#250 ‒ Training principles for longevity | Andy Galpin, Ph.D. (PART II)

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, at the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe Now without further delay, here's today's episode. My returning guest this week is Dr. Andy Galpin. Andy was a previous guest back on episode 239 not that long ago, in January of 2023, where we discussed the structure of muscle fibers, the difference between the different types of muscle fibers, hypertrophy, and how to start strength training. I wanted to have Andy back because we never really got to finish what we started in our first discussion. And the reason for that, frankly, is because we went a little deeper than either of us expected into the basic physiology of muscle. And I want to be clear, I have no regrets about doing that. I think that's an obligation that I feel is imperative through our podcast. Our podcast is known for going deeper into subject matter than you'll typically find in other podcasts. And so we did that. But the price you have to pay for that is sometimes you have to spend a little bit more time talking about things. So that's what we needed to do in this discussion. So we start here by providing a very quick but important recap of the first conversation around muscle cells, functions, types of fibers, hypertrophy, things like that. But then we use that to go into the rest of the discussion, which gets into the construction of a matrix. Now, you may remember if you heard the first discussion, we we talk about the different phenotypes, the powerlifters, the weightlifters, the strongmen, the CrossFit athletes, sprinters. And what we do here is we build out the principles of training in terms of frequency, intensity, volume, rest, recovery, everything that has to do with it. We then organize all of that information and ask the question, how would you tie that in for someone who's training for the Centenarian decathlon? Because as you'll recall, at least for me personally and for my patients, we're really less interested in becoming powerlifters. Weightlifters strongmen, crossfit athletes, et cetera. What we're really interested in doing is becoming centenarian decathletes. We're interested in being the most strong, physically fit, able people who in the final decades of their life are functioning like people who are two decades younger. As a reminder, Andy earned his Master's in Health Movement Sciences from the University of Memphis, followed by a PhD in human energetics from Ball State University, and he's a Professor of Kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton, where his research spans adaptations from whole muscle to cellular level changes, which he has applied to his work with professional athletes for more than 15 years. So without further delay, please enjoy my follow up conversation with Andy Galpin, which will surely not be our last. Andy, awesome to have you back. For what is very unlikely to be part two of two. This will just be part two of N, where N is an integer greater than two. And it'll be TBD on what that looks like in our first discussion, which I think truthfully was pretty technical, but I still think formed a very important basis for what we're going to talk about today. So I predict that today's discussion will be a little less technical, but we'll assume that the viewer listener has some familiarity with what we've talked about. But for those maybe who A listened to it a couple months ago and have forgotten, or B are not listening to it, I think it's probably worth investing a little bit of our time in going over some of the major concepts. So feel free to diverge from the line of questioning. But everything I want to talk about right now is just to give people enough background so that we can get into the meat of a discussion that you and I have already spend some time planning. So let's start by explaining what the cells of muscles look like and how they function.

When we say the term muscle, what we're typically referring to is a collective group. So when you think about like your quadricep or your thigh, it's actually four muscles there. That's why we call it a quad. We say bicep. How do you do biceps? It's actually multiple bicep muscles and orientation insertion. So in general, the way that humans move is muscles will contract and muscles actually contract at the end of them will come together to form a tendon. Those tendons actually connect to bone. So when you contract muscle, it pulls that connective tissue, the tendon that pulls the bone and you move. And so you've got muscles throughout your body, up and down. They have different orientations and they have different responsibilities. So some are meant to be what we call anti gravity. So this is to keep you up all day. And they don't produce a lot of force or speed, but they're meant to be non fatiguable, and others are the opposite. So explosion, power, propulsion. If you just look at, like the lower shank, so the calf muscles there, the gastrocnemius, that big one in the middle, if you point your toe to your face, that pops out at you. That's meant to be for power and sprinting and jumping. And the one that's actually lower, your soleus, is meant to be on all day, so that you can stand and walk all day and not get fatigued, despite the fact that both of them come together to form the Achilles that wraps around the bottom of your heel, inserts the bottom of your foot, and that's what makes your foot go sort of up and down. So in general, muscle is meant to create movement. Muscle actually does a lot of other things, though, that are vital to health, including pumping fluid up and down so blood will pool because of gravity towards the lower part of your body. Muscle contraction is in large part what squeezes the blood back up into your heart and into your lung. It is the amino acid reserve. So that's the place where you store amino acids so that you can use them to create red blood cells or immune cells or anything else. And it's also the primary place, actually, where you regulate blood glucose storage and all carbohydrates. So I could go on and on, but muscle in general has a very important function in your body for movement there and as well as signaling. So the last part to acknowledge here is we typically will call muscle an endocrine organ, meaning it'll actually send signals out through the body through what are called myokines or what some people will call exokines, if they're coming out as a responsive exercise. And that's sending a signal to your liver or kidney or brain or lung or anywhere else. So at the big whole muscle level is what we call that. That's the general function. Now, within that, each individual muscle, so pick the soleus or whatever one you want, is actually made up of billions, if not more individual muscle fibers. And those fibers or cells, that's the same actual term, myofiber cell fiber, I'll use those interchangeably. Those are actually just basically long cylinders. And so if you think about this like a ponytail, so if I don't have much hair left, you know, I'M in the same boat as you there, Peter. But if I had some, you'd see a big long ponytail and you would call that one ponytail. Really a ponytail is nothing but a collective whole bunch of individual hairs. And actually you can think of skeletal muscle at least. Cardiac and smooth muscle are quite different. But skeletal muscle looks very similar to a hair. So it is a long, long cylinder. It's very strong. In this case, it actually contracts where hair doesn't. But that's the basic function of that. And so within that you have a whole bunch of organelle that do things. So if you look at the whole muscle, what actually happens is that's surrounded by a bed of capillaries. If you talk about blood going into a muscle, it comes in be a big artery going to go through a bunch of capillaries. And those capillaries are really surrounding and mixing in and out that whole ponytail. So, so they're kind of all over. And so they're circular around the individual fibers. And that's going to get you nutrients in, like glucose or anything else, and get you waste products out, like carbon dioxide, et cetera. Within that big long cylinder, the capillaries are around it, you've got a whole bunch of things. And probably the most pertinent is you've got what are called nuclei. So these are myonuclei. And so if you remember basic biology, the nucleus is what controls any cell. So most cells in the world have one nucleus. Skeletal muscle is unique because you've got infinite number of them, basically spread throughout the duration of the muscle. And that gives you a lot of what we call plasticity. And so the more nuclei you have, the more control centers to have, the easier it is to respond to stressors, damage, adaptations, et cetera. That's why skeletal muscle is so again, adaptable to various, whether this is good stimuli or bad stimuli, like in the case of space flight or physical inactivity or whatever you want to be. So in addition to that, you've got, of course, your mitochondria, which you've spoken at length out over your career. And that's what's going to be able to use a lot of your, or produce a lot of your cellular energy. And then you finally, you've got what we call the contractile units. And so the things that make your muscle fibers contract together and squeeze on top of each other are actin and myosin. And so these are two molecules that kind of reach up the myosin, grabs the actin, it pulls it together, smashes it literally on top of itself. And that's why when you flex, say, a biceps muscle, it actually gains height because you're stacking things on top of each other, and that requires the muscle to go vertically. So that's, I guess, the big picture of what muscles are and then what they actually look like at the cellular level.

That was much more efficient than I would have done it. Let's layer on another question. You drew a contrast between the soleus and the gastrocnemius. And although you didn't use the exact terms, you alluded to it that one is sort of slow to fatigue and one is fast to fatigue, which of course is now part of another division. We would layer on this. So can you explain at that cellular level what the difference is between the gastrocnemius and the soleus?

We call muscle fibers one on one, but really there's distinction between them. So maybe we'll just take. Take a quick jaunt back into history. And I won't make this too long, although I'd love to. So all the way back to the invention of the microscope, Anton von Leeuwenhoek. Many people discovered things, but you get it. He gets the credit. Well, one of the first things he actually used that microscope for was he started looking at individual cells. He started looking at muscle, actually, in whales, in codfish, and a bunch of other stuff. And he started to notice that some of these cells are really small and some of them are really big. And that's the very first time we really started to functionally distinguish between. At that time, it was just big fibers and small fibers. Then pretty quickly after that, he started to realize, well, some of them are really red and some of them are more white. For a big number of centuries, really, we distinguish muscle as these fibers, these cells, either red cells or white cells. It took a long time to figure out why that mattered or what that meant. But eventually it became clear that the ones that are red are red because they have more of those capillaries, they have more blood flow, they have more mitochondria, they have more iron. All those things go into it. So they give an actual look of being red. The other ones have less of it. We didn't know for a long time after that, though, functionally what that meant. If you were to look back in some old textbook or had an old professor one from anatomy or something a long time ago, they might call fibers white or fibers and red fibers. And so you'll hear them distinguished based on color. That's the first distinction well, as soon as histology came around and we started getting better microscopes and technology, we started to realize that, wait a minute, we can actually test the individual muscle fibers for their power output. So this is their contraction. So this is you take them out of the muscle, you put them in a petri dish, you tie one end to a force transducer, you tie the other end to a fixed unit, and you put it in a whole bunch, a bath of calcium and ATP and a bunch of other stuff, and those fibers just start contracting unlimited. And you can actually measure how much force is being produced. And so now we went from distinguishing these fibers a color, red versus white, to now distinguishing them by their contractile properties is what that term means. So are you contracting with a lot of force or a small amount of force? And in fact, force wasn't really the distinguishing factor. It was speed. And so because of that, we started, the nomenclature evolved to now describe them as fast twitch or slow twitch. And that really specifically describes the twitch or the contraction speed. So two ways to distinguish the fibers now, color or contractile speed. Then eventually we started to figure out their enzymatic differences. The ones that had more mitochondria were better at using aerobic metabolism. So this is carbohydrate and fat metabolism. Those are both aerobically needed. The ones that were white or fast were much better at using glycolysis from the anaerobic part of the equation. So this is in the cytoplasm, outside of the mitochondria. Now, we could distinguish these things via enzymatic properties. You can call them a fast twitch fiber, you can call them a white or red fiber, or you can call them aerobic or anaerobic or oxidative or glycolytic, again, depending on if you ever had maybe some of this stuff in high school or college class, you might have heard them described as fast oxidative or fast glycolytic. And there's like, why is all this nomenclature exist? And that's exactly why it all happens. And so to come back to the beginning here, this is where it's going to really matter. Initially, when this distinction was drawn, that looked like there was two types. There's type one and type two. That's just what they called them. Type one is the slow twitch, the red fibers, the oxidative fibers, type 2 with a fast twitch, all the opposite, right? Well, in the 1950s, ish area, we started to figure out, well, wait a minute, there's actually a third distinct fiber type. And that fiber type was more closely aligned to the fast twitch fibers than the slow twitch. And so we started to delineate a little bit more. So you have your type one and they'll stay way over here. Then over here you have a type 2a and a type 2b. Again, they are distinct and different enough from each other that they need to be called their own thing, but they're closer together than they are close to slow touch fiber. So instead of, I don't know why they called it type one and type two and not type three, it's because they wanted to make sure people recognized they're really close to each other, but they're distinct. So we'll call them 2A and 2B. Well, some years passed and we actually eventually realized that humans don't have 2B. So again, depending on the exercise physiology book you might currently be using, they might still be using the nomenclature of type 2B, despite the fact that we've had genetic information since 1990 that humans don't even have the gene to express 2B. So 2B is just a non starter. With human, however, we do have what's called a 2X. And this is actually, this is foundation stuff that you're going to need later in the conversation when we talk about the second half. So humans, to summarize, have type 1, type 2A and type 2X. Well, felines and animals and bears and stuff we've done biopsies and stuff on. Bears do have the two B. Murines have two B. And so most other animals have four distinct ones. They have really, really fast one. These Bs are ultra fast. Two X is pretty fast. Two A's slower but fast and then one is slower. So if you run the entire continuum, it pretty much lines up. So the ones that are pure type 1 have generally more mitochondria and they are less fatigable. They don't produce as much force. Well, they do relative to size, but they're slower. And they do that as you move to 2a and to 2x. They become faster, but they become more fatiguable because they're more reliant upon glycolysis and carbohydrate metabolism. So that's generally what we're looking at with fiber types. So when you ask the distinction between how does the soleus and the gastroc compare? The gastroc in most humans is something like 60 to 70 or maybe even up to 80% 2A fibers. And so they are very, very fast. So the gastroc will again cause A fast contraction, but they won't hold on for very long because they get fatiguable. They the soleus can be up to 90% slow twitch. And so this is a great comparison because most muscles in your body are some combination of fast and slow twitch. But the soleus and the gastroc are probably the best example of the two extremes. If you look in animals like mice, you can see a soleus that is 100% slow twitch. For a number of reasons, humans never get that far down the line. If I biopsied somebody in the soleus and they were 80% slow twitch, I'd be like, wow, that's pretty high. And if they were 70% fast twitch in the gastroc, I would say that's pretty high. That's what you can sort of expect in terms of muscle physiology differences between the soleus and the gastroc. And again, why that functionally matters. If you have a compromised soleus, you're probably less likely to be standing. You're going to sit, you're probably going to be less generally physically active. If the soleus is compromised, it's hard to move fast and powerfully.

How modifiable is that distribution? Is it purely genetic or is there a trainable component to the ratio of fast to slow twitch fiber in a given muscle?

It's extremely trainable. It just comes down to exposure, which means stimuli and time. And the more stimuli you give it, the more time you give it, the more it will change. Now, like anything else, an asymptote exists here. So if you are very untrained and you're pretty inactive physically, maybe even take Noodle Extreme, you go into a cast for two months or space flight and you're literally inactive, that movement happens faster. If you are pretty trained and well trained and months and years go on, you start changing really, really slowly because you get closer to the end of the spectrum. But there is really, I mean, functionally, no limit to how far they'll go. Given enough total exposure to put you into like some realistic numbers. The soleus is kind of hard. Actually, the gastroctus is a better one. If you were, say, completely untrained and you hadn't exercised for say, five plus years, and then you did eight weeks of exercise, I don't even care what it is. It really doesn't matter that much. I would bet 10 to 15% change in fiber type in that kind of a time span, it wouldn't be that crazy.

Sorry. Just to make sure I understand what's actually happening there, Andy. Is it turnover? Meaning are you literally just expressing more type 2 and expressing less type 1, so that if you compare the muscle biopsies across those eight weeks, you've actually just displaced two into one due to making new cells and apoptosis of the old cells?

Really good question. Generally, no, there's this idea called hyperplasia. So hyperplasia is when you would grow a new cell, and that is very, very uncommon. In normal human situations, it can happen with extreme eccentric training. Looks like it probably happens with a lot of exogenous testosterone use over many, many years. But outside of sort of extreme examples, you can get it in cell culture and you can get it in animal models. But in human normal situations, hyperplasia is very uncommon. So what more happens is the current fiber type itself will transition its type, which is sort of tricky because this. Not sure how far you want to go here, but the reality of it is, remember how I said there's three fiber types? That's not actually true either. There's a whole combination of what we call hybrids. And so if you were to take any one individual muscle cell, it might be entirely, say, 2A on one end of the cell, but it might be what we call a 1, 2A. So this is a single muscle fiber that expresses both type 1 and type 2. Depending on the length of the cell, it may be different spots, so they're not always the same type. So the same thing could happen with 2A 2X, by the way. In fact, you can have a triple hybrid. You can have a 1, 2 a 2x. So you can have all three being co expressed.

So they're kind of pluripotent, and they basically have the potential to differentially express themselves based on stimulus or lack of. Okay, let's talk a little bit about how everything you just said factors into some of the metrics we're going to talk about vis a vis different types of performance in athletes. Let's start with hypertrophy. If you took a biopsy of my biceps and then you took a biopsy of a professional bodybuilder's biceps, how do our muscle fibers look different? Are his significantly at the level of the cell and the fiber significantly that much bigger? Does he have more of them? But they're about the same size, but in aggregate, they're bigger in cross section, of course. Is it a combination of both?

Well, this is a lot of really interesting questions. Let's use the vl, the vastus lateralis, the outside quad muscle, as a better example. Just because we have thousands of biopsy studies from there. So you asked a lot of really cool questions. Okay, a couple things to understand. Number one, counting muscle fibers total is a very challenging thing because the only true way to do it is I need to take your entire muscle, take everything out, cut it in half and count it. Now we can do some estimates. You can take all muscle size, take the average size of the muscle fibers and then account for our fluid and stuff. But that's sort of tricky at best. So we have good data on these from animal models, cats, actually dogs and things like that. Humans. It's challenging in general. Fast twitch fibers, let's just keep it fast and slow for now and not confuse people are generally bigger than slow twitch fibers by diameter, so they're generally wider. But when you throw training into the equation, that all goes out the window. I have analyzed I can't tell you how many thousands of slow twitch fibers and they are bigger than fast twitch fibers in that individual person.

Now does that tell us anything about that individual? For example, if you look at an extreme athlete, you know, like an endurance athlete who is getting as much potential out of their slow twitch muscle fibers as possible, is that generally the scenario where you will see remarkable up hypertrophy of the type 1 fiber?

That's exactly what it is. And so one of the things we see happen is fiber type specific hypertrophy with your classic endurance training. So throw kind of intervals and other things out the window for now. Just because scientific, it's hard to do. But if you do your steady state, runner, cyclist, swimmer, rower, things like that, I would generally be looking for their slow touch fibers to be very large, if not the same size as their fast twitch fibers, oftentimes larger. When you're actually pulling out one muscle fiber at a time, you'll see some really wild stuff. So that can happen individually, but on an average, that would be your answer if you were to invoke any kind of strength training. You can distinguish between powerlifters or bodybuilders or any of these things, it won't actually really matter because at the level of the cell, while we're going to distinguish between all those probably here pretty soon, at the level of cell, it's not that different. It's close enough to being the same thing if you compare it to how different it is than steady state cycling or something. And so in both those cases, I would basically say, hey, the 2A fiber is going to be very large, but you wouldn't be able to pull A2A fiber and be like, oh, That's a bodybuilder and that's a power lifter and that's a weightlifter. You would have absolutely no chance to do that. The only thing that kind of throws a wrench here is specifically exogenous testosterone. That will change the game in a number of important ways. Specifically, satellite cells are going to be changed and total muscle fiber size is probably going to get exceptionally large, which we'll throw it out there. But.

So again, just to make sure, I understand if you're going to compare my VLO to the VLO of Jay Cutler. So world class bodybuilder, if you do an ultrasound, there's no question that the total size of his muscle is so much bigger than mine. If you can start yanking fibers out, it sounds like it's. He probably has more fibers, probably because he's using exogenous testosterone and I'm not. But it also sounds like his type 2 fibers are bigger than my type 2 fibers.

I would be very comfortable with that prediction. They will be very, very large. We biopsied one individual powerlifter, bodybuilder. Some of his fibers were so large, the closest comparator we had were rhinoceros muscle fibers. They were so not all of them, but a handful of them where they were so large.

Can you give me a sense of scale? How many microns are we talking about here as a fiber or compared to a hair, if that's easier.

It would be honestly fairly similar to a hair.

So. Meaning you can see it with your naked eye. It's so big.

Oh, 100%. If I had it right now on camera, if you're watching this at home and if I had my tweezers out, I could pick one up on my petri dish and hold it in the camera. And you would be able to see it in this camera, no question. They can be very, very large. Even the smaller ones in human skeletal muscle, like the VL especially, you would see all the smallest one, no doubt.

All right, so now let's talk about another component of hypertrophy, which is. You know, it's sort of funny taking a step back. There is no other cell in the body that we spend so much time thinking about the actual size of the cellular unit. We don't really care about the size of your hepatocytes. We care about the functional units and how they integrate. We care about the function of the hepatocytes individually and collectively. But we're not really sitting there specifically thinking about it. And therefore, I don't think I've ever given much thought to. Are my hepatocytes the same size as your hepatocytes? And if mine get bigger or smaller, what's happening? And I'm guessing in the case of, you know, nafld, there's going to be some changes where there's both intra and extracellular fat accumulation. But when we now think about a given individual who undergoes hypertrophy training, and so objectively, their muscles have gotten bigger, let's keep this quote unquote simple, and not assume the use of exogenous testosterone. So we're not really talking about hyperplasia and the creation of de novo cells. By definition, of course, now we know that the myofibril has gotten larger, it has expanded in diameter. What has actually led to that? How much of that is water, intracellular water? How much of that is the synthesis of new organic matter vis a vis the amino acids or something else?

So there's two main ways that a muscle would hypertrophy. And we're going to distinguish chronic hypertrophy or permanent hypertrophy from acute hypertrophy being, you know, you just left the gym right now and your muscles are bigger, full of fluid. This is what that would be caused. So you've got sustained muscle growth over time. This is either going to be a result of what we call contractile hypertrophy or sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. In either case, the muscle cell got larger, the diameter is expanded, it's going to happen that way. The question now is, what actually changed inside that cell that caused it to allowed it to be permanently larger? Well, in the case of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, this is very new that we even thought it existed. Folks have been talking about this from the bodybuilding perspective in those communities for a very long time. And we always called it sort of bro science. And then turns out some folks at Mike Roberts and his lab at Auburn and stuff started looking into it and found that actually was happening. And so there's just another vindication for you bro scientists out there that sometimes those guys are onto things. Just because science isn't there yet doesn't mean it's wrong. It's like a very good example, right? Just hadn't really been studied, so that actually happens. Contractile hypertrophy happens as a result of increasing proteins on those myosin and actin. And so it may be important, maybe not. But the myofilaments here, you don't add more actin or myosin, you just add more protein, globulins to them and actually just sort of increases their diameter. What happens then is you can imagine myosin acting working almost like you had a circle of friends, and you were to reach your arms, extend your arms out to the side, grab your friend's hand, and when you brought your hands closer to your midline, your friends would then come closer to you. And if everybody did it at the same time, the entire diameter of that circle would get really small and expand. Okay, great. Well, if I were to double my size, but my friend stayed the same distance away from me, and then my friend doubled her size, what you can actually see happen is all of a sudden, when I go to reach my hand out to grab them, I'm already touching them because we were so much larger if the whole circle didn't expand. And so this is called lattice spacing. So the spacing between these actin myosin is very, very important. So if I just continue to get larger, what I would eventually do is tell my friend next to me, hey, you scoot over a few inches because you're sort of crowding on my personal space. And then that friend would say, hey, friend over. Same thing, same thing. So what happens is just the standing circle starts to expand. And so probably the biggest explanation for why muscle increases in its diameter is exactly that you've put more proteins in the contractile units in order to maintain optimal spacing so that they can reach out and grab each other and pull in for contraction. The whole thing needed to space out a little bit. It's like you invited a few too many friends to party. Everyone's uncomfortable now. We have to knock down a wall, make the whole thing bigger. If we bring in more friends, we got to continue to knock the wall down and expand the size, or else we just get too uncomfortable.

Now, next to each other, when you experience contractile hypertrophy, based on everything you've just described, it sounds to me like that comes with contractile force as well, because you're putting more hooks, basically. You're basically creating more anchors, that is actin myosin filaments to grab and contract. Is that essentially, to a first order approximation, a true statement?

Yeah, and this is actually true. Easily explainable for a number of ways. Number one, in general, especially early in someone's exercising career, as you get stronger, you will add more muscle mass. And those are very highly linked. That R score is not a hundred. It's not 99. It's not 100% the same thing. And we'll differentiate that later. Optimizing for muscle growth is not the same as optimizing for strength. Optimizing for strength is not the same from optimizing for muscle growth. So at some point they start to diverge more and more and more, but at the very beginning, they're very tightly linked. And so if somebody just wanted to be economical in their training, you could probably get a little bit of both. Well, you certainly would get a little bit of both. If you wanted to optimize for one, then that is a little bit different and we'll distinguish all that later. Now, as you continue on with your training career and you get stronger and stronger and stronger, then the link between muscle size and strength does start to go away, but it never goes away entirely because of exactly what you mentioned. If you're tacking on more contractile units, it's not maybe optimizing strength, but it's going to come with some increases in force. And the easy way to think about this is just look at whether it's powerlifting, strongman wrestling, mma, you're generally going to see people, as you go up in physical size, you go up in strength. Right now it doesn't mean you couldn't find 155 pound athlete who's stronger than 170 pound athlete, you clearly could. But if you look at old record scores go higher and higher and higher. And so there's an intrinsic length there or a connection between mass and strength, although it's not 100%. So, yeah, you're going to put those things on. And I guess one important note here is early in your training career, you really don't even need to distinguish between the two because both is going to come along for the ride. You add on some muscle, you're going to get stronger. And if you just strength train, you're probably going to tack on some muscle as well. They're both going to come along for the ride, so you can be a little economical that way.

Andy, go back to the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy for a moment. Just give me the background story on that. I was totally unaware of that when I was in high school. Of course, all I did was read Muscle and Fitness and bro, science was my life. I've been a little away from it. Tell me what it was that the bodybuilding community was proposing that science basically only really came to recognize in general.

For a long time, myself and many other exercise scientists were sort of purporting that if you wanted to gain muscle hypertrophy, 8 to 12 repetitions per set is the optimal range. But yet, if you look at bodybuilders, they're doing all kinds of other stuff. They'll do sets of 20 or 30 or they'll do different styles of training. And according to us scientists, that was not hypertrophy, that was muscular endurance or that was strength, and those would not result in hypertrophy. And then eventually more and more research came out and Brad Schoenfeld did much of this work. He's incredibly prolific and. And Brad showed well, actually, hypertrophy is pretty much equal from anywhere between five repetitions per set to up to 30 repetitions per set if other things are equated for.

Provided the RPE gets to the same point. Right. Or reps in reserve. Has to. Basically you have to get pretty close to failure. Not failure necessarily, but at the end of 30 you need to be hurting as much as you would be at the end of seven.

Yeah. And it's very hard because you're going to start hurting at like 15 much sooner.

Yeah, exactly.

You got to just bear with it.

So much more time under tension and in some ways it's also more taxing to your cardiovascular system.

Depending on the lift, it certainly can be. Certainly can be. So what the bodybuilding community would say are things like, hey, if you lift in this fashion 5 to 10 reps, you might increase contractile units and that's why you're getting stronger. However, if you were to go higher repetition ranges, it's going to be coming from sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. And why that matters is that's almost exclusively explained by increases in fluid retention. And so it is non contractile hypertrophy. So this is why you can get bigger but you're not getting stronger.

This is stronger. Yeah, right.

That's the functional distinction. And again, that's like something that we were just like, no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't happen. There had been like a couple of papers, but the technology wasn't there honestly to measure it until some assays came around and Mike really got that stuff going and it was like, oh, crap. And now it looks like the story is actually pretty clear. Mike has a wonderful review paper on this stuff and you can actually see a graph he's developed and you can look at when psychoplasmic hypertrophy happens, when contractile happens, and what happens over the course of your training experience. And I think it actually explains what's happening pretty nicely.

I think that was the perfect intro to what I think would be a really elegant framework for now, how to talk about A series of rows and a series of columns that make up a matrix. In our first podcast, we spoke about the different types of athletes and then we talked about the different variables that go into training stress. What we didn't do because there simply wasn't enough time was fill in that matrix. And that's what I'd love to do today. So I went back to is what are the different phenotypes of interest? So we're going to go with a powerlifter, an Olympic weightlifter, a strongman, a bodybuilder, a CrossFit athlete, a track and field athlete, and then we're going to look at them according to, you know, the following. If you're training to be specifically that athlete, what's your frequency of training? What's your intensity? For example, as a percent of 1 RM or VO2 max, what's the volume you're doing? How are you thinking about sets and reps, what's the rest recovery? And is there any other sort of skill based training adaptation that's necessary? I acknowledge this might take us a while, but I think this is a very elegant way to synthesize so many of the concepts that were in the first episode of our sit down. And I think in many ways this is kind of the rubber hitting the road. Now I'll tell you that my ultimate goal in doing this, Andy, is to now extract from each of those phenotypes the learnings for what I consider personally the most important phenotype, which is not powerlifter, Olympic weightlifter, strongman, bodybuilder, et cetera, but rather what I call the centenarian decathlete. In other words, even though I'm only 50, so much of how I think about training is for the 90 year old version of me. What do I want to be able to do at 90? I have a pretty good sense of what it is. It's quite audacious. What do I need to do for the next 40 years to make sure that at 90 I'm functioning, to be honest with you, like a very fit 70 year old. That's the aspiration. So we'll end with that if we have time. If not, that'll easily be part three. But let's start with the order that you presented them in, which was starting with the power lifter. So again, just for folks listening, powerlifting is a very, very specific sport. It consists of three and only three lifts. And you are scored on the basis of the total amount of weight you move in a deadlift, a bench Press and a squat and that's it. Nobody cares what you look like. Nobody cares how fast you can do that. Nobody even cares how many reps you can do. Right. There's nothing that goes into it except it's a number. A plus B plus C equals total, and that's it. Now, those guys are strong as hell for what they do. Maybe give people a sense of numbers, pick two different weight classes and explain to people just how strong a power lifter is in those three lifts.

To really clarify, when we say strength, you could also think about force. I'll say those interchangeably. And while in the real world, if somebody were to be able to drag a train or something, I'd be like, well, that's a strong person. But technically, maximal strength is what's the maximal amount you can do one time? And I know you said that a second ago, but I really wanted to make sure that the audience heard that correctly.

Yeah, because the name power lifter is a bit misleading here, which I think you're about to explain why.

That's exactly right. Power. The difference between force and power is, is speed. And so another way to say this is if you take speed, multiply that by force or strength, that's how you get power. And so implicit in that is power is comprised of both strength and speed. So there's a speed component to it. In the case of the exercises you listed in powerlifting, there's no speed component to it, really. They're trying to move as fast as they can, but they're not scored on speed. There's no clock. It doesn't matter at all how fast they move. It is explicitly a test of pure and absolute strength. What is the most amount you can lift one time? There are three different exercises we tried in, but you don't get to do it for three or four reps or it's not, you know, who can complete it the fastest. It is who's the maximum thing you can lift. So to give you some examples, I have worked with Steffi Cohen a little bit. Not much, but just a little bit in my career. And she has 25 or 27 world records. One of her competitions, I think she weighed 119 pounds and I think she deadlifted 525 in that competition. She's deadlifted 585, I believe. So getting in the stratosphere of 5, well over 5x body weight here, which is absurd. Deadlift is her thing, but she's still probably benching 200 something and squatting well over the 4 hundreds. So as 120 pound female, that's pretty strong.

It's simply unbelievable, actually.

Totally unful.

I was deadlifting today, right? Today just happens to be deadlift day for me. And because I no longer can, like, I peaked at 18. It's a little depressing, right? Like I just, so far that was my peak in deadlifting. Well, I mean, I don't know that I even care to lift as much as I did, but now I do different things. So today the main set was four rounds of one minute, as many reps as possible with 350. It's a different stress. Make no mistake about it. It hurts in a totally different way. Yeah. Do three, 15 as many times as you can in 60 seconds. Rest three minutes and keep doing that over and over again.

I hope Beth got a raise or got fired for that. One of the two. Whoever programmed that for you.

There's no way I'm doing. No, actually I told Beth after and she was like, what was your intention with this? And I was like, actually, yeah, anyway. But like, even at my strongest, I couldn't do 5:25. At my strongest, I weighed 160 pounds. So that's a staggering amount of movement.

And you've got good levers for pulling. You've got long arms. You're probably like pretty efficient at deadlifting.

I would assume deadlifting was my best of the three by far.

Yeah. Bench is probably your worst. I would assume based on it is.

I will embarrass myself by saying how much I could bench. I guess I should finish the story. 270 was my best bench at a weight of 160, which is not that good. I mean, let's be honest, it's not that good.

Not that terrible though either. It's okay. So if you want to look at like the crazy top end of the scale. I'm unfamiliar.

Yeah. Let's tell people more about like, what. And I guess in powerlifting it is a little complicated because you do have to consider tested versus untested athletes. It's a pretty big difference. Yeah.

Let's just give you the maximum human potential on all the steroids. Who cares? All the gear, all the squat suits and whatever. My friend AJ Roberts, I think his best quat was 1250, 1240.

It's just hard to believe that's possible.

I think he was 308 pounds for that meet. So this is, you know, 4x squat. I don't know what the like all time, all time, all time record is right now. Cause it's so hard. But I think it is north of 1300 at this point. It's not common, but people have pulled deadlifted a thousand and people have benched a thousand. There's a lot more people who have squatted like 1100 plus. There's a decent number of those people. But there are a handful of people who have deadlifted 1,000 and a handful that have benched a thousand. With all the gear and all this stuff, but who cares? It's like half a ton. They're taking off the bar, holding it, touching their chest. It's absurd.

It's simply absurd. Okay, so we've established that despite the hiccup in the nomenclature, these people are insanely strong. Again, I would encourage everyone who's listening or watching, you may never desire to do a maximum rep, deadlift, bench press or squat. I personally have no desire to ever do it again. Ever. There's never a day I'm going to put enough weight on a bar in any of those three lifts to even come close to that. That said, the principles of how they train matter a lot to me. So let's start with, well, you can take them in any order you want, Andy, but let's just talk about frequency. What are the sort of the guiding principles for how you take an athlete who comes to you? And I guess maybe for the purpose of this discussion, Andy, let's assume that all of the guidance we're going to provide is not for a world class athlete with an enormous training age. Conversely, let's also assume it is not for someone who has never lifted a finger. Again, I think just for the sake of simplicity, why don't we assume that in every situation you're taking a person who has some exercise exposure, but not specific to this endeavor. So in this case you're talking about a person who grew up playing sports. Maybe they're reasonably fit, they still muck around, they play some pickup basketball, maybe they do a little bit of this and that. They're no stranger to the gym, they understand what lifts and things are. But truthfully, they've never been to a powerlifting meet. And they're coming to you saying, hey, I would really I'd like to compete in the 50 and up, you know, or 50 to 55 powerlifting thing. So guy shows up with that, tell me how you're walking about his training program.

I want to make two slight distinctions inside of that distinction. One is what is theoretically technically optimal distinction. Two is what's probably more realistic and practical.

Okay, let's always feel free to give both of those. I distinguish these in my world as efficacy versus effectiveness. So max efficacy is exactly the former there. Theoretically, if you can do everything to perfection, you will have the best results. Effectiveness is in the real world. When you stay up late at night because your kids are sick and you got a little extra deadline at work and that's going to cut into your training, what's the best you can do?

You just described last night for me. So one thing that's going to hold true throughout all of this matrix we're going to cover is specificity is always your answer. If you want to get better at writing, you need to write. If you want to get better at sprinting, you need to sprint. If you want to get stronger and you want to get better at picking up a weight, one time the heaviest, you can pick it up. That is by far the most direct route to go. Meaning in this case, you should practice every single day, picking up 100% of your max.

Wow.

Theoretically, that's what specificity would tell you. Distinction two, that's not realistic. The injury for this person you described, injury frequency is too high. Now, if you are a truly elite athlete, you might do something close to that. If you look at the Bulgarian method, this is would be weightlifters, not power lifters, but similar. They're going to do a one rep max in the snatch, clean, jerk and squat every day. This is what they do. Now again, these are people probably on assistance. They are 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years into their training career and in between they're getting massages. And so like in theory, if you really wanted to maximize specificity, you could do that. And many have done that. Neom Solomon, I have Pocket Hercules, if you want to google that guy. Now he didn't do it for all of his training for all year round, but certain phases of his training, that's, that's what you would do. High specificity. You're going to get better at those things, no question. So to peel that back, anything besides that is less specific, but you have to then start hedging towards, okay, am I going to get hurt? That's not realistic for the avatar you described and all the practical implications. So what you want to do though is get as close to that as you can while not inducing overload, injury, all that other stuff. So realistic scenario, probably something like one to five days per week, you work that movement pattern. So realistically, two would be good for a lot of people. So if you want to get stronger at squatting, squat Twice a week. If you recover well and you squat well, your mechanics are well, three days a week, that would be a really, really, really good program. But you could get very strong, very strong doing two days a week in that movement. So if you wanted to do all three, like in powerlifting, maybe bench twice a week, maybe deadlift once a week, maybe squat once a week, something like that, maybe if you wanted to squat twice a week and deadlift twice a week, you could maybe get away with that, depending on other variables.

So it could be as little as two days a week of training, because you could do a bench squat day and a bench deadlift day potentially could.

And for a lot of people, the person you're describing, they would get stronger. It wouldn't be optimal, but it would be certainly effective for a lot of folks.

If they said, andy, I'm willing to be in the weight room four days a week, I'm really optimizing on this. If I'm going to be in the weight room four days a week, are you basically going to figure out a split where you get three of each in those eight sessions or something to that effect?

I'll tell people to look into what's called a conjugate. There's many forms of this, but this would be the west side barbell, Louis Simmons form of conjugate. And that's almost exactly what they describe. Right. So it's a little bit of pure strength work at the beginning. There's a muscular endurance phase, basically. There's a speed phase to it, and then there's a strength phase to it, and they just build that in, and they actually just sort of rotate it through bench squat, deadlift, bench squat, and they just power it through that way. So that's a very easy model.

And so you're saying that they would do that in any given workout or across the week? It's spread out that way.

Sorry. Yeah, across the week. So basically, you'd walk in the gym, you're going to do a max deadlift, and then you're going to do some assistance work in your low back or your glutes, your hamstrings, or whatever is needed. The next day you come in, it's maybe a max bench, then tricep work, shoulder work, rear delts, neck or whatever, et cetera. And then the day you come in, you kind of follow it that way.

The next question is, is the only time you're going to have this athlete moving insanely heavy weights in the three formal lifts, or do you have them do very Heavy things that are accessory. So I'll give you an example. Do you have them do very heavy hip thrusters or very heavy incline bench press or very heavy military press or very heavy front squats, I. E. Things that they are not going to compete in but have a high degree of overlap with what they're competing in.

Specificity wins here.

So you're going to say no because you're not a professional athlete who has all the time in the world just do the lift.

I would say stick mostly to the lift. Now, even for this person, it's not because they're not a professional athlete. You could make the argument they need variation more actually, because who really cares if they optimize their strength gain. I'd rather push it a little bit more towards overall safety. And variation will give you that because it's less overuse of the same movement pattern, the same loading pattern. The more variation you get, the less specificity, so the less direct adaptation but the less likelihood of overuse. So in this particular person, I would probably. But if we really said this, I would say here, maybe I'll say it this way. The core of our day when we come in is going to be that exact movement. It's going to be a barbell back squat in your stance, the way that you're going to compete. Great. Certainly within maybe the eight weeks prior to this competition. Outside of that though, when we call off season, we would introduce variation, do other stuff. While they're in that specificity phase, though, we might do our primary lift is what we kind of call it. And then after that we would do a ton of accessories. So we might do our hard work on our barbell back squat. And then maybe we go to a goblet squat. Maybe we do split squat, maybe we do lateral lunges. And we would do other stuff, reverse hypers and things like that. So you would want to use all those. But those would be what we call accessories or supporting stuff. And you would probably go to higher repetition ranges for those. You wouldn't do a max effort step up. You might do set to five, eight, something like that, to really support the joints and make everything feel good. But you keep your pure, pure strength work to that core lift.

And when you're in that, let's just pick one, let's just pick the deadlift, for example. What's the rep range you're going to have them working? Is there a number of reps that is so high that it's getting you too far away from max strength?

5 is sort of the number 5, unless you get starting past 5, you start losing horse production.

I used to know these tables off by heart from when I was younger. I believe 5 reps is that 85% of typically 1 RM that you do 5 for.

It totally depends. Actually it depends a lot on fiber type. It's actually sort of funny, but it depends on the movement. The same is not true for a deadlift versus a bench. Those numbers go way off. So it's a rough ish number. There's actually a chart called prelapin chart.

We'll put it in the show notes.

What the chart does is it tells you there's been a handful of studies on it out of New Zealand of some powerlifters and stuff. But this is from the Russian literature I believe originally. But anyways, it tells you how many reps to do throughout the week total at a given percentage. So in other words, hey, between 70 to 80% accumulate this many reps, between 80 to 90% accumulate this many reps, accumulate 90, 95, etc. And it gives you a range of reps to stay within in terms of total per week. And that's pretty good because it'll tell you sort of like, here's the amount of max effort you can get away with and then here's how much supporting work you need to do to make sure that stuff can happen. It's generally pretty effective to get you close.

Now to do this, you need to know your 1 RM. Okay, so this is a bit of an aside, but it might be relevant. There are these devices, I forget the name of it. I actually have one and I enjoy using it. I can't remember the name of it though. It's a little thing that sits on the ground and it has a strap that goes on the bar.

Oh, velocity transducers.

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

Probably Jim aware.

No, I have a different one. It starts with a V, I think. But anyway, if I do a set, let's say I'm doing a set of fives. If I want to do five sets of five one day, it's measuring the speed in feet per second or meter per second of each repeat. It knows the weight. So I tell it how much weight I'm putting on and it's measuring the velocity and it's telling me based on each rep, two things that matter to me, right? One is what's my projected 1 RM based on the speed that I'm moving That and what's my level of fatigue? As I've learned, the lower the weight, the less accurate it is. If you have £135 on the bar and you're warming up, there's no amount of speed you can put on that that will get you anywhere within what its prediction is. But once you get into that 5 rep range, it's pretty accurate. Do you think that's accurate enough for someone like me who doesn't actually Want to do a 1 RM, or do you think I'm just being a wussy?

You are being wussy.

Yeah.

But the other thing you can do is just do a rep max test. So there's any number of online calculators. Put a weight on that you're comfortable with and do it anywhere between 3 to 10 reps and then you can say, okay, I did 200 pounds for.

8 reps and it'll say that's your one RM and then go off that.

Yep. Now, one caveat I'll give you there. Those estimates will go up to like 20 reps per set, but the accuracy is awful. So if you're gonna do a max test, I generally Recommend Staying below 8 reps. If you can stick between like 3 to 8 range, that's gonna give you a pretty accurate score for most people.

You said something earlier that I now I think kind of resonates. I have never found those calculators to work for me.

Oh, you're a slow twitch guy. Yeah, there's no way. No way.

I think I'm a slow twitch guy and therefore I can do way more reps than you would expect. And therefore it tells me I should be able to lift more at 1 RM and I can't.

Yeah, there's no chance, whatever you're doing for at your 85%, you're doing 15 reps, I'm going to do four. So I'm a super fast switch guy.

That's the other thing I think that is. You need to couch that with your own genetics and training history as well. Okay, how many sets are we talking about here? So if I'm coming into the gym saying, okay, well, today's the deadlift day and let's just say I'm doing the kind of the west side barbell approach where the main set of the day, the working sets, are around my deadlift and then I'll do the accessory and endurance stuff later, we've established you don't want me going above 5 reps once I've done my warmup. How Many working sets would you have for me in that day?

Yeah. So maybe I could answer the very beginning. You can answer this whole matrix for strength with just this thing called three to five. So a three to five concept. Three to five days per week, three to five exercises, three to five reps per set, three to five total sets, and then three to five minutes rest between each set. It's pretty universal. That can take you as low as three days a week. You're going to do three exercises for three sets of three. Now, the intensity has got to be high, got to be a lot of load, Right. It could take you all the way to five days a week, five exercises, five sets of five. And that volume is going to be really taxing again, if you're loading it appropriately, since we're under the powerlifting category.

But just to be clear, Andy, that's the strength matrix. That's the strength column. Here is regardless of which of those athletes you are, when you want to focus on your strength, part of what you do, which every one of those athletes has to be strong, including the sprinter. You've got to be in the three to five.

Yeah. And now you could also say again, I already said earlier, one to five. So it's great. But this just makes kind of the rule super easy for people to understand. I certainly didn't invent this. This has been around for very, very, very long time. You'll find this in books in the 1990s and, well, earlier than that. But it's an easy one, kind of one liner for people to remember for strength.

So it's days, exercises, reps, rest, sets, sets, all that.

Right. So again, since we're in powerlifting and since we're in strength, that three to five only works, though, if you're loading that heavy. If you're going light, that's not going to work.

And just to be clear, let's explain to people what that means. Do you prefer RPE or reps in reserve? Either way, you want to just explain to people what those two mean and how they can use it.

To think about this RPE rating of perceived exertion, how hard is it? You could do this scale of 6 to 20. It's the original Bulwark scale. You could do it 1 to 10, you could do it 1 to 5, whatever. The top end of the scale is the hardest repetition you could ever do and you scale back. So you don't technically need to always be at the high end of the scale there. But you can't be if you're Going on a scale one to five, you can't be at two on this thing. Four is probably the sweet spot. Reps in reserve is another similar idea where it says, like, if you thought you could do 10 reps on this, and I want you to do two reps in reserve, that means I want you to stop at eight reps, right? So you left two repetitions in reserve. You left them on the table there. Same thing would be strength, right? So, like, hey, we're going to do a set of four here, and I want you at a one rep in reserve. So you're going to get that into four and go, I would have had one left, but I wouldn't have had two. I certainly wouldn't have had three. I would have had one left, but I'm going to stop right there. So similar idea, just a different way to express it.

Yeah, Rep in reserve for me has always made a little more sense. I think it's easier to explain to people, but at the same time, you have to know what failure is. It's not something you can figure out by yourself. You have to have the experience of dropping a bar on your chest and having the guys run across the gym to pick it up. Like, you got to know what?

Well, there are easier ways to learn, but that's one of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, I mean, like, you sort of have to have been through the ringer of, I think I have one more and you do, versus I think I have one more and you don't. And obviously it's much safer to figure that out on a deadlift than on a squat, for example.

I mean, honestly, like, just go on a machine. Who cares? Like, just get a rough idea, right? You want to get super safe. If you're not familiar with all this stuff, go on a leg press machine, Go on a leg extension machine. Machine. As much as, like, we don't love that. Just get close. Because you're right. RPE and RER both fail epically. When people are not highly trained, they think, oh, that's probably close. And really, you thought that was a 2 rer, but that was like a 7 rer. Like, you're not even close to where you're at.

Most people are just stronger than they really.

Way stronger.

They have much more in reserve. Okay, so we're assuming that for everything we're talking about with respect to strength, the individual will get to the point where they truly understand how many reps they have in reserve. And now for the 3 to 5 system to work are you talking 1 to 2 reps in reserve are needed?

That's probably pretty close. Probably closer to one the less comfortable you are. Fine, but remember, you're not going to get stronger by going at sub maximum weights. You're not going to optimize it. So like the whole idea of getting stronger, you got to test the limits of sort of where you're at, within a safe range, of course. And if you're just starting, take your time, ramp up, take six weeks, takes eight weeks, you have a lot of time, you know, you got 50 more years. Peter. Like we're not in a rush here, but yeah, eventually we gotta.

I only have 40 years, but.

You get it though, like, so do all the caveats aside, be smart with this stuff. We already put one other caveat that I always make sure to say here earlier in the conversation, which is, hey, if you wanted to get stronger and you're really untrained, you don't have to go this heavy. You can get very strong doing sets of 20, you'll get there. But this avatar was someone who he said is past that point a little bit. So they needed to really get closer to optimal strength. So this is why we're going a little bit heavier in regard there.

Before we leave the power lifter, I want to bring a few other things into this. So again, we're not in this discussion specifically optimizing on total health, correct?

Correct.

We're really optimizing around this person being a powerlifter. So now I come back and I say, Andy, okay, I got it, man. I'm all in on this. I'm going to basically do three to five exercises, sets, reps, et cetera. But I said, hey, look, on the other three days a week, is it cool if I do a bunch of cardio? And again, I'm not talking about this through the lens of health. I'm saying, will it make me a better Powerlifter?

Make you a better Powerlifter? No.

Yeah, exactly. So what would you advise that I do on my off days if the objective is maximizing my strength?

When I was kicking around these scenes a lot, Powerlifters were notorious for being the laziest sons you've ever seen in your life. If they're not lifting one rep max, they're going to be circling Walmart for two and a half hours to get a closer parking spot. No, that is not a joke. I've been in that Jeep. I've been in that Jeep. And just driving around, you're just like, oh my God. Saving Every calorie. Okay, great. I think more recently people in that community started to realize, like, I need some level of fitness because I can't handle the training volume. If you're pouring sweat, getting through your warmup and tying your shoes, you probably shouldn't be doing one rep maxes all day. Like, do we need to get fit first? They have to have some level of fitness. So what I would say is this. Do the stuff we talked about. Maybe finish each one of those workouts with a set of 8 to 10 or 12, just to pump a little bit of volume in there. That'll get you in a little. A tiny bit of fitness will be achieved kind of from that stuff. On your off days. If you truly want to maximize strength and you're fit enough, then just rest, do other stuff. Maintenance, you know, mobility, you know, breath work, blah, blah, blah. Like all the other recovery stuff, just hedge heavy as you can if you're just antsy. Gotta move, gotta move, gotta move. Fine, but this is be like a zone 2 or lower movement, right? Just don't do much work because every amount of work you're doing is just contributing to systemic fatigue. And remember, it's not just about doing things like preserving muscle glycogen, which you have to do, but it's not a huge deal. If we're doing say three sets of three, it's not going to drain you of that much muscle glycogen. But your nervous system requires carbohydrates for metabolism. Everything else has got to be optimized here. And that stuff takes a long time to recover. We got to restore muscle glycogen and phosphocretin and, and ATP, all that happens. So there's just no reason it would give you an advantage to do more endurance work in between. As long as you have some baseline fitness. And that's the one time where people do see gains from it is again because they're so untrained, so out of shape, if you will, that they feel better, they can train more, they can train harder, they can recover faster because they have an aerobic system. So that caveat aside, rest.

I remember when I was in high school, the gym I worked out in, which was a powerlifting gym, which is why I got into it, but really my primary goal was training for boxing, so I was doing infinitely more volume. And the powerlifters, they would mainly train in the evenings, so I think it was Tuesday, Friday evenings or something. It's exactly as you described. First of all, the two things that stand out to me, even to this day, 50 years later, I'm being a bit facetious. It was only 32 years ago. One is the obvious, how incredibly and insanely strong these men were. And two was how little they did. I couldn't believe how little they did. They would come in, they would put their slippers on, put their suits on, chalk up, do a set, rest for what seemed like an hour, do another set, rest for what seemed like an hour, do another set and leave. And admittedly they were lifting cars in there, they were so damn strong. But I just remember thinking like, how can you do so little? But I think you're answering that question in what they were doing. That's every single match has to go into burning for that flame.

Has to. I mean, think about this. You're trying to put £1,000 on your back. There's just no room for a percentage of fatigue. There's nothing. The consequences are quite dire here. Oh, think about this. Even though, say a ,thousand pounds represents one, their one rep max, it's 100%. And you could do 250 pounds and that's your one rep max. This is not the same thing. It's not the same thing because even though it's both 100% of your one rep max, there's an absolute load that is on a physical human body that is not, does not scale. And so like there is a major difference.

That's right. The connective tissue is not scaling literally at all here. Right. They still have tendons and bones that are not that much different from mine.

Correct. They're a little bit, but not that much different. And so when they go do that. Yeah, when they go do their heavy squat day or their deadlift day, remember, if they can squat a thousand pounds, do you know what they're doing for 70%, that's a 700 pound squat day. And so like those are their light reps, those are their maintenance reps. So that load is. It just takes so much more rest than when you do your 70% and you could come back tomorrow and squat and be fine because it was 220 pounds. So that relativeness doesn't scale. Even if you're talking about people that aren't like crazy strong, let's say they're a 700 pound squatter, that's still absurdly heavy. Their Practice reps are 520 pounds. That's just a ton of load on a human body. And that takes a lot to recover from.

Before we go on to the Olympic weightlifter, let's Pause for a moment here and just ask the question. What do you think is the long term consequence in a powerlifter? Is it the case that, look, if your mechanics are great, you can live a perfectly long, healthy life that is free of orthopedic disability in the final decade of your life? Or do you believe that at some point, if you're really putting 500 plus pounds on your back repeatedly, the probability of injury is high enough? And I don't mean acute injury, I just mean the chronic wear and tear. You know what, the likelihood that you're going to make it into the last decade of your life without significant limitations brought on by either spine or joint injury are pretty high. What's your take on that? Having watched a number of athletes go.

Through this, so scientifically we don't have really any data to speak of, so this is all anecdotal. We just don't have enough to walk on that. I don't think you would find a very highly competitive powerlifter who is under the illusion that this is great for their health. That's just not a thing, really. And they sort of either ignore it or accept it. Having said that, I could name you a ton of people who feel fine, you know, world record holders, multiple world records, or close. I can name you a ton of people who just lift kind of recreationally in the gym who are all beat to hell too. So it's a little bit of a. Well, okay, I could find examples on both sides here. It depends on how they train.

And because we don't have randomization, we don't know if the people who are just doing great would be doing great no matter what they did. And the people who are all beat up to hell are going to be beat up regardless of what they do.

And there's also a level of insanity. So you have the people like Louis Simmons and you're like, well, okay, you trained with a broken back, a known broken bone in your back, like, so, like, I don't even count you guys like that. That's not the normal, you know, response if you're trying to break world records. All those people are training hurt. I could say the same thing about professional fighters. It's a hurt sport. Like, that's.

Yeah.

But then I could tell you a bunch of them who are wrecked their whole life afterwards, and then a bunch that are like, feel okay. It's hard to say. I'll put it this way. You take any sport, you take cycling, you take swimming, and you push it to the extremes, like That, I mean, you're asking to not be able to use your shoulders the rest of your life. So it's not the sport per se, it's the extremity really that I think is probably the issue.

I completely agree. Anything you want to add to the training requirements of this athlete before we move on to weightlifters?

I could, but just in the sake of time, let's.

We've covered the big stuff. Okay. Remind people what Olympic weightlifting is. Again, the nomenclature here gets very unhelpful. But why is it that these are probably among the most powerful athletes in the world?

Sure. So this is now similar to powerlifting. This is what most people think of when they think of powerlifting. That's because they're going to do two exercises. One of them is called the power clean. So I have great sympathy for you people who get all these confused. The difference here is similarly to powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting is a competition of who can lift the most amount of weight one time. That's it, right? There are two exercises. One's called the snatch, one's called the clean and jerk. The clean and jerk has two parts, so it has sort of two names, but it's one exercise in competition, whoever lifts the most snatch, whoever lifts the most in the cleaning jerk, you add those two up and that's who gets our gold medal. It's one rep, your best score in one repetition, and it's the most amount of weight you can put on the bar. That's it. The difference is though, why is this not powerlifting? Why is this not truly a maximum strength test? Is because both movements require you to take the bar from the ground and throw it over your head and catch it. Because you're doing that, there is a speed requirement that has to happen. You simply can't throw a maximum weight over your head and catch it slowly. You can absolutely deadlift slowly. It doesn't really matter. You can bench slow and you can squat slow. You don't try to go fast, but it's not required. The thing. So if you look at the sport of powerlifting that in order to take a especially a snatch, which is apples to apples, the snatch is the single highest power producing exercise that has ever been studied. So nothing else produces more power per exercise than a snatch. And that's because you have to take the bar from the ground and throw it over your head and try to catch it. You just can't do it slowly. Your feet get to leave the ground so you don't have to worry about staying in contact but the bar doesn't crash down on you. Like if you do a speed squat and jump and you jump in the air, the bar would smash you in the back of your neck and your head and that hurts. Bench press, you can't accelerate through the end of the range of motion because the bar would leave you. So you actually decelerate towards the end of a bench. Anything where you're holding on to the implement, it's going to slow down. Things like throwing a medicine ball are great and they are very powerful, but they're not as powerful as a snatch because the load gets so low. So let's remember power is force times velocity. So a medicine ball throw has a high velocity, but it's a 6 or 8 or maybe 20 pound ball. With a snatch you might have 300 pounds on there, might have 100 pounds, it's just a lot heavier. So the force component's higher. So the power output is significantly higher. It is the best way to produce force. So because of that, those athletes are again, quote unquote, the most powerful because they're doing the most powerful movements. So if you were to look at like the vertical jump height on these individuals, it's absurd how high they can jump while still being exceptionally strong. So you're still talking about people who aren't squatting a thousand pounds, but at the same weight, they might be squatting seven or 800, 900 pounds. And also they're doing it at a speed that's not as high as, say they're not jumping as high as like a basketball player, but they're doing it with £600, £400, £500. So that's why it is quote, unquote more powerful. So you could find higher jumpers, you could find higher squatters, but they have this wonderful combination of really strong and really fast and that's why they produce so much power.

Now, going back to what we said earlier, they have to be strong. And so presumably they still have to follow the exact same principles we just talked about for strength. They're not going to optimize their strength doing 12 reps. They're going to have to be in sub 5, I guess here my question is, same thing, right? We've got the same avatar as you describe it, the middle aged woman, now, let's just say, who was an athlete in college and wants to try a new sport. This is the sport she wants to do. She's trained, she's not a stranger to exercise, but she's never done weightlifting, meaning Olympic weightlifting. She's never done these two movements. I'm assuming that you're doing a lot of the movement learning with very light load. You're doing a broomstick, perhaps the first time you do a clean and jerk or a snatch.

Totally.

How is she training her strength in those movements?

When you talk about Olympic weightlifting or weightlifting, of all the top things we're gonna talk about, this is by far the most technical component. And so we have to. I'm going to almost kind of leave that part of the conversation. We're just going to get bogged down there. But we do acknowledge it, right? It is a ton of technical work to get there. Because your point is, right. If you are simply snatching a PVC pipe, you're not going to generate any strength. That's pretty easy to understand. You're not even going to produce any power really because the load is way too light. It's super fast. It's honestly hard. You can't actually throw a PVC pipe over here very fast. It's very awkward. Trust me. You can't jerk it overhead like. Like it's super awkward. So once the technical component is sort of acquired, what you'd have to do to answer your question is build the technical skills and then get strength doing, say a front squat and doing a push press or an overhead press and stuff like that. A more traditional why you're building the technical ability, because what's going to happen is you won't have the technical ability to even get heavy enough on the snatch and clean and jerk for quite some time because you're going to be so limited by technique rather than strength or speed. So that's going to hold you back for a long time. And this is why a lot of folks will frankly not use these movements, which I think is a mistake. But if you were the classic kind of personal trainer and you know, you got a client coming in once a week, geez, are you really going to invest three months into teaching them how to snatch before they actually burn any calories, gain any muscle or get stronger? Well, it's probably a losing endeavor, but if you have somebody for a year, more importantly, have somebody says, I'm committed to doing this, I'm going to invest, okay, you know, five years, 10 years, this type of stuff, then it's probably a worthwhile endeavor there because it is total body. It's a deadlift mixed with a vertical jump mixed with an overhead press and a catch mixed with an overhead squat. You're moving, you're jumping up and down, and then you're catching yourself. So balance and proprioception are also there. Your lats are going to go to keep your position in the back core has to be there to overhead squat it. It's very, very well rounded. With the exception of horizontal pressing, it covers just about everything else. And so it's a very economical movement.

And also it's peak concentric and eccentric because the amount of deceleration you have to do in that movement is insane. Whereas, for example, in powerlifting, you don't really get to test the eccentric phase to the same extent.

Yep, there's no landing, there's no absorption and there's no movement in space, which is very important for neural control brain. Keeping your brain healthy and everything like that. Catching yourself on a fall. So, yeah, super productive.

My brother at one point became obsessed with setting his school record when he was in law school and he had a year of eligibility left, so he played football for another year. And for some reason, one of the tests that they were putting the team through was like clean and jerk and he won. I forget how much he moved. It was a lot for. He was about £185 and it was about twice his body weight or close to it. But here's what was interesting and what you said is what reminded me of this. All he did was the following. To train, he would put 135 on the bar as the max amount and do that as perfectly and quickly as possible. He would be filming himself, making sure elbow bar travel was perfectly straight and then do insanely heavy front squats and shrugs and all sorts of other accessory movements. And then on the day of the competition, he just went up. They've got three and a half plates on the bar. And he just did it that one time and that was it. But he never had trained above 135. I was amazed by that. But it sounds like that's not an unreasonable strategy here.

That wouldn't be my strategy. It wouldn't at all. But in his prediction, you would have.

Pushed more in training higher and higher weight. But he got kind of lucky. I guess it worked for him.

No, I wouldn't say that. I would say this. Let's say he did. He's 185 pounds and let's say he.

Did 350 or something. It was probably around 350.

350, great. Okay. He probably could front squat 450 at that time. It was probably back squat 500. I don't know. He was probably so limited by his technique, though. Rather than his strength. It was a smart idea to invest a lot in technical proficiency. So that's probably why he got so many more strides in technique, because it was so far behind in terms of the two things you have to have to do that moving. You have to have technique and then you have to have poor horsepower. He had way more horsepower than he had technique. So he invested heavily there and that's probably why he would have got away for it. To give you some numbers here, like we did with powerlifting, if you want to look at a good clean jerk, like a really good one at the lower weight classes, triple body weight is where we're after.

Triple body weight, oh my God.

Now this again, this doesn't scale with size. So if you look at like Lasha, the best guy in the planet for the last six or eight years, kind of the number we always throw over there is like 265. That'd be kilos. So like five, I think that's 570ish range, something like that. But he probably weighs 350. So, like if you're 350 pounds, you're never going to double body weight. Sorry, 585. Like 585 is the pounds no one's ever.

But the guys that are like 140 pounds can actually get to three times their body weight.

Yeah, for sure. For example, I was able to clean and jerk double body weight and that got me like seventh in the nation. Now it wouldn't even get you to the competition. Not even close. You want to get to a national level competition, as a male, you're probably doing, you know, certainly double body weight. Two, two and a half. You want to like place internationally probably much closer to that three. There's not a lot of people do triple, just to be clear. There's not a lot.

So how are we going to train this woman now? So it sounds to me like we're not going to load her up on the clean and jerk and on the snatch, she's going to be using more weight than a PVC pipe and an empty bar. But we're using 10 pound bumpers for most of the time here till we get that working just right. How are you training her strength so that you're building up the horsepower to match the technique you're building? I know how we're doing it in terms of reps and sets based on the 3 to 5. What exercises are you doing to most meet the needs of what she's ultimately going to do when her technique is good enough.

So think about it this way. If you look at peak power production when I say this, you take the force, so how much load is on the bar and you take the velocity and we plot it against each other at some point. If it's too light but very, very heavy, it's not powerful. Opposite of the spectrum, same thing happens. So the question is, where is that crossover point which there's enough power or there's enough velocity and enough mass? Well, this is actually hyper specific to the exercise. And since we're on the power, the weightlifter and kind of getting on power, if you do an exercise like a bench press or even like a tricep extension, that's probably going to happen at somewhere like 30 to 40% of your one rep max, you'll have peak power. So if you can bench press £200 and you want to train power on the bench press, you should probably put, you know, 80 pounds on the bar, something like that. 30%. If you move up to a more compound movement like a squat, instead of being at 30 to 40%, it's more like 40 to 50% for most people of your peak. So if you're again, if your max is 200 pounds in the squat, maybe you put 100 pounds. If you go to a clean jerk or a snatch, that number gets much higher to like 80 to 90%. So a lot of folks won't hit peak power in a snatch until they get to like 90% of their one rep max. If you do 90% of your one hour max on a bench press, you are going to be moving super slow and you will not be producing any power. So the optimum number, and by the way, the more trained you are, the more that curve gets shifted to the right so you can produce more power at a higher load relative to load. The how heavy to put it on the bar to maximize power is very dependent upon the movement. In the question you ask, like how are we going to get this person stronger? It's not going to come from these exercises. If that's the tactical limitation, you may have to get a kettlebell and do like a heavy kettlebell swing, maybe you want to do an rdl, maybe a deadlift, maybe a step up, any number of exercises like that until they can get to a technical proficiency to where they can get 50, 60, 70% or probably even higher. Then you're not really going to be truly testing strength because you're still going to be super limited by technique because you're not even at the peak power. Yet.

And you'd put. Again, just going back to that. That's a super interesting. And I've never thought of it through the lens of how that varies so much by exercise, but bench press, tricep press down, maybe bicep curl, you're going to hit peak power lower in that range, 30 to 40% super low load. Yeah. You go to a leg press or squat or deadlift, you're 40 to 50, depending on the person of one RM. And once you move to something so insanely technical, you gotta get close to 80, maybe even 90% of 1 RM.

Yeah. And that's because of the nature of the exercise, you get to explode. It's what we call a triple extension. Right. So it's an explosive hip, knee and ankle extension there. It's gonna be so limited by the skill that you gotta go heavy before you're getting to peak power, let alone peak strength.

Last year I swapped out my leg press machine for one of the Kaiser ones. So it's the, you know, pneumatic device. And I love it because it's giving me power by rep. And it's so funny. Now, I haven't been able to figure out the exact formula for max power, but that's generally what I'm trying to hit. Right. I usually use power as the metric I'm training to and then I look at the falloff and fatigue. So now I'm going to pay more attention to that, which is, am I truly hitting peak power at. Am I 50% of 1 RM? And that kind of stuff. So. So that's so cool. I can't wait.

If you're pretty trained, you might even be closer to 60%. And is it like a front squat machine? The Kaiser front squat?

No, it's the seated leg press machine.

It's like, oh, seated leg press. Yeah, yeah. You might even be higher. You'd probably be somewhere in that range. Kind of just depends.

I'll look for that. That's cool.

Since we're here 20 plus years ago, I was in a facility training professional athletes and we had some of those machines and I went probably, personally, I don't know, six, maybe eight weeks straight just using that Kaiser machine. And all I did for training was try to hit the highest watt output I could do. Didn't care how many reps it took, didn't care how many sets. I would take a break, I would rest, I try it again, and I would go until I got a higher number, come back the next week and I went up for eight weeks just by Trying to optimize power output. The thing you talked about earlier, the velocity transducer, there's another way of training here for strength or for power. That is velocity based training, which is almost exactly what we're talking about, which is instead of worrying about the weight or the rep ranges, we're simply trying to hit the largest power output possible. We're going to do as many reps as we can there with brakes, and that's how we're going to maximize power output. It's a very, very effective method. Rather than just putting an arbitrary number of reps down, you're going to go up peak power output.

That's sort of how I use the device now, right? Which is I say for this load, I should be this many meters per second. And when I can't do that twice consecutively, the set's over. And sometimes that means the set ends at 5, and sometimes that means the set ends at 8. But you agree that, and I don't know, this sort of stems from my belief, which might be totally unfounded, that I'm quote, unquote, sort of wasting reps if I'd be better off resting and coming back and doing it again faster and harder in three minutes than eking out more slow reps. Is there any validity to that?

Oh, it's not unfounded at all. There's strong science on that. Brian Mann at the University of Miami has done a ton of great stuff on velocity based training. You can check out a lot of his work. But there's a training concept called cluster sets. And so clusters have been shown to be highly effective for strength, power and even hypertrophy. Surprising enough, but what a cluster is is this. Let's say you were going to do six repetitions in your set, let's say five, just to keep it consistent, five reps, you could do, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, no breaks in between. Or a cluster set says you're going to do one rep, you're going to take a 5 to 20 second rest, you'll do the next rep 5 to 25 to 25 to 20. So you're still doing quote, unquote, 5, but you might accumulate, but you have micro breaks. Micro breaks, that's what clusters are. And they are extremely effective because they do exactly what you just mentioned, the quality. And when I, by quality here, I mean power output, velocity output, etc. It goes up because you reduce fatigue in specifically Reps 3, 4 and 5. Those will be much higher quality. So the old way we would say it Is instead of getting five reps, you get five first reps, which is much more important, right? So you get five higher quality ones. So the aggregate quality, force output, total achieved velocity, whatever is much higher. So it's very, very effective. Now what's funny is weightlifters, Olympic weightlifters have done this naturally for 50 years. So when they do a set of like say triples of a clean or snatch, no one ever goes boom, boom, boom. You drop it kind of reset, shake your hands, regrip, take a breath, reset. And it takes five to 10 seconds and you do. So your three reps, like takes a minute. You know, he's like PR triple. It's like you had a sandwich in between reps. It's not a triple. Like, what are you doing?

He checked your email.

Between those PR double, you did two sets of one. But there's a reason now. May not be optimal for other.

May not be optimal for hypertrophy, may not be optimal for pure strength. But here we're talking about the most powerful movement.

Super effective for pure strength. Super effective it is.

So, yeah, yeah. So just to be clear, would you even advocate this if you're trying to increase your deadlift? Do you think it.

Oh, yeah.

If you're saying I'm gonna do five reps on this deadlift, you would actually say it might be better to do five ones with 10 second break in.

Between if you're going for pure strength. No doubt about it. Good research on that.

Okay, so that's, that's super interesting to know.

Again, the little caveat here, we're getting a little deep. Exactly like what your coach said earlier. What was the goal here? Cause if the goal was pure, pure, pure strength, great. If the gear was though like some strength, but we need to accumulate with.

A bit of muscular endurance, then you.

Would not maybe not want to take that break. So everything matters, I guess is one way to say it. So I love that, by the way. It's just like, what was the goal here? That's like the best coaching thing ever. Like, what are we trying to do here today? It's great coaching advice.

Suffer. So how often do you want this woman in the gym?

So here's the fun part. Oh, this is really good. Because the total load is low. You can do this every day, right? You're talking about a small number of reps. Not to fatigue, not at all to fatigue. You're talking about a lightweight. You could go every day. There's no reason why you couldn't go. Do some power training. Pick any Power sport basketball.

Yeah, I was just about to say this is no different than saying, I'm gonna go play basketball every day.

It's better because there's even less fatigue than you, because there's a lot of fatigue in a basketball game. So as long as you keep these high quality. Now if you are doing these two fatigues set to 25 seconds rest in between, then, then that's the whole different thing. But if you're doing these non fatiguing, which is what you need to have for power and skill. So this is a very important point. For power and skill development, they need to be non fatiguing. If you're getting to fatigue, you're not doing either one of those things. Now you can get to fatigue if you're trying to produce a different adaptation, which is maintenance of power through fatigue, which is fine, but that's not the same thing. You're not going to improve your peak power by fatigue. Doesn't happen. So these sessions are kind of like quote unquote boring. You're not going to get a big sweat, you're not going to get a big pump, you're not going to throw up on the floor afterwards. It's sort of like, okay, then you go home like, damn. And this is honestly why they're generally not very popular. Like I got powerful, but I don't look any different. I'm losing weight. I don't have any of these other feedback mechanisms that says suggests I got a good workout in. Despite the fact it is very high quality training, you're just not getting that feedback. So in power training, power development stuff, very, very low fatigue, that's the goal.

Which type of athletes that are not weightlifters do you have doing these exercises?

Oh, basically everyone. It's hard to pick a sport where power development is not important. Caveats here. If you're a heavyweight champion of Bellator, you're a professional UFC fighter. Am I throwing maximum weight over your head and catching it all the time? I wouldn't hesitate to do it, but a lot of times they just simply have drama. Not going to happen. I don't hesitate to do it with professional baseball players. Don't hesitate to do with pitchers, though. Many of them don't have shoulder. Without getting too technical, your shoulder needs to slide and move in a very specific way, especially when you're pitching. And if they don't have that, then we would walk away from this. Or if they don't want to, it's fine, you can get away from it. Other than that, football Player, wrestlers, skiers, tennis players, same thing. If you're a shoulder athlete and you have any number of reasons you don't want to, great, we can walk away from it. But there's really anyone else can really go after these things. If it's all done appropriately, it's a fantastic exercise or set of exercises rather.

I want to talk about something that ties into both weightlifting and powerlifting that I used to do. I don't remember if it was just bro science, but empirically it seemed to be true. I used to have this set that I really enjoyed doing. So it was a heavy deadlift. So it was either a 2, 3 or 4 rep deadlift. And it was supersetted with trying to think would I do it as a jump plyo or a drop. But basically it was a plyometric in between. And the empirical observation was both helped each other. So it doesn't sound like that should be the case. It doesn't sound like my rest between deadlifts are plyometrics, but yet it did seem to make me stronger. Now maybe that was psychological, but there was a sort of bro science belief I had that that was doing something to the muscle fiber to get it ready to lift heavy. It sounds like there might be some validity here.

No, there's a lot of science here. So what you're referring to is a phenomenon we call post activation potentiation.

That's right, post activation potentiation.

It's been around for a long time. Very classic Eldwin Henneman size principle. So 1950s, 54, 56, 58. Sort of a series of papers back then. But basically, remember earlier in the conversation we talked about fast twitch and slow twitch fibers. Well, there are things called motor units. So when a nerve comes down and goes into a muscle, it has a whole bunch of muscle fibers in that. So the nerve and all the fibers collected together is called the motor unit. All of the fibers in that motor unit are of the same fiber type type. So all the fast twitch ones, all the slow twitch ones, whatever, and these are spread throughout the muscle. So what happens is when you do low velocity movement, like right now I'm doing all these things, I'm using low threshold motor units and these tend to be slow twitch ones. So it makes sense if I go to scratch my eyeball, I don't want to be producing max force. And not a good strategy. Right. The best strategy is you start with the lowest force output humanly possible and then you work your way up. And that's because this principle, another one called all or none. Which means when a muscle fiber contracts, it contracts with a hundred percent effort. You can't regulate it up and down. There's no dimmer switch. It goes on, off, on, off. So the only way you regulate force production is to increase or decrease the total amount of motor units that are activated. Because when you activate a motor unit, all the fibers get activated and all of them get activated at 100% contraction. So what happens is I go to scratch my eyeball and I activate the motor units that are the smallest and weakest. It's not necessarily like that, but it's proof of concept here. And now I realize, oh, I'm not scratching my eyeball this time. Now I'm actually picking up a medicine ball. Okay, I'll activate those same initial motor units and I'll activate some other ones and some more ones. And then I realize I'm not picking up a medicine ball. I'm picking up a car off the ground. Now I'll activate more and more and more and more of these higher threshold motor units. And those tend to be the more the fast twitch fibers. So in the case of post activation potentiation, what's happening is you're doing that deadlift. I think you said deadlift. And then a plyo de lift and a plyo. You do that deadlift. And because the size principle and you're requiring force production, you are activating higher threshold motor units. Then when you put the barbell down and you go to do your jump, those are still engaged and activated. So now you can actually jump with more force and velocity because you've sort of turned them on initially, you've activated them. And so it's 100% and, and there's a lot of science. Lee Brown, whose lab I sort of run now, brought me over to Cal State Fullerton, has done legendary. He's a lifetime achievement award winner. Legendary work in this area. It also goes the other way. So this is fun. When it comes to power training or speed training, people tend to think about things like resistance. So in other words, if you've ever done sprinting and you've like drug a sled or had a parachute on, great. You've done vertical jump training and you've had like the bands that hold you down. This is all added resistance. And that's fine for teaching you acceleration, which is moving over inertia quickly. However, the other side of the equation is if you want to get fast, I'm sort of jumping the gun here. We're kind of moving into our speed one but it's fun, right? You actually want to also practice moving faster than you can currently move. This is what we call over.

Yeah, I had a friend who was a sprinter in college and they would do downhill sprints like they would do 40 yard dash down an incline of 6%.

Six is pretty aggressive. Either way, it's overspeed.

Maybe it was four. It was like basically their legs were turning over at a speed that they would normally not even be used to. Turning over.

Yep. So instead of dragging the parachute, you turn around and have the bungee cord pull you a little bit, or you run downhill or you do something with. We actually had a device in our lab that is a harness that came down to you and we could reduce your body weight by 5, 10, 15, even 20%. And you could do all your vertical jump training, which we did with the volleyball team for one semester. And you're jumping higher than you've ever jumped. So it's the same actually, sort of post activation potentiation or pap in reverse. So you're actually learning to move faster than you can possibly move. So then when you go to actually do your work, you move faster. And the best example of this with Lee's work was you've seen baseball players swing a baseball bat and before they go up to play or they go up to their bat, a lot of times they'll put what's called a donut.

That weighted thing on it.

Yeah, Doing it on there. Right. And so you swing that thing and it feels heavy and you take it off and your baseball bat feels light and that's great. Awesome. Well, he actually looked at whether or not if you swing a wiffle ball bat. So this is a plastic bat, super light, which you can swing really, really, really fast. Prior to that actually improved baseball bat velocity more so than the donut did. So pap, that's the donut great. Super effective, but also unloaded super super fast is equally effective as well at getting you. So if you want to maximize, you probably should play with a little bit of both in the spectrum. You can do this with bands and chains. Like a lot of times we'll do is take a heavy band that you deadlift with and you can put it underneath your lats and hook it to a thing above you. And you could do assisted vertical jump training and just start flying in lots of other ways. You could do it. Yeah, that's a very real phenomenon. And the reason I brought that up is because you mentioned you felt like the deadlifts helped the plyo and I Explained to you. It did.

They both seemed to make each other.

But that's the point. So the plyo helped the deadlift because of the overspeed thing. This is called complex training. Not complex as in, like, multiple body parts and things.

Like complicated.

Complicated. And not a complex as in, like, a stack of different exercises, which is a kind of a different term here. So there's a different kind of strategy you could do called contrast training, but this specifically refers to, like, a complex where you would do. If you're going to do this, you need to stick within the same principles. So your total reps per set should still be around three to five. So in other words, you could do like, two deadlifts and then three vertical jumps or whatever, but don't do five deadlifts and then five vertical jumps. Your total set is now, like 10.

You're starting to fatigue.

Yeah. You can do this all kinds of ways. So we'll do this bench press and then medicine ball put or rotational movements. Tons.

I mean, the thought that I had at the time was, this is so ridiculous. But why does a sprinter not 30 seconds a minute before they hit the blocks do a heavy set of three deadlifts?

Well, first of all, they do.

Do they? Oh, okay.

When they can.

Okay.

The reason why they don't see it as often is because logistically, you have to have a bunch of dumbbell barbed.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not uncommon. Depending on what facility they're in, they'll be in the back, they'll hit those headlifts, and then they'll walk right out and going. You got to put your spikes on all that stuff.

Yeah. Which is so counterintuitive, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So you can't do this, and then an hour and a half later, go, run and go faster. So you have a window, you can do it in, you get your spikes. And so there's some, like, logistics things, but it's very common in training when it's easier to weigh with. So it is super, super effective.

Let's move on to strongman. We don't have to focus specifically on, like, an actual strongman competition, but maybe focus on feats of strength that also tend to require a lot of stamina. I don't know. Would the classic strongman activity be like an enormous sled pull or something like that? Pulling a truck, picking up a barrel and throwing it and walking over and picking it up again and throwing it. I mean, there's a lot I can think of. My favorite was tire flipping. There was a 450 pound tire at the gym I used to belong to and how long it would take you to do 25 flips was a metric of your.

I love. Yeah, Farmers carries. There's tons of rope pulls, all kinds of good stuff. Yeah.

Now we're starting to get from highly, highly specific where power lifter, you've got three things. Weightlifter, you've got two things. Now we're really getting into more breadth. There's almost no limit to what a strong man, strong woman can do. And maybe one would argue this is more functional, this is more versatile, this is more engaging. You're also probably now starting to expand the interest of the Gen Pop into what we're talking about. So you at the outset said the three things that mattered most were specificity, specificity and specificity. When you're dealing with something that has so many components, how do you wrap your mind around specificity versus generality?

Yeah. So this is why Strongman is great. I mean, probably like you a little bit. One of the reasons I got in this field is because of the Strongman being played on ESPN at three in the morning in the 1990s. Thank you, Bill Kazmir. This is a whole generation of us who are like, what is this stuff? This is incredible. Right. So there still is some specificity, like when you get to those competitions, because you kind of know which. But yeah, this is why they're dope. Right. Like someone who's optimized for grip strength, you know, hold the Atlas stones or something, is not going to be the person who's optimized for the deadlift carry the deadlift competition or the overhead press or whatever. Right. You'll see people who win three straight events and they'll get dead last in another one. CrossFit has a very similar feel here. So we're going to test you a bunch of different planes here. And if you're great at deadlifting, you're probably going to be poor at pressing. That's just sort of how it goes. Right. So in this particular case, you have real strongmen who are, in fact, based on the definitions we said earlier, not technically, quote, unquote, the strongest in the world. Because the way you win in strong man or woman is how many reps typically can you do at a very heavy load. It's a global feat of strength, but it's not to the same level of high precision. So if you were to then technically take everyone from a strong woman competition and the same weight class as everyone from the same equivalent level of powerlifting, competition. The squat would probably be higher on aggregate. In the powerlifting competition, however, if you said, let's put on 95% of your one rep max and see how many reps you could do, the strong woman would absolutely smash. Again, on aggregate, you could pick one individual person or something, but as an average. And so what we're doing here is saying we're going to take extremely heavy loads and we're going to ask you to do it to fatigue, but we're probably going to do a little bit safer than we would typically do. So you don't generally see like a bench press to fatigue. On a strongman, you don't see a deadlift to fatigue often you're going to see something like a car lift. And the reason they do that is because you can actually load the bar a lot higher in the air. And so it ends up being almost closer to like an rdl. So you take that knee cross out of it and allows you to do a lot more reps. It's still brutal, still, like, insane. That's why they do some funky stuff like that. A farmer's carry, you can do that as heavy as possible and drop it when you're done. They kind of hedge in that direction. Same thing why you would never see a snatch or a clean jerk. Way, way, way too risky. It's going to be a log press overhead. Awkward and weird, but.

And that's why, like, even the tire flip, like I remember people would say, like, come on, how can you flip a tire that's £450? And it's like, well, remember, you're never fully lifting a 450 pound thing off the ground. Like when the first movement of the deadlift, it might be £250 that you're lifting up. And then by the time you're pushing it, you've got the momentum helping you. So, yes, it's infinitely safer. And ultimately you're fatiguing. At least for me, my cardiorespiratory and muscular fatigue hit almost at the same time.

100%. You're gonna feel blown up. Your forearms will be gone. In fact, you know what's actually really cool is maybe five or six years ago, they started putting heart rate monitors on people in these competitions. And then they'll broadcast them. They're just pegged the whole time. They're like 180.

No, no, it's insane.

The entire time. Max heart rate. It's lovely.

Truly is.

Which is actually another reason why one could argue if you wanted to look at something that is generally better for global health. It's a pretty good endeavor here. You're going to get a lot. It is human movement, it is varied. It requires stabilization and all kinds of random movements. But it is super heavy and to high levels of fatigue. So yeah, it's a great movement.

So now let's talk about this one again through the training of a person who is new to this. So guy comes to you and he's never powerlifted, he's never weightlifted, he's never done a strong man. You know, he goes to the gym to do a little bit of cardio and do a little bit of strength training, but there's never been specificity to the training. He doesn't have any injuries that we need to worry about. Let's just put that in there at the moment. So there's nothing that's truly off limits. But he has no technique. He's not coming in on a foundation of he knows what it's like to deadlift at least twice his body weight or something like that. Just assume he doesn't have that. But he says, andy, I'm interested in this both because I think it would be a fun competition to do, but also I think it's more in line with my long term health goals. So I don't want to get injured. I definitely do not want to get injured doing this and I want to be able to do it for quite some time.

Cool. So what you want to do is build a week a frequency and what exercises you do throughout the week so that you are not doing too many things too often in the same movement. So for example, if you're going to work on your farmer's carries, that's great today. But you then probably wouldn't want to work on a movement like a deadlift maybe the next day because you're going to be fatigued with your grip. Okay, great. So then maybe you pick a non fatigue, maybe that's yoke walk or something like that. The next day, load it up there. So you just want to kind of be a little conscious of that. How many days in a row are you hinging? How many days in a row are you holding or pressing directly overhead and just kind of move or vary the movement patterns is the first up. I'd say repetition range. I would probably stick in the like 5 to 8 window initially for this person because you can get enough little fatigue. You can also bail pretty easy. It's heavy and you're practicing. This is a big distinction. You want to practice perfect repetition and so what I mean by that is instead of going to like an R area or rpe, I'm going to go to technical failure. So we're going to do a goblet squat and we're going to do 100 pound sandbag or 150 pound medicine ball in front of you and we're going to do front squats and we're going to do. The goal here is to do eight or so. But as soon as I see you break technical, you're done. And that's going to get that person a lot of fatigue, a lot of strength, but also keeping them very, very safe. And they're going to learn to feel I don't get to win anymore when I break technique. So they're just going to continue to learn whole technique, hold technique, hold position. And I would do the same for their overhead pressing, all that stuff. Right. We start to get into bad positions in our low back. All right, we're done. And so getting them to technical failure is the phrase that we would use. Here is the way I'd go about it. And you can actually do these more frequently than the average same exact avatar could in powerlifting because the movements are more varied. See, the recovery is probably going to be a little bit higher rather than getting the same exact locked in position and just sort of moving in one plane. You're going to get sore. But there's also not as much of a typically like eccentric landing demand like there is in weightlifting. There's eccentric, but it's typically controlled or it's intentionally uncontrolled dropping or something. Right. So you can get away with more volume because your recovery is going to be a little bit higher there.

Tell me, going back to our weightlifter and powerlifter, why would we not also, or maybe we do and we just didn't state it explicitly, why would we not also also force technical failure into the mix? Is there ever a time when we would tolerate a break in form where we see more lumbar kyphosis or lordosis than we think is actually healthy. But we want to learn how to grit through that because sometimes a single rep max sucks no matter what.

With the case of Olympic weightlifting, it almost takes care of it for you. So if you have a break in position, you're probably going to miss the lift. So it's self limiting that way a little bit, especially when you get past a certain load. Like you could do 30% of your one rep max with very poor technique. But as you start getting up higher and higher it becomes again, a little bit more self limiting. You definitely want to make sure you're holding position in all of them. But the technical demands of something like a bench press are fairly low. There's only a couple of joints that really need to be taken care of. As long as they're okay, you're there. When you get into something like a snatch, every joint has to be in the right spot or your thing can go wonky. A deadlift is the same thing. Like a deadlift is not as complicated. A squat is fairly complicated though, but there's also variations you're going to do. Probably you're going to do some sort of box squat or chair squat. You're going to limit the range of motion. And so the last thing I want to say about that is since the goal of powerlifting is to achieve a one rep max, you're actually not trying to achieve optimal range of motion. In fact, you go the opposite. So physics wise, work is force multiplied by distance. So if you're trying to maximize force, you minimize distance because you minimize the amount of work you have to do. And so they are intentionally limiting range of motion. So they're actually doing this like pseudo technique, which is not to maximize actual human strength, it's to maximize the score on the barbell, which is not necessarily the same thing. And so you're probably going to be working so hard on that technique that it almost keeps you out of the squirrely areas because you're trying to just instead of getting these like big long range of motion things, like you're just trying to get through the stuff, you're gonna go all the way down and touch, but you're gonna set yourself up in a position that minimizes range of motion, which is actually putting your joints in the right spot. So it's a little bit there taken care of.

What percentage of powerlifters deadlift with a traditional narrow grip versus a Sumo?

I don't know an actual number there.

Is that simply a leg length to arm length difference. Like for me, sumo is so much more comfortable than than narrow.

Generally it's going to be, it just gets easier on the back. But it depends on three factors. It depends on your shank to femur ratio, it depends on your femur to upper back basically. And then it depends on your arm. So all three of those things get wonky. And then it depends really on your hip versus back strength. So strong hips do well with sumo. Weak hips are going to get smashed with sumo. A lot of ways. You can go about it there's a whole argument we could have here, but we'll probably skip it.

I'll save that for the next one. Okay, so our strongman is training very frequently. It's highly varied. We're in more reps and we're training to technical failure, meaning we're not pushing low quality reps. When we break technique, the set is over.

Okay, let me differentiate. The reason why I brought technical failure up in this one is because you're doing a combination of high load and high fatigue.

It's just too risky to break form.

Correct. If you break form a little bit and you're doing two reps, okay, like the load is high, so that's the danger. But now you're combining both danger, which is load and fatigue. And so that's why, like, I wanted to plant that distinction for that avatar.

This is also an athlete who just talked to me about volume. How many hours a day are they training? This is not the guy who's driving around Walmart for two hours trying to find the parking spot. This person's fit. They're burning matches all day.

They're gonna have to be to get through this kind of training. There's no science here. You're gonna walk completely away from science. Unlike the previous ones we could talk about, which we didn't get into. Number of reps in terms of total volume to hit per month for like a weightlifter. Things like that. You don't have any science on this because like how do you quantify holding a hundred pound medicine ball in your chest and taking how many steps, seeing how many steps you can take. Like, how do you quantify all these things? If you do something like weightlifting and I can say, how many reps did you do? Over 70% of your one rep max. And that's the number we're going to. Because there's two exercises. It's very easy with this one. Like, how do I equate time? How do I equate the fact that you did one exercise and you did it for 40 yards, with the other exercise you did it for seven reps. I don't know. So I would give you basic progression recommendations here, which is 10%. So in general, regardless of physical exertion, if you increase your total volume by more than 10% per week, you tend to start getting into problems. That's the thing I would flag is keep it below a 10% progression per week and start lower than you think and then just add that up.

And again, how are we even thinking about here? It's not because in lifting I'm keeping a mental tally of sets and reps per body part sort of thing, or whatever. Right. How are you doing that with 100 pound medicine ball for 7 steps versus 50 pound medicine ball for 10, 25 steps? They both heard about the same. What does that mean?

This is the problem we have in exercise science comparing lifting to endurance. How do I compare three sets of ten at 70% to 45 minutes at 65% VO2 max? I don't know. You have no comparator there.

This is sort of where in cycling, as I'm sure you know, we use something called the tss, right? So the training stress score. And then we have a chronic and acute training stress store. So as a cyclist, I used to have a dashboard basically that take the data from my power meter. So every day I'd come in from my training and I'd hook the power meter up to the computer. I'm sure this is all done via Bluetooth now, but it would take a lot of data that was really relevant. So it knows a couple of things about me. It knows my maximum heart rate and it knows what's called my FTP, my functional threshold power, which is the highest number of wattage I can average for 60 minutes. It's a super important number. Everything, as you know, in cycling is metriced on that FTP number. When I come in from a ride, that ride might say, well, Peter, you went and rode for three and a half hours. You utilized this many kilojoules of energy. Your average power was this many watts and your normalized power was this many watts and normalized power, it's a power function calculation that takes into account the variability. So the more the normalized power is different from the average power, the more up and down spiky you had. So normalized power gives you more of a physiologic sense of what you did. Well, these algorithms now were so good when you had that data at telling you where you are in terms of overtraining under training. And so if there was just some way we could get that out of more complicated movements. And again, I'm just thinking like, obviously you could get that out of heart rate, you could probably get that out of heart rate variability, you could probably get that out of ventilation. So if there was some way to capture ventilatory rate, but other than that, we're missing power. I mean, that's the bottom line is we just don't have the metric for power. That output is what's making that, I guess so difficult, right?

Yeah. In this particular case, you would jump to physiology. You would go to hrv, certainly. Like, heart rate would probably not be a great one, but you would have to go to what's the physiological response rather than the actual metric, which is. Could argue better. So, like, who cares if you're at X amount of reps per week if your physiology is fantastic? The other thing is, I'm sure people who spend their career coaching in this area probably have better answers for you. If it was me coaching, I would go to physiology. We're taking physiology metrics and we're going to see what happens.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the things we used to do before we had our HRV to look at was look at resting heart rate in the morning and look at. I forget what the term was for it, but it was basically willingness to train.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Sounds silly, but it turns out to be very highly correlated with burnout.

It still is still like the single best metric you can take.

We only used a score of zero to three, if I recall. It wasn't like rocket science, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't have to be crazy at all. Like, we will take this metric still to the day I die. Yeah. There's manipulation that can happen there, of course, and we always do something else. But it's going to tie very, very tightly, typically, to even something like hrv, resting heart rate's okay. It's just too slow and the magnitude of change is too little. And so HRV is much more sensitive that way. You're not going to see a change in resting heart rate until you get far down the road. Like you're getting cooked here. You can see them very quickly, matter of days, certainly within a week. With hrv, where you wouldn't may or may not necessarily see the heart rate, but nonetheless, mood, how much you want to train, any number of ways. You can ask that. How do you feel today? That's a good one. Just like, how do you feel today? Well, don't give any context. What do you mean, feel? No, no, just like, how do you feel? That's it. Track that down and you're going to see that thing. In fact, you can actually do this. We've done this with giant data sets. That number alone, it basically is going to run the same as HRV over a big enough thing. Like, you're going to see the same number for the most part. So if you're working with like a big group of people and you don't have hrv, say Middle school kids or something like that. Or people just ask that again. There'll be some outliers day to day and some squirrely people and all that, but you're going to get a pretty good sense of.

Yeah. I mean, the takeaway here for someone listening is knowing how you feel the day of, and listening to how you feel the day of is really important. If you do not feel like pushing yourself hard in the gym on a given day, that's a really good sign that you shouldn't be.

You have to be a little bit careful here.

I say sort of give it the warmup. Give it the warmup phase and then make the decision before you get to the working sets.

Anyone who's ever well exercised knows plenty well, some of the days you feel awful are PR days. You're gonna eventually set a record that day. And there's a little bit of, like, on the jocko scale of like, okay, like, you just suck it up, mental toughness, all that stuff. But then there's also, like, you don't want to just go nuts, you know?

But I would say just because you feel crappy doesn't mean you don't exercise that day. It's a question of how hard are you pushing that day. There are days you're going to push and there are days you're not going to push. I would argue there's no day you shouldn't be doing something. You got to get through the warmup phase before you make the distinction of whether it's a hard day or not.

This is where auto regulation training becomes so awesome. If you use things like, say, you have your velocity transducer, and you know that when you're at 50%, you're typically at 1 meter per second, blah, blah, blah. And if all of your metrics are down, it's a pretty good indicator of, like, all right, it's just not today. You feel terrible, you don't want to be there. You're truly giving it an effort, but all the numbers are down. Okay, we're bagging it today. That's a nice way to do it.

Okay, let's talk about CrossFit. Obviously, there's a big, pretty decent overlap between CrossFit and strongman in that CrossFit is there are events that take a really long time. There are certain sets that can take 20 minutes that are metabolically as demanding as what most people could barely do in an hour. Tell folks a little bit about how CrossFit works. I don't know if we distinguish between CrossFit with a capital C and CrossFit with a little C. Because there's a lot of CrossFit like stuff that isn't maybe branded CrossFit. But I think for our purposes, let's just make it all the same.

We'll call it, and I don't mean this as any pejorative, but we'll just call it like competitive circuit training and just anything like that. This is one actually thing that's really cool about sports is we get to invent new ones all the time and we get to like continue to test human capability. In a lot of ways, it's really, really fun. So CrossFit is scored a little bit differently. It's a nice combination. There are some weightlifting movements. So you might see one of the competitions being a one rep max snatch. That's it, whole thing, right? You might see it as like an endurance event. So you might have to run a marathon or cycle a marathon or something like that. Right. And you might see some of these more circuit training, type of, you know, 20 kettlebell swings plus three snatches plus a vertical jump and 20 pull ups and many rounds that you can do in 10 minutes. You know, some things like that. So the idea is you try to combine a bunch of these things and every event gets scored just like strongman. And at the end of the three or days or whatever it is, whereas the highest amount of points, just like Strongman. So similar to strongmen like that, it's not one of them, it's many. It's not one single structured exercise. It's a lot. It's typically a combination of exercises in the same exact one. Similar to weightlifting in tech, they'll use barbell movements. It's typically big, complex movements and all that. And it's similar to powerlifting in terms of like, hey, sometimes max strength matters. So it's a little bit of like a combination of all these things. So one thing that they do though, if we compare this to strongman, is the absolute loads are lower. And so when you see a strongman, it's probably going to be doing something where the winner of the competition might win with like 5 to 15 reps. Not always, but something like that. Right. So it's a log press. You're probably not doing 100 reps in the log press. Some people might not be able to press the log once or twice and the winner typically has 5 or 6 or 10 or 12 reps roughly here CrossFit competition volume tends to be way higher. It is hundreds of repetitions per event. Sometimes and so what we've done is it's still very, very strong. It's still very, very powerful, but it is less. You won't see anybody ever touch £600 in a CrossFit competition. Every event in Strongman is £600 plus. You might see £1,600, it's way, way, way higher. But you won't see Strongman ever reach 65 reps in an exercise that just never happens. So it's hedged that way. If you look at the avatar for a highly competitive male crossfitter, 5, 9 to 5 11, 190 to 210 pounds. Strongest men, it's 6, 6, it's 6, 2, it's 330, 380, 400.

Like, they're just so there's no weight class in Strongman. There's no weight class. Is there a weight class in CrossFit?

There are some weight classes in Strongman, though. It's kind of like big, medium, little.

Okay, and what about in CrossFit, besides the gender difference?

Gender and age is the only distinction that you have in those ones.

And I guess the reason CrossFit can get away with that is you're going to get punished the heavier you are in some of the endurance events and you're going to get punished the lighter you are in some of the strength events. So the idea is that's probably why everybody kind of coalesces around 200 pounds or 190 pounds.

The other part of it is they have a lot of gymnastics based movements and a lot of hanging and pulling things and you're going to get hammered. If you're over 200 pounds and you have to do 100 pull ups in five minutes, they're just going to get crushed on that stuff. Now, CrossFit is wonderful and this is actually a nice point to talk about. Another point, if you were to take an elite athlete in any of these categories, there's a misconception here because I got a lot of. From our first conversation, I think a lot of people were like, oh my Gosh, you're disregarding CrossFitters. Their VO2 maxes are elite. They're blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, no, they're not. They're unbelievable athletes and they are way more cardiovascularly fit than strongmen and certainly way more than powerlifters and weightlifters. But you're not going to find the average crossfitter that has the same VO2 max as the average equivalently high level cyclist. No chance. What you're misrepresenting here is not that they have done something that we have never seen before. It's the fact that they are just phenomenal athletes, like just absolutely phenomenal athletes. The reason I'll say this is you know these numbers better than I. You can maybe correct me here, but if you were to take a high level cyclist, their peak power is astronomically high, despite the fact that these are, you know, quote unquote, pure endurance athletes, that the wattage that they can kick out on a 22nd peak burst on a bike would torch anything any of you have ever seen. Like, it's insanely high. The wattage.

Like my greatest regret in speaking about this stuff is that I have yet to come up with a way to explain to people what wattage feels like. You see, I think people have an intuitive understanding of what 500 pounds feels like because you've been to Home Depot, you picked up the 50 pound bag of salt and you can sort of say, wow, deadlifting 500 pounds would sort of be like picking up 10 of these at once. However, when I try to explain to somebody that when Bradley Wiggins a thousand watts. Well, even when Bradley Wiggins absolutely smashed the one hour record, which is generally regarded as the most pain a human being can endure in any sport, the one hour record in cycling is that mark and he held 440 watts for one hour, crunched in a tuck position with his iliac vessels folded on top of each other. I can't tell you what that's like if you've never pedaled. I have to say, look, come and sit on a bike. I'm going to set the ERG to 440 watts. Let's see how long you can go. And the average person is going to not make it one minute, not even close. They will not come close to lasting a minute. The average person is going to be dead at 20 seconds. They will fail. And by the way, they might weigh 180 pounds. And I'm going to say he weighed 138 pounds or whatever he weighed. He might have weighed 145. Wiggins was tall, he was probably 6:1. But the point is he looked like a bean pole. And the force he could generate for 60 minutes is more than you can generate for 30 seconds. I don't have a way to explain what that feels like because shy of doing it, shy of putting watts to pedals, you can't feel it.

I mean a thousand, like you put a thousand up there, that's a big, big number. I mean that wouldn't be a Crazy number for a cyclist. If you did it, you know, 20 second burst or whatever.

Not only that, he's a cyclist, is doing that after riding six hours. And after riding six hours at an average wattage of 250 watts, which again, for most people, they can't hold 250 watts for two minutes.

No way. So this is a good example of. This is not suggesting cycling training is great for power development. What it's suggesting is when you take really world caliber athletes, they're really good at a lot of things. They're just really, really athletic. And so when you're comparing your power output to that person, you're thinking, oh my God, that guy's so powerful. And he is. But I promise you, I could put a whole bunch of athletes on there that can kick 1200, 1300 for sure. Way higher than that. If you had a highly powered trained person. So when you say like these crossfitters are miracle, they're not. They're just so fit, they're so strong, they're unreal.

I think what makes them special is they're great generalists. There's nothing that they're the best at. The gymnast is better at gymnastics. The weightlifter's better at weightlifting, the powerlifter's better at powerlifting, the strongman is better at strongman, and the endurance athlete is better at endurance. There's no question.

Yeah, because we hear the comment too about, well, they could do this CrossFit competition and then they could go do a weightlifting competition the next day. Like, yeah, but they're not winning medals, not at national events. They're not going to. Occasionally they might make a world team or something like that. But that's one person.

What makes them special and it's worth acknowledging is how good they are at so many things.

They're so good. So, so good. I don't know if you probably didn't follow, but like back in the original days, like the stuff that they would come up with to try to get rich froning to lose, it just didn't matter. They made up all kinds of stuff and he smashed everything. You can't come up with enough accolades to describe how talented these people are. You can't. It's not that at all. The men, the women like what they can do is phenomenal.

It just comes back to what you said at the outset. Right. Which is ultimately specificity wins. And I actually write about this in my book. I was like, look, when I was cycling and it was all I was doing, I was a really one Dimensional athlete. My upper body was useless.

Well, you wanted to be.

I wanted it to atrophy away. I was not good at running, even. Even though I had the engine. Running was hard for me. The impact was not pleasant. If I was sprinting, I couldn't get my heart rate over 130 because I didn't have the leg pounding strength to cope with it. No lateral movement, no flexibility, no balance. Like there is no other dimension to it other than turning pedals over quickly. Again, not to take anything away from the best cyclists in the world, they're marvels of human physiology, but it's super, super specific. And again, I think that's true for every athlete we're talking about. Once we get into these strong men and CrossFit athletes though, you start to see what in some ways impresses me a little bit more, which is just broad, remarkable feats of strength and endurance across a great range.

Think about less examples. Just think about an elite marathon time. Let's call it two hours to make math easy, because it's getting there. Technically it's been broken, right?

Kipchoge sort of did it once.

Yeah, unofficially, with some caveats stuff there. You break that down what, four minute, 4:40. Four, 40 mile?

Yeah, maybe even quicker. Maybe 4:34 or something like that. It's insane.

They'll call it four and a half. I don't know of hardly any people in my life who could do that once.

Most people couldn't hold that pace for a quarter mile.

Well, that's what I was going to get at. So you break it down even Further, you're talking 65 second 400 meter dash. You will not find many people on this earth that can run a 65 second 400 meter dash. One time you walk that down even further, that's a 12 second 100 meter dash. That's like a number that you might be a little more familiar with. The best marathoners in the world would smash almost everyone you know in a 100 meter dash. They're blazingly fast.

Virtually everybody in a 400 in a quarter mile. It's insane. It's the same thing as the Bradley Wiggins example or you know, any of the cyclist thing. It's like we just don't understand how far we are. I think the difference is in the running. I think most people can understand because they can remember back to high school gym class how hard it was to run 66 seconds for a quarter mile.

I tell people all the time, go run a 400 meter dash next time. Go time it's not hard. Everyone's like, oh yeah, I can be 60 and it's like they come in 85 seconds. You're very far off this number. So don't conflate world class, the best we've ever known athletes to thinking these concepts are then wrong because we're talking about general concepts in this case, not CrossFit.

So going back to this CrossFit athlete, how are they able to balance the volume? Because they're now pushing the envelope so much between strength, power and endurance that at some point you're robbing Peter to pay Paul. I mean you have to. Is the trade off that you have to make in that training a function of your incoming athleticism, your genetics and maybe your goals? You might say, look, I'm going to index to be better at these events than that events. Is that the only way you can basically do it? And there is no true way to have a global optimization strategy.

We don't have any science on any of this stuff and I've never coached crossfitters. So having said that, there are some really, really, really smart, really smart people that are coaching crossfitters so they could probably walk you through what's going on here, but I don't have any science to go off of. In general though, if you just look at physiology specificity, it does matter, right? So if you were going to optimize somebody for strength, you could have one of two philosophies. You could say, look, we're really, really, really strong and we're good at this stuff and we recover well from it. So we're going to stay doing more of these strength type things because we can actually get more total volume in because you recover well from it as an example. Or you could do the operators, you could say, hey look, we're going to go and do a lot of strength because that's the weakest part we have and we're going to try to bring our weakness up. So it's kind of a coaching philosophy of maximize strength or try to minimize your biggest limitation in terms of like actual total volumes you get per week and stuff. Again, I don't have any actual numbers on that. Everyone does this quite differently. What I can say is it's so beautiful CrossFit in the sense that you need to have a ton of baseline aerobic capacity, you need to have some peak power, you need to have some strength and you need to be highly anaerobic and you need to have real high recovery from anaerobic efforts. You have to find some sort of combination which is like, to me, one of the most, if not the most fascinating part of the whole thing is like, what do you do? And nobody has an answer. It's just strategy. We're going to try to go here. The other strategy they have is just we're just going to hammer everyone, see who's left, and you're going to be ready to go there.

What do we know about heart rate recovery as a model of fitness? I'm guessing within the CrossFit athlete, that's a very, very important part of it. As you pointed the anaerobic recovery is essential.

It's a strong metric. It is very good. In fact, you'll see this. There's a number of different places around the country where you can just go and get a VO2 Max test done. Like you'd go in and pay $100 or something, which is great. A lot of the times they'll actually, if they're good, they'll look at 1, 2 and 3 minute heart rate recovery as well. Because you can glean a lot of insight from there.

Do you know off the top of your head what the metrics are that we care about for 30, 60, 120.

22Nd recovery, 80% in two minutes.

You mean within 20% of baseline.

Say you're at 200. There's no reason you should be above 160. Two minutes in. So two minutes recovery, you should be well below 160 beats. If your max was 200, so that'd be 80% of your max. You should be well below that by the two minute mark.

Oh, that's much slower than I would have thought I would have expected. Within two minutes you'd need.

That would be like minimum.

Minimum. Okay. What's considered excellent?

60. So in functional case, you're going to be down to, in this thing, 120 beats, which is like almost is going to feel like you're resting. After that, you're going to feel like you're barely even ventilating. But that would be a solid number to be at. If you're above 80, though, it's like sound the alarm. This is a real big problem. And then you can walk yourself down.

Do we care what an athlete's maximum heart rate is in particular, or do we care much more about, for example, heart rate recovery and what they can do at their max heart rate, in other words? I'll give you one example. Right. So VO2max, surprisingly, is not that correlated with speed. It's VVO2max. That is right so velocity at VO2max matters much more in running than VO2max in cycling. Turns out VO2max not nearly as important as PVO2max power at VO2max. But at least when I was training, we were not looking at heart rate recovery. Recovery, meaning I wasn't and my coach wasn't. But I wonder if, like, that's a metric that we should have been paying more attention to, in addition to kind of PVO2 max and FTP and all those other metrics.

If you look at VO2 max specifically, I can't comment on cycling. I don't know those data, that literature. Well, I do know the running literature. You're going to have three main components that are going to predict endurance running. And VO2 max is only one of them. Running economy is very, very important as the other one. So they're all three. And lactate threshold, of course, is like the sort of triangle of things. Any one of them on its face is not going to get you anywhere, and all three of them are still not going to get you everywhere. So movement economy on a bike, it's probably similar, probably more. Your power ratio starts to get in.

On a bike, it's actually less. Believe it or not, on a bike, it's FTP to weight, which is effectively efficiency.

Like, how far can you travel on a bike per push?

That's what makes cycling, to me, such a remarkable feat of engineering. It's basically just machines. It's take your functional threshold power, divide by how many kilograms you are. That's a number. If you line up everybody at the beginning of the Tour de France and rank them in that order, that is the order they will finish, barring an accident or a strategic blunder. And you can make strategic blunders?

Yeah, because efficiency on a bike is super high, where efficiency and human movement, it's like 20% or something like super, super low, whatever that number is, when you actually start to pay attention. And what metrics do you pay attention to? Max heart rate? Are you going to find that as a predictor of any kind of performance? No, with the exception of whether people stop way prior to hitting a max heart rate. So that would be like, if you're going to do a VO2 max test, one of the five metrics you look for to identify, to make sure it was an actual max test, is whether or not they get close to their predicted heart rate max. And so you will see this occasionally, people stop at 150, 155, heart rate, 160 maybe, or something, and they're not.

When they should have been 175.

Correct. That's also like, can just happen normally. I've had a lot of high level athletes. Max Hari 172, 175. And you're like very fit fighters. The championship fighters kind of thing. Five, five minute rounds are going to fight in ufc and they're like, it's just sort of where you are. But they can also cruise at 168 for a whole round, take one minute rest and do that for five. You're like, holy crap. Okay, so their ability to hang on at 95%, in this case it's like 98% and they can just hang there for minutes where most people get to 98% and you have seconds of life before you're gasping for something. So it is a little bit of crude. I've also had people, myself included. I'm still well over 200 as a max heart rate.

Wow.

My RER too. Like it's nothing. If I do a VO2 max test and I am like lower than 1.3, I know it was not a max test. Like technically you're not supposed to get over 1.1, 1.35, 1.38. Those are not crazy numbers for me to hit. I just handle that stuff super well.

What's your resting RER? Is it still close to 0.7, 0.7575?

Typically, I mean, those numbers are like kind of all over the place. Like my CO2 tolerance is also very, very high. I can handle a large buildup of waste. My VO2 max overall is not particularly high relative to these things. 55, 58 depending. Probably lower than that right now, but I've never crossed 60. It's kind of relevant, but it's also not so. The problem is, as you're very aware, I'm sure when heart rate gets too high, you start limiting time to fill.

Yeah, your preload is low and your stroke volume goes down super low.

So stroke volume gets super low. So it's not always the best thing to be super high. And then there's some other factors here in terms of like accuracy of measure and some other things to pay attention to, but in general it's not a proxy. I don't remember if we talked about the study I did in Sweden with the cross country skiers in their 80s and 90s, but I can't remember. I think our average max heart rate was like 150, 148. These are 80, 90 year olds and they didn't Care at all. They were at 150 and they were like.

It's amazing. Like, got lifelong athletes though. These guys never got out.

Oh yeah, yeah, right.

These guys were.

These are people who are world champions.

Never stop.

Totally world champions in the 1940s and 50s and are still competing every year in cross country skiing.

So.

Never stopped. Just savages.

These guys have VO2 maxes in the mid-30s, probably still.

Yep. 92 year old. I think his VO2 max was 38, I remember correctly, something like that. Several of them over 40, 86, 88 plus year olds. Crushing. We had such a long conversation that the first time I can't remember if I told the story, so I apologize if I did, but I'm gonna tell it again. But one of them in particular. So we were over in Stockholm doing this and these guys. I don't speak Swedish and they didn't speak English and we're in a hospital and so there's cardiologists there and we're trying to like, as you do with VO2 maxis, like you're yelling and encouraging to go, go, go, Right. And whatever. And one of them got done. We were cycling. He got off and he sat next to the hospital bed. He took like three breaths. He's like. He said something. I asked what they said and they like. He said he didn't understand the instructions. He wants to try again. And he got up and he started getting back on the bike and we were hitting the car. They're like, whoa, like. And I'm talking 15 seconds. Whatever it takes to take three breaths. He just like got back on the bike again. We're ready to go. I was like, this guy. And they're like, no, no. And I was like, let's go to wall. Let's see what he has.

I love it.

Cardiologist said, no again.

I think the CrossFit athlete in some ways is. Of all of the athletes we're talking about here, the one that is most representative of maybe what our long term realistic goal is. Not necessarily at that extreme because obviously I think when people think CrossFit, they think of stuff that they're never going to do. But in terms of being a generalist, I think that's the closest one we're going to see. So is there anything that is off limits, in other words, if you exclude preexisting injury? So we're not talking about somebody with a labral injury that can't be doing power cleans and snatches. How much of your time and energy is going to go into max rep, powerlifting movements, relatively heavy weightlifting movements. Given that you need to do so much other stuff and build that base of endurance. And let's just assume for the purpose of this discussion, you're optimizing around being the most well rounded, not being a spike in one particular domain over another.

Okay. 70, 2010. This is the number 70, 2010. I got this from my friend Kenny Kane, who ran CrossFit LA. I think it's like the eighth or ninth CrossFit or one of the original ones. Still coaching to this day, so been longer and the way that he programs it, he's in Santa Monica, so he doesn't have a lot of CrossFit competitors. The avatar you explained is pretty much his client. It's people who are 30 to 50 and all those things. His model works perfectly here. So what he says is 70% of the time you're in the gym, you're there for practice. And what I want to point out here is that doesn't mean we're like practicing barbell only and things like that. You're going to go through a full workout, you're going to sweat, you're going to get tired. But the core of what we're after here is practicing. So we're getting better at, say, technical proficiency with a little bit of fatigue. We're getting better at hip hinging, we're getting better at breath mechanics, we're getting better at pressing overhead, and we're going to use fatigue and load to get better at something. 70% of the time, we're practicing. 20% of the time we're gonna compete, which is you're gonna try to get your best score on that workout, right? So we're gonna put it up There, you know, 10 minutes, how many rounds you can get to, whatever. And you're gonna try to get the best number you can in that workout, which is very different. Now, notice the shift here. Practice is 100% emphasis on quality. Who cares about the score 20% of the time, though, it's the opposite. It doesn't mean we're gonna let technique go it. It's just the mind frame is different. We're out here. We're trying to conserve our efficiency. So if we're doing, say, box jumps for reps, we're not jumping up as high as we can every time. We're actually kind of doing the minimum amount we can to get up, get back down. We're being careful and calm, and we're trying to get the highest score on this workout. We can 10% of the time we go to death, basically, which is like, we're going balls to the wall. We're not trying to hold back, we're not trying to, like, be strategic. We're trying to get to death's door as fast as we can and just live in the suck, basically. So if you do that in your brain, let's say the average person per month is going to work out 12 times. So that means, all right, three times a week, I'm going to go to the gym. Four weeks, that's 12. All right, so then like maybe eight of those workouts, which is twice a week, I'm going to be practicing again. You're going to get a good sweat, you're going to get stronger, you're going to build some muscle, but the intention there, then maybe three of the workouts left are going to be those competition ones. And then one of them per month, we go absolutely nuts again. We're trying to not hold back or get after it and we're going to lay on the ground for an hour afterwards because it was just sort of awful. I think that's a very, very good way to think about how you'd want to train for a sport like CrossFit, because the movements are what they are. You're going to get better in a lot of ways. You're going to stay safe, you're going to get a little bit of that. Like, oh, shit, this is going to be crazy today. Like, I better not drink tonight, go to bed early because tomorrow is that. And then there's enough of the 20 percenters where it's like, it's really, really hard this week. One day a week is super, super hard. Because the other big problem we see with the people that train like this, that also have real jobs, is how much time they spend in sympathetic drive. And they end up just torching themselves because it's too much high intensity too often and they don't understand when to like, dial it back. So if you kind of have this model, it's sort of like two days a week, you're working out blood pumping, you're getting feeling good, it's recovery. Like, you're gonna feel great one day a week, though, you're gonna push it harder. And then one of those four weeks, that one hard day is really, really, really hard. And that's enough for most people that have other life stressors, you'll be able to recover from that stuff, but also then feel you're not just sort of like not getting anything outta your training, so 70, 2010, I think, is the perfect model for this.

So I'm glad you brought that point up. It's so important when I think about the difference between my life today and my life when I was 18. You know, there are a lot of things that were better when I was 18. Just physiologically, you're so much stronger and fitter and all the rest of it. But also a big part of it is there was no other sympathetic drive. To your point, anyone who's got a teenager knows they're like the singularly most selfish creatures on the face of the earth. They're incapable of caring about anything that is not themselves. So everything in my life revolved around my workouts. Tell you a funny story. One day when I was coming home from school to do the third of my four workouts for the day, because every day had four workouts in it, I forgot my key and I couldn't get in the house. So I actually broke into the house. I actually smashed a window to break into my house to make sure I could do the workout. And that didn't strike me as a weird thing to do. I can't remember if I used my fist or a brick, but I literally just broke the window, got into the house, didn't bother to clean it up, and was in the basement hammering the weights when my mom came home and thought there was, like, a break. Breaking didn't occur to me as a random thing. So, again, there's no other stress in my life. There's nothing else that matters other than training. But then you're 50, and all of a sudden life is stressful. Is there a way to quantify and help people think about that as it factors into the training load equation? If you want to think of it.

That way scientifically, there's a name for it called allostatic load or allostasis. That's what it means scientifically of all stressors combined. Lots of ways you can do this. We have our own algorithm that I use that we actually factor in everything. We actually break it up into what we call visible and hidden stressors. So visible stressors are visible because you see them or feel them. You know, if you didn't sleep well last night, you know, if you're thirsty right now, you know, you ate that food that visibly was probably not the best choice. Alcohol, cigarettes, like, sort of all these things. Hidden stressors are things that you won't necessarily feel in the moment. So maybe your carbohydrate to protein ratio is off, or you're way too high in carbs or too low in carbs or something like that. Maybe you've got some medical conditions, some pathogens, some micronutrient deficiency, excessive inflammation, like something else where you're just like, my recovery sucks, but I'm doing all the right things. So we put all that stuff together, we measure all of it, and then we actually can kind of score them. And then we base our programming based on those scores. It's how we do it. How would one do it if they didn't have blood work and saliva and urinary and kind of the whole thing that we have. You can't just go from the visible side and just try to put a score. If you did something as simple as how was your sleep 1 to 10, how was your psychological and mental stress, how well did you eat? And then like overall recovery, do you feel like those four alone will get you, like, somewhat close? Because think about it this way. Adaptation in the body happens because of stress. But because we just talked, that stress bucket can be overfilled. What you want to do is dump as much stress stress in from the type of stress you want and have as much of the other stress you don't want out. So if you're already pre filled with other stuff and you put a little bit of training stress on there, you're already, you're overfilling here. If I can dump that other stuff out of the equation, though, I can dump more and more and more training in before we start overfilling. So that's why it's very, very important to keep that allostatic load not down. You don't want it low because remember, you have to have stress that causes adaptation. You just want it filled with the right stresses that go in the right direction. Specificity. Right. The more specific the stress can get, the more specific the outcome can get. So those are the big rocks I'm sure you've talked about a trillion times. But that's why that stuff is very, very important. Paying attention to the total allostatic load.

I'm going to skip the track athlete at this point. So this is.

We can do it in two minutes if you want.

Right, let's do it. And should we just limit it to not the field side, but just the track side? So we're talking sprinters. Bingo. So these guys are insanely strong if you put them on a force plate treadmill. I've heard Usain Bolt is literally hitting at four times his body weight on a force plate treadmill. I don't Know if that's true, but.

I would believe it.

So what are we saying here? This is highly technical, meaning technique really, really matters, Efficiency really, really matters. And then it's forced to weight, I assume close.

There's some more factors at play here, because force is not the real driver here. Speed is. You have absolute acceleration and then you have peak velocity. When Usain comes out the gates, that's acceleration. He's not particularly strong relative to his other folks in acceleration, probably because his force production is not like exceptionally high relative to the other ones. However, once he gets vertical, his peak velocity is so outrageous. And his ability to maintain peak velocity, in fact, if you go look, that's the thing that really separated him. He maintained that peak velocity so much longer than anyone else did. So it looked like he was passing everybody. He wasn't.

They were just slowing down.

Field is slowing down. So you have peak velocity and you have acceleration. For other field sports, you have change of direction and agility. The difference there being your determination versus reacting to stimulus and changing direction that way. Okay, so that's where we're at in terms of are they strong too? Yeah. You have legendary stories of 100 meter dash ventures, squatting, 600 pounds, 700. Like, it's the same thing we talked about earlier, fallacy of like, when you're an elite athlete, you're probably good at a lot of things, but that doesn't mean you're optimized for it. So they need to be strong because they have to overcome force. What, a hundred meter dash, 200 meter dash, boom acceleration piece. But then they have to have true elite speed, which is a function of how fast you can turn your feet over and running, as well as your stride length. And so there's like a technical component to it as well. But training for peak speed is just those two components. So you use a little bit of resistance, fairly light, lighter than power, or at the low end of the power spectrum, 30% or less to train the acceleration part. And then you move as fast as you can. You either use normal or overspeed training to train peak velocity, which should make, you know, intuitive sense now that we sort of walk that conversation. So you train those two aspects of speed, and depending on where the end of the velocity is, they may need a little more force or they may need a little more actual peak velocity stuff. And then you use that on your force velocity profile to figure out where that athlete needs to train. And then just to finish quickly, if you go back through the entire matrix, speed training and power training are almost identical. You can do them at a very high frequency. You want to do complex movements. You don't want to do typically isolation single joint movements. You want to do things you can move as fast as you can. You can do them very frequently. If you're a very elite sprinter, you gotta be careful of your hamstring and stuff like that. But for the most part, physiologically, it's low fatigue, it's low total volume, it's high quality, and you just now are going lighter so that you can move faster. That's really the only difference.

Just to be clear, are you saying that the workout of actual running, like for example, using an assisted, like a slight tug run, that type of workout could be done frequently? Yeah.

There's no fatigue really. There's no joint beat up. There's no systemic fatigue. So just to contrast this to like one distinction we made with CrossFit that's very important. The reason why we talked about only doing high intensity stuff so often in CrossFit, it's because it's the first one we've talked about and the only one really of this group, maybe some strongman, but it's the one that has the most systemic fatigue associated with it. The rest of them are pretty much localized. Your back might get tired because you had a heavy load on your back for a back squat and your hamstrings might be tired because you sprinted maximally right now. But you're not going to see your HRV get tanked. You're not going to see a global total body fatigue like you would in a CrossFit scenario. Because it is whole muscle, it is cardiovascularly driven. There's an endocrine response that's massive and that doesn't happen. So because of that you have systemic fatigue. So that distinction is why I made that distinction earlier.

And you also at the. I think it was on the powerlifter, weightlifter, we talked about sort of the neurologic component of this. Can you say a bit more about that?

So when we get into powerlifting a little bit and now really into weightlifting and certainly in as we've gone down the spectrum here into true speed stuff, there is such a high component to neural activation to make sure that we're not only optimizing all the motor units we need, but in the case of speed, you have to do them in the right sequence. And so movement mechanics and being smooth and the rhythm that you have to have to move actually fast as a human, it's very, very challenging. And so that rhythm is Very important. So this is what we call synchronization. You have to be firing the right muscles in the right group in the right order throughout your gait. If it's, say, running, and that's not necessarily the case in powerlifting, or even so much a little bit in weightlifting, but more not much in powerlifting because kind of everything's on at maximally and you're just sort of controlling everything. But like rhythm, the common word you'll hear in like sprinters or running, like you gotta be in the right rhythm and. And you might get faster without actually improving your velocity ability by just getting in better rhythm. And what they're meaning by that is learning what to fire, what to relax, and having that fire relax. Fire relax. So a joint can move and then be ready to strike again and be ready to strike again.

But is this autonomic or conscious?

It can be both. The idea would be to make this as subconscious as possible, so you're just in the moment relaxed and moving, and everything is understanding when to contract and when to relax. Initially, though, when you learn it, it's going to be very conscious.

What is the most taxing workout that the sprinter is doing during the week? What is the workout from which they need a recovery?

Probably their true peak speed stuff really going true peak speed, there's a little bit of risk there, but the fatigue and then being able to come back and reproduce peak speed. Because here's the distinction. If you did a CrossFit workout and you were able to maintain 95% of your peak speed from today to tomorrow to the next day. So let's say you did a workout today and you had a little bit of residual fatigue tomorrow when you came back, if you're 5% reduced, you could still probably do your workout because you could use other components, you could use your strength, you could use recovery, you could use all kinds of things. If you're trying to train maximum speed and you're 5% slower tomorrow, then we're not trotting maximum speed anymore. And so it's just a level of recovery that has to be higher to be able to achieve what we're trying to go after here, which is hitting a new actual peak velocity. And so it's not the fact that you're like super sore. Generally you're going to feel fine, maybe a little sore, but Your numbers are 3% lower and you're like, damn, not recovered enough. Where in almost every other sport you'd be like, well, great, that's totally fine.

Go play, let's kind of now tie this all together for a totally different type of athlete that most people aren't thinking about, which is the centenarian athlete. And I'm not assuming that we're starting from the standpoint of having been world class Olympic cross country skiers in our 20s who never stopped.

Stop.

I'm talking about somebody who's in their 40s who, I don't know, kind of has the epiphany that says, wait a minute, like, it's cool to be a powerlifter, it's cool to be a weightlifter, it's cool to be a crossfitter, a strong man, an elite runner, cyclist, swimmer, whatever. But I'm going to pick a different sport. I'm going to pick a sport where the optimization is around my ability to be as physically robust as possible in the last decade of my life, which means I want to be able to do a bunch of things that most people can't even fathom when they're 80 or 90 years old. That means like I can run up an escalator if it's broken, carrying my luggage. I can put the 25 pound bag in the overhead compartment of the airplane. I can pick a grandchild up out of a crib. I can play on the floor and stand up on my own, no issues. I can go for a hike on rocky terrain and I'm not going to slip and fall again. Things that you would do blindfolded today. But the number of people in the last decade of their life that can do this, you can count on a few hands. So I'm going to argue that to train for that, you have to make trade offs. One of the biggest trade offs you have to make is optimizing against getting injured. Because the compounding effect of training is so, so strong that it's rivaled only by the compounding effect of not training.

Correct?

You know exactly what I'm saying. But for the listener, you will lose it way faster than you will gain it. And therefore, you could argue rule number one of what I'm proposing is you can't ever stop training. To have an injury that sidelines you for three months is an unacceptable risk, even if the concessions you make for that cost you some peak performance. Okay, so armed with all of those caveats, what would we beg, borrow and steal from each of these phenotypes into our centenarian decathlon?

We're going to work backwards, which is physiology first. So you have three things you need to train, and if you train those three things, you can steal from any of those areas. You'd like to get those three things done. And you can mix and match, and I would argue you should. So thing one is you have to have high quality functioning muscle tissue. Number two, nervous system. And by that, in large part, when we typically think about the nervous system for exercise, we often think peripheral. I'm even talking central vis a vis the brain. And then four, cardiopulmonary. Sorry, three. So we need to make sure that we got muscle. We need to make sure that our motor control is very, very astute. And then we need to make sure that our cardiopulmonary system is high functioning. You do all three of those things, you're gonna be able to do all those activities you talked about a second ago. The distinction of the brain is very, very important because if you were to go to a sport like powerlifting, the downside is while there's a lot of neural activation required for peak force, the lack of variation and the lack of range of motion is a problem. One of the things that has become very clear, preserving brain health. I'm not sure, actually, there's a recent paper by my friend, do you know Tommy Wood?

I do know Tommy Wood very well and I've been meaning to have Tommy on the podcast. I need to get him on the podcast.

Oh, too. Tommy would smash. Did you see his paper on late onset dementia and part.

Yep, yep.

Super clear, in my opinion, that one of the key components to maintaining brain function throughout life is proprioceptive innervation. And so you need to be moving in space and learning your sighting. So if you think about this from the exercise perspective, if the octogen, the 100-year-old 90 year old, you need to have some physical activity that is uncontrolled. You don't want to be moving up and down, same foot positions all the time. This could be an outdoor hike where we're engaging with the environment. Plus the steps are non uniform. Terrain is slippy. Whatever. It could be a sport. Could be surfing, could be badminton, it could be anything else. But you need one physical activity in your plan that requires you to react to the world. Strongman probably checks that box a little bit. Probably a lot. Maybe not maximally, but a lot. Weightlifting checks that box pretty well. Olympic weightlifting, running, sprinting, checks the box decently. Right. You're moving especially. You can kind of walk through the rest of them. Cycling probably wouldn't check that list very well. Right. So we want to think about. That's the first thing. That's what's needed. The second thing that's needed then is high force production. So you preserve your nerves by asking them to do a lot of different things. Tommy's paper. And by asking all the motor units to work. So something throughout your week has to be high force production. And by high force production, I'm going to say greater than 80% of your max. That could be powerlifting, could be weightlifting, could be strongman, could be CrossFit. No problem. Could be any of those things. Could be different plyometrics and stuff like that. All right, nervous system is checked, those two components. Cardiovascular system. I think the cardiovascular system needs to be able to do two primary things. I'll split into three. It needs to be able to sustain consistent work output over a minimum of 30 minutes with no interval, like no break back down. Call this zone, whatever, I don't care, but this is no break whatsoever. Weightlifting does not check that. Powerlifting does not check that. Strongman, maybe, but you're probably going to be taking some breaks. CrossFit might be able to get away with it. You might be able to do a 25 minute workout with almost no dip. But you may actually need to integrate more classic steady state stuff here. This might be an air bike, this might be a sled push, this might be a jog, a swim. It's like something like that. So that's one component cardiovascular system has. The other one is has to be able to get to max heart rate. You got to get all the way up there. So CrossFit, absolutely. Strongman, absolutely. Powerlifting, kind of if you're going heavy enough, you'll get up there. I mean you can get blood pressure is a 450 over 350 during a 1 rep max deadlift. You can get complete occlusion basically, but probably not the place I'm starting for my max heart rate training. That's just not really an option.

And how many times a week do we think a person needs to experience their max heart rate for this athlete? Again, not talking about a real athlete, but even just once a week of.

Hitting that max heart rate, it takes the systemic fatigue out of it. I would love two. Two would be really, really good if you can really handle it. If the allostatic loads low, three would be fine. But I would say minimum one. Most people shoot for two. That's great. I would say the same thing for the steady state peaks. One's good, two might be better. It depends on what you're doing. Like if you're also doing a lot of like Long, just walking, you might hedge your bets there a little bit. And then the third one maybe in this category is recovery from high intensity stuff. So not only just be able to get your heart rate up high, once being able to come back down, regulate yourself, come back up, regulate yourself back down. And that could be certainly done with CrossFit. Certainly no strongman, maybe done with a few other things. But that's kind of where we're at there. So if we were to kind of go back to the beginning one day a week, playing some uncontrolled one day a week, it's got to be really high force. One day a week's got to be max heart rate. One day a week, got to be sustained heart rate. Those could all also be combined. There's no reason why you can't go in, do 10 minutes of pure strength training, check that box and then go pace and pickleball, check that box. You could do max strength stuff for 10 minutes and then go do a CrossFit 20 minute AMRAP. So it doesn't have to be like 100 days. We can do this whole thing in 40 minutes easy. So we do those two things. We've checked off cardiovascular health, we've checked off neurological health. Then the third one is muscle health. And the muscle needs to be able to do a handful of things. It needs to be sufficiently strong, which we sort of already talked about. It needs to be of sufficient size. Okay. Now we don't need to be excessively large, but there is some minimum requirement we have to have as we age.

Do you think about that from the standpoint of like almi, where you really want to see somebody above? We hold patients to a very high standard. We want our patients above the 75th percentile for ALMI, you see a big step up in mortality benefit above that. How do you quantify that for folks.

So you can look at that? Depends on how much data you can get in them. FFMI is also like crudely okay. If you get in the above average or higher, I'm good.

Is it literally something as crude as FFMI and ALMI as an anthropometric measurement of size?

I think it's totally fine. What you're going to see generally is a tighter line between strength than you will see size as you move up. We probably are out of time, but there's a whole discussion. The whole idea that like too much muscle mass is detrimental to your health and age is like a giant misnomer.

There are nine other topics that I want to discuss that we won't, but we'll come back and do them in round three. And that's one of them, actually. You've just hit two of the nine remaining topics. One of them is exploring the myth of strength is paradoxically harmful as you age. Too much strength. Right. Strength athletes struggle as age. We'll go through the debunk of that.

Yeah, that's super easy to debunk too.

And then also talk about the uncoupling of strength and size because both of them are so highly correlated with longevity, as is cardiorespiratory fitness measured by VO2 max. But I love the idea of uncoupling them a little bit because my reading of the literature is that strength trumps size, you know, but anyway, we can sort of get into that. So strong and enough size. And I also think one of the arguments that says size still does matter goes back to the non functional or non structural component of muscle, which is the metabolic component. So it can never lose sight of the fact that this is our greatest glucose reservoir. And the metabolic benefits of having a huge glucose sink are enormous.

You want to keep your inflammation low. There you go. That's a key component to it. So the last part to round out is your skeletal muscle needs to have muscular endurance. So it needs to be able to do something for 20 repetitions in a row or something. And this is very important for, again, walking up 15 steps, 20 steps. This is not going to be cardiovascularly limited. It's going to be limited by the local muscular endurance. It's going to be limited by your strength. Actually, there's like another total missed thing when people think like, wow, I walked up a flight of stairs and I was out of breath. I'm so out of shape. No, you're weak. Because what happened is every step was 85% of your one rep max. And so that became very, very. You just did, you know, 12 reps at 85%. If you were stronger and that was 50%, you wouldn't be out of breath.

That's a really great distinction. Yeah, I'm really glad you're making that point.

Just get strong. And all of a sudden, while that.

Task was not as hard, even with the steps, what makes it so elegant is it's actually strength to weight ratio. So you might even say, well, but I am kind of strong. And it's like, not for your weight, you're not. And the gravity now makes it. Your strength to weight ratio is not high enough.

Correct.

That's where your fatigue is coming from.

Which is A precursor to the U curve, J shaped thing of too much muscle mass. Getting large as you age is higher mortality. It's like you're looking at bigger people is what you're really looking at.

But anyway, what are some of the do nots? So we've talked about what they need to do. But if you go back to this caveat that I've placed on you, which is I'm going to make you czar for the day on training here. But I'm going to say I don't want to see people getting injured. I want to make sure that there's no interruption of training. I'm going to argue that the older we get, anytime we have interruptions in training, the cost of regain is so, so high. So how do you factor that into a strategy around training for this person?

Exercise induced injuries happen in a couple of ways. It's very, very rare that it's muscle that's the problem. The only problem that you have with the cardiopulmonary system or cardiovascular system is systemic fatigue. That's not really its fault. Right. It's systemic fatigue. So if you're not overdoing it globally and this would be your rundown, this is maybe you're getting sick really often. Any number of hormone cascades or out of whack, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen, all off. Like things like that, mood, can't sleep, appetite, like those are some of the markers we look for of global fatigue. So if that's not what we're talking about here, you're talking about, oh, I got hurt, threw my back out, my knee hurts.

Yeah, neck is this knee, is that back?

Is that what you're talking about is joint? So the only reason joints really get hurt is repetition over bad movement patterns. So, so as long as you're moving well in those joints or not moving well, depending on the joint not moving at all rather then you can really do unlimited amounts of volume, theoretically until the point you hit systemic fatigue. Because it's not going to be muscle that's going to be the problem. You'll have some muscle strains and stuff like that, but this is not putting you off for three months unless you tear something off the bone or whatever, connective tissue. So it's connective tissue or it's going to be joint. So how do we keep those things we need to move properly? The first step I would do if we really had this like 40 year time frame is I would invest heavily, heavily in understanding proper movement patterns and then I would load them very Specifically. So step number one, you need to make sure you can do the movement pattern perfectly with assistance. Let's do a squat and put your hands on the rail and squat all up and down. So hold onto the band. Grab a. Okay, great. You can do it with assistance. Awesome. How about body weight only? Great. Step two, you did with body weight only. Step three, now we can add a little bit of eccentric load. So I want you to just lower the thing down, down to its full range of motion. We're all in good positions. You're under control. We're great here. If you can do things eccentrically, I don't care what the load is. Could be your body weight. Still, you can control the descent of the pushup. You're holding proper position. Shoulder, neck, low back, all the spine, which is generally the problem. Right. That's all in the right position. Great. Fall on the floor. Start back to the beginning. Great. We're under control. We're good there. At that point, we can now look to get into unilateral. Okay, great. So you did it great when you had two limbs. Can you do it great when just your left side? Yeah. Can you do it great with your right side? Ooh, no. Okay, now we're going to start predicting. Given enough time and enough volume and repetition, we're going to start seeing a weakness, which means we're going to have a compensation movement, which means we may start getting all of a sudden, low back is hurting now, or why is your left knee hurting? Why is your right ankle hurting? Something was probably moving slightly wrong in one position. So we're going to do a unilateral evaluation here, making sure we're fine there. Once you check that.

Loaded or unloaded?

Both. We haven't even got to load it yet. We're just seeing, can you do it? Can you do the movement once you pass all that? Now we introduce load. Okay, great. We also. Now, once you can do all those things and you pass it with load, now we ask speed into the equation. So can you do these things in the exact same positions? When I ask you to go as fast as possible, second to last step is then you add fatigue. Now you notice what's the vast majority of time people start a new workout, the vast majority of the way that they progress is they add volume. I'm going to go for a mile. I haven't ran in forever. I'm just going to start working out on today. I'm going to run for a mile tomorrow. Run mile and a half. They just start adding volume well, you're adding volume on top of dysfunctional movement. What do you expect is going to happen? Six weeks, six whatever. If you can do all those things, then I know you move perfectly well eccentrically and concentrically. You can do it in bilateral or unilateral position. You can do it with load when I ask you to go fast and when you get tired, rip and roar. Now like we can do whatever, we can do absolutely anything. And we're going to do that through a variety of movement positions. So overhead pressing, overhead pulling, horizontal pressing and pulling, lower body hinging, lower body pressing, rotational unilateral support, diagonal, all over those things. And once we're clear there, now we can start saying, okay, we can put any of these exposures on you that you want, you want to go after cardiovascular system first. Probably a good strategy. In fact, fact there's actually data suggesting paper came out recently showing that six weeks of pure steady state endurance training, I think this is cycling, like 45 minute cycling prior to hypertrophy training resulted in more muscle growth at the end of the hypertry training than the group that didn't do anything. So being in good aerobic fitness is quite powerful and important even if you're trying to get muscle mass. So you could go after those other goals later. But, but the big thing, and by.

The way in that study, was it because the cycling trained group had a higher work capacity when they were doing the hypertrophy training?

I think. Actually let me get back to you, but don't hold me exactly to this, but I think the total workload accomplished in the actual hypertrophy training study was the same.

They controlled for that. So they almost pair matched them to.

I'm pretty sure which was the sneaky part.

Wow, that's super interesting.

Don't hold me to that one. Exactly though that may be wrong.

Okay, we'll take that one offline, you know. Cause one of the injuries that I think a lot about and I see it happen, you know, I don't know if this is the classic middle aged guy injury, but it's that torn Achilles and it's usually, I don't want to stereotype it because I'm sure there's someone in whom it hasn't happened this way, but it always seems to be the athlete who's been a little inactive for a while and then he goes right back to that indoor soccer match and like boom. You can hear it across the gym. It's so loud.

You're going asking a connective tissue. In this case the Achilles tendon from never contracting more than 50% of its max for years to all of a sudden going to a maximal contraction on a hyperloaded eccentric stop and change. Not going to happen. You're going to tear something somewhere. Probably won't be in a ACL because Achilles is going to go first. You don't as often see in pro sports, Achilles go because it's going to handle loading. ACL is going to go first. So in your case, it's the opposite. That is tissue tolerance, right? It's very, very easy to avoid with some small amount of tissue tolerance. Which is basically a fancy way of saying like just expose the tissue to that demand slowly and increase that demand over time and it's gonna be just fine. Unless you excessive.

One of the things that I just find so great for this, especially as I'm getting older, is always warming up with some sort of jumping. And it's just multiplanar. It's, you know, really simple, is back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, side to side, side to side, side to side, and then it's one leg out, one like doing the clock. I don't know if you know that drill, right? You've got one leg going out to 1 o', clock, 2 o', clock, 3 o', clock, 4 o', clock, 5 o', clock, and by 5 and 6 o', clock, you're actually having to spin yourself backwards and you're always coming back to the center of the clock, if that makes sense. And again, these aren't huge jumps, but the goal is just to introduce lower leg variability and tension within the tendons and the connective tissue of the lower leg at unusual angles.

This is actually why I am more of a proponent now of running than I used to be for health. I initially was apprehensive against it because if you look at all forms of exercise, nothing even compares with injury rate than running. Running is by far the highest. Nothing will cause more injuries than running for the average exercise for a lot of reasons, right? So I'm like, this is stupid. I actually have changed my thought on that now for this exact reason. Just a small amount of running is enough to keep tissue tolerance through most of the lower half to be able to do anything like that. So this is a few miles a week. I think it's first of all like something I think the normal human should be able to do is run a mile decently sprinting too. Like a little bit of sprinting. And I don't mean like 100% over speed sprinting Even if this is as simple as, you know, sprint the straightaways, walk the corners kind of thing, and you did two laps, that's pretty good. Like you're going to stay away from a lot of foot and Achilles related injuries.

Andy not surprisingly, we left nine questions on the table. Kind of getting through. Technically only about three, but these were big ones. So I'll just say thank you very much and I hope everybody enjoys this at least half as much as I did and I'll see you back for round three. Maybe we need to do this in person. You got to come up with a reason to come to Austin, right?

I'll make it happen.

Can't be that hard.

All right, I'll make it happen.

We'll commit to round three in person so we can get a workout in at the same time.

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to see the the spot too.

All right. Thanks Andy. Yep, thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in depth exclusive content without relying on paid ads. It's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription now. To that end, membership benefits include a bunch of things. One Totally kick ass comprehensive podcast show notes that detail every topic, paper, person thing we discuss on each episode. The word on the street is nobody's show notes rival these monthly AMA episodes are Ask Me Anything episodes. Hearing these episodes completely access to our private podcast feed that allows you to hear everything without having to listen to spiels like this the Qualys, which are a super short podcast that we release every Tuesday through Friday highlighting the best quality questions, topics and tactics discussed on previous episodes of the Drive. This is a great way to catch up on previous episodes without having to go back and necessarily listen to everyone. Steep discounts on products that I believe in but for which I'm not getting paid to endorse and a whole bunch of other benefits that we continue to trickle in as time goes on. If you want to learn more and access these member only benefits, you can head over to peterattiamd.com forward/subscriber. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, all with the ID Peter attiamd. You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast player you listen on. This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice, no doctor patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and the materials linked to this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have, and they should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Finally, I take conflicts of interest very seriously. For all of my disclosures and the companies I invest in or Advise, please visit PeterAttiamD.com about where I keep an up to date and active list of such companies.

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