How to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Pavo satlin Pavo satlin is considered one of the Premier strength training and fitness coaches in the world he has pioneered the development of various programs to improve strength which he calls the mother of all Fitness indeed today you will learn about strength as a practice as a skill that can be applied to sports that can be applied to general fitness to getting leaner to getting faster and to improving your endurance as Pavo Satan explains by building one's strength through body weight exercises free weight exercises and occasionally machines one can develop incredible levels of Fitness at any age we discussed some of the spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing strength Feats like 100 pull-ups per week and we emphasize that one does not have to be seeking hypertrophy one does not have to be seeking getting larger muscles in order to get exceptionally strong I myself these days am focusing primarily on trying to get stronger and build endurance for sake of health and for General Life reasons and because getting really strong turns out to be very beneficial in every aspect of life today you're going to learn how to get extremely strong you can add muscle if you want in parallel with that or as pav Satan explains you can pursue strength and flexibility for their own sake and there's tremendous value for doing so so today's discussion pertains to women to men and frankly to people of all ages I do think that pursuing strength as its own thing independent of muscle growth right which we hear so much about these days everyone wants hypertrophy grow muscle this and that pursuing strength as its own thing is a tremendously valuable Endeavor today you're going to learn how from the world world's Premier expert in this topic you're in for a very special episode with Pavo satlin he is truly in a class all his own when it comes to Fitness and strength training 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 this episode does include sponsors and now for my discussion with Pavo saulin Pavo sat welcome Andrew uh pleasure to be on your podcast I respect your work a lot thank you likewise thank you I will say that you and perhaps one other person have truly changed the way that I think about Fitness the way that I train and I'm super excited to talk to you today so I'm withholding excitement there are a bunch of different ways to think about this thing that we call Fitness strength endurance hypertrophy and there's so much information out there now how do you conceptualize fitness meaning do you look at things through the lens of Are We focused on nervous system bone connective tissue or muscle do you look at things through the lens of anterior chain posterior chain hypertrophy strength I would just like to get your sort of high level conceptualization of this thing that we call Fitness with the idea in mind that most people would like to have some level of endurance some level of strength and feel healthy and presumably look however they want to look but let's set Aesthetics aside for the moment how do you think about this thing we call Fitness well first of all Andrew is uh strength is the mother mother quality of all the other qualities so this is again it's a statement by Professor M mat going way back and without a foundation of strength you cannot build anything so any athletic event requires a base of strength of course that uh shot putters going to need much more strength than Triathlon uh Triathlon athlete but they all need strength speaking of which uh in Triathlon in Marathon running in distance uh in cycling it's been proven that putting athletes on a heavy low repetition strength regimen the kind that doesn't really add muscle but just makes you stronger neurologically and uh it makes them race faster so once you're stronger everything becomes easier how much stronger you need to get that will vary in the Soviet Union they had something called the model athlete so they figured out that for every particular event uh your odds of succeeding are going to be much higher if you're able to you know Squad this much or bench this much and jump this high and so on and so forth and this is easy enough to find these numbers for your individual Sport and talk to various coaches for people who are not competitive athletes who just want to enjoy life you just need to think about uh having a reserve of strengths for whatever it is that you might do so look at some PT standards and let's say in the military or in law enforcement and possibly apply them to yourself I don't want to impose my set of Standards because there are many different like I might prefer you know pull-ups and X and Y and Z but if we're looking at strength as the foundation for General physical preparation right so there's such a thing as general strength preparation that's part of that there's also you know special strength which is Sport specific work that's different and uh there are different ways of getting this done but as you and I know that uh certain exercises are going to have a great carryover outside these particular exercises so as long as you're mobile as long as you're symmetrical and those are the things you have to address first you need to look into work of uh gr cook for example then strength has to be your priority once you have reached a certain level strength that's appropriate for your sport or appropriate for your lifestyle at that point you can just maintain it and focus and other qualities so I will um give you an example uh Soviet scientists research and Gena they OBS they measured a number of athletes in 20 different sports athletes of different levels so they evaluated various quality one was absolute strength and other was rate of force development pretty much power and the third was is the rate of muscular relaxation so how quickly the muscle can relax after contraction which is very very important and they have found that uh strength grew just very little from the intermediate level to the advanced level there's not a lot of improvement power increased a little bit more but the speed of relaxation is just just shut up as the athlete be became more advanced so it's again so strength it is the modable qualities but that's not the end all for everybody so reach the level that is appropriate for your Sporter activity then just maintain it efficiently and uh focus on something else if we talk about strength if we talk about other qualities well we'll get to them later what movements do you believe if they exist all people should include in their weekly routine someplace when thinking about how to develop perhaps maintain but but for most people it's going to be the goal of still achieving some strength okay strength increase excuse me I think there has to be a very low quantity of exercises just very few exercises you want to focus on and uh I'm going to give you some options to choose from so what we try to do a strong first in my company my school of strength is we try to provide people with various simple very low Tac High concept ways of addressing reaching their needs because for one reason or another for this indiv the barbell is the preferred tool for another it's the kettle bell or body weight or some or something else so I'm not going to say that if you don't do kettle bell swings or barbell squats you'll never amount to anything that's just not true but you can pick some you can pick some events so you definitely ought to do something for a posterior chain you absolutely do if we are looking at uh at the barbell I would start out with the narrow Sumo deadlift so this is narrow grip but not Nar grip pardon me but your stance is just wide enough to let your arms through uh your arms stay parallel to each other and uh so you just find it very comfortable stance for yourself so Professor Mill has been in your podcast he explained to you about the uh you know different hip architecture and so on so you have to find whatever works whatever works for you and when people talk about functional strength training and then they start standing on a ball and jugle oranges doesn't make a lot of sense to me because that doesn't look like my life or yours probably right but if you have to get a heavy bag of groceries or something you got a deadlift and the narrow Sumo deadlift so if you look at powerlifters an example would be classic example would be Ed cone that's a narrow St Sumo I'm not talking about wide Sumo that's a very sport specific event and uh you practice that first you learn how to hip hinge it's extremely important to learn how to hip hinge again uh Steward stress that how important it is for your back health and for your longevity so you learn to do that then whether you decide to pursue deadlift or not if you decide not to pursue High numbers in the deadlift maybe it's not appropriate for you or maybe you're liking the coaching a fantastic exercise for everybody is a zercher squat so in the zercher squat you hold the bar like this in the crooks of your elbows so it's resting right here it's possible to pick it up off the ground but it's you know it's it's an advanced skill that's it's an advanced skill better just to walk it off the rack the advantage of the zerra squad over let's say the back squat or the front squat is even if you have messed up shoulders wrists elbows you still can do that coaching uh desert your squat is very easy very simple and you have tremendous reflex of stabilization uh of your midsection it's just very very powerful so you acquire that skill of getting tight so getting high numbers on that exercise in the zercher so let's say an athlete could shoot for double double body weight it that's that's a really good goal and the bar for those listening not watching is cradled in the in the crooks of the elbows in front of the body are the arms uh cross you can hold them like this you can hold them like this or different ways of holding them you definitely would want to get proper coaching uh you don't want to you know you don't want to bruise yourself you want to be comfortable you want to do it right but it's not doesn't take a lot of skill to do that you find some pressing exercise and again uh if we're sticking with the example of the barbell the bench breast has gotten better reputation you know thanks to the gimm Bros and you know all gim Bros do is they bench pretty much well these days they also check out their phones I guess every set between every set the 11th rep I joke people checking their phones yeah there we go but if you look at athletes they athletes who also do some lower body work some posterior chain chain work and something for the midsection and again Zer sad could address that they are making a great use of the bench press so it's nothing it's a very simple exercise well not very simple it's a relatively simple exercise and uh unlike other pressing exercises it allows you to make strength gains with a very low volume of training so you can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger good luck doing that to the overhead press or the one arm push-up or something like that so those are just couple examples uh there are many other examples you can do snatch grip deadlifts you can uh list as very very long we can address the same thing in the same way with kettle bells you can look in the body weight exercises but you need to find several exercises that have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond the ability to do this exercise if you just do curls you know you're going to do you're going to get better at curls but not at much else so Canadian um Canadian scientist back in the 80s the duale and his team made some interesting uh some interesting discoveries and again they just found that doing something leg extension is not going to carry over to the squad it just not the coordination is so radically different so you find several exercises that you enjoy that don't hurt you that uh you uh have the equipment available that you got the proper coaching for and you pretty much stick with them and there's absolutely no reason for you to change these exercises it's possible to change them on the margins you know from a wide grip bench press to Nar grip bench press uh squats with a Paws and so on and so forth but you don't really have to do uh a great variety of things variety it's a good topic we can discuss this later but uh like looking at the example of weightlifting as much as we can find many reasons why variety could be beneficial improved neuroplasticity uh reduced uh reduced risk of repeative strain injury and so on but the so did the statistics in weightlifting there's no correlation between the number of exercises and uh the platform results and for people outside the sports it's going to be the same so find this limited just limited battery of exercises that you can ex you can do well you can do painfree and just enjoy them for years I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity now I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night now one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature actually has 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snoring if you'd like to try an eights Sleep mattress cover go to 8sleep.com huberman to save up to $350 off their pod 4 ultra eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor one of the most important factors in both your short and long-term health is your body's ability to manage blood glucose or blood sugar to maintain energy and focus throughout the day you want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or crashes I first started using levels about 3 years ago as a way to understand how different foods impacted my blood glucose levels and it's proven incredibly informative for determining my food choices when I eat specific foods and how I time eating relative to things like my workouts both weight training and cardiovascular training things like running and when to eat before I go to sleep to allow for the most stable blood sugar throughout the night indeed using levels has helped shape my entire schedule so if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a CGM yourself you can go to levels. linkhub levels has just launched a new CGM sensor that is smaller and has even better tracking than before right now they're also offering an additional two free months of membership again that's levels. link spelled l i n k/h huberman to try the new sensor in two free months of membership would a combination across the week of some sort of squat let's say the zercher squat a um perhaps a kettle bell swing or something else for a posterior chain pull up and dip be a fair Fairly comprehensive program absolutely I'm a fan of dips I like dips a lot I heard you say that you uh were some years ago you said that you were using dips for economy of time um and I started getting into dips I um haven't quite figured out the best way to load dips once because once you get past 15 20 repetitions of the body weight dip it gets I turns into something else sure absolutely uh it turns into aerobic exercise perhaps well uh Luke Iams uh he was a powerlifter from the Golden Age of American powerlifting he says anything over six reps is bodybuilding yeah I'm trying to stay in the lower rep range today I'll talk about this with you more uh because I think a growing number of people both men and women who are starting to do weight training or really incorporate strength training into their program are seeking a combination of strength and perhaps endurance as well without putting on too much size maybe size in some select body parts Andrew I think they need to uh do possibly several different types of types of training but going going back to your examples dips are fantastic if you can if your shoulders can handle them if you know how to do them it's a great exercise but not particular Democratic that's the problem so either you can do it safe or you can't and possibly it's possible to coach some people to do to do the dip so if you're coaching somebody to do the dip the first prerequisite is to build up to a full skin the cat so it means you're hanging upside down you know look up what it means folks uh on a bar so you got to be able to get yourself in that position so if you're able to do that and if you're able to get out of the position you know strongly and confidently there's a good chance that you can start up and doing dips and be coached into that if you can't probably not so either try to build up to that unless there medical restrictions or not uh you mentioned the example of pull-ups absolutely pull-ups are one of the best General strength exercises and again to your listeners uh General versus special special in Soviet terminology just means sport specific so the carryover when you start doing pull-ups when you excel at pull-ups or the dips you are going to get a carryover so far beyond these exercis which is exactly the reason you do that so I like your choices very much yeah what about specialized training for grip strength I I believe that if somebody's large if they can squat 500 lb if they can deadlift 600 lb I don't really care if um the question is can you open the pickle jar sure this is a critical I just get my wife to do it so uh it's uh grip strength is extremely important and you being in neuroscientist you know the disproportional representation the motor cortex of your gripping muscles and the forarm and everything so so uh and there's another reason why grip is so important so if you make a fist if you make a very tight fist you're going to feel uh you're going to feel the Overflow of tension IR radiation going to other muscles so pretty much by gripping tighter you are instantly increasing your strength in anything that you do and uh so very simple example for your listeners take some um pedestrian exercise like curls and and do as many strick traps as you possibly can the way you normally do them and then start just crushing that bar or that dumbbell or whatever that you're curling you will immediately be able to knock out several more reps so that makes you so much stronger and again the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important uh for whatever reason obviously it correlates with longevity we don't know why we have no idea correlation is not uh causation so we don't know whether getting stronger a stronger grip is going to make us live longer but statistic basically is worth a try right so one can either find exercises that train the grip in the context of developing something else or train the grip directly so either way is is great so the first examples would be climbing the Rope or doing pull-ups and weighted pull-ups on a rope that's a great way to train obviously so what you do the way you program it is uh let's say once a week you climb the rope and a couple days a week you do pull-ups that's a good way to go about it and you don't need to do anything else and another example would be some exercises like the cattle Bell snatch when you start snatching a heavy kettle bell and you drop it from overhead that eccentric loading uh is is very very powerful and that develops grip very very well and again right now we're talking more about what uh what people in the grip world called the crushing grip you know how you squeeze something there are other types of grip that they differentiate but this type of crushing grip is what's going to help most athletes and non-athletes the most and uh I also warn you that uh hanging on the bar and doing Farmers carries beneficial as they are for many reasons it's not going to do that much for it interesting I started incorporating Farmers carries thinking it was going to improve my grip but they're healthy uh if you look at McGill's work you will he he will tell you that carrying two heavy objects it's going to really pound your spine and uh but on the other hand as symmetrical carry it appears to be very beneficial then there's another interesting example now right now I'm not talking about grip training at all uh I'm not even talking about strength training but I'm talking about sort of a former run uh Dr Mike Prost who used to work with the US Marine Corps Navy he developed this very interesting protocol and a test called the kettle bell mile where you take a kettle bell that's approximately 30% of your body weight and uh he he has good reasons for why it has to be that way and you pretty much run with this kettle bell and you switch hands as much as often as you want and it's a fantastic way to uh improve your running posture to develop very stabilizing muscles and to improve your ability to rock but it doesn't beat you up as much rocking does you know rocking carrying heavy weight that's it's rough on the body so it's a fantastic way uh it's a fantastic way to to train your endurance an additional way how heavy is the kettle bell that 30% because he says when you start going heavier it's going to affect your gate so you're not really you know you have to you have to kick your hi over to the side it becomes it becomes something else that's a heavy Kettle Bill 30% of your body weight yeah I mean I'm 210 lbs it's not not trivial it's probably something like to 62 LBS or something like that uh 70 lb Kettle bill it's not no no no it's not trivial by any means but it's also not something you jump in to immediately and also what's very cool is because you get to switch hands very often you're not destroying uh your ql and other stabilizers that Contracting isometrically and so what we're doing right now here is kind of a form of anti-glycolytic training if you muscle contracts briefly and relaxes contracts relaxes with and the contraction Cycles are really short you're able to avoid glycolysis you're able to keep that muscle working aerobically for a long time and not beat yourself down so uh to the listeners who'd like to try it start by walking with a kettle bell pass you know switch hands off and then eventually build up to running and obviously build up gradually held like a suitcase yes only only like a suitcase mhm okay yeah there's a podcast um led by a guy named cam Haynes he's a bow hunter he's one of the people that really brought Extreme Fitness and Ultras to the sport of bow hunting and is legendary there and for his podcast he has you carry the 72lb rock up a it's about 1,000 feet of the wildness and I've done it it's uh it's hard because of the shap of the thing and so you're moving it from shoulder to uh to you know to football carry to uh you know uh infant carry and uh you're not talking about that you're talking about suitcase on the right correct are you trying to crush the grip while you're doing it no you're not no this is not this is not developing a grip whatsoever and and you're running at a 10 20 minutes 30 minutes well he's go he says run for a mile that's the goal and he has some numbers I can give you a link can look at up Dr Mike prast and direct grip strength strength training is great as well so for example the best product for that would be the captains of Crush grippers from Iron mind iron mind iron mind is the company that started a serious grip training pretty much in modern era and their grippers are the golden standard some years ago my colleague as strong for Brad Jones and I we decided to get serious about it and see what that feels like and we spel spent many many months we were both able to build up to uh uh closing the number three gripper uh from a parallel set so uh that means that gripper takes 280 lbs to close and when you're using very small muscle groups it's extremely extremely hard and the observations that we both made and uh other colleagues and people have made that once you are able to do that everything becomes so much easier however the training itself is extremely hard because people are thinking that when you're training the grip is just some kind of isolated thing you can you can write it drive the car and you can kind of squeeze this little pink thing that you picked up at uh at the department store no when you train with a heavy duty gripper like the one from Iron mind it's a full body effort and you need to use um pretty much every neurological trick in the book in order to to uh exert yourself so for example if you uh if you have ever seen uh the sunanin stance in Kate which is it's a stance where the knees are kind of pulled Inward and uh shoulders are pressed down there's a lot of lot of tension everything everything's very very seriously engaged the toes are gripping the ground so you're pretty much gripping the ground with your toes you're Contracting your glutes you're bracing very very hard you're compressing your viscera your ltis firing and you're sending this all this effort everything the only thing they're not working like you try to keep your traps and face out of this and you're directing this effort into your goup you get just as tired from doing that work as from uh doing like heavy squats or something that's remarkable but if you like that it's a fantastic thing to do well the the motor neuron recruitment that you are describing is phenomenal um I have one reflection on this relationship between grip strength and Longevity uh just a a little bit of Neuroscience um you may be familiar with this so forgive if you are but for the listeners as well the motor neurons that control movement of the Torso lie closer to the midline on both sides of the spinal cord the motor neurons that are responsible for more distal mus muscles um that is further from the midline sit outside of those and so as you get out to the movement of the digits you know the fingers and toes um those are the most distal from the midline the rate and pattern of degeneration of neurons as a function of Aging even if there's no ALS or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or anything is always outside in we don't know why this is it may relate to the uh presence of the enzyme um sod superoxide dutas um but it does seem that people that train their peripheral strength they can offset some of that outside to in or distal to more uh close to the midline degeneration so I believe and this is just a belief that it's not just correlative that when one trains their periphery they actually can offset some of the degeneration it's also the way it's mapped in the brain which is a kind of a discussion outside of here we need to get some diagrams up for people to really um conceptualize that but it's also the case if you look at older people 70 80 90 their calves are generally atrophied even if their torso is still very thick and muscular if they did training so I feel like obviously training the core and the Torso is so key but training the the peripheral muscles at least from the perspective of longevity it makes sense why that would be important well there are so many reasons obviously to do that so I think that whether you choose to do that directly with grippers or and there are some other devices obviously unlimited number of devices and exercises or as a part of another exercise like climbing the Rope uh definitely strongly encouraging your listeners to do that I'm going to try this running with the kettle bell on one side for I'll go out for a mile with it on the right and then oh no no you s all the time as much as you want because if you try to do on one side you're going to pound your stabilizers just pound them you're not going to recover forever and this way this is one of the secrets secrets to developing uh isometric endurance is very uh rapid switching you know short contractions and uh brief rests and over and over and over that way you are not uh you you know the muscle doesn't go uh into esia and you know keeps getting oxygen pretty much I'd like to talk about concentric versus Ecentric portions of a movement concentric generally being the lifting phase and Ecentric of course folks the the lowering phase um is there a case for just doing concentric movements yes um is there a case for emphasizing the Ecentric portion uh how does one balance those when thinking about soreness recovery and frequency of training okay well first of all the case for concentric only is if you're trying to minimize muscle girls and uh if you also are trying to minimize soreness so for athletes uh in weight classes or athletes in sports where you get punished by carrying extra weight it's a very good idea so for example uh when Barry Ross coached telis and Felix at that point she became the uh fastest she won the 200 meters uh in the world she was 17 years old I think she was the youngest and so he would have her do deadlifts and they were conscent only and she would have her drop the bar and uh the reasoning for that is is exactly that you're able to get stronger you're not putting on extra muscle mass also it's it's safe it's really very very safe way to train and in programming in programming a protocol for somebody who's not necessarily in that in that boat it's still just for the sake of variety you may want to choose to avoid the avoid The Eccentric on certain days like you're trying to recover accelerate the recovery so you uh lift the weight but then you step down so you could definitely do that eccentric work it's suppos supposedly very helpful to promote hypertrophy but there are a lot of ifs and butts in there I'm going to talk right now about The Eccentric strength work Ecentric work for strength specifically it's very because the muscle is strongest whenever you're lowering the weight it's very easy to uh do something knuckleheaded and get hurt which is Jim Bros do that all the time and instead of doing that what the wise much wiser approach is to get a perfect spotter great competent Spotter and put on after you've done your normal couple of low repetition heavy sets add maybe 5 10 pounds over your maximum and make a perfect eccentric with an intense ion of lifting it so you're lowering this bar that you're just you know the bench press bench press barbell you lowering to your chest and you're loading yourself like you're ready to press it back you pause on your chest without losing tension you're ready to blast it back and then your spotters take it off you and you do this about do this about two three times this uh this sort of a strategy or variation of it was uh us used by reek will he was uh he was able to bench press over 50000 lb wearing a t-shirt uh at a body weight of buak 81 back in the 80s one of the great greatest uh bench pressers who was extremely intelligent about his training and he did the same thing with his heavy attempts as well and incidentally even better not even better I should say you do this in a different day when you combine this this same type of eccentric with a very uh uh con perfect assisted trip not Force Trap like Bros do it's so you bro you know the guy shaking there and dying no so again let's say that your best bench press is you know 315 so you load up 325 you lower it perfectly and you're not and you're lowering at the speed of your uh Max attempt so you're not going very very very slow you know how guys do it they take the first uh quarter of the range of motion very slow and they fall through that doesn't do anything at all no you lower it at that uh rhythm of your maximum weight you pause and then you press it and your training partner gives you enough assistance to make it feel like it's about your 90% so the fact is you're not you get to feel a supera maximum weight but you're not experiencing any psychological stress it's very very powerful and again you do this uh you do this maybe for one or two singles this uh also ties with the Soviet research on gymnast they came up with something called artificial controlling environment so they compared a group of gymnasts that was uh working up to some strength demanding skill with doing typical regressions and at the same time they were also working on um typical strength training weighted pull-ups and so on and the other group would have the coach provide this perfect assistance to enable the athlete to perform the skill at a high level as they put it uh living their motor future motor future but with enough help not to to make it hard but not stressful and the difference in gains were just just just dramatically so much gain so much faster so I would say that would be a very good way to use uh eccentric work uh isometric isometric training calls can also be very powerful for strength and a great value of isometric training is and its ability to coach you to live properly and not just live properly other uh other athletic events as well if let's say that you're trying to learn to throw a front kick and you're doing it you're all over the place but if you place your foot on a wall and if your coach or Sensei positions your body your foot in a certain way and teaches you to start to start applying pressure to that wall and the ground at the same time and kind of a pulse it against the wall adjust your body uh and then you relax shake off your muscles and you go hit the bag and suddenly you're going to do so much better the same thing let's say that you're trying to optimize your uh position for the bottom of the deadlift so you load up more weight that you could possibly lift and then you wedge yourself under and you start applying pressure and it doesn't feel good so you change a little bit so isometrics are very powerful for uh not just for strengthening the sticking points but also for optimizing the angles then we're also dealing with something that um there's also great disinhibition effect so what your listeners might not know is uh so there two you're you have two pedals in your nervous system as and pardon me for telling you this you don't need obviously you know all this but there's the exitation inhibition there's the gas the gas pedal and the brake pedal and there are various influences some of them psychological but not all of them that are taking away from your strength that's called inhibition and under certain circumstances there are documented cases like a lady lifting off the front of a 36 pound 36 100 pound car to save her son and there are documented cases of that so that disinhibition takes place so isometrics does have some disinhibition effects property is very very powerful also isometrics teaches you to uh teaches you not to give up on a heavy attempt because if you put um the experiments were done in a safe manner on the machines obviously but if you put an inexperienced person and uh the machine is moving a slow at a slow rate so when it starts speed starts approaching zero uh that inhibition takes place so pretty much the subject thinks the gig is up I'm not going anywhere that's it I'm done I'm just giving up because I failed but training with isometrics allows you to develop to develop this kind of a neural Drive endurance that you need to grind through safely through a heavier tap so very very powerful how would you incorporate isometrics into it so you can do this uh as a part of your warm-up you can uh also do pause reps they're fantastic it's when you combine combine a eccentric concentric and isometric contraction all in one so perfect Temple for the squat you lower to the parallel and you stay tight and you stay there for 3 to 5 seconds and then you explode upward so that uh that's a great way to train I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor ag1 ag1 is an allin1 vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast the reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I still take ag1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement what that means is that ag1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins minerals and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily Health ag1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status your metabolic Health your hormone health and much more so I've consistently found that when I take ag1 daily my digestion is improved my immune system is more robust and my mood and mental focus are at their best in fact if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 with your order of ag1 again go to drink a1.com huberman to claim this special offer I'd like to talk about neural Drive um I attribute you with popularizing maybe you invented it but um certainly popularizing the term like greasing the groove uh in one of your books and by the way we provide links to um Pav's books in the show note captions I'm a collector of your books than I love them um some of them are getting to be collector's items they're a little bit harder to find but you'll have to compete with me on eBay um but some of them can be found elsewhere and we'll provide links uh to those but this notion of greasing the groove complet completely changed my conceptualization of strength training because I was weaned U more or less trying to run cross country during the cross country season only ran it once but I greatly enjoyed it continued that sort of training or trying to put on strength and size kind of a a numb skull young male approach to things but what it served me reasonably well I'm grateful that I included both however I was so tuned to this notion of training a body part creating an adaptation then waiting for the adaptation to occur and then training the body part again you know the arguments are all over the Internet two times a week three times a week and then I came across this concept of greasing the groove which as a neuroscientist felt so intuitively correct and turns out to be correct you'll explain what it is but the idea that more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of opportunities for development of strength of size hypertrophy if one wants and I would say just generally more flexibility over one's Total Fitness program once one understands this concept you no longer look at this split or that split or this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume oh that is important but you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous system and to me it was like uh water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together all these different concepts so could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is and then I think the implications of it will become obvious but we'll also spell out please interrupt me because this is about to become a this might get really long so please interrupt me at any time so first I'll talk about the neural component then we're going to talk about the frequency and the morphological adaptation structural adaptations as it leads so ladies and gentlemen greas the groove we are talking about uh let's use an analogy let's imagine that you are a bow hunter and you work in your garage and then you walk out of your garage and you sho an arrow and you just go back to going about your business just working in your garage or let's say you're a kid who uh who practices martial arts and every on every break between classes you just go in the corner and you practice your kada this is the best way to practice your skill in small portions in a spaced out manner what's really fascinating is um traditional education and traditional strength training it's based on the cramming model so remember cramming for an exam so you're studying at night and you somehow squeak by and you pass it okay great and then a couple days later you happily forget everything so in contrast imagine that you let's say you're studying a foreign language you write words on cards and at every opportunity you're standing in line in the bank so the Lesser Mortals are fooling around on their phones you're just going through your deck like oh can I translate this word I go put it back in the deck flip it over then next time you in some other place you do this again so this is an example of space practice versus the traditional Mass practice and the evidence of the superiority of space practice is just overwhelming it goes back to the 19th century and there's at least like a more than a thousand papers published on that and still very few people do that which is really sad and uh strength is a skill so two interesting things happened in the 50s one is Thomas rash he was an American uh exercise physiologist he proposed that strength adaptation was largely uh largely uh skill and he looked at pretty much the adaptations he noticed that there's no correlation between the muscle growth and strength then uh at the same time as Soviet scientist uh tanov was his last name he was measuring the electrical activity in the muscles of weightlifters who are pressing overhead and back then the Press was one of the competition events and what he found is as the athletes got stronger after some months the emgs started dropping off when they're lifting the same weights so pretty much he found out that the nervous system activity became more economical they were able to try less hard yet still live the same weights or pretty much they they could try harder and lift even heavier weights and hypertrophy could not explain that because in the 50s the Soviets were very anti- hypertrophy they were just doing doubles triples singles pretty much so if we look at what's going on it's uh the heian mechanisms so pretty much every time that you activate a particular connection synaptic connection you know between the neurons that connection becomes uh Stronger so if you do it over and over and over so the grease the groove is the analogy is that command that's coming in from your brain to your muscles that's the groove that's that pathway and the more you use it pretty much the more grease it becomes so it's like becomes a superconductor so in the future you don't have to try as hard to live the same amount of weight or you can try the same amount and you can live it harder so we're not we haven't even addressed the neural drive yet we just pretty much made the Mo neurons more responsive more responsive to it and um it's a very easy and very simple way to train and uh strength comes very easily and very very unexpectedly to make sure that it does happen you have to address uh the issue of specificity so specificity pretty much means without getting too too much into the weeds to get stronger first of all you need to lift weights that are heavy enough and uh if you're looking about percentages of one R Max we're looking at like 75 to 85 typically if you go to light you don't make the impression on your nervous system and it's just not specific enough if you go to heav very quickly you're just going to burn yourself out and uh so pretty much like it's a weight That's Heavy enough to respect and light enough not to fear and second of all and this is very surprising is you only do about half or fewer reps that you possibly could do so for example let's say that you're lifting 80% of your one rep max and let's say that you're able to do eight reps maximum with it that's your that we're just fairly fairly common well you're only going to do about three uh three to four reps per set and that's it and the Jim Bros at this point go crazy like where's the intensity well intensity and strength training is just how heavy the weight is it has nothing to do with the f and it's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard you're exerting yourself there are times for that there are absolute times for that but if the weight is heavy enough and if you have the repetitions that you possibly could do you're going to get stronger it's very safe and you're not going to burn out psychologically and it's also very easy on your body so um also that builds muscle as well purely because you're able to do a very high volume of work I'm not able to explain the mechanism why it builds muscle but as the Soviet found out in weightlifting research there's a correlation between the volume and uh Robert troman between the volume and the hypertrophy everything else being equal you're going to get bigger so almost every day you're doing the sets of three four WS maybe even five and they start adding up and before you know it you're stronger and at the same time you have developed muscle so to summarize the grease the groove you're trying to train uh moderately heavy as often as possible while staying as staying as fresh as possible and uh if you decide to do it in the gym a very simple protocol would be a set every 10 minutes it sounds really bizarre like why why why would would you rest for so long this apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation there's so much is still unknown so we do know the G the group works great but we speculate that some of it has to do with some the same phenomena related to uh to learning in other fields so if you're doing something over and over like like you're saying 2 plus 2 is 4 2 plus two is four you're just using your short-term memory you're not memorizing anything but if you say 2 plus two is four you go get a coffee you come back and you try 2 + 2 four so there's that desirable difficulty that you have in there and you have to process that instead of just go through the groove that uh that apparently helps helps this adaptation so rest for at least 10 minutes do sets of about the repetitions of half of what you're possibly able to do and you know listen to your body typically train two three days in a row and then take a day off but listen to your body incidentally this Greaser group is the topic of uh my next book I have completed it it's not published yet if if you look at uh I can't pronounce the Hungarian professor's last name chahi thank you thank you I appreciate that so he's talking about that perfect uh challenge perfect practice lies in that channel between boredom and anxiety so if you put yourself in that channel and if you keep lifting this moderately heavy weights with a moderate effort over and over and over you're going to get strong that's one of the many ways to get stronger are you doing anything in the um rest periods between these 10 minutes so is it uh let's say uh bench press um wait 10 minutes till you bench press again but in the meantime you're doing zercher squat 5 minutes after the first bench press that's one of the way to do that you can do up to three exercise three exercises at the same time so let's say like Zer Squad and the bench press and maybe a third thing but I say those two are enough and uh another option is you can do that you can incorporate this into if you do only one exercise you can squeeze it into your lifestyle or your athletic practice so for example uh in uh that's say you're teaching a track uh track uh practice or martial arts class and every 10 minutes on the clock you just have the class do drop and do three hard let's say three one arm push-ups okay and then get back to the class so there's no interference whatsoever in fact it's better than no interference back in the 60s Soviets found out something called the uh strength after effect so if you do strength work that's not exhaust in nature and that's not novel to you it has a tonic effect uh just for any any uh anything that you can do with your brain or with your body anything so what they would even do some coaches they would do soal strength warmup let they would um B up as usual for a track class let's say track practice then they would do let's say three sets of three of something like with 80% Max which is not much and they start they start their practice the then the coach noticed that the athletes are starting to droop a little he'll repeat that you know he might repeat that up to three times so what you have is by having this short very small dose like a nano practice of strength you rejuvenate yourself and your productivity increases so much so whether you want to just do the strength exercise several of them in that one hour period or whether you want to combine that with writing a great American novel that's you know that's your business I suppose if someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home you could incorporate Grease the groove into your entire day that's ideal yes and obviously it's difficult with some equipment but what you could do you could use the heavy duty grippers you could do uh one arm push-ups you could uh uh you could keep a kettle bell under your desk and do press it at at every opportunity and again the idea is really just practice you just try to hit it perfect perfect trap and notice that uh if you have some issues if you're a warm-up dependent person for Orthopedic issues I'm talking about warmup in the very much in the uh body not the mind in this particular case then it might not be appropriate for you although you know with 10- minute rest it might still be okay but uh practicing a skill without the warmup that means rehearsal is very powerful for improving that skill people think they automatically equate performance with improvement with learning but it's not so not at all when you are doing something that's just out of the blue it's uh you know the way a sniper would take a cold shot that's so much harder because you have to produce that solution uh or maybe an example that's closer to most uh viewers GF uh you go to the driving range you start hitting it and like wow you you're amazing you just get yourself fine- tuned you hit you're perfect then uh then you go and you play the game and you cannot replicate that because suddenly different club uh different topography everything's different and you didn't have the luxury of that tuning yourself up right there so it feels it doesn't feel like you're stronger but you are going to get much stronger I've been eager to share with you some recent findings that are not my own but that I think you might be curious about and then I think most people hopefully will be curious about as well it's not greasing the groove specifically but it provides a at least partial mechanistic understanding of how particular types of physical movement with this High motor neuron and attentional engagement can generate high levels of alertness that can be devoted to as you say writing the Great American novel perhaps uh there's a guy at University of Pittsburgh named Peter strick who for the first time started to map the connections between the adrenals and the brain and he was able to do this using some really cool technology the basic takeaway is the following uh adrenaline released from the adrenals as uh some of the listeners may know doesn't cross the bloodb brain barrier but turns out it binds to receptors on the Vegas which then stimulates noradrenaline in the brain and provides this increase in alertness so then the question is how do you get your adrenals engaged you know we can sit here and we can we can do a staring competition which I'll lose um for certain but you know there are all sorts of psychological tools we get you know caffeine Etc there there're all sorts of ways to cold water but it turns out what Peter found was that there are particular locations in the motor cortex that send a two uh basically a two synapse connection D synaptic connection directly to the adrenals and the areas of motor cortex that Engage The adrenals cause them to release adrenaline but just by sheer movement of particular muscle groups are the core as you were talking about before like bracing the core causes the release of adrenaline which then via the Vagas uh causes the brain stem area uh to release nor adrenaline wake up the whole brain essentially increase learning and performance in anything and as well the stronger and stronger activation of the motor neurons deliberate activation of the motor neurons seems to engage adrenaline release now to me this was a wonderful way of um trying to persuade people that they have internal control over this thing that we call motivation that movement itself can increase adrenaline which can increase the tendency to want to move as long as again you don't want to have too much adrenaline either right right and and I'd like to talk about that um but I think I and so many other people were kind of raised and conditioned at least in this country to think oh if I want to increase my level of motivation I need to like um I don't know watch an inspiring video that could be great or I can uh drink caffeine and that or an energy drink and certainly that will do it but to me the the discovery uh that particular movements and particular muscles being engaged in activity itself changes the neurochemical milu I mean of course it had to be right it's a big duh but I think that um anyway I was excited to share with you uh these data I didn't discover them that is new to me so I read The Naked Warrior I was closed when I when I read it um but it's a wonderful book because it talks about body weight um only exercises and this concept of for instance like trying to crush um one's fist on uh you know making a really strong fist on the other side and how that will increase your uh your gripping ability on the other side this kind of thing yes as you know with your background and Neuroscience obviously there's so many uh neurological phenomena like if you can think of like muscle software that we have access to that if we become conscious about accessing that we can be so much stronger yeah so when you talk about you know doing a a set of three or four repetitions or two to three repetitions at about 85% or 80% of one rep mask waiting 10 minutes and then the intervening 10 minutes going and trying to learn something important or physical or cognitive this makes perfect sense to me because of the relationship of adrenaline but also the way that your tire nervous system has changed in the in the intervening period and plus you have the contextual interference so uh one of the Greer group is not something that I invented it's something that I was able to codify and explain and possibly refine but it's been around since the day of Ecclesiastes and uh specifically in strength training Paul Anderson Paul Anderson one of the greatest weightlifters of all time uh he was uh he was a big favorite of the Soviet public you know very tough group to impress but they called him The Wonder of nature he was so strong and uh Paul Anderson would do a set of squats then he would wander around drink some milk half an hour later do a set of presses then go do this again and uh so he reinvent not not should say reinvent no he invented without knowing neurons from Nyland many of the Training Concepts are just Cutting Edge today and again so this concept of contextual interference remember I talked earlier how if it's harder for you to produce a solution if you're trying harder to remember 2 plus 2 is four or how to throw the ball then you're going to learn more as opposed to if somebody just hands it OH 2 plus 2 is four so Paul Anderson had both the spacing time came like so the the groove has been forgotten in the sense of time and the contextual interference he did another exercise that erased whatever previous groove right there and it's uh it's very fascinating how looking at some of these oldtimers and just how how genius s were MH yeah the unconscious genius aspect of it is is so cool and of course I don't want to be disparaging of common um gym programs these days but I do feel like the way that most people train yeah you'll do that yeah the way that most people train in terms of thinking okay I'm going to hit the gym you know three four times a week or I'm going to train chest one day and chest and biceps while that has some value I feel like um for creating all-around strength and hypertrophy there's just such a incredible Treasure Trove of other things that you're sharing with us today that that are just not discussed as much because people don't take the lens of the nervous system component one one thing that I'd love to ask about the nervous system in terms of training adaptation and Recovery is that I was weaned somewhat under the uh thought patterns of Mike mener this was in the Darian Yates era and I knew Mike a little bit I paid for a consult uh with him over the phone we never met in person um so that had my mother asking you know why is this grown man calling our home and why are you wire in the old days you had to wire somebody money so I do um but it was so worthwhile because uh Mike taught me that the goal of training was to induce an adaptation anything additional was not necessary and in his case he he felt was counterproductive very infrequent training Etc and it worked tremendously well to take me from like 150 lbs to 210 lbs which I had no need to do but my body just reacted like crazy but then again I was 16 17 and 18 years old in that time probably could have done any number of different things and and experienced similar results who knows but the concept of course is that you train to induce an adaptation then you rest and then you allow the adaptation to serve the you know moving higher poundages in good form this sort of thing the problem however is that and mener highlighted this is that training of any kind running lifting Etc taxes both the nervous system as a whole and the muscles locally and the connective tissue how should we think about training and recovery so when you describe Grease the groove I could imagine if I had a home setup or I'm going to the the gym I could maybe do four or five rounds of this training but at some point M it becomes counterproductive so um wow a lot of great question I'm just trying to think about how to schedule this sort of thing keeping in mind that the nervous system fatigues as a whole and then there's also the issue of local muscle fatigue or or even the propensity for injury if you just overdo it sure yeah so if we could just Riff on this if you don't mind Andrew I'll break it up because a lot of great questions right there so one as you mentioned there are different ways of training and again uh we the greas grp load parameters apart from the long rests are very much based on Soviet weightlifting system and I'd like to talk a little bit about that later another system that a completely and radically different and it ties very much to Mike menser's training uh for reasons who become obvious is the classic American powerlifting system from the SE from the 80s and uh when people argue about training methods what they need to understand is uh there are many ways to get the job done you know at his research in Estonia found because there's so many different combinations of stimuli and the different different adaptations that result you can arrive to similar outcomes in a lot of different ways so to say this is right and this is wrong you cannot sometimes do that I mean I can say most of things are wrong but I can also say there's multiple right ways of training and they can be radically different and they're different because they rely on very different phenomena so in this particular case you're talking about recovery and frequency which is again a great way address it I'm going to talk about two systems that are completely different and yet have that same pedigree that they have brought so many gold medals so one system is the Soviet weightlifting system is again where athletes would train several times a day and Bulgarian system is a more extreme example of that and every day and the Other Extreme would be the American powerlifting system exemplified by U uh hassid Marty Gallagher Ed Co Kirk kaasi so starting from the 70s through the '90s those a really glorious day for years powerlifting and in that system they would pretty much do one or two heavy sets per lift once a week so it's kind of a little bit like Mike menser's work kind of but not but we we'll we'll address why so how can that be and how can both systems work so you address the recovery there's a concept called heterochronicity which heter means different chronicity refers to time so the different systems in the body to cover recover different rates and if you don't take that into account then uh you're going to have some serious problems so the Soviet system took uh if you look at the Soviet system with frequent training they looked at okay we want to do frequent practice which is exactly what we do we don't want to beat the muscles up so much that they that takes some very long time to recover you know not too much eccentric stress not too much acidosis avoiding things like that uh and they were able to adjust the loads in such a way so let's say your weights are heavy but not too heavy the Reps don't go too high so you're able to recover pretty much pretty much overnight and the benefit of that is it's been shown that if you fragment a given workload over more days over more sessions you get better results and it's uh your body is able and your nervous system endocrine system your carcass everything is able to handle much more if it's split into a small doses so let's use an example of a meal let's say if you're trying to an eating competition how much you can eat in 24 hours so it's not like those Coney Island you know how many hot dogs you can e one sitting no but you would probably eat a lot more if you spread it throughout the day and uh this is the same idea so it's like that Parable from Nim talb about uh the king that got anger in his son and he says he's going to crush him with a big rock and he realize well what did I do I don't want to kill this kid but the king's name King's word is King's word right so he ordered his uh peons to break up the rock into pebbles and then just dumb his pebbles in the kid so that's the same idea so fragmentation the load always is uh allows you to do more and do it safer so something else is related to that in some training systems some training systems rely on adaptations let's say for strength uh that go in the muscle that go beyond just the contracto proteins just you know the part you know my part that make uh that create Force so for example the Soviet system they also tried to increase the storage of creatin phosphate with which is the kind of immediate fuel for for muscle contractions for this type of work we're lifting heavy weights over and over and so by training sometimes easier you're able to keep stimulating that creatin phosphate adaptation but without the still allowing muscles to recover so this kind of a dance and it's fairly complex then on the other hand the American system did something completely different and uh the explanations for what happens in the muscle with this within this American System we don't know for sure but there's a hypothesis by Russian specialist Vasa that's seems quite credible so here's so again the system here's the system you train hard you do one hard set once a week or two hard sets so the satellite cells that are immature cells in the muscle they're sitting there waiting to jump in in you know if you need to replenish the messed up ones in order order for the satellite cells to get their job done they try to figure out scientists try to figure out what sort of a stimuli our or required and one the can a strong case can be made that a very particular damage to the micr structure of the muscle can can provoke that stimulus so but that damage has to be very very specific if you beat up the muscle with a baseball bat you're just going to get a whole lot of scar tissue and you know some satellite cells will just die and others will just be become scar but if the cross bridges in the muscle the cross Bridges is that part that does create force in the muscle if they do tear in a very specific way it seems to do the job so the way the muscle contracts is so there is a imagine that you're rowing a boat on the water so water is one proteins called actin and masin is the the ores that are moving in there so the ore dips into the water Hooks and pools and that ore relies on available energy in the muscle so these uh ATP molecules of you know stored energy they're floating around and the head mein head needs needs that ATP in order to both to hook to produce Force but it also it needs ATP to unhook as well and it's in this in between stage is called a rigor so whenever the muscle has produced Force but there's not enough energy for it to relax so the muscle is stuck in riger so think of riger mortars so if you tear dead body's muscle you know there it's going to tear and supposedly this is going to happen only when you're able to uh when the consumption of ATP is really high in the muscle but the but the supply is not and so if you're if you do that in the first let's say 20 20 30 seconds before acid do is set in that's what that's what should happen because if you wait longer when there's a lot of acid in the muscle acid uh it kills that reaction that uh it kills that reaction that uses ATP so you're not using As Much Anymore sure the the demand is down the supply is down but it's on demand so it's not so good so if you erase that fatigue point so if you try to deplete that caum phosphate that kind of Rocket Fuel of the muscle within about 20 30 seconds then presumably some of these hooks some of these ores are going to get stuck and when the muscle lengthening and they're going to tear and that's a very specific tear it doesn't happen in the outside of the muscle it happens just on the inside in there whether this is true or not I do not know but it's a pretty good theory that does explain Mike menor's method and and explains the uh American powerlifting meth method interestingly about about MK mener and again to the listeners who are not aware of the method that means training Muscle really hard very infrequently with very low volume professor yiv kashki before he died you know famous Soviet Sports scientist known known in the west mostly As the father of what is called petrics in the west and but he's also done many other things as well he spoke very highly about mener he thought mener was brilliant mener was an innovator but many people some people get good results from it like you did and a lot of people do not and uh so pretty much what prasena suggested that might happens is eventually uh you'll reach the limit of adaptation of how much you can deplete how much you can deplete the crean phosphate in that window that's when you hit the wall and this is where the American system comes in this system is called cycling the history of cycling is fascinating the relationship uh the interaction between the Soviet and American strength schools is absolutely fascinating so just to go back for a minute Soviet track athletes in the 50s were using the typical stupid High rep uh High rep reps to burn then in then in the late 50s uh some very sharp young specialist vital chov he uh made a case at a conference what are we doing let's look at what he said let's look at Paul Anderson D hebburn Bruce Randall these North American strength THS let's look what they're doing they're lifting heavy stuff for sets of three to five reps let's knock this down s off soov track athlet started doing that right there so this is how the Soviets for example learned from Americans that's an example of how it went the other way uh the classic periodization as is known mization in which you kind of start out with higher volume and less specific to lower you know to lower volume more intensity and so on that uh periodization is not used by lifters in the Soviet Union lifters thought that's just completely not it's it's just not usable it's just inappropriate for their needs Arad the professor and Olympic champion made very strong case why but Americans who got some limited information about it American powerlifters not weightlifters were able to de during training system based on that premise something that the service didn't do and the way it worked is is like this you don't necessarily have very high volume but you start I'm going to give you a most classic example of this type of cycling again this is again Cassidy Gallagher Cole and Kwasi four weak blocks let's say they're um that there's like going to be three four week blocks maybe four so you do lift once a week on week four you go for a PR so let's say this is a month of fives so this is on your week four you're going to do a PR set of five you plan for it week three is somewhere around your old PR week two is lighter week one is lighter still okay and then after that you may increase the weight but still relative effort is going to drop and you're going to kind of repeat the process so it does multiple things on the muscular level so what Paras explained you pretty much decondition yourself tempor temporarily and you progressively increase that Crea and phosphate use so initially when you decondition it doesn't take as much to get the stimulus you don't have to push really hard in first week you push harder in the second and harder and harder there's a concept uh their Concept in uh periodization so Sport Science of react it versus resistance reactivity means how responsive your body is to the stimulus and resistance kind of like in the medical terms you know how much it can you know it it's uh it's not affected by it so when you're starting light after a layoff your reactivity is high and your resistance is low it doesn't take much so boom sudden you build this muscle and then you can building up and when you reach when you reach a peak then you just then you just uh step back again and uh on the side of the nervous system and endocrine system much later Soviet research they said you can train hard maximum two weeks out of four that's it more than that you cannot handle so for every month you're training two weeks hard the other ones you're cruising you're not as hard sometimes easy sometimes uh there are different ways of programming it the typical one that you hear about in the west as you're kind of build things up for three weeks and then down in four it's one of about 16 different possible Arrangements doesn't have to be there can be um here's one brilliant way uh Franco Colombo who uh passed unfortunately was not just a great bodybuilder he was a great chiropractor and great strength athlete super strong very strong and Brilliant so he told me about one his deadlift cycle week one moderate week two heavy week three moderate week four very heavy again this is different way of arranging the same concept and these American powerlifters were able to build a system that built the muscle probably exactly in this manner what was happening at the same time oh yeah and there's also another angle how that system possibly has worked this is fascinating any type of exercise that you do uh makes your muscles more slow twitch it's just the way it is it's very very bizarre yeah even explosive even explosive even just trying to crush the bar and drive the deadlift up even that the more you do it so gold spin's research back in the 80s that any cycle of stretching or contraction resets the uh heavy chain mein you know the contracto proteins that makes it towards slower time so any type of work if you do biopsy on somebody who is a couch potato you're going to find that person probably has a higher uh concentration of white fibers than you and I wild very counterintuitive very counterintuitive and uh so that's like a default setting for the fibers however if you take time off uh it something changes and it changes be it goes beyond the change so this uh this research came some out of Sweden I believe when they trained a group of subjects and strengths they saw a predicted decrease in the ratio of type 2x fast f fibers then they took a couple months off and then they experience they called it MHC overshoot m in heavy heavy chain again like Fast fiber overshoot so they had something like 70 more per uh fibers after that wild nobody takes two three months off these days and but they figured out vasansi figured out that is not needed for athletes because obviously you get de conditioned in other ways right so remember we talking about het heterochronicity different processes take place at different rates so it's like you're constantly playing the whack the mole so this is is getting out of shape but this is not recovered yet it's it's a game that's that's a game of uh training programming so in the American system first of all the infrequent training it reduced the stimulus for the conversion of the fibers towards towards a slower isopor slower types and the second all the taper that they did later so suddenly switching for five to like one triple one double for a few weeks if you do that for just a few weeks you're do like a one triple one double you're not going to lose muscle mass because it really takes over a month but there's enough time for the uh for the myin to configure itself to a faster time so that's probably what happens interesting and neurologically I think what happens probably they exerted themselves very strongly once uh once twice a month so it's again you know neural Drive probably with strength and disinhibition and other things like that and the irony is the system has lost its popularity some records in deadlift like Dan Austin's record and possibly NAA said back in the 90s and 80s there's oh yeah Lamar Gant Lamar Gant is this is the strongest deadlifter pound perp pound in history so like 683 at Buck 32 or something like that and it was done back in the 80s so he trained that way done Austin in other lifts records have increased in part because of the equipment changes and some other reasons but uh at cone dominated the platform for decades and so there are some great great lifters who train this way but then the system lost his popularity for reasons have nothing to do with its Effectiveness it doesn't mean it's appropriate for everybody though because train a lift once a week for one or two sets there's not much practice and that's a problem so unless you're training under a very high level coach or you're already coming in with great skills it's really good second if you need any kind of level of endurance or if you're playing other sport you're going to be very sore from this type of training so it's a great system for certain type of people I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of 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huberman to get up to $400 off based on what you just told us about Franco's training and and the rest seems that shorter training Cycles might be ad vantageous even just conceptually and and practically like I I've tended to break up my year into 12 to 16 week training Cycles been doing that for a long time and now that I'm 49 this is the year that I decided I was going to start modifying my training a bit because certain little things aren't working for me as well okay um you might laugh I'm actually curious whether or not you'll laugh or approve um I switched at some point to uh using the belt squat these belt squat platforms I just feel like that you may want to explain it yeah the belt squat is essentially you stand on a plat form so you're on uh unfortunately you're on display for everybody there but that's not why I do it you step up onto a platform sometimes it's called a pit shark Rogue makes a Bel uh belt squat there are other ones of course have no relation to any of those companies and you wear a big thick um lifting belt but it's kind of sagging in the front and then you uh as if you were going to attach a weight to it but you attach yourself to usually it's a cable or a um or a lever between your legs sounds scary but that lever or cable can drop below the level of the platform you're standing on and you can load up quite quite a bit of weight on this what I love about it is um you can get uh very vertical if you want or just a little bit of forward tilt because you can place your fingers on the on the handles you can grip them if you like the point being there's a lot of degrees of freedom in terms of stance and um I like that you're not loading the shoulders true I I you know I don't want to sound like a wuss but I'll do it um you know I I moved from standard squats back squats to front squats then to hack squats and then now I've been um playing around a lot with uh the belt Squat and really enjoying it because you can go really deep you can blast out of the bottom position you can load up lots of plates on there if you have the strength to do so without the feeling that you're just compressing your whole spine um or worrying about dropping the weight so I'm enjoying working with it I love your thoughts on Belt squats true um but in general I I am hearing you and I'm thinking that moving away from this uh 12 to 16 week Cycles is going to be advantageous because what I'm finding is that it's hard to account for Life events in that way and and plan training and travel and all this but four weeks is kind of a manageable thing this month this is what I'm going to do and of course the months work together the body doesn't know the difference between February and and March as it were well in California it doesn't places it do it does right exactly the seasonal Cycles are real elsewhere um but I'm thinking shorter training Cycles might might be a a strong conceptual and practical framework um and um yeah I'd love your thoughts on both of those the belt squat or a a leg work that's non-spine compressing MH and uh shorter training Cycles as a general theme that people might think of incorporating into their training the belt Squat and this leg work that's not spine compressing I'm going to address healthy people like yourself so if somebody has medical restrictions you got to Belt Squad because the doctor says so that's what you got to do as long as you're also addressing the rest of your posterior chain as long as you're training your lower back your upper back obviously your neck which obviously you're doing that and in some other manner there's absolutely no problem with that so let's say you're doing some shrug pools or something you got that taken care of or you're doing some deadlifts and also for powerlifters what powerlifters do it's a tactic is uh when you're training the same lift especially if you train the same lift very frequently there is always that that heterochronicity something's not catching up quite as fast so you're going deadlifting and uh your hands are beat up use straps you know or you come into the deadlifting and your back feels like well it's time to deadlift my back my back is not quite ready well you could go do a neuros Sumo or something like that so there are ways of modifying things this way so you're able to if let's say you hit some hard deadlifts or hard squats and you need some additional leg work sure you don't need any extra stimulation for your upper back and midb however if you are a person who has more of a minimalist who does fewer exercises then you just can't afford that because then you're going to have to do some additional exercises you're going to do something else so may I suggest for your listeners and viewers to do zercher squats again a fantastic exercise it does not beat up your shoulders it does not build up your elbows or your wrists it may leave some bruises you know but it's okay you can live with that and uh does that answer with the Bell squat yeah and by the way machines in general here's also very interesting observation about machines machines are very Ed use ful for advanced trainees and uh fairly useless for beginners oh I love that you said that I barely touched machines early on in my training I dare I say call it a career but I've been doing it for more than 30 years so I'll call it a uh a stage of yeah it's a decent run um but if you imagine but imagine the scenarios what people do what do people do oh it's safer get in climb into this machine right there you're not developing any stabilizer so you get out of this machine you get crushed somewhere but on the other hand if you are more if you're more uh Advanced lifter so like you know Marty Giger one of the top powerlifting coaches in the world he might recommend leg presses in a very specific deadlift stance to a lifter and uh this is going to increase strength on your leg drive without beating up your back but you're already doing your deadlifts you can definitely do that so Advanced lifters may make a good use of machines and they don't need to be taught how to do that they can figure it out but beginners really should just use exclusively free weights I'm not saying everybody should do Squad bench deadlift kettle bell snatch and this and that no there's a large menu of exercise to CH choose from but you got to choose just from that menu where you discover the weight that's free that's truly truly free uh should we move on to the cycle shorter cycle yeah the shorter cycle a lot of it depends on the type of programming that you do so the type of agression that you use so if I may may I step to the side on that so in strength training you can look at the typical linear progression we just progressively increase the weight it only works for beginners obviously you look at the wave progression where you know you're going up for a while then backing off and then going up again and interestingly enough in this classic American Cycle there's a wave there even though the weights keep going up every week but if you uh if you did a set of five with 500 pounds on on the fourth week of your fives and then you went to 520 for triple 520 for triple is a lot easier so there's a D Lo built in there just people don't realize it so it is a form of wave loading as well then there's also the step loading step loading is a very interesting way of going about it and I believe it's the preferred programming choice for do it yourself people who not necessarily aspire to records but want to train in a very simple Manner and step loading pretty much means where you start out it's kind of like reverse think of George castanza approach to uh Progressive overload right so it's like regressive overload do the opposite instead of starting light and going heavier start fairly heavy and then stay with it and then stay with it and stay with that until it becomes fairly fairly light and then increase in that casee you're staying this longer so that's a good approach for Less experienced people more exp there are limitations Advanced athletes run into limitations of this method and finally there's variable overload which is what's used in the Soviet weightlifting system and later in Russian powerlifting and there's no progression there at all it is just based on pure appur adicity irregularity so it's like imagine muscle confusion but the smart kind and nervous system confusion where it lows Whiplash like at least 20% every time in volume from session to session or week to week and excis are changed and so on so there's no progression whatsoever so if you're using a fairly conventional linear or wave progression the shortest cycle is generally a good idea at least for older lifters like in uh using the American powerlifting experience older lifters uh with came back at Ernie France Rick crane Rick crane especially who passed recently unfortunately so they were observing how a an older lifter can't afford to start as light because he stop losing ground too much and he can't afford to go as heavy as well or not for long so they pretty much switched to Shorter Cycles something like eight eight week Cycles even possibly six week Cycles so it's uh it's a legit it's a legit approach but there are many different ways obviously because you looking at the at the big picture you kind of have to look at it uh you know from up close and from and from afar but overall I'd say yes if uh for older and more experienced lifters it's a it's a good idea great most people I think who do resistance training these days uh would like to also have some degree of cardiovascular fitness in fact I think one of the great things that's happened in the last 5 to 10 years is that most everybody men women we can talk about kids and kid training but um adult men and women thinking about muscle the importance of having muscle and being strong in particular as part of their longevity and health this is a great progression that's so very different than when I was growing up where the only people at least in American gyms that lifted were preseason uh football players uh bodybuilders and maybe a few other you know uh Niche groups but now things have really changed earlier we were talking about what um you know why the Soviet system and uh training for strength is has been the tradition and here why things are just so different in how we conceptualize resistance training and I'll just go out on a limb and say what I believe and have thought for a long time which is that what screwed up everything in terms of people's conceptualization about how to use resistance is bodybuilding that you know I mean no knock against people that want to make bigger muscles that was a screw up number one yeah that was yeah it it seems to be that the idea is you know you go to the gym multiple times per week you get a pump I mean notion of the pump like it always feel it feels aversive to me not the pump itself but when people talk about it it just feels a little inappropriate like let's get a pump like it just feels weird when people say that in any event um but this whole notion of just flushing the the the uh the muscle with blood and getting it to you know sure you get some window into your potential future self if you go home and and eat a bunch of food and sleep but somehow it it's so um unathletic sure in its approach and I have friends who've done competitive bodybuilding and that sort of thing not too many but so I I've have respect for the sport at some level but I feel like the way it's spilled over into quote unquote gym culture has um done equal harm and good and and what I like so much about your work is that it's really about strength as a skill strength as an asset for longevity yeah um and I guess when I think about somebody who wants to be strong somebody who wants to be healthy I also have to ask should people be training for for strength and endurance like the two opposite ends of the spectrum because it seems to me that would be the answer great question as opposed to what most people do which is hey I'm going to go to the gym maybe I'll push a sled and then I'll I know I'll do some kettle bell swings and then I'll also do some pull-ups and then I'm you know I'm GNA like take a picture of my tricep in the mirror I mean it just seems like while it's better than doing nothing yeah it's clearly not making America that much healthier um and I just think there's such a vast landscape of opportunity in training for strength and endurance but they seem at such odds with one another for most people so maybe we could just kind of throw up on the on the Whiteboard here this notion of training to get strong strength as a skill strength as something that's valuable for longevity I think we touched on that a little bit earlier and then endurance the ability to carry two suitcases to the airplane without coughing up along at the end also the ability to take a hike with your partner or your kids maybe actually have a backpack on your back and not have to stop every 50 Paces just being a fit overall person which one forgive me for the duration of this question but when when travels to Europe I haven't spent too much time in Eastern Europe but when you get over to uh you know Switzerland or Austria you see people who are strong and they have endurance I mean I imagine a sherpa is strong with endurance as well right by the way sherpers are really messed up their mitochondria are truly messed up this is a excessive hypoxia it's very interesting their metabolism is quite severely anerobic it's very weird Oh weird they're the markers of oxidative stress is is really really high but sorry that's off topic no no we can touch on that because it's interesting people who live at altitude and uh up to a certain point Danver is good the Himalaya is not good okay well yeah I have Scandinavian relatives and and um you go to Denmark or or Sweden or Norway and you just look at these people are so healthy their posture is great they're strong and they're not spending a lot of time in gyms sometimes they are so what's going on in terms of strength and endurance and maybe how bodybuilding and this no of building muscle has perhaps um caused some issues that we need to help people reconceptualize once again several great questions let's talk about bodybuilding and then before getting to endurance uh what you said it's it's absolutely true but I'd say that's there are different types of bodybuilding if you look at bodybuilding historically it was guys were strong I've had the honor of knowing some uh Golden Age Arab bodybuilders like Franco Coloma and Dave Draper and Clarence bass and these guys were formidable they were not just uh pretty boys they were absolutely extremely strong so I think something happened in the culture where bodybuilders stopped stopped valuing strength some bodybuilders there's still there's still a number of guys out there who are following traditional method and are strong also interestingly enough the Bro split you know hit once a mus a muscle once a week it's not necessarily bad if you again follow more of a into this classic American powerlifting model so instead of training three times a week you train five you know in addition to your squad day deadlift day bench day you can have shoulders day and arms day and whatever but you go heavy you know look at reg Park you know with his uh sets of five and if you focus if you emphasize this medium reps and again Soviets eventually came to the conclusion that um for strength you should stick in the one to six repetition range and you shouldn't do a lot of singles and doubles threes and fours should predominate but fours and especially fives and sixes this is where you get both hyper Trant strengths that's that beautiful combination and fives have a great tradition American powerlifting as well if you train with fives you're going to get muscle and you're going to get strengths and you're not going to complicate things so there are some bodybuilders out there who train in this particular Manner and they're fantastically strong just not many of them unfortunately but I also would like to add that there's another influence that messed things up I would take the Bros of the '90s with a big bench press and the chicken legs to these guys who standing balls and juggle oranges and what whatever the hell they're doing I I mean this uh the idea is so there's the concept of neuroplasticity which obviously you know so much more than I about that that's always throwing her out oh you need variety and so they throw every circus trick at the uh at these poor clients and by I use the word clients purposefully like at strong first at our school of strength we have students because haris lot of clients but in that world they're definitely clients well today you're going to stand on one foot and then you're going to pull on this cable and then tomorrow you're going to kneel and you're going to do this kind of thing while asymmetrical loading and uh symmetry are absolutely something that's needed under certain condition you need to do it in a professional way like if you look gray cook gray Cooks work gray will tell you just get yourself symmetrical and start lifting instead of uh Reser to this unlimited uh What uh colleag of mind Mark riing called randomx of variety so I'd say that's the other there way too many choices and when there are no constraints when everything's available you go to a store everything's available you don't know what to pick and you can stick with that so that's that's a very big problem I would say so I would say the less time people spend on the internet unless you know you're looking up research papers or doing something else valuable or fine watching a good movie that's all right so unless you're looking up a research paper or watching a movie forget about it or your podcast or my website that's it the rest of it is off limits but strength and endurance uh endurance is a very broad term and if we talk about let's talk a little bit about training for athletes for endurance and let's talk maybe a little bit for the general population we're trying to do for health and again for just going for a hike so the endurance of being able to do triathlon or Swim a very long distance the adaptations are primarily taking place in the slow fibers and you have some very specific uh adaptations to the capillaries and the mitochondria so many things but in a very specific way and that's not going to help you let's say if you're a fighter it's happened over and over where a guy who's been uh marathoner he takes up MMA MMA and he starts getting gassed really rapidly because while he has uh his slow fibers can keep going forever but not at the intensity that's required for this particular sport so and also we're talking about there's endurance that's peripheral and Central so you're talking about obviously your heart you're talking about your lungs you're talking about the plumbing but then you're also talking about the extraction and use of the oxygen which is huge and it's totally different it can be trained with the same methods but adaptations are very different so then when people realize that oh let's start smoking these MMA guys in Marsh larts guys and BJJ guys let's just make them puke and that's going to improve the endurance and it does improve their endurance but a very high cost so in the sovet sport Science there's a term the cost of adaptation comes from Felix me Professor he was a well re a cardiopathy or but later again his re research and stress is amazing so there's the cost of adaptation and it's the same thing is uh pretty much as buying buying a car or table you can get the same table for for a lower price or you can pay the top dollar so you can increase your strength while at the same time blowing your back out or you can increase your V to Max while uh getting arisma in the process or you can do it in the healthy way so one of the issues you have to look at the trying to lower the biological cost of the adaptation so in strength training we do that by very careful and not training hard too often so again the American system it's two weeks out of four the Soviet system pretty much the same although the planning the planning is going to be different first if we look at the cardiovascular adaptations the before before we looking into the um into the mitochondrian and into the muscle most of the work should be done below the threshold pretty much so what's the threshold so for Runners let's say you're running and you you're able to maintain the conversation and when you start running too fast and you cannot maintain the conversation you pass the threshold it's like you're going faster and you're breathing harder linearly and suddenly it goes like this like a hockey stick so at that point your body is no longer able to uh process all that acid and uh things are starting to get hard so there are certain implications there are certain implications for your muscles for sure we'll discuss that in a few minutes but for your heart there are two things we're primarily trying to train one we're trying to train the stroke volume so pretty much how much uh blood the heart can pump out with each contraction and it's very simple thing to do you get up to like um you know 70 to 70 to 85% uh of your maximal heart rate so the heart starts stretching literally so so this blood is incoming and the Heart starts stretching and it's requires volume some uh to defon Riders they might throw the uh throw the food in the back of the cycle and they write all day because that's what they've got to do and that's requires that adaptation for people who just do for health you don't need to do that much you know 3040 minutes several times a week is enough but for a high level you have to stretch the heart if you start redlining the heart rate the heart starts twitching so there's no time for it to uh to to fully to fully relax and stretch you're no longer really increasing your stroke volume and what you're doing right now you're strengthening your ejection fraction which is like the strength of the heart which is needed for athletes whose sport require red lighting heart rate you know if you're fighter if you are a 400 meter Runner you absolutely need to do that but what they found it went back to German research going to decades later and then the sovet research if um you start lining your heart rate before you have that volume that you put in and built up the stroke volume you're just heading for pathology so there are arism there's all sorts of different things that that the aibs all sorts of things that can start happen that are bad and also your performance is not going to be very high because again your stroke volume is not there and even for athletes who do that they should do it for a very short period of time it's just too stressful and it's just not needed typically it's a peak it's peaking phase for some weeks before leading up to the competition so pretty much steady state steady state I uh exercise like riding a cycle or jogging or hiking when you're still able to talk it's the best most efficient and healthiest way to to promote that quality when you're increasing your heart stroke volume if you decide to get a little more intense at some point interval training is appropriate but unfortunately it's completely and totally messed up and misunderstood it's like a catch all term high intensity interval training and uh Brent rashal a professor out of San Diego said this is nonsense this term is a nonsense what does it even mean like what's high intensity and also here's a question what does low intensity interval training mean uh going back to taking a taking a a step to the side but that's discussion will help us when we discuss what happens in the muscle terminology so there are different rest periods between sets there is uh there is the ordinary rest period so which means you pretty much recover your function it's like you're just as strong or just as enduring as as from the previous set there is the um uh suprax rest period when you if you rest extra sometimes you get some extra performance out of it and uh there is this stress rest period when the next set is going to be harder your performance may or may not be compromised but it's going to be harder so with ordinary stress ordinary rest periods that is called in track is called repeat training you know so you run 100 meters then you rest for you know whatever 10 15 minutes as long as you need longer possibly then you repeat it again and your performance stay this way interval training again it's established that just means that things are going to get worse from set to set so that's the definition of interval training the irony is the interal training was designed to increase the intensity of EXC size while reducing the demands on the body so if you look at the works of work of uh Fox and Edwards uh their uh pioneers of internal training in United States they give some great examples so let's say you're running for 30 seconds and you're at this speed and you're going to produce this much acid and your heart rate is going to be this High well if you run for 10 seconds with short periods in between at the same speed you're going to produce a lot less acid and your heart rate is not going to climb to the stratosphere here and uh that typee of training is very very useful and interal training can be used for promoting any type of adaptation you can use it for uh hypertrophy so here's uh here's one Training Method I learned from my colleague Fabio zonin it was designed by Professor Mason in Italian Mr Universe and Professor okay you take 80% of your W rep max so let's say presumably a trap Max set of five rest for 30 seconds set of five rest for 30 seconds if you cannot do it anymore you're done and then you come back maybe 10 minutes later do it again that's an example of interval training again I see and you can structure interval training to uh for adaptations within the muscle a mitochondria and you can also do that for your heart so here's how you do it for the heart today there are a lot of fancy popular protocols but all you have to do is go back to what Germans did many decades ago here's the premise your vegetative system your heart your lungs your plumbing uh they have inertia so uh for example imagine yourself as a kid you run really really hard you know you run for you know 100 meters or something or less maybe and everything's fine and then you're talking to your body and something you start sucking with so that's an example of uh of this inertia so if you get your heart rate up to about 85 to 90% One reped Max and then you suddenly switch to jogging you don't want to stop because that's just way too way too hard for your heart without getting that Venus return from muscles working what happens is uh the heart slows down but there's that blood keeps on moving and the blood literally stretches the walls of the heart I see so Sprint perhaps uh 100 200 300 400 meters and then jog back traditionally it was not quite a Sprint the duration would be typical 60 to 90 second uh the intensity is such that you get to top off at 85 90% of your heart rate Max something like that and then you jog until your heart rate goes goes to about 60 70% so that's roughly about the same probably and uh that to look things up it's like German interval training that was done it is based on very definite physiological events like this is what the heart does this is we're trying to do with the heart and is a instead of inventing some things that are simply trash the body for no reason whatsoever and part of the problem also Andrew is it's very easy to get uh misled by quick gains so uh and it happens in strength world and in endurance world let's uh let's remember uh the the years when you and I and every other male listener bench press their Max once a week MH you're strong next week you're stronger third week you're stronger like you're doing the math you're doing the math like okay well I should be setting the National Record by Christmas and maybe be going to the worlds by by summer and then at six weeks you're done and for experienced athletes happen sooner like after three weeks the same thing with endurance when you start doing glycolytic work when you start redlining heart rate and increaseing the acides your performance jumps so quickly it's very contagious it's like oh not contagious pardon me it's very exciting and you think that you're going to keep going forever but you really absolutely will not so for if you want to train for if you want to train uh your heart a good way of doing that is steady state work if you decide to do some sort of intermittent intermittent work there are several different ways one is um intermittent exercise that's more of a repeat in nature not interval which is very bizarre to people let's say that you go moderately hard hard for 10 seconds you go easy for 10 seconds and you do this for 30 to 60 Minutes imagine doing that that's good work it is good work but you know what to be shocking to you that you're not going to produce that much as or you're not red line your Redline your heart rate better would be like like 10 seconds of work 20 seconds of rest that that would be a fascinating research that sweds did back in the 50s and 60s on that it's amazing if you keep the work periods short uh you're able to not produce a lot of acid but just go very very hard and you're going to be able to uh train your heart and your lungs in this manner too you can also do and you also have peripheral adaptations in the muscles mitochondri and so on vascular some capillarization happening too but you know it's also interesting there's one particular type of I hate the fact that it falls onto the high intensity interal training umbrella because it's not because everything that sounds like hit it's not good to me because it's just made up label but there's one type of training that delivers great benefits to your uh cardiorespiratory system and at the same time it also does that for you know for your mitochondria and even builds muscle in the same time in track it is called glycolytic Power repeats and in uh the last 20 years there are several good papers that were done on that uh dybala Burg master I think pardon me if I'm mispronouncing their names but pretty much you do a wind gate like a 30 seconds of Hard Exercise followed by approximately five minutes of rest and you repeat it several times here's what's unique about this this type of method it gets your heart rate up to about that 85 85 90% or something then you're going to walk it off after that so you are going to get adaptations for your heart it's not the most effective way but it's uh for healthy people it's a healthy way and it's a very efficient way at the same time we'll discuss later what happens in mitochondria level but also what's interesting you're also likely to get build some muscle as well and uh typically there is the conflict which we're getting to this point about like strength versus endurance typically there's the conflict of strength versus endurance because you know if you're looking in the uh mour on one side ampk on the other side things seem to be like okay this is pulling one way this is pulling the other way but somehow this particular load while promoting peripheral and Central endurance also uh endurance at least in the fast in the fast and intermediate fibers also does promote muscle growth interesting and what sort of exercise this is not Sprints this would be kettle bell swings for instance in in the studies that were done they use wind Gat they use cycle they cycled sprinting if you are a going uphill you could certainly do that this 30 seconds is hard you're you're pushing you're pushing yeah uh going in a track it's too easy to get something messed up so going uphill you can do that we do the with skettle bells we did this work in my first skettle Bell school over 20 years ago where we would do a set of you take a heavy kettle bell moderately heavy kettle bell like you know for you know for you or me to be like a 70 pounder and we would snatch it really hard for a set of 20 25 reps and then we just jog the heart rate comes down and then we take this leisurely powerlifting rest and we're going to do it again and it's a fantastic way to promote uh various uh aspects of Fitness so you're going to get cardiorespiratory endurance you're going to have get peripheral adaptations endurance in the muscle and you're also building muscle at the same time the reasons for that here's the theory again all we all the conversations we have about this is what happens in the muscle all these are theories we we know pretty much if we do X we're going to get get you know Z whatever or Y some kind of result at this point but we may not necessarily know for sure so the following is another one of the theories but it's another good credible one so this is Professor Victor sanov so according to him the preconditions for muscle growth in addition to the obvious like food and food and things and hormones so when you reach a certain level of acidosis only a certain level level of acidos is not necessarily very high that those hydrogen ions will make the membrane permeable to the hormones so they're going to enter and go into the nucleus and start doing their job so that's one of the part of the explanation then at the same time also the free creatin when creatin phosphate that hot fuel gets burnt off that's also anabolic for one reason or another so there are some explanations whether that's how it is or not I don't know but the fact is doing a hard 30 40 second set followed by a very generous rest we're talking about 5 10 minutes and repeating it five times possibly more it it works very very 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to the heart so basically they reduce the stress on the heart so just walk it up first the first step if if your heart rate was high uh then the second thing is you want to do exercises you want to do relaxation myo relaxation muscle relaxation exercise what they are is if you watch boxers how they you know shake off their shake off their shoulders and drop drop their hands and do things like that these exercises go back to the 30s Soviets used them since the 30s and they used them with Elite athletes uh kids in grade schools and everybody so these exercises serve several uh functions one is if you are doing an exercise that is strength exercise in nature some of the Cross bridges are stuck pretty much and so your muscle is thick atropic it's like gel so by moving your muscle in a passive manner you get you get it unstuck and so you restore circulation obviously and uh the other reason is again control of muscular tension is very very important it's important to learn how to contract the muscle for strength it's very important how to relax for uh speed for endurance just for a happy life if you look at the best sprinters note how relaxed their faces are when they're on their jaws relax how relaxed their necks are so relaxation is something that's practiced just like tension so regardless of what exercise that you just did shaking off we call this fast and loose drills sh taking like passive like turn your muscles to Fat so you want to do this for a little bit then after that uh it it depends how long is your rest so if you're taking a and depends what exactly that you're doing in some extreme examples let's say that you're a sprinter let remember we talked like doing Sprint repeats with let's say 100 meters in 15 minutes you think wow sounds like a great great training session well the problem is these guys do need these 15 minutes to get the acid out of the system and have some other functions to recover but after a couple minutes the CNS excitability goes down mhm so what the Soviets figured out back in the 40s still is what you do then after you walked it off after you shook it off you hear and there you insert some very kind of like a light and easy hops or whatever using the same muscle groups so these poor athletes really have a complicated dress protocol there's really no no rest for the wicked there if you are a lifter who taking very long rest periods in between let's say you take those 10 minutes then after your heart rate is down and after you show cough and after you walk to the L can just sit down you can do whatever you want do not sit a slouch because obviously stum Mill explained why that's not a good idea and speaking of slouching one reason that a Runners get their backs jacked up after running or some endurance event is again they go into their knees and they you know get into that collapsed posture and uh their discs are really pliable and warm after the run and then suddenly put them into flexion and they get messed up so yeah you also got to like you point out to watch our posture but you really got to watch your posture during recovery because you slump between your sets of squats and then you know you could blow something out right there interesting I used to think that I would this recurring sort of lower back hip thing that I finally feel is under control and I used to think that it correlated with travel and something about maybe not sleeping as well and traveling perhaps but what I've noticed is even if I just sit too much after training my legs hard I end up with this back issue so just moving to standing desk configuration after training legs irrespective of travel has really helped and I think um I mean nowadays there's all this excitement about walking I don't know if you you know I don't know how much time you spent on social media but like walking is the new thing for 2024 you know people discovered walking to lower you know postmeal blood glucose I mean all stuff that was great thing to do um we'll see what happens in 2025 what the what the new and I'm I'm a fan of walking but um no small part because it just feels like it loosens up everything after training and I like to train early in the day if possible and I know it's a a dramatic reduction and kind of aches and and and strains as a the thing you can do I remember when I watched your podcast with uh Stu McGill you mentioned that uh the um upward facing dog Cobra or Cobra helps you right putting yourself an extension into extension so for people who for whom that works it's uh you can just lie on the LIE on the floor in your elbows and just read a book so for example add strong first uh courses when people do exercise and then we teach them so we have several authorized postures so you either have to sit ram rod straight you know you can sit in the Lotus or SE out or something like that or uh you can you know half kneel still upright or you can lie on your stomach so we do not allow this this collapse posture because this is a great great way to get hurt plus you know you look like a slacker when you're slacker mentally you're not going to be focused on whatever you're supposed to be doing so I think that's I think that's a good idea and to bring us back to do you want to talk a little bit about the peripheral adaptations from endurance okay and then maybe we can talk about like what should people uh what should people do who are not athletes so a much bigger thing than the V2 Max is the adaptations the ability of your muscles to extract and use the oxygen so this again call this revolution anti-glycolytic revolution comes from also yanski again he's known as the father of Plyometrics but he's so much more than that and back in 1980 he looked at the typical endurance training protocols and he says okay everything everybody's trying to push the athlete to the greatest degree of discomfort and make the athlete a custom to that degree of discomfort and he says that that's just wrong instead we need to figure out how to postpone the fatigue and how to fight the mechanism that produce the fatigue and it says glycolysis anerobic glycolysis is the primary cause of that we could split a lot of hairs whether it's uh you know it's the glycolysis itself or it's uh the acid from coming from ATP breakdown or whether it's uh n organic phosphates or whatever but whatever it is it always happens when the acid dosis is running High when acid becomes high so that doesn't really matter which which exact U exact factor is so he figured out you need to promote aerobic metabolism in the working muscle fibers so he decided that endurance training for for high level athletes and people who are not athletes it will apply to you as well has to be specific that's exactly why like that uh that Marathon R who joined the m& MMA class and then sucking wind his endurance is totally not specific here's an example of uh specific endurance is where you're using the same muscle fibers that in your sport and in the mode that's consistent with that sport so vasansi would have people like skiers for example do this very long push off on the ski and then Glide push off and glide and uh yeah suan of who came after him so an example of that you have this really powerful contraction of the muscles that are used in your sport and then there's that relaxation during which the muscle recovers is it's my globin oxygen that there's a small amount of oxygen in the muscle and it requires that creating phosphate fuel that is used for the short term so pretty much instead of relying on that acid producing metabolism glycolytic metabolism that you start using on one hand to use lifter metabolism you know creatin phosphate that's what fuels uh you know a set of three reps and on the other using this Marathon runers aerobic metabolism so you're like putting glucolysis in a visce and a great example of that comes from bosanski is not the only one who came up with this idea it's being reinvented by others so in boxing Leon Spinx to the viewers who don't know who he is Leon Spinx or a professional boxing world champion and uh he defeated Muhammad Ali amongst among others so he's a great champion and he hired uh arth lyard who's a great running coach from New Zealand to work in his conditioning and lyard had him do work in the heavy bag for an hour and a half to two hours Non-Stop and he says no of course you're not going all out sometimes harder but you're definitely not tapping the bag you're not Shadow Boxing and so if you're putting your muscle fibers in a very specific metabolic window and do it over and over and over that uh they start adapting to it fast fibers start developing mitochondria fast fibers start developing capillaries fast fibers don't lose their strengths but they start developing the plumbing and the ability to use the oxidative system to recover rapidly but going back to again this larger periodization idea is when you start with a new stimulus it's uh your body is highly reactive but the resistance is low you cannot take much of it then that teeter totter goes the other way you'll no longer you have to figure out how to restore that reactivity and different training systems do it differently so an example of the American powerlifting system you basically go go lighter start over with a lightweight so you decondition yourself purposefully like two steps forward one step back MH and that's uh another example would be to use what um the Soviets called specialized variety and this is something that you could see in the Soviet weightlifting system with medv and Alex mvv one of the scientists and coaches and also the Westside barbell powerlifting Club so specialized variety as opposed to random variety it's when you have the same lift and with just very slight modifications so the motor program the intention stays the same but again imagine that instead of uh deadlifting deadlifting from the platform your deadlifting standing on a off a plate MH so it just slightly increased the range of motion but you're still doing the same thing or imagine that you uh bring your grip in the bench brass a couple of inches in or imagine that you use a block just as a popular exercise in powerlifting you put a like imagine putting a brick on your chest up to the size of a brick lowering it to that pausing and pressing back to work that very specific sticking point so you're still benching so what you're doing is you're resume you're resolving this conflict between accommodation and specificity and like you on one hand it's novel but on the other hand it's really it's like same but different it's a very good tactic it requires it requires uh the knowledge of knowledge of the iron game it's not some because if you go from the bench press to the military press or dips you might see Improvement but or might not because that's not specialized variety anymore but if you look at like in medv Alex medv when he coached the national team for the cleaning jerk and snatch for the two comp comp competitive lifts they had 100 variations wow but all these variations were like okay so now we're snatching from hang now we're snatching from blocks now we're jerking from the wck do you see what I mean they all this reminds me of uh this reminds me of this humorous book about Scandinavians written by Scandinavian explaining how very different different Scandinavians are and so this book has pictures of the same guy wearing different sweater sounds about right so yeah that's my Scandinavian relatives will chuckle at that I feel like one of the um again I'm not trying to point out the the ills of of uh the fitness culture but I feel like if I were to put up on a wall uh the two or three things that have caused the most confusion and and you know reduction in people's potential results from Fitness would be seeking the pump as its own thing and seeking soreness as its own thing and then confusing panting hard and sweating a lot with intensity yeah you know I feel like those three things you know people think I had a great workout or my new trainer is you know I finished just completely depleted you know this and then these are the same people that are complaining about an injury or they quit or they don't have the motivation because you know they they're not taking whatever pre-workout as required to generate that kind of quote unquote intensity um I'm not looking for agreement but would you agree or disagree I mean you know and then maybe by comparison we could sort of throw up on the wall the things that we should be seeking when we train as opposed to these kind of um you know before I answer this question since we're talking about the peripheral adaptations you made a great point about seeking pump I'm going to give you a great example how when not seeking pump is going to do so going to deliver great adaptation for you so do you remember that idea of punching the bag for an hour let's say or two hours that's how that promotes M countre endurance develop in the fast s fibers that can also be done with strength exercises as well for wrestlers and MMA fighters so you can do the bench press you can to bench press and develop endurance in your fast fed twitch fibers the nature of endurance is very very peculiar you know in uh team sports there's a term repeat Sprint ability so repeat Sprint ability means that let's say that you sprint for 20 MERS rest for less than a minute Sprint for another 20 you know just something like that so Sprint rest Sprint rest which is which reflects the nature of uh team sport football soccer and so on on the it's totally different from running 400 meters around the track in strength endurance is the same thing uh NFL combine you know that's it's it's a fine test whatever it's nice bodybuilding exercise good pump but on the field you're not doing 30 reps you're doing one rep and then it'll be later you're going to do another rep so uh your conditioning for a fast fibers can be structured in the same manner so there's Russian research researcher named bikin uh he put his uh several groups of athletes in different protocols so one of them was doing the typical high intensity whatever circuit training smoker right so you take 70% of your one rep max and you do this for 30 seconds and you go push hard and then you do next one and very typical then the other group anti-glycolytic group the athletes would live the same 70% % one rep max for three reps uh they do one exercise second exercise third exercise rest for one minute do it again and again and again so to The Listener 70 rep max an average athlete can probably crank out about 12 reps with it a fighter is probably going to crank out 20 some reps with that easily so they only do three reps and so three reps uh another exercise another exercise rest for one minute do it over and over and over and the end result was really fascinating the outcome there is one particular test discovered by the same researcher that like correlated has the highest correlation competitive performance for MMA fighters so this test was R 0.888 it's very very high and very interesting thing what it is it's the rate of heart rate recovery after an allout set was 70% one rep max deadlift it's hard set it's brutal very very brutal interestingly enough the Reps was 70% one rep max correlation was not so good even the deadlift strength was not so high but it's that recovery from that was was very very high so the group that did the Santa glycolytic work never did more than three reps completely blew the traditional training group out of the water then in addition to that they were able to bang out a lot more consecutive reps as well they weren't even in training for that then after that they also so competitive better results in competition and so on so forth it's uh it's a great way to train because you're able to so you take imagine taking a weight that's that you can lift maybe uh 12 to 20 times and you lift it about three times rest for a minute and do it again and again and again this is very much like a blue color workers um day and you're not seeking pump whatsoever but as a result you're going to develop that that type of endurance that repeats strength endurance that very much is applicable to most combat and team sports and also for the real life whenever you are moving uh Furniture you're not trying to look I'm going to try to get a pump let's see get this piano up there and I get another one then we're going to rest for 20 minutes then we're going to start over no uh Swedish work occupational strength they found that old and crafty and Wy workers like loggers and others they were able to like they they keep their efforts very brief and then they rest for a few seconds and do it over and over and over so that intermittent nature of rest is uh is very powerful seems like this is a repeating theme and by the way thank you for spelling that out so for people that perhaps want to try something like this and I intend to four exercises three um three exercises excuse me um done each at roughly 70% of your one repetition maximum so what you could do for about 12 repetitions but you're only doing three repetitions rest a minute in between exerc active again just walk around shake it off and do this for do this about 15 times possibly later 15 15 rounds up to 15 rounds um and so this could be uh zercher squat uh pullup um dip um deadlift or something like that maybe going not do the dead you know you use really good examples so this is this is a protocol that I did for for a couple friends of mine for their high level BJJ competition we did exactly that they did zerges they did pull-ups on towels and you know more more specific and more grip and they did the closed grip bench press and the reason it's close it doesn't put on K mod Mass but it you know works at triceps really quite nicely but yeah but you can even do it with one exercise three reps rest for a minute three reps rest for a minute uh and so on how many times per week is one repeating that uh you can repeat this three or four times a week easily but it depends on what else you do twice a week is enough even twice a week is enough and it fits your strength training regimen it doesn't take away from your strength day so it pretty much you can treat that as you light day for strengths for the same lifts okay so and this would uh is going to increase endurance but is also going to increase strength somewhat it's going to increase strength somewhat in B Bin's experiments definitely did at least on Fighters But realize Fighters typically are not that strong so up to a point up to a point it is going to increase your strength as well and it the very least is going to support your strength and it's uh it's a great way to just perfect your Technique perfect your skill it's wonderful it's very very meditative my colleague at strong first Brad Jones he even just uh uh wrote a book about it the iron cardio because uh he took a protocol strength aerobics protocol like this Russian protocol developed by another one of my colleagues alexar another one of our instructors and he just used the whole system and people loving it because uh sorry I'm going to go back from the beginning to alexar so he's um he lives in France and he was coaching some he was coaching some uh uh law enforcement some law enforcement personnel and they were on a stake out where they absolutely had no ability to train normally and they wanted to do something something effective so he said okay take this kettle bell and you keep it in your hotel room or wherever is your steak out do one clean one press one front squat put the kettle bell down Shake It Off one clean one press one squat put it down and like a metronome in a very rhythmical manner you're not trying to breathe hard you're not trying to get a pump with singles you won't and you do this for you do this for about you know 30 minutes or whatever amount time amount of time that you do and and it does develop that repeat strength endurance fantastically well there's additional secondary effect of some cardio because you're you're breathing in between pretty much your recovery your heart is recovering and um you're not getting sore because you talked earlier about like people seeking pump and seeking soreness one of the reasons soreness comes from is obviously you know a lot of eccentric contraction that's very true but what people don't realize that soreness also comes from too much acid in the past the coaches used to tell oh you know acid burns holes in your muscle it doesn't but what it does do is when the acid levels are high in the muscle it stimulates production of free radicals which Pound The Cellar membranes later it also stimulates activity of lome lomes and fites that just eat up eat up the tissue the muscle so if you do too much a if you do too much acidic work you're going to be sore as well so seeking that makes no sense whatsoever especially as we know not even from scientific studies but from athletic experience uh some people get sore all the time see no progress in anything some people don't get sore they keep getting stronger and everybody in between so there's no correlation if you're looking for pump on the other hand if you're trying to build muscle one very while building strength one very simple guideline would be I achieve some pump with a heavyweight and Low Reps so if you keep your reps five and at fewer even three but you achieve a little pump that means you've performed a sufficient volume of work to stimulate the adaptation what exactly happens in the B I cannot tell you but it absolutely does work for both uh strengths and both um both hypertrophy so many theories about what causes hypertrophy at least you and I know that we don't know we're just speculating here just a I really appreciate that you uh always acknowledge that um that we're sort of we're not totally in the dark about hypertrophy might might be I like this theory about the hydrogen um creating a permeability of the of the cells and you mentioned that then it gives the hormones access uh some folks might know and some people might know you know that the steroid hormones like testosterone estrogen and others they combine to cell surface receptors but they can also go into the nucleus of a cell itself and cause changes in expression which is sort of if you just think about puberty is the most Salient example right there's all these latent potential in the cells of the body but then once the testosterone and dihydro testosterone and estrogen arrives in the body depending on the on the the sex of the individual then you activate hair growth you activate breast growth you activate muscle growth thickening of the vocal anyway that's through Gene uh changes and gene expression um in this configuration that you described before you know uh of doing this um three repetitions and repeating you may be doing that three times a up to three you can even do one as you mentioned yes right three times a week could I also train for strength simultaneously same days or other days other days other days so on the intervening days I could go in and do my my real strength work yes and you look at your priority if uh if your strength is more important do this uh do this type of a strength aerobic work no more than twice a week MH and you know then you do strength like an additional three times or four times if uh that type of endurance is more important do real strength work once a week and then three four times of the other kind this is also a very good idea in general for planning for training planning for planning training different qualities because trying to develop everything to a high level at the same time it's impossible it simultaneously training in parallel everything only is good for young kids when they're developing because you know you got to try everything nothing's at a high level later on uh there were different models of how to structure addressing different qualities so one example would be training so here's one really good example how strength and hypertrophy can be uh can be addressed can be addressed at different periods the experiment goes back to 1970s it was done on Ivanov kova I forgot the third uh third author uh experimented done on throwers and they were doing squats and bench presses and uh one group was doing 85% for five triples you know typical heavy type stuff the other was three sets of 10 was 60% which is fairly typical hypertrophy work uh Jim Bros would say that's too light for sets of 10 and I say no it's not because you still have to throw the shot put the next day if you if you do 10 sets of 10 reps to failure you're going to be completely done your strength will be down by about 40% for for the next few days so and so they one group did this the other group did this they both made good gains uh and the third group but up to point then they they Plateau the third group they alternated two weeks of this two weeks of that and they in the quad interesting I have to say didn't make that much difference but in the bench press there's a huge difference that alternating these two types stimuli so that's an example of block training how you can do that but what you can also do is you could simply maintain a quality so fortunately it takes a lot less work to maintain anything that you reach than uh than to um to get there so typically training some quality once a week at a moderate effort is enough to maintain it like in strength example of strength if once a week you lift 80% of your max with three sets of three reps you can maintain your strength easily for months easily it just just doesn't take much at all and you don't want to stop your strength training ever totally because again it has that um it it will improve everything that you do even your endurance but then you can switch the priorities in the same matter and people can do that in their own way oh okay here's a great example so I love Stu's biblical week so where Stu McGill he trains two days a week of strength two days a week of Mobility two days a week of endurance which is uh which is a very good and balanced balanced model but what you could do for a while is you switch to doing one two three so let say one quality gets three days a week one quality gets two one quality gets one and then you shift the priority so this sort of a serial specializ ation is a very good tactics for for experienced traines maybe switching it up once every month perhaps once a month is good once a month is good and maintaining that um you know moderate hard what was it moderate very hard what was uh Franco's um what was the cycle forgive me for foret you know you can do that as well yeah what Franco had four weeks of deadlifts uh moderate heavy moderate very heavy and again we can Define them a lot of different ways but we definitely need to vary the effort not just the intensity somehow somehow in our training it can be done differently in different uh in different Training Systems one very simple way is just to stop stop your sets earlier before long before failure and you know later on and some weeks just get a little bit closer to that so that's an example of that classic American cycling powerlifting cycling so when on your week four you're going to do five reps with your five rep max but on week one you're doing five reps with your perhaps 10 rep max so that's that's a very simple way of doing that where you go easy and then you go harder and then you start over but there are many many different other ways of of structuring it but generally speaking I'd like to warn people that training hard has to be done but it's not something it has to be done really small doses it's like let's use singles as an example heavy singles heavy singles are the special sauce of strength training it they cannot be used as the foundation of your training unless you are except for some very few genetically gifted individuals you know we all know that bulgarians have done that in the weightlifting but again these guys were specially selected specially assisted and they were broken very quickly uh Soviet Champions stayed there from Soviets who uh won the Olympics at the age of 36 like BL Felder and alexv for weightlifting that's just a absolutely old man and rigard said David rigard said I think what 63 World Records because they were very careful about when to use this uh near maximal stimuli they figured out this and the system itself the Soviet weightlifting system was totally empirical which is really fascinating they just looked what works what doesn't compare it and just kep kep trying so they've experimented with everything and they simply have found that uh certain observations like okay lighter lifters can do more heavy singles than heavier guys intermediates can do more than the advanced guys uh it's going to vary from lift to lift a lifter to lifter no difference between guys who onun drugs and guys who are not but you have to individualize it and they found that if you do too many heavy singles you're going to not progress rapidly you hurt yourself you don't do enough you don't progress as quickly so it has to be have to find that sweet spot for yourself and they also were very definite that the singles are maximum so that's what competitions are for so they would go to 90 maybe 92 and a half% once a blue moon 95 but you're not there to test yourself there's even like uh like Russian powerlifters what they do couple weeks before a meet they have this uh work up to a weight that's kind of Max so the word for it this prka and prute it translates kind of like estimate it's like an estimate this is not you're guessing like you see this is where I'm at that gives me an idea what's going to be my first attempt what my opener is going to be instead of oh I'm going to test myself I'm going to show them gym is not the place to show anything that's what the platform's for so you need to find uh if you're interested and serious about strengths you need to find how often you can go heavy in the different lifts start with you know start with something maybe once a month about 90% And then try to see you doing it more doing it or doing it uh fewer times but the meat and potatoes of the training has to begin this moderately heavy weights heavy enough heavy enough to respect not light enough not to fear and most of the work has to be done with that so it's like those sets of three four maybe five reps with 80 80% something something like that and that's fairly Universal across the training systems because the American powerlifting system uh you know is organized the cycling organized totally different but that's again there's going to be you no fives and threes and fours that's going to be a big deal Soviet system different but a lot of Threes a lot of fours some fives some variations but why it is so some of it possibly has to do with skill practice because this goes to an example it's a western study of uh a discrete skill a discrete skill to listeners that means something that happens once kind of like a throw or a lift as opposed to continuous skill like running and in an experiment they tested these athletes do this discreete skill for six sets of one three sets of two or one set of six and uh two sets of three did much better so supposedly it's like there's certain amount of repetitiveness like when you hit the perfect trap and then you're die MH so again three triples have that very special quality and presumably there's a drop off of ability to concentrate and really execute properly absolutely I mean uh one thing that keeps coming through here is that whether or not one's talking about high volume or low volume or endurance or strength quality Quality quality oh no doubt about it every everything else is potentially detrimental and frankly has added a lot of confusion to the fitness literature where people I think you know they're doing you know five sets of five or do I do 10 sets of 10 and it I if I may you know this isn't my my field of expertise but again having been in and around it for a while I feel like the message that keeps coming through that's going to deliver the results is every single repetition high quality the rest period high quality whatever that may be walking around shaking it off the the structuring of the program high quality I think people are far too halfhazard and seeking the pump and soreness and some sweat so that they can have their post-workout shake well I'm not trying to be and a selfie and a selfie uh between every set um and just kind of check the box even for people that aren't competitive athletes I think there's just such a an enormous range of things to be gleaned from taking one's Fitness training seriously um even the word Fitness is kind of a strange word training seriously right I've never even called it a workout I think I picked that up from Menor you train you don't like I've never or you practice or you practice I like that very much I also like the distinction between students and and clients that's that's a very these are not just these are not just labels I think they really no they really not change our cognitive frame in the Soviet system uh when you're talking about your training session often times it was referred to as a lesson when various qualities were developed like strength endurance and so on vashi for example often mentioned that like education of qualities and at strong first are we talk about a practice not a workout and uh great line that was written 100 Years Ago by Earl litterman and his uh secrets of strength and back then uh strength athletes understood the importance of not training on the nerve so they understood you you just train and then eventually you're going to go for a PR but the rest of the time you don't kill yourself and when he's describing kind of this uh early adherent of this high intensity whatever ever and he's referring to him he says he has literally worked himself out and he says that's something that Strength Seeker cannot afford so semantically when you're trying to work yourself out that's you're trying to exhaust yourself or are you trying to practice to excel to get better at something and that applies to inequality because endurance very much has a has a skill component just like strength because the ability to uh reuse the elastic properties of the tissue issues the ability to relax between the contractions to restore the circulation the ability to maintain the proper posture and so on and so forth these are all skills the breathing breathing skill huge extremely important for strength for endurance for absolutely anything and if you're going through this mindlessly it's uh yes yeah nobody's going to get very far this way okay so while one could use resistance training in order to generate strength and endurance you explained how to do that there are good number number of people out there including myself that sometimes like to get outside for a run or to hike um as you mentioned earlier about the rucksack I'm not such a fan of the ruck sack because of being pitched forward but I like this idea of carrying the kettle bell and switching sides now nowadays they also have some weight vests that are a little bit more um uh you know close to the body that distribute the weight um what are your thoughts about going into the gym in order to do the strength training and then generating the endurance work elsewhere to be blunt like how would one combine lifting and running in a way that allows one to get stronger and develop endurance perhaps simultaneously if we're talking about right now uh people who are just active people who are not athletes there are several things they need to keep in mind one is uh the timing relative timing of strength work and endurance work if the strength exercises that you're doing are primarily neural adaptations is which you're targeting which means lower repetitions heavier stuff then it's important to be fresh when you're doing the exercise it's not really doesn't matter as much what happens afterwards so which means that you could do some heavy deadlifts you know heavy deadlifts uh and then a few hours later you can go for your hike on the other hand if your uh lifting is more hypertrophy oriented it's less important if you come in tired it's okay even if you just hiked in the morning and then you went uh did your curls but afterwards for 36 48 hours it's ideally to restrict endurance exercise so because you're really going to have a massive conflict right there and uh it's it's not a good idea to do that if you're doing our preferred work of let's say sets of five reps five reps again they address both endurance and strength well I guess you better keep a window on both hands right there there's always a conflict you know Thomas saell said there are no Solutions they're only uh they're only uh compromises so you just have to decide which way you want to compromise but that separation in time really does help the other thing is spending different times when you focus on one thing versus the other so the next two months you're going to spend on hitting your strength hard and you're just going to do two hikes a week just to just for your health just to maintain and then summer rolls around and you put your lifting on the on the back burner you left lift less not necessarily lighter just less and you spend a lot more time outdoors and uh and do these different things keeping in mind also the duration of uh the duration of training so the longer your training session is of any kind the more you are triggering adaptations that are uh that are more in favor of endurance so your cortisol level goes up and there are some other things that do happen that drive you towards endurance as opposed to strength so even in your your strength training don't make the sessions too long what's too long it's really hard to know at this point in the Soviet weightlifting practice the top guys would spend two two and a half hours they would for them that work that seemed appropriate but then again don't forget that that point they're juicing and in the pr steroid eras those times are shorter and this is one of the difference in steroids by the way that's in your training when use steroids or not the uh as I mentioned earlier Soviets esta the correlation with the volume of lifting and uh muscle mass that's one thing but there also established correlation between volume of lifting at 80% or higher and strength and the correlation is very strong 0.84 however uh if you're talking about the muscle mass with that lighter stuff some lifters would just get great results and some lifters would just get more endurance and they found that guys were juicing they can keep doing higher volumes and still still keep getting more muscular but uh the guys who are not who are clean they're just not able to do that so trial and air probably like Marty gagher says fill an hour I think that's a safe I think that's a safe guideline fill an hour yeah I like the fill an hour I don't think I've ever spent more than an hour of actual work in the gym maybe a 75 minutes or so I notice if I train longer than that I pay a serious price in terms of post exercise fatigue later in the day I'd actually like to talk about this concept um I looked it up before sitting down today there's a little bit of literature starting to emerge not not as much as I would like about post exercise coleric depletion you know so much of our ability to hold our attention is dependent on epinephrine nor epinephrine and acetylcholine release in the brain and of course muscle muscular contractions acetool being the dominant transmitter from nerve to muscle um communication but this idea that if we exercise too intensely or even if we just do cognitive work that's very intense for a period of time that there's this post exercise col energic depletion and then we get this what people typically call brain fog although that's not a real medical term so I think from the Practical standpoint a lot of people who would like to train more for strength train more often for strength do strength and endurance work the the challenge sometimes isn't just scheduling it it's that we feel depleted and tired afterward have you observed this and is there a way to use strength training or other forms of training to improve cognitive function because I you know again as you pointed out only compromises not Solutions but I do see a world in which one could use their physical training to give them a uh for lack of a better word a boost into the day so you're getting stronger you're developing your your health and you're also able to then lean into your day with with more more focus and attention that would be the ultimate scenario yeah well there's obviously we're looking at a zero some game so there's you only have so much you know your resources are limited one thing that will absolutely help is fragmentation it's been proven that dividing up a given workload into smaller chunks allows you doesn't matter what it is whether it's endurance training or strength training or some cognitive work you're able to you're able to do more and that's one thing that to consider the other is uh obviously the um feedback you know you have to listen to your body pretty much Soviets stressed very much that you have to take the cybernetic approach you have to have the feedback no matter what the training plan says says you have to listen to you have to listen to that feedback and freshness in the Soviet system of strength training and not just in weightlifting freshness was Paramount it's even better let's talk about how track athletes in the Soviet Union and trained for strengths and that's more that's would be even more applicable to a lot of the listeners because they definitely didn't spend two and a half hours in the you know in the gym so Professor vladimirov he was a head coach and he was one of the first to implement heavy lifting for the for the track after right after the Soviets decide hey look at these Americans you know lifting heavy Weist Bruce Randall and Paul Anderson and Canadian Doug heurn so these lifters he has absolutely says always do Low Reps so they would never do more than three four reps even with the lightest weight even with a warm-up weight they spent a lot of time doing just singles and doubles and it was absolutely essential that they stayed fresh and part of it was just the how they felt part of it is the performance how well they jumped and so on and how they felt after so they found if you're really obsessive about it you have that tonic effect that lasts at least until the next day and the tonic effect is both for your strength for your power but uh also for you know your cognitive functions as well but it's also very very interesting that here's an idea uh do a bench press before the next day before you're competing in a jump or do a heavy Squad the day before you're competing as a thrower so it's again it's very interesting how the opposite part of the body stimulating that was uh was very very helpful very interesting phenomena so they found if the strength work is is familiar and non-exhaustive it absolutely facilitates whatever is that you do afterwards and um restricting the this is where the difference this is where track athletes were very different from a lot of other people they try to restrict their volume as much as possible of strength training in part because well they had to do other things and because they had to stay fresh so uh if you look at the volume if you look at generally speaking how many repetition that you want to perform per exercise per uh per training session and again these are purely empirical numbers they come from Soviet weightlifting but they were also applied in track so the minimal volume is 10 to 20 repetitions total so minimum and uh optimal is 20 to 30 maximal it becomes 30 to 50 in that window so when you're looking at 20 to 30 reps maybe on the lower and right there you're going to build strength and if you also are going to not go to failure and rest sufficiently between sets unless greas unless you're greasing the groove you need to look at at least five minutes pretty much and that's both for neural and B chemical reasons but more is really better unfortunately really a lot of it is just comes down to listening to your body and just using your judgment I wish I had any better I wish I had any better answer here I think it's a terrific answer I like to leave the gym with some gas in the tank H because well I get paid to think and to speak as it were uh not to lift but and many great thinkers in the strength World starting from leaderman back a 100 years ago to uh to Soviet weightlifting uh authorities like you know ronov and uh Roman and uh later on somebody like even Steve Justa was a very colorful individual just brilliant brilliant uh strength strength athlete um a farmer from Nebraska who just came up with some fantastic protocols but he would say that you've got to finish stronger than when you started I love that and that seam is very much permeates uh professional or high level strength training where this mentality of a workout or try to get smoked or pumped or throw up in the bucket they they would look at you as that's insane one of the reasons that also Soviets restricted the number of reps in the squad because you do sets of 10 in the squad you're going to definitely put on some mths no question about it but one of the reasons they restricted that very few people did sets of 10 except for heavy weights who were had a hard time bulking and even more is like okay that's too much cardiorespiratory stress and even though Soviet weightlifters did some general physical training like cross country running or playing soccer but they're not trying to get their cardio in the uh on the lifting platform that was just made no sense whatsoever so restricting the Reps will go a very long way restrict uh increasing the rest periods to at least 5 minutes would go a very long way and restrict a number of exercises because people don't realize that you're using different muscle groups but still using the same brain you're still same using the same adrenals and uh all that stuff really adds up and so I would say two during one practice one training practice maybe two maybe three exercises Max lifts and nothing wrong with doing just one and yeah if you want to you know do your curls and whatever calves later that's fine but you can tack it on in the end or you can do it totally separate those things don't really zap you you can just come in in a separate day and just do your enjoy your calf burn love it there seems to be an over Reliance nowadays on pre-workout stimulants uh I'm a big consumer of caffeine in the form of yerba mate and coffee I'm old school that way um not that I my coffee yeah you you still drink coffee every day yes I do yeah but only twice got a moderation moderation right um these days there's a lot of emphasis on just trying to get as you know absolutely wired and and geared up for training um and I think that in part contributes to why people feel this post exercise fatigue you know they go hit the gym hard after a pre-workout and then they're doing their post-workout shake and a bunch of carbohydrates to replenish their glycogen and then of course two hours later you want to take a nap I mean it's amazing anyone could study or do anything at that point I think that's uh very different than the kind of training you're describing I also um just so I'd love your thoughts on on stimulants generally and how they can support or hinder performance and I'm also curious about um just the what's lost in that model in terms of learning how to cycle one's energy up and down you know several times today you've mentioned this this thing of of the ability to relax the muscles and relax the the nervous system in between sets um maybe even in between reps who knows um but usually between sets and certainly and sometimes between reps under certain circumstances abely yeah so so maybe we talk about stimulants uh before we started today we were talking about you know when stimulants can actually hinder performance um when they can help and then maybe we talk about this cycling of of um tension and relaxation because I look at training physically as a as a as a venue for exploring nervous system function and control over nervous system generally that one can apply elsewhere so that's the kind of theme I'll just roll roll out onto the T well first of all I'll preface it by saying that stimulant and any kind of Pharmacy stely out of my wheelhouse so what you're about what I'm about to say is purely reflected knowledge you know with your neurobiology background you can tell the listeners so much more than I could possibly can but top athletes when they compete after a competition I'm talking about power strength sports like powerlifting or weightlifting for the next two weeks they're they're just gone they're completely flat because there are two adaptations that take place in uh in in strength training proper strength training so on one hand it's much more economical uh function of the adrenal glands on the other hand it's much higher capacity as well so these are the guys in gals who are able to Crank It Up really really high when they want to but they're also able to really keep it keep it down when they don't have to and they do know that for the next two weeks after after the competition or after some idiotic gym Max you know that might take a week they are they're going to be flat they're going to be completely gone so you really have to spare your adrenaline the lifters who take heavy lifts in in the gym they still typically they stay at the training Max not the competition Max so what's the training Max a training Max it's uh the heaviest way that you can possibly lift with without uh getting too excited about it and uh back in the 50s uh uh luchkin he was uh one of the fathers of Soviet weightlifting he came up with a great uh tactic how to find that weight if your heart rate goes up before the set that's too heavy so that you got to like you got to monitor yourself unless you're in competition of course that's that's a different game if I will defer to others about how much uh one should or could take stimulants before training uh lifting I'm talking about but generally speaking you got to do it moderation and especially you got to save it for the times when you really need it like in the American powerlifting system when you have during week three and four that's good time to do it during the weeks one and two when the weights are lighter lets your adrenals recover and you don't need to push yourself as hard anyway so it's just one example how to how to go about this if you have to drink some stupid energy drink to just get yourself up to training there's something wrong in your life possibly it is something that's lifestyle choices and you need to address it if you always feel exhausted after training you're missing out on life I mean if you're doing a very a desk job that does not require High cognitive ability something that's really mechanical with pen and paper or computer and you choose to just destroy yourself on a daily basis with uh a lot of sess to failure or metcons or whatever it is well it's your choice if you want to destroy your life like that but again if you look at your adrenal profile if you look at uh your sympathetic dominance if you look at your how you're just feeling is going to be really really awful the other angle to this is um as we talked earlier in learning and skill training skill practice is learning current performance is not indicative of learning so just because you're able to lift five founds more because you got yourself all jacked up and some drink doesn't mean you necessarily got stronger so you just need to come in and put in your practice and walk away and come back and then when there's time and it's the day to go heavier that's that's when you do that so don't want to discourage you from drinking coffee in fact if you drink a stimulate coffee should be the only thing the rest of this stuff is I don't know yeah coffee tea coffee tea and uh then uh figure out again figure out what is that moderate moderate amount figure out how to use it when you truly need it as opposed to be relying on it all the time uh would you mind before we go to the next question if I if I just share with you a result that I just wanted to plant in your brain uh because I've been excited to tell you about this because it's new results from the field of Neuroscience that I don't think anyone's discussed anywhere but I think you might find interesting for your sake of discussion here but also for looking forward um I didn't do this study I wish I had the the study very briefly is interested in the neural basis of choking not choking someone out or not anything else related to choking but when one feels that the stakes are really high and suddenly ability Falls away what is that so what they did is they developed this game where essentially the potential payoff in this game while recording from neurons in the brain is either low medium or very high or the occasional jackpot like you could just win the whole thing and the payoff is is very very considerable then they looked at the amount of upper motor neuron recruitment so essentially the areas of the brain that drive coordinated muscular Behavior or action and what they found is that it basically scales with the level of reward so you get more um neuronal engagement as the reward scales up however every time the jackpot was offered it over engages too many motor neurons and so that this notion of Cho of like choking when the stakes are really have IR radiation that you cannot control exactly it's like spill over of like it's like too much we could call it too much excitement but it's not adrenaline in this case although that's probably associated with it you think oh great you know I'm going to I'm going to get an award I'm going to get bigger or even bigger okay oh my goodness this could change everything and all of a sudden performance just tanks and so it turns out it's it's a bra it's a brain thing at the level of over recruitment which just speaks to this idea of being able to maintain arousal within a certain range is an essential skill to any performer I just i' share that it's a fun set of results all I learn something I have to share it with somebody who I think might might U care so if ever people wonder about the uh why people choke it's it it is a hyperarousal at the level of the brain not apparently not so much the body well being able to control arousal it's such a key skill for an athlete and uh part of that obviously it should be directed as sports psychologist and there are some fantastic techniques for example Dr Jud boto who is an author who published the book with strong first uh Dr J squatted 602 at by a weight of 132 and that was back in the 80s he was in his 40s after serious back injury surgery and uh he was he was a sport psychologist and he discusses this various various skills as fascinating his control of exitation inhibition was such that he would sleep between attempts a couple minutes before the attempt his Handler or coach would wake him up he would wake up he'd get himself into frenzy he'd lift the weight to go back to sleep nine times a day throughout the day now that's a Mastery of excitation inhibition your on switch and off switch so part of that are is sports psychology there are tools in sport psychology for that part of it is uh training is whatever you do in the gym some of your habits and some of your practices like for example okay David riger is one of the greatest weightlifters of all time some people would say the greatest weightlift of all times and U when he was discovered by rud plukfelder his coach who was another Olympic champion world champion one of the things that the coach was impressed with is that rigert would do his set and then that after he set he would just go completely limp like a rag and he was very impressed with that later um in riger's career when he was a world champion already in the United States so there's a there's an America coach r writes how he saw him in Columbus Ohio or Cleveland Ohio competing back in the 70s he was uh lying and smoking a cigarette and uh then he gets up he snatches 60 kilos like 135 pounds or something once then he just picks up something else equally trivial and then he goes and does a goes his first attempts and then ends up with a superior performance at a different time riger bet box of kanyak to that he would snatch 90% of his max which which was his max was probably around 370 or something so he was able to snatch 90% of that no warmup whatsoever and so this is this ability of that incredible control so part of it is whatever you're born with part of it is Sport psychology techniques but part of is developing some habits as soon as you're done with your lift just power down incidentally after training a strength athlete ought to perform a cool down and uh Russians did some uh did some numbers on powerlifters and they found that the top powerlifters they spend time and cool down and the guys are not so good they don't because not only it just allows you to bring your exitation down get your parasympathetic get you to start recovering so you do some easy stretching you do some meditating you do some breathing exercises whatever you do but even after each set so you so you put up that heavy deadlifter Squat and you just immediately come down and then you walk around and you chill so you just try to tune your uh switch so much breathing exercises come in handy for that there are breathing exercises to increase your excitation uh there are breathing exercises that are able to very much uh put you in a state of inhibition very deep inhibition even some of them are hypercapnic some of hypoxic which means you know you try to increase carbon dioxide or you're trying to decrease oxygen there are some very sophisticated yet really quite simple techniques that that uh that can help that can help you do that I love this concept of just learning to push on the accelerator um push on the break and to and to play with disinhibition as a first person to come on this podcast even among the neuroscientists I've spoken with to talk about disinhibition thank you for bringing that well the history of that's a beautiful concept and an important one for how we function that's a that absolutely is the original research was done in the 60s eai and steinhouse uh 1961 I believe and then later on that was a big part of the training method of Dr Fred Hatfield Fred Hatfield is a legend in the uh in the iron game he was uh one of the first to Squad a th000 pounds in competition and he was uh he was just a fantastic lifter and a and just brilliant scientist so he tried to direct a lot of the training uh towards this inhibition so he even developed special techniques that are largely forgotten ironically but yes disinhibition is huge and it's uh also one of the one of the things about disinhibition to it's also very important to avoid failing because never failing a lift that's part of dis inhibition so like we talked about Ed con early another one of the powerlifting grades ad cone competed over several decades set over 70 World Records in several weight classes uh only missed a couple lifts in competition never missed a training lift whatsoever always calm always composed an amazing lifter amazing guy and what's very likely happened is that his inhibitory Pathways just shriveled and got pruned and died what people don't realize that you know greasing the groove that's the term proper term long-term potentiation is like when you are getting better at like that transmission gets stronger it's like your nerves become superconductors but there's also its evil twin long-term depression so pretty much what happens is now you're trying as hard but your muscles are not jumping in response anymore so one of the ways to uh get this long-term depression is by by failing so whenever you're attempting certain thing and if it doesn't happen that that's a way that pathway starts starts firing weaker and the inhibitory Pathways start become stronger and it becomes even worse if you're emotional about it so you said quite a few things about adrenaline but uh adrenaline has adrenaline does promote neuroplasticity but not always in a good way so if you look at the PTSD treatments you will find that if uh a person re-experiences that bad whatever thing that happened and then it gets into the feedback loop that positive feedback positive doesn't mean good positive it just means it keeps increasing it because every time that there's a spike of ADR adrenaline that reinforces the memory so if you missed the attempt and you also got really upset about it and you remember remember it again so you're making yourself weaker and weaker which reminds me of a very fascinating way that the Ancients used for uh to record some events before before there's writing so let's say there's a wedding between VIP families they bring a kid young kid seven-year-old let's say and make the kid watch the whole thing and after after the festivities they throw the kid into the river the kid crawls out of the ri and it was he doesn't know to he doesn't expect it and the kid climbs out of the river he's going to remember that wedding for the rest of his life he's going to hold that record because of the adrenaline Spike asso so that really did increase the neuroplasticity so that memory became really deeply ingrained so yeah part of uh part of disinhibition is not promoting inhibition is just not failing so Fred Hatfield had a beautiful line uh success beg gets success failure begins failure train to success not to failure do you recommend actually avoiding train to muscular failure absolutely there is really no reason for that if you're doing that with uh single joint bodybuilding exercises like curls it probably does not make doesn't matter and if you're doing it for bodybuilding but I still don't see the point because every rep closer to failure that it's going to increase exponentially your recovery time so you're not going to get quite as much uh yeah you might get more muscle gain from that particular last trap but your recovery is going to be increased so much and also as you start training to failure you also you're converting more of your fibers to toward slower toward slower types so on the other hand if you don't train to failure you don't so there's an interesting Spanish study when uh they found that when athletes train to failure again they're some of the mein and type 2x fast fibers they convert it to 2A so they they became slower probably because now it's an endurance event when you're training for as many reps as possible it's really an endurance event on the other hand the athletes that trained with half the maximum possible repetitions uh they did not experience that decline which goes back several decades to when Arad vario vario Olympic champion scientist head coach incredible incredible person uh he said there is a big difference between six sets of three and three set a six because uh and you think like this sounds like the most obvious thing to say but the fact is you build just as much strength with six sets of three as three sets of six you get a lot less tired you get to practice for three extra sets and you can train sooner so that's uh that's fundamental so pushing to failure also the other thing is about the control of your Technique towards the last TRS there's no control left but imagine that you always have that perfect technique so you grease that pathway that becomes a reflex in fact early on the Soviet Sports scientist very much view strength adaptation as just the development of conditional reflex kind of like you know Pavo with the dogs drooling dogs and then you go into the competition and you psych yourself up and you don't even know what's going on you're not aware but you only have one pathway there's no plan B you only remember how to do your deadlift in this particular know any other way the neurons are trained to to complete the execution of the movement exactly and all in a very specific way because there's no plan B when you start failures so you start okay this is the stressful situation so I re I revert to plan B but for there's Plan B for amateurs top athletes don't have plan B watch a top lifter fail an attempt he or she is going to shake with that bar shake shake shake shake and finally it's going to come down but it's not like the butt's going to shoot up or something ugly is going to happen so going back to that point you made earlier about the quality of practice quality is absolutely Paramount and it's uh strength training is a skill practice any athletic training is a skill practice maybe writing the elliptical is not a skill practice but it's not a it's just not a sport anyway it's not anything any you know even hiking is a practice you're trying to stay tall you're trying to breathe in a particular manner all practice the Crossovers between physical training and um mental Pursuits are astonishing to me you know as we're talking about this avoiding going to failure um I'm in the process of writing my first book I know you've written several books and I'm finding it to be very different than anything else I've ever done and the experienced writers tell me that you should you know end on a uh uh end on a sentence where you kind of know what the next sentence could be perhaps to see the unconscious mind for the next day but but that you don't want to run right up into a wall and then bang your head against that wall uh metaphorically speaking um because it places a kind of frustration into your nervous system that you arrive to the page with the next day I guess the opposite could be argue too but but it fits very well with um with what we're talking about here I because of the early Mike mener training uh or the influence I should say um I've tended to train a failure uh purposefully and used to do Force reps and drop sets and all that stuff as the years have gone by I've started only incorporating a few sets to failure and my volume has increased somewhat and I'm training heavier at lower repetitions and my progress as I get you know toward my fifth decade just continues to um just continues and so I I just decided as you were saying uh the last couple of sentences that for the rest of the year um I'm going to not train to failure because I really want to experience what it's like to do that for a long period of time as opposed to just reducing the number of sets that I take to failure I'm also I'm very stringent about form and always have been and I do want to ask what are your thoughts on um unless somebody's training for isometric or Ecentric specific training full range of motion not just for sake of building strength but can using a full range of motion also improve flexibility without some dedicated flexibility training and I'd like to use this as a segue to talk about flexibility training yes it can so sarum murus can grow in length as well so the contractile part of the muscle they can grow lengthwise as well it's uh something that needs to be done carefully and cautiously of course and it's uh with not with heavy weights eventually it's possible for a person to perform you know flexibility feeds with heavier weights if it's desirable but initially something go lighter so yes absolutely you can and uh it's it's one of the easiest way to promote flexibility and uh flexibility also has a very much a a neural component as well so part of it obviously you know you're looking at you're looking at what's happening in the joints of course part you're looking at uh you know the length the length of the the length of the tissues too but a lot of it is also the ability to reset the regulation of MUSC muscle lengths and tension so it's uh like the ability to do a split for example it's part of it is yeah well if you're provided your hip joints are built for that sort of thing a lot of it is really in your mind because you're experiencing defensive inhibition you're just afraid you're going to get a torn turn in half so which brings us to very interesting parallel as we kept talking about um Quality and has also talked about that flow Channel by Professor chah exactly thank you so between uh boredom and anxiety so when you're trying to do a split for example so you see somebody trying to get into that stretch and that person goes oh sitting there and panicking and being in total pain and nothing good is going to happen you're pretty much just uh facilitating this pain Pathways and you're just learning to hate this exercise a smarter individual would get to the point to the edge of pain and then stay there for a while and owning it until this the uh until the spindle is reset you know okay accept the new range of motion add some contraction relaxation contraction relaxation you know isometric stretching you know progress progress even further so in any type of training forcing the adaptation is just not going to work whether it's flexibility whether it's strength whether it's endurance there's time for very high level of effort but there's never time for ripping yourself in half right there's never time for hurting yourself on purpose so uh but yes do do uh long range of motion work to increase range of motion for the upper body I'm obviously very partial to his kettle bells but one of the great many benefits of kettle bell training you know a bow they handle is uh the way it's designed so you press it from here overhead that offset Center gravity helps to pull your arm back so you're just improving the shoulder flexion you're improving thoracic extension it's so much easier to place yourself in exactly good position and then just stay there so it's very important to stay open to keep that keep that useful posture and keep that good uh good shoulder function so but yeah with squats you can definitely do that just very progressively one warning about squats if you're going for parallel squat like it is in powerlifting it's a parallel defined as the top of the knee is a little higher than the crease on the hip not a right people will argue about this um in some comical ways from time to time so when a parallel is not right angle at the knee correct it's parallel the top of the the top of the thigh I I realize you said it very clearly but I'm just making sure because debates abound on the internet the top of the thigh should be parallel to the floor well or deeper yeah yeah but but when you do go for that depth or somewhere in that ballpark uh that's uh you can go wide in The Stance you can progressively increase the width of distance if you do it for flexibility there have been people who are doing squats like in know almost like a horse stance style squats and progressively developing great level of flexibility it's possible to do that but uh you are doing that you're going wider but not necessarily deeper so it's okay to go wider but you still you're still your femur should not be dipping too much so if you're trying to go Rock Bottom in the white stance your hip architecture is not designed for that right so like Tom Platz like famous for squatting very very deep like he was narrow but he used a narrow stance got it so glutes on Cals practically but he was a shorter guy right but he also he was but also he was also squatting in a pretty narrow stance so in this particular case you're not experiencing with the hip you know with the hip limitation right there so it's okay for you but imagine if you try to go wider and then you try to go it's just again this is not not a good idea you could end up on the floor literally on the floor if you want to develop here's a great way to develop flexibility for this type of rock bottom squat if you're not there yet uh initially even without resistance assume your normal squat stands and I'm talking about a narrower stands you know shoulder wi or somewhere there and approach the wall face the wall put your arms out and start squatting and you will find the wall is going to teach you so it is the feedback from the wall if you start doing something funny with your spine you're going to hit your head on the wall and fall back so it's it provides terrific feedback it is something that I learned originally from uh uh from shakun a shikun practitioner and again quite a number of skills that my system are picked up from from martial arts but we applied the strong first to use that for teaching people that upright Squat and developing the developing the mobility for deep squat it's a it's a foolproof it's like uh Greg Cook would call this a self-correcting exercise and those are really the best when the coach can walk away and you know have a cigarette and the student is still going to be able to do it righty I love your book relax into stretch I think it's a really important concept this idea that the nervous system and our mental state is preventing inhibiting a good amount of our natural flexibility that we can work with the mental state and Progressive relaxation and contraction of muscles and related tissues to well absolutely can and it's very much minded over the matter I have a great success story so one of uh one of my senior instructors as strong first Steve fredes so met him a couple decades ago and uh he had a severe back injury so he spent eight or n months in bed and perette and he's not he was not athletic he done some jogging or things like that in the past and uh he decided to get serious about getting strong so he healed up until he was healthy he started uh lifting kettle bells then after that he started powerlifting and he started doing uh proper stretching like this so he's uh right now he's Steve in his late 60s he holds a a bunch of American Masters records in the deadlift even though his back was totally messed up lifts without a belt he's you can break your fist on his abs I like having people punch would you please punch Steve just don't hurt yourself but he also worked out have to suspend his SI splits and you know that's at that point he was uh probably in his 50s when he did that and maybe 60s possibly and then he even competed in these crazy allaround meets where there's one lift where you hang between two chairs then you pick up a dumbbell from the ground you can find the footage somewhere in the internet so here's a man who took uh who did not take his injury line down so once he was cleared to train he decided to approach his training with the uh attitude of a musician because he's a music professor and in my experience that people who who become very successful and uh in strength musicians and martial artists are among the people who who can succeed because they're used to practice for many hours they're used to paying attention to small detail and they're used to doing whatever other people consider boring over and over so again here is this 67-year-old man with abs you can break your hands on deadlift records and uh and full splits that's that's what a human mind is capable of love this concept of a practice or of practice not of a practice but instead of training I always thought a training is such a better word than working out and it probably is but I think practice uh is such a better verb than training is also good of course but practice is uh it puts you in the mind in the right frame frame of mind you imagine the word work out like litterman quote he literally worked himself out uh as long as you're highlighting um remarkable instances of people in the second half of their life let's let's say um getting quite strong developing impressive skills before we started recording today you were relaying to us uh that your your father has um acquired some significant strength could you just share some of his um his abilities to inspire both the uh the people um in the second half of their life or so and to um motivate slash intimidate the younger ones and um get them going because they really have no excuse I'm very proud of my parents and uh they're both 87 years old and uh my father has always been an athlete and then at the age of 71 I brought him to powerlifting meat and I see him in the warm-up area picking up you know 225 pounds with bad form like Dad what are you doing he got interested so fast forward a few years and uh by the time he was 75 he had several American records in uh several weight classes and uh he deadlifted uh in the low 400s uh without a belt body weight of 198 and in fact when um uh back at that point when Professor Stuart McGill who is a very good friend of mine he uh came to watch my dad uh I think he pulled like 385 for triple before competition in at Gold Gym Venice and uh Ste examined his back back and he said he had a you know muscularity in the back of a 40y old so I thought it was pretty pretty pretty cool so uh he's not deadlifting right now because an old injury cut up to him he fell off a track vehicle you know like imagine a tank without a gun uh military tractor vehicle on Ice in the winter and uh about 40 years ago and there are some things that cut up to him so he cannot deadlift right now but he's still twice a week he does over 50 pull-ups in total and you know and at least twice a week he does over 100 perfect body weight squats like powerlifting style squats you know and he does that he does push-ups and things like that so he just stays on top of that and he's still maintaining very good strength very good muscularity so the approach to building muscle for him is it's that same volume with medium reps and the medium effort it always works because it builds strength it builds muscle it's very safe it's uh it's very enjoyable and uh my mother she uh she used to be a professional Bina and she got started training since she was six so she because she had to train all day she hates exercise but she still does it because she must and uh she came up with a great anti-glycolytic training protocol for herself so this is something she invented I had nothing to do with it but it's just totally goes with vash's work she climbs stairs at a highrise and she will climb stairs from one floor to the next she'll walk the hallway come back and then go to the next floor so that's the same idea that vasansi had intensify the intensity of contraction and then give a little time to not so in order to for the acid not to pile up so you keep that effort creating phosphate powered and aerobic powered and you know so she does that for 17 floors or whatever a few times a week and plus other things but yeah I'm very fortunate uh very proud of my parents my father-in-law Roger he's a great example and a great greas the group success story so he is a retired firefighter and Marine and uh at the age of 64 and he always uh lifted very unusual for his generation he started when he was 15 and uh never stopped but he couldn't quite do 20 pull-ups when he was a marine so at the age of 64 he got on the Greaser Groove protocol so so at that point his max was 10 reps so I said Roger every time you go by the pullup bar hit hit five and when they become really really easy and then you can add a rep well a few months later he finally he when he worked up to nine daily reps he tested he could do 20 Pull-Ups so at 64 he finally aced the US Marine Corps pull-up PT test something that he couldn't do as a young Jarhead and uh yeah seeing these older folks who are not taking their age lying down and taking their training very seriously it's just uh very admirable and you know you see much younger people start complaining some 30-year-old comes I'm aging I'm getting older what should I do it's like what's wrong with you son you know yeah I completely agree these are inspiring stories truly inspiring and people of all ages should pay attention it's um not done in one Leap there's the progressive nature to it and I think not training to failure um just is resurface in my mind now as we have this discussion you know the idea isn't to to grind it's to just Grease the groove get in there and do it as a that's right practice actually I I'm going to change my language around this I realize that when I call it a practice as a as a noun it's not as effective as practice as a verb I'm going to practice okay not that just for me this is just my own internal thing you know my neuroses insist that I share this but I do think that semantics are important as you pointed out before because it has a lot to do with how uh we feel about ourselves um and what we think are we're capable of um it starts with being inspired to try something but also like I didn't grow up in a particularly athletic family um you know not none of us are unathletic but I didn't think I could be you know reasonably strong have decent endurance and I wouldn't consider myself an athlete by any stretch but um you were being too modest but my consistency like I have I have confidence in like if I bite down into something there's a good chance I'm going to do it for the next 30 Years well in consistency my uh my friend uh Jim Wright who passed uh he used to say consistency over intensity and that that's absolutely true if you're doing if you're doing things correctly with proper form if you do it over and over you will win over long term which also interesting kind of brings me to an interesting point you made me think of the long-term development athletic development here's what I'd like to see in an perfect world nobody is tried that yet but I imagine a strength athlete starting out using the Soviet system and later by the way the Russian powerlifting team uses exactly the same training methodology derived from that which means you training many times a week let's say Squad four or five days a week and uh you're doing a lot of reps with this moderate effort and you do this for for years and you achieve high level and then at some point you switch to this American powerlifting system because your skills are already fully home and you fully adapted to the type of stimulus that that first system brings and you switch switch to this once a week cycling method it would be very interesting to see what uh what would happen how far one could go so folks in your 20s and 30s get going on it now and we'll have a podcast in a couple of decades to check back uh send us a note or put in the comments I'd love to talk about body weight training I love love love the book Nam Naked Warrior thank you uh I got that book initially because in the early days of starting my laboratory I was traveling a ton and I didn't always have access to gyms and I wanted to try and grease the groove when I arrived in my room in the middle of the night in Germany or whatever so um I still have not succeeded in doing pistol squats on both legs one is I have some dominant and weakness as it were um but I without any natural strength ability uh to speak of uh was able to learn one arm push-ups um uh one arm pull-ups I'm not there now I have to return to that level of of upper body strength um but it's remarkable what one can do with body weight training and you describe some really beautiful progressions in the book I highly recommend this book folks um so maybe we could just take the push-up as an example and a handstand push-up as the extreme of that right um what I love so much about that book is for in you talk about doing a push-up against the a wall is trivially easy for most people doing a handstand push-up free free standing very difficult but there's a series PR of progressions in between that maybe you could describe to us that once you realize that oh I can work through this over time and if I'm not in a rush to get through it and I just do these a few times a week or more ah or a few times a day a few times a week or more I could do a handstand push-up freestanding or a pistol Squad or a one arm pushup or a one-arm pullup it's not outside one's reach at all absolutely yeah so could you fill in some of the gaps that so getting people to think about the the kind of physics of this and the principles behind it it's such a valuable system and and one that um is a lot of fun too before talking about the system Andrew may I speak about the relative benefits of different types of resistance please okay yeah so the body weight resistance I'm going to talk about uh body weight kettle bells and barbells and obviously there are other things as well but you know it's going to take too long so body weight training the great advantage of body weight is its accessibility so you can do a pushup absolutely anywhere so that is that's a really huge selling point because for some people somebody who travels all the time and uh somebody who's in places where gyms are not available so that's that's a great asset some people just simply enjoy it greatly that's that's just fine the downside of body weight training is it's a lot harder to learn these skills than it is let's say to learn some many cbell skills or even some barbell skills so it seems very innocent and so easy but the uh it may take time to really get some of this so that may take time to do it long may might take a longer time the beautiful thing about the barbell is uh well for first of all the satisfaction of lifting really heavy stuff some people find it extremely satisfying if you don't maybe it's not for you but if you do it's it's incredible then the ability to adjust adjust the weights in small increments so you can prescribe 87.5% one W Max and you can do that you cannot do that with body weight in fact with body weight it's very hard to calibrate resistance that's another one of the problems because you do need to have some skills figure out the regressions and progressions how to do that and and uh the other thing the other great benefit of the barbell is some of the lifts especially the three power lifts allow you to make great gains in strengths and if you choose muscle mess with a very low volume it's uh it's possible to do three sets of five once a week in the squat and get very strong try to do that with pistols it's just not going to happen so reasons for that we can speculate we know some reasons we don't know others but it it is what it is the beauty of the cattle Bell for strength specifically is it's very easy to teach the body language of strength of the cattle Bell you would think that with a with a body weight it should be easier because a lot of the skills that I teach in uh in my book The Naked Warrior they are either gymnastics or martial arts based so it's like okay here's the hollow position from gymnastics or here's this little trick from uh heart style martial arts so there all both use body weight nevertheless it's it's takes a lot more processing to figure out how to do this right from scratch like especially Contracting your abs properly especially if you don't have ABS to start with by the time you have them that's good but if you don't have them it's hard with a kettle bell for example you take uh you start doing double front squats with a pair of kettle bells it's going to be like zerchers you're going to your abdominal wall is going to light up you suddenly learn exactly oh this is what it means to get tight or you stick your elbows inside the knees and do goblet squat oh this is what the proper proper squat feels like and just very easy to uh very easy to integrate uh integrate all your body in one lift and there is an an apparent disadvantage of the kettle bell which also can be an advantage there's no you can program 87 and a half% body weight I mean one rep max because kettle bells jump in large you know like for example from 53 to 70 lbs for example that's a big jump and uh I mean these days some companies will manufacture kettle bells with small like you know small jumps what's the point you are defeating some of the uh reasons for the being for this particular piece of equipment and uh here's what they are one is Simplicity you only can have a couple bills and do a lot of things but the other is when you go when you suddenly let's say that you've been pressing a 53b kettle bell and you're doing a lot of sets and your goal is to press a 70lb kettle bell and it's a big jump so what you're going to do is first of all you're going to have to put in a very significant volume of work that foundation of the pyramid many strength uh authors throughout history bill star and many others use that analogy of volume as being the foundation of the pyramid you're going to have to press that 24 Kil many times properly before you're going to have a run at 70 you have to develop the confidence the other thing is you're going to have to acquire the skill of tension total body tension everything is linked up because when you go up couple pounds it doesn't make a difference you're doing the same thing you're not noticing when you go up a lot everything has to be just so so as you're doing going through your sets of five with a 53 pounder you're also doing just cleans with a 70 pounder you're starting to see what it feels like you're doing getups with it you're starting to see acquiring see how that weight feels like again we're talking about dis inhibition here you're planning and owing this weight so you're forced to put in a very significant volume of work which mean which is very healthy it will lead to a lot of really healthy adaptations and you will force to develop the skills to make that transition and plus you're also having that desirable difficulty in skill in learning the there is that concept by Robert Bor about desirable difficulties for learning if uh learning is very easy something is presented you don't learn much if you have to struggle like even if you're reading something and a font is ineligible ironically you end up learning better so that's is an example of a desirable difficulty as you're progressing this way so that is for strength obviously gettle Bill have their benefits for for endurance and for for other things as well but just for adjusting the resistance often times it's just a matter of preference and a matter of accessibility so I'm not going to say you pick this tool you pick that tool you pick the other tool but if you decide to pick the body weight uh my recommendation would be just be ready patient for a long road because you have to patiently learn these little subtleties of micromanaging your body again you watch the body language of gymnasts you watch the sunin in uh uh some styles of karate and you'll see that amazing uh linking of the different parts of the body into the one chain how the tension is used so it's um it's very rewarding but I would say that's probably the most attention demanding even though it seems so innocent and so simple and so safe but it Demands a lot of attention but if you that's your speed and if you enjoy practice true practice that's that's a great way to go I haven't explored kettle bell training so much whenever I've tried the standard kettle bell swing just kind of if there is such a thing but you know between the legs two-handed kettle bell swing I tended to get some right side uh lower back pain medial glute thing and I'm sure I'm not doing it correctly and I um I've wanted to learn Kettle belts properly you have an online Kettle belt course yes uh we do have several resources so we have the uh book kettle bell simple and Sinister we which is available on Amazon we have uh an online course under the same name we also obviously have uh uh workshops live instructors that you can find locally at our website strong first but I can tell you that of course some people are not supposed to do swings as is true for every exercise for example in McGill's work say some people who have problem with Shear sometimes they might have issues but a great great number of people majority people can do swings very successfully we have seen some really pretty broken people when they're clear to do that and when they're coached properly the big issue is you have to hip hinge not lift the gettle bell with your back or with your arms and for that we have very very specific progressions you cannot go move Beyond this until you do this okay here you are doing this particular hip hinge drill with no weight okay good you got that down now you're going to do a cattle Bell deadlift which is just a you know Sumo deadlift with a light kettle bell then you're going to progress with a very particular type of Swing so it's about patience but the benefits are really worth it so what are the benefits let's say of the cattle Bell swings as opposed to or snatches again snatch is more of a less Democratic exercise like the dips parallel bar dips fantastic for those who can do that but you know if you can that's too bad but there are alternatives so again the snatch is great if you cannot do snatch you can do swing so the swing it allows you to train power and power endurance in extremely safe manner because if you try to develop power in a lot of conventional ways uh you will find like okay you try doing Olympic lifts it's very skill intensive trying to learn how to do that and besides for some athlet it's not appropriate racking the bar and uh overstretching the wrist ligaments like for example for Fighters that's a kiss of death that's a really bad idea to stabilizing the wrist in this manner and for many athletes other athletes too you know pitcher doesn't want to do that baseball pitcher so high you know then you try to do things like sprinting Sprinter requires a lot of coaching proper coaching much more than a kettle bell swing and it's very very easy to rip a hamstring or something like that so it's this kettle bell swing allows you to train power and power endurance at the very safe Manner and what's also very unique about it you don't have to use a lot of weight what's unique about the kettle bell and kbell swing and another thing about the design you can swing it back between your legs but you don't have to let it passively s swing between your legs you can choose to accelerate it this is called over speed eccentric so some years back uh our colleague one of our instructors Brandon hler he put uh me and several other uh our colleagues instructors on the force plate and we started doing Swings with over speed Ecentric which means accelerating in downwards and upwards so we were using just a 53b bell so the most experienced guys we were able to generate over 10 GS of acceleration so basically we made that 50 lb Bell weigh 500 lb but if uh to the listeners who know about how uh how the tissues how the passive tissues can handle the load when the loading is really rapid it's amazing how these tissues can handle it very very safely so you can apply tremendous amount of load of course you don't start with that it's not how you start your swings so and you can develop power endurance so you can do a whole lot of different many different sets many sets you've had Megan Kelly VAB our uh certified instructors out of UK you know she said a Guinness World Record for a crazy number of swings done in an hour and uh so she would just go her training is she would go and do swings uh she would do a few reps pick up set it down and she would do it for let's say 90 minutes and she would do it with a heavy kettle bell and the adaptations are fantastic from that in the kettle Bill world we referred to W the hell effect so what's the what the hell effect what the hell effect is when you're getting an adaptation that's not a beginner's gain but it's an adaptation that's totally unexpected there's some collateral benefit how suddenly you're able you're able to do something and uh the improvements in Fat Loss improvements in resilience so res like for example speaking of resilience so some of the Tactical teams that I worked with in us here when they added either swings or snatches to their training with the kettle bell plus one-legged uh kettle bell deadlifts as well they sto tearing their hamstrings so you have this amazing way to do Ecentric loading for the hamstring but it's very safe and just really prepares you uh one of my friends he's still playing baseball in the 60s he says thank you for the kettle bells you know he went through the course in what a federal agencies 20 years ago and he's still doing that he's retired but he's still he's still doing that so that's a great benefit the amount of pure workload that you can do in this amount that's why you can burn a lot of calories you can uh develop cardio whatever but also like why would anybody want to do power training who's not a power athlete because for so many reasons right now I don't need to speak about it that your other guests have for the reasons of longevity how important it is to to have high levels of power and uh the cattle Bill swing is one of the ways one of the ways to develop it and interestingly enough going back like you know these acceleration patience uh Professor Yakov Nikolai Yakov LIF up Soviet biochemist he was just talking about Sprints during added Sprints when you were adding Sprints just to a jog you know this kind of a fart like work he was saying how important how good it is for elderly and for teenagers how good it is so the cattle Bill even if you're not sprinting if you don't know how to sprint you're able to get so many of this uh youth promoting benefits and again you have one tool that can train all the qualities you can develop Mobility you know the bent press That's a tremendous exercise the bent press where the mobility of the t-spine the uh mobility of the shoulder so like you were watch and uh watch for example uh Dr uh Dr Pope Mosley he is one of our instructors and he's also a a doctor and bed researcher I mean the gentleman is 70 years old and he's doing this beautiful bent presses getting himself in the range of motion that young guys you know on phones can possibly get into and is's doing it in a healthy manner so you can develop Mobility you can develop strength you can develop endurance and uh resilience in all one one package so obviously I'm biased and I'm not saying it's the only way to go but that's one relative benefit uh one of the many relative benefits of kettle bells but in the overall lifelong journey like if you're looking at three things right now your newest strength what should I start with I would say start with the kettle bell it's the best entry point we find it so easy to start coaching people in powerlifting or transition to some body weight strengths after training them with kettle bells it's uh it's extremely easy because they've got that body weight language of strength down I'm going to have a few questions uh in the upcoming months about kettle bells I'll try not to bother you too many times but I'll I'll uh thank you I'll use the course as a guide but I I'm determined to to derive some of these benefits of of kettle bells because uh kettle bells have been around me for for over a decade now um and I I just haven't quite taken to them not through some aversion but I'm I'm going to approach it correctly I love the body weight work um the body weight work um I don't know maybe it's takes me back to PE class when I was in high school or something when we do these fit fit tests um is usually some pull-ups some push-ups a reach and a and a run or something like that like a like a you straight-legged uh tow reach who knows if it's a meaningful metric but in any case um something so satisfying about going from struggling with push-ups to being able to do a one-arm push-up or something like that um and you describe it in in how to make that progression in the book for people me just to interrupt you and it's also cool that you're a bigger guy and you're doing that this is what I love to see and we're seeing that as strong first a lot we'll have to see uh bigger guys and gals getting into the body weight exercises because that's not typical of their strength we like to see skinny people getting into the barbell and just go against like for example seeing somebody like uh Dr Mike hardle one of our Master instructors you know he's a former American bench brass record holder and coach for the powerlifting Team USA I mean watching him do one push-ups you got to love that stuff because normally big guys hate body weight work it's humbling and little guys hate barbell and we just get and not just guys women we have we have these ladies these skinny little ladies lifting amazing weights that's just always awesome to see that it is awesome and I love that strength training resistance training is starting to really make a showing here in the US and the general public I think it's one of the best things to happen in the last few years and this discussion uh your knowledge is going to put even more momentum behind if I just made to guide people just briefly on a very high level uh great news you have so many choices bad news you have too many choices so pick one program with an established track record and just stick with it and follow it for a long time do not try to over customize everything Daniel conman spoke how much algorithms outperform humans so often I've seen this over and over how a properly designed strength program or endurance program that was uh generic design but with certain uh you know feedback loops in there okay if this happens you have to go back and make some changes deliver much better results and customized programs very often so find something that's simple find something that does not have a lot of moving parts and uh and just stick with this for a long time if it's working do not look for the for the next thing because the next thing maybe it's as good maybe not but also do keep in mind that every time you change gears you lose momentum uh you know you're uh you're a neuroscientist I don't know if you spoke to your audience about the law of neural Darwinism but the there's a competition between the synaptic sites so you the pathways so you can only do so many things well so a child can do everything but not but poorly but as we get older some you know some of these Pathways get pruned but others get reinforced and unfortunately we can't excel at everything so there's this classic example uh with and not just physically mentally as well cognitively as well this classic example with taxi drivers uh back in the days for GPS taxi capab drivers they were supposed to pass an extremely challenging test how to navigate through the city that was not designed to be navigated through and uh they found that uh certain part of their hippocampus was more developed than than in others and so this you know so they thought well maybe it's just pre pre-election maybe whoever made it through the test were the guys with more muscular Hampe you know and then they monitored then they monitored two groups of students over several years and they said they start with the same size and in the group that passed there brains so to say got bigger in that port and the others they didn't okay but then at the same time in a different test of a different test of memory the the guys who passed the test they were not so good so they lost something in the process it's just life it's uh many things in life for zero some game you want to seek some balance up to a point but they're comes a point where you know you cannot do it all we are limited in time we're limited in our adaptive capacity yeah Amen to that and I appreciate you highlighting the London cab drivers uh experiment um your your knowledge of Neuroscience is truly impressive you're way to jous thank you no it's true uh no other guest on here has discussed long-term depression which uh it's uh my dad said andw you know something my dad early on that is good things happen at Junctions of fields if you always stay exactly just in your own narrow field and you're just you know it just the same thing is repeated but when you start going to somewhere else a little bit outside as adjacent whether it's Neuroscience whether it's okay how do they you know what are the martial arts skills how do the martial artists do for striking or somewhere else I think that just really interesting to kind of Step a little bit outside your comfort zone and sometimes you see patterns that's what happens your father's a smart smart man thank you kids and young people training uh I don't know what the going word is now as to whether or not there's a you know too young to to resistance train age you know some people say there isn't um when I was growing up it was thought that if you squatted heavy or you deadlifted heavy before you reached your um natural uh limits of your height that it could quote unquote stunt your growth like your comments on that but based on what we were just talking about it seems that if a young person is interested in developing a super skill in one area one sport okay but there's a real trade-off to that and perhaps what we should do as kids um is a little bit of soccer a little bit of swimming little bit gymn gymnastics seems like a wonderful all-around sport maybe a little archery you know try a bunch of things some ballet you know try try well that's the time to do that that's explos that neurodiversity and the things that you can possibly do and then find the things that you click with and for the physical body early specialization destroys athletes it is really terrible because early on kids absolutely need to do a wide variety of different activities and really pursue a fairly balanced development you know there may be a biased towards strength or biased towards endurance but they really need to do it all and uh specialist athletes break they they break they're really do so that balance between General and specific uh it's a tough balance yeah and psychologically sometimes too we had a guest on here who's uh become a psychologist but she was a concert level uh violin player then injured her finger and it was like the most devastating thing you know when we put all of our sort of identity into one thing um sure you get your Michael Jordan's and you get your uh Tiger Woods's and that's and seriously there's no right answer or wrong answer so I remember um Ivan AB badv who was a head coach for the Bulgarian weightlifting team he says if Paganini played whatever instrument you know in addition to his own instrument playing in 15 hours a day he would not have become Pagan and that's true but I'm not saying that specialization is necessarily the right choice for everybody some Some people prefer to be decent in many things and it is healthy but you still have to decide you still have to make decisions very much you're looking like at a budget do I want to buy a couch or do you want to go on a vacation to Italy or do I want to go on a much Lamer vacation and buy a Lamer couch and do both and I'm not saying what's the right answer right there but just people do have to understand there are there are limitations they can't successfully compete into two sports for example it's not going to happen especially if it's a power sport an endurance Sport and uh they can't study everything to a high level just just as well if you want to be polymath that could that that was fine in the 18th century right now it's a little bit tougher yeah a previous guest you may know him Josh weit skin of uh you know chess PR G Fame he's gone on to do several things um at world uh class level by severing from the previous uh Endeavor completely he hasn't picked up a chess piece since he was 16 which is remarkable pivoting to other things but when one looks at the data on uh child prodigies very few of them are like Josh most of them don't actually succeed in doing anything else at a very high level except hopefully survive and thrive in their personal life who knows um after being Ultra successful as a young child probably because their nervous system is so you know they greas the groove so heavily for one Endeavor it's very hard to cross over Josh is exceptional in that regard well exceptions prove the rule usually exactly um not to say too mechanical and specific but I'd love to talk about abdominal or rather core work sure uh another thing that I love in the Naked Warrior are the abdominal exercises I must tell you um after years of doing some crunches here and there in different you know for whatever this class or that class or trying to I never really cared about having my abs defined um for its own sake one should probably be uh able to at least contract their abs okay it's a the level of we assess them by punching them right right right exactly but there's some wonderful exercises in there about learning to brace the entire body and some um dare I say some uh rather um unorthodox ways of assessing stability at the level of the core I'm thinking about the the plank where somebody tries to either kick you over or push you over this might sound violent this is not where you start folks kind of gentle but I never thought I could do like hanging Pikes for instance and like now Pikes are a standard part of my weekly routine I love doing five sets of five of hanging Pikes and um and I will tell anyone that decides to go down this path that when I first tried to do a pike I failed miserably I um tried an elseit failed miserably tried to the you know hang from the bar and just getting into a chair position and could just barely hold that the progressions are what matter right slow progression and patience now now five sets of five Pikes trivial for me but when I I just want to emphasize that when I started I was far far away from that and it's the progressions in the book that really helped me and I've maintained that Pike ability so thank you for that and I say it not not to necessarily um to highlight what I can do but that to highlight what I do believe most anybody can do if you put the work they can't if they put a lot of attention in so uh midsection training is one of the most misunderstood messed up areas of physical culture there's a thousand different exercises and people like oh you got to have variety this many reps that's not the point the point really is tension and attention so that's those are the two things and uh ideally your best first step is really learning abdominal tension through something like a zercher squat or double Kettle bille front squat where the load distribution is such that it forces reflexive stabil ization and you feel oh that's what tide ABS feel like and getting somebody just weak in a plank it's hopeless there's absolutely not going to help it's not there are ways of building up to it yes by Rolling in the back and so on so but if you don't have that option or if you choose not to exercise it you have to be extremely attentive to the details of what's going on with on your abdomen so you need to learn things like for example you need to learn to contract the pelvic diaphragm pull your butt up because you're trying to con you know trying to constrain the intraabdominal pressure then you need to learn how to direct attention to the different parts of your abdomen almost like a body bodybuilder but really not quite more like a gymnast there is this argument about in strength World about you know internal Focus external focus and queuing and the agreement is in Mortal learning well external focus queuing is so much better than focusing on you know whatever happens within the individual muscle it may be true in the beginning and maybe through outside of the strength game but any top strength athlete that you will meet they have their own internal cues how they do something later on they may forget them it Des spires and you know but they know how to this is how this is how I Engage The lat in the in the bench press uh George Halbert bench press world record holder famously said it took him many years to finally understand how the triceps is used in the bench press many years so there's a lot of internal component and for the ABS very very very much so you have to learn how to very much direct your attention there to get high tension you have to keep the rep slow like you said five sets of five perfect High Reps are not necessary you're not going to burn off fat by doing more reps you're just going to irritate your back that's all you're going to do nothing else so you treat your app training very much like a like a like a strength strength vent and if you do that uh you're going to get those results and finally the final detail is you need to use that intraabdominal pressure as your friend uh because in lifting like a deadlift or squad or something intraabdominal pressure helps you it supports you when you're doing abdominal work you work against that abdominal pre intraabdominal pressure you're just create that pressure and contract again it this is something called internal isometrics so it's kind of interesting it's just a combination of a classic strength work with very internalized kind of almost like a martial art approach to it then you need to learn also how to obviously use your abs in lifts and lifting and once you do and this is the beauty you don't really have to train your abs anymore so Franco Columbo for example great example in addition to winning you know being super strong strong and winning Mr Olympia he won the best abs he didn't train ABS he said he told me I hate AB training he just would stay tight whenever he did his heavy lifts and this is pretty much what happens when you reach a certain level of strength and a certain level of awareness simply staying tight during your strength work and also employing power breathing which is very important uh you're going to be able to to get as strong as as you need in the ABS and get your six-pack or whatever provid it you know you don't need the Twinkies so how do you pressurize the in fact may I show an abdominal exercise right now that is just sitting at this table that's also going to teach you how uh teach your audience how to properly pressurize for lifting so normally it's better Down Standing so and it's not for people with high blood pressure heart concerns you know check with your doctor if that's the situation so you take a normal breath in your abdomen and you uh pull up your butt pretty much like imagine you have to go to the restroom and you trying to you can't quite you know it's far away you're trying to stop yourself then you put your tongue between your teeth and you start and you start hissing and you do this in this ratcheting kind of manner so try to keep old the pressure out of your head out of your neck direct old the pressure it all this pressure is just you're really staying below and so this type of hissing you will notice that very rapidly you're going to contract everything around your waist so everything around your waist is is going to contract and you're going to stain your abdomen you're also going to start learn how to properly how to properly stabilize yourself under under heavy weights the difference between using this technique for lifting and for just training the ABS when you're training the ABS there's going to be some spinal flexion not a whole lot you don't want to do a lot of that there's going to be some spinal flexion when you're doing that under a heavy barbell squat you're maintaining your spine is neutral it's like your body stays a cylinder and um you're going to hold your breath pretty much but the idea is the same so it's like so the Val Sala maneuver one uh Russian coach called it it's it's an ex it's a it's an exhalation that didn't happen Okay because people don't know hold their breath properly they just and then eyes are bulging out well there's no stability right here so first of all you got to inhale low and how do you do that if you watch top lifters how they do that they will do it through purse lips you can also do it through the nose but you cannot do it through big wide open mouth so I'll show you why so if you you can you folks can try it at home so if you put your hand on your stomach and trying to do an abdominal breath doesn't go very well now for contrast pinch off one nostril take an abdominal breath or you can do that through P lips try it again so you see more resistance more resistance and again you're engaging the diaphragm instead of just uh just your uh thorax right there so you take that breath into your abdomen in like through a small opening through your nose or through through your Pur lips you draw it in right there and then you know down below you pull it pull it up and then after that it's that that exhalation that didn't happen do you see I so I I'm familiar with sort of bracing my abs what I've not done before is the uh resisting going to the bathroom thing that you mentioned the pulling up of the butt and then and then so you're creating compression from the bottom and from the top and also from all around that happens reflexively as well I see so that's the position to get into before say like a a hard a zercher squat or something like that ABS absolutely and if you're doing that for an exercise that's long long in duration you know if you don't want to be holding your breath too long then uh we have an expression that comes from one of The KES tiles breathing behind the shield so so right now I can speak to you but I'm still just as ti so you see what you're doing so the way we tested it our the where we teach it in our workshops is you lie on the ground I tell you to tense up and I'm going to stand on your stomach I'm going to have you sing a song and you're going to have to learn to properly maintain that pressure while still containing containing uh continuing to breathe so you're able to stabilize your spine but you're not going to pass out from maintaining that by uh by holding your breath for a period of time and then finally what you got to learn to do is you got to learn to match the breath with a force so synchronize synchronize when you're punching when you're throwing when you're lifting you have to learn how to match that contraction the timing of the abdominal contraction and the pressurization sometimes exhalation sometimes just pretending to with the effort once you learn how to match the breath of the force it's like magic and what people don't realize it's not just purely mechanical mechanically yes of course it works you know Stu explained this so well about the stiffness of the structure the analogy of the bicycle frame it's the same thing you're getting an expensive bicycle frame when you have strong ABS as opposed to the cheap one that rattles and uh Wiggles but there's also something that it's never never spoken about in the West for some reason the Soviet studied that decades ago this is something they called uh the numo maatic reflex numo is p Neu m o so air so there are barer receptors receptors uh for sensors for pressure inside your abdominal cavity and thoracic cavity so whenever these receptors are stimulated what they do they automatically increas the sensitivity of alpha Mona neurons so which really means to the audience is this if you imagine your brain is the music player and imagine your muscle is uh is a speaker the amount of intraabdominal pressure is your volume control so by by increasing that pressure you're increasing the strength but by by releasing that intraabdominal pressure you relax the muscle so that's why in stretch as I mentioned before you can be sitting in a half split and groaning no you need to release if you release that passive breath again you're going to your muscles are going to relax so controlling your breath is uh very much as it's known in martial arts it's very much synonymous with controlling your body and your mind very often fantastic when one throws a punch um is it true that exhalent sh is actually providing additional power no question about it yeah it's been it's been measured it's been measured on Fighters uh it's also been measured in lifting as well there was a study that was done in the west even when screaming increases strength significantly and again this is not just a psychological component I mean there may be some psychological component to that but again there's this very distinct uh increase of strength through through uh through that through that reflex and it's very easy for the uh listeners to test that get a dynamometer hand gripper and just test yourself on that and just see test it out on different uh with different breathing patterns and just see what happens and whenever you know this idiotic practice at some gyms oh you can grunt right here and it's just well I guess you can be strong here and yeah of course if you're doing this on purpose you're walking in with the Bros and you're just trying to just to make noise to attract attention that's wrong but uh strength is a noisy Endeavor so there may be some hissing there maybe some grunting it's uh it's just absolutely unavoidable and it's uh if if you're if you're trying to be quiet and if you're trying to be a lady or a gentleman well maybe it's not for it's for it's for somewhere else not for the gym so some potentially uh trivial questions but I think they are not trivial uh I hope they're not in any case where should we place our eyes when we're in exertion um close our eyes and grind it out look at form in the mirror I'm a big fan of gyms without mirrors yes because I have to concentrate on the form um vision is a powerful tool and and source of feedback but also um a source of a lot of things there must be a rule about this or at least a set of guidelines for uh are we eyes closed and grimacing are we um checking our uh bicep vein in the mirror just kidding don't do that folks um during a lift where should our eyes be is there any idea that looking up it makes it easier to drive up out of the bottom of a squat has this been explored well there it has there are several there's several sides to that part of it is the uh spinal safety so Stu will tell you that extending the neck is going to facilitate the entire posterior chain and he also tell you that lifters with longer necks may be able to get their heads up and uh that might work better for them uh for some other lifters especially those with pronounced lard dois where they're very Arch big arch in the back that may Arch them too much that might be inappropriate or it just kinged their neck it's it's all possible and uh so a lot of coaches these days and left like a deadlift they try to including uh Andy Bolton Andy Bolton he's the legend AR deadlifter he's the one the first uh lifter to lift over 1,000 lbs in the deadlift and Andy and I we co-authored the book The deadlift Dynamite so Andy's got the most beautiful deadlift just the most incredible beautiful deadlift so Andy what Andy does is pretty much what the standard recommendation for most people is these days where you're maintaining a neutral neck and your eyes kind of go with that so you get yourself in the position you know on the bottom the deadlift like where you head is the continuation of your body like you're an insect or something and then you look at the spot on the ground that's appropriate and your eyes will come up so that's a good general standard recommendation for people with long necks looking straight ahead it's it's a good recommendation some lifters succeed with crazy ideas Lamar Gant that again pound per pound the biggest dead lifter he was in tremendous hyperextension he was looking at the ceiling uh then at a high level of competition there are some other subtle ways uh some things people try so Constantin Constantino from laia he was another great deadlifter who passed he uh he would look down at the start he would look absolutely down he was pretty much uh and if you look at um if you look at it from your perspective when your neck is in flection interesting enough that facilitates the KN extens which is really really weird yeah and uh I my chin towards my chest uh not all the way down but yeah yeah you will find that your quads are going to be stronger yeah but it's not for everybody for somebody else that's a great way to mess up mess up the back so there are some there's some subtleties and there are also some people who really get fancy with the Eyes eye movement you know follow the bar do these other things like I count from gymnastics good rule of thumb is uh if you look straight ahead more often than not you're going to be okay but from that there are a lot of fancy ways to do it as for for closing your eyes closing your eyes is not recommended it changes the coordination of the lift but for advanced lifters lifting blindfolded is a really good idea so Robert Roman one of the top Soviet uh Specialists he pioneered that and you would have his lifters do some of the sets blindfolded and it's really amazing at how much not relying on your vision relying your can aesthetic sense what that does it's uh it's quite remarkable and also just to add one more thing and a competition at least in powerlifting a lot of uh I mean the top guys they don't see anything really you know they're just deep inside their rage they're not it's a total tunnel vision auditory exclusion everything so it's uh whatever they had some they had in whatever remembered position but don't ask him to look at you or see you it's not going to happen they're someplace else yep paav I must say this has been a spectacular Voyage Through you're very kind Andrew has been uh it's been a real pleasure very a very stimulating conversation oh thank you and um I'm going to just embarrass you a little bit further by by telling you more uh positive things about you um uh because I notice it makes you uncomfortable it's perhaps the only thing that makes you uncomfortable but in all seriousness I don't think I can't sense any discomfort I I want to just thank you for a number of things that are reflective I'm sure of what other people are thinking first of all the level of rigor that you've approached this whole thing of strength and fitness and flexibility and breathing and you know every one of these topics too many to list off just now is it's remarkable it's really fantastic I love my job so that's that's easy this comes through and um and it's rare these days but it's rare in any age to find people that are so dedicated to um this level of rigor in a given area and and it's so appreciate coming for me it means a lot thank yeah we really we need people like you you're you're truly a scientist and a practitioner you embody the principles that you um discuss clearly which is also important if I could blush I would right Russians don't blush no no got it um a topic for another podcast so that the the rigor and the quality of the information that you put forth in your books and on this podcast and elsewhere uh your online course is just absolutely spectacular and I hope people noticed you know I couldn't help but notice as an as an academic but your attention to proper attribution for people that have done the work and accomplished the various Feats from whom you've gleaned various aspects of this knowledge is not to be overlooked because that's something that's so lacking these things it it's just it's so it's it's remarkable and it's important to highlight it should go without saying it really shouldn't it yeah it should go without saying but it doesn't you know these days it's more about who can glean the most attention as opposed to shed light on others and um and there work um and in doing so as uh as we've observed there's absolutely nothing is lost and so much is gained it's for everybody so thank you that that's a proper attribution is is spectacular and I really look forward to um sharing the resources where people can learn more but already today you've just provided such a wealth of knowledge for us and um it's a real honor to sit here with you and to learn from you I plan to listen to this podcast several times over and and take detailed notes uh we timestamp it all and and I just hope that we'll have the opportunity at some point to sit down again um and as well perhaps uh to get the opportunity to train together uh so I personally could learn from you but in the meantime on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching thank you ever so much Pavo you're thank you Andrew you're real pleasure you're a real and thank you for spreading the spreading the word of health and strength strength and health wonderful thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with patulin I hope you found it to be as interesting and as actionable as I did to learn more about Pav's work including his books his online courses and other resources please see the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast 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 5 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 pre-sale at protocols book.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 if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook LinkedIn and thread and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman Lab podcast again that's hubman lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zeroc 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 hubman lab.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 Pavo satlin and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]