Build Muscle, Great Posture & Resilience to Injury | Jeff Cavaliere

Jeff Cavaliere:
Longevity ultimately is being able to maintain function as you age. Because again, it's not the number of years, but the quality of the years. So all muscles in your body serve a function. You're training these muscles to get stronger, and you're training your balance, and these are all skills that can be learned and improved. They're all trainable. If it's trainable, it's fixable.

Andrew Huberman:
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff Cavaliere is a Master of Science in Physical Therapy and a certified strength and conditioning specialist. He is considered one of the world's foremost experts in training for both men and women to increase the strength and size of their muscles, their overall health, and longevity. Today, we discuss some of the things that are not often discussed and considered the small things, but that are actually the big things, because they allow you to do the big things for your health and fitness and longevity decade after decade after decade, and to do so pain-free and while making continual progress. We also discuss the typical big things, the specific multi-joint exercises and cardio workouts that create the greatest results. Today, you'll learn some simple exercises that will strengthen and protect your back, your shoulders, even improve your foot strength, which most people don't think about, but turns out to be foundational for everything, your pressing and pulling movements, leg training, and your cardio, and that will allow you to live your daily life with vigor and ease at any age. I must say, I'm a longtime fan of Jeff's work, which he's been publishing to YouTube and elsewhere as Athlean-X. As you'll soon realize from today's episode, Jeff is far more than just another fitness trainer. He has deep knowledge of human physiology and kinesiology, and he really understands that everybody's situation and body is different, and thus needs different tools to address and solve their specific problems and to achieve their desired results. I should also mention that Jeff and I went to the legendary Gold's Gym in Venice, California, where he took me through an arm workout, so biceps and triceps and forearms, and he showed me what has become his kind of signature move, which is face pulls, which are essential for improving your posture, for your rear delts, and for general stability of the shoulders. So you can find a link to those workouts in the show note captions. 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, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for today's discussion with Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff Cavaliere, welcome back.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Thank you for having me. This time actually nice to come out to California.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Get a little workout in.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, we have a studio this time. Last time, I think we were in a rented apartment in New York City.

Jeff Cavaliere:
It worked.

Andrew Huberman:
I said it then, I'll say it again, you're the man. I've been watching your videos and following your training advice for many years. I would say Mike Mentzer, Dorian Yates, and you.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's-

Andrew Huberman:
I've merged the principles and-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Very high humbling praise for me, for sure.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, you're 50.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Never touched gear. That's slang for steroids. You're not on TRT. You've never done it.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And you look amazing. I know you're very disciplined with your diet, your training, but you're married, you have two kids, you put in the work all over life, and you're a testament to what's possible if people do things right. So today I want to talk about a number of things, but something that I believe is not discussed enough, which you discuss a lot, and it's just been transformative for me because I also happen to be 50, is we both know that the big things, like doing the regular compound multi-joint lifts regularly, that's all critical. We know the big stuff is critical, and people talk about the big stuff all the time. But you talk about the small stuff that makes the big stuff possible for decade after decade. And I credit you for fixing my back pain. I credit you for the fact that I basically have no pain despite training very hard for more than three decades. So let's talk about the small stuff-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... which is not actually the small stuff. I think of it as the kind of hinges and bolts on the system that allow that system to work. So low back, shoulders, neck, these are the pieces that nobody wants to train, no one wants to think about, no one wants to talk about, so let's start right there. How can we keep our lower back strong and pain-free while also doing things like deadlifts and squats, et cetera?

Jeff Cavaliere:
I'm glad you're talking about all of this. Obviously, it's such music to my ears. But I think the background of being a physical therapist is what set the stage for my focus on these things. Because when I was younger, pre-physical therapy days, I did all the dumb stuff, too, and I did all the things, just the big things, and realized that it wasn't necessarily a path to longevity. But in the immediate and in my 20s, I was literally breaking down then. I had knee pain then. I had back pain then. I had shoulder pain then. So I think people who are in their 20s these days have the luxury of having access to videos like this where they don't just say, "Oh, that's just maybe a hard workout." Now they start to say, "Well, maybe I'm actually doing some damage here. Maybe I do need to pay attention to the smaller things." And when you have enough videos out there that showcase these small things, for instance, you mentioned back pain, we talk about a major cause of back pain not being structural back pain. A lot of the times, the back pain that we suffer from in our lives is not surgical. It doesn't need surgical treatment. It just needs the right addressing of the muscles that contribute to that or how we allow muscles to get tight that shouldn't get tight if we did full range of motion on certain exercises. So in particular, I mentioned the glute medius. And the glute medius is a muscle that Is going to control hip position, hip movement. So if it's controlling the position of our hips, that means it's controlling our pelvis. And if our pelvis is tilted or twisted or forward or backward, obviously the spine is literally adapting to the position of the pelvis beneath it, because it's connected through the sacrum. So how is that not important, right? So all these muscles that connect to the pelvis that change its position are inadvertently going to change the position of the low back, directly the lumbar spine. That is going to likely cause dysfunction down the road if you don't address that. So it is these little tiny muscles and these little tiny exercises. So I made a video years ago about an exercise that you could do to help to loosen up if there was a knot in the glute medius, right, an area of spasm, a localized area of spasm. Because when the spasm's there, you adjust the way you move, right? You're in pain, so you're trying to move around that spasm. Something as simple as a leg raise, down and back while holding down that pressure point on the glute medius, helps to alleviate some of that discomfort and that spasm to the point where you could restore normal motion again, because you're not avoiding pain, and all of a sudden the back pain goes away. There was nothing structurally there. Fine. That's a great video. It helped, I think 50 million people have seen it.

Andrew Huberman:
We'll put a link to it.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
This is the one where people, everyone, you should watch the video. This literally erased my back pain, what I thought was going to require surgery. You lie on your side, one leg is in front of the other, toe down on the ground.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
You put it up and back. Jeff provides a beautiful description of what is essentially a very simple movement, but if you do it properly, the pain evaporates. It's wild. And I thought it was a back issue, but it was a glute medius issue.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. And again, you can feel referred pain anywhere. But what happens next is, great, you solved that area of spasm. Why do we get spasm? Oftentimes it's because we're providing artificial stability to an area of weakness. Because spasm is basically the muscles holding on and saying, "I need to protect this area." And so if the muscles around the low back are protecting that area, there's a reason for it. It's probably because the muscles that are supposed to be stronger are not strong enough. So that doesn't mean that you do this one thing and you're done. Yes, you might have no back pain that day, or it might have relieved that episode, but it means that there's an area of weakness that could benefit from strengthening it. So you come back and you start to do glute medius strengthening. I demonstrate an exercise where you put yourself up against a wall, right, and you stand on the leg outside the wall, furthest away from the wall. And you let yourself drop, just let your hips drop, right? They get lazy. And when they drop like that, the only way you can get them level again is to slide yourself back towards the wall. And that's abduction of the hip that way to get you back to level again. That is the glute medius dysfunction, to get you back to that level position. Well, ironically, every time you lift a foot off the ground to walk, you're getting a pelvis that drops side to side, right? Every time you go in a single leg stance, the pelvis is going to drop a little bit. The people that have less control of that have more of what they call a Trendelenburg gait, where the pelvis rocks side to side as they walk.

Andrew Huberman:
So like, if you were looking at them from-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Behind

Andrew Huberman:
... the back.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Pick your preferred opposite gender folks, and then the butt swinging from side to side.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. It might look good on Instagram, but it's not going to-

Andrew Huberman:
Right

Jeff Cavaliere:
... do good for your back, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So you go back and forth. Well, all that uncontrolled motion starts to wreak havoc, and eventually those muscles start to say, "I got to provide this artificial stability. So what do I do? I spasm." And so if you don't extend the plan beyond the fix, how do you then build that strength up to prevent it from coming back? And so I'm all about not just the fixes, but really about the preventative things you can do to stave this off long term.

Andrew Huberman:
So we'll talk about the structure of a really good basic program. And many people talk about that, sets, reps, splits, et cetera. But let's just assume for a second that somebody listening to this is training their lower body twice a week.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
They're doing compound exercises and some isolation exercises. But they're dealing with some back pain, or they're not. They're in their 20s or 30s, or structurally they're blessed and they're not dealing with it. What are some additional things that we would call small things that make the big things possible for much longer, and also make people stronger at the big things, that people can do? Would you say back hyperextensions? Would you say-

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's where I'd start

Andrew Huberman:
... watch your video on medial, glute medius training. What would be the exercise to insert, and how many times per week to do it, and when?

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's a good question. So yeah, reverse hypers are an amazing exercise. I like doing them because they're very easy to do anywhere. You don't have to have resistance on them. They make a great machine that actually provides resistance, straps over your legs that you can lift additional weight on. But the challenge for most people, remember, they're chronically weak in these areas, so even just the body weight lifting of their own legs is going to be a significant enough challenge to get overload. But you can literally do it on your bed in the morning. You can get up, you lay enough of your torso on top of the bed so that you're not falling off the bed, but you can just have your legs hanging off your bed and your body up on top of the bed, and do a reverse hyper.

Andrew Huberman:
So raising the heels-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Raising the heels up

Andrew Huberman:
... so that they're parallel with the floor.

Jeff Cavaliere:
As level as you can get them. Again, the bed's a little soft, so sometimes you kind of dip down as you're lifting your legs up. But it's sturdy enough that you can get to almost a parallel position to the floor. I like to make sure, we'll talk about this, but the muscles are doing the work and not momentum, right? So you want to hold that contraction briefly at the top to convince yourself that you actually were able to perform the movement. So you get up, hold it for a second. And I think what's important on that too is, people who don't have the strength in their glutes, because it really is a glute weakness issue, not necessarily a low back issue. A lot of times it's weakness in the glutes that's transferring the load To the low back that can't handle it. And people get the symptoms in the back, but it's the weakness somewhere else that's causing that. So I like to focus first and foremost on the glutes, glute max, glute med, just to make sure that they're strong enough. And again, if you test even big-time athletes, we would test their rotational strength of their hips. Some of the strongest athletes, some of the biggest squatters, some of the best lungers, they're lunging over 200 pounds. You put them in position, you try to bend their hip into internal or external rotation of their bent knee, they can't resist it at all. So it just goes to show you that all the squatting, all the big lifts, aren't enough to counteract the smaller muscles. There are different functions. A rotational muscle of the hip is not a sagittal plane muscle of the hip. It has a different function, so they all have to be strengthened. So along that line, we will do the reverse hyper as a good sagittal plane exercise focusing on the glute. When they get to the top and I tell you to contract it, squeeze so you know that it's the glute that's squeezing and doing the work, not that you're arching at the low back, that you're using the muscles that are already overworked in the first place. So get that up there, squeeze, reinforce that it's the glute that did the work. Great exercise. The glute medius, like I said, the hip bump. Super easy exercise. You could do it anywhere against a wall.

Andrew Huberman:
It's the one next to the wall.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Against the wall. You could do it anywhere against the wall. Anything, you can just-

Andrew Huberman:
It is like a butt bump.

Jeff Cavaliere:
It's just a hip bump.

Andrew Huberman:
You basically raise the leg that's closer to the wall, like 90 degrees, outer one you're standing. It's almost like you're trying to slide that hip-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Just slide it up

Andrew Huberman:
... that's along the, that's closer to the wall, up the wall. So it's like, yeah, it's like a kind of like side booty bump to the wall.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But sliding it up.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Yep.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And this is sometimes where you have to invest, and this is the small things, but they're also small investments. A little mini hip band, the little elastic bands. They're just loops, the little FitLoop they're called. Put it around your heels.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Lay on your belly, bend your knees to 90 degrees.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And then just try to open your feet apart.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Spread your feet apart, so now you're strengthening the rotation of the hip. Or hold one steady, let one leg, it's a little hard to show here, but let one leg come a little bit in front of the other, and then try to cross it over the other one, so now you're getting external rotation-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... of that hip. So you're working external rotation against resistance, internal rotation against resistance. Super easy things to do. You can attach a band around your ankle, and then you can do lateral hip swings, but with a component of rotating against the resistance of the band, too. So I'm moving my leg out and rotating out at the same time. How do you do that? Just focus on your toe. If your toe is turning out, your hip is turning out. If your toe is turning in, then your hip is turning in. So you don't have to focus so much on how do I move that, just focus on what the foot is doing, and you turn it. As long as the knee is going with the foot. You're not just spinning the foot. The knee and the foot go together. So there's simple things, and again, you might need a band or a mini band or something to get these smaller muscles more specifically, but it's $10, $15 for a band. It's well worth the investment if you can get rid of these long-term recurrent issues that keep coming back and causing agony every two, three months as a reminder of what you're not doing.

Andrew Huberman:
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Jeff Cavaliere:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... and you put it around your waist, and then you actually have a weight between your legs-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... hanging-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... a couple inches off the floor, and then the goal is to walk-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and it makes you kind of have to kind of monster walk or-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and the idea is to not let the weight swing and hit your feet.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Now, I know that sounds really awkward, but it really works-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because, and I know it works for a number of reasons. And by the way, all this strengthened other lifts for me dramatically.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
I was kind of at a sticking point with a number of lower body lifts and upper body lifts, and it really seems like it helped create a real stability in the lower back glute area. What is that dog leash thing doing? And it's very simple, right? Just tie a weight between your legs-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and then you're trying to walk, but not let it swing.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Why does that work?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Anytime you can take these smaller exercises and bring them a little closer to actual function, I think it's better. It's better carry-over. So, if you're talking about actually being on your feet and walking, that's a step towards function. You're going to be more useful, I think. But what you're doing is, as I mentioned before, every time you pick up a foot off the ground, you're in single-leg stance. So, when you're in single-leg stance, if you're not contracting the glute medius on the side that you're standing on, your pelvis is going to drop. You're going to drop in the side because you're not balanced anymore. You're going to drop towards the up leg. You may not drop if you're consciously trying to stay level because you're firing the glute medius. But for someone that has a weak glute, you just have them stand on that one leg, and you're going to see that pelvis drop. So, when you're doing this test, and you're adding the weight to the equation here, the weight is really to create a pendulum effect, right? Because when you start to move anything, that weight's going to want to go in an exaggerated way. So, what we're trying to reinforce is, okay, can you do this and take these slow steps in these alternating single-leg stance and prevent that weight from shifting so much, i.e., because you're dropping too much, that it would hit or bang into the other leg. So, you have to be able to walk slowly through single-leg stance and not allow enough of a drop by having good contraction and control of the glute medius so that it would minimize the weight itself. It would quiet the motion of the weight itself. So, you're reinforcing, how hard can I keep this thing engaged as I walk? And if you could do this, the faster you could move yourself and still have minimal displacement of the weight, would be a good indicator that, wow, you're really starting to get good control and strength in that glute medius. Another thing I like to do is, we call it a suitcase lunge. Right? So, you do a lunge where you offset the weight on one side. So, you carry it in the... If I'm going to lunge forward, I put it on the opposite leg. Right? Hold it on the opposite side. What that's going to theoretically do is, obviously, when I lunge forward, I'm going to want to fall to the side of the weight. Picture having even like a 50-pound weight or a 60-pound weight in your hand. It's going to want to go that direction. In this lunge position, if I can straighten myself out and keep my torso rigidly in place the whole time, then I can really strengthen that glute medius on the opposite side. And what's cool about that is it's also done in conjunction with a sagittal plane lunge. So, now I'm starting to train in multiple dimensions and planes at one time. So, a lunge in this direction, suitcase carry offset, only one dumbbell, not in the other side, obviously. You're going to get that desire for the body to fall towards the side of the offset weight, and again, that starts to shift the pelvis up. The only thing that will keep it down is by keeping the hip in, abducted, and level, and that pelvis stays level. So, we'll do that with a lot of our athletes and work up to some pretty heavy weights there, too. And again, it is a kill two birds with one stone type exercise because you still get the benefits of the lunge, which I love as an exercise.

Andrew Huberman:
So, let's say somebody is going to do some hip slide up the wall and/or reverse hypers-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... if they're lucky enough to have a gym with a reverse hyper machine, or even a-

Jeff Cavaliere:
It's a hyperextension

Andrew Huberman:
... just a high bench-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... or a hyperextension machine.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Classic hyperextensions.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm. You just go face inward. Or glute ham, I meant.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So, the upper body moves-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and for classic hyper-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... heels go up.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Which I like, too, by the way.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's more direct, low back strengthening.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Which is always good. We can always strengthen our low backs. Those muscles need to be strengthened, but again, I would say more often times, the source of the low back pain is coming from the muscles beneath them that are weak, chronically weak, like the glutes.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. So, reverse hypers, the hip sliding up the wall approach, maybe the dog leash with weight between legs. Doesn't have to be a dog leash, folks, but you get the idea. To try and minimize the hip sway. Should those be done at the end of a lower body workout when the lower back and glutes are partially fatigued or very fatigued? Or done separately at a time when they're really fresh?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Two times. I think you could do them on a dedicated day at a dedicated time. So, I approach my ab training as ab training, and I always keep it separate. I just like to focus on, I'm going to do five to 10 minutes of core strengthening right now, here and now, separate from my workout. Because I don't want it to be an afterthought. I think it should be... It's a key component of what I do to keep a strong core, so I want to focus it, and I don't want to add it to the end of my workout when I'm already mentally checked out. Right? So, I do that. I think when you start to have these issues that require special programming, right, then you should own that special programming because it's yours. It's what you need specifically. Others might need things for their shoulders or for their rotator cuff. But whatever special programming is, do it as a small routine on its own day, at its own time. Or even it could be on a workout day, but a separate time that you just go through as a routine, five minutes to seven minutes, three times a week or so. That's it. If you want to put it on a training day, it's actually not a bad idea to put these smaller muscle exercises or smaller focused exercises after your bigger training, because, A, you're not going to compromise your big training and the goals that you have for For that but you also are pre-fatiguing some of those bigger muscles that are going to want to dominate these small movements anyway. The compensations that you're going to see on these small movements are always going to be the big muscles trying to kick in and do what they've always done, which is take over, and you're trying to get them to not. So if you can pre-fatigue them a little bit prior to doing these small exercises, you're actually setting the smaller muscles up for more success.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, if I could travel back to my teens, and I started lifting when I was 16, and 20s and 30s, I would've started doing all of these things-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... a couple times a week, or even just once a week, even before there was any pain. Because I had the same, I don't know if it's arrogance or just ignorance, that, oh, yeah, pain, that's what old guys talk about.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Like, "I have no pain. I feel fine."

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I think by training a certain way without pain for a very long time, it's almost like the spring is getting compressed, because it means that unless someone has perfect mechanics and they're covering all their bases through other sports and things of that sort, it's almost like the stronger, stronger, stronger you get, you're just setting yourself up for one of these things to go, and in my case, it was this lower back thing, and for some people, it's their shoulder.

Jeff Cavaliere:
When you're young, those things that appear as post-workout soreness even can be masquerading for long-term pain problems and dysfunction down the road.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right? Because again, when we're young, we just feel, "Hey, I'm sore. I had a hard workout yesterday. I'm a little stiff." Again, we get through it, we manage it. It's not that interruptive of our life at that point, so we move on. But I believe that those are many examples of what is potentially happening beneath the surface, that if you continue down that road, that normal workout soreness becomes more chronic joint pain, discomfort, movement limitations. And we also lose range of motion as we get older, so if we're not focusing on actually trying to maintain that, it just starts to pile up, and it's one of those things where you look back, we look back years later and go, "Wow, I can't believe I've lost this much range of motion," or, "I can't believe I've gotten to this state," when it really was just accumulation of many, many of those days of doing things where you weren't paying attention to all the little things. So it doesn't really creep up on anybody. It's like it's happening, and it's happening every day. It's not like you can't intervene. You just have to be aware of what you need to do to intervene.

Andrew Huberman:
You have a post that really humbled me, and people are going to laugh. They're going to be like, "I can't believe you can't do that." Well, now I can do it. I'll explain what it is in a moment. But a longevity test-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Oh, boy

Andrew Huberman:
... that includes test of balance-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... strength, and inner fortitude, and that's the put your shoes and socks on- ... standing on one foot, obviously one foot, then the other.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Not sitting down, but doing that in the morning every day. And I'll tell you, if you're training hard, that lower back's going to ache a little bit-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... when you first-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... first thing in the morning. This is a very cool test, and I force myself to do it now. And I have to say, a lot of mornings, I'm like, "I just want to sit down and put my shoes on."

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah, right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I got this puppy now and he's grabbing my shoelaces- ... which makes it even more dynamic. But in all seriousness, it's a very interesting, very simple test. If you could just explain what it is. Folks, trust me, you want to do this every single day.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So they call it the old man test. It's gender-neutral, though. It could be a woman test. Everybody is fair game. The goal here is to simply put your sock and your shoe on the floor on both sides. Lay them down in front of you. Untie your shoes, making sure they're loose enough that you can get them on your foot. Stand on one foot to begin the test, lean over, pick up that shoe, or pick up that sock, put the sock on, pick up that shoe, put it on, tie it, and then put the foot down. Only after you've tied the shoe can you put it down, and then go and do the other side. And it is difficult. It is very, very difficult. It happens to be one of the tests that I do a little bit better than other tests, but we were joking before. I told you that about twice a year, I still get back pain every now and then, and mine came from leaning over to put my sock on the other day, and my whole back felt like it was going to blow up on me like that. So there's a lot going on inside the body when you're doing this, right? Why would my back all of a sudden seize up on me when I'm going to put on my sock? Because you don't realize the responsibility that those lumbar paraspinal muscles have in trying to control even just leaning forward, and they're trying to make sure that you're doing it at a pace that's safe for your spine. So doing this every day is a little mini workout for those muscles. And again, I think we tend to get so lazy as we get older, and complacent, and so that once you start sitting down, you're just going to sit down when you put on your socks and shoes. What's the need to get up and do this every day if I'm comfortable doing this sitting down? Or, "Wow, this was easier because I sat down today." You can't be seeking easy. If you seek easy, you're going to get old a lot faster. So this test is testing your balance. It is testing, again, some of the mini dynamic control from those muscles in the low back. It's testing your ankle mobility in a way, because you're going to get a lot of this going on, the perturbation through your ankles and your knees, and it's testing your hip strength. Because again, once you go on one leg, you're now talking about pelvic control the same way we did before, so you have to have good strength there. But it's not uncommon for people to not be able to pass this test. But with practice, like anything else, you're training these muscles to get stronger, and you're training your balance, and these are all skills that can be learned and improved. They're all trainable. I actually put a video out not long ago about different measures of longevity, and one of them was that test. Another one was pull-ups. Another one was the number of pushups you could do. And we could talk about these after, but the number one was going back to your glute media strength, and can you lay in a side-lying plank position With the top leg up about 45 degrees. You could keep it stacked. It's a lot easier to stay in a plank position. You raise that leg off of the other, now it's all relying on that lateral pillar strength of the underside hip, the one closest to the floor.

Andrew Huberman:
So one arm down.

Jeff Cavaliere:
One, or elbow-

Andrew Huberman:
Heels stacked

Jeff Cavaliere:
... on the elbow.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay, heels stacked at first.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah, at first.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. On your side.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So side plank.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Not just lying on your side.

Jeff Cavaliere:
No. Side plank.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not the-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Hip lift

Andrew Huberman:
... the picnic date-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... stance. It's lying on your... So side plank, and then you're going to raise the top leg up-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to make a 45 degrees between.

Jeff Cavaliere:
A 45 degrees.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And see if you can hold that even for just 30 seconds. And it's difficult. You'll feel a lot of shaking, you'll feel a lot of sagging of that bottom hip because you're asking your glute medius on that underside leg to hold you up into that position. So the beauty about that series of tests, though, is that they're all trainable. So if it's trainable, it's fixable. You can improve, as you have, right? You're now much better at the test, the old man test.

Andrew Huberman:
At the shoe test?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The old man test. Yeah, definitely.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There are mornings when I want to cross one leg over the other-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... kind of go into like the, what do they call it? That kind of pseudo-crow pose they talk about in yoga.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Just rest the ankle on there. It's like, "Uh-uh."

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And sometimes it... People are probably laughing at this. Go try it, folks.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. No, it doesn't-

Andrew Huberman:
Some people might do it just right away, it's very easy. Many people will find this difficult.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
To the point where you're like, "I don't think I can do this." But you quickly-

Jeff Cavaliere:
And strength is-

Andrew Huberman:
... get good at it

Jeff Cavaliere:
... Yeah, strength is not even a determining factor or predictor here, either. You can be very, very strong-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... and do incredibly poorly on this test.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Because you're not strong in these areas. Or you could just have bad vestibular balance, right? It could be that alone. Once you start to lean forward or look down, you don't have good control. But it is testing a variety of things, and if you do poorly on it, you can look a little deeper, investigate a little deeper through additional tests to try to find out exactly where your weakness is.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
But it's a good broad-spectrum test to see how good your functional balance is.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, some people might wonder how do you work up to it? There's something called Velcro shoes. No, I'm just kidding. The... Or slippers. It's easier, right?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's going to be quicker.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Totally. Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I think it's definitely worth trying.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think identifying these weak points I think is just so critical, and I'm probably going to say this 20 times during today's recording, but for the young guys and gals who are thinking, "Oh, that thing is so easy," trust me, with time, it's the gradual creep of little things that you stop doing. I'm going to add the side plank in.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I just haven't been doing much planking, not much isometric stuff. And I'm sure that I've got a weakness somewhere along the chain of muscles that's required to do that properly.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And what I love about these sorts of small things that support doing the big things for much, much longer, hopefully forever, is that they don't have to be done as part of the standard workout, and they can be incorporated into, like you're watching something on Netflix, and you just kind of move some furniture out of the way, and you just do these-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Totally

Andrew Huberman:
... at that time. Which is really cool and important, because it's not just about an additional workout. Because people are slammed. They've got so much to do.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And like how am I supposed to do all this stuff, and be with sunlight, and this and that? But it's straightforward.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You know?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Well, that... Look, I think the thing that you've done better than anybody is practical implementation of the things that are going to benefit people, that are not time-consuming or overly time-consuming. They're easily implemented. A lot of what I focus on is when we're talking about these drills or exercises to do, a lot of them are bodyweight, or a lot of them are done in minimal space. Because the more elaborate it becomes, or the more time-consuming it is, or whatever it is, there's just so many reasons for people not to do them. And they are going to be viewed as the extra stuff until they become adopted, and they realize how much they're helping them. It's always going to be viewed as the extra stuff originally. So to get someone to buy into the concept, open up the timeframe where they can do them. Let them do it during watching Netflix. Let them do it, me, while I'm on the floor doing some crunches after I've already done my workout. Open up the restrictions so that you're still getting the effect, but you're minimizing the prescription of it so it's so demanding people don't want to do it.

Andrew Huberman:
So one thing that I don't think we've ever talked about on this podcast is that many people don't just work out, they also play a sport.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe they do golf, or maybe baseball or softball. Maybe they swim. In every sport, there are obviously dominant patterns of movement, and there's a lot that's out there about how to train to improve those patterns of movement. I'd like to ask the opposite question. Let's say somebody played baseball, or golfed, or whatever their sport was, and now they have imbalances that are the consequence of having done some activity, like a golf swing, over and over and over, standing in a particular way. And they have pain, and they are thinking about longevity, not just of their golf game, but of everything else. Tennis, whatever. Just pick your sport. I think this is very common and not commonly discussed. What can people do to compensate for these unilateral movements or for these always left foot forward type stance things that won't compromise their game, but also overcome any pain and imbalances? I've always been curious about this.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That brings up the point of how sport-specific training has evolved over the years. There was a time when sport-specific training meant doing everything that you could to replicate the motions of the sport, and trying to strengthen those movement patterns. I think, gladly, we've moved past that stage of training, because you can get better at that movement pattern by simply doing that movement pattern. You can increase the strength of your entire body by increasing the strength of your entire body. So the focus of the weight room can be to do your general strengthening bilaterally, right? Regardless of what movement pattern direction your sport favors and improve the strength there and the function there because the carryover to your movement pattern is there. Like, when you get stronger and then you go back to swing a bat, you're going to still have the increased strength that you built in the weight room in your swing of the baseball bat. And you can throw harder if you're a pitcher, or you can throw further if you're a quarterback, if you improve your overall arm strength and your upper body strength. A lot of upper body throwing strength has nothing to do with your arm. It has to do with the stability of your core. So if you're getting much stronger in your core, you can have more torque generation to throw the ball further without having to do anything to your arm. So, I think the strategy should be that when you're playing a sport and devoting a lot of time to it, whether at the professional level or not, you still should be focusing the majority of your strength training and conditioning work towards your overall balanced physique, trying to get strong across your entire body. Let the skill work be the skill work. And if you want to focus, there are certainly a few things. We mentioned a couple more at the gym yesterday, but a few things that specific athletes can do to improve their specific skill, and that's fine. From a strength training perspective, and that's fine, like maybe more forearm work if you're having to swing a racket or a bat, right? That's fine. That can be done in addition to your basic core lifting. But to go back to the days where the strength training was basically replicating the motions of the sport, especially nowadays where you've got athletes who never stop playing their sport. It's young athletes. They're playing baseball year-round through all these fall leagues and winter leagues and there's way too much repetition of the same movement pattern. And that doesn't end well because you can see what's happening these days with pitchers. Like, it's almost a rite of passage. How many years are they going to be able to pitch before they have to have a Tommy John surgery?

Andrew Huberman:
What is the Tommy John surgery?

Jeff Cavaliere:
The ulnar collateral ligament basically being replaced or it tears in their elbow. They're out for an entire season. But it's like some of these pitchers, it's like they want to get it done early so they can hopefully come back and then have a string of years where they can dominate. It's crazy, but I think a lot of it is coming from a lot of overuse, a lot of repetition, not enough moving into other sports and movement patterns to balance off the strains and stresses that they're doing in that sport, their chosen sport. And it's causing a lot of avoidable stress that, again, just fixing it through a more managed, well-balanced approach in the weight room is probably key number one.

Andrew Huberman:
It's interesting. That's not the answer I expected, but really cool to hear that. So doing the classic all-around weight training, squats, some deadlifts-

Jeff Cavaliere:
The goal should be to strengthen your body, to improve your flexibility everywhere. If you're talking about, let's say, a situation with a pitcher where you have hypermobility of your shoulder because your throwing requires a lot more range of motion than a non-throwing shoulder, you don't have to say, "Well, I'm mobilizing my shoulders now, so I have to do a lot of mobility work on my throwing shoulder." That might not be necessary. In some cases, you might want to not do that because it's already mobile enough because of the skill work. So it's not like a broad you do everything you do here, you do there on each side. You might want to actually steer away from some of the things that you're repetitively using in the sport itself. But from a strengthening standpoint, you'll never go wrong sticking to the core lifts, building up your strength in those core lifts, and bilaterally strengthening your body and your balance and your coordination and your explosivity and your power. You're not going to go wrong. That does transfer back over to the sport itself. People think that it has to be in this sport-specific motion to transfer back over there. That's not true.

Andrew Huberman:
One thing I noticed yesterday when we were training, as well as in your videos, is that whenever you have the opportunity to do a movement standing as opposed to seated, you'll do that.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Whenever you have the opportunity to stagger your stance a bit, not fully lunging, but offset your stance a bit, you'll do that. And then you also talked about even on a dumbbell curl, leaning a bit toward the side that you're curling up, assuming you're doing alternating dumbbell curls, can be very useful. Would you sort of explain the general logic for that, and then maybe we can touch into a few of the specific examples?

Jeff Cavaliere:
I have a phrase, "If you want to look like an athlete, you have to train like an athlete." Right? And what that really means is like, sure, people might want to look athletic. They want to have an athletic physique. They might want to have the six-pack abs. They want to have what they think is an athletic-looking physique. That's great because a lot of people want that. But you have to train for it. It comes at a price. There's a way to get there, and I believe that the way to get there is by training like an athlete. It doesn't mean you have to start going out and doing, again, all these things that people thought is what athletes need to do to be athletic. You just have to start, A, caring a little bit more about what you do. So treat it like you're an athlete and these little things matter. It goes back to the original point. The little things matter just like they would if this was your contract on the line. Every little thing would matter. But more importantly, functionally, what do athletes do? Most athletes, not all, but most athletes are on their feet. Most athletes move around. You move around, you're not squared up with your feet right next to each other unless you're... I mean, in one phase of an offensive lineman's duty, they stand up and their feet are square, but they quickly stagger their feet for more stability. So you need to be able to operate from that position, I think, as often as you can, because it's not to produce professional athletes. It's to produce a body that's functioning the way it prefers to function. Why do we default do that? If I told you, "Andrew, I'm going to come over here and I'm going to try to push you over right now," would you stand up like this or would you put one foot back? Like by default, you would instantly go to one foot back and you try to lean into me and get more stable because your body instantly knows that's a more stable position. If I can train with more stability, I know I can decrease injury risk no matter what I'm doing. You talked about even something as simple as the curl. It's not just looking at the bicep, but when I turn towards the bicep and I kind of screw, I call it screwing down, as I screw down on that weight, I'm able to stabilize the torso a little bit more over this shoulder. I can even dig the arm into my side a little bit, engaging the lats, stabilizing the shoulder girdle, so that when I lift the weight, I have more tension in the biceps, number one, but more stability that the biceps can work from by stabilizing the entire shoulder girdle. When I'm out in space like this, it's a little bit more of a freewheeling deal here where I don't have that stability. So, is something going to happen or go wrong from doing that? No, but that's not creating the most functionally stable body. So by turning your body around that arm, keeping it stable in your side and curling, I'm able to create a little bit more stability there. I take it to the same way down to the ground with a lunge. When you lunge and do my favorite, a reverse lunge, which takes a little bit of the stress off the anterior knee-

Andrew Huberman:
So stepping backward

Jeff Cavaliere:
... taking a step backwards rather than forward. Just again, I'm sensitive to that because I have pretty bad knees from those early days in the 20s of doing things wrong with flat feet. You want to, as you step back, A, take a little bit of a wider step on that back leg so you're creating a wider base of support, more balance, right? Rather than being completely narrow. Because not just staggering my stance, but staggering and widening my base of support is what I do.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, this is key. It's funny, if you're in the gym with people, I'm not a trainer, but occasionally I've shown some people how to do some things, and you say, "Widen your stance," they immediately put one foot further out-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... in front of the other. But what you're talking about is getting them-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Width

Andrew Huberman:
... the space between the insides of your feet-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... further apart. So literally widening your stance.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. And widening outside shoulder width.

Andrew Huberman:
Not lengthening your stance, right?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right. And especially as you lengthen your stance, widening them in conjunction is going to create a wider base of support, more stability. So when we do that, you step back, you create a little bit of that width and balance. But as I go down into the lunge, you'll find if you don't lean your torso or turn your torso a little bit in the direction of that forward leg and kind of do that same screwing down effect that I talk about, that front leg will wobble a little bit. You'll feel that the hip is a little bit more unstable. Back to, again, that single leg suitcase lunge we talked about where that hip drops, and you get a lot of that instability. I want to be able to turn and sort of screw down on that hip, and what I'm doing is basically kind of tying the muscles of the pelvis together, muscles of the hip, co-contracting and creating more stability so that now, when I ask that quad and glute and hamstring to work and push me back to a standing position, it's working more efficiently because it's on a stable base. I've mentioned before, if we were going to jump and try to get the highest vertical jump we could, would you jump off this ground, this floor, or this table, or would you jump off of sand? Right?

Andrew Huberman:
Jump off a firm surface.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right. If you jump off of sand, as soon as you try to place force down into the ground, it's going to dissipate because the ground itself is moving. Well, when we want to create as much force, and efficient force as possible, we want to have a stable base. So that all that co-contraction of the hip, when you screw down into it, or even in the shoulder girdle, when you're going to then operate this elbow flexion, shoulder flexion movement of a curl, then you basically get a more efficient movement. So stability is a key for more efficient movement and also, I think, long-term safer movement.

Andrew Huberman:
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Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And you said, and I listened fortunately, on pull-ups-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... to not let the bar be at my fingertips, to try and get my knuckles over the bar.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? And you have a beautiful demonstration of this. It almost sounds like that trick that kids do where they go, "Hey, pull my finger."

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You know? It's not that trick, folks. But where you put some resistance to each of your own fingers-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... like your index finger, your middle finger, your ring finger, and then your pinky finger, and when you put the pressure on that pinky finger, you can feel it right at that elbow.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And so sure enough, I was causing this elbow pain by doing pull-ups and slipping off the bar a bit, and at my fingertips. As soon as I took your advice and got my knuckles over the bar-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... even though it requires a little bit of a wrist bend, sure enough, I haven't had elbow pain in a decade.

Jeff Cavaliere:
It is one of those things that can happen so quickly, too. You could go from having no elbow pain to the very next day, having elbow pain, or even right after the workout, doing elbow pain, if you're doing a lot of chin-ups with this issue, where the bar is too far away. And it's just an overload issue. Essentially, the muscles, the flexors, the deep flexors of the forearm that run down into the fingers, it's actually the ring and fifth fingers. So, the fourth-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... and fifth finger that tend to be the weakest and least resilient to that kind of stress. If you're gripping through there and that bar gets deep into the fingers, or if you do it where you're doing a curl even, and the bar sits too deep into your hand there, and you try to curl heavy-

Andrew Huberman:
Meaning toward the ends of your fingers

Jeff Cavaliere:
... toward the ends of your fingers.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. Not into the actual meat of your hand. It's just a lot of strain, more than that muscle's really built for to handle, and those tendons get a little bit strained, and it can immediately feel like a knife in the elbow feel. And it takes a long time to go away, because how many other exercises do you do where you're gripping and requiring the grip to be in place to do that? Now, if you want to intentionally do this, you can do it intentionally, let's say an underhand lat pulldown, like they call it a hook grip, because what people want to discourage people from doing is pulling down too much with the bar, right? Causing too much forearm involvement in whatever back exercise I'm trying to do. But in that case, you're really trying to hook through the stronger fingers of the index finger, middle finger, right? And even the just, you're getting a little bit of assistance on the ring finger, but you're really trying to hook through there. All four fingers might be on the bar, but most of the force is being held through there. And you're still pulling down a lot through your lats to pull that bar down. So, it's not like you're just letting it hold all the weight. But that little hook grip is meant to discourage any meaningful wrist flexion that would take over and take away some of the work of the lats. But if you've got a history of elbow issues, you don't need to use that grip. It's just not worth it. The extra benefit of the little extra forearm involvement may not be worth it for you. But for people who find that they don't have elbow issues and they want to get a little bit of that, you can do it in an intentional way, but you really have to kind of steer away from making these fingers do the bulk of the work.

Andrew Huberman:
How did you figure that out?

Jeff Cavaliere:
By having that issue multiple times.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I was just, again, just blown away. It was like, okay, I've got this inner elbow pain, and I'm curling, and I'm doing my tricep work, doing my back work, and I'm wondering, okay, what's wrong with my elbows? And, I'm, at that time, a young guy.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm like, "What's going on?" And then it makes perfect sense, as you pointed out. Ring finger, pinky finger are taking too much of the load near the tips of the fingers. Force myself to put the bar or the dumbbell in the meat of my hand.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. Now we take a more traditional grip, right? You're not relying on those distal tendons to have to do all that work and manage that load. Now the hand can hold onto hundreds and hundreds of pounds, right? So, if we can just get it into the meat of the hand, now I'm getting all the assistance of the intrinsic hand muscles on top of it. So now it's no longer a strain or a stress to those particular tendons. But believe me, two things contribute to me figuring these things out. Number one, being a physical therapist changed everything for me, because I had to think of things differently. Number two, when you're treating patients, not everyone presents the same. So, you have to come up with alternative ways to get to the same end result. I might be able to tell nine out of 10 people to do a Bulgarian split squat to alleviate knee pain, but for that 10th person, it just lights them up, and they can't do it. You have to be able to figure out how to work around that. And the second thing is that I had the unfortunate but fortunate experience of having to deal with a lot of these things through my life in the early years, and even still now. I still do things that cause inflammation and a need to reassess and look at what I'm doing and maybe why. And like you, I knew when I first started experiencing that pain also in my 20s, I didn't have an elbow issue. There's nothing structurally wrong with my elbow, so I had to look somewhere else. I didn't look then, but I looked when I got older and had way too many of those incidents happen. So, it forces you to look, and it forces me to look. I have to look because this is what I do for a living, but it forces me to look and figure out what's causing this, and more importantly, what can you do to stop it?

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I and many others are eternally grateful, because that inner elbow pain, the lower back pain-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Brutal

Andrew Huberman:
... yeah, they're brutal. They can really take the pleasure out of a lot of things, because it's not just during training.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The shoulders. I'm going to knock on wood in a second because I've been fortunate that my shoulders haven't given me issues, but that means it's probably just next. But perhaps that's also the consequence of having, once again, listened to your content, and whenever possible, I've tried to get into external rotation, which is, if I reference the Fonz, will anyone know what I'm talking about?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
So, thumbs out and giving the thumbs up, but thumbs rotated away from the belly button, away from the midline.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Could you explain where the shoulder tends to be most vulnerable in this business of internal, thumbs pointing toward the belly button, versus external rotation during all sorts of movements, and also just daily life?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Good point here too is on top of the thumbs is not just the flipping of the hand itself through supination and pronation of the forearm, but literally letting the elbow kind of travel with that, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Yeah

Jeff Cavaliere:
So you're letting everything move together because it's the rotation that's happening in this joint, this ball and socket up top, and-

Andrew Huberman:
Shoulder's got to rotate out

Jeff Cavaliere:
... with it.

Andrew Huberman:
With it.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So you'll find the elbow just-

Andrew Huberman:
Right. So we're not just, sorry, we're not just talking about moving your thumbs away from your belly button out. For those just listening, we're talking about getting the elbows-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right, with it

Andrew Huberman:
... in a bit more-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... as those thumbs go out. The shoulder's externally rotating-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... as well.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Which is key. And the issue with internal rotation, external rotation is that they're both motions of the shoulder, right? We need both of them. We need to be able to, if you go back to the pitcher, he needs to be able to externally rotate and then, of course, internally rotate to throw the ball. I'm not saying that internal rotation is the devil. What we need, though, is the ability to control internal rotation. We need the ability to have enough external rotation strength to hold that position for longer or to be able to control, right? The eccentric control from the external rotators is what actually controls the internal rotation.

Andrew Huberman:
The eccentric control from the internal rotators-

Jeff Cavaliere:
From the external rotators

Andrew Huberman:
... from the external rotators is what controls the-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Is what controls internal rotation because as we're-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Jeff Cavaliere:
... lengthening the external rotators, we're controlling, if we have good control, the eccentric control of that, then we're slowing down the internal rotation, or at least controlling it at a certain pace.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's extremely important when it comes to pitching. We have this rapid internal rotation going on-

Andrew Huberman:
Right

Jeff Cavaliere:
... is that-

Andrew Huberman:
Which essentially the thumb is moving toward the midline.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right, to throw

Andrew Huberman:
Right. And so is the elbow, so is your shoulder.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So if the external rotators are eccentrically strong, they can control that and control the pace of that and make sure that it's not outpacing what your shoulder itself can structurally protect. So it's important to have that, too. But internal rotation in the world of the non-athlete is particularly problematic if, A, you're posturally holding that position for way too long throughout the day, and which is what we all chronically are suffering from.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Whether we're texting, typing, not focusing ever on the external rotators in our training. You're just getting chronically tight and internally rotated. And then when you go to do even basic things like lift your arm up over your head, you're creating an internal shoulder environment that's more prone-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... to creating less space and inflaming tissues that wind up getting pinched in that position. That basically, when you're tight internally, you get changes to the shoulder capsule itself, which is all the ligamentous structures that surround it, that make you more internally rotated and tight. You can't get out of that position. So now when I go to raise my arm up, there's just less room in here. For instance, I think we might have done this before, you and I, but if I were to have you just lean forward like this or slump-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... your shoulder and then raise your arm as high as you could in front of you.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's as far as you get.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right? And you're limited, not because of anything that's necessarily tight right there, but structurally, there's a little bony bump on the top of your humerus that's actually getting stuck on the upper portion of your shoulder joint there.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So now, bring your arm down, open up your chest as much as you can, turn your arm out a little bit. Now raise it up overhead, and it goes higher.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Why? Because you just created external rotation inside the joint that allows it now to go up in a higher position.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Well, what happens if you're chronically in this position of internal rotation, and you go to raise your arm, you go to wash your hair, you go to get stuff out of the cabinet, you go to do all the things you do every day, every time, with there being less space in there, there's more likelihood to pinch on a supraspinatus tendon. There's more likelihood to be pinched on a bursa. And every time we pinch, we potentially inflame and cause more swelling inside that joint, which causes less joint space, right? So you're inflaming those tissues, more compression in that joint, and then more pain ultimately, and then that winds up causing, down the road, things like partial thickness tears and tears of the rotator cuff that we don't want. So internal rotation in this elevated position is not good. Having external rotation abilities or strength that can help to centralize... What it really does when people talk about rotator cuff training is, yes, you're working the external rotators, but really, what its main job is to actually keep that ball centered in the middle of the socket.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, I see.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So as you go and you raise your arm up in an internally rotated dominant shoulder, it will migrate up. Why? Because the deltoid pulls up. So as you're raising your shoulder up, the deltoid's pulling that humerus up, and the internal rotation of the other muscles that are already too tight, chronically tight, are just keeping it in the front side anyway. So you're lifting your arm up, and you're getting very little space. What the external rotators will do is they'll keep it centered, so that as you raise, instead of it migrating up, it's countering the force of the deltoid. So it's staying in the middle, and it basically can rotate and stay right in the middle where it has to be. You're not getting this migration or pinching going on. So that's the real function of the rotator cuff is to maintain a more centralized position with less of this pinching. So you really have to focus on, when we're talking about avoiding shoulder issues, the biggest thing you can do is start training the rotator cuff, not stop training the rotator cuff. And if you're doing a lot of heavy pressing or a lot of work with exercises that tend to internally rotate your shoulders now, then you have to do even more work for the rotator cuff to try to maintain that balance. If you're doing all kinds of delt work and you're never doing rotator cuff work, you're just creating more and more of that imbalance. So I think the biggest thing you can do is maintain mobility of the shoulder, mobility of the shoulder girdle itself, so the scapula being able to rotate, and then having strength of the muscles of that shoulder girdle, which are the rotator cuff. Those are the three main things you can do to keep- That shoulder functioning well and staying out of this domination of internal rotation with elevation.

Andrew Huberman:
What's your favorite external rotator exercise?

Jeff Cavaliere:
My favorite is just simply attaching a band to a stable, it could be a stair post, or it could be in a gym, just a rack, right? And you step away, you put the band in your hand. From the anchor point, you're going to step out until there's good tension on the band. If you were to let it relax, it would pull your hand towards your chest, towards your belly. You externally rotate to about back to neutral or a little bit beyond if you can.

Andrew Huberman:
A little bit beyond your torso.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
A little beyond your torso if you can. It's even better if you have that range of motion. Sometimes people don't. And when you get it there, you, again, hold it, right? You hold it for a second just so you know that you actually muscled it out there and you didn't just swing it out there.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
The number one thing people do here to cheat, and we talk about this, we talked about it in the gym quite a bit, your body knows how to compensate. If you ever want to know what you're doing wrong, just look at yourself in a mirror and then look and see what your body's trying to do. You'll realize the compensation is the direct opposite of what it's not doing, what the job it's avoiding. So, when the rotator cuff is trying to externally rotate the shoulder, the way I can avoid that is just lift my elbow away from my side. I can get my hand from here to here if I raise my arm out to the side.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
But now I'm using my delt to do it and not the rotator cuff.

Andrew Huberman:
So, keep that elbow pinned to your torso.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So, you got to keep the elbow pinned to the torso. So, the easiest thing you can do is just put something underneath your arm.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
A little towel, fold the towel, put it underneath there, and then do the exercise. And if you find that your towel is dropping to the floor, it's obviously because you're lifting your elbow away from your body and you're using the wrong muscle.

Andrew Huberman:
Do this as a warmup, do it at the end of the workout. How many sets, how many reps, how many times a week?

Jeff Cavaliere:
There's different applications of it. You can do it before a workout. So, if I'm going to press, like let's say bench press, I could use this as a good warmup before I go press, almost as a neuro-activation technique to make sure those muscles are alert and firing so that I can make sure that they're working when I go to press to keep my shoulders back in a better position. And especially as I raise my arms up in an overhead press, I can make sure that they're alert, they're fired up, they're willing to contribute to keep that head centered when the arm's going up overhead. So, I like to do them on pressing days as a neuro-activator before I train, and it's serving as a warmup, too. Or on other days, again, treating it as my special program, which is what I have to do because of all the issues that I've had with my shoulders. Again, this one didn't come necessarily from bad training, but just dumb decisions, trying to throw a baseball back with the Mets. I lost a bet. It's now famous at this point, but a player bet me that I couldn't throw the ball from... Well, let's rephrase that. I bet that I could throw the ball from right field to third base on the fly, because it just looked rather short from where I was.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
But it's actually a lot longer, and only the better arms in baseball can actually do that really easily. So, I have no idea why I thought I could, but I did, and literally the moment I let that ball go, I feel like my labrum went with it, right? And maybe landed somewhere near second base because it just felt like a burning zipper pain in my shoulder, and I've had to deal with it ever since.

Andrew Huberman:
Did the ball get to third base?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Oh, no.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Jeff Cavaliere:
No way, no. I think it landed with the labrum at second base.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, man.

Jeff Cavaliere:
No way. So, I learned my lesson, but the fact is, it's something that you can adopt pretty easily as a special programming type thing. And there's things you could do, too, to make it a little bit more interesting. Once you get into position where you could do the actual repetition, you could then hold it in a neutral position. Neutral for this exercise would be not in, not out.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So, where your fist is pointing straight ahead. And then take a big giant step away from the band.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So, you're increasing the resistance of the band dynamically, but still having to keep yourself in that same position.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Because as soon as-

Andrew Huberman:
So, elbow's still locked to the side.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Fist out in front of you. You're holding the band, there's tension.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Step away from the bar that the band is fixed to so there's additional tension.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. And it's going to want to pull your hand back-

Andrew Huberman:
Right

Jeff Cavaliere:
... but you keep it right where it is.

Andrew Huberman:
Got you.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And then the fun part of it is that I could then take it even further. I could jump out there. So now, it becomes a little bit more ballistic and dynamic.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So, I can be in this position and then jump, and if I jump quickly, now it really wants to pull me in, but I have to still keep that same position here. So, it's mimicking a little bit more of a ballistically dynamic force. So, I could do that. I could start to change the angle. I could be here in this position, now facing the anchor point, and it still wants to pull me into internal rotation.

Andrew Huberman:
So, band in front of you, not to the side.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And then I could jump back and see if it pulls me down this direction.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Internal-external rotation is done so many different ways. Again, I could be in this position here. I'm just reaching my arm out in front of me and turning my arm all the way, thumbs down to the floor, all the way back past the sky-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... and then thumbs out towards my side, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's internal-external rotation, and I don't even have a bent elbow, right? Because we're talking about a shoulder movement, not an elbow movement.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
But when we do it, we could do it down low. It's going to be easier for people to start, and the more things you start to do with external rotation, internal rotation with the arm elevated, the more challenging it starts to become. So, you progressively move towards movements where you're internally or externally rotating against resistance in a higher and higher arm position.

Andrew Huberman:
Love it. I want to take care of my shoulders. For me, neck training has been fundamentally important for avoiding injury. Outside of the gym, got rear-ended in a car I had just bought. My first car, this was many years ago, 2005 CR-V. I'm like, "Driving my first new car." I'd driven used cars before.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Stopped at the light, and all of a sudden just, rack, someone just ran into me. Person next to me ended up with some pretty bad whiplash and back pain. I was a little sore, but- Nothing really. And it's not a controlled experiment, but I credit that I've been training my neck, even back then. Now I learned how to do it properly from you and your video, and we will definitely provide a link to it.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I talk about this nonstop.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
This video is so valuable. You don't need any special equipment. Some standard plates and a towel. But this neck thing, it's not just for fighters. It's your upper spine. Posturally, I feel like people don't under- nowadays everyone's posture is so terrible. Posturally, it makes your default posture better. It's something we're always all working on. But neck training for men and women. I think men probably would be okay with having a... Most of them would be like, "Oh, cool. I get a slightly bigger neck."

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Women probably want to avoid that. Is there a way that women, or men, but tends to be women, who want to have great posture, a strong neck, but they want to maintain that kind of elegant neck.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
They don't want a thicker neck.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Is there a way that they can strengthen the neck muscles and achieve that without thickening the neck?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. I think that women would be less resistant to the idea of having a stronger neck, I think as long as we weren't talking about building massive traps along with it, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And I think that they think neck and traps, because they do feed into each other.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
The reason why men who train their neck tend to have a better or much thicker look to their neck, better for men, is that they're also con- in conjunction likely training their traps, either directly or indirectly through some of the other movements they're doing, and in a heavy way. Women who tend to train their neck directly and not focused on building their traps at the same time, they're just going to have a stronger neck. Because they're not necessarily the biggest muscles in here that grow substantially. And again, when you look at the proportional growth in muscles from men and women, there's already a difference in how big these muscles will grow, male versus female. But now in an area where the muscles themselves don't grow to astronomically large proportions, you really aren't going to get that much size in the neck. And I think women are chronically under-trained when it comes to the neck. I can't tell you how often that you'll prescribe some kind of an ab routine and I'm not even thinking about the repercussions on the neck, because for me it's like it's no strain at all. But a lot of people will complain, and most often it's women, that just doing the crunch, because yeah, I don't want them holding onto their neck-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... and cranking on their neck during a crunch. They'll say, "My neck is hurting, I can't do that. I can't do that routine." It's only hurting because of fatigue, not because... Their neck is being held in one position, and their fingers are just basically touching back there to just keep them away from cranking, and it's also to put-

Andrew Huberman:
That's how you want them, people-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... doing crunches. Not cranking, not pushing their-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Don't pull.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So just touching-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the back of their head very lightly.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Just touching the back of your head lightly.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And what you're getting there also is a little extra weight.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
The way your arm's back there-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... is going to provide a little bit of extra resistance on a basic crunch. But it's also leaving the neck unsupported, because so often people are used to holding the entire weight of their head, and then what happens is they start to fatigue in their ab. Here we go again. What is the body's natural compensation? They know that the eyes have to get up when they're doing a crunch. The eyes have to raise up. So what do they do? They just pull on the head and the eyes come up, and they're not doing any more work for their abs, but they've gotten to where they thought they were supposed to be. Natural compensation gone wrong. That's not what we want to do. So when women are encouraged to do it, quote-unquote, "right" and don't pull on your neck, they don't have the strength in their anterior neck to do that. So doing this neck series that you were referring to is a great way to strengthen the neck. And again, depending on how much weight you use, you could just use a five or a 10-pound plate and have plenty of overload there to create a stronger neck without a lot of hypertrophy. And for those that aren't aware, the series is simply taking a plate. Let's just say we start really light. We take a five-pound plate. We wrap it in a towel, nice cushy towel so it's not uncomfortable at all. You lay on a bench, and you're going to go basically in four different directions. You're going to rotate your body's position on that bench in four different ways to work the extensors, the flexors, and then the lateral neck muscles on both left and right sides. So all you have to do is, let's say you're starting on your back. You lay on your back, head is off the edge of the bench. That nice cushy towel with the plate inside of it is put up on top of your forehead. You allow yourself to lean your head back. But as you come up, you want to also pull your chin down, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Because you're not just trying to overextend or hyperextend your neck at any point. The stability we talked about before, whether it be the hips screwing in or the shoulders screw... The stability you get here is the retraction of the chin. That provides the stability to the neck. So you have the retraction of the chin, which is just pulling it straight back. It's going to feel like it moves only about a half an inch or so.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's the position there, and then you pull your head back up to neutral again. You flex your neck until you're back to neutral again. You do that 12 repetitions, however many, sub-fatigue here, but just enough to cause some fatigue. Turn onto your stomach at that point if you like, put the weight on the back of your head, and then do the same thing. Retract first, make sure you got the stable neck.

Andrew Huberman:
Chin closer to your Adam's apple.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Chin closer.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Good way to talk about it. And then you basically allow your head to sink down forward off the edge of the bench, and then you're going to extend your neck back up again to neutral, or in this case, a little bit beyond into a little bit of extension. And then you go to your side and the same deal. You allow your head to just bend a little bit to the laterally, like ear towards the shoulder.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
But you're laying on the bench. You do the same thing. Place the weight on top of the opposite side of your head, and then you're going to lift up against that weight. These are just supposed to be done very slow, very controlled. There's nothing crazy explosive about these. You're just supposed to feel those muscles. And trust me, if you have not done these, you do one, you start with one round of this and then wait until tomorrow, because you don't want to do too much, because I guarantee you're going to be sore.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Back in the day when I played football You didn't realize how weak your neck could get in an off-season until you put the helmet on for the first time. And just one practice with the helmet on, and you're controlling all that extra weight of the helmet dynamically, and the neck would be sore for two, three days. We had to accommodate even to the weight of the helmet. So with neck training, it's a long, slow process. You just start very light, you start submaximal, and you start building up your strength. And then when you talk about a crunch, that's a nothing exercise-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... for maintaining stability and control. When you get into situations like you, where you have accidents and car accidents, you become not only just resilient, but potentially life-saving, by having a stronger neck.

Andrew Huberman:
Gosh, if I could highlight, bold, and underline this and send it out as far as I can, the neck stuff, men and women, you will be positively amazed at the transformations. Your pressing lifts will get stronger.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Your pulling lifts will get stronger. You get stronger. Aesthetically, for guys, I mentioned this in the video yesterday-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... but I'll say it again, that a lot of guys who work to widen their shoulders, if their neck strength isn't coming up proportionally, it looks like they got the wrong head on that body.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It looks crazy. Guys, you look ridiculous, especially in street clothes. I'm not saying you need a giant neck, but there's a proportion thing there that's important if you care about that sort of thing. As I say this, I know that most people won't take the time to do it because it looks awkward.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It's a tiny play. They really-

Jeff Cavaliere:
It's a weird thing to do in a gym, too. It just seems a little weird, but look it, people do a lot of weird stuff in gyms.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And this is one of the better weirder things you can do-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... if you're going to invest some time. Again, it doesn't take a lot. It really doesn't take a lot to pay big dividends here because it is an area that's pretty much untrained. Again, we're not talking traps. Traps get a lot of work, but those deep muscles of the neck don't get trained very often at all.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So much of what you teach is about winning the short game and the long game.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
And to me, winning the long game is about being able to come in and do the big stuff year after year, decade after decade, so that when you're 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, why not?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? The experiment of whether people can have great strength and mobility, et cetera, into their 80s and 90s, with rare exceptions, has never actually been done. That experiment is happening now because resistance training, especially for women a few years back. If it-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... was in bodybuilders, nobody did it. Now everyone knows this as part of the longevity game. So I'm so excited that these, again, what sound like small things are getting out there thanks to you, because they really do make a difference. And I believe that in our 80s and 90s, and maybe even beyond, people can move right and feel right and be posturally right. There's a cool video, forgive me for going long, but we'll put a link to it, that I saw, no, it's not AI, of a woman escaping from a Chinese resting home.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
So she's in her 90s, she's 92, and she's climbing over the front gate. She was caught on surveillance camera.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Oh, I haven't seen this one yet.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's so cool.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Surprised that hasn't come on my feed, for sure.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So she's crawling over the surveillance gate, and then she gets out, and then she walks away. Now, she's got some-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... a little bit of frailty to her, but there was a drop down to the ground on this big iron gate, and she's just like, "I'm out of here." Which is pretty inspiring.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Well, that's not to say that when you do the things I'm saying, you do the small things, that you're not going to still have aches and pains and things-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... that you have to be able to also manage that. How can you show up each day and still manage the fact that, yeah, this shoulder's still a little bit sore, or this knee is a little cranky. You have to continue to show up if you're going to play this longevity game. Right? Because stopping is the fastest way to slow your body, right? So I think to slow your body down to a point of really poor quality of life. You have to figure out how to manage through these injuries and train around and through these injuries. And a simple example of that, I always like to use an analogy of a construction zone. If there's one street that's shut down, you're not going to shut the whole city down. Right? You need to find a way to redirect traffic around there so the city can operate. So if it was, let's say, that shoulder and you were doing, I don't know, a dumbbell or a barbell overhead press, you can't do it, it hurts. You have to have a way to reroute that. So let's say it's a machine press. Is that my first choice based on the things we talked about? You're sitting down, you're on a machine, you're in a fixed pattern. No. But if it allows you to still train, you're getting a lot of other benefits. Number one, you're getting some additional strengthening of the, and activation of the deltoid. You're getting some movement through the joint itself, which we know bathes the joint surfaces and helps to provide nutrition to the joint. You're moving that capsule so it doesn't get stiff and tight. You're doing a lot of things right, even though it might be choice B for the exercise. Let's say you can't do any pressing at all. Again, you don't shut the city down, you just take a back road, right? You just take another back road. The back road might be rowing.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Rowing is going to still work the shoulder joint through extension. It's still going to provide some of those joint benefits. It's still going to provide the capsular benefits. It might not be stimulating the delts that way, but there's other exercises you could do for the delts that won't do that. So our job is to figure out how we can always have something we can do so that the option is not, or the alternative is not nothing. Because that's when things really start to go wrong, when you opt for nothing. And that's when the aging process starts to really accelerate to the point of even just the functional aging, how you feel, and the quality of your life will sink if you don't continue to figure out ways to do that. So I always felt my mission or my goal was to empower people with these options and these alternatives of how do you do these things. Because again, if someone came to me as a PT and my bag of tricks contained one, two, and three, and they couldn't do any of them, then what do I do? I have to have options four and five there, too. And I think that's always been my strength is to figure out, not just to have option four and five on reserve, but then also have six, seven, eight, nine, and ten in case I needed those, too. And if I could provide people with that information, then they know how to dip into those at the right time to keep going, keep training.

Andrew Huberman:
I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Joovv. Joovv makes medical-grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology and our health. Now, in addition to sunlight, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near-infrared, and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health. These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improvements in vision. Nowadays, there are a lot of red light devices out there, but what sets Joovv lights apart, and why they're my preferred red light therapy device, is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use the specific wavelengths of red light, near-infrared, and infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Joovv whole body panel about three to four times a week, usually for about 10 to 20 minutes per session, and I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you would like to try Joovv, they're offering up to $400 off select products for listeners of this podcast. To learn more, visit Joovv, spelled J-O-O-V-V, .com/huberman. Again, that's J-O-O-V-V, .com/huberman. Do you do cardio? You're naturally pretty lean. I know you eat extremely well.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we can talk about nutrition a bit as well, but what are your thoughts on cardio?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Cardio is like the right foot to the left foot. It's very important for the overall picture of health. If you're avoiding cardio and conditioning entirely, you're not as healthy as you think you are. I don't do as much cardio as I should. It's always my big confession that I don't, and the reason why is simply because I have to choose based on time limitation. And for me, with priorities being to spend some time with my family and my boys, and how much can I actually get done with work and in my workout time, I always will take a step in the direction of strength training and weight training, but I try not to ignore it entirely. And when I do, I jump on a bike, and I do stationary bike riding because I like the fact that I can increase resistance on the pedals and kind of turn it into almost a pseudo ... Again, the meathead side of me wants to turn it into some sort of a resistance activity. But of course, doing it for the duration to improve my cardiorespiratory health. But it's also good for my knees. My knees are quite beat up. Again, that's something that I'll never be able to reverse, at least not without modern medicine. But I have to manage that, and anytime I try to do anything where I'm running or jumping, it tends to hurt a little bit. I do still love to jump rope. We talked about jump rope before. Jump rope happens to be a lot lower impact for me, as long as you can do it properly on the balls of your foot and absorb the shock of jump roping. But I would say between jump roping and stationary bike at a higher resistance level and done in interval fashion, those are my two favorite ways to do it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, jump rope's great.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I haven't been doing it as much as I used to.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And now that I got this new pup, I've got him in his little penned area sometimes.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'll skip rope. I don't let him run around while I do it because I'm afraid I'm going to whip him-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Whip him, for sure

Andrew Huberman:
... on accident. I don't want to do that. But I'd forgotten how effective it is at getting heart rate up.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Especially if you're doing some double unders-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... or speed it up, or high knees and things like that. The coordination piece is awesome. It's one of these things, like back to the basics feels good. It feels really, really good.

Jeff Cavaliere:
There's a gamification aspect. You want to learn a new skill. Can I do it single leg? Can I do it side to side? Can I do it double under, as you said? There's little built-in challenges that I think we inherently always try to up the level of what we're doing to see what we can do or what we can't. But that's built-in. That's not really built in on a lot of the other modes of conditioning, which is why people who do skip it, skip it, because it tends to be unapologetically kind of the most boring part of training. If you're used to doing lots of different exercises and feeling the weight in your hands, it could be a little bit boring, but there's ways to make that more fun.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you like running?

Jeff Cavaliere:
I actually like running, but again, I can't tolerate it. My knees are just... They feel like they want to detonate after about a quarter mile. Now, I could do it on my... I have a Woodway treadmill.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Which are incredibly forgiving. It's like-

Andrew Huberman:
Which one is it?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Woodway.

Andrew Huberman:
Woodway.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Jeff Cavaliere:
We used to have them in all the MLB weight rooms.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Basically, there's no deck underneath them, so it's like running on air. And best treadmill also. Pretty super expensive, but they're worth the money if people have the ability to invest in one and they want to run indoors.

Andrew Huberman:
Are those arced ones, or are they straight?

Jeff Cavaliere:
They make an arced one, but they're straight-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... and there's just no deck in there, so it feels a lot lighter and more forgiving on your feet. They actually have some amazing versions of the Woodway that they call the AlterG, where they actually take the gravity away so you can run in a gravity-free environment.

Andrew Huberman:
That sounds wild.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Which is crazy, because if you think about injury rehab, we've taken players with lower body injuries, put them on the AlterG, and had them run with only 5% or 10% of their weight. So, you can un-weight their body, get them into the mechanics of foot on the ground and running and-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... transmitting the force through the whole body, but do it in an environment that takes all of their body weight away, and then progress up to now you got 10% of your body weight that you're running on, and then 20% of your body weight that you're running on. So, you can actually progress them-

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, that's cool

Jeff Cavaliere:
... to not have to go from non-weight bearing to fully weight bearing.

Andrew Huberman:
That's cool.

Jeff Cavaliere:
In a cool, athletic way.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, because swimming's great, but-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... you have to have access to a pool, and-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I miss swimming. I need to get back to that.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. I swam as a kid all the time.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, likewise. Yeah, every kid in my town did soccer and swim team.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Those were kind of the big sports. I'm comfy in the water. I live near the ocean now, but unfortunately, the ocean hasn't been that clean since the fires.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
There's a bunch of hazards to ocean swimming-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
... that I've seen. A person on our swim got hypothermia once, so I'm like, "I don't know."

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I think that the cardio piece, the big debate seems to be whether or not if people have a limited amount of time, which most people have a limited amount of time, whether they'd be better off investing in some high-intensity interval training-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... or some so-called zone two-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... zone three kind of steady state stuff. We know that caloric deficit is required for fat loss, but assuming caloric deficit, is there a best cardio for fat loss?

Jeff Cavaliere:
The one that you're going to do-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... is going to be the best one for sure.

Andrew Huberman:
Good answer.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And I think it's hard to sustain some of the higher zone five cardios for long enough to have a significant cardio-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... or a calorie burn effect. I did a famous video with Jesse where I had him do burpees, which is one of the most calorically demanding exercises you can do. Which is, for anybody that doesn't know the burpee, you basically quickly lower yourself down to the ground, you do a full pushup, you push yourself explosively out of that pushup, you jump up to your feet again and back to a standing position. That can burn around, I believe it was 13 to 15 calories per minute if you did them nonstop for a minute. Well, if you're doing burpees nonstop for a minute, you're likely not doing them nonstop for many more minutes than the first minute, because it's a very demanding exercise. So while your heart rate will go soaring right through the roof very quickly, you can apply even intervals to do this, right? You're still going to start to fatigue because of the anaerobic part of it, too, through the muscles of the chest and the arms getting fatigued. You just can't really do it for more than, let's say, 10 minutes, even in interval format. So what are you really burning there? If you did it even straight through for 10 minutes, 15 calories a minute, you're talking about 150 calories. So people who use their cardio for weight loss or caloric deficit are going to do better doing longer distance cardio at lower intensity levels. So getting on a bike and riding or jogging or running or even doing laps in interval fashion where it's a jog and a run and a jog and a run. There's a lot of different ways to do that, but to sustain them for a lot longer periods, 45 minutes to an hour. But there again, I'm a big believer that when you're trying to create the deficit, relying on the conditioning, we're not talking about cardiovascular here, we're talking about just creating the deficit, relying on the conditioning is a much more inefficient way to go about this than what actually should be done, which is just to focus on your nutrition.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Because it's just so much more effective to create large deficits or large swaths of deficits from cutting back the crap you're eating right now than it is to try to get it through zone two cardio done for very long periods of time. Again, not to say that that's not beneficial for your cardio and your cardiac conditioning. That's a separate issue. But when you're trying to create caloric deficits there, I always tell people, first, you got to work on what you're putting in your mouth, because the old saying goes, "You can't outrun a bad diet." And there's just no way to really do that effectively over time. So of the two forms, I'd say the zone two steady state longer form is going to do more absolute levels of caloric burn.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know if you've ever done this, but I know you're you, and everybody has to pay attention to their caloric needs and nutrition needs, but what does nutrition look like for you on a given day?

Jeff Cavaliere:
So I don't know how many calories I take in on a given day. I've never really counted past when I really first started out, and I think it's an important part of the process is people should count, because it does two things. Early on, they should count because it gives you awareness. You may have no idea how many calories you're actually having until you actually count them. You also become aware of many of the things that you are taking for granted that you're just doing almost second nature that is just not healthy. You're eating things repetitively that are just not healthy, or drinking things that are just not healthy. And when someone asks you to log what you're eating, you become very aware of every calorie you put in your body. So that's part of it. The second thing is there's an education that goes into learning how many calories each food has. I can't tell you how many people, they'll think that chicken Parmesan is the same as grilled chicken just because it's chicken, and they're very different in terms of their caloric impact. So educating yourself about what those macronutrient profiles look like for whatever food you're having is part of the process, too. Because ultimately, where you want to be able to get to is, can you make equivalent swaps in your head on the fly wherever you are?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right? That would be nutritional freedom.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
As far as what that day would look like, what I try to do is I try to build my base around protein. I always have. The reason for that is it's one of those macronutrients that I know I need to build lean muscle. It's one that I know can provide satiety. It's one that I know is important to everything I'm trying to pursue and what everyone really should be trying to pursue if they were trying to be healthy. So they should base their meal around that first. Start with your protein. And I use a visual way of doing that where I just say, "Hey, take your plate and divide one third of that plate or that meal," if you're having it in separate plates or separate dishes-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... "one third of that meal should come from a lean source of protein." And that could be chicken, fish, beef, whatever it is that you prefer. But have that be the one third, and then divide the rest of your plate with carbohydrates, preferably in a 2:1 ratio with fibrous carbohydrates to starchy carbohydrates. So the fibrous being the green, the vegetables, asparagus, the broccoli, and then the starchy carbohydrates, the rice, potatoes, pasta. Me, personally, I don't believe that I should eliminate my starchy carbohydrates. Again, inherently, I'm an athlete, and I know that that's ... you know, served a very important purpose for me, for energy, for fuel resources, for glycogen, for my muscles, that I don't avoid that. Plus, I know that I could never long-term restrict myself from carbohydrates. So when I started out, I said, "I have to adopt a plan here that I know I can stick to." If it was taking away pasta and taking away oatmeal and taking away the things, there's just no way that I could sustain that. So I don't think that people should try to start out on some change to their diet where they're restricting foods they know they're never going to be able to maintain long-term or keep away long-term. So that if you can learn to manage them and eat them in a way that's more controlled, because the rest of the stuff on your plate is actually helping to minimize your cravings for that or controlling your portion sizes there, that's the long-term goal, I think. And then overarching over all that, calorically, just because it's a fact of nature, fats are more calorically dense than carbohydrates and proteins, so just be aware of your fats. I know a lot of people who go down the path of healthy eating, and they're putting olive oil on everything and avocado on everything, because they're healthy foods. But they're putting so much of it because they want to feel like they're doing the healthy thing. But you're also skyrocketing your calories. So you have to at least be aware where and how you're applying your fats, because calorically they will add up. I have nothing against fat. I think everybody should have it. I think it should be part of every meal. I'm just saying you need to be aware of your fat content. I try to go low sugar as much as I possibly can. I try to avoid processed foods. I try to avoid blatant sugars, unless it's my birthday and I'm having my carrot cake. But for the most part-

Andrew Huberman:
That's really your only, quote-unquote, "bad food" all year

Jeff Cavaliere:
... that's not my only... That's become an urban myth a little bit. Maybe I'll have it twice a year. But no, I really try not to indulge in those things. But I'm not missing it.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
I really enjoy it when I have it. But I'm not depriving myself of it along the way. If people felt deprived, then have it more often. I could have a piece of carrot cake once a week and probably not have anything happen to my physique. So the fact that I don't is just really more out of habit than anything else.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
But if you're in a plan where you feel so deprived that you're pulling your hair out and the first chance you get to just jump off your diet and eat all the things that you really were keeping yourself away from, then you're on the wrong plan. So I think that no matter what it is, whether it be keto, whether it be, I guess you'd call this a bodybuilder-style diet that I eat, or whether-

Andrew Huberman:
Or I call it clean omnivore.

Jeff Cavaliere:
There you go. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I basically eat the same as you-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... although I suppose I probably am a little high on the fat sometimes-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... just because, I love nuts and-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... Parmesan cheese and a little bit of butter and some olive oil and stuff. But-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Which are all good foods. It's just that calorically, there's an impact there.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And if you're going to eat them, what I always recommend people do is, again, you could just cut back a little bit on some of the other portion sizes, just to accommodate calorically for what you're doing. But I do think that that concept of the equivalent swaps is big, because if you learn to eat the way I just suggested, and there's no magic behind what I do, I've just been very consistent with it, is that you'll be able to make swaps when you go anywhere. What's a protein I can have here today? What's the restaurant have? Oh, they only have pork chops. Okay, fine, I'll have a pork chop. You're visually just replacing equivalents on the plate. Sometimes it doesn't always work. I just did a video where I talked about a steak and a grilled chicken breast are potentially the same protein in terms of their protein content, but they're not the same calorically because the steak has a lot more fat than the chicken breast does. So you might have a smaller steak to make that equivalent swap out. But that's only going to come through your understanding and knowledge of the foods and what they contain, so that early phase of learning what they have is important there. But ultimately, nutritional freedom comes from the ability to be consistent with what you do. I talk a lot about the fact that we can get to the gym, we can train for an hour. It's not easy for people, especially to do it at a high enough intensity level, but we can train for an hour, go home, and feel like, "I did my work today. I feel good. I did what I was supposed to do."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Great. Your nutritional job just started. You now have to figure out, how do I navigate the next 23 hours, whether I'm asleep or I'm awake, but how am I going to navigate the next 23 hours, because that's what nutrition is. That challenge is infinitely harder, and the reason why a lot of people struggle with their weight is because they have to figure out how to get that right and do that in a repeatable way day in, day out, day in and day out. And I've been doing what I've been doing here now with my nutrition approach for 30 years. 30 years. So when people ask me, "Is it hard?" For me, it's not hard at all. But it wasn't super easy in the beginning. There's a process to go through to get it there, and I was willing to go slowly, but also not sacrifice the things that I really knew I wouldn't be able to live without. So therefore, I can live with it forever. And I think people make way too aggressive changes when it comes to nutrition. Basically, you're not just changing your diet, you're changing your habits, and you're changing your lifestyle. So when you go and you start making these radical changes to your nutrition plan because you're on a diet, it does not work.

Andrew Huberman:
Listen, what you described, what I'll just call clean omnivore, I think is just an awesome way to approach nutrition for a couple of reasons. One, it works. Like you said, it's flexible. Even with travel, you can always make some adjustment toward that. It handles the protein needs thing pretty much on its own.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
You have to make sure you eat enough of those meals and enough protein.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But as you were saying it, I realized that if they adopt this mindset that you have for nutrition, it gets them out and away from the marketing-based draw of nutrition.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because people say, like, "Oh, protein bar," or-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... "High protein yogurt." And listen, there's some great yogurts.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
I love Bulgarian yogurt.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Greek yogurt's great. Bulgarian yogurt. No disrespect to the Greeks. Love Greek food- ... by the way, too. But Bulgarian yogurt-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Bulgarian's the better stuff

Andrew Huberman:
... is so good. Full-fat Bulgarian yogurt or low-fat Bulgarian, amazing. And Yeah. And the Bulgarians are known for their strength in many ways. But you get outside the marketing pull and you start thinking about food for its macronutrient content-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and its micronutrient content and quality as opposed to the packaging-based stuff. Because even the non-processed or non-highly processed foods, mostly we're reaching for them because of what's on the label. Like the colors, the words, and these kinds. And what you're describing is completely different. It's getting to the actual food.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think that's a very important, not so subtle distinction, and once people make that switch, they're really in the driver's seat. It's not like you're like, "Have to go prepare every meal," this kind of thing.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Well, yeah. And again, even with some of the push towards higher protein foods now, again, the packaging is bragging about the protein content, but they've also increased the sugar or they've increased the fat, and it's like all you've made is a higher protein. Even Snickers has a high protein bar.

Andrew Huberman:
Are you serious?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah. Either it's Snickers or Milky Way, they have a high protein bar. It's like, okay, this is insanity. So, I mean-

Andrew Huberman:
Show me the C-suite of the Snickers. I'm going to get in trouble for this, but whatever. I want to see how fit these people actually look.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah, right.

Andrew Huberman:
And if they're eating that stuff.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like something tells me they're not. Yeah. Thank you again for being a voice of reason in the nutrition space.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah, and I'm not a nutritionist. And people are quick to remind me of that whenever I speak of nutrition. I'm only speaking from my experience, both with myself and anybody I've ever advised on how to do that. It works, it's sensible, and it's something that could be sustained. So for me, that's what's most important with nutrition. And again, I don't fixate on any one particular way. If doing keto works for you, great. As long as you can sustain your eating that way, great, because all we're trying to do is manage our weight long term and not sacrifice other elements of our health in the process. So if it works for you, cool. But this is what has worked for me.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm starting to see more content out there about foot strength. You've mentioned you have flat feet.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I had some foot injuries from skateboarding years ago. Broke my left foot twice. Some "snapped arches." It's not really a thing, but... And have started to think about foot health and foot training and stability, and so on the one hand, it seems kind of silly. It's like, oh, really? We're going to start training our feet? But on the other hand, our feet are always in contact with at least our shoes, if not the ground. So what are your thoughts on this notion of flat feet, foot strength, and how it plays into stability and performance, and just overall ability in life?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah, it's actually something I wish I had done more of at an early age. One of the easiest ways to test this is to, especially for someone like me who has... I have flippers for feet. Flat out, just flippers.

Andrew Huberman:
Is that genetic or sports-based?

Jeff Cavaliere:
I think it is partially genetic. My mom had pretty flat feet, and then I also think that it was years of doing things without addressing that. So I was-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... as I started to lift weights and applying a lot of external force and load onto those feet that were not able to support that, it just got worse and worse. They weren't always as bad as they got to, but I wish I had done more for it at an early age, because even now, if I were to go back and try to train the intrinsic foot muscles more, it's just not going to reverse the damage that I've done in the knee to this point. So I'm less motivated to try to do it, because I've also figured out how to manage with the flat feet now to decrease the impacts of it. So I'm not so motivated to go jump in now and spend extra time on something that may not have a huge impact for me. But for someone who's just starting to deal with flat feet and the weakness in their feet, I would definitely jump in and do something. And the easiest test is simply to put a towel on the floor, put your foot on it barefoot, try to scrunch up the towel with your feet, and if you start to rapidly cramp up in those foot muscles of yours, and again, it goes back to what we talked about before in the low back. The cramps are coming from a lack of strength. They're trying to provide support in an area that doesn't have it. So if you don't have intrinsic support or arch strength, then you're trying to ask the foot to do too much of what it can't. Even a simple scrunching or activation of those muscles to scrunch the towel together is too much for you to handle, kind of like the weak neck on a crunch. You have very weak feet, and you would benefit from doing a lot of those activities that help to do that. Some people recommend running in sand. Some people recommend using these towel drills. Even just balancing barefoot and doing single leg balance drills barefoot are going to not just cause ankle strength improvements, but intrinsic foot strength improvements. They're all good things to do because you can improve... They're muscles. They are literally muscles, too. You can improve the muscular strength of your feet. And when you do, I think you can start to restore some of the natural arch that you've lost to the foot. If it's because of tendinous dysfunction that's there or inherited, as you said, a genetic predisposition to this, you may not be able to have the arch of somebody who has naturally better arches, but you could certainly create enough of an arch where all the arch is really doing is it's just changing the position of your ankle joint itself.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right? So of how the tibia sits on your ankle. If the foot collapses, the tibia is now torqued, essentially, in its relationship to the foot. And so now every time you step, whatever forces are being incurred on the ground are being sent up through the ankle, into the knee, into the hip, into the back. So you're just trying to maintain a better, more natural alignment between the tibia and the foot itself. So that's what happens with the weakness of the foot, is you're basically allowing it to collapse too far to start to create that torque in its relationship to the tibia. So if you can start to increase the strength of those muscles resting, they can basically maintain a higher arch or a more natural position that's more aligned with the tibia, and that's where the benefits come from. Something I knew nothing about back in my 20s. Nothing. I didn't think at all to do that. All I did was go put an orthotic in Which basically put me in a better position for that. It lifts the foot up and it puts me in a better alignment to try to start decreasing some of the ongoing damage I was doing to my knees by being in that torqued position, but did nothing to actually fix the problem itself.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's like wearing braces.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Exactly. So-

Andrew Huberman:
Not mouth braces, but like a knee brace.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Well, I was going to say, right.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Like a mouth brace actually-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, right

Jeff Cavaliere:
... would actually create some long-term change, but this is doing nothing but... Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Like limb brace.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
This is something I've been thinking about and reading up about a lot, but you might find interesting and, I don't know, maybe since you're so much more versed and formally trained in strength training and these offsetting these unhealthy compensations. Been spending a lot of time looking at how the human body degenerates as it gets older.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I'm trained as a developmental neurobiologist, and what you learn is that development, it doesn't just stop at like puberty or something, or even when someone turns 25. Our whole life is a developmental arc.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And it really is an arc, right?

Jeff Cavaliere:
It is.

Andrew Huberman:
And people who can offset that last third of the arc have remarkably better lives in terms of their unassisted living, their ability to be there for others, et cetera, cognitively and physically. To make a long story short, it really appears that both at the level of the spinal cord and brain, but also at the level of the muscles, that the muscles that are furthest away from the midline degenerate first. And it's interesting, today we've been talking about neck. Yesterday, we did forearm training.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
We'll provide a link to that. Grip strength goes, calf strength goes-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... foot strength goes. And this could be taken down to the motor neuron level, the spinal cord level, molecular level. There are data starting to emerge. So I'm of the mind that many of the things that you've been teaching and that we've been talking about today of working these distal muscles, especially as one gets older, but ideally one's entire life, are really going to be a big piece of the longevity game. I really am.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Longevity ultimately is basically, in my eyes, is being able to maintain function as you age. Because again, it's not the number of years, but the quality of the years. So all muscles in your body serve a function. They're all there for a reason. Almost, I think there's one or two that were potentially, they don't actually even have a function. I forget which ones they are, but for the most part, they're there to serve a purpose. The idea that we don't train all of them in some way is a little bit crazy because they're there. They need to be able to function for the lifetime of however long you're going to be here. Finding ways to do it where we don't have to do hundreds of different exercises to address all of these muscles is the ultimate goal, so we can become more efficient with our efforts and we're not skipping them. But the idea that they're not necessary or they don't need to be maintained or maximized over a lifetime doesn't make sense to me either, right? So I think we need to be able to just find ways that we can work them into what we're already doing. And again, I do think that we have different rates of decay, too. You versus me versus someone else. So that's where I really believe people need to adopt these individualized plans. We all do, let's say, the basic strength training, but then your specialized plan that addresses your accelerated weaknesses is this group of exercises. And my specific plan to address my accelerated weaknesses is this specific exercise plan. But they're all there to be worked on, and they're all there to be maintained.

Andrew Huberman:
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Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... Q&A type thing for a moment about body type splits and rests and training to failure, et cetera. And then I have a very specific question about training splits that relates to real life and how to incorporate a resistance training program into real life in a way that's truly sustainable. Okay, so first things first, how many warm-up sets per exercise typically?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Depending upon what you're doing, and we're right off into the nuance of all this.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Because the nuance is really everything here. When we talk about muscle splits, and there's so many factors that contribute to this, but let's say you're doing, just for sake of argument, you're doing a pull workout. If I'm doing pull would be, let's say, back and biceps and- Even rear delts if we want to put them on the same day. So, you would warm up your bigger muscle group first. So, let's say you start with back, and you warm up the first exercise you're doing there. You could do a general body warm-up like we did a little warm-up for our arm workout yesterday, which is actually a shoulder warm-up. We talk about in that video why. But you do a little general warm-up first, and then you start the first exercise with lighter weights so you can warm up. I'm doing two or three warm-up sets and I'm done. As long as I feel like I've sufficiently warmed up that movement pattern that I'm going to do before I start to load it, as long as I feel like the joints, I've got all the creaks out, and I feel like I've done enough of an assessment of how everything feels for that day, then I'm ready to go. People spend way too much time warming up to work out. You just get yourself ready, and what happens is the workout itself becomes the rest of the warm-up you need for the subsequent exercises. Once you get through that first exercise, you're usually ready to go. And when we're talking about then shifting focus to let's say even the biceps, my biceps have been working every one of my pulling repetitions, whether I was rowing or doing pull-downs in some way. So, there's no more warm-up after that.

Andrew Huberman:
Train work sets to failure or stop with so-called reps in reserve?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Oh, this is a great one for me. I mean, I'm failure. I understand the science shows that they can get close, but it's also very heavily dependent upon, meaning failure or not failure, very heavily dependent upon volume. So, when you're looking to do a workout that is going to have... You can do it in 30 to 45 minutes, have a high impact in terms of its ability to stimulate growth. If you're with me, you're going to train to failure. And I like objectively training to failure because I know I got to failure. I'm not talking about getting to a point where I don't recognize the exercise I'm doing, where I'm compromising the quality of the exercise I'm doing. I'm not talking about doing it on the more compound or complicated exercises that do require synchronized movement for multiple muscle groups, because like let's say a row, a heavy row, could start to get dangerous if you're losing body position because of fatigue. So, we're doing it on the exercises that are the hypertrophy-based exercises, a little bit more focused on one single muscle group, a little bit more isolated in nature. So, for instance, a single-arm row versus a bent-over barbell row. That'd be a good difference between the two.

Andrew Huberman:
So, you won't take the bent-over barbell row to failure necessarily?

Jeff Cavaliere:
No. I wouldn't recommend taking that all the way till failure.

Andrew Huberman:
But you'll get close.

Jeff Cavaliere:
I'll get close, yeah. Oh, yeah. For me, it's always going to be close. My criteria there would be form breakdown.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So, as soon as my form started to break down, I might have had another two reps left or three reps left, but that's it for that on the barbell row. Whereas if I'm doing a... Here's a better example. If I'm doing a one-arm cable pull-down for my lats, which I love that exercise, it gets a really good stretch in the lats to come down. It could look a little ugly at the end where I'm just doing a couple partial repetitions or something just to add a little bit more stimulus-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... that with no extra risk to my body from doing it. So, there's the difference between them. But I'm always advising that you're training towards the high end. Unless you're training for strength, which is a whole different game. That's a whole different set of rules. It's a whole different stimulus that you're trying to build there. That is high loads that you're trying to manage efficiently, not with inefficiency to try to force muscle growth. So, that's a whole different ball of wax, and you're really trying to stay away from true failure there. It's actually not in the way you would actually build maximal strength, because maximal strength relies on clean, efficient, well-performed repetitions done cumulatively over time. That's how we get neurologically stronger.

Andrew Huberman:
And a lot more volume.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And a lot more volume, right.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So, that's a different game here.

Andrew Huberman:
So, for squats and deadlifts, are you taking them to failure?

Jeff Cavaliere:
No. Same concept as the row. Those big presses like that, I'm not going to... Or leg movements, I'm not doing true failure on those. I could do other exercises and different variations. I could do a Bulgarian split squat to failure.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right? Because I love that to failure, because when I go down and I can't go up anymore, I just simply drop the weights right to the floor right next to me.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So, there's different ways to still do squatting patterns without having to put a bar on my back with the heaviest of loads that I can handle and do that.

Andrew Huberman:
And then, total volume, I guess if you're going close to failure or failure, per muscle group, and I'm not calling legs a muscle group, I'm calling quads a muscle group-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... hamstrings a muscle group-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... glutes a muscle group. Work set ranges per workout?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Per workout, again, probably somewhere between six to 10 on some of the smaller muscle groups like the biceps and a little bit more, maybe 10 to 12, 10 to 15 at most if you're looking at some of the larger muscle groups, like the quads, like the lats. I would go a little bit more. So, that breaks down into around, if you're doing roughly three sets an exercise, you're looking at three to four exercises to get to those larger muscle groups. And for the biceps, you can get away with doing two exercises or three exercises for a total of around seven or eight sets. When we do our workout, what we do to expose ourselves to more exercises, because we can influence the biceps in different ways, a little bit more long head stretch, short head focus, heavier load, more concentration work, you could do that just by doing less sets of the exercise. And again, when you're properly warmed up, and if you have enough experience training, there is nothing magic about doing three, right? We all think three, but you could do two and then move on to a different exercise that stimulates the biceps differently. That's a better total effect than maintaining that you have to do three of this and three of this and three of this, and then therefore limiting yourself to the three exercises. I could do four or five exercises that give all complementary functions to the biceps, do two of them each, and get a better workout.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I like a couple of warm-ups on the first exercise- Two work sets.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
Move to something else. Two work sets.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's what I tend to do.

Andrew Huberman:
And a few regular listeners of this podcast are probably thinking, "Well, how does this square with the conversation with Dorian, where it was really like one, maybe-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... two work sets per exercise?" He's always insisting on taking the work sets to failure and often beyond failure-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... with forced reps. So when you start looking at it as like you were saying, like with squats and deadlifts or rows, you're not going completely to failure, and I'm not going to say they're equivalent, but there is some offset there, right?

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It's either taking one, maybe two sets to complete failure with forced reps per exercise and then another exercise. It wasn't like we just did one exercise for back.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Then we did the pullover and then we had a row-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... a pull down, and then some rowing and so forth. So it ends up being about six work sets with some pushing beyond failure. You're talking about 10 to 12-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but maybe not so many sets where you're pushing past failure.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah, and I grew up watching Dorian Yates and doing the workouts, and I loved it. I found it hard for me to maintain that kind of intensity, especially training alone, right? Force reps are almost impossible alone-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... unless you have machines that can allow you to do that. So it was more of a difficulty of being able to stick with that type of training or reproduce it over and over and over again. Dorian Yates is Dorian Yates for a reason, because and a six-time Mr. Olympia for a reason, because he had the ability... He's like the Michael Jordan of bodybuilding. Michael Jordan did the things he could do because he could do things other people couldn't. Dorian Yates, I feel, could do things that a lot of other people couldn't in terms of tapping into that pain, discomfort, and ability to go further when he wanted to quit. Right when it got to be the hardest part of the set, he could start to revel in it and go further and further and further. I don't know if everybody has that ability. I can do it intermittently, but I can't do it consistently.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
And so for me, I just have to realize that and say, "Okay, I'm going to have to back off a little bit of the intensity, some of the forced reps, increase my volume just a little bit." Because it ultimately comes down to a volume and intensity game. And it could be literally the extreme examples of this. There's a lot of cyclists who cycle at 80 to 100 RPMs, but do hours and hours of that, who blow up their quads and have amazing lower body size from their cycling. How is that working? Well, there's a metabolic effect they're getting, too, which we know is another stimulus for growth. But at the right amount of volume, even low levels of absolute load can create growth, right? There's extreme examples of that. And I always go back and say, she probably hates me for it by now, but I always use the example of my wife, who is a barber, and she used to cut 40 haircuts a day. 30 to 40 haircuts a day. She was like a machine. But little girl, and she has these great traps, really well-developed traps. And it's not necessarily from the load of the scissors that weigh ounces, but it's the weight of the arm being held like this all day long. No direct trap work ever in her entire life. Massive traps that look great, by the way. Baby, you look great. But had great trap development because of that. That's an extreme example. That's eight hours a day, every day. That's no load or just, again, very minimal load, but extreme amounts of volume. So in terms of muscle growth, I always think there's always the possibility to get where you want to get, but you have to know how to balance volume and intensity.

Andrew Huberman:
In terms of frequency of training a given muscle group across the week, I'll just say two things that most people don't think about. One, there's nothing special about a week. We use a week as a division of time. But muscles don't really care about weeks.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Right. Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
They care about stimulus and recovery.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
The adaptation, the hypertrophy, the strength. So I consider myself somebody with a relatively poor recovery quotient.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I can hit each muscle group directly hard once per week. So sets to failure, somewhere in between what, say-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... Dorian does and what you do.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yesterday's workout felt slightly higher than the normal volume-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that I would do. The workout I did with him was slightly lower, so somewhere in between. But there's a lot of indirect training. For instance, I'll train my legs really hard one day per week, but then I'll also do a HIIT workout on the assault bike. And yeah, it's not a squat workout, but my legs get some stimulation from that.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
My lats do, too.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'll do a sprint workout one day per week. So that's what works for me. For you personally, before you make a suggestion to the larger world out there, how often can you directly hit a muscle group with the kind of intensity and volume that we did in the video that we provide a link to?

Jeff Cavaliere:
I can only directly hit that muscle group the same as you, once a week, with that level of intensity. Even in what we were doing yesterday, a lot of my focus is on you. I'm trying to focus on making sure you're doing what you're doing right. I'm trying to coach my way through what I'm doing. So it's like if it was just me and my own gym, I might've even zoned out a little bit more, gone a little bit harder, got a little bit uglier face when I was doing my repetitions that were hard. So it might be even a little notch above what was shown in our video in terms of intensity. I can't do that more than once a week for a muscle group. Now-

Andrew Huberman:
But you're also training back, you're also training chest, you're also training shoulders on a separate day in that case.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Well, that's the key, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
So when people recommend higher frequency sessions or every 48 hours or to twice a week minimum and all that, you are also forcing yourselves into some splits that have a lot more muscles being trained at once. Because in order to get back to them again in the same seven-day week period, you have to do multiple in one day. So let's just say in a push-pull leg scenario, you have to do all your pushing muscles. So right off the bat, you're doing chest, shoulders, triceps in one day. I find even that to be a lot to ask For me, at times, not all the time, but especially if I'm short on sleep and short on time that day, I can't get through all those and get an adequate stimulus because there's just too much work to be done. So, that creates a need to have to condense into these multi-muscle group splits that you go through the push, you go through the pull, you go through the legs. Now you got to have, let's say, one rest day, come right back again. So, you're training six days a week. Some people can't manage that either. But what I do is I say, all right, if I train, let's just say biceps, like we did, and I do them really hard, and I even just did biceps and triceps, say. If I did those two, I still have to get through legs, I have to get through shoulders, I have to get through chest. I break legs into anterior and posterior chains, so that's sort of two workouts. I have to get through a lot more in the week. So, if I had to get it all done in one week, I would run out of time. First thing I do is I extend beyond the seven days. So, I break that rule.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Because I realized, like you said, that our body doesn't know the difference. So, it's okay if it takes me a little bit longer to wrap around before I do whatever the arms again, let's say, in this case, the arms again. So, I break that rule. It could be nine days for me in terms of my cycle. But I know that when I come back after biceps, let's say I do posterior chain legs and then let's say I do after that chest, right? Even just a single muscle group. When I come back and I do back, the reason why back is following chest is I'm going to give my chest a reprieve from the day before. I'm going to go pulling when I was just pushing. Neurologically, I'm giving myself a complete break. But I also know that I'm looking backwards to when I did biceps, and it was 48 to 72 hours prior that I did biceps. When I do my back, I know I'm going to get indirect work for my biceps again.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Guarantee. So, and if I don't know that, I can make sure I do by doing underhand rows. I could do underhand pull-downs. I could do chin-ups rather than pull-ups if I feel like I didn't adequately stimulate my biceps that day. So, I can make selections in these back exercises that indirectly hit the biceps. That's a lot of volume. That's enough.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Like, you're getting direct volume. There's no rule, again, that says that it has to be directly hit to contribute volume to the work being done by that muscle group. So, I come back, and I do my indirect volume there. And a lot of times, these studies, I actually spoke to Brad Schoenfeld about this when he spoke at my event. They don't do a lot of accounting for the indirect work because we can't quantify what indirect contribution that row had to-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Jeff Cavaliere:
... a bicep. So, there's not a lot of data around that anyway, about how much contribution the indirect work works towards. So, when they do these studies, and they look for how much total volume, they're looking at direct work for that muscle group. So, I feel as if it's, intuitively, from my experience, I know that I definitely get another exposure for that muscle group, and that contributes to the overall volume. And then again, if it takes me a little bit longer to wrap around based on how I'm pairing things together, then so be it. But I'm getting that indirect work, but never twice directly.

Andrew Huberman:
So, in some sense, you are similar to the Mike Mentzer philosophy, not of one set to absolute failure, because he was really, really on the far end of things there.

Jeff Cavaliere:
I did that, too. I just again, couldn't sustain that.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. But in terms of not making the seven-day week the-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... holy grail of how you organize your schedule. Because Mike, I was fortunate enough to know him.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I paid him for a consult and-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... got to know him over the years before he unfortunately passed away. And he had me training, I think it was like shoulders and arms, rest two days.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Then it was like legs, rest two days, and then chest and back, and rest two days. And he said-

Jeff Cavaliere:
It was mind-blowing.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it was mind-blowing. And the problem with that, I think for a beginner is you get results. You certainly get results.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But you don't get the opportunity to develop the skill of training.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, there's, as you-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Or the enjoyment of it, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Or the enjoyment.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So, three, maybe four days a week of resistance training for me just is like the sweet spot.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But as with you, I've found that I can give myself permission, like if travel comes up, or a poor night's sleep, or some extra workload or something, like okay, there can be an extra day after legs, or you can modify things. Which brings me to my other question. Yesterday, after we were training, I learned something remarkable, which is there are times when you will split your split simply based on real-life constraints.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And you gave a beautiful example.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm smiling already. You said there are times when you're supposed to train at night, but you go in to read to your boys or spend some time with them before sleep, and you'll fall asleep next to them.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's more often than not.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So, then you'll go into your home gym at like 10 or 11 o'clock at night-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and you'll do half of your leg workout.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And then you'll literally split the split and come back and do the remainder of that workout a few days later.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I love this example because it's the real world.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And obviously, you're prioritizing time with your boys. And that's what really matters. That's why you're training in the first place.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, yes, to have your physique-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... et cetera, but your dad.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That's what motivates me now.

Andrew Huberman:
That's what motivates you, to be around for a long time. So, splitting the split. You wouldn't suggest it to people, but life happens. So, what does that look like? Is it that you're doing your quad workout and then normally you would also do something else, but you're doing the other stuff later, or maybe doing three sets of squats and coming back two days later and doing the other three sets of squats?

Jeff Cavaliere:
So, here's the irony of it. I don't know if I wouldn't recommend splitting the split.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Jeff Cavaliere:
I feel like I'm starting to learn that splitting the split is me breaking a bad habit that I was unwilling to break a long time, because of the same mentality that led me to think of a seven-day training week, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That I think what's happening and that I've been seeing is that splitting the split does a few things for me mentally. It recharges me on a night where I really don't have a lot in the tank. If I get over there, and I was just sleeping for the last 30 minutes or 45 minutes, I'm not in the greatest state of mind to train. But if I know that the requirement is, let's just get through, if I'm going to do my shoulders, let's say, let me get through ... half of what I would normally do. I'm going to focus today on the non-strength focused stuff, because I'm just not neurologically prepared to do that right now. So let's just work on the lateral raises, the strict lateral raises in that case, the hip exercise I like, it's a hip hugger. It's just different exercises that I would do that would be perceived as the non-compound exercises. And I'll do those, and what I find very quickly is that because I can ease into those exercises, they're not as heavily loaded, but they're high intensity. And it doesn't have to come from the load, it comes from the effort. I can ease into them. After one or two sets, I'm good, and I'm kind of into it. And I know that once I'm done with these six sets or so, I'm done for the night. And I can come back and do my strength work when I'm ready, which could be two days later usually. Sometimes the very next night. Really, I'll just split it to the next night, and whatever was planned gets bumped one spot. It's going to extend that training week even further so that nine days can become 11 or 12. But we talked about recovery before. It seems to be working well with me for my recovery at this age. And again, I think I have very bad sleep habits only because of the result of working out at 11:00 or 12:00 is you... And by the way, eating dinner after that, that's my dinner time. Eating dinner after that, I get to bed 1:30 in the morning and I'm getting up at 7:00, or I get up to bed at 2:00 and I'm getting up at 7:00. This might be what works for me best right now because I don't have the recovery through as much sleep as I should get. Now, I know a lot of people will yell and say, "Well, you need to work on your sleep and get better recovery." I understand that. Right now, this little pattern is where I'm in. It can be fixed by me training earlier in the day, stepping away from work and training earlier in the day. I haven't found the time or the way to do that effectively at this moment, so this is what I have to navigate. And I encourage people to do the same thing. Find what works with your current schedule. You can have an eye towards fixing it, but what works for your schedule to get you through this time period? I think it's working because I have more recovery time in a less recovered sleep state that seems to still be progressing because I can still lift heavier than I have been able to. I'm still able to create effective workouts for me. I feel good. My joints are actually feeling good. Things are feeling even a little better than they were. So it happens to be working for me. So I might be changing my mind a little bit about frequencies and volumes in terms of what I do in a given workout. And accepting the fact that it can happen over two days is so relieving because it's like, "I don't have to bring it all today. I can just sort of get this much done today." And it allows me to have a higher effort to handle, again, some of the lower volumes that we're doing. So it's a win-win all around. And the kids like me more for it, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Well, and someday they'll see this and they're going to see so much of your content. They're grateful for it.

Jeff Cavaliere:
They're totally disinterested right now.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, but they're going to be grateful for the fact that-

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... you're obviously prioritizing them, and your wife, and your family, and that's a beautiful thing.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, Jeff, thank you so much for the workout yesterday. I definitely learned a number of things.

Jeff Cavaliere:
That was fun.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm definitely feeling it a bit in the-

Jeff Cavaliere:
We got to do more of those.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, we should do more. And thank you for coming back to educate us. And some people, when they speak, not a whole lot happens except a bunch of exhales shaped into sound. When you speak, people learn, and they learn super valuable information, everything from the basics all the way up to the nuance. You're constantly educating yourself already, just a moment ago. You're still evolving the way you're doing things, and you share that. And again, these so-called small things that allow one to do the big things for much longer and much more effectively is really what it's all about. And you clearly walk the walk. You look awesome. You're 50, steroid, TRT free, all of that, and you look incredible. And so there are probably none people who are doing what you're doing. You're truly an N of one that you can encapsulate all this, and you're just so generous with your time and your energy, and so I'm very grateful for you coming on here again.

Jeff Cavaliere:
I was so pumped. I've been wanting to come back here for so long, and negotiating the travel is always a thing for me, but I was so excited to be able to do it, finally do it, and getting the workout in, and to come back and sit down with you is always my favorite thing. So thank you for having me.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, please come back again. You're an inspiration to me. And like I said, you're a absolutely extraordinary educator. Thank you.

Jeff Cavaliere:
Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Jeff Cavaliere. To learn more about his work and to find links to "Athlete X" resources, please see the show note caption. In addition, you'll also find links in the show note captions to the workout that Jeff and I did and that was referenced a few times throughout the episode. So that's a link to a proper workout for the biceps, for the triceps, for the forearms, and Jeff's signature move, face pulls. 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. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep, to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." And if you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Jeff Cavaliere. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.