Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Build Strength, Muscle Size & Endurance

Andrew Huberman:

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Galpin is a full and tenured professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, in Fullerton. He is also a world expert in all things exercise, science and kinesiology.

Andrew Huberman:

Today, you are going to hear what is essentially a master class in how to build fitness no matter what level of fitness you happen to have. He talks about how to build endurance and the multiple types of endurance. He talks about how to build strength and hypertrophy, which is the growth of muscle fibers. So if you're seeking to get stronger or build bigger muscles or build endurance or all of those things, today you're going to learn how. You are also going to learn how to build flexibility, how to hydrate properly for exercise, and we'll also talk about nutrition and supplementation.

Andrew Huberman:

What makes Dr. Galpin so unique is his ability to span all levels of exercise science. He has the ability to clearly communicate the sets and repetition schemes that one would want to follow, for instance, to build more strength or to build larger muscles. He also clearly describes exactly how to train if you want to build more endurance or enhance cardiovascular function.

Andrew Huberman:

What's highly unique about Dr. Galpin and the information he teaches and the way he communicates that information is that he can take specific recommendations of how recreational exercisers or even professional athletes ought to train for their specific goals and link that to specific mechanisms. That is, the specific changes that need to occur in the nervous system and in muscle fibers, and indeed, right down to the genetics of individual cells in your brain and body in order for those exercise adaptations to occur.

Andrew Huberman:

It's truly rare to find somebody that can span so many different levels of analyses and who is able to communicate all those levels of understanding in such a clear and actionable way. Indeed, Dr. Galpin is one of just a handful of people to which I and many others look when they want to make sure that the information that they're getting about exercise is gleaned from quality peer-reviewed studies, hands-on experience with a wide variety of research subjects, meaning everyday people, all the way up to professional athletes in a wide variety of sports. So it's no surprise that he's not only one of the most knowledgeable, but also the most trusted voices in exercise science.

Andrew Huberman:

Dr. Galpin is also an avid communicator of zero-cost-to-consumer information about exercise science. You can find him on Instagram at @drandygalpin and also on Twitter at @DrAndyGalpin. Both places, he provides terrific information about recent studies both from his laboratory and from other laboratories, more in-depth protocols of the sort that you'll hear about today. So if you're not already following him, be sure to do so. He provides only the best information. He's extremely nuanced and precise and clear in delivering that information.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm certain that by the end of today's conversation, you'll come away with a tremendous amount of new knowledge that you can devote to your exercise pursuits. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin.

Andrew Huberman:

Welcome, Dr., Professor, Andy Galpin. It's been a long time coming. We have friends in common, but this is actually the first time we've sat down face-to-face.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, I'm very excited.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, there are only a handful, meaning about three or four, people who I trust enough in the exercise physiology space that when they speak, I not only listen, but I modify my protocols, and you are among those three or four people. First of all, a debt of gratitude. Thank you. You've greatly shaped the protocols that I use, and I know there's far more for me and for others to learn.

Andrew Huberman:

So you're a professor, you teach in university, and you have a tremendous range of levels of exploration. Muscle biopsy, literally images down the microscope, all the way to training professional athletes and everything in between. So you are truly an N of one.

Andrew Huberman:

And just to start us off, I would love to have you share with us what you think most everybody or even everybody should know about principles of strength training, principles of endurance training and principles of, let's call it hypertrophy, power and the other categories of training. And this could be very top contour, but what do you think everybody on Planet Earth should know about these categories of personal and athletic development?

Andy Galpin:

Well, that's a great first question. Holy cow. I think I'll start it this way. There's about nine different adaptations you can get from exercise. Fat loss is not one of those. It is a byproduct, but that's not really what I'm getting at. And so, we can kind of categorize everything like that, and we can talk about what are the concepts that you need to hit within each one. And then you could have infinite discussion of the different methodologies. And so, that first thing to hit is the concepts are actually fairly few, but the methods are many, right? People have said that in iterations throughout time.

Andy Galpin:

So if you walk from the very beginning, the first one to think about is what we'll just call skill. So this is improving anything from, say, a golf swing to a squatting technique to running. And this is just simply mechanically how you want your body to move. I'm just going to globally call that skill.

Andy Galpin:

From there, we're going to get into speed. This is moving as fast as possible. The next one is power. And power is a function of speed, but it also a function of the next one, which is strength. So if you actually multiply strength by speed, you get power. And the reason I'm making this distinction, by the way, is some of these are very close, and I'm going in a specific order on purpose here. For example, power is, like I just said, it's a function of speed and strength. So if you improved speed, you've also likely improved power. But not necessarily, because it could have come from the force direction either. So there's carryover. So a lot of things that you would do for the development of strength and power, they are somewhat similar, but then there's differences.

Andy Galpin:

Things that you would do correctly for power would really not develop much strength and vice versa. So we can get into all these details later. Once you get past strength. And the next one kind of down the list is hypertrophy. This is muscle size, right? Growing muscle mass is one way to think about it. After hypertrophy, you get into these categories of, the next one is — these are all globally endurance-based issues. And the very first one is called muscular endurance. So this is your ability to do ... how many push-ups can you do in one minute? Things like that. Past muscular endurance, you're now into more of an energetic or even cardiovascular fatigue. So you've left the local muscle and you're now into the entire physiological system and its ability to produce and sustain work. And we can get into a bunch of differentiations within endurance, but just to keep it really simple right now, the very first one, think about this as I call this anaerobic power.

Andy Galpin:

So this is your ability to produce a lot of work for say 30 seconds to maybe one minute, kind of two minutes like that. The next one down then is more closely aligned to what we'll call your VO2 max. So this is your ability to kind of do the same thing, but more of a time domain of say three to 12 minutes. So this is going to be a maximum heart rate, but it's going to be well past just max heart rate. Then after that we have what I call long-duration endurance. So this is your ability to sustain work. The time domain doesn't matter in terms of how fast you're going, it's how long can you sustain work. This is 30-plus minutes of no break, like that. So as just a high-level overview, those are the different things you can target. And again, some of those crossover, and some are actually a little bit contrarian to the other ones.

Andy Galpin:

So pushing towards one is maybe going to sacrifice something else. So as an overall start, that's really what we're looking at. Within all of those though, they do have similar concepts in terms of there is a handful of things you have got to do to make all of those things work. And we could talk about as many of those as you want, but one of them is functionally called progressive overload. So whichever one you're trying to improve at, if you want to continue to improve, you have to have some method of overload. And as you well know, you've talked about a lot. Adaptation physiologically happens as a byproduct of stress. So you have to push a system. So if you continue to do say the exact same workout over time, you better not expect much improvement. You can keep maintenance, but you're not going to be adding additional stress.

Andy Galpin:

So in general, you have to have some sort of progressive overload, and we can talk in detail about what that means for each category. But this could come from adding more weights. This could come from adding more repetitions, it could come from doing it more often in the week. It could come from adding complexity to the movement. So going from say a partial range of motion to a full range of motion or adding other variables. So there's a lot of different ways to progress, but you have to have some sort of movement forward. So if you have this kind of routine where you've built Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday or something, and you just do that infinitely, you're not going to get very far. So that's I guess the most high-level overview of all the things people can go after. And then we can go from whatever direction you want from there.

Andrew Huberman:

Well, I'd love to do the deep dive on each one of these for several hours. And I imagine that over time we probably will. I'd love to chat about a couple of these in a bit more depth. So in terms of defining what the progressive overload variables are for these different categories, maybe we could hit the two most common combinations of these nine things. The first one being strength and hypertrophy, and maybe we could lump power in there, maybe not, you're the exercise physiologist, but strength and hypertrophy, which at least bear some relationship. And then maybe separately we could explore sustained work endurance, this 30 minutes or longer continuously. Because I think many people train in that regime and probably something like VO2 max anaerobic as well because I know that a number of people now incorporate so-called HIT or high-intensity interval training, I think with the hopes of either shortening their workouts and/or gaining some additional cardiovascular benefit.

Andrew Huberman:

So if we could start with strength and hypertrophy. I know many people want to be stronger, they want to grow larger muscles or at least maintain what they have. So what are the progressive overload principles that are most effective over time for strength and hypertrophy?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, okay. So I'll actually go a little step back. With every one of those categories I talked about, you have what we call your modifiable variables. So this is a very short list of all the things you can modify, the different variables within your workout that can be modified, that will change the outcome. Fancy way of saying if you do this differently, then you're going to get a different result. So modifiable variables, the very first one of those is called choice. So this is the exercise choice that you select. Now, one of ... I'm going to go double back here, so I'm kind of doing a little bit of inception. So follow me here as I'm going up a layer to come down a couple layers. I have these fundamental laws of strength and conditioning that are kind of like a little bit of a joke, but progressive overload's one of those laws. Another one of those laws is your exercises themselves do not determine adaptations. So here's what I mean. If you're like, "I want to get stronger," you can't select an exercise that doesn't determine you getting strong. If you don't do the exercise correctly, and I'm not even referring to the technique, that of course matters, but if you don't execute it in the right fashion, then you're not going to get that adaptation. So if you choose, "I want to get stronger. I'm going to do a bench press." Well, if you do the wrong set range, the wrong repetition range, the wrong speed, you won't get strength. You maybe get muscular endurance and very little strength adaptation. So the exercise selection itself is important, but it does not determine the outcome adaptation. So the very first thing that you need to think about if you're like, "I want to get stronger or add muscle" is not the exercise choice.

Andy Galpin:

It is the application of the exercise. What are the sets? What are the reps or the rest ranges that you're using, that's going to be your primary determinant. Now some exercises are certainly better for some adaptations. For example, a deadlift is probably not a great exercise to do for long duration endurance. You could theoretically do 30 straight minutes of deadlifting, but it's probably not our best choice. It's probably a pretty good choice for strength development. 'Cause you're going to do a low repetition, high set range. You could theoretically do bicep curls for power, but probably not your best choice, right? Single joint isolation movement is not the best for developing power. You've ever done a bicep curl as fast as you possibly can, that's not going to go well. So in theory, any exercise can produce any adaptation given the execution is performed properly. So now that we've understood that a little bit, the exercise itself does not determine the adaptation. Coming within each one of these categories, exercise choice is an important variable because it does lend you to things like what movement pattern you're in. So in other words, if you want to get stronger and you're thinking, "Okay, what exercise do I do," you need to think a little bit about, "What muscle groups do I want to use," and that's going to be leading you towards the exercise choice. For example, "I want to use my quads more." Okay, fine. Maybe you're going to choose more of a front squat-type of variation, a goblet squat. So the load is in front of you. If you want to emphasize maybe more of your hamstrings and glutes, you're going to maybe put a barbell on your back or do a different one. So the exercise choice is important to the prescription because it's going to determine a lot of your success. Another kind of simpler way to think about this: If you are a beginner or moderate to intermediate, or maybe you don't have a coach, you probably want to hedge towards an exercise selection that is a little bit easier technically.

Andy Galpin:

So you maybe don't want to do a barbell back squat. It's actually a pretty complicated movement. Maybe you want to do a little bit more of, again, a goblet squat or even use some machines or a split squat, something that's a little bit simpler because you don't have a coach, you're not a professional athlete. The likelihood of success is higher, and the risk has now gone lower. So the very first variable within all of these is the exercise choice. The second one is the intensity. And that refers to, in this context, not perceived effort. Like, "Wow, that was really intense workout." It is quite literally either a percentage of your one-rep at max or a percentage of your maximum heart rate or VO2 max. So for the strength-based things, you want to think about what's the percentage of the maximum weight I could lift one time, and that's what we're going to call one-rep max. Or it's a percentage of my heart rate.

Andy Galpin:

So if I tell you to get on a bike, and I want you to do intervals, and I want you at 75%, I'm typically referring to 75% of your max heart rate or VO2 max or something like that. If I tell you to do squats at 75%, that means 75% of the maximum amount of weight you could lift one time, or close.

Andrew Huberman:

In terms of determining one-rep max, I confess I've never actually taken the one-rep max for any exercise, but I have some internal sense of what that might be or what range it might be. Is it necessary for people to assess their one-repetition maximum before going into these sorts of programs?

Andy Galpin:

No, not at all. I think a more intuitive way is to take a repetition range. Well, you can do this a couple different ways. So there are equations you can run, and you can just Google these anywhere, and these are called conversion charts. And so it says, "Okay, if I did 75 pounds on my bench press and I did it eight times ..." You can just run an estimate that says, okay, you're probably going to be able to bench about 95 pounds for one-rep max or something. So that's a very easy conversion chart. So just pick a load that you feel comfortable with, but it's kind of heavy, but not crazy heavy, and do as many repetitions as you can with a really good technique, and then look what that number would be.

Andrew Huberman:

So conversion is probably safer than doing one-repetition maximum

Andy Galpin:

For the general public who has, again, no coaching, it's safer. For a professional athlete, it's not any safer, or not even a professional athlete, but a trained person with a coach. But for most people, yeah. That's a good way to go about it. You can also just kind of do it with feel in the sense that, say, you want to do a set of five repetitions and you do the load and you think I could have done one or two more, and then you kind of have an idea of what that number's going to be. If you think, "Man, that last one I had to kind of really, really, really get after it," then maybe just call that, that number. So you don't have to get overly concerned. In fact, when we start getting into these number ranges, you're going to see that they're all ranges. We're not going to give a specific 95% for one of these exact reasons.

Andy Galpin:

It's not that precise for most of them. In fact, some of them like hypertrophy have enormous ranges that you like almost can't miss. So the intensity in that case doesn't even matter for the most part because that's not the primary determinant. Some of these you're going to see intensity is the determinant. And some of these you're going to see volume is the true determinant. So intensity though is the second one. Choice was the very first manipulatable variable; intensity was the second one. The third one is what we call volume. And so this is just how many reps and how many sets are you doing? So if you're going to do three sets of 10, that volume would be 30, right? Five sets of five, that volume is 25. It's just a simple equation. How much work are you totally doing? The next one past that is called rest intervals.

Andy Galpin:

So this is the amount of time you're taking in between, typically, a set. Then from there you have progression, which is what we started to talk about, this progressive overload. Are you increasing by weight or reps or rest intervals or complexity or whatever. So all of those things can be changed as a method of progression. And so maybe you want to go progressing from a single joint exercise, like a leg extension on a machine, and you want to progress by moving to a whole-body movement like a squat. That in of itself, you don't have to change the load or the reps or the rest. That is a representation of progressive overload. And it's probably a pretty good place to start because number one, especially for beginners, you want to make sure that the movement pattern is correct. Don't worry about intensity, don't worry about rep ranges or any of these things.

Andy Galpin:

You need to learn to move correctly, and you need to give your body some time to develop some tissue tolerance, so that you're not getting overtly sore. In general, soreness is a terrible proxy for exercise quality. It's a really bad way to estimate whether it was a good or a bad workout, especially for people in that beginner to middle to moderate. In fact, even that for our professional athletes, we do not use soreness as a metric of a good workout. It's a really bad idea for a bunch of reasons. On the same token, because stress is required for adaptation, you don't want to leave at the gym and feel like, "I don't really do much." There has to be there. So if you think about soreness on a scale of one to 10, you probably want to spend most of your time in the three.

Andrew Huberman:

You mean post exercise, in between workouts?

Andy Galpin:

Totally.

Andrew Huberman:

And I know we'll talk about recovery extensively later, but if one body part or set of body parts is sore, is that an indication that one should stay out of training? I would imagine the answer is no in most cases. And secondarily to that, if a particular muscle is sore, does that mean that muscle is not ready to be trained again?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, the answer to both those is the same, which is no, right? You can certainly train a sore muscle. You need to, I guess have a little bit of feel on that, right? So if you're sore of like, "Okay," and you're moving around a little bit and you're like, "Man, this is a little bit sore," you can train. If you're like, "I can't sit on the couch without crying because my glutes are so sore," we probably don't need to train again.

Andrew Huberman:

Does whimpering count as crying?

Andy Galpin:

In that particular case, I'd say you've actually gone to the place of detriment because now you're going to have to skip a training session, and now you're behind. So your actual total volume, say, across the month is actually going to be lower because you went way too hard in those workouts, had to take too many days off in between. You're going to see that you're going to cover less distance over the course of a month or six month or even a year. So you want to walk a pretty fine line. And for most people, I would say hedge a little bit on the side of less sore than more sore because frequency is very, very important for almost all these adaptations.

Andrew Huberman:

The training frequency.

Andy Galpin:

Which is the last modifiable variable, right? Frequency, which is how many times per week are you doing that thing? So those are our global things that we can play with. So what I'm trying to manipulate, and you can get strength versus hypertrophy, or you know what, I want a little bit of both, all those variables are the things that are going through my mind. Which one do I need to move in which direction so that I can get this outcome and not this outcome over here. For example, some folks might want to get stronger but not put muscle mass on. Some folks are just kind of want both. And that's a lot of the general public. "I want to get a little stronger and a little bit more muscle." Great. But there are instances where people, for performance reasons or for purely personal preference, "I don't want get any more muscle," great. "But I want to get stronger," awesome. If you manipulate those variables correctly, you can get exactly that. Very little development in muscle size and a lot of development in strength.

Andy Galpin:

And this is why we continue to break world records in sports like powerlifting and weight lifting that have weight classes. So there's a top number that we can hit in terms of body size, but yet we continue to get stronger and faster. So this is very possible if you understand how to manipulate all those variables. So that being said, we can start off with you wanted to go strength and-

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, strength. And I love that you mentioned the fact that it is possible to increase strength without increasing muscle size, at least not dramatically, because I think it's not just weight class athletes. I know a lot of people who for aesthetic reasons, they'd like to be stronger. They're hearing that having strong bones and strong muscles and tendons is great for longevity and for avoiding injury and so many other features of life, and yet they don't want to fill out progressively larger and larger sizes of clothing.

Andy Galpin:

And we can go harder to the mechanisms on that piece if you want, or we can save that and come back to it.

Andrew Huberman:

Sure. What I'd love to ... Both. What I'd love to know though is if we could define some of these modifiable variables in the context of strengths. So let's say I'm somebody who, I come to you and I say, and let's just say for sake of balance here because she actually does do some weight training. I bring my sister in and I say, "Me and my sister both want to get stronger. What modifiable variables should ... how should we modify the variables?"

Andy Galpin:

Love it. All right, great. I'm going to do inception on you one more time. So one of my other laws ... oh, this one will be fast, I promise ... of strength conditioning is, in general, the default is all joints through all range of motion. So this is important because it's going to answer your very first question on this strength category. So in general, the ankle should go through the full range of motion, the ankle; the knee should go through the full range of motion, the knee; the hip, the elbow, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Andrew Huberman:

Across the workout, not in a single movement? I would hope, unless there's an amazing exercise I haven't heard about.

Andy Galpin:

Well, there are some exercises that we're going to call more full body. Think about a full snatch. You're going to take a lot of your muscles, a lot of your joints through a lot of the range of motions. Other ones like an isolation, we call these single joint exercises. So imagine a bicep curl, you have one joint in that particular case, the elbow moving the shoulder, and everything else is pretty much stable, and this is how we'll differentiate multijoint from single joint movements. But yeah, so across, I would even say it doesn't even have to be the day, but maybe throughout the week, try to get every joint through full range of motion. Now a couple of quick caveats to that. I am not advocating using full range of motion and allowing really bad exercise technique. So when I say full range of motion, that's the default.

Andy Galpin:

That doesn't mean every single person can do that for every single exercise. It means that's where we should be striving to. And that's our starting point. You're going to see a lot less injury and a lot more productivity out of your training sessions. In fact, the science is fairly clear on this one. Strength development as well as hypertrophy is generally enhanced with a larger range of motion of training. And the mechanisms are somewhat understood on that. So that being said, if you have to get into, say, a bad position with your, say, low back. The spine is a very good one here. In general, the spine should stay, it's very neutral is what we call it. So no, no flexion, no extension, especially in the lumbar region. So if you're doing, say, a deadlift and in order to take your knee through a full range of motion, a deadlift, you have to compromise your back position.

Andy Galpin:

That's no bueno. So caveats there aside, don't kill me, in good positions always. So why that matters is if we walk through strength, the very first thing I'm going to go through is the exercise selection. So let's choose an exercise which ideally has a full range of motion or close to it that doesn't induce injury for you. That you can still maintain good neck and low back and position and everything else. You feel comfortable with. So you can feel strong, but you don't feel like, "Oh. my gosh." If you've never snatched before, having you do a snatch for a maximum, even 75%, like it's a terrible idea. You're not going to feel confident. It's going to be a train wreck. I would rather put you on a machine bench press so you can go, "I feel stable, I feel safe here, and I can just express my strength."

Andy Galpin:

So exercise choice, in general, full range of motion. And you want to kind of balance between the movement areas. So this is an upper body press. So this is pushing away from you, bench press, things like that. Upper body pull, pulling an implement towards you, bent row pull-up. The pressing should be horizontal, so perpendicular to your body as well as vertical. So this is lifting a weight over top of your head, lifting away from you. The pull version is pulling horizontally to you and pulling vertically down, pull-up, things like that. From the lower body, we typically call these hinges. It's sort of a funny muscle thing, that no one's going to laugh at but maybe me and you here, is we'll categorize muscles as, or movements, exercises as pushes and pulls. So a squat tends to be push because you're pushing away the ground. A deadlift is a pull 'cause you're pulling the implement up to you.

Andy Galpin:

But in reality, every single exercise is only ever a pull because muscle doesn't push things away. Muscle can only contract and pull on itself. And so again, super nerdy thing that most people are like, "Yeah," and everyone's like, "That's so dumb."

Andrew Huberman:

No, but I think it's a really important point because it also speaks to something I think we'll get into later, which is that posterior chain, anterior chain. And if that's mysterious to people, it'll become clear before long. Posterior chain, anterior chain makes a lot of sense to me because of the way it's grounded in the firing of motor neurons, which is ultimately what controls muscle. So it's also I think-

Andy Galpin:

You and your nerves all the time.

Andrew Huberman:

Exactly. So it also depends on the lens through which one looks at life and exercise. Of course, my lens is primarily neuroscience, but I realized that the importance, I like this idea of pushing perpendicularly to the body, overhead pulling both toward the body and from overhead. That just makes really good intuitive sense, especially since a lot of people are just listening to this and not watching it. So in your minds, folks, you can think about pushing away like a punch or overhead lifting something overhead and then pulling toward your midline, or toward your body, rather. And then pulling yourself up like a pull-up in a PE class for those ...

Andy Galpin:

So the lower body's the same thing. It's some sort of pushing away, like a squat or a split squat or a lunge or something like that. And then some sort of, again, we'll call pull or hinge. So a deadlift or Romanian deadlift or hamstring curl, or something, where you're contracting and pulling the thing. And you could split these into a thousand different categories. If you're really in that field, you're going to want to add a bunch of other ones. But that's just a rough conception. So if you were going to do a single workout, you could choose four exercises, and you could choose one of each: one press, upper body, press; one upper body pull; one lower body hinge; one lower body press, and then that would be a decently well-rounded exercise. That's your exercise selection. And if you're taking those through a full range of motion, you're at a pretty good spot as close as you can. The next one is intensity.

Andy Galpin:

So if you want to develop strength, this comes back to one of my favorite scientists of all time, who happens to be a nerve guy actually. And generally I like to shit on nerves as much as I possibly can 'cause I'm a muscle guy, but I have to give Henneman some credit here, and I know you know who that is.

Andrew Huberman:

Henneman's size principle.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, of course. So this is a series of papers I think, and then I think it was in Nature?

Andrew Huberman:

At least some of them.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, in 1954, '56 or something. You can fact check me, I'm sure you will. But he basically outlined this idea that, okay, there's a certain recruitment threshold needed for neurons to fire, and we have muscle fibers in what we'll call fast-twitch muscle fibers and slow-twitch muscle fibers. And in general you're going to activate the slow-twitch ones first because they tend to be associated with low-threshold motor neurons. It's not exactly that way, but it's close enough. Well the only way that you activate some of these higher threshold neurons is to demand the muscle to produce more force. And it's fairly specific to force, right? It's not something you can do over an endurance thing unless it gets really extreme and fatigue happens.

Andy Galpin:

So in general, the only way to use these big chunks of your muscle, which are incredibly important for aging, by the way — one of the major problems we have with aging developing or development of aging-related issues with muscle is the fact that we lose fast-twitch fibers preferentially, and then we have major problems as we go down the line because we've lost a big chunk of our strength and size.

Andy Galpin:

So you want to make sure these fibers stay alive and intact. Okay. So if that being said, the only way to develop strength is then to challenge the muscle to produce more total force. If you are fairly untrained or new; I guess I should have stated this all at the beginning as well. One more inception then I'll stop. When it comes to this level of detail of exercise prescription, a fairly untrained person is going to respond basically the same to every single thing you do. In fact, we've done this in the lab many times. We've done training studies doing things like 30 minutes of cycling and seeing huge increases in muscle strength and size, which is not a prescription for most people to increase size, but people that are really untrained, if you did plyometrics or strength training or endurance running, they all just get better at everything.

Andy Galpin:

So that caveat kind of aside, if you want to be more intentional and more specific to this, to the goal of strength, you need to produce more force. Specificity matters. So we have size principle to help understand this, and we have our laws of specificity, which say SAID principle, right? Specific adaptation to imposed demand. So the adaptation you get or the result of your training is going to be a reflection of the demand that you imposed. So if you want to get stronger, you need to impose a demand of strength, not repetitions. So this has to be, the load has to be very high. In general, you're probably looking at above 85% of your one-rep max. If you're moderately trained, maybe 75% will work. Lowly trained, again, everything works, but in general we want to be pressing a load that's very high. So because the intensity demand is so high, that is going to enforce you to do a low repetition range.

Andy Galpin:

You can't do 12 reps at 95%. Then it wouldn't be 95% of your one-rep max. So by definition, true strength training is really going to be in the five repetitions per set or less range. That's where most of it's going to occur with specificity. So we've covered choice, intensity, and repetitions. The total amount of sets that you do is really kind of up to your personal fitness level. If you did as little as three sets for exercise, that's probably enough. Totally, yeah, totally work sets. So get fully warmed up and build up to that 85%. Don't just walk into the gym and throw 85% on and go, "Thank you." That's an important distinction. So work your way up. Do some ... A very classic warm-up thing would be a set of 10 at 50%, a set of eight at 60%, a set of maybe eight, again at 70%, and then maybe a set of five at 75%. So two or three or four sets kind of building intensity and lowering the rep range. And then you would go after your two or three working sets.

Andy Galpin:

Also, in terms of intervals, now because we're trying to ... the primary driver of strength is intensity. It's not the volume, it's the intensity. So in order to maintain that, we have to do a low repetition range, but in addition, we also have to have a high rest interval because if we have any amount of fatigue incur, and we have to then reduce the reps or reduce the intensity, we've lost the primary driver, we've lost that main signal. So the number we're going to throw out typically is like two to four minutes. So imagine you did, you know your set of bench press, and you did five repetitions at 85%, you probably want to rest two to four minutes before coming back to the bench. That doesn't mean you have to sit there on your phone. In fact, please don't. Everyone will thank you for not doing that, I promise. You can engage other muscle groups. This is what we call supersetting. So you're doing your bench press, and while that two-minute clock is running for your chest, to rest, you can go over and do your deadlifts, and so, you know, you can kind of move back and forth. And this is how you can make strength training not seven-hour workout. If you're a professional athlete, you're going to take that time because you want to maximize the outcome. We've done this actually in our lab too. Supersets will reduce the strength gains but by a tiny amount, and most of us don't care enough relative to it's going to triple the length of your training session. It's not worth it. So for the average person, I will tell them, yeah, superset. For someone who's trying to break a world record in weight lifting or powerlifting, I don't superset.

Andrew Huberman:

Interesting. Yeah, I think I've found that I don't recover particularly well from strength and hypertrophy training. So in-

Andy Galpin:

Like in the workout or the next day?

Andrew Huberman:

From workout to workout, unless I keep the total duration of those workouts ... I like to say no more than 60 minutes of work. Of real work.

Andy Galpin:

Yep, yep.

Andrew Huberman:

Maybe 75. Past 75, I find that I just start to ... I have to introduce additional rest days or I just get weaker over time. So I'd set a kind of a limit at 50 minutes, and then I usually violate that limit.

Andrew Huberman:

... Kind of a limit at 50 minutes and then I usually violate that limit and end up doing 60 minutes. I'm excited to hear that one can superset exercises as long, as they work different muscle groups, of course. I wouldn't want to do bench press and overhead press superset just because you can, I think that goes without saying for most people, but just to point that out. But that I could do some push, pull, push, pull without compromising total intensity that much.

Andrew Huberman:

I certainly would be willing to give up a rep here or there or a few pounds here or there. May I ask whether or not in doing that one gets any even tiny bit or more of additional benefit in terms of cardiovascular work? Because I imagine after even a one-rep max, which I've never done as I mentioned, but let's say I get three reps on the overhead press, and then I get four reps on a weighted pull-up, and I'm going back and forth, I'm no doubt going to be breathing harder than if I was sitting there texting away on my phone in between sets.

PART 1 OF 6 ENDS [00:35:04]

Andy Galpin:

Yep, of course. In fact in general, one of the things that I'll present in my class is a giant list of ... in fact on the top is all these different exercise adaptations I started the conversation with. On the vertical column are as many of the physiological potential adaptations one would get. Changes in endogenous pH, blood pressure, lymphatic changes, bone density, all these things. You just have this giant list, and then you can run a matrix, and you can start to look at, "Okay, if I do speed training, am I going to see changes in the nervous system?"

Andy Galpin:

Well, very much so. That's the primary actual reason those things work. Very little change in the muscle system. It's almost exclusively explained by the central or peripheral nervous system. On that same token, are you going to expect many cardiovascular adaptations from speed? The answer is no, because although we didn't cover it, speed is very low intensity, very low rep range, very high rest. Well as you go to strength, and then you go to hypertrophy, you start seeing more and more increases in cardiovascular adaptations because you're doing exactly that.

Andy Galpin:

You're starting to reduce rest and you're starting to increase volume, but you're going to lose things like bone mineral adaptations because the load starts to go down. You can look at this matrix and understand, "If I'm a person who wants to maximize the adaptations I get across my entire physiology for the least amount of work," you can choose these different adaptations to go after that are going to kind of land on these things. Exactly as you mentioned, if you're going to take five minutes rest between each rep; so let's say the extreme, you're going to do three sets of one repetition for strength at 95%, you're going to take probably five, maybe seven minutes between each attempt. You'd better not expect many changes in your resting blood pressure, there's no cardiovascular strain there.

Andy Galpin:

You're going to put it together in a circuit where you're going to lose some potential strength adaptation, but you're going to gain something there. All these things are, it's not about good or bad or right or wrong, it's always about what advantage do you want and what disadvantage do you want. I can cut really in to the chase here on one of these things because we'll get to this eventually. If you want to know the ones that are going to generally give you the most physiological adaptations across the most categories, you're almost always looking for hypertrophy type of training and then this anaerobic conditioning piece that we'll get into. That's going to hit the most systems at once.

Andrew Huberman:

That's great to know, and we should definitely go a little bit deeper on those types of what the modifiable variables are for those categories because I think that, I'm guessing the vast majority of people want to be a bit stronger, maybe add some, a little bit of muscle or more, make sure their heart is healthy and et cetera. This is wonderful, and I think it's clarifying certainly a lot for me. For strength, I guess training frequency.

Andy Galpin:

Frequency.

Andrew Huberman:

What should determine training frequency? I had the great benefit of, long time ago when I was in high school, actually, I paid for a session over the phone with Mike Mentzer.

Andy Galpin:

Oh lovely.

Andrew Huberman:

The Mike Mentzer.

Andy Galpin:

Sure.

Andrew Huberman:

We got to be friends over time.

Andy Galpin:

High-intensity training.

Andrew Huberman:

At the time I was pretty young, and my mother kept saying, "Why is this grown man calling the house?" We would talk all the time about training, but he tried to convince me to train once every five to seven days. Very few sets, very high intensity. I must say, it worked incredibly well. I think with my recovery quotient, which was not very good. I think it has improved over time. It was not very good. It was remarkable. Of course this was a time when I was-

Andy Galpin:

Full of the most animalism you'll ever have in your life.

Andrew Huberman:

I was 14. I was sort of on my own version of anabolics. I was really heavy; I had a long arc of puberty.

Andy Galpin:

And you were untrained.

Andrew Huberman:

I was mostly untrained. I'd been running cross country and skateboarding and playing soccer.

Andy Galpin:

Doing all the things that are like the antithesis of growing muscle.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, it was literally ... and people would probably say impossible. It was something like 40 pounds of muscle inside of 12 months. It was crazy.

Andy Galpin:

I would believe that.

Andrew Huberman:

Then of course that stopped working over time, and then you start going down the odyssey of trying to find the thing that's going to work that well, and you eventually realize that it was because you were untrained. Training frequency is crucial. Let's say that people are doing these whole-body workouts, as you've described them, not alternating upper body, lower body, because there's so many different splits that we talked about. It probably doesn't make sense to go into splits right now.

Andrew Huberman:

How often can and should one train a muscle? How do you know if a muscle is recovered locally? How do you know if your nervous system is recovered systemically?

Andy Galpin:

Okay, this is a bunch of really interesting questions. I'm not sure exactly what route you want to go. I'll start here. As I mentioned earlier, soreness is not a good barometer of exercise quality because some types of training are going to induce more soreness and some are going to induce less. That's important to this conversation because when you ask about how do you know if a muscle is ready to train again, one of the questions is what are you training for?

Andy Galpin:

If you're training for hypertrophy, muscle size, muscle growth, we need to hedge towards recovery because what you're trying to do is cause a massive insult there. Allow then protein synthesis to occur. Building of new tissue, which takes time, 48 to 72 hours at a minimum, that process needs to occur. If you're doing actually more strength, and this is a differentiation between hypertrophy and strength, then you didn't induce actually much damage.

Andy Galpin:

In fact, you're generally not going to get very sore from true strength training. Very little unless you get really heavy or you did it a lot. The primary driver of hypertrophy is not the same primary driver of strength. We talked about that already. That's intensity driven for volume, for hypertrophy it's not intensity, so because we have different mechanisms, we have different outcomes, even though they're closely aligned, strength is not going to cause a lot of soreness, therefore intensity is the driver. Therefore frequency can be as high as you want.

Andy Galpin:

You can train every single day, the same exact muscle, if speed or power or strength are the primary training tools, because you need stimulus there. Skill, as well, practice. You know that as much as anybody. Developing a new motor pattern requires a lot of repetitions. You don't need a tremendous amount of rest. That's not a damaged thing, it's a repatterning issue. Strength training, in fact, if you look at, again, true strength professional athletes, they're going to train the same muscles basically every day. They're going to squat every day.

Andrew Huberman:

Is that because the primary mode of adaptation is recruitment of these high-threshold motor units? It's mainly neural?

Andy Galpin:

No. Everyone's going to say that, and this is where I get all feisty.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm not saying that. That was actually, there was a question mark there. If we were online putting comments, there'd be a question mark.

Andy Galpin:

I would've blocked you. Just kidding.

Andrew Huberman:

You already blocked me.

Andy Galpin:

Probably twice. Okay. The early adaptations to exercise, especially strength training, are hedged towards the nervous system. No question about it. People always say central nervous system, but it's probably more peripheral. Whatever. Semantics probably, but pedantic. It's nervous. If you train today, tomorrow morning, you're not going to wake up with a ... actually increase in contractile proteins in muscle. Your muscle might be a little bit bigger due to some acute swelling, but you could have a pretty acute that persists change, and the nervous system, we'll call it, that allows you to be stronger within a couple of days.

Andy Galpin:

Sustained hypertrophy is probably more along the lines of four weeks where we can see that. Where we can actually see changes in the ultrasound. Now you're making changes immediately. That protein synthesis process is happening very fast, and it's going to last. It just takes us time to measure it in terms of a noticeable change in your whole muscle size.

Andy Galpin:

That being said, the first four weeks we typically say are primarily nervous system. After that, now we're starting to see most of the changes coming from the muscle side of the equation. With strength development, it's a combination of three areas. In fact, all muscle contraction has these same three things. It starts off with some signal from somewhere in the body, whether it's all the way up the top or at the level of the spine, depending on if this is a reaction or an actual conscious control.

Andy Galpin:

From there some signal has to tell the muscle to contract. Signal is one. Two, it's muscular contraction, and there's a lot of variables inside the muscle tissue itself that determine its functionality. If we took an individual biopsy and took a muscle fiber from you and took one from me, and we took those muscles out and put them in a petri dish, and I tied one end to a force transducer, the other end to a thing that pulls it, and we soaked it in a bath of calcium and a bunch of other stuff, even if they were the same size, your fibers might contract a lot faster than mine, even relative to size, or not, or slower, or there's various properties.

Andy Galpin:

The intrinsic fibers themselves determine a lot of functionality. From there, muscle fibers don't cause movements. Muscle fibers simply contract. They're all surrounded with connective tissue, and that's all surrounded with a bunch of more connective tissue, and that all surrounds into a muscle. That muscle is then surrounded with more connected tissue. That all comes together into a giant tendon. That tendon attaches to the bone. It's pulling on those tendon that actually move the bone that cause human movement.

Andy Galpin:

That's area three. Area one, the nervous system; area two, the muscle contraction; area three, some sort of connective tissue thing. Changes happen at all three of those levels. We're not even now talking, even you entered the discussion of biomechanics and you changed say the pinnation angle of the muscle, which is the angle at which the muscle fibers lay relative to the bone.

Andy Galpin:

This is basic mechanics. Is it pulling perpendicular to the bone, is it pulling horizontal to the bone, or some sort of angle? All of these things determine human performance. When you're talking about, again, that strength development, you can see tremendous improvements in total force production by manipulating all of those areas, and you have not touched changes in muscle size.

Andy Galpin:

If you change muscle size in a true sustained fashion, whether this is sarcoplasmic or contractile proteins, you have given yourself more opportunity to produce more force. It doesn't guarantee you produce more force. Body builders are not stronger than powerlifters even though they have more muscle. Body builders are probably stronger than most people. There is a relationship between muscle size and strength. It's just not a one-to-one guaranteed ratio.

Andy Galpin:

That's generally because although the muscle has been aided, they may have not changed the biomechanical considerations, they may have not changed the connective tissue nor the nervous system stuff. That's why we see this giant relationship that our value is pretty high between strength and hypertrophy, but if you really want to get to the ends of it, it's not. That matters to your actual question 10 minutes ago because again, you can train strength daily on the same muscle, but if you want to allow for that process of contractile proteins to add and grow, then you're going to have to allow some recovery because if you go back into that muscle too soon, you're going to blunt the response, you're going to stop it, you're going to cut it off.

Andy Galpin:

You have all kinds of problems going on in the cell that are going to just attenuate that growth response. I gave you the answer for strength training. The answer for hypertrophy is probably less than three out of 10 on level of soreness, you can go again. In general you're probably looking at 72 hours is the optimal window.

Andy Galpin:

If you trained your shoulders on Monday, you probably don't want to train them again on Tuesday if hypertrophy is the goal. Maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday's best. Something like an every two-to-three-day window is probably, and we know a little bit more now about why that is. The gene cascade, the signaling response happens, well the signaling happens instantaneously within seconds. The gene cascade is probably peaked in the four-hour window, depending on which gene you want to look at.

Andy Galpin:

It's just a snapshot. The protein synthesis process is 24-to-48-hour thing. It tends to look like let that thing finish and let that signal go back to baseline, and then hit it again, and then hit it again. Now as long as you're providing the nutrients, the recovery should happen, and you should be able to sustain the same work output in the training session, so the stimulus stays high and the recovery's there, and you can now continue to grow muscle.

Andrew Huberman:

You mentioned 48 to 72 hours for hypertrophy. What if, for whatever reasons, the training split, lifestyle factors, et cetera. Somebody, say, let's use your example, trains shoulders on Monday. Ideally they would train them again on Thursday in their particular instance, somewhere ... Wednesday or Thursday, but they don't. They wait until Saturday or Sunday for whatever reason. Maybe it's more compatible with their work and other exercise schedule, whatever the reason, are they actually losing hypertrophy that they gained or they've missed a window to induce further hypertrophy?

Andy Galpin:

It's probably better to think about it, the latter. It's not that you've lost, it's just you've kind of lost an opportunity to make more progress. I will save you a little bit, and going back to your HIT program, this is the original high-intensity training. The Mentzer thing, which is not-

Andrew Huberman:

The HIT with one I, not the high-intensity interval training, but high-intensity training. One set to absolute failure. Maybe two for each muscle group.

Andy Galpin:

Twenty-minute workouts.

Andrew Huberman:

Dividing your body into a three-way split and then literally training six times a month, which most people think that is absolutely crazy, there's no way that's going to work. I can tell you if you are untrained, you grow like a weed. If you train hard enough.

Andy Galpin:

Even if you're trained; look at the people Mike trained. He put a lot of bodybuilders on really high levels. Now they had the same similar help you had at that timeframe.

Andrew Huberman:

Wait, to be very clear, I was not taking exogenous anabolics. In fact-

Andy Galpin:

No, but your endogenous was just as good.

Andrew Huberman:

I probably was. I wasn't measuring my levels there, but I probably would. I grew easy, and in general, I tend to grow pretty easily from weight training. I should say that to Mike's credit, and I think this is an important message, that he was the one who really said, "Look, unless you're going to make a professional career out of it, do not run the health hazards of exogenous hormones. Certainly not at your age."

Andrew Huberman:

He deterred me from that, which was great because it never entered my mind. It just was one of those things where Mike Mentzer said don't do it. He had clearly done it. He is speaking from an informed place. It never entered my mind. Also, what was really wild was I was continuing to run cross country. There was a trade-off there at some point.

Andy Galpin:

A little bit of an interference.

Andrew Huberman:

When you're young, many people can get away with what at this age would surely place me into a state of overtraining, even at low volume.

Andy Galpin:

The whole field on interference effect has changed quite a bit recently, which we could come back to if you want. Just to finish out the idea here with that last question, if you want to take five days or six days in between each muscle group, you can do that. In fact, if you look at the research, it's going to show that frequency is not that important. It's not that it's not important, but it can handle changes as long as you get to the same total volume.

Andy Galpin:

You can do that, you just have to do a lot more work in that one workout. If you care about the six-week, eight-week thing; if you're like, "I'm in this for the next 60 years," it's probably okay, but it can be there. The challenge with splitting up your training sessions for hypertrophy into smaller numbers like once or twice a week, it's just difficult to get that number.

Andy Galpin:

It's difficult to get that volume done. Volume-wise, the more recent meta-analyses are going to say that you're probably looking at around 10 working steps per muscle group per week. Seems to be kind of the minimum threshold that you're going to want to hit. If you did three sets of 10 at your shoulders on Monday, three sets of 10 shoulders Wednesday, and three on Friday, that's nine working sets. If you wanted to do three different shoulder-work exercises on Monday and hit your nine sets, it's not really actually going to be that much different.

Andy Galpin:

The problem is 10 is kind of the minimum. You probably want to look for more like 15 to 20, and in fact, well-trained folks, 20, 25. That becomes very challenging in one workout. In fact, you're not going to be able to do it. That is where, it's not the frequency that looks like it kills you, it's just the fact you have got to get, because the total driver of strength is intensity, but the total driver of hypertrophy is volume. Assumed you're taking it to fatigue or muscular failure.

Andy Galpin:

It's just tough to get enough done. If you can and if you want to set your schedule up that way, you'd probably remember, if you do those types of training sessions where you're just going to completely exhaust a muscle, it's going to be sore for a while. You're probably not going to come back. That's, sort of the logic behind that was, let's take this thing to tremendous failure and give it six days to recover. It can work. It's just not the best. I think is one way to think about it, for most people.

Andrew Huberman:

It's also hard to do those workouts without a training partner if you really want to do them correctly.

Andy Galpin:

And stimulants and headphones and all kinds of other things.

Andrew Huberman:

Well anyway, yeah, stimulants are not, I certainly don't recommend those. Maybe a cup of coffee or two if that's your thing, and some of the safer supplements, but certainly not the sorts of stimulants that the guys in the '70s and '80s were famous for using or still use. You talked about repetition ranges broadly for strength training. So five or less.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

You said frequency could be as often as every day. Rest two to four minutes, maybe even longer if you're going for one-repetition maximum. For hypertrophy, what are the repetition ranges that are effective, and what are the ones that are most effective if one is trying to maximize some of the other variables? Like, people don't want to spend more than an hour to 75 minutes in the gym because I think that while the rep ranges might be quite broad, as you allude to earlier, there are the practical constraints. What repetition ranges or percent of one-repetition maximum should people consider when thinking about hypertrophy?

Andy Galpin:

Right. The quick answer there is anywhere between five to 30 reps per set. That's going to show across the literature pretty much equal hypertrophy gains. We can have a really interesting discussion about why that is. I'm just remembering one thing from a second ago. I want to give a better answer for the frequency. You can do every single week for strength or every single day for strength. If you want the what's probably minimally viable, two — twice per week per muscle.

Andy Galpin:

Hamstrings strength twice per week. That's a good number to get most people really strong. You can do every single day. You don't need to though. I want to make sure that I wasn't saying you have to train a muscle 85% every single day to get it strong. Two is a good number, three is great, but probably even two is really effective.

Andrew Huberman:

Got it. This explains the high frequency of training for strength athletes that's always mystified me, and the very long workouts make sense because very long-

Andy Galpin:

They're going to even train twice a day. Even the squat, in the morning squat and the afternoon every day.

Andrew Huberman:

With their eating and their sleeping, they probably don't have time for anything else.

Andy Galpin:

That's why they're pros. That's their job. That's what they do. Yeah, for hypertrophy. Strength training programming is somewhat complicated. It's not the danger, but you're going to have to pay one way or the other. The risk is a little bit higher because the load's higher, and you have to be a little bit more technically proficient. When it comes to hypertrophy training, the way I like to explain it is it's kind of idiotproof. The programming is idiotproof. The work is hard though.

Andy Galpin:

Here's your range: anywhere between five reps and 30. Can you hit somewhere in there? Perfect. It's all equally effective. You can't screw that up. The only caveat for hypertrophy is you have to take it to muscular failure.

Andrew Huberman:

And you need enough rest for the adaptation and protein synthesis to occur.

Andy Galpin:

Yep. If you recover faster, you can maybe do it more frequently. If you don't, maybe less frequently.

Andrew Huberman:

By that logic, should people perhaps experiment and figure out what repetition range allows them to recover in concert with the training frequency that they can do consistently?

Andy Galpin:

My recommendation is I think you should actually set your ... use the repetition range as a way to have some variation because most people don't want to go in the gym and do three sets of 10. They're going to get very bored very quickly. I think you should actually intentionally change the rep schemes for simple sake of having more fun. It is a very different challenge. The mechanisms that are inducing hypertrophy are different, but there's only a maximum amount of growth that one can get.

Andy Galpin:

You have, as best we think it now, and some people actually will espouse that we know really clearly about the mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy. We don't. It's still very much a guessing game, but the three most likely drivers are one, metabolic stress; two, mechanical tension; and then three, muscular damage. You don't have to have all three.

Andy Galpin:

One is sufficient. You can have a little bit of one or two, so you get to play here. We've already talked about the muscular damage. Again, it's very clear. More damage is not better, but it is somewhat a decent proxy. Again, a little bit of soreness is good, just don't get so sore it's compromising your total volume.

Andy Galpin:

Mechanical tension is kind of like strength. This is why if you do even sets of five or eight, and you're kind of close to that strength [inaudible], you will gain a little bit of muscle. It's not optimal muscle gain, but you're going to gain some because everything of these ... physiology doesn't cut off at four reps and then five reps is a different thing. It's always a blend. Think of it as a fading curve. As you get closer to the end, it fades less effective, as you get closer to the middle, it's more effective. Anywhere between eight reps per set to 30, it's equally effective. Past 30, it's going to blend out. Past eight to five to four to three, it's going to blend lesser there.

Andy Galpin:

Metabolic stress is one, the damage is the other. Or sorry, mechanical tension is the one that's heavy, muscle damage the other one, the third one is metabolic stress. I get a bit of an area of scientific contention, but something's there. I know something's there. We're just kind of fumbling to figure out what exactly it is. Metabolic stress is the burn. It's there. It's why blood-flow-restriction training probably works. That's done very light so there's no mechanical tension, there's very little damage, but somehow it induces a good amount of hypertrophy.

Andrew Huberman:

Very painful.

Andy Galpin:

Oh boy.

Andrew Huberman:

I tried this. I have a friend, former special operator who lives out on the East Coast and took me through a blood-flow-restriction training protocol in a park. I don't think I actually cried.

Andy Galpin:

You probably did.

Andrew Huberman:

I might have cried out once or twice. It was unbelievable. Especially the lower body movements. Was a humid day. I'll claim a little bit of jelly.

Andy Galpin:

No, no.

Andrew Huberman:

It was brutal. It was really brutal. I also-

Andy Galpin:

Do it on the best day of your life, and it's still brutal.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay, well that makes me feel a little bit better. It was intense and people should know that it is important to use the proper cuffs for these things. I don't have any relationship to any of the companies that sell these cuffs, but the reason is that you actually need to block particular avenues of blood flow. You can't simply cinch off a muscle. You can't tourniquet a muscle and train.

Andy Galpin:

Not a good idea.

Andrew Huberman:

You can actually kill yourself that way.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, you can get a blood clot.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, and so if you're interested in blood-flow-restriction training, I imagine you have some content about this or will at some point, but also there are resources online that people can look up.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

A question about hypertrophy training that I think many people are wondering about: train to failure or don't train to failure, assuming good form?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. Okay, assuming good form, great. The answer is both. You want to train to failure, but you don't need to go to extreme failure. You don't need to necessarily go to that, like, a partner has to lift the barbell off my chest, but you have to get close. You have to drive either heavy stress, damage, or pump.

Andy Galpin:

A really easy practical way to think about this: I heard Mike Izraetel, who runs a company called Renaissance Puritization, years ago, outline this at a NSCA talk, and it was beautiful. This is the most eloquent way to explain the context about training hypertrophy. A way to look for three things in your workout, and let's say that you want a particular muscle to grow. Let's say you want your glutes to get larger. When you're doing your glute exercises, number one, are you feeling the glute contract?

Andy Galpin:

It doesn't have to be there, but that's a good sign if it is. Okay, let's say, "I didn't really feel my glute contract. I felt it more my quads or my back." Okay. "Did you feel a big pump afterwards?" "No, I didn't really feel a pump there either or during." Okay, great. Number three, next day. "Did you feel a little bit of soreness there at all?" "No, I didn't." Well that's a very good indication, if you didn't feel it during the workout. You felt no sort of pump, and it didn't get sore. Don't expect much growth.

Andrew Huberman:

Have you distributed the work across a bunch of muscle groups.

Andy Galpin:

Most likely other muscle groups were too involved. Especially if you're like, "No, but man, my back got really," well that's a really good indication of telling you what the hell was moving. In terms of targets, if you were to put again a one to 10 scale, how much should I feel it burning during anything less than a three, okay, it's probably not doing much, but a 10 is not better than seven. You need to feel it, but it doesn't have to be like, "Oh my gosh, I'm dying here."

Andy Galpin:

Soreness, same barometer. If you can get three, three and three, you're probably in a pretty good spot. Five, five and five is maybe better, but you don't need to go much past that. I want you to feel the muscle group either working or if you're like, "I didn't feel it much, I didn't really get a pump," but the next day it got really sore, then you're still on a good path. Again, really sore as in, "Woo, little tender," but next day, it's okay. Day after that I could train, no problem.

Andy Galpin:

That's really what you want to go after. In terms of understanding, is this likely to produce some growth or not?

Andrew Huberman:

Excellent, excellent. Very clear parameters and recommendations I know are benefiting me and will benefit a lot of people. If you'd be willing to throw out a few sort of sets and parameters that could act as broad guidelines for people who want to explore further. I realize that with all these modifiable variables that there's no one-size-fits-all for strength. I love this five to 30 for hypertrophy. That's pretty broad.

Andrew Huberman:

I don't think I've ever done a 30-rep set of anything, but now that you've thrown that out there, I see it as a bit of a challenge.

Andy Galpin:

You want to know what's awesome about 30? You're going to get an insane pump, you're going to burn like crazy, but you won't get super sore because the mechanical tension's so low, it's so light. You can get away with those things, and it's hard because your mind is going to wander. You're going to get up to rep 20, and you're like, I'm done.

Andy Galpin:

You're like, "No, there's a lot left here to get 30." Where like I said, 10 is much easier. You're just like, "Okay, two more, two more." Thirty's like, "I've got 16 more. It's awful."

Andrew Huberman:

Counting is work.

Andy Galpin:

It's terrible. People tend to just kind of check out. Thirty is possible, but a little bit extreme. I would recommend all of them. It's a really fun play. You could do different in the same workout too, by the way. You could do one set of 10 push-ups and then take a little break and then do a set of 25. You can mix and match these things. There's no magic recipe that has to happen for all those; or do it different.

Andy Galpin:

Mondays are my sets of 10 days, Wednesdays are my set of 20 days, and Fridays are my set of 30 days. You can have all kinds of fun there, and it's hard to screw up.

Andrew Huberman:

Great. I love that. That phrase is always reassuring. For strength, is there a sets and reps protocol that is pretty surefire?

Andy Galpin:

A way to just think about a really fast answer for power. Well, speed, power and strength is what I just call the three-to-five concept. Pick three to five exercises. If you're feeling better that day, choose on the higher end. If you're feeling less that day, or you have a shorter timeframe to train, go less. This would be three sets, or three exercises, rather, or five exercises the most. Three to five exercises. Do three to five reps, three to five sets, take three to five minutes rest in between, and do it three to five times a week.

Andy Galpin:

That can be as little as three sets of three, for three exercises, three times a week. That's a 20-minute workout three times a week. It can be as high as five sets of five, for five exercises, five days a week. It's very broad and allows people to still stay within the domains of strength and power while still being able to move and contour to their lifestyle and soreness and time and all those things.

Andy Galpin:

The only differentiator to pay attention to between power and strength is intensity. If you want strength, this is now 85% plus of your max. If you want power, it needs to be a lot lighter because you need to move more towards the velocity into the spectrum because power is strength multiplied by speed. While getting stronger by definition can help power, you probably want to spend more of your time in the 40%-to-70% range, plus or minus. That's it. Both of them, conceptually, they'll work everything else. The exercise, the reps, the frequency, all that can be still in the three-to-five range. Just change the intensity depending on which outcome you want.

Andrew Huberman:

The nervous system obviously plays an important role at the level of nerves controlling the contraction of muscle fibers. Of course we have these upper motor neurons, which are the ones that reside in our brain that control the lower motor neurons that control muscle. This takes us into the realm of where the mind is at during a particular movement. To me, this is not an abstract thing. I can imagine doing workouts that are mainly focused on strength or mainly focused on hypertrophy. And in the case of strength, am I trying to move weights, and when I'm trying to generate hypertrophy, am I trying to quote, unquote challenge muscles?

Andrew Huberman:

In other words, if I'm just trying to move a weight away from my body, pushing a bench press or an overhead press, I don't know that I want my mind thinking about the contraction of my medial delts. I think I want my mind in getting the weight overhead with the best proper form, best and proper form. Certainly with hypertrophy training, best and proper form is going to be the target as well. That simple, or I should say, subtle mental shift changes the patterns of nerve fiber recruitment. Can we say to get stronger, focus on moving weights still with proper form and safely, and to get hypertrophy, focus on challenging muscles, still with proper form and safely.

Andy Galpin:

It's very fair. As a snapshot answer, it is very fair to think about. Intentionality matters for both. In other words, if you look at some interesting science that's been done on power development and speed development, the intent to move is actually more important than the actual movement velocity. If you're doing, say, something for power or strength, and you're doing just enough to get the bar up, that will result in less improvements in strength than even if you're moving at the exact same speed, but you're intending to move faster, and this is one of the reasons why good coaching matters.

Andy Galpin:

If you're coaching an athlete through a power workout, especially, and they're doing enough to just lift 50% of their one-rep max, it's not going to generate as much speed development as them trying to move that bar as fast as they can even if the net result is the same barbell velocity. Turns out, nerves matter.

Andrew Huberman:

I was about to say amazing, but as a neuroscientist, if I say amazing that nerves matter, what's amazing to me is what, if I understand correctly what you're saying is that even if the bar is moving at the same speed, same weight, if my internal representation, my thoughts are I'm trying to move this as fast as possible versus I'm just trying to get the bar away from me and get the weight up, I'm going to get different outcomes.

Andy Galpin:

This is quality of work. Did you do enough to just check off the box, or did you actually strive for adaptation? Similar concept actually works for hypertrophy in terms of ... there is a handful of very recent studies that have looked at what we'll call the mind-muscle connection. This is doing things like imagine a bicep curl, and you're simply looking at and watching your biceps, and you're thinking about contracting it harder. Even though you execute the same repetitions at the same exact intensity, initial indications are the mind-body connection are going to result in more growth than not.

Andrew Huberman:

You just gave authorization for people to look at their muscles contracting in the gym.

Andy Galpin:

Please do. Yeah, of course.

Andrew Huberman:

The selfie is still ruled out.

Andy Galpin:

I'd rather you look at your muscles than your phone. I'm fine with it. Those are initial, we don't have a large depth of research to support that, and maybe some stuff will come and counter, but it does, it matches what folks in that community have been saying for a very long time. There's actually some stuff on simply flexing in between.

Andy Galpin:

If you've ever seen a bodybuilder, they'll do their set of bicep curls, and then they'll get out, and they'll flex, and they'll check, and they're literally ... this is what Arnold did. If you go back to "Pumping Iron"-

Andrew Huberman:

College weight rooms, I should say. For some reason there's something about that age group, but there's a lot of checking of biceps in college weight rooms for reasons that escape me.

Andy Galpin:

If you ever interact with my wife, she will be the first to tell you-

Andy Galpin:

If you ever interact with my wife, she will be the first to tell you, I cannot walk past a mirror without ... I'm checking something out.

PART 2 OF 6 ENDS [01:10:04]

Andrew Huberman:

That you can't, or that she can't?

Andy Galpin:

I can't.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay.

Andy Galpin:

Not her, me. I'm the one that cannot walk past-

Andrew Huberman:

All right, well, then I'll be careful not to disparage that behavior.

Andy Galpin:

It has nothing to do with the hypertrophy, but I'm a muscle guy, so I'm always thinking and tinkering, right? Whatever. But I think it's very much worth your time to do a higher-quality training session, be more intentional — be present — than just executing the same exact workout. I think that's globally very clear to be to your advantage. So if you're thinking, "I don't want to work out today, I got all this going on," or "I'm tired," or whatever, "I'm just going to do the workout anyways and get through it." Okay, if you can go, "You know what though? I'm going to cut 15 minutes out of this thing. I'm going to get my head right. I'm going to go get two 20-minutes of quality work done." That's your best option by far.

Andrew Huberman:

You alluded to the fact that even just looking at a particular muscle might benefit in terms of the number of fibers you can recruit or its potential for hypertrophy. I've heard before, and I certainly have experienced, that muscles that, for whatever reason, genetics or sports that one played, et cetera, muscles that we find that we can contract to the point of almost a slightly painful contraction, seem to grow more readily than muscles that we can't recruit very easily. And the reason I mentioned sports that we played earlier is you just have to watch the Olympics to see that swimmers obviously are very good at engaging their lats. You look at the gymnasts, they seem to be very good at engaging everything, and they go through a huge number of different dynamic movements; that explains that. So I find that if people say, "Oh, you know, I can't get stronger in this," or, "My, whatever, body part is weak," in terms of its inability to engage hypertrophy.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, I see where you're going.

Andrew Huberman:

That oftentimes that can be because of an inability to engage those upper motor neurons to deliberately isolate those muscles. Are there ways that people can learn to engage particular muscle groups more effectively over time for sake of hypertrophy or strength, or for cases of trying to overcome injury potential or injury, because imbalances are bad across the board?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. This is actually very common, and I think everyone has probably gone through this. There's some part that you just can't get going. For me, that was the lats. That was the rhomboids, so my back muscles. For years, I couldn't activate my lats or my rhomboids. These are the muscle groups that connect your shoulder blades. So if you try to squeeze your shoulder blades together, that set of muscles there, they're called your rhomboids. Your lats, of course, are more vertical and pull you kind up and down. And no matter how many lap pull-downs I did, bent rows, pull-ups, I could never see any development there, no increase in strength, and it took me probably a decade to figure out how the hell to actually get these things on. In fact, if you would've asked me even in my college years as a college football player, "Hey, flex your lats, show me your lats." You would've seen no movement there.

Andy Galpin:

When I was doing a pull-up, in that particular case, the only way I could get the bar to move was by using my biceps. So it's a synergistic muscle. It was supposed to be a secondary or tertiary muscle in that movement, but for me it was primer because of my overstrength in my biceps coupled with my lack of activation in the lats. So you're compensating the same movement. Actually, an easy way to think about this is imagine doing a bent row. So imagine you're bent over at a 45-degree or a horizontal angle, and you're going to pull a barbell to your belly button, right? Now you can actually do that exact same movement with very little back muscle activation by simply flexing your elbows more. And so you think you're ... The barbell going all the way down, it's coming all the way up to touching my belly, and you think you're doing a great back-development exercise. When in fact, because of the way that you're executing the movement, you're getting very little back development.

Andy Galpin:

And this is a really good example of why someone has done a specific exercise many, many, many times, but yet failed to see development in a muscle group, which goes back to earlier part of our conversation, which is why exercises themselves do not determine the adaptation. It's the execution that matters, right? It's the technique, it's the rep range, all of those are going to determine your actual result. So if any time you're banging your head against the wall and thinking, "Why am I not getting movement here?" Growth or strength or whatever, it's guaranteed to be one of those areas. You're probably not getting the muscle groups to activate. In that particular example, just because we're here, imagine doing that bent row. Instead of pulling the barbell to your belly, squeeze your shoulder blades together first as far as they can possibly go, and then bring your elbows up without changing the angle of your elbow. So in other words, without bringing your hand closer to your shoulder. So keep that same angle and come up as high as you possibly can, and then finish out the movement. That's going to guarantee a utilization first of the back muscles and finishing with the biceps at the end, which is how that movement is supposed to go.

Andy Galpin:

So how do you coach into that? Well, it can be a number of things. Whenever I'm diagnosing movement quality, I look for a handful of things, but very first one is awareness. You'd be surprised how many folks, when you just simply tell them that muscle group right there, and maybe you give them a tactical prompt, so you touch it, or you put something against it. This is actually why ... Sorry, I'm jumping over the place. But this is why things like a belt work very well for actually increasing abdominal strength. So a misconception out there is if you wear a belt when you're lifting, then the belt does all the work for you, and your abs get weaker. That can happen, but the exact opposite can happen as well. So if you take a belt, for example, and you cinch it down really tight, and then you just completely disregard your midsection, you will see a loss of strength in your midsection because now the belt is doing the work. But if you put the belt on just a little bit, kind of tight, to where you get some sensory feedback, and you think about using that belt as a way to activate the core musculature, you'll actually see a higher ... And if we look at like EMG activation, the core muscles would be activated higher to a greater extent than when the belt is off.

Andrew Huberman:

Because proprioceptive feedback.

Andy Galpin:

Hundred percent.

Andrew Huberman:

And for those that are wondering what proprioceptive feedback is. Proprioceptive feedback is that there are nerves that extend out to the muscles that control muscle contractions, but then there are sensory inputs from the skin and muscle that go back into the nervous system, and those work in concert, and that feedback is proprioceptive. I think it literally translates to a knowledge of where one's limbs are and what's happening on those limbs.

Andy Galpin:

In space, yep.

Andrew Huberman:

I've seen ... I don't have a training partner, but I've seen in gyms where someone will be training, and someone will tap the muscle of the person who's doing the work ... This is consensual tapping of other people's muscles, not walking around gym touching people's muscles, please. To provide that proprioceptive feedback, so that the person doing the exercises becomes more aware of the muscle that they're supposed to be training. And it seems that that's probably an effective practice.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, I'll give you two examples. I'll go to the back with that pulling movement, but then I'll stay in the belt really quickly. A very easy example that you can do right now listening, and I learned this from Brian Mackenzie, our mutual friend, right? So if you take your hands and open them up, like you make an L with both your hands, and now take those and put them around your waist just above your hip bones. Now what I want you to do is press out as hard as you can on your hands with your core, and you can feel a lot of core activation. And most people think core activation is the front of your stomach, right? Your six-pack. What you need to do is create a cylinder around your back. So it's the front, it's the side, and it's the back. So if you take your two fingers, point them, now; put them just outside your belly button. Can you move your fingers by just moving your ab muscles? Ninety percent of people can do, yes.

Andy Galpin:

Same exact thing: now go to that same position just above what's called your ASIS, your anterior superior iliac spine. Right up that front of your hip bone. Right in the front. Can you now move? Great. Fifty percent of people are not going to get any movement there.

Andrew Huberman:

Really?

Andy Galpin:

Take your thumb and go right above your PSIS.

Andrew Huberman:

My what?

Andy Galpin:

PSIS, posterior superior iliac spine. Now can you move? Most likely, no.

Andrew Huberman:

Sort of if I do a mini, little back extension.

Andy Galpin:

Don't — just with your core musculature.

Andrew Huberman:

Barely.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Maybe-

Andy Galpin:

Ninety percent of people can't. If you can't perform that contraction, you can't stabilize your spine. So only way to get stabilization in your spine is then to go through hyperextension. And now that's a compression strategy you're putting on your spine. It's better than rounding your back like when going forward, but overextension is not great either. So you want to be able to flex the musculature in a cylindric fashion, so you have control. So if you go back to our very first things and with your hands open, and you put them right here, and if you're like, "I can't get activation." If you pay attention to your thumb, right? Now, just move your thumb. And now you see activation back there, right? Boom. Now if you could imagine turning that on just a little bit, and now notice how I can do this, by the way, at the same time I'm talking, if you have to go, [breathing hard] we don't have control, right?

Andy Galpin:

So you have to be able to separate breath from brace. So now if I can put myself in a position, and Kelly Starrett has always said 20%. Give me 20% activation here, and now I can squat, I can hinge, I can jump. I don't need to be locked down to a hundred percent scream to be able to brace my spine. It's going to be ineffective and wasteful. I want to be here. Well, a belt provides that proprioceptive feedback, where I can put it on, 20%, and it just is a reminder if I don't press against the belt, the belt slides and falls down a little bit because it's not on super tight. If it's on so dang tight, it's doing the work and I forget. So we just want a little bit of feedback there.

Andy Galpin:

Same thing with your upper back. If you're having a difficult time activating those rhomboids or those lats, someone can do a simple thing where they take their finger, put it right between your shoulder blades, and you just tell them things like, "Hey, squeeze my finger. Squeeze my finger." As you're doing your bent row or your pull-down. You can touch the lat, you can do just visualization stuff. So just imagine like a 3D rendering of that muscle group, and you're watching that muscle group contract. It's very powerful and very effective to do it. So a touch, a visual, all this stuff can help get people to activate. Outside of simple awareness, typically, eccentric overload is a very effective way for activation of a difficult-to-target muscle.

Andrew Huberman:

So the lowering of the bar or the lowering of the weight?

Andy Galpin:

The movement of the weight away from the body is not necessarily always lowering. Because that depends on what muscle group we're doing, right?

Andrew Huberman:

I misspoke. Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

Things like a pull-up. Okay, so if I'm going to do a pull-up, and I have poor lat activation, I can still get the pull-up muscle movement executed by contraction of the biceps and things like that. However, to make the movement simpler, I'm going to go all the way to the top. So imagine stepping on a box or something going all the way to that top of that pull-up position and starting from there. And I want you to simply lower it under control. And so you're just simply breaking the movement down into smaller pieces that allow you to focus on the execution more. It's going to be great. Eccentrics are great for strength development, very good for hypertrophy and allow you to focus on control.

Andy Galpin:

I'm willing to bet a huge percentage of you out there who're like, "I've never had a sore lat. I've done a lot of pull-ups," and things like that. If you do that eccentric only, you'll probably wake up the next day going, "Oh gosh, I feel it there." And that's the sign. Even if you didn't feel it in the workout, but it got a little sore the next day, keep down that path, and then eventually you'd be able to do a concentric, maybe take a break, maybe do an isometric, where you just hold that position, and eventually work that into a progression where you can do the concentric, eccentric, and isometric portions and get activation. So that might take you six weeks, might take you six months, but that's generally a pretty good strategy for learning how to activate a muscle group.

Andrew Huberman:

Terrific suggestions. Is it true that eccentric emphasized movements might require a little bit longer recovery or they lead to more soreness than concentric movements?

Andy Galpin:

They typically can, but they're also higher force output. So very good for strength development, but they're going to lead on average to more soreness. So more potential for intracellular disruption that is going to be associated with pain. There's not as much ... People will like to explain muscle soreness as a result of microtrauma and microtears in the muscle, and that can happen, but that's not the norm. Most of the time it is things like disruption of calcium that's going to lead to excessive swelling, excessive pressure, and that's going to be then translated as extreme pain. So that's probably explaining more muscle soreness than actually microtrauma.

Andrew Huberman:

Terrific. I was going to get to breathing later, but maybe just for now, if we can do a brief little foray into breathing as it relates to weight training. Is there a prescriptive for how to breathe during resistance training — here I'm thinking with weights, not necessarily body-weight-only movements, although I suppose it could be — that applies 75% of the time to 75% of the people? What I was taught, and I'm hoping you're going to tell me this was wrong because then there might be more benefits awaiting me, is that I should exhale on the effort and inhale on the lesser-effort portion of an exercise. Is that true? Is there a better way to breathe?

Andy Galpin:

There is a better way to think about it. So number one, if you can breathe and brace, then this conversation goes away. So if you can remain ... you can maintain intramuscular intra-abdominal pressure while breathing, then I don't really care when you breathe. Very challenging to do at very heavy weights. If we flag this on two areas of a paradigm. Paradigm one over here, you're going to do a set of 30, and you're going to do front squats where a barbell is sitting on your throat. If you don't take a breath, this is going to end one way and one way only, you passing out. Clearly has to be some breathing strategy. The other end of the spectrum is, let's say you're going to do a vertical jump, you don't need any amount of breath there. It's never going to happen. The question is, what about in the middle?

Andy Galpin:

So I'm doing some sort of strength training there. Well number one, make sure you're braced, and then you can get away with less need to worry about it. In general, a decent strategy is to maintain a breathhold during the lowering or eccentric or most dangerous part of the movement, and then you can exhale on the concentric portion. So if the bench press is our example, if you held in, braced, lowered it under control, and now started the concentric pushing away force, and then you wanted to take an expiration during the last half of the concentric portion, that's an okay strategy. If you're going to do a single rep, you don't need to worry about it. You can just avoid or omit breathing entirely. You're going to be just fine. If you're doing more than that, especially three to four to five to seven, eight, you're going to have to have some breathing strategy. A very common one is probably every third breath. I'm going to do like [breath] ...

Andy Galpin:

Exhale on the third. Reset, rebreathe, something like that. If you feel like you need to breathe after every one, that's okay, but it's going to get wasteful because you have to take time in between reps of sitting there. If it's a squat, that's different versus a dead lift if you're resting at the bottom. So there is a little bit of game here. So in general though, as that 75, 75 kind of really thrown out, you threw out, breathe in through the lowering and exhale on the out. If you have to, less reps, don't worry about more reps, then you need to come up with some sort of breathing strategy.

Andrew Huberman:

How about breathing in between sets and maybe even after the workout? Yeah, this is something I think a lot of people overlook, and because it is the case that recovery has to do both with the specific activation and to muscles and the nervous system, but also the attacks on the nervous system can also take place between sets. I mean if you're really geared up between sets and you go to adrenaline as high in between sets or close to it as you are during your sets, you can imagine that the recovery would take longer or at least that you're not spending adrenaline in the most efficient way, if there is such a thing.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, fair. You're not going to see any athlete that I work with just breathe in between. Whether it's in between innings or in between rounds, every single one of them is going to go back, sit in the stool, and they're going to immediately be into a breathing routine. A very intentional one. They're a little bit different for every athlete, depending on the sport. Even a PGA golfer, there's going to be a, "We just hit our ball, we're moving to the next one, we're going to go into a breathing strategy." Every one of them; it's a huge area of potential benefit and consequence if you're just ignoring it. In general, we want to do any sort of calming breath, we want to restore. It depends on what we're combating, are we combating low oxygen or high CO2? So that strategy is going to be a little bit different, but in general that is a huge time opportunity to get better.

Andy Galpin:

In fact, people can go back and listen to some of your earlier episodes where you talked about ... you have spoken about, I think on this show, when neuroplasticity works and if you're losing that opportunity post exercise, you're leaving gains on the table, if you will. So not only are you going to see everything athletes that I work with mostly have a breathing strategy in competition, we're not going to just finish a workout, high five, drink water and walk out of the gym. There will be a down-regulation strategy that is heavily involved with some sort of light control as well as breath control, the individual prescription on that. There's a ton of variation with what you can do. The easiest thing is do something that calms you down. Most likely that's going to be moved towards as much nasal breathing as you can possibly do, and a really easy rule of thumb is a double-exhale length relative to inhale.

Andy Galpin:

So if you need to take a four-second inhale, double that time and breathe out for eight seconds. Box breathing is fine, so equal inhale, equal hold, equal, exhale, equal hold. So four-second inhale, four-second exhale, et cetera. A triangle is fine too. There's a lot of ways; you can get really complicated like what Brian Mackenzie will do, and Rob and those guys have ... you can get all kinds of systems for inhale-exhale control, it can be optimized, but some strategy of calm. We're going to almost always put you on your back or close. And then we're going to cover light. We can do some ... We've done actually a number of musical interventions as well. But you can just as simple as sit down in a locker room if you have to and just breathe for five minutes. That alone is going to be productive.

Andrew Huberman:

That's great. If you're breathing in the locker room for five minutes, I suggest closing your eyes, or you'll get some funny looks, and if ... you'll still get funny looks, but you won't see people looking at you.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Huberman:

I love this. And I started doing this because you and Brian Mackenzie informed me about this, and it completely changed the rate of recovery for me. I realized that I was leaving workouts, both endurance workouts and strength hypertrophy workouts, feeling great, but looking at my phone, getting right into email and meetings, not concentrating on my breathing, and all I did was to introduce, on your recommendation, a five-minute down-regulation; so exhale-emphasized breathing, a bunch of different varieties, physiological sighs, box breathing, exhale-emphasized twice as long as the inhale component for five minutes. And I noticed two things: one, I recovered more quickly, workout to workout. No question about it.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

The numbers told me that. And the other is that I used to have this dip in energy that would occur three or four hours after a hard workout. And I always thought that had to do with the fact that I had generally eaten a meal at some point post workout. It turns out it wasn't the meal at all. It's that adrenaline ramp-up during the workouts; I wasn't clamping that at the end, and so I think eventually it just crashed, and then three or four hours later having a hard time even reading what's on the screen of my computer, thinking maybe it's the screen, maybe it was what I ate for lunch. Turns out the down-regulations allowed me to work through the afternoon with no issues whatsoever. It's really been quite powerful, and so I'm grateful to you for that, and I think this is something that I think 98% of people are not doing, and it's only five minutes.

Andy Galpin:

You didn't even have to do five. Give me three. If you really have to push it, give me three. And you can even do this, you can save time, you can do this in the shower if you have to. So you're done, you're finished, drink of water, whatever has to be, and you're getting in a shower, getting ready, just giving three minutes in the shower. It's not ideal, but as little as that it — can pay huge dividends. You need some sort of internal signal that we're safe. Like throttle down here, we're going to move on. That has to happen. I could go on and on here, but I think we're making the same point over again. It's a big deal and do it.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah. And you're saving energy. I mean the energy here is neural energy. I think fighters do this. Good fighters learn to do this between rounds. Yeah, sprinters learn to do this between events. I think humans should learn how to do this between any sort of interval-type activity, including work, social engagement. I mean this is such a powerful tool.

Andy Galpin:

Do this for one minute after every important, whether it's an individual high-volatile interaction, or if it's a ... you just did a nice 45-minute sprint of work, and you're deep into it or whatever, fine. Just give me one minute. Set your alarm, just one minute, and that also will pay dividends.

Andrew Huberman:

I love it. And as I said, it's made an outsized positive difference on my training but also activities outside my training. Which is for me, I'm not a professional athlete, I train for health and because I enjoy it, but when a really hard workout starts to interfere with the ability to do the other things in life ...

Andy Galpin:

Of course.

Andrew Huberman:

.. that's not a good situation, so this is really terrific. There's a lot more in each of those categories of strength and hypertrophy, but you've given us a tremendous amount of valuable information there. Maybe now would be a good time to shift to endurance. And of the four types of endurance and maybe you could remind us what those are. What do you think are the two that most people are seeking or pursuing in terms of health and aesthetics, right? I mean realize that we probably have athletes out there as well, but think when I think health and aesthetics, I think, okay, the ability to do sustained endurance, 30-plus minutes of some ongoing activity. How does one maximize that work? What are the modifiable variables? And then maybe you could tell us what the other major category is that people ought to have in their kit.

Andy Galpin:

So starting off with exercise choice one thing, as soon as we cross into the endurance world, and this is true for all four of those categories, exercise choice needs to be very concerned with eccentric landing. So you don't need to avoid it, but you need to recognize it relative or compare it against those other strength and speed ones. The volume is low on those ones. So if you have some eccentric absorption, it's okay. But as we sort of talked about five minutes ago, more eccentric means greater chance of muscle-damage soreness. So if you take something and magnify it across 30 minutes, or even five minutes, but of maximum exertion, you have a recipe for blowing up. You can imagine, I haven't run in forever, and I've listened to this Huberman Lab podcast, and I'm, "Okay. I'm going to get into my zone 2 training," whatever, and I start jogging. I'm going to do, "I remember when I was, I used to be able to do 25," and you just do a 25-minute jog.

Andy Galpin:

The amount of eccentric landing that just occurred on every single step because you're never, with running, even slow running. You never have two feet on the ground at the same time. So it is a one foot, land, one foot, land. Your entire body mass plus gravity onto one leg at a time, repeated now hundreds of times. That eccentric landing is going to cause tremendous soreness; your quads are going to go, you're probably going to get shin splints. Those are entirely caused by eccentric landing and when the tissue is not ready to tolerate that. If you're not landing correctly, this is when knee pain happens, back pain, shoulder, neck pain because of movement compensation. So anytime we start pressing to fatigue, let's be very concerned with there.

Andy Galpin:

So my initial recommendation is, start with activities, exercise choice-wise, that are mostly concentric-based. So think about a cycle. So when you're riding on a bike, you're pushing the pedal, but you're never landing and absorbing it. So you could go out and do a 45-minute bike ride, and you're not going to get that sore because there's not a lot of eccentric load. Swimming, similar thing here, there's some eccentrics when your hand hits the water, but fairly minimal. It's mostly a push, push, push, push, push, no load. Rowing, similar thing, mostly concentric. Pushing a sled is fantastic, going uphill running, or even walking hard uphill, all good because they're very minimal landing relative to running downhill, which would be a very, very bad idea to start. So if you're first jumping into these things, progress your volume for endurance very slowly if it involves eccentric landing. A really bad strategy would be to jump in and do, say, circuit-training class that involves a bunch of box jumps, right?

Andy Galpin:

This is not a good way to do your first foray into conditioning. You're going to get incredibly sore because you're jumping and then landing, you're now looking at three to 10x body weight, in terms of absorption, with a single land, even if you're just jumping. So be careful of that in any of those endurance areas of exercise choice. So what to pick? Pick the one that you are most technically proficient, because you're going to do it a lot, it's going to be a lot of repetitions. Whatever one you feel the most joy in — if that's rowing, great. If that's pushing a sled, it doesn't really matter. You can do this actually with weights. This is our preferred way, by the way, with our athletes. So we might do a 30-minute circuit where we do a five-minute farmer's carry with a pretty light weight. So you're just going to carry some weights in your hand, and you're just going to walk up and down the street for five minutes.

Andy Galpin:

You're going to set that down, and then you're going to do, say, a three-minute plank, and then you're going to pick that up, and you're going to do body -weight squats, like slowly and just tempo. And you're going to do a handful of different exercises, so the athletes don't get super bored or a very simple one: if a 30-minute workout, 10 minutes on a treadmill, 10 minutes on a bike, 10 minutes on a row. But for those of you that are like, "Oh my God, I can't do 30 straight minutes running," cool, break it up into three or four different exercises that are all fairly safe. That's how I would do that long-duration piece.

Andrew Huberman:

Got it.

Andy Galpin:

For exercise choice.

Andrew Huberman:

And then in terms of heart rate during that period, I mean how much attention should we pay to this? The very broad prescriptive I've thrown out on this podcast a few times, based on my read of the literature, is for most people that are oriented toward health, including people that are working on size and strength gains, hypertrophy and strength, of course, that getting 150 to 180 minutes of so-called zone 2 cardio ... can just barely have a conversation. But if one were to push any harder, you wouldn't be able to, that kind of thing. It's just as a generic recommendation that almost everybody should follow in order to just keep their cardiovascular system healthy. But I know there's a lot of nuance there, and some people would like to be able to run continuously for an hour at speed, right? Obviously not sprinting, but what are some of the finer points on long-distance endurance?

Andy Galpin:

So I have to-

Andrew Huberman:

And how often should one do it?

Andy Galpin:

Okay. Frequency you could do it is daily. Right?

Andrew Huberman:

Even when doing strength and hypertrophy strength?

Andy Galpin:

No question.

Andrew Huberman:

Well, that I think is an important point for people to hear because a lot of people think that they are going to greatly diminish their strength and hypertrophy gains, as it's often called, by doing zone 2 cardio.

Andy Galpin:

Zone 2, you have almost no ability to block your hypertrophy. Zone 2, truly, if it's really within that category, if you're talking about conversational pace, there is, in fact there is strong reason to think that it's not going to influence hypertrophy for the overwhelming majority of people.

Andrew Huberman:

It might even help it by increasing blood flow to the various muscles.

Andy Galpin:

Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:

Let's say someone's doing primarily strength and hypertrophy. Their primary goals are strength and hypertrophy, and then they're going to hit that 150 to 180 minutes of zone 2 cardio per week, assuming they're breaking that up into three or four sessions. Does it matter if they do it in the same workout before or after? Does that matter? I tend to do, just by way of example for people, certainly I'm just one example, I tend to do resistance training one day, then I'll do zone 2 cardio the next day. I jog because that's the thing I prefer. Then I'll do strength hypertrophy training the next day and jog for my zone 2 cardio. And then I take one full day off a week. I've never actually done the zone 2 cardio on the same day, but where I had to do it on the same day, would it matter if I did it before or after my strength hypertrophy training?

Andy Galpin:

Not really.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay.

Andy Galpin:

You're going to be just fine. The interference effect is what this is called. So this is all the way back to 1980, Bob Hickman stuff. And he was actually working in a lab with John Holloszy, who's one of the fathers of exercise biochemistry. So the story goes that Hickman came in, he was the strength training guy, and Holloszy and almost all those initial exercise physiologists were conditioning folks. So it's almost always swimmers and runners. That's why a bulk of the exercise physiology historically is shaped in that direction. It's what those scientists were interested in. So Hickman was there in the lab, and then how much of this is myth or not, nobody knows. So the story goes that ... this is sort of chipping back and forth, and you know how from a PI to postdoc and kind of that razzing works a little bit. And eventually he was like, "You got to start running with us." And he was like, "You got to start lifting with me," and kind of goes back and forth. Well, you know who wins that equation. It's not the postdoc. The PI gets in, and Hickman says, "Okay, fine."

Andy Galpin:

So he starts running with Holloszy and then eventually starts to realize, "I'm getting weak; I'm losing strength and I just can't..." I think it was his bench press specifically that was going down or maybe his squat, I can't remember, who knows if it's even real. But point is, so he is going along, and so eventually that starts to create a little bit of animosity, and it's like, "Actually I don't think this is good for me," and then blah, blah blah. And so they did what any good scientists would do and said, "Well, let's find out." Right? And so he run a really famous experiment where he took three groups, one group did an endurance piece, the steady state cardio. One group did a strength training piece, and then the third group did both of those workouts combined, not like a reduction, so both volumes stacked on top of each other.

Andy Galpin:

And the results are fairly predictable in terms of the endurance group, only, had the greatest increases in VO2 max and endurance markers. The strength training group had the greatest increases in muscle hypertrophy. But where the interesting part was where this whole field started was the combined group, this concurrent training is what it's generally called. So you're doing concurrent things, and typically that means hypertrophy and strength stacked on top of some steady-state endurance-

Andrew Huberman:

In the same time frame-

Andy Galpin:

Same workout ...

Andrew Huberman:

Same two-hour block?

Andy Galpin:

Or same week. It doesn't really ... It can be-

Andrew Huberman:

Got it.

Andy Galpin:

Kind of all these. Well, the concurrent group saw the same improvements in VO2 max as the endurance group. And he was like, "Well, okay." So strength training did not compromise the endurance adaptations. However, they saw much lower increases in strength and hypertrophy. And so the conclusion was the addition of endurance work compromised muscle growth and strength development, however, the addition of strength training to your endurance work will not compromise your endurance gains. Now that second piece has been shown countless more times. So if you're an endurance athlete, adding strength training is almost always going to be massively beneficial. Very little chance of detriment for this is why every endurance athlete is going to have some sort of strength and power component to their training. The controversy though came in the interference effect. So how much endurance training really blocks muscular development, and for years, myself included, was we preached hard, "Don't do these two things at the same time."

Andy Galpin:

My friend, my colleague Kevin Murach has a really nice review article with Jimmy Bagley, those two guys put this thing out, you can go read that. Where they cover all these things, and they've got some nice figures in there, but the general answer here is interference effect is sort of real, but it's probably greatly overblown. It matters. So you're talking about a 20-minute jog at conversation pace that's probably doing very little. With the assumption that are you doing an eccentric-based exercise like running, well then you're going to have more of an interference effect than cycling. That makes a ton of sense if you think about it, right? What's your total energy intake? If you're eating sufficient calories, you can still be in anabolic state. If the addition of extra energy expenditure, it's all it really is — the cardio — put you in a negative energy state, it's going to become very difficult to go through anabolism. So those things matter.

Andy Galpin:

If you're talking about running a few laps around the track as a warmup, that's not interference effect. What we're really talking about is a big volume performance consistently. Now, after Hickman came out with this paper in 1980, people followed it up in the '90s and 2000s with mechanism. And we started to see, hey, there's this cell-signaling pathway that goes down, called mTOR, and that's what leads to muscle growth. And then on the other side of that equation, there's a thing called AMPK, which is more associated with mitochondrial biogenesis and endurance. And there's this little molecule in between. At the time, most people would point to TSC2, well, turns out AMPK activation is fine and if you activate mTOR, has no bearing on AMPK, but if you activate AMPK, it's going to activate TSC2, which inhibit mTOR.

Andy Galpin:

And so it was like we had practical outcome, i.e., Hickman, you're going to get weaker. Now we had mechanism. So that story became very strong that this interference effect, and this is how science should work, right? When you see mechanism match up with practical human outcome.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

It's a strong story.

Andrew Huberman:

That's what you want. Yep.

Andy Galpin:

It was still wrong though. It just took more science, right? And this is why we always have to give science a bit of time, and you have to be willing to follow, right? And again, even me in the field who has a practitioner background and science, I felt very strongly this is a big problem. It just didn't turn out to be the case. Enough studies came out where I'm like, "Okay, it's probably not that big a deal." Unless the movement is heavily eccentric-based, the volume is very high.

Andy Galpin:

The movement is heavily eccentric based. The volume is very high. You're trying to maximize muscle growth, and energy is not controlled. If that's not all the case, interference effect is probably not something most people should worry about, especially when you compare that against the well roundedness that you need for total physiological health, probably not a big deal.

PART 3 OF 6 ENDS [01:45:04]

Andrew Huberman:

Very reassuring for me to hear because I do enjoy lifting weights, and I really enjoy running, and I love running outside. I believe I used to experience the interference effect when I used to do a very long run on Sundays. I would just go out for two hours or something like that. I don't know that I ate enough or who knows, I always feel like I eat enough or more. I love to eat. But that long Sunday run always made it hard for me to make progressive gains in strength and hypertrophy in the gym. Whereas when I cut that to 30 minutes three or four times a week, I don't see any interference effect at all.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, probably very real.

Andrew Huberman:

And I haven't trained specifically for endurance in a very long time, so I haven't experienced the noninterference effect, which as you said before, most, if not all endurance athletes probably are, or at least should be doing some sort of strength work just to keep the undercarriage strong as I think that's called.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

So what are some protocols that people could explore for continuous endurance training? I mean, I've thrown out this 150-to-180-minute zone 2 cardio, but that's really the kind of kindergarten of endurance, and there I'm probably being generous. It's probably the nursery school of endurance that everyone should do. What sorts of other protocols? I realize that can be very goal directed, but is it unreasonable, for instance, for somebody to do four hours of continuous endurance training with intervals in there as well to get it, kind of all-around heart health and the ability to go long distances?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. I'll answer this too, it's the very first one, to tackle the long duration endurance is how I heard of it. You asked earlier about heart rate zones. To me that's almost totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter, right? If you're moving, you're moving. That's the functional piece here. If you want to push it and go at a nonconversational pace, that has tremendous health benefits; if you want to do it a little bit slower, fine. If you're at the pace where you can have a conversation, to me, I don't even count that as exercise. That's not a pejorative, by the way. That is just general physical movement, and it is extraordinarily clear you need a lot of that. You need a lot more of that than we get. You can do this in a couple of efficient ways. Just taking your phone calls moving. If you've got a 30-minute call every day, or most days of the week, and you can do that while moving, you've checked not that whole box, but a pretty good chunk of it.

Andrew Huberman:

And that could even be done inside.

Andy Galpin:

A hundred percent.

Andrew Huberman:

Pacing back and forth. I'm a big pacer.

Andy Galpin:

Oh yeah, me too. You probably saw me. I'm going to walk up and down all over the place. Most of the time when I'm in my office working, I'm shadow boxing, I'm doing air squats, not even intentionally, I'm just like ...

Andrew Huberman:

Do you have one of those treadmills under the desk?

Andy Galpin:

I don't. But every lab I ever came through, somebody did.

Andrew Huberman:

We did an episode on workspace optimization, and the data on those treadmills are pretty interesting. They definitely increase alertness for which, for obvious reasons, even a little bit of movement is going to generate a little bit of adrenaline. So pacing around, moving, taking calls, moving, getting walks when you can. And then in terms of building endurance, let's say somebody wants to get into better shape. They already may or may not already have some size and strength that they're happy with and they just want to get in ... They want to improve their health.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

When does that 150, 180 minutes thing tick over into a different protocol?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. Okay. So I think the way that I can outline a weekly schedule, just as a conceptual model here, that long-duration stuff is not even counting, as I mentioned. It's just this is what you need to do as a human moving forward. We haven't improved. If you're extremely unfit, you may see some changes in cardiovascular health there, but for the most part, this is just knocking out the general physical practice. You need to be higher functioning. So whatever that time domain is, I don't really care. It's not a huge concern of mine. What I think you need to hit are these nodes, you need to do something once a week that gets you to a maximum heart rate. Now, I don't have to literally mean max, but close.

Andrew Huberman:

This means really sucking for air?

Andy Galpin:

Really, as high as you can possibly get. You can wear a heart rate monitor if you want, but maximum heart rate that the rough equation we say is 220 minus your age. So if you're 40 years old, your maximum heart rate is probably about 180 beats per minute. Now I can tell you flat out right now, my max heart rate is close to 210, which means I'm 10 years old. So take that number with a grain of salt. I have had a bunch of professional athletes who are in their twenties, and their max heart rate is 175 and they are in way better shape than I am. So maximum heart rate is not a good proxy for physical fitness. It's a rough number.

Andy Galpin:

An easy way to do it is if you have a heart rate monitor or anything like that, do the hardest workout you can possibly do. See what the highest number you get and assume that's close. If you want to just start at 220 minus your age, that's fine too. Do something though where you're like, "Yep, this is death. This is really, really challenging." For how long? However long that takes you. That can be a 30-second go on an air assault bike, that could be a ... do one of those things where you kind of sprint, run as hard as you can during the straightaway on a track and then walk the corners. Kind of an old classic, back when you and I were kids, interval training.

Andrew Huberman:

They don't do that anymore?

Andy Galpin:

I guess, I don't know. I don't hear anyone ever talk about it.

Andrew Huberman:

In PE class, we had to change and if you didn't bring running shoes, you had to do it barefoot.

Andy Galpin:

Oh, I love it. I love your teacher.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, it wasn't ... Our football, basketball, baseball teams weren't that good, but anything like running, cross country, just because of where I grew up.

Andy Galpin:

Oh yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Like brutal, brutal coaches, so, yeah, they'd make all kids do these runs.

Andy Galpin:

Yep. So we can be in the 30 probably seconds at a minimum. It's hard to get you to a true heart rate max in shorter than 30 seconds. You can get to total suck in under 20 seconds, but getting to a true heart rate max is probably going to take more than 30 seconds. So it doesn't really matter what you want to do. It can be again, a sprint uphill, it could be what you were talking, it could be burpees to death, whatever you want to do, just ...

Andrew Huberman:

Although those have an eccentric component, right?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, they do.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

No question about it. But if you did ...

Andrew Huberman:

Not to actual death by the way.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. If you just did, "I'm going to do as many burpees as I can for 90 seconds," it probably won't take you much longer than that to get to close to max ...

Andrew Huberman:

And is that a whole workout?

Andy Galpin:

It could be.

Andrew Huberman:

So once a week, get to max heart rate?

Andy Galpin:

Touch it.

Andrew Huberman:

I love it.

Andy Galpin:

Touch it. It's not the best, but it'll work.

Andrew Huberman:

And what are the specific benefits that provides?

Andy Galpin:

Okay, so earlier in our chat we outlined the rule of specificity, specific adaptation to impose demand. If you're never getting to that high of a pace, it would be trying to get stronger but only going to 60%. So every cardiovascular adaptation that occurs with cardiovascular training is just simply going to get to the top end by doing this. So if you just start at the heart itself, stroke volume increases. So this is the amount of blood that's kicked out per contraction. Cardiac output, resting heart rate. If you go to the endothelial function, you're talking about nitric oxide release. Endothelial health in general, capillary mitochondria all the way down. You just walk through the whole system, pulmonary exchange to the lungs, all of those are going to benefit by being challenged to their maximum.

Andrew Huberman:

It will also teach you where your vomit reflex is.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, there you go. Right?

Andrew Huberman:

Let's hope not.

Andy Galpin:

Stress is what causes adaptation, right? So if you push your ... Okay, here's the difference. If you did 25 minutes of steady state, you're not challenging the same thing as what we just talked about. The way that I explain this is if you understand the point of physiological failure, then you understand the place of adaptation, that's it. So if you and I both go run on a ... We did both did a VO2 max test, so classic VO2 max test is going to take eight to 12 minutes and it's going to look something like this. We're going to get in a treadmill and we're going to run and every minute I'm going to just slightly increase that treadmill, either the speed or the grade, most of the time it's the speed. So we get to a high grade, say 10% grade or something, and then we go five miles per hour, 5.2, 5.4, 5. ... , and we just go until you can't go any longer.

Andy Galpin:

Now let's say you and I did that and we had the same exact timeframe, and so we both went eight minutes. The time that you last is not the thing that we care about. It's the volume of oxygen that you breathe out is what determines it. So let's say we move at the same time domain and we had the same VO2 max, let's say they were both 50 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which is an okay number, but that's nothing to be extremely proud about. Just because we have the same number does not mean we have the same point of physiological failure, and this matters because it's going to answer the "What do I do about it then" question, right? So if you got off and I started asking you a series of questions, and I basically said, "Why'd you quit? Why did you jump off the treadmill? Why'd you stop?" And you were like, "My chest, I couldn't catch my breath. I thought my heart was going to explode." Okay, great.

Andy Galpin:

If you ask me and I said my legs were on fire, I was breathing hard, but I couldn't take another step, this is a very rough indicator of different places of physiological disruption. Now what I've seen a lot with my professional athletes, especially like fighters, they're going to generally fail in their legs because they don't often do a lot of strength training in their legs. They don't do a lot of leg work. They're fighting on their back, literally, a lot, or on top, or on their knees, so their legs tend to give out before. Someone who fails in the cardiovascular system, let's say you did a lot of leg training, typically like an endurance athlete, that's not going to be their issue.

Andy Galpin:

It's just going to be they're going to reach a heart rate and ventilation threshold that they can no longer handle. If I put you on the exact same training protocols, it's not going to be as effective because you are going to always fail at your legs, and they're going to always fail at their cardiovascular system. I need to flip that, right? I need to put you in a position to where you can reach a true heart rate or ventilation challenge while your legs are still hanging in there or the opposite. So the training protocol is based on that point of failure. The adaptation is in the same thing. So if you are failing because of your legs, then you might see a greater increase in capillarization in your legs relative to somebody else who's failing in their cardiovascular system. They may see a greater change in something on that side of the equation so that it matters how you're failing at all times.

Andrew Huberman:

What I love about this is that it sounds like it's like a thermometer for where one is weak and needs work, but also provides a stimulus to improve the very thing that you need.

Andy Galpin:

That's the trick, right?

Andrew Huberman:

So to just get it real brass tacks about it, it would be once a week ...

Andy Galpin:

Okay, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Ninety seconds near maximum heart rate, could I do more? Could I do five or six of those 90-second bouts?

Andy Galpin:

No question you can do ... As long as you touch that max heart rate, I'm good. Right? Ideal world, probably four to eight.

Andrew Huberman:

In that single session.

Andy Galpin:

Ideal.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay.

Andy Galpin:

Right. If that takes you 20 seconds or 90 seconds, it's fine. If you want to do 30 on, 30 off; you want to do 20 on, 40 off; 40 on, 20 off. Those numbers don't matter.

Andrew Huberman:

And is there an interference effect of this on the other sorts of training that we've talked about?

Andy Galpin:

It actually tends to be complementary. The evidence available suggests that this high-interval stuff is more likely to be complementary to hypertrophy training, probably because of lactate and some other cool things which are very beneficial molecules that people don't understand, they think it's bad. It's actually a hugely beneficial thing. It can be interference, it can provide an interference if calories are not accounted for, if rest is not accounted for, and other things. But in general, it's probably okay. I wouldn't add it to your equation if you don't need it for maximizing hypertrophy. But for the person who wants to just get well-rounded physiology, I wouldn't hesitate to do these even in the same session or different sessions.

Andrew Huberman:

Terrific. And if that's done once a week, and the 150 to 180 minutes or so of zone 2 cardio is done in the rest of the week; person's doing their strength and hypertrophy training, we would hope, what other sorts of endurance practices could one incorporate? You mentioned muscular endurance, the ability, like a wall sit, or the ability to do a plank. Is that something ... Is that useful for anything?

Andy Galpin:

Yes.

Andrew Huberman:

Doing planks and wall sitting?

Andy Galpin:

No, no, it's extraordinarily useful. Let's hold on muscular endurance. I want to finish one more thing on this side. So if we're building this week of endurance, once a week, hit that number, if you can do repeated bouts, we talked four to eight, that's fantastic. If you can't manage the mental energy every week, do it every other week, it's still very good, right? Because I get it, I'm a working person too. And sometimes you're just like, "I cannot, those workouts feel incredible afterwards, but man they are daunting." If you love this stuff, you could do it four times a week. If you hate it though, it's not realistic to think you're going to be able to knock this out. You're going to end up doing 70, 80%, which is not going to get you the benefit. So just don't do it.

Andrew Huberman:

You really have to hit that ceiling?

Andy Galpin:

You got to get up there, close.

Andrew Huberman:

Have someone chase ... I always say when doing this kind of work, in my mind I'm thinking that I'm basically being chased by somebody with a syringe full of poison. And while there are other ways out of the situation, and for the benefit of what we're talking about, what I'm referring to is to just run.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

My motivation is typically if you just get this done, we're done in a couple of minutes. Just get it done. Don't go here if you're not going to do it, but when you show up, check in, and it's over really quickly.

Andrew Huberman:

Breathing down-regulation afterwards?

Andy Galpin:

Hundred percent, you have to, right? It's a huge key. So if you absolutely can't do it, do it every other week. That's twice a month. Give me twice a month. Can be done on the road, can be done in 20 minutes, do a really good thorough warmup. Don't just jump into those by the way, right away. It's not going to be as beneficial. Really nice, good sweat broke, really good warmup, and then give me four minutes of hard work and we're done. Right? Get out of there. If you want to use a bath or hot thermal stress to kind of aid in that warmup process, fine. Get in a sauna, get in a hot bath, Get really hot, get up there, warm up, knock it out. Whole thing is 20 minutes plus five minutes breathing, you're out of there.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm going to start doing this.

Andy Galpin:

You got a bike right there?

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, every room in this studio has a different piece of equipment, it seems.

Andy Galpin:

So I want that once a week, realistically every week if I have to. I want that physical activity piece, call it whatever you want, long duration thing. Ideally you'll do as much of that through your nose only. You're not going to be able to do the interval stuff at nose only, don't even try. But if you can go that whole 30-minute time or 20 or 40 minutes, whatever it's going to be, that's actually a good way to regulate intensity. So go as hard as you can while still being able to breathe through your nose. Only if you have to open up your mouth a little bit, fine, but try to stay there. What you'll see is very quickly you'll be able to increase your work output while just breathing through your nose, which has a bunch of other benefits. The other piece I want is this middle ground, which is can you sustain hard work for eight to 12, maybe as little as four minutes?

Andy Galpin:

I'll give you four to 12 minutes. This doesn't have to be quite as high as the first one. You don't have to get to heart max, but can you get somewhere in the 80% range and can you hold that for four minutes, maybe give me two minutes, two minutes rest and do that twice? Something like that. Ideal situation is what a runner would do, is what we'll call mile repeats because they're running four- or five-minute miles. Whatever time it takes them to finish, they're going to rest that, so it's a one-to-one work-to-rest ratio. So a five-minute mile, rest five minutes and go again. That's probably pretty unrealistic for a lot of folks.

Andrew Huberman:

Well the five-minute part is unrealistic for most folks. For me would be eight minutes, eight minutes.

Andy Galpin:

Fine.

Andrew Huberman:

Probably something like that.

Andy Galpin:

Well in your particular case, just do the 800 meter. So do 800 meters. Do something that takes two to six minutes to work. It is a lower intensity than the max stuff, but is a much higher workload. That is probably going to give, you might even argue, the most cardiovascular benefit because it is sustained work output and that's very critical. The downside of kind of like that conversational pace, it's physical activity, it's movement, it's blood flow, it's lymphatic drainage. It's not very cardiovascularly challenging though. You're just not going to get an optimal health from just walking actively.

Andrew Huberman:

So two to six minutes of ...

Andy Galpin:

Hard work.

Andrew Huberman:

... of hard work with then an equivalent amount of rest in between, and then repeat how many times?

Andy Galpin:

Once if you have to. If it needs to be one rep, if it needs to be a six-minute thing, and then down-regulate breathe, twice if you can do that, six times, eight times, whatever you can really do, and you can just take that as long of a training session as you want, or a short exercise choice could be whatever you want. So again you can do sled pushes, or it could be a kettlebell circuit, or any combination of things where you're working and you're not giving yourself a break. You have got to be able to hold on at a very high waste product production level as well as a high demand for energy, and then bring it down.

Andrew Huberman:

And breathing during this two to six minutes of hard output is mainly through the nose or combination nose and mouth, or is that getting too technical?

Andy Galpin:

Well it's probably ... Like I like it, but you tell me if it's too technical. You're going to try to maintain nasally as much as you can, but you're going to lose it at some point. You can go through their, Brian and Rob's, gear system and learn more, and then you can kind of see what gear to be in if you have to go nose in, mouth out or something like that. But I don't really care too much honestly in that range. I'm getting most of my nasal-only stuff at night and training and everything. So if you have to open up the throttle there to get the work done, okay. Oh then we'll actually go to answer your question, which was muscular endurance. Let's go back to that piece. Muscular endurance is incredibly important for general maintenance of joint health. In other words, you have got ... Form follows function is a very classic sciency physiology saying, meaning you've got a couple of different, there's a bunch, but to make it easy, two different types of muscle fibers, fast twitch and slow twitch.

Andy Galpin:

Fast-twitch fibers tend to be, but they're not always, bigger. They contract with a higher velocity. That's why they are called fast twitch, but they tend to be more glycolytic, and thus fatigable. Slow twitch tend to be smaller, well not always, they're more packed with mitochondria that are generally better at burning fat as fuel but contract lower velocity. Well, we have these two types so that we can regulate function more. You have some muscle groups that we're going to ... Sorry, let me go back up a quick second. Each individual muscle in a human body has a combination of some amount of fast and some amount of slow. That percentage of fast versus slow differs from muscle to muscle. So it also differs from person to person. Easy example is your calf muscle.

Andy Galpin:

There's three but there's two primary muscles in your calf. One's called the soleus, one's the gastroc. The gastroc is the one where if you take your toe and point it towards your face and then flex, that's the one that pops out on the medial side, the inside. The soleus is what we call the antigravity muscle. And it is generally about 80% to even 90% slow twitch. And that's because it's supposed to be contracted lightly all time, it's supposed to be on permanently. It's meant to keep, we call it antigravity because it's meant to keep you erect, up and moving. Your spinal erectors are supposed to do this. Various muscles for postural are generally slow-twitch muscles. So we're supposed to be on all times, not produce fast, not produce force, but don't get tired. The gastroc is the opposite. It's not activated very often, but when it's activated it's meant for extreme propulsion.

Andy Galpin:

So this gives us the ability to reach up and scratch our eyeball and also punch somebody. We have to be able to regulate force output, which is going back to Henneman, right? Controlling what we use and what we don't use while also not wasting energy, which is the downside of activating a big threshold motor neuron is it requires a ton of energy. It's a more efficient mode of energy, but the total amount is really, really high. So muscular endurance is going to help those slow-twitch muscle fibers and slow-twitch predominant muscles maintain their working job. So if you lose your muscular endurance ability in your spinal erectors or your calf, you're going to start slumping into bad positions. You're going to be putting joints in a movement pattern that they're not going to be the most happy with. So it's more about then being able to just maintain a two-minute wall squat.

Andy Galpin:

It's about maintaining joint integrity and allowing that musculature to not fatigue when you ask it to do heavy and fast. So what I mean by that is you've got a whole combination of muscles in your shoulder and we'll generally call these the rotator cuff muscles. Well let's imagine those slow-twitch postural muscles get fatigued and they start to lose contractile tension, and then you go do something heavy or fast or an emergency situation, those are already prefatigued. You're going to rely more upon the fast-twitch muscle fibers which are there less for postural integrity. You're likely to get out of position and this is a whole recipe of like "God, why is my shoulder just hurting? God my back." That's very often a case of the slow-switch fibers and the slow muscle groups losing muscular endurance. So you need to build that back up so that they can control and hold the joint in the position so the fast-twitch fibers can then contract with force.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm hoping that what I'm going to say next meets what you said accurately. My experience is that getting injured lifting weights, or even doing housework or yard work, almost always happens when I'm not paying attention, fatigued — that's kind of obvious — but also getting in position to initiate a movement, setting down a weight or lifting weights off the rack or picking up dumbbells. That's almost always when I seem to activate this lower back thing that happens every six or eight months. And what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that this muscular endurance from wall sits or planks or things of that sort, maybe you could give us a few other examples of these, can help us because they actually prepare the system to do what we normally think of as the more intense work. So it sounds like it's really the architecture of the body includes nerves and muscles and everything else of course that lets the limbs and other kind of action end of the body do its best work. Is that [inaudible 02:08:03]?

Andy Galpin:

... Express its own power and force. Yep. We've actually landed on one of my final laws of strength conditioning, which is similar to what I said earlier. So I said exercises do not determine adaptations. Application determines adaptation. So it sounds similar, but it's quite different. There are no good or bad exercises. There's only good or bad application. Here's a great example of that. So you do not get hurt deadlifting because deadlifts are dangerous. You only get hurt deadlifting because you either got in bad position ... you got in bad position because you either started in bad position, which is one of the things you just said, or you ended up in bad position, you did too much volume, you did too much intensity, or you did too much complexity. Those last three things all hurt you because they result in the first one, which is out of position.

Andy Galpin:

Or another way to think about this is if it's not a visible change in position is stress got put into a part of the system that should not absorb that much stress. So you did too much of it, you did it too heavy, you got fatigued, and so you broke position, you got too heavy, so you broke position, you made the exercise too complex, you put too many moving parts in it, you put too many joints in it, and you got out of position. You did that too many times over time. Now we've led to either an acute injury, bam, back pops and you fall on the floor, or just like "Man, this thing is hurting," over time. All these are results of the same thing. So you cannot ever blame the exercise for causing the problem. It's always either the user or the coach.

Andy Galpin:

You programmed way too much here, and I can't handle that position, or you yourself went into it too much. So if you're getting these little tweaks and problems going on, you've made an error in one of those things. So simply back off, reduce the complexity, give yourself more stability, less moving parts, do less volume, do less intensity. In fact, if you look at the people from the physical therapy world in terms of the pain literature, it's very clear that just stopping a movement is very rarely going to work. What you want to do is back off all the way down to just below that threshold of that's what aggravates it, and you want to train right there.

Andy Galpin:

That's going to allow you to do two things. Number one, tissue tolerance, and then number two, desensitization. A lot of pain stuff, and you can probably speak a lot about this, especially with things like low back pain, is there's not necessarily often much damage there. It's a lot of hypersensitization of just pain signal, pain signal. Omitting the movement entirely does not get that signal to go away. You need to train just below that signal and desensitize it. So you want to make sure that the muscular endurance allows you just putting volume right below where you start to get a tweak, and it is beautifully effective for that.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, I've experienced this right side lower-back pain for years, sometimes shooting down the hip. The two things that really helped were doing anterior tib work, so hats off to Knees Over Toes Guy, Ben Patrick, who has created a lot of popularity around tib work.

Andy Galpin:

It turns out, joints, full range of motion, you're in a better spot.

Andrew Huberman:

Something about stabilizing the stuff from the knee down helped my back, and then also some neck work, and friends of mine are always teasing me that my gym is filled with the most bizarre equipment. It doesn't look like any other gym. A lot of it's just designed to keep me healthy and still training. But I love this idea of getting right at below the threshold of pain activation and not simply going into complete nonaction or just taking complete rest because that actually can be detrimental. I'd love to talk about a few items that support training of all kinds and where there's a lot of confusion and, indeed, misconception and mystery and just get your take on these. And I just want to acknowledge at the outset that for some of these there's a lot of science, for some of them there's less science, but there certainly is a lot of experience in your camp, and those categories are cold, heat, and hydration.

Andrew Huberman:

Because obviously, whether or not you're a runner, whether or not you're strength training, if you're a human being you need to hydrate. But in terms of work output and physical work output maybe even cognitive work output, maybe tackle hydration first. There is what I call and what I think is now come to be known as the Galpin equation, which you really do deserve credit for because I think that people realize that there are a range of solutions out there, but there is a really a desperate need for straightforward solutions that work for 75% of people 75% of the time. So hydration is key. Maybe you could underscore just how key it is for us, and then what is the Galpin equation, as I call it? And I think others are now referring to it. Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

Okay. Benefits of hydration slash consequences of mishydration, so whether that's dehydration or overload ... Physiology has hormetic curves. Right now, typically we think about this in terms of toxicology. So what this means is at some point giving you a dose of something, testosterone is a very easy example. If you're clinically deficient, or low in testosterone, and I give you a little bit and it brings you back into a normal range, you generally see an improvement in health and functionality. Taking you though from normal to super high doesn't always necessarily provide additional benefit. In fact if you continue to go, it's going to provide detriment. So everything has this curve, and then some things are hormetic stressors, which means a small, short, fast insult is actually beneficial because then you come back bigger, faster, stronger; that's how adaptation works. Basic hormesis, okay. Hydration's the same way. So at the end of the curve here, if you are underhydrated, we all know you could die.

Andy Galpin:

You have to have things. In fact, water is the only thing that is ubiquitous across biology in terms of every living thing has to have it. There's no other vitamin, mineral, nutrient that is required among all living things with exception of water. So that should give you a pretty good indication of it's importante, right? You got to have this thing. Down here, at the bottom, if you're dehydrated and I give you more, it's beneficial effects. However, if you are up the top already and I continue to give you more water past that, now we run into actual problems, and we can get what's called hyponatremia, which is more common than people realize. Natremia being actually not referring to the water, but the sodium concentration being too low, and you've probably talked about that at length of why that's an issue. If sodium-potassium balances inside, outside of cell come off, your heart stops, right?

Andy Galpin:

Muscle contraction ends and all these things. So you don't want to be over or underhydrated. So understanding this rough equation I sort of loosely calculated one day is helpful for that. I think the most context is talking about how much water to drink throughout the day and then how much water to drink during exercise. So the very easy answer is half your body weight ounces per day is a very loose guideline for total amount of fluid consumption. So if you weigh 200 pounds, aim for a hundred ounces of water, it's a very easy number. If you hit that, you're probably, I'd say 90% of you are good 90% of the time, alone. If you then go to exercise, you need to then account for that fluid loss with exercise. And in general you want to consume 125% to 150% of the amount of weight you lost in fluid.

Andy Galpin:

In other words, if you worked out and you were 200 pounds naked, and you went and did your workout, and then you dried off and you weighed yourself again and now you're 198 pounds, you lost two pounds of water, that's 32 ounces. You want to drink back about 125% of that. So instead of drinking 32 ounces, I want you to drink 40, 42, 45, something like this, because one of the reasons why is unless you're drinking something that is isotonic, meaning the same exact concentration in your blood and in your fluid, you're just going to go closer to that hyponatremia. You're going to get a bunch of baroreflector responses, and you're going to actually think you have too much fluid and you're going to urinate it out.

Andrew Huberman:

What if I'm not weighing myself before and after workouts? Is there a shorthand version of this that after training for an hour, I should drink at least X number of ounces? Assuming I'm not sweating super heavily.

Andy Galpin:

In that particular case, you could probably go something like, if everyone in the world did, I don't know, 12 to 20 ounces, that's probably pretty decent.

Andrew Huberman:

And they're probably doing that right?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

And what about electrolytes, consuming salt, potassium and magnesium?

Andy Galpin:

But that thing only works though if you're coming in at optimal hydration, and this is the problem, this is why you have to flag this starting with a good total daily amount of water. Because if you're coming in and you're like, "Oh, I drink two or three glasses of water a day," then you might need to drink 50 or 60 ounces postworkout because you are way behind. So that like, oh, 12 ounces or so works if you're already generally very well hydrated.

Andrew Huberman:

And if people are drinking four to six glasses of water a day, but they're also drinking a lot of caffeine in any form, then they're going to be excreting more water in most cases, right? Because caffeine's a diuretic.

Andy Galpin:

It kind of is, but it kind of isn't, either. It's not the diuretic that we used to think about it as. It is still fluid consumption, so it's only a diuretic if it causes you to excrete more fluid than it actually ... was being intake. So if caffeine intake is in a normal range, I don't have to worry about the diuretic effects. If someone is drinking 12 cups of coffee a day, or they're taking caffeine pills or something, now the excretion is going to outkick the coverage. So now we're going to have problems, right? Because there's no fluid consumption with the caffeine pill. So in general, things like tea consumption, I'm not super worried about those things. You can count those towards your total fluid intake if you want. So if you're like, I drink 60 ounces of water plus 20 ounces of coffee and then this, you're going to add that all up and you're going to be totally okay.

Andy Galpin:

So natural form, you also have problems with synthetic forms of caffeine versus natural forms of caffeine. Natural forms are pretty okay.

Andrew Huberman:

So coffee, tea, et cetera.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, all that stuff.

Andrew Huberman:

Pill form is where it gets tricky.

Andy Galpin:

Always. So in general, just eat real food and things, you're going to be just fine. The last piece to consider is your diet quality matters because the fluid content in your food can vary wildly. So something like a bagel might be five to 10% water, or something like a watermelon is 98%, 95%, something in a huge range. Even meat is very high percentage of fluid intake. It's really high, even after you cook it, there's still a lot of fluid in there. So if you're eating a whole food, mostly whole food-based diet, your endogenous hydration is actually pretty high already, just from your fluid. If you're eating a very highly processed, dehydrated, oversalted diet, you're way low on hydration just in your food.

Andy Galpin:

So you have to factor all these things. In fact, one of the things that happens to us constantly with folks that go from a highly processed, low-quality diet to a high-quality one is they're just peeing nonstop. "What the hell is going on?" I'm like, "Well, you actually have brought in 60 additional ounces of water in your diet relative to what you used to have, and you've gone from 10 grams of sodium there to four, to two, sometimes one, sometimes it gets very low because you're not like salt ... Are you salting your food?" "No." Okay, well we don't have sodium intake then; we're way down. So everything that we're considering is based on that. So let's assume someone's eating a pretty well-balanced diet, they're drinking 60 ounces of water and maybe some caffeine and coffee and tea, things like that. We don't exactly know the optimal amount of sodium one should ...

Andy Galpin:

We don't exactly know the optimal amount of sodium one should intake. It is very clear high sodium concentrations are still associated with a lot of negative health outcomes, especially in combination with poor physical activity, in combination with low food quality and other comorbidities. That's a very bad thing. You need to be very careful about those things. If everything else is okay, we're okay playing with a little bit of higher salt. In fact, you're probably going to feel better. You're going to feel generally pretty good.

Andy Galpin:

It needs to be very clear. If you are overweight, highly stressed, and you don't have a lot of these things ticked off, and you have known comorbidities, you really need to pay attention to salt intake. It can be very nasty. So that being said, what we're generally going to look at for folks is, are you ... at least can we categorize you as a low-sodium or high-sodium sweater? If so, there's a whole list of electrolytes you can look up that are going to have something like 200 to 400 milligrams per serving. And there's a whole list of these things. If you're a low-sodium sweater, I'm probably going to send you after one of those. If you're a high-sodium sweater, there's a lot of electrolyte supplements that are closer to 600 or 800, even a whole gram per single serving size. So you want to play with that, a very ...

PART 4 OF 6 ENDS [02:20:04]

Andrew Huberman:

How do you know if you're a low-sodium or high-sodium sweater? We actually have an episode on salt we put out, or is coming out soon, if it hasn't come out already, which is ... you know when you look at the hazard ratios for salt intake?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Basically your probability of really bad things happening to you goes way up as you get towards a lot of sodium intake, say of 10 or 12 grams day.

Andy Galpin:

Totally.

Andrew Huberman:

And this is translated to teaspoons of salt, et cetera.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

But also very low sodium intake is a problem.

Andy Galpin:

No question about it.

Andrew Huberman:

It's not a perfect U shape. It's kind of a J-shaped curve or a kind of hockey stick shape, more or less. But how would I know if I'm a low-sodium or a high-sodium sweater?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Would I just kind of lick my sweat or have someone else do that?

Andy Galpin:

You can yeah, find a super friend who will lick your sweat for you.

Andrew Huberman:

No willing volunteers that I'm aware of. But would I be able to tell?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, you can get sweat testing done. Actually you have a number of options. The kind of original one that most of us use in the background for many years was called Levelen. They'll send you out a little patch, you can wear that, send it in to the lab, and they'll measure it directly in the lab and send it back. It's $150 bucks or something like.

Andrew Huberman:

Do they bin you into low, medium and high sweating?

Andy Galpin:

They're going to do that, but they're going to tell you exactly the milligrams. And they're actually going to tell you what products and stuff that they're exactly matched to.

Andrew Huberman:

Do you do this with professional athletes?

Andy Galpin:

We have many times, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Interesting.

Andy Galpin:

You can do a more consumer grade version. Gatorade has a patch, for $25 bucks you can get two of them. You can put that patch on your left forearm and download the Gatorade app, and you can do a workout, measure it right there and click it over and they'll tell you exactly, not only higher or low, but again, they'll tell you the milligrams of sodium that are in your sweat, and you can figure out again, kind of high, medium, or low.

Andrew Huberman:

Interesting. I do much better on a slightly higher sodium intake.

Andy Galpin:

Most do.

Andrew Huberman:

And my carbohydrate, I do eat carbohydrates, I'm one of those that it is pretty moderate, but I try and eat clean foods. So I notice, and I tend to be slightly low blood pressure. So again, to reiterate the warning there that if somebody has prehypertension or has hypertension or is obese, you really do need to be careful with your sodium intake. But many people seem to find that they feel better when they increase their sodium intake, and they're still in that healthy portion of the hazard ratio.

Andy Galpin:

Most of the athletes, I would say in general, we're going to go higher in salt when they come and we're going to run their stuff, we're going to add salt. Almost always. Very few times have I gone, "Ah, we need to cut this back." One of the exceptions are the ones that come in that eat like 14-year-olds, and I'm like, "Okay, you're at 15 milligrams or 15 grams a day because you're eating nothing but ..."

Andrew Huberman:

Garbage.

Andy Galpin:

So we're going to come down, you're going to feel way better. All this bloating and everything else that's going to happen go down. You can do that. There are actually more biosensors that are coming out, that are not available yet, but they're coming very soon in this space. They're going to be able to give you real-time metrics on salt. So you can pay attention to those. I haven't seen one and used one personally, so I don't want to espouse about how good or bad it is, but I know that those are coming from a handful of companies. An easy way to do is just wear a hat or wear some sort of headband or something and do your workout, take it off. If you see a huge white band, or if it's completely clear, then that's going to tell you. Big white band, you're probably a high-salt sweater. Completely clear, very little coming out.

Andrew Huberman:

That's great. And I can see the posts on Instagram now. People showing their salt band from sweating.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

I mean obviously salt is so essential for so many physiological functions.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

You don't it want too high or too low, but if you're losing more, it makes sense you would need to take in more.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

So half of my body weight in ounces as just a foundation of fluid intake. Coffee and tea could be included in that, but that should probably be mostly water or things similar to it. And then during exercise, how do I want to think about this again?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Let's say I'm a high-salt output, then I'd want to drink maybe 40 ounces of water with, or more?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. Okay, I'll do this easier. Let's talk about pre, and mid and post, right? So what to drink pre. If you come in having hit these rules, you're okay. And preworkout can be as little as like five or six ounces, basically a couple sips of water, fine. If you come in poorly hydrated, then you maybe need to go more like 12. But here's the deal. If you start off a session in a bad spot, you're not going to catch back up. You're in trouble. Let's say you come and you follow the direction, 500 milligrams salt before, 500 milligrams after. A very easy rule. Pick whatever source you want. That's a couple of sprinkles of table salt. If you want Himalayan, that's fine. You don't have to. Himalayan's actually a fairly low-sodium salt. So it's not the best for this purpose.

Andy Galpin:

If you're a higher-salt sweater, a little bit more. If you want to go choose an electrolyte, of which there are an infinite amount, you can look on the packet and it'll tell you 250 milligrams per serving or 400 or 600 or whatever it happens to be. But around 500 pre, 500 post is a very general rule. And then during is, thanks to you, my famous Galpin equation now that is all over the world. All I did is I took the literature and I said, "Okay, in general, the research shows pretty clearly two milligrams per kilogram body weight over 15 minutes seems to put you in a pretty good spot." Most people don't think about kilograms or milliliters. So can I just run that over? And then it turns out it's about your body weight divided by 30, in ounces. That's all you have to do.

Andrew Huberman:

So body weight in pounds divided by 30.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, exactly right. So you weigh 200 pounds divided by 30 and that's the number of ounces you're going to want to go every 15 or 20 minutes or so.

Andrew Huberman:

So I'm getting that amount every 15 to 20 minutes throughout the training.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

And now in the weight room, that's pretty easy to do.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

'Cause there are rest intervals, but people will need to do this while running.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

Or cycling, and that can cause a little bit of gastric distress if you're not used to it. Is that right? You can learn to run with some water in your belly?

Andy Galpin:

One hundred percent. The gut is very trainable in a lot of directions. But in terms of fluid as well as carbohydrate, which is another thing that is going to get people. But that's, yeah, very trainable. It'll be uncomfortable initially, but you'll quickly get into it. The better solution for those folks? Just come in hydrated and you might not even need any water. You could probably perform just fine. So the ones that don't have as much of an opportunity, you really have to emphasize walking in. We have this problem with professional golfers. They have plenty of time to drink water, but they're so focused on the shot and there's a lot of variables coming up. Once they hit their shot and they're moving onto the next one, they're thinking about a scorecard of 185 yards away. "Can I go 184 and a half yards? Can I go 186 yards? What's the slope of that? What's the wind up here? What's the wind up there?" They're thinking and they just forget. Even though they have four and a half hours, so we have to make sure that they immediately get off the course, we go right into recovery. As hard as we possibly can. They wake up the next morning, they're in a good spot, we crush recovery. And now it's like, "Hey, if you can remember to drink this, great. If not, we're still fine." If it's not a big deal and you have time like in a lifter, because I deal with that problem with fighters too. We can only drink so much in the middle of a fight. A couple sips over here, but we can't go mix like two millimeters, it's like, "Can you get a couple sips in?"

Andy Galpin:

They say "Yeah. Oh shit, forgot." It's not going to happen. So we have to take more of an emphasis on before and after. So start your recovery process immediately and then come in the next day. That's your window. And then whatever you can get in during the workout, that's fine too. If you're a higher-salt sweater, instead of doing 500, 500, maybe do 750, 750. If you have a longer bout of exercise and especially if it's hot or humid, then you might want to consider some salt in the workout as well. And 300 milligrams during the workout, totally fine. It's enough.

Andy Galpin:

If it is a really long workout and it's really hot and you're going to lose pounds during it, you need a specific strategy. If you're going to lose less than a pound, you don't need to worry about it. It's not going to be enough of a detriment for you to really care. So that's a kind of a rough rule. Now if you're 200-plus pounds, maybe that number moves from one pound to two pounds. But really the number we're looking at is 1% of your body weight. If you're losing more than 1% of your body weight, we need to start caring. If it's less than 1%, it's not going to really pay that much of a difference.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay so for myself, because I don't get super technical, I don't wear any devices besides a wristwatch.

Andy Galpin:

It's a nice watch.

Andrew Huberman:

Thanks, yeah I'm very attached to this watch, or it's attached to me, I suppose. My body weight in pounds divided by two. That's what I'm going to try and get across the entire day as a kind of baseline. And then my body weight.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

In pounds divided by 30 during the workout every 15 or 20 minutes, I'm going to try and consume that amount. And then I definitely do better when I increase the amount of salt that I'm taking in anywhere from 500 milligrams to a gram of salt several times a day actually. But I'm not eating that often. Which leads me to my other question, which is, I prefer to train fasted or semifasted, meaning first thing in the morning.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Or within an hour or two of waking as obviously I've been fasting while I'm asleep or having not eaten anything for three or four hours before.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

I just feel lighter and more energetic. If that works for me, is that okay? Or is it better to eat something before one trains?

Andy Galpin:

Personal preference. Easy answer there.

Andrew Huberman:

Great.

Andy Galpin:

It depends on, of course, how hard you trained, what the training was like, what sport you're involved with, how many [inaudible 02:30:52], et cetera. But in general, personal preference for the average person.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, that probably handles 90% of the questions about that. Cold. Cold showers, ice baths and cold immersion up to the neck. I always preface this by saying there are not a lot of studies, there are some, but not a lot of controlled studies looking at cold showers because it's harder to control the variables of where people stand.

Andrew Huberman:

So I would say if you have access to cold immersion of some sort, ice bath or cold immersion, great. But if you don't, cold showers would be the next best thing. The lore goes that if you do an ice bath or cold-water immersion after strength or hypertrophy training that you are short-circuiting some of that. The lore also goes that cold showers might be okay, and my interpretation of those data and that discussion is that all that is probably true, but I have a hard time imagining that the effects are so robust that it can completely prevent strength gains and hypertrophy, such that my stance for myself is try and do the cold-exposure training away from the strength and hypertrophy training. But if you can't do it any other time, right afterward probably isn't going to throw my whole system out of whack and prevent the improvements. Am I deluding myself?

Andy Galpin:

Couple of caveats here. Number one, obviously I have a personal vested interest in cold. I've been around this stuff for a long time. Being involved and being an advisor for XPT and being in this space a long time, I'm a big believer in cold, especially cold water.

Andrew Huberman:

Deliberate cold exposure.

Andy Galpin:

Hundred percent, right? So that being said, I do think getting into an ice bath immediately after a hypertrophy session is getting pretty close to you just shouldn't have done the session. It is detrimental.

Andrew Huberman:

Good to know.

Andy Galpin:

I wouldn't do it. I guess it's the most blunt way to put it. If you are like, "Hey, I'm not super concerned with growing muscle, and I want these other things that come with cold-water immersion." Fine. It's not a zero, it's not taking you backwards. How much does it cut you down? I don't know. We don't know. That'd be a difficult number to come up with. Is it a 1% reduction? No, it's more than that. Is it a hundred? Not even close. I don't know where it lands though. It's enough though for me to go, "In general, best practice is don't get in the ice immediately after a workout."

Andrew Huberman:

How long should I wait?

Andy Galpin:

Well, in theory the best answer we could give you would be four hours. Because of what we talked about earlier today of going, okay, immediately you've got this signaling cascade that takes seconds. You've got gene expression that's happening in this rough four-hour window. After the genes have gone off and now you're just going through the protein synthesis process, the signal's already there and it's gone back down to baseline. So then reintroducing or introducing cold here is not going to disrupt that signal. That's very nonscientifically founded, because we don't know at this point at all. What is very clear though is if you get off your workout and go right into the ice, it's probably 10% attenuation of growth. I don't know, maybe more? Depends on the person. Some people, if you look at the individual data, it's pretty bad. It's enough to where it's like, "That's a really big deal." The benefits of the ice, I don't think now, outweigh the benefits of hypertrophy training.

Andrew Huberman:

What about cold showers?

Andy Galpin:

I don't think cold showers are going to do much. If you've been in both, you know that this is like we're not playing the same game here.

Andrew Huberman:

Right. An ice bath, or true cold-water immersion up to the neck with limbs in, for one to five minutes is a completely different stimulus than in the cold shower.

Andy Galpin:

Especially also compared to similar, like cryo. Right? It's not even the same thing here. So in general I would say don't do the cold shower, I don't really care. Can you work it out so you don't do them at the same time? That would be my hope, right? I would actually prefer you do the cold before, if you really had to do it.

Andrew Huberman:

Certainly will wake you up, get that adrenaline burst.

Andy Galpin:

No, we've played with that actually years ago doing that. There's actually some fun stuff you can do with the endurance piece with cold stuff, but it is totally not feasible for most people because you're getting water everywhere, then go jump on your bike and just get shit, and it's just a giant mess. It's fun. But yeah, I would say walk away from it, if you can. That's actually where I stand based on the data.

Andy Galpin:

Based on my intuition and experience, I don't think it's a good thing to do. Now having said that, that's mostly concerned with maximizing hypertrophy. Strength is not as clear. There are some data to show it actually blocks strength adaptations, but because of what we talked about earlier, the mechanisms and the drivers are different, and so I don't think it's as big a concern for strength development, though I would still generally say if you can get away with staying out of the ice immediately after the workout, and you can at least wait a few hours, that's the better approach. Less concerned with strength, more concerned with hypertrophy, in terms of interference effect. If you can do it on off-days, or before, or any other time, that's the place to land.

Andrew Huberman:

That's generally when I try to do it.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

I was just kind of throwing out an extreme case because I get asked that question a lot. What about the use of ice bath or cold-water immersion, or cold shower after endurance training?

Andy Galpin:

Okay, so a couple of interesting things here. You mentioned we don't have a tremendous amount of data on cold-water immersion overall. So a lot of this is moving. There have been some papers to show that cold-water immersion can actually enhance mitochondrial biogenesis, and actually, even for endurance stuff, it's been shown to cause improvement and endurance adaptations relative to not. It's not enough for me to be truly confident in that statement yet. I would like to see that repeated. Not that I have a problem with the paper or the methodology that they use in that particular study, but this is a weird thing. So I want to see this repeated more often. So I have less concern with doing it immediately post endurance because you could even argue that there may be some benefit. I don't think you need to go out of your way to try to make sure you get ice immediately afterwards and thinking you're going to get some massive adaptation.

Andy Galpin:

We use ice a decent amount when I can get athletes to do it. But this context is different. Number one, when we're in camp and we've got a world title fight coming up, or something else, we've just pitched at a major league baseball game, I am not concerned about hypertrophy. I am not even concerned about strength development. I am now pushing towards recovery. There's a paradigm that I think is important with all of these things to understand, which is, are you pushing for optimization or adaptation? When you are pushing for adaptation, you don't want to block the signal for adaptation. This means less recovery. You're not going to feel as good, and you probably should be hedging towards stress. When you're pushing for optimization, it's the opposite. So if I'm in season and I had a pitcher just throw 125 pitches, I'm not trying to cause adaptation.

Andy Galpin:

I'm trying to recover as quickly as possible, because four days from now, we got to do this again. And I got to do this across 162 games. You're going to play five days in a PGA golf tournament, and you're going to have to do it again every week for a bunch of weeks in a row. I need recovery as fast as I possibly can. So if I'm blunting adaptation, fine. I'm not actually trying to do something. I'm trying to optimize. If you spend all of your time in one of those two areas, you're going to have problems. So you need to be judicious about thinking, "Is this a point in my life or training cycle that I want to cause adaptations? Or am I trying to optimize?" You spend too much time in one of the other ones, again, you're going to have problems. So that's generally how I will treat the ice for all those adaptations.

Andrew Huberman:

What about heat?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

And I'll frame this question differently, because I'm sure there are a number of ways in which heat can short-circuit all sorts of things. I mean, heat, in excess can kill you.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

It can shut down fertility. In excess, it can do all sorts of things. But it can also increase growth hormone, increase vasodilation, improve one's ability to sweat, which can be very beneficial in a number of contexts.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

For the typical 75% of people, 75% of the time, when do you think heat is most useful? And here I'm referring to dry sauna or wet sauna.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm not specifically talking about infrared sauna because the data there are a little unclear to me. My sense with infrared saunas is they don't go hot enough for my particular taste.

Andy Galpin:

You and I have a similar taste there.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay, yeah.

Andy Galpin:

If we're not crushing 200 past I'm not interested.

Andrew Huberman:

Right, and my sense about infrared sauna, and maybe I haven't seen the data, is that a lot of people like it because the way they look in the infrared sauna, it feels cool. It feels like you're doing something unusual. Now, infrared lights are beneficial for other reasons, actually, for mitochondrial health in the retinas.

Andy Galpin:

Sure.

Andrew Huberman:

The good data. But infrared sauna, to me that never goes hot enough. So I'm talking about 200 or hotter, maybe a 180 or 220, obviously do what's safe, folks, and heed all the warnings about pregnant people not going into saunas, et cetera.

Andy Galpin:

I assume you're lumping in hot-water immersion as safe.

Andrew Huberman:

Hot-water immersion. So hot baths, hot sauna. When do you think most people could leverage sauna or hot baths to benefit their training and fitness and health?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. Okay. I have a handful of things to say about this topic. One of them is you never have a hard time convincing people to get hot. Everyone feels good, like "Yeah, getting a hot bath. Can you take more hot showers?" Sure, no problem there. There are a handful of studies that have looked at this immediately post, and it seems to even augment hypertrophy.

Andrew Huberman:

So after hypertrophy training, getting in the sauna for 20 minutes?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, whatever it needs to be. We don't have a good titration. What's the number, minutes-wise? We don't have a temperature titration.

Andrew Huberman:

Hot shower would be a second. That would be a weak second best?

Andy Galpin:

I would say it's a very weak second.

Andrew Huberman:

To like a hot bath.

Andy Galpin:

Maybe. I think a hot bath is probably a lot closer to what you're looking for. It actually kind of goes back to our initial conversations. Theoretically you're just going to aid in blood flow, so you're going to put more nutrients in, more waste product out, metabolic stress, all that stuff is going through. So that's the thought anyways. We are far from knowing.

Andrew Huberman:

Makes sense.

Andy Galpin:

It's plausible, right? Absolutely plausible. And something people will do, feels good. Let's say with cold and hot, I want to caution you against a couple of things. This is true across all physiology, but you need to be really careful about moving percentages from molecular to outcome. Very careful. So for example, it's easy to see a paper that says, "Okay, we put you in a hot bath or something and we saw growth hormone increase 300%." That is not going to result in 300% increase in muscle size, right? In fact 300% might result in absolutely no change in physical size. And the reason I'm saying this is because there's a lot of people in this space that will misapply the mechanisms. And they'll grossly overestimate what these things can do, and what they do do, because they'll find something like that. You know this, you've done enough cellular work too.

Andy Galpin:

In the lab, If I see mTOR doubled, I think, "Shit, it didn't work." I need to see a 10x increase before I know it's even physiologically relevant. So reading that paper, reading someone's social media post, and you're like, "Wow, it increased mTOR 38%." I'm like, "Well, that didn't work." And you're like, "Wow, that's huge." I'm like, "That's not 38% increase in muscle size." So that's a very important point I want to make because I'm going to talk about the benefits here in a second, but I don't want people to be fooled into thinking that this is some crazy miracle. The same thing with the sauna. In terms of general health outcomes, it is clearly a beneficial thing. This is a really good idea to get hot a lot. It is not a substitute for exercise though. It's a very important distinction. If the options are nothing, or sauna, get in the sauna. Really good idea. If the exchanges is though, like "I don't need to work out because I did the sauna." Bad. This is not a winning solution.

Andrew Huberman:

You and I know some maniacs that actually work out in the sauna.

Andy Galpin:

We do. Kind of not far away.

Andrew Huberman:

I don't necessarily recommend that. That actually would probably kill a large number of people. But it can be worked up to.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Certainly.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. So every time I talk about that I flag that because it's just too easy to hear that and go, "Well, I think Dr. Huberman said if I just get in the sauna I don't have to work out." No. Those words have never come out of his mouth.

Andrew Huberman:

I definitely didn't say that. And I'm definitely not working out in the sauna. If I'm in the sauna, I'm either sitting or I'm lying down. And I'm trying to make it through. I tend to do three 20-minute bouts across the entire week. So I aim for 60 minutes per week of heat exposure, which is not a ton.

Andy Galpin:

I would be lying if I said I've never worked out in the sauna.

Andrew Huberman:

So you're one of those.

Andy Galpin:

I love it.

Andrew Huberman:

People will do air squats, they'll bring the Airdyne bike in there. I look at the sauna as kind of a time to get lazy and sweat.

Andy Galpin:

Totally fine. Going back to your original question. So potential, to a plausible aid. We need to see more research on that to really get handle on whether to put this in practice. I think if you try it, very little harm. I struggle to see a downside. If you make sure your hydration's on point, right? 'Cause now you got to factor in the fact you just kicked out two or three pounds. If you're you at 200-plus pounds, I assume, or roughly, if you're in the sauna for 20 minutes, I would imagine you can do two or three pounds.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah usually, I hover somewhere around like 225 and I drink a 32-ounce water.

Andy Galpin:

Right.

Andrew Huberman:

With an electrolyte solution that's pretty high in salt afterwards, and sometimes during. And sometimes after that. If I do it late in the evening, I'll go to sleep and I'll wake up in the middle of the night.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Just feeling so parched. It's amazing how much water one loses in the sauna.

Andy Galpin:

Like a normal sweat rate for someone 225 pounds, especially for 20 minutes in a sauna. I would absolutely expect you to do three pounds, easy.

Andrew Huberman:

So I should be drinking more, probably even more water.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, you're probably half the water that you need to get.

Andrew Huberman:

And you mentioned the possible benefits of doing it after strength hypertrophy training, which make sense for plausible mechanistic reasons, with no official data there yet. What about after endurance training? Assuming somebody hydrates well enough and they're not overheated from their endurance work, could also be of benefit.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Wow. So more and more what I'm thinking the framework here is in an ideal world, one would train, and then do sauna, or heat exposure of some kind. Endurance training or strength hypertrophy training and then do sauna and then do cold exposure on off days or at least four hours away from any kind of training. Or if you had to do it close to training, doing it before training.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, I love cold in the morning. We've actually run this experiment on professional athletes, but we do enough tracking with things like HRV, which is a global metric of overall fatigue. And you probably talked about that before, there are problems with it, but it gives a rough idea of overall fatigue. HRV in general, higher the score the better. So a low HRV is fatigue, right? Well if you wake up and take your HRV in the morning and then you get into ice. What's going to happen is you're going to see that number plummet, the second you get out that's going to fall off the earth.

Andy Galpin:

Which means roughly you've moved into a sympathetic place. Surprisingly, if you get in 30-degree water, you're going to go very sympathetic very quickly. However, if you continue to watch your HRV for 30, 60, 90 and up to two to three hours post, you will generally see an improved HRV score relative to where you started. So it's back to this hormetic stressor. A really cold, shocking exposure will be a net result of you being more relaxed throughout the day, in general. And we've seen that now, very consistently across years with athletes. So I think it's a great way to start your day. You won't need nearly as much coffee after spending three minutes in 30-degree water.

Andrew Huberman:

Thirty degrees is pretty darn cold. I was in the ocean this morning for about three minutes. I didn't bring a thermometer, but it felt like somewhere in the low 50s.

Andy Galpin:

But 50 and moving is really cold.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

Water's moving.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

Right, that's really cold.

Andrew Huberman:

That's right. The thermal layer that surrounds you when you sit still in cold-water immersion. I'm encouraging people now if they really ... It was a joke that people like to look real stoic and tough when they're in there. They're just grinding through it with no pain at all. But the stillness is actually reducing the stimulus. If they sift around a little bit, you break up that thermal layer, that's where the real action is.

Andy Galpin:

We've joked about this for years. Do 50 degrees with a whirlpool jet on. Now I'm impressed. Because that is hard. You sit in 35 degrees for three minutes. But with XPT I've seen, I can't even tell you how many hundreds of people, from all walks of life, of all ages that we've been able to get in 30-some-degree water for three minutes. Fifty degrees with a whirlpool going, that number gets very small.

Andrew Huberman:

And if you don't have access to a whirlpool, this should be reassuring to you. Some people say, "I don't have access to ice." And ice can actually get pretty expensive if you're doing a $50 ice bath every day.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah it's a pain, ice.

Andrew Huberman:

So you can fill your bathtub with cool to cold water, get in, but just make sure that you keep sifting your limbs and it's chilly.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

And the studies on the very now well-established increases in dopamine and epinephrine that occur in cold-water exposure were actually done at an hour in 60 degrees Fahrenheit. And so you don't necessarily need it ice cold or an ice bath. But immersion is really better than the cold shower. The cold shower is kind of the espresso shot version.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, yep. That's sort of funny because if you look at most of those initial studies and you think, "Man, how did they get people to sign up, to spend 45 minutes in 55-degree water?" 55 degrees is cold, even if it's not moving. And then they're going to not spend five minutes in it, they're going to go an hour. And if you've ever done ice baths at that temperature, you know that like after a few minutes it's not that bad. But man, that's a protocol.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, it's kind of a cold endurance protocol. 'Cause it's one thing to get in for one minute to three minutes and to know you're getting out, you could sing a song, you could do anything to distract yourself, but 45 minutes to an hour is intense. I don't think they paid the subjects. But anyway, that study was done.

Andy Galpin:

[inaudible 02:48:46].

Andrew Huberman:

I forget where it was done. But anyway, they were hardy subjects. I want to talk a bit about overtraining and gauging recovery.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

So there are a couple methods that I've heard about and that I use, based on some data that I've seen, but mainly discussions with really informed people like yourself, Brian Mackenzie, Kelly Starrett and others. The two that I'm aware of for gauging recovery of the nervous system and kind of systemic recovery are grip strength, especially grip strength on waking in the morning.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

And the so-called carbon dioxide tolerance test. The ability to do a long controlled exhale after a few rhythmic deep breaths. Which I'm assuming taps into both one's ability to mechanically control the diaphragm, but also how well one is regulating carbon dioxide. First question is, is this stuff fiction, fact or a combination of kind of "anecdata," as I call it? Are there any peer-reviewed published data? Is your lab working on these things, and am I deluding myself using these tools or are they useful?

Andy Galpin:

It's not fiction at all. With CO2 tolerance, there's less published data. We've run a study in our lab looking at the associations between the CO2 tolerance and what we call trait and state anxiety. And those are in the publication process is what I'll say.

Andrew Huberman:

Great.

Andy Galpin:

So you can't really talk about that stuff, as you know, until it's out. But in general I'd say there's a reason I'm still doing it. I'll just leave it at that.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, well assuming it's not a clinical trial, I think sharing preliminary findings is fine, as long as we highlight them as preliminary. I'm not a reviewer, but I look forward to reading the paper.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah but scientifically, ethically, you need to be careful about telling people results before you've gone through that process.

Andrew Huberman:

Which is why I'm flagging this as "these results are not yet passed through the peer-review process." So you're hearing about it prior to peer review.

Andy Galpin:

Having said that, there's enough in that field. I'm not the first one into that field, and so I'm very confident that that's a real thing. In terms of actual tracking recovery, the big picture is this: when we run through a full analysis, when we have an athlete go through our biomolecular athlete program, we're going to run and we're going to look at three major categories. Category one are what we call visible stressors. And then we have hidden stressors, and then we have recovery capacity. Anytime the total stress load outpaces recovery capacity, you're either going backwards in your physical ability or you're reducing adaptability. Now you have levers to pull here; you can reduce stress intake or you can increase recovery capacity. What we want in an ideal situation is to be able to implement the most stress possible because that's the driver of adaptation. Recover from that.

Andy Galpin:

Now we get the most adaptation, and adaptation being simply a change. Whatever change you want it to be, that's our gold standard. It's pie in the eye. Some people have endogenous differences, they just recover better, they don't. There are genetic factors, but let's talk about the ones that are manipulatable. If we go to the stress side of it, you want the throttle to be pushed as far down on the ones you want stress from and as far off of the ones you don't want stress, so that the adaptation comes in the exact area you want, and you're not burning gas in something you don't care about, because you're just taking that total stress bucket too high. Recovery capacity over there. So here's how you can do that. You can run some analytics and measure what we do with everyone. Do these very comprehensive breakdowns to figure out what's that physiology look like, hidden and visible, and then what's the recovery capacity.

Andy Galpin:

Once we have that blueprint, we can now figure out what are the two or three things we need to track that are these indicators of what we call performance anchors. So an anchor is something that kind of drags behind you or below you, that slows you down. The analogy being, let's say we're going down one of these amazing canyon roads, and I won't say which canyon we're in. So you can stay hidden here. And your car's going down at a certain velocity, and you want to go faster. Most people's first impulse is to hit the gas, the accelerator. We want to push. Well that's fine, but if your foot is on the brake and you push the accelerator, you might go a little bit faster, but number one, you're wasting a lot of literal gas to go a little bit faster. And two, you're burning your engine, you're going to blow.

Andy Galpin:

The easier solution is just take your foot off the brake, you're going to go faster by just stopping yourself. Then if that's not fast enough, we can hit the accelerator. Everyone wants to just push down, more stimulus, more optimization. Bing, bing, bing, bing here. Our first analytics are, like "Where are these performance anchors? What's dragging you back?" What's putting down the brake? I want to move those two or three things out of the way, and now let's see how far you get. Look at that. Your recovery capacity has gone way up. Your adaptations are happening faster now.

Andy Galpin:

Or we can do more work because you're recovering quicker. So we're trying to figure out in those buckets, and we have a whole host of things that we measure, biomarkers and surveys and everything else that we go through, to find out what's there. So after we've done that, now we're just going to track a few of those recovery markers along the way to figure out what's globally happening. So that could mean grip strength. I have some folks who are going to test grip strength daily. Others, we're going to look at HRV or combinations. We may look at performance metrics, like a force plate. So you're going to do a vertical jump every single day, and we're going to see where that's at. We've used the tap test before, which is how many times you can tap your fingers as fast as possible. It's a rough indicator of central nervous system.

Andrew Huberman:

In say a one-minute interval.

Andy Galpin:

Exactly. And there's apps you can do on this. You tap as fingers as fast as you can and it's going to say, "Hey, you did 60 taps today and your average is 75."

Andrew Huberman:

I like that because it taps into, huh, no pun intended, upper motor neuron capacity.

Andy Galpin:

Hundred percent.

Andrew Huberman:

Because a lot of things like grip strength, obviously I have to send the deliberate signal to my hand to grip, but at some point the lower motor neurons are going to be taking over the majority of the work. Like the signal is probably one and done. Whereas the tapping is going to be repetitive sending of signals from upper motor neurons.

Andy Galpin:

So some of the athletes I work with, we track blood every day. We track urine every day. We track, ideally, a ...

Andy Galpin:

...Blood every day. We track urine every day. We track ideally a combination of subjective and objective measures. Everything from "How did you feel last night," to environmental sensors of their bedroom, full PSGs going on running actual sleep diagnostics, not Oura Ring, nothing against Oura, but like full analytics. And some of them it's as simple as, "How do you feel today and what was your vertical jump," right?

Andy Galpin:

So we're going to put people in a position to succeed, and we're going to figure out what's the lever that they need to pull, as well as what's their aptitude, what sport are they in, what can we realistically get away with? And some of them will take machines with them, and we'll do blood every day and urine and all kinds of stuff. And some of them it's a lot lower.

PART 5 OF 6 ENDS [02:55:04]

Andrew Huberman:

For myself, I'm not ... as I mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of devices. I'm trying to wear the wristwatch, I tend to go off feel, which ... it's not the ideal objective way to gauge things. But part of my reasoning for this is my colleague from the Psychology Department, Dr. Alia Crum, has done some studies where they've deliberately given people false feedback about their sleep. So told people, "You didn't sleep very well," or they've told people, "You slept really well." And performance can be driven in the expected direction based on feedback, independent of how well people slept or didn't sleep.

Andrew Huberman:

Now that doesn't mean you can take someone that only slept two hours or was up every 30 seconds because of apnea and tell them they slept great, and they're going to perform great cognitive tasks. But you can take someone who slept very well, tell them that their recovery quotient wasn't very good, and their output is going to be worse. And that's my concern about a lot of devices out there. Not to name specific devices, but it's still unclear to the general public what the specific algorithms are to generate these recovery scores, right?

Andrew Huberman:

And so many of the things that reportedly track sleep aren't tracking sleep, they're tracking heart rate and breathing, which are correlates of sleep depth, but that's different. And again, I'm not knocking those. I think the sleep trackers, if nothing else, have provided a forum whereby people are very conscious of getting good sleep. It's sort of like knowing the total caloric intake of your food, people go, "Wow, I'm actually eating a lot more than I thought."

Andy Galpin:

Calibration.

Andrew Huberman:

Or less in some cases. But often the case is that it's more, so I think for the typical person, I'm wondering whether or not ... like myself, because I'm not a competitive athlete or certainly not a professional athlete. Competitive with myself, I suppose, but no one else. Morning pulse rate, I tend to take when I'm, on waking, if I wake out of a really stressful dream, I might relax a little bit and then just take my pulse rate, kind of get a range and see if it's spiking for whatever reason. I don't tend to measure grip strength, although I've heard you can just use a classic scale.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Old fashioned scale with the needle, now old fashioned, or some other more technical device is probably good if there's a low-cost one.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, they're all low cost.

Andrew Huberman:

And then the carbon dioxide tolerance test. So we haven't really talked about that in specific ways. My understanding of it is it's four deep, slow breaths, in through the nose, out through the nose, and then a big inhale, as max exhale, and then timed duration of exhale through the nose, and then stopping the stopwatch at the point where lungs are empty, not necessarily as long as one could hold their breath. Did I get that right?

Andy Galpin:

Pretty much.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay. And I guess we should credit you and Brian Mackenzie.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, those guys.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

For sure.

Andrew Huberman:

And the folks under Brian's umbrella for really establishing this as a really good metric. When and how can I use the carbon dioxide tolerance test to gauge recovery, upon waking, post training session?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Would that be a good time?

Andy Galpin:

Number one answer is whatever you do to be consistent. So do it under any good science experiment. Do it under the exact same conditions as you can. That generally means somewhere in the morning, 'cause that's when you're probably going have the most control, most ability going. So yeah, like you would take any HRV or other metric, wake up, get under control, get stabilized, take your metric.

Andrew Huberman:

Got it.

Andy Galpin:

Going to be pretty good.

Andrew Huberman:

Got it. Sodium bicarb — baking soda. Rumor has it and data has it that it can actually be a pretty effective training tool.

Andy Galpin:

Very effective.

Andrew Huberman:

Could you explain a little bit of about how it works and how one might explore using sodium bicarb to enhance training output in a couple of different contexts?

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, so there's a handful of these ubiquitously effective supplements for performance. Sodium bicarbonate is one of them. And it's a very ingenious idea because it's so simple. Effectively, muscle contraction happens because enzymatic function occurs within a fairly specific pH range. So if it gets extremely acidic, it doesn't like it. And so whether you're running through aerobic glycolysis or anaerobic or anything else, all these things require, even ATP hydrolysis requires ATPA, and enzyme has, the enzymes don't function well outside of this fairly special range.

Andy Galpin:

So what happens is generally fatigue, the sensations of fatigue are actually caused by some signal that, hey, we're starting to run on a pH, or we're getting in the wrong range. You're not out of gas usually, you're not too low on oxygen, you're not running low on muscle glycogen yet. You're typically going to see sign or feel signals of fatigue way prior to that, mostly being pH issues. That being said, what if we could regulate pH better — enter bicarbonate. So, without going too far into metabolism, effectively what happens is this, you take an inhale and you're mostly breathing in oxygen, O2; when you exhale, you're breathing out CO2.

Andy Galpin:

So the difference is you've gained a carbon somehow. Well, all of your carbohydrates in your body come in the form of long carbon chains. In fact, that's what a carbohydrate means. It is a one-carbon molecule that has one water molecule attached. It's a carbon that has been hydrated. In the case of glucose, blood sugar, it's a six-carbon molecule. In terms of fat, which are the only two places you're going to get most of your cellular energy, carbohydrates into fat. That is also a big, long block and chain of carbons. So whether you're getting your energy from fat or carbohydrate, you're going to split those atoms.

Andy Galpin:

So in other words, you've got six carbons attached to each other. And in this part of chemistry, it's exergonic. So when you break that carbon bond — so break one of those carbons off from the other — that's going to release energy. Just like if you had a pencil in here and I snapped it, and you go, "bang," and, "pop." I broke the bonds that were connecting that graphite, the next piece of graphite, and that released energy 'cause I put energy into the system, et cetera.

Andy Galpin:

Okay. As a result though, we've now had say five or six carbons chained together. We broke one off the end, which is not how it works, but making the point. And now you have one free-floating carbon, use that energy release to then go make ATP to then go make your muscles contract. But now you've got carbon floating around, you can associate free-floating carbon with being at a high acidic level. It's not going to happen. The only way that you're going to go through this process is if your body says, "Do we have an oxygen molecule available that we can bind this to immediately?" Yes we do.

Andy Galpin:

That carbon attaches to that oxygen molecule. You can't just put CO2 in the blood because of what we just talked about. So you're going to bind it through this bicarbonate process. It's going to go through your blood, it's going to go into the lungs, it's going to go back into its carbon dioxide molecule, it's going to trans, go through the alveoli into the lungs, and you're going to exhale. So you went from carbon to this bicarbonate system back into carbon exhale. So inhaled O2, plants go the opposite by the way. So they're going to breathe in the CO2, they're going to cleave off that carbon, stack those carbons together, and that's how they get larger. In your blood, those six-carbon chains are called glucose.

Andy Galpin:

If we store that in your muscle, we call it glycogens. We take a bunch of glucose and stack it together in a plant, we call that starch. That's effectively what it is. So you took a bunch of carbon from the atmosphere, stuck it all together, and that's a starch. If you want to do it in the form of fruit, we take that starch from the ground, you put it up through the tree, go all the way up to the top, put it into the flower, break it up into these big, huge chunks of starch into little forms called fructose or glucose. That's why fruit has fructose in it. And that's why tubers and stuff have starch in them. Basically starch in an animal is glucose glycogenesis.

Andy Galpin:

Okay. All that to say if that's happening, and we know that a byproduct specifically of anaerobic glycolysis, meaning the breakdown of carbohydrates for fuel, typically in a very fast pace with low oxygen availability. The downside of that equation is acid production. We know that's a problem, 'cause I started the conversation off there intentionally. So what if we could reduce the acid buildup, and you know how pH kind of works; I went in kind of double negatives there. You don't want too much acid buildup. Then could we prolong and sustain energy in a more effective pace, especially in this anaerobic interval kind of environment. And again, that's important because in those things, failure is not a result of running out of fuel or oxygen. It's a result of fatigue building up way too quickly.

Andrew Huberman:

Is that also true for resistance training? There's maybe more of the creatine phosphate system.

Andy Galpin:

That can be an issue. It could simply be an issue of force production. You just don't have enough force. You're not out of energy, you just can't muster enough force. You do enough reps, then it's going to be an issue there. Creatine phosphate would be the big winner, depending. So to come back a little bit to the beginning, and then I'll ... l'm circling this all together intentionally. All right. Well, the way that we produce energy is going to be in two primary categories, anaerobic and aerobic. Aerobic meaning with oxygen, anaerobic meaning without. In terms of muscle contraction, you're pretty much talking about carbohydrates or fat.

Andy Galpin:

Now fat is going to be exclusively aerobic, meaning I'm going to use fat for the entire body, roughly equally. So you're doing a sprint up a hill and your hamstrings or your glutes or your quads are on fire, you're not just going to use the fat that's directly in those hamstrings. You're going to lose it from the entire body. It has to go through lipolysis, so it's in this stored form, in adipose tissue. It's got to get broken down, put into blood. Blood's going to have to go through your body, get taken up in a muscle, taken up through muscle into the mitochondria. Then we're going to have to go through this process called beta-oxidation.

Andy Galpin:

So remember, carbohydrates, and glucose especially is a six-carbon molecule. Fat, if it's in the form of a try glyceride, it is a three-carbon glycerol backbone. And three — try; one, two, three — fatty acids, three-carbon backbone. And those fatty acids are just big, long chains of carbon. That's all it is, right? So we're going to break that thing down, put it in the blood, move it up, move it into our mitochondria. You can't walk those things across the mitochondria while they're too big. So what you have to do is cleave them off into little chunks, and it turns out we break them off into two-carbon chunks. So we call it beta as in two. Move those into mitochondria that can go through this little thing called Krebs cycle or tricylic acid cycle. And you kick out a bunch of energy out of that, you add two carbons.

Andy Galpin:

So as a result of that process, you're going to generate two carbon dioxides. But remember, you can only go through that process if oxygen is available because you have to be able to place those carbons onto something or acid gets up way too high, too fast. This is one of the reasons why fat is a nice fuel source, but it's very slow. It's takes physical time to move from the back of your shoulder into your blood down your hamstring, uptake, uptake, uptake. In addition, it's required oxygen availability. If you need energy faster, you simply don't have the time to bring in the oxygen, transport it through, go through capillaries, exchange through tissue, et cetera. Carbohydrate, on the other hand, is going to be stored locally in the exercising muscle cell and specifically in the cytoplasm.

Andrew Huberman:

As glycogen.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah, as glycogen in the store there. So what's going to happen, initially, your initial demands for exercise or for fuel are going to come from the glycogen stored in the muscle fiber itself. It's just going to break right there. And you're going to be off to the races. So you have the six-carbon molecule, you're going to break it into two separate three-carbon molecules. Okay, boom, that breaking provides you a tiny bit of energy, very small, but some. Now you're going to take those two three-carbon molecules, and you want to be able to oxidize them because that's your only next step. But in order to do that, you got to go those into mitochondria, so you got to break one of those molecules off, so then you'll be back to your two-carbon molecule just like you did with fat, that's going to go into mitochondria, and then it's going to go through the exact same Krebs cycle, two carbons, et cetera.

Andy Galpin:

But hold on, if you don't have sufficient oxygen or sufficient mitochondria availability and you're stuck at that two three-carbon place, what the ... do you do? You have problems, right? Now we have to say okay, wait a minute. We have a three-carbon molecule, and we have a bunch of this acid buildup. Now acid functionally is hydrogen, that's what — potential hydrogen is what pH stands for. So, if hydrogen is building up as a byproduct of muscular contraction, and then you're having this three-carbon molecule, what a can actually do is grab one of those hydrogens. And those three-carbon molecules, by the way, are called pyruvate, pyruvic acid, right? If you take a pyruvic acid and you grab hydrogen, put it on top of it, we now have a different name for it. It's called ...

Andrew Huberman:

Hydrogen Peroxide.

Andy Galpin:

Lactate. Bingo, right? That's what lactate or lactic acid is, right? So we've now built that up. So number one reason why lactate's not causing your fatigue, it's actually preventing it, and that it does a bunch of other really cool stuff. But the point is that system current lasts so long, that gets overwhelmed very quickly. What are you going to do with the rest of this hydrogen? Well if you started off in a normal pH range, you don't have very far to go before you've now gone into that level of too much acidity. If you start off in a more basic — and basic I don't mean simple, I mean chemistry, right? And more alkaline, then that same amount of increase in pH is no longer, now just puts you back in your physiological range. So sodium bicarbonate, whether taken as a cream or a powder or baking soda or anything else can simply put you in a more alkaline state even acutely. So this is something you can take right now before your workout. You're going to delay, what we call delay the progression of fatigue.

Andrew Huberman:

And how would people start to approach this practice? My understanding is you can do this with common store-bought baking soda.

Andy Galpin:

No question.

Andrew Huberman:

There's always a concern about gastric distress.

Andy Galpin:

Oh, boy.

Andrew Huberman:

That it's a very effective laxative, sometimes an unwanted laxative effect. But how would one approach this before? Let's say I'm going to, I'm doing the mile repeats.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

Exercise — mile repeats, a protocol that we talked about earlier. I'm doing that for a few months, and now I want to try the sodium bicarb.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

Of course, I'm well hydrated, hopefully I'm well rested, I'm ready to go. When am I going to drink this sodium bicarb solution? How would I make the solution? Let's say I take 10 ounces of water.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

How much bicarb do I want to ... sodium bicarb ... should I put in there? Can we come up with a ... Is it half a teaspoon? Is it a teaspoon?

Andy Galpin:

Here's all I'm going to tell you. You will thank me by starting lower. You can always go more later.

Andrew Huberman:

So a little pinch.

Andy Galpin:

You cannot go backwards.

Andrew Huberman:

How about I start with a quarter teaspoon.

Andy Galpin:

Fine. Honestly, half is fine.

Andrew Huberman:

Half a teaspoon.

Andy Galpin:

Totally fine.

Andrew Huberman:

Dissolve that, slug that down. I read a study recently that showed that people will hit their, the peak benefits of this at different times, but it's somewhere, if memory serves me correctly, somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes later, so I might want to drink it on the way to the track.

Andy Galpin:

It can be as low as 20.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay. So maybe as I get to the tracks and I'm going to do some warm up with some walk and jogging.

Andy Galpin:

I say 45 minutes.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay.

Andy Galpin:

That's just a very rough standard. But yeah, you're right. It is individualized, and you probably want to play with that a little bit, if not just somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to an hour.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay. And then, the perceived and real fatigue. If done correctly, the perceived and real fatigue ought to be reduced.

Andy Galpin:

Yes.

Andrew Huberman:

I can do more work without feeling exhausted. Will I feel less of a lactate burn, done in air quotes, for those listening. I realize that's a very crude way to describe a complex physiological process.

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

Fantastic. Can sodium bicarb be used repeatedly for longer-duration training?

Andy Galpin:

Yep.

Andrew Huberman:

And if I were going to use it with weight training for whatever reason, maybe I'm doing circuit-type training, or I'm doing the superset-type strength training that you talked about before — push pull, push pull — where it's a little bit more cardiovascular lead demanding, then maybe I'd sip that throughout the workout, make sure there's a bathroom nearby, it sounds like, because I do, I am aware that many people get pretty serious gastric distress.

Andy Galpin:

It can happen very quickly.

Andrew Huberman:

Okay. Great. Well it sounds like an amazing training tool. I really appreciate you sharing, cause I think it's one that doesn't get a lot of airtime these days because it's been around, but sounds like it has some pretty impressive effects.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. You know, what's sort of funny about that is, I mean I get it, pop culture is what it is. But still to this day, if you want to talk about your most effective general health slash performance supplementation, it's the same, three to four to five. It's because they work really well.

Andrew Huberman:

Without going into the chemistry of each one in the practice, each one. Because I definitely want to get you back to talk about diet nutrition and supplementation-

Andy Galpin:

Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

-at some point. But I think we need a full couple of hours to get that right, at least. If you, as a teaser, would you mind just listing off the other supplements that you have found are very effective for many people? So sodium bicarb, baking soda, is one, what are some of the other ones?

Andy Galpin:

Yep. We'll go kind of a reverse order. Beta-alanine is another very classically effective one. Similar idea as sodium bicarbonate, so it's going to ... Beta-alanine's going to come in, it's going to be converted and stored as what's called carnosine in the muscle, and carnosine is an intracellular buffer. So in other words, it's just going to delay the buildup of acid. So, fatigue blocker, if you will. So, very effective, very cheap, very safe, well studied.

Andy Galpin:

The top one though of all of them by far that has an incredibly strong safety profile. It is a cheap, it is simple form to get, has an important magnitude of effect and is effective across multiple domains of physical health and performance. And it is because of that it is my crown jewel. It is in my opinion, without questioning, the Michael Jordan of all supplementation. And that's creatine; it affects so many things.

Andy Galpin:

We typically think about it as it's muscle stuff. You, you've talked kind of quickly ... we're talking about the creatine phosphate system, but we have to realize the mass majority of research on creatine phosphate is not in sport performance and has not been for 20 years. It's in clinical and it has everything from effects on the neurological system to there have been associations to mental health and depression. And to be very clear, I am certainly not saying you can take creatine and cure anything. And I'm not saying it's going to stop you from depression or anything, but I'm saying there's a lot of research in these areas, and there's a reason people are doing it.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, I completely agree. And if you're willing, I'd love to have you back for us to do a discussion on creatine and the brain or creatine and the nervous system. That would be a lot of fun, and maybe we can do a kind of journal club in advance of that. For those that don't know what journal club is, where scientists read a bunch of papers and then argue about them, discuss them and try and extract the kind of agreed-upon center of mass, if you will. I think I've long been taking five grams of creatine monohydrate per day, mainly for the cognitive effects. I sense an effect, that's obviously anecdata, but I think there are a lot of data out there as you [inaudible 03:14:46].

Andy Galpin:

There's enough, you're not crazy. There's enough there. And in fact, there's enough mechanism now to understand the metabolic needs. People think ... I'm a muscle guy, so I'm going to think about the metabolism needed to fuel muscle, but we forget cells, immune cells, red blood cells, nerve cells, astrocytes, brain — all this stuff requires energy, and it's all going through metabolism.

Andrew Huberman:

Super interesting. We will do the deep dive on that soon. I have a final question for you. You're involved in a really interesting, I think really cutting-edge project that I first learned about from you. I don't know of anyone else doing anything as forward-thinking, and, frankly, as relevant to the general population because of my interest in people getting better sleep and learning how to do that, avoiding stress and learning how to do that. Tell us a little bit about what I believe is called absolute rest.

Andy Galpin:

Right. So, this is something that we've been playing with behind the scenes for a long time, and this is typically how high-performance stuff works. People want exclusivity. And so this has been built ... effectively what happened is a friend of mine, Cody Burkhart, I don't know if you know Cody, but a fame-

Andrew Huberman:

Down in Texas.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

Andy Galpin:

NASA.

Andrew Huberman:

NASA guy. Yeah, I do know Cody.

Andy Galpin:

Wonderful. Just down the road thinker. Everyone's interested in sleep, right? And for forever I would ... We're using with athletes, but everything available tells you how you're sleeping. Nothing can tell you why you're sleeping that way. And so we got together in Boulder, and then I met some of his former colleagues, computer science folks, Harvard MD and some really impressive tech folks. And we were just thinking about an idea, and we came up with ... and we started to realize the problems. We used First Principle Thinking, it's one of my favorite approaches. If you've not familiar with that, go Google that. That's just a recipe to solve problems, is First Principle Thinking.

Andy Galpin:

And we just started to think about, man, all the sleep tech is there, it's real, I don't need to convince people that they need sleep, everyone's done that. You need high-quality sleep, but how can I provide solutions? And with the people I work with, I can't just tell them your testosterone's down or your sleep's down or recover. I need to be able to be like, "This is down and here's why and here's our solution," that's how our high-performance world works. So, enter absolute rest. This is saying, okay, what are the actual nodes that go into high-effective, high-quality sleep? Number one is psychology.

Andy Galpin:

So, there has to be some sort of screening diagnostic for, "Are you not sleeping because of simply you can't control yourself," and you've done a wonderful job of giving people tools, or, "If you can't quiet your mind before sleep, do this." "If you wake up and you can't go back to sleep, here are a bunch of things." So we have some screens that we can do, and there's some other stuff we can do to analyze this is a psychological issue. Let's say it's not right. You're out of control, and we have different tricks we use and stuff on [inaudible 03:17:40] we talk about, but it's not that.

Andy Galpin:

Okay, is it physiology, which is no. Number two, do we know what your dopamine levels are like? Do we know what your serotonin levels are like? What's melatonin look like? What's this? What's adrenaline? What's cortisol? Cortisol being the primary driver, What is this relationship DHEA? Where are these things at? So we're going to measure all that and track that. We're going to measure that during the day, prior to sleep. We're going to measure that next morning and even sometimes throughout sleep. And we're going to figure out is this a physiology problem. If it is, then we have clear corrections. If not, we're going to go on the next step, which is this possibly a pathology. So you have some sort of sleep disorder.

Andy Galpin:

We're going to run full what's called PSG, so polysomnography, full. The exact same stuff you would get in a sleep clinic. It's a sensor that's going to go on measuring EEG and EOG and we're going to have muscle activation sensors to see if your legs are moving, and everything else is going on, and we're going to get a full diagnostic. And if anyone's ever done this, the amount of sleep issues that are happening in people that they don't even realize is extraordinarily high. So we're going to figure this out. One very quick example, we just did this with a professional athlete, and he was having like 280 roughly of these episodes per night. And to be categorized as an episode, you have to meet these four specific criteria: oxygen saturation, ventilation changes, brain changes, et cetera. And he hit that over 280 times a night.

Andy Galpin:

And what this technology allowed us to do is figure out what position did all these things occur in. Well, in his particular case, most of them were happening was on his back. And so we bought a very simple pillow basically that went on his back, that kept him from sleeping on his back and we saw an 85% reduction in sleep awakeness issues the very first night. Now we did that. Testosterone eventually tripled after three months by just improving sleep. And all we did is move him onto his left to right side. So huge improvements just by understanding where the problem occurred and why it occurred there.

Andy Galpin:

We didn't have to change hardly anything else. He had the basic hygiene stuff down and temperature and all that stuff, and he had his Chilli Pad and all that to keep the thing cool. We couldn't fix it, years by the way, this took us two years of just trying everything. We're like, "Man," and it was just like, "I wish we could get you to sleep better." And I pulled out every trick I knew, and it just was as soon as we built this, then I'm like, "Oh my God, it's all ..." He's not overweight, by the way. He doesn't have any, he's not iron deficient, doesn't have any of these other classical symptoms that are associated with bad sleep. Supplementation, everything ... we've done a thousand protocols. That fixed it overnight.

Andy Galpin:

So if it's not psychology and it's not physiology and it's not pathology, then the last one that people don't have any idea about is environment. And so what you don't realize is we have a box. We can sit right next to your bed. You just plug it in, you don't have to do anything. And it's going to run full environmental scans. So it's going to look at the temperature in your room, it's going to look at the humidity in your room. It's going to look at the volatile organic acids. These are things that are sleeping out from your mattress. It's going to look at particulates in the air and possible allergens and things that are floating around that are closing your nose off, so you can't sleep at night, and now you're mouth breathing. And you've talked a lot, I'm sure, on the previous episodes about why that's bad.

Andy Galpin:

It's going to look at your CO2 cloud. So we've talked, we've already set this point up, right? You're inhaling O2, but then you're exhaling CO2. Well, during the day and when we're conversing, you have quite a bit of force with that acceleration, but at night it's just barely seeping out of your mouth. So what happens is CO2 sends to cloud up and build around your face, and then you end up rebreathing that CO2. And this can cause a large number of sleep problems because you're simply rebreathing, and the panic; whether you fully awake or just kick out of a sleep stage, the CO2 around your face is a big issue. This stuff has all been known, by the way, with the astronauts for a very long time. It's just hasn't translated into the commercial spaces. Of course, it got into our high performer space. So we can measure that as well. And then we can figure out for the most extreme, we can actually come into a bedroom and build an entire sleep-optimization setup and control the entire thing. But for most folks, the minimum we can do is run full diagnostics and check off, is this environmental related, is it pathologies or something else?

Andrew Huberman:

So is this a commercial device that people can eventually access?

Andy Galpin:

It is now.

Andrew Huberman:

So where can people learn more about absolute rest?

Andy Galpin:

Absoluterest dot com.

Andrew Huberman:

Very cool. And just our full disclosure, I wasn't aware that you had done this prior to today, what you'd mentioned. I always like to ask people, scientists or otherwise, I always love to ask you, what are you most excited about lately? And this sounds like an amazing technology.

Andy Galpin:

And just to be really clear, that's not like something we're working on. That's landed.

Andrew Huberman:

That's landed.

Andy Galpin:

We're ready to go.

Andrew Huberman:

Great. Well, and that's one of the things I appreciate about you is that you're willing to sometimes speculate, but you always say it's speculation. But in general, you seem like the kind of guy where if you're going to be public-facing about something, if you're going to make a statement, there's got to be quite a bit behind it. You're not going to allude to the "in 10 years we might be able to do this," or in five years, you're very data-driven kind of guy.

Andy Galpin:

Yeah. Well, the people I work with, we need answers, right? We don't have that timeframe, and we typically have like, "Hey, we start the season in four weeks." So that's just where I'm at.

Andrew Huberman:

Well, as I said, I appreciate that about you, but it is but one of the many things I appreciate. I think the listeners and I can well appreciate, on the basis of today's discussion, what an enormous wealth of information you are, how clear and potently you communicate that information. And also how you can take a huge cloud of information and still distill it into protocols that ought to work for 75% of people, 75% of the time, which is an immensely valuable thing to do. So for me and from the listeners, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the several, now, hours. I lose track of time, which reflects all good things. Several hours to take a break from teaching, take a break from research, take a break from the other important commitments of your life and really share with us all this incredible information. I'm so grateful.

Andy Galpin:

My pleasure, man. I'm glad we finally got to connect. This has been a long time in the making.

Andrew Huberman:

It has. And I'm going to bring the breathing protocols to my training. I'm going to start doing more of the endurance-type and interval-type training. I'm going to start moving when I do heat, I'm going to start moving when I do cold, I might even start throwing some sodium bicarb into, a very small amount of sodium bicarb into some water before I train. And listen, Andy — Professor Andy Galpin — thank you ever so much.

Andy Galpin:

My pleasure.

Andrew Huberman:

Thank you for joining me today for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. If you'd like to learn more about his work and learn further information about exercise science from Dr. Galpin, please find him on Instagram at Dr Andy Galpin. You can also find him on Twitter at the same handle, Dr. Andy Galpin, spelled with one L. And if you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. Please also subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and Apple. And on Apple, you have the opportunity to leave us up to a five-star review.

Andrew Huberman:

If you have questions or comments about the podcast or you have suggestions about future topics or guests that you'd like to see me interview, please put that in the comment section on YouTube. We do read all the comments. In addition, please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning of today's podcast. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you're not already following Huberman Lab on Instagram and Twitter, please do so. There I discuss science and science-based tools, some of which overlap with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information covered on this podcast. Thank you once again for joining me for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

PART 6 OF 6 ENDS [03:25:32]

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