.

02:24:06.640 And so it's just a level of recovery that has to be higher to be able to achieve what we're

02:24:11.980 trying to go after here, which is hitting a new actual peak velocity. And so it's not the fact

02:24:16.920 that you're like super sore. Generally, you're going to feel fine. Maybe a little sore, but your

02:24:21.820 numbers are 3% lower. You're like, damn, not recovered enough. Where in almost every other sport,

02:24:26.040 you'd be like, well, great. That's totally fine. Go play.

02:24:28.720 Let's kind of now tie this all together for a totally different type of athlete that most

02:24:33.380 people aren't thinking about, which is the centenarian athlete. And I'm not assuming that

02:24:38.800 we're starting from the standpoint of having been world-class Olympic cross-country skiers in our

02:24:44.060 20s who never stop. I'm talking about somebody who's in their 40s who, I don't know, kind of has

02:24:50.840 the epiphany that says, wait a minute. Like it's cool to be a powerlifter. It's cool to be a weightlifter.

02:24:55.400 It's cool to be a crossfitter, a strongman, an elite runner, cyclist, swimmer, whatever. But

02:25:00.080 I'm going to pick a different sport. I'm going to pick a sport where the optimization is around

02:25:05.500 my ability to be as physically robust as possible in the last decade of my life, which means I want

02:25:13.240 to be able to do a bunch of things that most people can't even fathom when they're 80 or 90

02:25:17.300 years old. That means like I can run up an escalator if it's broken, carrying my luggage.

02:25:21.780 I can put the 25-pound bag in the overhead compartment of the airplane. I can pick a

02:25:28.280 grandchild up out of a crib. I can play on the floor and stand up on my own. No issues. I can go

02:25:36.400 for a hike on rocky terrain and I'm not going to slip and fall. You know, again, things that you would

02:25:42.440 do blindfolded today, but the number of people in the last decade of their life that can do this,

02:25:48.700 you can count on a few hands. So I'm going to argue that to train for that, you have to make

02:25:55.320 trade-offs. One of the biggest trade-offs you have to make is optimizing against getting injured

02:26:00.580 because the compounding effect of training is so strong that it's rivaled only by the compounding

02:26:08.260 effect of not training. Correct.

02:26:10.140 You know exactly what I'm saying, but for the listener, you will lose it way faster than you

02:26:15.460 will gain it. And therefore, you could argue rule number one of what I'm proposing is you can't ever

02:26:23.180 stop training. To have an injury that sidelines you for three months is an unacceptable risk,

02:26:29.140 even if the concessions you make for that cost you some peak performance. Okay. So armed with all of

02:26:37.660 those caveats, what would we beg, borrow and steal from each of these phenotypes into our centenarian

02:26:46.340 decathlon? We're going to work backwards, which is physiology first. So you have three things you

02:26:51.720 need to train. And if you train those three things, you can steal from any of those areas that you'd like

02:26:56.360 to get those three things done and you can mix and match. And I would argue you should. So thing one

02:27:01.080 is you have to have high quality functioning muscle tissue. Number two, nervous system. And by that,

02:27:08.080 in large part, when we typically think about the nervous system for exercise, we often think

02:27:12.440 peripheral. I'm even talking central vis-a-vis the brain. And then four, cardiopulmonary. Sorry,

02:27:18.720 three. So we need to make sure that we've got muscle. We need to make sure that our motor control

02:27:24.180 is very, very astute. And then we need to make sure that our cardiopulmonary system is high

02:27:28.640 functioning. You do all three of those things, you're going to be able to do all those activities

02:27:32.460 you talked about a second ago. The distinction of the brain is very, very important. Because if you

02:27:37.740 were to go to a sport like powerlifting, the downside is while there's a lot of neural activation

02:27:44.760 required for peak force, the lack of variation and the lack of range of motion is a problem. One of

02:27:52.000 the things that has become very clear, preserving brain health. I'm not sure actually, there's a recent

02:27:57.400 paper by my friend. Do you know Tommy Wood? I do know Tommy Wood very well. And I've been meaning

02:28:01.420 to have Tommy on the podcast. I need to get him on the podcast. Oh, to Tommy Wood Smash. Did you see

02:28:05.220 his paper on late onset dimension? Yep. Yep. Super clear, in my opinion, that one of the key components

02:28:12.320 to maintaining brain function throughout life is proprioceptive innervation. And so you need to be

02:28:17.840 moving in space and learning your study. So if you think about this from the exercise perspective,

02:28:21.640 if the octodarian, the 100-year-old, 90-year-old, you need to have some physical activity that is

02:28:26.060 uncontrolled. You don't want to be moving up and down same foot positions all the time. This could

02:28:31.460 be an outdoor hike where we're engaging with the environment, plus the steps are non-uniform,

02:28:36.760 terrain is slippy, whatever. It could be a sport, could be surfing, could be badminton, it could be

02:28:42.540 anything else, but you need one physical activity in your plan that requires you to react to the world.

02:28:48.440 Strongman probably checks that box a little bit. Probably a lot. Maybe not maximally, but a lot.

02:28:53.380 Weightlifting checks that box pretty well. Olympic weightlifting. Running, sprinting, checks the box

02:28:58.440 decently, right? And your movement especially, you're kind of all over. And so you can kind of walk

02:29:02.060 through the rest of cycling. Probably wouldn't check that list very well, right? So we want to think

02:29:07.740 about that's the first thing. That's what's needed. The second thing that's needed then is high force

02:29:11.420 production. So you preserve your nerves by asking them to do a lot of different things, Tommy's paper,

02:29:15.920 and by asking all the motor units to work. So something throughout your week has to be high force

02:29:20.680 production. And by high force production, I'm going to say greater than 80% of your max. That could be

02:29:26.100 powerlifting, could be weightlifting, could be strongman, could be CrossFit. No problem. Could

02:29:30.200 be any of those things. Could be different plyometrics and stuff like that. All right. Nervous system is

02:29:34.380 checked. Those two components. Cardiovascular system. I think the cardiovascular system needs to

02:29:38.220 be able to do two primary things. I'll split it into three. It needs to be able to sustain consistent

02:29:43.680 work output over a minimum of 30 minutes with no interval, like no break back down. Call this zone

02:29:50.920 whatever. I don't care, but this is no break whatsoever. Weightlifting does not check that.

02:29:56.000 Powerlifting does not check that. Strongman, maybe, but you're probably going to be taking some breaks.

02:30:01.920 CrossFit might be able to get away with it. You might be able to do a 25 minute workout with almost no

02:30:06.000 dip, but you may actually need to integrate more classic steady state stuff here. This might be

02:30:11.160 an air bike. This might be a sled push. This might be a jog, a swim. It's like something like that.

02:30:17.240 So that's one component the cardiovascular system has. The other one is it has to be able to get to

02:30:20.460 max heart rate. You got to get all the way up there. So CrossFit, absolutely strongman,

02:30:25.520 absolutely powerlifting, kind of. If you're going heavy enough, you'll get up there. I mean, you can get

02:30:31.000 blood pressures of 450 over 350 during a 100 max deadlift. You can get complete occlusion basically,

02:30:36.940 but probably not the place I'm starting it for my max heart rate training. That's just not really

02:30:41.020 an option. And how many times a week do we think a person needs to experience their max heart rate

02:30:45.740 for this athlete? Again, not talking about a real athlete, but even just once a week of

02:30:50.320 hitting that max heart rate. It takes the systemic fatigue out of it. I would love two.

02:30:56.200 Two would be really, really good. If you can really handle it, if the allostatic load is low,

02:30:59.700 three would be fine. But I would say minimum one, most people shoot for two. I think that's great.

02:31:03.440 I would say the same thing for the steady state piece. One's good. Two might be better. It depends on

02:31:08.340 what you're doing. Like if you're also doing a lot of like long, just walking, you might hedge

02:31:12.380 your bets there a little bit. And then the third one, maybe in this category is recovery from high

02:31:16.460 intensity stuff. So not only just be able to get your heart rate up high once, being able to come

02:31:19.860 back down, regulate yourself, come back up, regulate yourself back down. And that could be certainly

02:31:24.420 known with CrossFit, certainly no strongman, maybe done with a few other things, but that's kind of

02:31:29.320 where we're at there. So if we were to kind of go back to the beginning, one day a week playing

02:31:33.280 as some uncontrolled, one day a week has got to be really high force. One day a week has got to be

02:31:39.080 max heart rate. One day a week has got to be sustained heart rate. Those could all also be

02:31:42.880 combined. There's no reason why you can't go in, do 10 minutes of pure strength training,

02:31:47.900 check that box, and then go play some pickleball. Check that box. You could do a max strength stuff

02:31:54.860 for 10 minutes and then go do a CrossFit 20 minute AMRAP. So it doesn't have to be like 100 days.

02:32:00.400 We can do this whole thing in 40 minutes. Easy. So we do those two things. We've checked off

02:32:05.600 cardiovascular health. We've checked off neurological health. Then the third one is

02:32:08.640 muscle health. And the muscle needs to be able to do a handful of things. It needs to be sufficiently

02:32:12.700 strong, which we sort of already talked about. It needs to be a sufficient size. Okay. Now we don't

02:32:17.880 need to be excessively large, but there is some minimum requirement we have to have as we age.

02:32:24.240 Do you think about that from the standpoint of like ALMI, where you really want to see somebody

02:32:28.880 above, we hold patients to a very high standard. We want our patients above the 75th percentile

02:32:33.120 for ALMI. You see a big step up in mortality benefit above that. How do you quantify that for

02:32:40.120 folks? So you can look at that. Depends on how much data you can get in that. FFMI is also like

02:32:45.680 crudely okay. If you get in the above average or higher, I'm good.

02:32:49.500 Is it literally something as crude as FFMI and ALMI as an anthropometric measurement of size?

02:32:55.060 I think it's totally fine. What you're going to see generally is a tighter line

02:32:58.020 between strength. Then you will see size as you move up. We probably are out of time,

02:33:03.840 but there's a whole discussion. The whole idea that like too much muscle mass is detrimental to

02:33:07.780 health and age is like a giant misnomer. There are nine other topics that I want to discuss

02:33:12.680 that we won't, but we'll come back and do them in round three. And that's one of them.

02:33:16.940 Especially you've just hit two of the nine remaining topics. One of them is exploring the myth

02:33:23.940 strength is paradoxically harmful as you age. Too much strength, right? Strength athletes

02:33:31.220 struggle as age. We'll go through the debunk of that.

02:33:33.840 Yeah, that's super easy to debunk too. And then also talk about the uncoupling of strength and size

02:33:38.120 because both of them are so highly correlated with longevity as is cardiorespiratory fitness

02:33:43.240 measured by VO2 max. But I love the idea of uncoupling them a little bit because my reading of

02:33:47.460 the literature is that strength trumps size. But anyway, we can sort of get into that. So strong and

02:33:53.300 enough size. And I also think one of the arguments that says size still does matter

02:33:57.740 goes back to the non-functional or non-structural component of muscle, which is the metabolic

02:34:03.240 component. So we can never lose sight of the fact that this is our greatest glucose reservoir

02:34:06.620 and the metabolic benefits of having a huge glucose sink are enormous.

02:34:10.660 You want to keep your inflammation low. There you go. That's a key component to it. So the last part

02:34:16.840 to round out is your skeletal muscle needs to have muscular endurance. So it needs to be able to do

02:34:22.120 something for 20 repetitions in a row or something. And this is very important for, again, walking up

02:34:26.900 15 steps, 20 steps. This is not going to be cardiovascularly limited. It's going to be limited

02:34:31.180 by the local muscular endurance. It's going to be limited by your strength, actually. This is like

02:34:34.540 another total missed thing. When people think like, wow, I walked up a flight of stairs and I was out

02:34:38.900 of breath. I'm so out of shape. No, you're weak. Because what happened is every step was 85% of your

02:34:43.940 one rep max. And so that became very, very, you just did 12 reps at 85%. If you were stronger and that was

02:34:49.580 50%, you wouldn't be out of breath. That's a really great distinction. Yeah. I'm really glad

02:34:53.220 you're making that point. Just get strong. And all of a sudden, while you're, that task was not as

02:34:57.140 hard. Even with the steps, what makes it so elegant is it's actually strength to weight ratio. So you

02:35:01.960 might even say, well, but I am kind of strong. And it's like, eh, not for your weight, you're not.

02:35:05.720 And the gravity now makes it your strength to weight ratio is not high enough. Correct. That's where your

02:35:12.200 fatigue is coming from. Which is a precursor to like the U-curve J-shaped thing of too much muscle mass

02:35:17.120 getting large as you age is higher mortality. It's like, you're looking at bigger people.

02:35:21.820 That's what you're really looking at. But anyway. What are some of the do nots? So we've talked about

02:35:26.080 what they need to do, but if you go back to this caveat that I've placed on you, which is I'm going

02:35:31.880 to make you czar for the day on training here, but I'm going to say, I don't want to see people

02:35:36.380 getting injured. I want to make sure that there's no interruption of training. I'm going to argue that

02:35:41.360 the older we get, anytime we have interruptions in training, the cost of regain is so high.

02:35:48.080 So how do you factor that into a strategy around training for this person?

02:35:52.860 Exercise-induced injuries happen in a couple of ways. It's very, very rare that it's muscle.

02:35:59.060 That's the problem. The only problem that you have with a cardiopulmonary system or cardiovascular system

02:36:03.880 is systemic fatigue. That's not really its fault, right? Systemic fatigue. So if you're not overdoing

02:36:08.600 it globally, and this would be your rundown, this is maybe you're getting sick really often,

02:36:15.000 any number of hormone cascades or out of whack, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen, all off,

02:36:19.300 like things like that. Mood, can't sleep, appetite. Those are some of the markers we look for

02:36:23.580 of global fatigue. So if that's not what we're talking about here, you're talking about,

02:36:27.200 oh, I got hurt through my back out. The knee hurts.

02:36:29.740 Yeah. Neck is this, knee is that, back is that.

02:36:32.140 What you're talking about is joint. So the only reason joints really get hurt is repetition over bad

02:36:37.920 movement patterns. So as long as you're moving well in those joints or not moving well, depending

02:36:43.780 on the joint, and not moving at all rather, then you can really do unlimited amounts of volume

02:36:49.560 theoretically until the point you hit systemic fatigue, because it's not going to be muscle.

02:36:53.360 That's going to be the problem. You'll have some muscle strains and stuff like that, but this is

02:36:57.180 not putting you on for three months unless you tear something off the bone or whatever.

02:37:01.140 Connective tissue. So it's connective tissue or it's going to be joint. So how do we keep those

02:37:04.840 things ingrained? We need to move properly. The first step I would do if we really had this like

02:37:09.500 40 year timeframe is I would invest heavily, heavily in understanding proper movement patterns.

02:37:15.920 And then I would load them very specifically. So step number one, you need to make sure you can

02:37:20.760 do the movement pattern perfectly with assistance. Let's do a squat and put your hands under the rail

02:37:25.880 and squat all up and down. So you hold onto the band, grab up. Okay, great. You can do it with

02:37:30.520 assistance. Awesome. How about body weight only? Great. Step two, you did it with body weight only.

02:37:34.700 Step three. Now we can add a little bit of eccentric load. So I want you to just lower the

02:37:40.900 thing down, down to its full range of motion. We're all in good positions. You're under control.

02:37:46.440 We're great here. If you can do things eccentrically, I don't care what the load is.

02:37:50.280 It could be your body weight still. You can control the descent of the pushup. You're holding proper

02:37:55.160 position, shoulder, neck, low back, all the spine, which is generally the problem, right?

02:38:01.400 That's all in the right position. Great. Fall on the floor. Start back to the beginning. Great.

02:38:05.600 We're under control. We're good there. At that point, we can now look to get into the unilateral.

02:38:11.280 Okay, great. So you did it great when you had two limbs. Can you do it great when just your left side?

02:38:15.540 Yeah. Can you do it great with your right side? Ooh, no. Okay. Now we're going to start predicting,

02:38:20.660 given enough time and enough volume and repetition, we're going to start seeing a weakness,

02:38:24.220 weakness, which means we're going to have a compensation movement, which means we may start

02:38:27.900 getting all of a sudden low back is hurting now. Or why is your left knee hurting? Why is your right

02:38:32.000 ankle hurting? Something was probably moving slightly wrong in one position. So we're going to

02:38:36.920 do a unilateral evaluation here, making sure we're fine now. Once you check that-

02:38:41.420 Loaded or unloaded?

02:38:42.380 Both. We haven't even got to load it yet. We're just saying, can you do it? Can you do the movement?

02:38:46.860 Once you pass all that, now we introduce load. Okay, great. We also now, once you can do all those

02:38:53.740 things and you pass it with load, now we ask speed in the equation. So can you do these things in the

02:38:58.300 exact same positions when I ask you to go as fast as possible? Second to last step is then you add

02:39:02.780 fatigue. Now you notice, what's the vast majority of time people starting to work out? The vast majority

02:39:08.160 of the way that they progress is they add volume. I'm going to go for a mile. I haven't ran in forever.

02:39:13.380 I'm just going to start working out on what to do. I'm going to run for a mile. Tomorrow I'll run

02:39:16.020 mile and a half. They just start adding volume. When you're adding volume on top of dysfunctional

02:39:20.120 movement, what do you expect is going to happen six weeks, six whatever's? If you can do all those

02:39:25.420 things, then I know you move perfectly well, eccentrically and concentrically. You can do it

02:39:29.700 in bilateral or unilateral position. You can do it with load when I ask you to go fast and when you

02:39:35.300 get tired. Rip and roar now. Like we can do whatever. We can do absolutely anything. And we're going to do

02:39:40.360 that through a variety of movement positions. So overhead pressing, overhead pulling, horizontal

02:39:47.560 pressing and pulling, lower body hinging, lower body pressing, rotational, unilateral support,

02:39:54.160 diagonal, all over those things. And once we're clear there, now we can start saying, okay, we can

02:39:59.880 put any of these exposures on you that you want. You want to go after cardiovascular system first,

02:40:04.560 probably a good strategy. In fact, there's actually data suggesting, we have a count recently showing

02:40:09.380 that six weeks of pure steady state endurance training. I think there's a cycling, like 45

02:40:15.200 minute cycling prior to hypertrophy training resulted in more muscle growth at the end of

02:40:20.440 the hypertrophy training than the group that didn't do anything. So being in good aerobic fitness is quite

02:40:26.100 powerful and important, even if you're trying to get muscle mass. So you could go after those other

02:40:30.720 goals later, but the big thing in- And by the way, in that study, was it because

02:40:35.420 the cycling trained group had a higher work capacity when they were doing the hypertrophy

02:40:41.640 training? I think actually, let me get back to you, but don't hold me exactly to this, but I think

02:40:46.160 the total workload accomplished in the actual hypertrophy training study was the same.

02:40:50.120 They controlled for that. So they were almost pair matched them to- I'm pretty sure which was

02:40:53.400 the sneaky part. Wow. That's super interesting.

02:40:55.600 Don't hold me to that one exactly though. That may be wrong.

02:40:57.920 We'll take that one offline. Because one of the injuries that I think a lot about,

02:41:01.860 and I see it happen, you know, I don't know if this is the classic middle-aged guy injury,

02:41:06.120 but it's that torn Achilles. And it's usually, I don't want to stereotype it because I'm sure

02:41:10.920 there's someone in whom it hasn't happened this way, but it always seems to be the athlete who's

02:41:16.740 been a little inactive for a while. And then he goes right back to that indoor soccer match

02:41:21.320 and like, boom, you can hear it across the gym. It's so loud.

02:41:25.080 You're asking a connective tissue, in this case, Achilles tendon,

02:41:28.120 from never contracting more than 50% of its max for years to all of a sudden going to a

02:41:34.500 maximal contraction on a hyper-loaded eccentric stop and change. Not going to happen. You're

02:41:40.140 going to tear something somewhere. Probably won't be in an ACL because Achilles is going to go first.

02:41:44.740 You don't as often see in pro sports Achilles go because it's going to handle the ACL is going

02:41:49.580 to go first. So in your case, it's the opposite. That is tissue tolerance. It's very, very easy to

02:41:54.680 avoid with some small amount of tissue tolerance, which is basically a fancy way of saying like,

02:41:59.120 just expose the tissue to that demand slowly and increase that demand over time. And it's

02:42:04.380 going to be just fine unless you access it. One of the things that I just find so great

02:42:08.260 for this, especially as I'm getting older is always warming up with some sort of jumping

02:42:13.680 and it's just multi-planar. It's really simple is back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,

02:42:18.580 side to side, side, side, side, side, and then it's one leg out one, like doing the clock.

02:42:22.720 I don't know if you know that drill, right? You've got one leg going out to one o'clock,

02:42:26.560 two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock, five o'clock. And by five and six o'clock,

02:42:29.380 you're actually having to spin yourself backwards. And you're always coming back to the center of

02:42:33.080 the clock, if that makes sense. And again, these aren't huge jumps, but the goal is just to

02:42:38.060 introduce lower leg variability and tension within the tendons and the connective tissue of the lower

02:42:45.580 leg at unusual angles. This is actually why I am more of a proponent now of running than I used to be

02:42:52.220 for health. I would initially was apprehensive against it because if you look at all forms of

02:42:56.700 exercise, nothing even compares with injury rate than running. Running is by far the highest,

02:43:03.020 nothing will cause more injuries than running for the average exercise for a lot of reasons,

02:43:06.880 right? So I'm like, it's stupid. I actually have changed my thought on that now for this exact

02:43:10.460 reason. Just a small amount of running is enough to keep tissue tolerance through most of the lower

02:43:15.780 half to be able to do anything like that. So this is a few miles a week. I think it's,

02:43:20.100 first of all, like something I think the normal humans should be able to do is run a mile

02:43:23.740 decently. Sprinting too, like a little bit of sprinting. And I don't mean like 100% over speed

02:43:28.720 sprinting. Even if this is as simple as, you know, sprint the straightaways, walk the corners kind of

02:43:33.720 thing. And you did two laps. That's pretty good. Like you're going to stay away from a lot of foot

02:43:38.180 and Achilles related injuries. Andy, not surprisingly, we left nine questions on the table kind of getting

02:43:44.460 through technically only about three, but these were big ones. So I'll just say thank you very

02:43:49.580 much. And I hope everybody enjoys this at least half as much as I did. And I'll see you back for

02:43:54.480 round three. Maybe we need to do this in person. You got to come up with a reason to come to Austin,

02:43:57.900 right? I'll make it happen. Can't be that hard. All right. I'll make it happen. We'll commit to

02:44:00.880 round three in person so we can get a workout in at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to see the

02:44:04.200 spot too. All right. Thanks, Andy. Yep. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive.

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The Peter Attia Drive - April 10, 2023

#250 ‒ Training principles for longevity ｜ Andy Galpin, Ph.D. (PART II)

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