Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimize Your Training Program for Fitness & Longevity | Huberman Lab Guest Series

Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode marks the fourth in the six episode series on fitness, exercise and performance. And today's episode is all about optimal fitness programming, I.e. how to design a fitness and exercise program that can achieve the goals that you want for fitness and for sports performance. Dr. Andy Galpin. Great to be back. In previous episodes you taught us about the various adaptations that occur at the level of cells, at the level of organs, indeed at the level of the entire body that underlie things like improvements in strength and speed, hypertrophy, AKA muscle growth, and the various forms of endurance. And you laid out beautifully the various protocols that one can do in order to achieve each and every one of those adaptations. Today I'd love for you to teach us how we can combine different protocols to achieve multiple adaptations in parallel. For instance, how to improve endurance and strength, how to achieve some level of hypertrophy, perhaps directed hypertrophy at specific muscle groups, while also maintaining endurance and perhaps improving speed, for instance. And if you would, I'd love for you to tell us how we can combine different protocols and vary those across the week, across the month, across the year, so that we can make regular progress and perhaps even you could give us a window into the ways to make the fastest progress possible.

Yeah, I would love to do that. You know, we've invested a lot of time in the previous episodes covering background and concepts and detail about the physiology. So you understood why you're making the choices you're making and why other choices are, are less effective in this discussion. I would actually like to jump maybe more directly to the answer and kind of get right into the protocol. So maybe a little bit less background if you're interested in that stuff. I suppose you have to go backwards a little bit and watch some of those previous episodes, but I would love to jump into just some samples, some case studies, if you will, and kind of walk through different protocols. I know that over the course of my 11 years as a college professor and being in the public space a little bit, probably the most numerous style of question I have gotten is exactly that. So I know the rep range for this, or I know the style of training for that adaptation, but how do I put them together? And I would just like to spend our time today going through those things. And the reason I want to do it is this. Some people listening at home surely just love exercise. They're already bought in and they're going to train no matter what, and they're interested in just actually being more effective. And so the way that you structure and put your plan together will in large part determine getting more progress for less effort or actually being able to put the same amount of effort in and getting results faster. There's also some folks probably listening who are like, okay, I exercise, I do what I can. I'm bought into the benefits. You've talked so elaborately over the hundred plus episodes you've done about the various benefits of exercise, but you don't like. Absolutely. You're kind of doing it because you know it's important, but you're not there. So for those folks, it's sort of like, okay, how can we actually make this thing more effective? So we can make sure you hit the things you absolutely have to get for the short and long term benefits. Right? To make sure that you're looking the way you want to look, you're performing physically the way you want to perform, and then you can do that across your lifespan. So how can we give you all some structure to where, again, you don't have to turn into an absolute lover of physical fitness and it doesn't have to take over your life, but you can still get more results for your same time restrictions, whether that be you have two days a week or five days a week, or only certain access to equipment or experience, whatever the case may be. How can we help those folks as well put together a protocol that will get them closer to their goals with less restrictions.

Fantastic. And I'm hoping that along the way you'll also point us to how often to take the fitness assessment for each of the adaptations that you referred to in a previous episode. We will also link to that fitness assessment segment in the show. Note captions for this episode because that fitness assessment for different adaptations, I think, is a really powerful way for people to touch in and see how much long endurance do they have, how much anaerobic capacity do they have, how much strength do they really have? And then perhaps you'd also be willing to throw in a couple of additional ways that we can assess our level of fitness and progress in this arc of a fitness program across the year.

Amazing. I can't wait to do that. I think it is also important, before we jump in, to acknowledge a lot of folks may be thinking to themselves, I don't really necessarily need a plan. Why do I have to do that? I don't have a certain goal I'm going after. I'm not running a race anytime soon. I'm not a competitive athlete. I just, I go to the gym and I work out and that's great. Well, I would like to try to convince you that regardless of where you're at, having a plan will achieve those things we just talked about, which is more success in a shorter time frame. There's actually a significant amount of research to support this. Those individuals who go on a specific training plan compared to those who do not will receive better results. Right. Independent of the effectiveness of the program. Right. So we've talked in previous episodes about tons of different styles and strategies. And to reiterate, it really doesn't matter which one you pick. The fact that you have a plan is always more effective than not having a plan. And so again, even if you're not planning on competing with something, if you want to shorten the amount of time you're in the gym, get more results from it, I would strongly encourage to put something together. The two largest reasons why people don't get results with their fitness training protocol is, number one, adherence. And then number two, some sort of progressive overload. Both of those two things are challenging to accomplish without a plan. Right. So the reason people don't go to the gym, one of them, and one of the reasons why it takes them so long, is because they don't walk in with a very specific plan. It's sort of like going to the grocery store and, and figuring out what you're going to buy versus knowing exactly what you're going to get in your shopping list, grabbing those things and getting out. You'll notice your time in the grocery store is half the length. You're more productive and you didn't waste money on extra things. Okay? So that alone will drive adherence because you're now going to be thinking to yourself, oh, that 90 minute workout I do is actually really just 60. And so now the next time you go to training, you're like, man, I don't have 90 minutes. You realize it's only 60 or 40 or 30 or 20, whatever it needs to be. So that alone will get you there. The second part of that, which is overload, it's very difficult to understand and remember. Well, the last time I did lat raises, I used I think five pounds and I think I did like 12. Well, if you don't have some sort of system of tracking, and this can be as simple as a notebook, just writing down what you did before and doing a little bit more the next time, that is going to almost guarantee you success. So having some structure, and this structure can be fairly loose, we're going to talk about a bunch of different examples is something I strongly encourage everyone to utilize for their exercise.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is also separate from Dr. Andy Galpin's teaching and research roles at Cal State Fullerton. It is, however, part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Momentous. Momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality The Huberman Lab Podcast is proud to be partnering with Momentous for several important reasons. First of all, as I mentioned, their supplements are of extremely high quality. Second of all, their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations. If you're going to develop a supplementation protocol, you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations. With single ingredient formulations, you can devise the most logical and effective and cost effective supplementation regimen for your goals. In addition, Momentous supplements ship internationally and this is of course important because we realize that many of the Huberman Lab podcast listeners reside outside the United States. If you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned on the Huberman Lab podcast, in particular Supplements for Hormone Health for sleep optimization for focus, as well as a number of other things including exercise recovery, you can go to livemomentous spelled o u s so that's livemomentous.com Huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I've been using an eight sleep mattress cover for about the last eight months and it has completely transformed my sleep. I'm sleeping about the same amount, but I'm sleeping far deeper and I'm now getting the proper ratios of so called rapid eye movement or REM sleep and slow wave sleep and waking up feeling far more recovered mentally and physically. The underlying mechanism for all that is is very straightforward. I've talked many times before on this podcast and elsewhere about the critical relationship between sleep and body temperature. That is, in order to fall asleep at night, your body needs to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees in terms of core body temperature and waking up involves a 1 to 3 degree increase in core body temperature. With eight sleep mattress covers, you can adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment to be one temperature at the start of the night, a different temperature the middle of the night and and a different temperature as you approach morning. Each of which can place you into the optimal stages of sleep and have you waking up feeling more refreshed than ever. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to Eight Sleep.comhuberman and check out their Pod 3 cover and save $150 at checkout. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.comhuberman to save $150 at checkout. So what sorts of things should people be thinking about when developing an overall fitness program?

A few minutes ago we were talking about how two of the major reasons people don't get as much out of their training programs as they would like is because of 1 a lack of adherence and 2 a lack of progressive overload. So the solution to that is constructing a plan that lives within your realistic limitations. So I would like to walk you through my ten step approach to how I design training programs. Now before I do that, I think it is fair and important for the audience to understand that this is simply my approach. I've been doing this a long time. I played college football and I wrote my own training programs back then. I have and am still working with professional athletes in PGA Tour, the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, as well as a ton of general population folks. So this is a combination of the evidence base that we've been talking about in terms of best practices for strength and conditioning as well as just my years of experience. So there are many, many ways one could do this. I'm not even suggesting this is the best. This is simply how I do it. This is exactly how I handle it when a new individual comes to me and how I teach my students. So step number one is assessing properly and identifying a training goal. Now that's actually sort of funny because we hear that a lot, but a lot of people actually never take that step. Not to call anybody in the room.

Out, but what's happening here is this morning Andy, Dr. Galpin and I were training together and he was providing amazing tips on form and set rep, cadence and this sort of thing. And he said, so what's your training goal for the next 12 months? And I paused and it turned into a very long pause.

Which is an easy, nice way of saying he didn't have an answer.

I didn't have an answer. I of course I don't just want to maintain what I've developed in terms of strength and hypertrophy and endurance, but I don't have a clear goal. So I'm hoping that by the end of today's discussion, I will be on track to a clear set of goals to try to.

Amazing. I'm not going to bore you all here, but really, I can't stress enough how important that step really, truly is to getting results. The analogy we use here is if you left your house and you were attempting to get to the grocery store and you just started driving, and if you drove every possible road, you would eventually get to a grocery store. And so, yes, that can work. A better approach is saying, here's where I am, there's where I want to go. What is the optimal route there? And that's really what you're doing with goal. So it is a boring stuff. It is not interesting to hear. I don't have any real hacks, tricks for you, but it is step number one on purpose. We have to know exactly where we're going. You can do this in two ways. Way number one is to just pick something arbitrarily. Decide I'm gonna run a 5k, or I've done that before and I want to improve it by 10 seconds. I want to lose 10 pounds. You can just pick one. That's great. Another way is to run through that fitness testing protocol we described a few episodes before. And if you do that, you can see which of these areas that maybe you have the largest lagging in, or what is the most severe performance anchor is how we refer to it, and then choose that as your primary goal. So either option. Some people come into training programs with a very clear goal in mind. They want to add more muscle or whatever. Whatever. Okay, great. If you're like, I don't really know, you know, I just kind of work out, then run the fitness testing protocol. You'll see what score is the lowest in, and then you'll maybe make that a priority for the next, say, three months.

So the first step is to identify a specific or set of specific training goals.

A really nice tool for helping you set a goal is a system called smart. Right now, there's a little bit of debate on what those acronyms actually stand for, but we'll get close enough, right? So SMART is often specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. So starting off with S specific. In general, the more specific your goal is, the higher likelihood you will have at succeeding in that M. Being measurable means it needs to be Something that you can actually put a metric on. So this can be objective or subjective. But generally I like to have at least one objective measure. So remembering objective is something that is not based on feeling. It is not up to you. This could be something simple like your body weight, it could be how much you can bench press, what's your one mile time, Whatever is most important to you, it actually doesn't have to be a fitness related goal. For example, if you're using fitness as a way to enhance your sleep, the main metric you may be interested in is amount of hours sleep slept. It could be something like efficiency or whatever is most interesting, it could be work productivity, it doesn't really matter. So it doesn't have to actually be the future fitness goal. But what is the motivation of why you're doing it? So that's specific, measurable, attainable or actionable. This is often described is something that is within your capability. So attainable. A bad example of attainable is something like my goal is to win more games. That may not be up to you, the team, the other team you're playing, it could influence it, the schedule, etc. So attainable should be something that is within your control. Realistic or relevant to you is something that is again something realistic that you can achieve. You wouldn't want to make a goal that is, you know, you want to double your body mass. That is not going to happen. So think about the constraints. How old are you? What's your training experience, how much time do you really have to invest in this? And then pick something that is realistic. And then honestly, my little twist here is take that in minus 10%. Because typically when people put together training programs, their, their goal tends to be quite lofty and they get some small percentage of the way in, realize they're never going to get there and then back off. We actually, it sort of reminds me of a classic deception study that we did in my lab one time where we took people and we had them do this maximal front raise. Basically so you held a dumbbell out in front of you for as long as you possibly could. And the goal here was actually it's a deception study. So we're tricking them. And so we said, okay, we want to just get normative values to see how long people can hold this front raise. And I think we use something like 5% of their body weight. And so they came in and they did it one time and we timed them, they didn't get to see the clock, they left. And then we said we got to Come back in, repeat it. Right. We got to do a couple of tries here to get a normal value in cases off or whatever. Well, the participants were split up into four groups. So group one actually was told that their time was 15% lower than that. They actually got. Group two was 5% lower, group three was 5% higher, and group four was 15% higher. So the second time they came in to do it, our graduate student, quote, unquote, made a mistake and left the timer in front of them. So the first time, again, they did the exercise. They're just holding it. They don't have any idea how long they're holding. The second time, they had a giant iPad set, like, just a little bit off centered, or they can clearly see it. So they watched the time go by. And of course, what happened was those folks say who did one minute the very first time when they tested, they came back in to do the second time, and they're holding it, and we told them they actually got 45 seconds, when in reality, they had done a mitt. So they're holding it and holding it, and they think they only did 45 seconds. By the time they get to, like, second 40, 41, 42, they get past 45, they almost all quit, like, 47, 48 seconds because they wanted to beat their previous score, but then were like, cool, I beat it. And then they quit early. They were actually not yet the failure, but they were just happy enough to beat what they thought they'd done, and then they quit. The other group on the inverse side again, say they got a minute. We told them they got a minute and 15 seconds. They got to, like, 45 seconds, 50 seconds, and started realizing, oh, man, I have 30 more seconds to go. And they quit way early because the carrot was way too far out. They realized, I'm never gonna get there, so I'm just gonna stop now. Can you guess which group did the best on the post test?

Ones that were just within about 5% of totally.

So they wanted to improve. And so again, say they got a minute. The first time we told them they got a minute five, or, sorry, they got a minute five the first time we told them they only got a minute, they actually exceeded that greatly because they wanted to pr. So making sure that that goal is properly aligned, it needs to be a little bit scary, a little bit unrealistic. Well, you're going to have to work for this. If it's too easy, you'll quit. You won't feel like a challenge. If it's too hard, though, you'll quit early as well. So you want to make sure it's that reasonable balance of like, ah, should I train today? Or like, maybe I'll just go through. If I do that, I'm not going to hit. I got, I got to get after it. But not like, oh my God, like there's just no chance here. So you're going to, so you're going to walk away early.

That's a fantastic study, I have to say. It's very simple. I think it illustrates a number of important psychological principles about goal setting, motivation, self perception, but also the dopamine system. The dopamine system is this universal reward system, meaning it doesn't only work for food, or only work for fitness goals, or only work for academic goals or relationship goals. It is the universal substrate for all of that. I actually think there's some real gems of information that study design that you described. So just cue that for maybe a potential collaboration between our laboratories, because I think it's very important. But it does queue up another question relevant to fitness in particular, which is what are your thoughts on intermediate goals? So let's say my goal is to drop 2% of body fat from where I am now a year from now. So roll into the next year from now about 2% lower on body fat, but maintain my lean body mass or maybe even increase it. How should I assess progress? Because the dopamine system loves a goal. It loves anticipation of a goal, but it responds best to, we sort of re up, if you will, our dopamine anytime we get a signal that we are on the right track to that goal. And that signal could be, okay, I did the workout. I just trust that these workouts are going to give me the result I want. But of course we know that when people get a glimmer of the idea or some objective feedback that they're on the right path, that dopamine system really fires and provides motivation for continuing toward the ultimate goal. And as we've talked about in the strength, speed and hypertrophy episode, resistance training itself has this built into it. Because of the infusion of blood into the muscles, you actually get a little window into what you might get in terms of an adaptation simply by way of the so called pump. Whereas endurance type work generally doesn't have that. You don't see yourself get better, drop back, and then adapt and actually get better. But that's actually what you see with weight training. So given all of that contour of the dopamine system, what sorts of intermediate goals should I set for myself or should somebody set for themselves? And I realize it will probably depend on the ultimate goal. But would you say check in on progress once every week? Every month, three months?

I don't know if you can tell the look on my face. I love this question and this topic. I spend so much time on my senior graduate level program design course. I've been fortunate to work with a few athletes where we've had multiple years. And if you can really take the time to step back and go, it's not about optimizing for the next six weeks. And in this case it's not the next fight, it is the championship fight that we need to get to in three years or it is the Olympics, which are on a quad program. Right. You're really optimizing for that four year. If you can have that foresight and really think about that and then work backwards, you can see some pretty tremendous things. The sort of saying that is like, we tend to overestimate what we can get done in a week and underestimate what can happen in a year. That can be extraordinarily powerful. However, you have to have those metrics called out ahead of time because you will lose motivation in that short term because you won't see that result immediately. But if you remember, I'm on a path to 4% or 2% or whatever you need to be. Therefore, I only need to be this far right now. I need to be that far and then that far. It's actually quite clear. And so what we would actually do in that scenario, not to go like so off track here, because I can really go on this stuff is, let's say it was the year recommendation. You're going to actually need to go to the last part of smart, which is timely. So part of setting this goal is making sure you understand the time domain responsible. And it's actually quite, quite great here because not to go inception on us, where we're like list within a list and Rob kills us over here. But number one of this program design thing was assessing your goal. Number two is identifying your defender. What I mean by that is what is stopping you from hitting that goal? So you want to lose 2% body fat in the next year. Okay, great. What's going to stop us once we can achieve that? And we'll go into more of that in a second, then you just start walking that 2% backwards. So you might have to go something like this. Look, every time I start working out really hard, I always get hurt. Interesting. Okay, great. So maybe instead of jumping really hard into an high intensity interval training program, knowing we're likely to hurt something or get burnt out or quit or whatever the defender is for you. Maybe we invest something right now, which is maybe improving your flexibility or working on movement technique. Whatever's gonna stop you from getting hurt. Or maybe we progress slower so we don't get there. That will allow us to do the work necessary to hit that goal 12 months from now. Not two weeks from now, not two months from now. Maybe that's not the case. Maybe you're like, no, look, hey, I move well. I feel like I'm in, like, decent shape. I've got enough muscle mass on me. Um, we've talked in previous episodes why having insufficient muscle mass is sometimes detrimental for fat loss. So you checked all that box. I don't get hurt very often, right. I got equipment around, no problem. I've got the time in my schedule and I have enough muscle. Great. Well, now we maybe just split it up and say, look, we got 12 months, we got 2%. It's as simple as doing a half a percent per quarter of the year. And now all we're looking at is that number, right? I don't have to necessarily get all these things done. I can go quarter, half percent, half percent, half percent, half percent. You're going to get there, right? The other scenario that I laid out a second ago, it maybe needs to look like something like this. Quarter one is going to be zero percent. Like, whoa, yeah, that's right. You may not lose a pound for the next three months. We don't care. That's not the goal of these three months. I know that's the goal this year. That's our major macrocycle goal. We're going to get there. But to get there most effectively, we need to invest in, you know, working more with your chiropractor or whatever the thing is, right, that will allow us to then go half a percent. Quarter two, when we can really start training, but we're going to ramp into it. Quarter three, we're going to go another half a percent, and now we're halfway there. Quarter four, we've invested so much. You're ready to go. We're going to go hard. We're going to get that last 1%, that last quarter, and we're going to get there and you won't be hurt.

So that makes it very clear. And I can also envision how the precise structure of these intermediate goals would vary depending on what sort of adaptation one is pursuing. And I do remember from Our previous episodes that fat loss itself is not an adaptation, it is a byproduct of other adaptations. So I just want to make sure that you know that I was paying attention. It's committed to memory.

Absolutely.

Some goals, such as fat loss, are very quantifiable and yet they might not be linear. Right? It's hard to know. The assumption is if you ingest x fewer calories than are required per day, then you'll lose X amount of weight, some percentage from body fat. I think that cues up the idea that we need to build some flexibility into our thinking about these intermediate goals in order to just make sure that dopamine system isn't tethered to exact numbers of. Because after all, a reduction in 2% body fat, for instance, is really desired to achieve a different sort of overall body composition or recomposition. I don't know by the way, that that's my exact goal. I think one of my goals is to be able to run a mile faster. And I'm sort of haunted by this experience of wanting to run cross country in college and trying to walk on. We weren't a Division 1 school, but the threshold for being considered for the team was you had to run a sub 10 minute 2 mile which turns out to be very, very fast.

That's really hard.

I did not do that. I didn't even come close. But. And I don't think that I could reasonably do that now, I'm not interested in committing to the kind of training required. The sacrifice isn't meaningful enough for me.

Fair enough.

But lowering one's time to run a mile by, I don't know, 10% seems like a reasonable goal across six months.

Sure.

Great. So in the case of a goal like that, clearly there are specific training programs. But this raises the issue of what if I have other goals as well? And at what point do people's having multiple goals start to set up collisions between goals? How do we know whether or not something is reasonable not just on its own, but because of the other things that one has structured into their program. So being able to reduce a mile time by 10% in six months, okay, maybe that's doable, maybe it's not, you can tell me. But also being able to double the amount that they can do for single repetition, leg extension for that matter, at the same time, those seem like incompatible goals.

Right. So a couple of things. Number one, the more specific and precise you can be with a single goal, the faster you will get there generally. So in theory, if you had one thing you wanted to achieve. The best way to go about it is to focus on that, give it the most priority. That doesn't mean you can't do anything else along the way. You can, but you would want to focus on that. The more additional goals you bring in, the more distraction you're creating for that primary goal. Depending on what those goals are, you can actually do them. At the same time, some other combinations are less effective. Think about it like this. We went through those nine adaptations, and we went through them in a specific order on purpose. The closer those adaptations are together in that list, the more compatible they are to training each other, the further away they become more challenging. So just to give a few examples, if you wanted to improve your speed and power, you could basically train those simultaneously. They would not interfere with each other at all. In fact, since power is speed times force, it would be complementary. If you just walk down the line from there to strength, hey, same thing. If you get faster, that's going to aid in strength because force is mass times acceleration. So if you improve acceleration, you're contributing to strength. Same thing with power. So speed, power and strength are generally very complementary. You can absolutely train all three of those goals at the same time and have no issues getting into hypertrophy. Now, we've got a little bit of distinction. If you're going to train strength and hypertrophy, as we talked about in that episode at the base, those are going to be complementary. You add on some muscle, you're going to get stronger. You start training for strength, it's probably going to help you out on some muscle mass. As you get to the end of that spectrum, the overlap between the two starts to go away, such that if you truly wanted to maximize strength above everything else, if you continue to train for hypertrophy as well, that's going to take too many resources out of your recovery bin and you won't be able to do that. The inverse would also be the same, right? If you're training to maximize strength, you wouldn't be able to put enough volume on to get sufficient hypertrophy. So if you wanted to then combine speed with hypertrophy, you're going farther away from each other, which means it's going to be more and more distraction. So the hypertrophy training would cause a ton of fatigue. You wouldn't be able to go at max speed for your speed or power strength. So you're going to be compromising those results. Now, speed training won't compromise your hypertrophy training because it's non fatiguing Right. And so boom, here we have a little bit of an interference effect one way, but probably not the other. Let's move down the spectrum one more time and get into endurance. We won't go through all of these things, but you're getting the idea here. Oh, a little bit of a high intensity intervals. Okay, cool. Now, would that compromise my speed, power or strength? Probably because there's a little bit of residual fatigue. If the volume was low enough, then you'd be fine. All you're worried about there is not necessarily like some sort of cellular mechanism. It's just simple fatigue. It is amount of energy expenditure versus is that compromising my recovery to come back? Would those first three or four of those speed, power, strength, interfere with your ability to elevate your anaerobic capacity? Probably not. Almost surely. In fact, if you look at any of the literature on endurance training, you will see that speed, power and strength almost always improve endurance. Right. Endurance training added on top of strength can be detrimental, can have a neutral effect, but generally doesn't help one get stronger by adding additional conditioning. Unless you're so unfit you can't get through the volume needed in the strength training. Right. One more example here so we don't drag this out too far in the case of something like I want to lose fat. Well, hey, we don't have to worry about interference. It doesn't really matter if you're fatigued for your hypertrophy session. Not a big deal. We're just trying to get some work done. If your hypertrophy session fatigues you from your conditioning, it's cool because you got the work done so you don't have to worry about it so much. So it really kind of depends on the actual goal. And what you want to pay attention to is actually what are the chances of overlap, which means, like what are the adaptations you get physiologically that cross over from one to the other and then what are the ones that are actually going to start interfering? In fact, I have, in my, in my class, I have this giant matrix chart of interference effect going from adaptations through a whole bunch of systems, everything from like handling ph to lymphatic drainage to bone mineral density, et cetera. And you can walk through these whole things and say which ones actually have a positive effect, which ones have a massive positive effect, and then which ones actually have a little bit of interference. And perhaps if you guys are nice enough, we could throw that into a newsletter or something, some PDF or something.

I think that would be immensely valuable. I think some of that more extensive information when it's laid out in grid form like that is really useful. Well, now we've said it.

I didn't say I would do it, I said perhaps.

I think it's a great idea. I think it's a terrific idea. The idea that items closer to each other on the list of those nine different adaptations are going to be easier to achieve in parallel than items further apart makes perfect sense. And what I heard was that there's a few caveats that might seem minor, but they're actually quite important. Such as anything that is relatively low intensity and doesn't impede recovery can probably be included as a parallel goal. So some speed work in conjunction with some long duration cardio work, even though we're talking about number two on that list and number nine on that list.

In that case, the long duration endurance, even if it's low intensity, may actually interfere with the speed if the volume gets too high. If you're talking about I went on a 30 minute jog for most people that, that it's totally fine. What we're really talking about here is when the miles start piling up and the time really starts getting there in combination with some of the things, the factors we talked about earlier, which is exercise choice so more eccentric landing based exercise choices. Running for example, is more likely to interfere than cycling because you're not landing. Swimming is low impact. So if you're going to do those things, you can hedge your bets a little bit by choosing an exercise choice that is less impact impactful. Again if we're literally. Because there's oftentimes confusion here was like, oh, don't do 10 minutes on the treadmill before you lift. You're gonna cut like time out. Warm up is fine. We're really talking about probably more than 30 plus minutes at higher than 60% heart rate, like random number, something like that depends on the person, etc. But it has to be a decent chunk. Again you can actually fix that by then just consuming calories. You can also fix that by making sure everything else in the hidden invisible stressor bucket is improved. So this is like one of our tricks that we'll get into when we get into the recovery is you don't necessarily need to have to reduce your training if you just ramp up your recovery.

I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a vitamin, mineral, probiotic and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic greens daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me meet all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it covers my vitamins, my minerals, and the probiotics are especially important to me. Athletic greens also contains adaptogens which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work, or just general life. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, if you'd like to try athletic greens, go to athleticgreens.com huberman to claim the special offer. I'm going to take the liberty of assuming that most people fall into one of either three bins in terms of their goals. Again, most people, certainly there are going to be people that lie outside these bins. I think if you polled 100 people or 100,000 or a million people as to what their major goals were in working out, they'd say, as you so nicely listed out before, aesthetic changes, functionality and longevity. But that one in three really kind of sit higher than most people would like to perhaps even admit they want to look good, which usually means they want to lose some fat, gain some muscle in specific places. I realize there are folks out there who want to gain a lot of muscle, just muscle everywhere, but I think most people would like to have a little more shape here or a little more muscle there to either balance out their aesthetic or to accentuate certain parts of their physique. And they would probably like to shave off some subcutaneous fat. Although there are those exceptionally lean people out there and they exist too. I think it would be gain muscle in specific places, lose fat, and do it in a way that also provides some boost to their health span and longevity. I would say that might even be 50% of people out there. Again, I'm taking the liberty of guesstimating another bin I would venture is interested in getting stronger and putting on more muscle. Certainly there are a number of people that are interested in doing that and that could even be more muscle all over, or more muscle with some accentuation to certain areas, areas where they happen to be weaker or less developed, as it were. And then the third bin would be people that really enjoy cardiovascular work. Oh, I should say the second bin probably care about their longevity also, but it's not really foremost. Like, yeah, I feel great now and I'll live to be whatever, but I only want to do it if I get that much muscle.

Right.

We know these kinds of folks. Yeah, I don't.

I run a poll in my class every year when I ask like, what you guys all lift. And of course like, I make them put their hand up. I'm like, you guys are in my class, you're going to put your hand up, let you lift weights. And then I ask them like, why do you train? And like health is long term. Health is like on the list. And they all like, I'm like, any of you that selected health are liars. Like, you're 20 to 25. You are not exercising for health. You are exercising because you want to look a certain way or get stronger. Once you get past that undergraduate age, though, the actual desire to live longer and better actually becomes pretty real.

Yeah, I think that there are people who want to feel better. They know that exercise and the results from exercise can make them feel better. But yeah, that second bin tends to be more focused on the aesthetic change, it seems, or being strong. And then the third category I think are people I know a lot of folks like this who really enjoy what are normally considered endurance type activities. And here I just want to highlight again what you so beautifully illustrated in previous episodes. That you can gain a lot of endurance even using weights or machines. It just depends on how you use them. Right. It's not about the exercise, about how you perform them, et cetera. And you again beautifully provided all those details as to how to create endurance, regardless of equipment standards, et cetera. But that third category seem to be people who enjoy running, cycling, swimming, hiking, dancing, activities that they can do for long periods of time that often when will involve some sort of skill that is based on improving motor patterns. So maybe not so much stride, but certainly for people that are really love tennis, people that love a sport like golf, right. They want to be able to not just walk, you know, they want to walk the 18 holes, they want to have a great golf swing, et cetera. I'm not a golf player, so forgive me if my nomenclature is off golf swing.

I would say they're three. Golfer.

Yeah, golfer.

You don't play golf.

Oh, got it. You don't play golf.

Oh, you play golf. You wouldn't call a golf player.

I played miniature golf a few times and that's about it. Although Stanford does have a beautiful golf course, I'm told I should learn how to play golf.

I'll come up and play golf if you want. You come up, I'll play it. I'll tell you how it works. Get me on that course.

I can see it from my lab. So category one, I think is a significant fraction of people. So as we lay out these different ways to assess goals and as we approach the structure of a, of a program, as you'll tell us, if we could perhaps touch back to those every once in a while, again, I'm taking the liberty of assuming that we will net about 80 to 90% of people out there. Again, those categories being people who want to lose some fat, maybe build some muscle in specific areas on their body and really want to be healthy. They want to feel great and they want to have a long health span, AKA end lifespan. They want to live a long time feeling great. Second category, people want to build more muscle and strength. Sure, they don't want to damage their health, but that's not their main focus. Their main focus is on building muscle and strength. And then that third category of people who really want to do more endurance type work feel great and strong doing it, but not because they can carry heavy weights while they're doing it, but rather they can feel vital and they can push harder for longer and maybe even translate that to some of the more recreational type activities or sports like tennis and things that are more long duration playing soccer, maybe even softball or things of that.

So surfing, swimming.

So those three categories, maybe we could call those bin A, B and C for sake of today's discussion. I think if you're willing to embrace, I think that will be informative toward our listeners in a way that simply not assuming what people's different goals are might not be able to accomplish. Said differently. Hopefully by doing that, people will derive a lot more from the description of the program that you're going to give us.

Love it.

Now, I am certain that I want to let you return to your list of the five things that people need to consider when establishing a exercise program.

Yeah, great, let's do that. I also do want to acknowledge a point you've brought up acutely. Exercise doesn't mean just lifting weights. That's my background, that's what I spend my time on. So I sort of default to examples in that category. But it doesn't have to be that you've articulated plenty of other ways where you can get amazing forms of exercise that have nothing to do with lifting weights. So for those folks in was it bin C or 3, I can't remember.

We go A is gain Muscle, lose fat, be healthy now and forever. Bin B is get stronger, gain muscle, don't damage your health, but not really focus on health in the immediate term. And then bin C is want to play or do endurance type activities and quote, unquote, feel strong doing it. So have more vigor to be able to do that longer and maybe with more attention to skill, et cetera. And of course also want to improve their health.

What you've effectively done is you've given us three different avatars with three different goals. Right. So the next step for each person or group is going to be to identify their defenders. But before we get that, we got to close the loop on this smart thing. So in each case, they have either chosen that goal based on their personal preference, or perhaps they did our fitness testing protocol and realized they need to gain strength. So whether the reason they chose to be in buckets B or A or C was because of our protocol or it's just personal preference, it really doesn't matter. They still want to go through this process of laying out their goals and making sure that again, they are specific. Right. So let's go through Ben C, which is a great one. So you want to have more energy and you want to feel stronger when you're doing your kite boarding. You want to feel stronger when you finish your round of tennis, round of golf, game of tennis. Okay, great. That's a different strength. Absolutely. See, I hear. I know what you're saying, though. Amazing. So that goal needs to be specific to that. Right. So it would be hard to make a goal like, I want to feel better at the end of my round. Boy, what? That depends on too many other factors. A better goal would be something like this. I want to be able to run this two mile loop that I do around my neighborhood and I want to do it and have a lower heart rate at the end or I want to be able to get my heart rate back, my heart rate recovery back faster. Amazing. That will probably align with you feeling quote, unquote, stronger with it. Right. So I did the same course and either I can do it at the same speed and it's not nearly as hard, or I can go faster, whichever one, it doesn't matter. But that would be an example of a specific goal. The other buckets you laid out kind of already have specific goals. Like, I want to get stronger. Well, that's going to be the goal. The other one is going to be, you know, I want to lose some fat. Okay. That's kind of the goal is sort of implicit. In that it's the other people where you're just like, I don't really care about that. I just want to be able to surf the great waves and then not feel exhausted afterwards. All right, cool. Well, then you still should pick a metric that is not that activity. Maybe because it won't be within your control depending on the waves and the temperature and all this stuff that you can use as a proxy to say, if I were to do something that represented me feeling probably better when I surf, what would that be? And it's not perfect, but it would be still as specific as you could get. You still want to make sure it's measurable. Again, this example might be something like you're going to go to the pool and time how long it takes you to swim 800 meters or something. Right? It's attainable. And then you'll set a goal that's realistic and timely. I'm going to improve by 5% in the next two months. Okay, cool. That probably falls in the realm. And then you're making the assumption that if you did that, you'll probably feel better when you go out to do your primary activity, which is, say, surface. The reality of it is every time we work with an actual athlete, that's what we do. Athletes don't come to us to lift weights, they don't come to us to get stronger. They come to us because they want to play better and they want to stay on the field more. What we're trying to convince them of is if you do this thing in the gym, then that should translate into you being better at your sport, recovering faster, being less injured, but it's still just a proxy. And so that's all you're doing with these other non specific goals, especially when they're performance based goals. And we didn't package it that way, but that's really what you talked about for Ben C. There. It is a performance based goal. I want to be able to perform when I'm in the field. And my brain, that's a sport. And your brain, it's when you're at yoga class, it's the same thing. We've said this earlier in our series that if you have a body, you're an athlete. I want to prepare your body such that it can do exactly what you want it to do. You then get to have the choice of what you ask it to do. You call it a sport, you call it your Saturday hike with your family. I don't really care. It's the same thing. You get control of your body performing the way you want it to perform. And that's what this whole thing is about. Great. So now that we've covered, I think as much as we need to regarding assessing and choosing a goal, I want to get back to this idea of identifying your defender. So you really need to think carefully about what is stopping you from hitting those goals. And so you're forecasting a little bit. You're also going back into your own personal history, right? Do you have history of knee pain? Do you have a history of working too much? Do you have a history of a lot of travel? Do you have a history of getting sick a lot? What are these things that are happening that are going to stop you from hitting your goal? A couple of examples I've already laid out. So we don't need to go too much longer here. But in the case of somebody who is in maybe bin A right, which is I want to lose some fat, maybe gain a little bit of muscle. Okay, what's stopping you from the strength and conditioning side? Is it the fact that you can't train consistent enough? Is it a fact that when you go to train, you don't know what to do? Is it a fact that when you go to train, you train your ass off and you're not getting results? Okay, great. All three of these different scenarios are going to result in different programs because they have different reasons you're failing. And that is really critical. Instead of just going, I want a fat loss program and picking one up off the Internet, it may not actually be addressing the point of failure for you. So the sooner you can choose your programs based on why you're failing, the sooner you'll start getting results. So you have to run a little bit of a critical analysis there. And it can be, you know, something scientific and it could be a measurement. And it also could just be you thinking about you've tried this in the past and why didn't it work? I wasn't that interesting. Okay, tell me more about why it wasn't interesting. I'm not really into machines and that's all I had. Okay, great. Or I loved it. I loved the gym I was at and I was getting results, but it was so far away. Okay, interesting. Why did you stop before? Why didn't it work? Or if it did work in the past, amazing. Let's go back to something similar. But has your life changed at all? Is there anything different about now than when it worked three years ago? Yes. No. If not, maybe we run it right back. If it is okay, we're going to sort of predict those things and you want to work effectively. What I'm saying is, throughout this entire 10 step process is going to be, you want to make sure that there are the non negotiables that are in your life that you know are going to be ahead of your fitness program. And you want to work with those things, not against them. Right? Because life will win. When it comes to your children, when it comes to your job, life is going to win. You're gonna have to give up something. It's gonna take some hard work. But we want to fight the right battles for most people, right? Even for our professional athletes, we get this all the time. It's just like they have nothing else to do but train, right? Like, whoa, hold on now they're getting traded. They have agents to deal with, they may not have a contract, they have families. I think life will get in the way, I promise. And so you want to fight the battles that you can win, not ones that you're going to lose. And so that's really what this game is about. So if the battle is, hey, my job is super hectic. Okay, great, we're gonna come up with a different strategy that's more flexible. Maybe I'm still gonna hold you to the fire. I'm not gonna be easier on you, but we're just not going to try to set up a situation where you have to do this workout Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday because you know, your job is on the road and you're the provide all the, the, you know, income for your family and your. Okay, whatever. The thing is, right, that's what we really want to identify. So when I say identify your defenders, you need to run a little bit of a critical analysis on this and a little bit of a tool I'll use for. This is a modification of another system I stole from Kenny Kane, which is what we call the quadrant system. So you can imagine everything in your life goes into one of four buckets. All right? Now bucket one, I'm just going to call business. And this is anything to do with your job, income, sort of all those things. Bucket two is relationships. So again, this could be family or love life, like anything that we would call relationships. Social connection, purpose, anything right there. Bucket three is your fitness and bucket four is your recovery. So one of the first steps we take is we walk through this and we say, all right, you have 10 points total and you get to distribute these 10 points across the four areas. So not 10 each, you get 10 total. And so we walk through and we say, right now, where are you giving your points? And we could do this right now for you if you'd like. Or I could make up a scenario. Do you want to do it? Sure. Great. So, Andrew, right now, in the last month, if you had 10 points total in those four categories, where would you be distributing the most points? Which category and how many points would that be?

Business. My work.

Business. Work, job, sort of all those things. And how many out of 10?

Which doesn't, I should say, ever quite feel like work? Running a laboratory and doing the podcast doesn't ever really feel like work in the traditional sense, but it's career, it's work. It involves relationships, but it certainly doesn't enhance my fitness, except of my vocal cords and recovery. So with those notes there, I would say four to five.

You pick five. Five. Fair. That's the most common number five. Business. Five.

Great. Once again, I'm typical, which makes me happy.

You nailed it.

One of the few ways in which I've been accused of being normal. I pick five for business.

No kidding. What's the next highest and what's that score?

I do invest in relationships. I would say. Does it have to be around. Can it be.

It has to be a whole integer.

A whole integer. Two.

Two. All right. We're seven out of ten here. So would you say it is fair that you spend roughly two and a half percent of your. It's not necessarily time. It's energy, time, focus, sort of all of these things, two and a half times as much on your business as you do in your relationships.

It varies depending on what's going on. Feels a little skewed in the direction of business. So I might want to adjust to a 4, 3 ratio there. Maybe not, but I think I'm going to hold to five. Two business relationships. And then just for sake of example, and because this doesn't seem like an exceedingly precise measure, it can have some slop, of course.

Where would you put fitness and recovery?

I definitely put energy into fitness, so I'm going to give that also a two.

Yep. Which leaves one for recovery. Great. That what you just laid out is, again, the most quintessential split you could have. In fact, you run this game on everyone, they're going to come up with basically the same answer unless they don't work out or whatever. Right. Okay, so a couple of rules here. Recovery must be, at minimum, half of your fitness allocation. In your case, two to one, you're fine.

I thought you'd say it has to be half like it has to be 5 out of 10 points. It doesn't leave much for anything else.

I would like it to be minimum 20 of the total, which means 2 out of 10 now. And when I say recovery, I don't simply mean muscle. I mean you need personal time, you need meditation, you need enjoy sleep, you need to go to a concert and get out and see people. And so like whatever the things that give you energy back. Right. Some folks that's personal time, some folks that's social time, whatever that means to you.

Right, Yeah, I actually get a lot of energy from my work and so it, you know, that's why some of these numbers are a little bit, you can always kind of cloak the underlying dynamics.

So here's what we do from this game. We look at that and we say if that's our split, Andrew, five, three, two, one.

Five, two, two one.

Five, two, two, one.

I'd love to be able to put three in relationships just because. But then I need 11 out of.

So here's the fun game we play. You're currently at this and you don't get to add to 11, you have to stay at 10. Your 10 is different than my 10 maybe. Right, but 10 is 10 or just whatever the maximum you can actually do, it's you. So if we went back to our training goal, whatever that goal was for you, and we went back to our defenders, we would look at this score now and say is 3 out of 10. Fitness was 3. Right.

Fitness is 2, so it's 5, 2, 2, 1.

Is 2 out of 10 sufficient to hit that training goal in that timeframe you described? And let's say you said I want to hit a new PR in my mile six months from now.

Yeah. For simplicity's sake and also because it's largely too, I'm going to put myself in what I referred to as bin A earlier. My bifab percentage is okay. It's in the range that I would like, but I would like to bring it down a little bit. Probably gain a little bit muscle here and there, keep regain some endurance and certainly my immediate and long term health are extremely important to me.

Great. So then the question, and the answer may be yes, that this is the optimal split for you. If it is not, then we have to make a choice. We either alter the goal or the timeline to make it realistic or we alter our quadrant. And then if we're going to alter our quadrant, the next step is critically important. We need a list of very specific life actions that we're going to take that allow.