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Hey, y'all. Nimminy here. I'm the host of a brand new history podcast for kids and families called historical records. Executive produced by Questlove, the story pirates, and John Glickman, Historical Records brings history to life through hip hop. Get the kids in your life excited about history by tuning in to Historical Records.

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You wanna gain more muscle. You wanna have more energy. You wanna have more mental focus. Okay. Why haven't you done that before?

I want to find what is that single thing that stopped you from winning, and that's all I wanna work on. Professor of kinesiology. Expert in muscle physiology. Doctor Andy Galpin. What's gonna burn more calories?

Walking a mile or running a mile?

Running a

mile. A calorie is energy. Walking a mile, running a mile is the same thing.

If someone's listening right now and they're thinking fitness and strength are my big goals this year, how would you encourage them to think about it?

Number 1 predictor of success with training programs is

The number 1 health and wellness podcast.

Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The 1, the only Jay Shetty.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose. The place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Today's guest is gonna help us do that for our physiology, for our body, for our muscles. I'm excited for you to listen to this episode because I know it's gonna make a big change in your life this year.

Today's guest is Andy Galpin, professor, podcast host, and leading expert in human performance science with a PhD in human bioenergetics. Andy focuses on muscle physiology, strength training, and performance science. Andy has worked with elite athletes across sports including Olympians, UFC fighters, NBA, and MLB all stars. Welcome to On Purpose, Andy Galpin. Andy, it's great to have you here.

Oh, it's our pleasure, man. We have many friends in common. It's about time here.

Yeah. I love it. Thank you so much for for being here. And I wanna dive straight in. And today, what we did is we asked our audience to tell us what they wanted to know from you.

And we had so many questions. People had so many things they wanted to learn. And I think when we're releasing this, it's gonna be at a time when it's, like, kicking off the year. Like, this is a big goal for people. This is what people wanna achieve this year.

They wanna be fitter. They wanna be stronger. And so the first question I wanted to ask you is, what routine is the best for someone that wants to gain muscle and lose weight?

There is no specific direction to that. And I know that was, like, the most deflated answer possible after that enormous setup. But I'm saying that because I actually want to empower people, not the opposite. Having done this for many years, having taught for a very long time, 1 thing that is very clear, if you give hyper specific answers to questions like that, when someone hears that and they go, oh, I can't do that exercise because my knee hurts, or I can't train like that because I fill in the blanks. Right?

Then they often feel like they can't do anything. And so what you do is you take people from 10 to 0, and I hate that. I wanna go everyone from 0 to 2. I wanna get somebody to 10, but I want all the wins we can possibly get. And so if you look at that combination of things you said, 2 very things specific things.

Grow muscle, lose fat. Okay. Great. That gives you effectively every option under the table for your fitness routine. There are some core things that will lay in that foundation now that will be true regardless of your approach.

I can hit those very quickly. This is a basic saying that we will and there's variations of this, but the concepts are few and the methods are many. As long as you hit these next couple of concepts, you can choose all kinds of different methods. The methods are things like how many days you do it. You use kettlebell?

Do you run? Do you go outside? Do you use group classes? You go those are all methods methods. They're important.

We can get to that detail. But concepts are few. Here's what that's gonna look like. Are you doing something consistently? If you look across the literature for many years now, the strongest predictor of success with training programs, fitness programs, exercise programs, and nutrition programs, number 1 predictor of success, short and long term, is adherence.

You have to be consistent. I would take a consistent approach with a suboptimal program, with a bad program, any day of the week for that particular question. So be consistent. Second 1 is there's gotta be some sort of progressive overload. That doesn't mean you have to lift more weights.

It doesn't mean you have to train harder or more. But there has to be some sort of intentional progress that could be done within the day, the week, the month. You get lots of ways to get there. But be consistent and try to keep progressing eventually. Outside of that, we're getting into more nuance.

And so now we're thinking about things like you probably wanna use really high efficient movements. These are exercise types, movement patterns that have a lot of caloric expenditure with minimal time. Right? Most likely, I'm inferring from that question that person probably doesn't wanna spend 20 hours a week in their fitness. And so you wanna choose things.

This is not typically isolation work. So I wouldn't spend 20 minutes doing bicep specific exercises for that particular person. You gotta get a lot of muscles work, and you gotta burn a lot of calories. So this could be a combination of some type of strength training program and some type of cardiovascular program or anything in between. The reality of it though is I'll reiterate 1 more time.

And because I've done this many, many times, personally. This is consistent across the literature. Those 2 goals can be achieved with no or minimal cardiovascular training. These can be achieved with very minimal strength training. These can be achieved with body weight training.

With any other combination of those things, you have tons of options there. So if that is truly your goal, pick something that's gonna give you a little bit of both sides of that equation. Stay safe. Don't get hurt. You still gotta work and our because this is our third 1.

There's gotta be consistent effort there. So be consistent. Keep doing it. Try to be high productivity with that, and then you gotta try. I need a 6 to 7 out of 10 on an effort scale.

Would love to see a little bit more, but I'll live with 6. Below 6, we may not be having enough actual stimuli to grow muscle or lose weight. But you give me those 3 things, and most people are gonna have a tremendous amount of success.

Absolutely. Thank you for that. I appreciate the refreshing answer and not having to be specific. And and I agree with you. I think that's that's a very fair way to go, and it's actually the only truth and reality to it as well.

Yeah.

You know, honestly, I have a hard time when I get questions like that because I want at home as a listener, when I hear people on podcast, I'm like, would you just give me, like, 1 example? So I'm so sensitive to do that. But the reality of it is, it's not the most honest answer. It's not the answer scientifically. And me, coaching people now, the people that I personally train, the non athletes, it's not real.

That's not really how I would approach them. So I I try to do my best to give an honest answer. And I know that's not always as tangible, but it is honest reality.

Yeah. If someone's listening right now and they're thinking fitness and strength are my big goals this year, how would you encourage them, like, the work the people that you work with? If someone's like, Andy, train me now, coach me now, how should I be thinking about my goals over the next 12 months? How would you encourage them to think about it?

There's a handful of ways, we will always start at the top. Okay. What's what's our biggest constraint? And that sounds a little bit backwards, but we call these things performance anchors. So you want a goal.

Right? And I use the soccer example here, football, maybe, if you're listening. You wanna kick you want a goal. And there's something in that way. There's a defender.

There's a goalie there. What's your goalie? And I'm saying that to say, is it finances? Is it time? Is it injury?

Is it you've never been to the gym before and you're nervous? Because once I know that, the entire path I'm taking is going to be different based on that very first filter. You wanna gain more muscle. You want to fill in all those blanks. K.

Why haven't you done that before? Have you tried in the past and failed? Have you never tried? That's the biggest lever we have to work on. If it is a finance issue, I can't afford gym membership.

K. Got it. Now I'm gonna take you on a totally different route. If it is unlimited finance, like, okay. Now we're doing, you know, next level stuff.

If it's somewhere in the middle, we have different answers. So this could be a combination of saying, identify why you failed in the past or why you've never started and overcome that barrier, and I'm done. I'm gonna stop right there. That'll give me 6 months. Right?

In this initial case, in that person you laid out, I'm cons I'm going back to what I said earlier. Adherence is number 1 and consistency over time. So I want this 1st January push, this February push towards fitness, like new year, new me. I wanna win. I want wins, wins, wins.

I don't care if it's an optimal program. It doesn't necessarily matter. We'll come to those details later. But I want you to have an experience through fitness that went yeah. That was kinda it was okay.

It wasn't so bad. I well, I wasn't super sore and I okay. Now you're a believer. Now I can get that 2 days a week to 3. Now I can get you invest $50 and get you a kettlebell at home.

K. Great. Like, we can start pushing the pace here. If we do the opposite and we get these big, huge charges, that can work if you're an all in type of person. You, maybe I could get you on that.

Alright. Like, let's get it personality wise. But if that's not your personality, oftentimes, that is a crash and burn by February or March, and that actually dissuades you probably more from starting again the next time. So for the general population, as a aggregate answer here, I want to find what is that single thing that stopped you from winning, and that's all I wanna work on. When we program this for our executive clients and all those, we look at the year.

And we look at this whole thing and we use what we call a quadrant model. So the quadrant is you get 10 total points, and you can choose to spend those 10 total points across 4 areas. Right? So 10 total, not 40 total. Here are your 4 areas.

And we do this practice before they start anything. They don't get a workout before any this question is answered. We go through this exercise. We lay out their answer. This gets posted on a note card.

It goes in their most vulnerable place. This could be their office. Where's the point where it's gonna you were gonna work out today and then you didn't? Is that your Netflix TV? Is that the office because you wouldn't stop working?

Is it right? You get held accountable to that and we're gonna hold you accountable to that. Here's what the quadrant looks like. Quadrant 1 is we'll just call it business. Whatever you do for your life and your finances okay.

That's business. Quadrant number 2 is social, family, relationships, whatever that means to you. Number 3 is your physical health. Again, these these are wide ranging definitions and everyone gets to define it for themselves. Quadrant number 4 is recovery.

So we start off by asking, and we always do this. And if if you wanna play along, you're welcome to. This is kinda fun sometimes.

Let's do it. Great.

Let's do that right now for you. So you got 10 total chips to start with business. Of your 10, how many do you wanna spend? Let's say this is January and you're gonna get kick started. Jay, what are you gonna put?

And it's time. Am I thinking about in terms of time or energy? Or

It's all of it. Right? So we intentionally keep it vague. If I say you got life energy Yeah. You got 10.

Right. Could be money, could be combination, focus, attention, resources. However that makes sense to you. Yeah.

It's business, family Biz let's start with business. Health and? Recovery. Recovery. Right.

So business and I would and over what period of time? It doesn't matter. You define it. Okay. So I'd say, yeah, over the year.

Let let's do a let's do it a quarter. Quarter 1.

Over the quarter. Okay. Yeah. So I'd say, honestly, where I'll probably prioritize would be, like, 5. Great.

Yeah. Most common answer is 5. Okay. By far, the most common answer is 5. Nobody wants to say 6 because in their hand, they're go Haven't got enough left.

Yeah. And no 1 and Windows is not 4. Yeah. Right. So we're at 5 for business.

Now let's go on to, relationships.

Relationships, I'd say, is, well, my work I business relationships are very strong in that sense. So my personal relationships, I'd it's an easy 1 for me. My my circle is small, so I'd say

2. Okay. Great. We're at 7 now. Right?

How many is your fitness?

2.

Great. Now we have an obvious 1 left.

Yeah.

Couple of rules we have in this 1. By the way, what you just gave is by far the most common total answer. Yep. Almost everybody has this problem. There's issues with what you just said.

We never let recovery be less than half of our next highest category. I'm happy you did 2 in 1. That's great. Most people recovery end up going to 0. What does recovery mean?

It doesn't necessarily mean a massage or sauna. Fine. That can be it. Recovery can be a night out with friends. Recovery can be I need alone time.

Recovery tons of ways. But what is the thing that gives you energy back is what we're trying to go after. Physical fitness, same sort of thing. There's always overlaps between these things. We will work through you on that 1.

So that that routine you laid out is fine. Okay. You gave me 2 for physical fitness. I'm gonna construct a program now that says this is at most 20% of Jay's energy. If I come then and get you with this program 5 days a week, I know I've lost already.

You're not gonna get it. And if you are, are you gonna get it for 3 straight months? You just told me business was a really big priority. At the same token, when you come back to me and you're asking and you're wondering why the program isn't getting you the success that you want, I'm gonna say, you gave it 20%. What expectations did you have?

K? What do you wanna take it from? If you're not willing to move it from somewhere else, there's only finite things that a human can do. So we're gonna walk backwards from that equation. So I might say, fine.

We're there. Now we get to quarter 2, and you wanna adjust that. You want more results. You wanna lose more fat. Fill in the blank for the adaptation.

I go, great. Where are we gonna pull it from? It's not gonna come from recovery. Now it means less business, less friends. This is the ultimate dynamic we have to play.

Right? People don't wanna do the recovery, and they don't wanna pull it from there, but then they expect massive gains in fitness. We can get you through short periods of time. We have these special scenarios all the time where it's like, hey. The Olympics are coming.

World champions are coming. We we can juice up this a little bit with all kinds of little tricks, but those don't last. And sometimes, they burn you into a bigger hole. So if we're thinking long term strategy with you, I'd say, great. I'm fine with 2.

We'd scope up a little program. And in your brain, it goes to 2. And I'm watching. And I'm like, Jay, you didn't do this thing for recovery. It's been 3 days.

It's been a week. We're at 0 for recovery. Don't expect fitness goals with no recovery. Bam. Jay, been out went out again last night.

Went out a little again. Took another trip. Friends has been at 3 or 4. You get the point here. Right?

So we can hold you really accountable to that and saying, if you're not getting your fitness goal, number 1 starter is, are you even giving it a chance to succeed? Mhmm. If not, we have a nonstarter, and we have to change our expectations.

Yeah.

If you want more results, you gotta give me more pie. Give me a bigger shot at it, and we'll get more results.

Yeah. Super smart. Yeah. I I really appreciate the constraint approach too. Yeah.

I found my straight was travel. And so I haven't traveled for the last 6 weeks and I've felt my absolute best with sleep, food, diet, everything.

I've been on the road for probably 8 straight weeks and I'm the opposite.

Yeah. Exactly. And and that was my my life was like, I'd be working out for 1 week, eating right for 1 week, everything's good, then traveling for 1 week. Then 1 week so I was 1 week on, 1 week off, and then I'd planned to spend these 2 months in LA Good. And it has been life changing from a workout point of view, sleep point of view, recovery point of view.

Everything we just talked about. Yeah. I can do I have been doing 5 days of workouts a week, you know, eating really well, whatever, because I'm in 1 place. Because I'm saying all of this to reiterate your point. It was all about the constraint.

Always. It was all about the constraint. I had the motivation. I had the driver. I had the discipline.

I had all that stuff. But travel was the thing that made me feel like I was having gains for a week and then losing it, and then getting discipline and then losing it, and that was just exhausting.

So let let me run you through 2 specific examples on that. I love you brought up travel. This is super easy. We, have a coaching program called Arete. This is this, like, excellence in kinda everything program.

If you were an Arete with us right now, I would say, great. You've been home. I'm gonna change your entire program. It's gonna be more gym stuff. We're gonna lift more weights.

We're gonna have a very specific plan. I'm gonna ask you to report back exactly how much you lifted, and we're gonna track it. And we're gonna do heavy there. Had we flipped the role and you were all of a sudden on the road, I would say, great. If I gave you that same program, that's gonna be a terrible 1.

It's not gonna work. Why? Because everywhere you land, you're gonna have to go to find a gym. It's not gonna work, and then the hotel gym sucks. Like, I've set you up for failure.

That's bad coaching. I would have sent 6 weeks going, you know what? Here's what we're gonna do. It's called a flexible program. We don't need anything more than a band and a kettlebell.

K? Maybe not even the kettlebell. And we're gonna rotate the days. So what I mean by that is, right now, if you're at home, I would say, okay. Mondays are this, Tuesdays are this, Wednesdays are this.

And when you didn't do that on Wednesday, I'd be calling you. Why didn't you finish? Why didn't we train Wednesday? I don't care. I'm on it.

Right? That doesn't work when you're on the road. I would do more flexible program where we have a concept we're trying to hit. We're trying to get a strength training day in. You do that strength training day whatever day that comes up.

And as soon as you get it in, we check it off. And then we have, say, the next day is gonna be a long duration workout. Great. You get that in when you can. But we also have flexibility because when you go, hey.

You know what? I got an extra hour today. There's no gym, but I went for an hour walk. Boom. Got that thing in.

You have different things you can plug and play based on availability, time, and energy. Right? So that's the way to have you success. At the end of the 6 weeks, we wouldn't have probably made a ton of progress on you if you're on the road constantly, but we would have not gone backwards anywhere. The the literature is really clear.

The science is clear. You can maintain muscle size. You can maintain muscle strength very, very well. Cardiovascular fitness is incredibly stable with 1 or so training sessions per week. Mhmm.

We could've kept you right where you're at. And then we would've looked at this and said, okay. Our expectations for progress are not gonna be high during Jay's 6 weeks of travel. Let's all set expectation here. But when when we get home, we're getting after it, and our expectations are higher.

Mhmm. So at the net end of both of those, you add them together and and you see where I'm going with that. Right?

Yeah.

So it's not just expecting yourself to to gain £5 of muscle every single month. It's unrealistic. Yeah. We don't look at the whole quarter or the whole year is what we in our table, we look at the whole year for people. We go, okay.

Great. Quarter 1 is not the quarter we're gonna go after it. We're gonna work on mobility. We're gonna work on our breath work. We're gonna work on thousand other things that can be done on the road, can be done to traveling.

We're gonna get our best gains in fill in the other blank. When we've got maybe it's Q3. And we actually have goals for each quarter for the year that are plotted out, and so we give people the best chance of success. The best example I can give of that is quarter 4 is the worst possible time to have fat loss goals in America. Like, it's impossible.

You run into Halloween, I have a little bit of candy. Right? And then it's, like, well, I'll get back on it, but reality it is, like, Thanksgiving is gonna be here in a couple of weeks. All the way out through New Year. Yeah.

Terrible. If you try to have it for most people, a huge fat loss school, you're gonna lose. So we don't play that game. You know, we typically focus on this part of the year. We're gonna shift towards muscle growth.

That's when you need excessive calories. Right? Let's feed the beast. Let's not fight our life. Life will win.

We're gonna go back typically just as, you know, big examples here. It's different for everyone. We will focus more typically on on fat loss, quarter 2. You know why? No holidays, nothing around, and everyone has a little bit extra motivation to look a little bit better over the summer when the sun comes out, and they're more likely have their shirts off, clothing down.

So it fits life a little better. Is is you see my point here. Right?

Seasons. Totally. Seasons of when to shift. And sometimes, we have 1 goal. It's really basic.

It's really simple. It's like I wanna do this, and it's not possible throughout the year. And we don't shift and mold it. And I think Andy, you know, I'm taking a couple of steps back here, but it comes from this societal view of what fitness is. Right?

Like, that's and I wanna talk about that with you because

I love this. Yeah.

Because I just feel like as I'm listening to you, I know it's 1 of the biggest challenges is we don't actually know it's like every year there'll be a new thing like strength is really important, protein is really important, this whatever. Right? And it just there's a new fad every year and and I wanna talk about that with you. But I think for a lot of us, we don't really know what the pillars of fitness are. Like, we don't know what defines someone as fit.

We just have goals like, oh, I want abs this year. I want this this year. I want less belly fat this year. And, you know, for someone who grew up overweight, I grew up overweight. And then when I changed my diet, started working out, I just got super skinny and lean.

It's like, to me, there was a point in my life where I just believed if I was lean and that I wasn't overweight, then I was healthy. Right? It was as basic as that. And I think a lot of us carry that around where it's like you see someone with abs or whatever you want, and it's like, yeah, they're healthy. They're fit.

If you had to break down and say, what is the pursuit of fitness? What's the answer?

Yeah. No. I absolutely love that. So at its highest category, we always define it as people generally want 3 things in their fitness. They wanna look good, they wanna feel good, and they wanna perform good.

Pardon my grammar. Right? Now what does look mean? I don't know. You tell me.

You wanna have this look or you don't want I I do not care. But at some point, you want your body to look a certain way or not like a certain way. Up to you to define. You want it to feel a certain way. You want it to feel strong.

You want it to feel fast. You want it to feel mobile. You want it to feel I I don't care. You define that. Then you wanna perform.

What's that mean? You wanna have more energy. You wanna have more mental focus. You want your digestion problem to go away. You don't want that knee pain gone.

Okay? So it's it's a look, a feel, or performance metric. Absolutely. Ultimately, everybody's after. Right?

Yeah. So from our professional athletes to non to the students that work in my lab for our research questions, that's the first lens I'm looking at. What does that mean for you? So when I'm designing a when we're designing a study or we're, again, working individuals, filter number 1, what does fit what does look mean to you? What does feel?

What does perform look to you? Now I'm calibrated. Right? Because I I love this question so much. Fitness can be, I just wanna be able to surf every day.

Amazing. I'm in. Right? Fitness just means I want more energy with my kids. I'm I'm I'm here for all of that.

All of that can be rooted in performance. We have a saying that if you have a body, you're an athlete, Which is to say, I don't care if you wanna use those physical abilities to shoot a basketball or hit a golf ball, like some of our clients, or you wanna use that to just run your business better, be a better leader, make better decisions, to be able to work more hours and less fatigue. Fine. You're still asking your body to perform. It's the exact same thing except for a couple of little points at the end of physical movement skill.

Right? So that's answer number 1. Now taking this question entirely differently, if you look at what is generally true for most people, fitness is a combination of a handful of things. You wanna be able to do activities and not pay major consequences. That is it.

Right? I I wanna be able to walk up this dang hill and then not wake up tomorrow in in screaming pain. So it is a I want to do a, and I and I don't want b to happen as a consequence. Right? So I wanna empower everyone to be able to have that and then not pay major consequences, whether it's injury or handful of other things.

So for most people to be able to execute a a resilient physiology, that is to be able to do many things is it's 1 of the reasons, again, we called it Arte. It's it's this concept of I wanna be able to do many things and then not have severe consequences. So you're gonna have to have some semblance of physical strength, number 1. Right? Are you gonna need to be a power lifter or a bodybuilder or a weightlifter, blah blah blah, but minimal levels of strength.

If you wanna look at this from the medical perspective, I can make that argument. We can go into tons of the research.

I was about to ask you that. Yeah.

I'm Cheryl Swoops, WNBA champ, 3 time Olympian, and Basketball Hall of Famer. I'm a mom and I'm a woman.

I'm Tarika Foster Brasby, journalist, sports reporter, basketball analyst, a wife, and I'm also a woman.

And on our new podcast, we're talking about the real obstacles women face day to day.

See, athlete or not, we all know it takes a lot as women to be at the top of our game.

We wanna share those stories about balancing work and relationships, motherhood, career shifts. You know, just all the shit we

go through. Because no matter who you are, there are levels to what we experience as women.

And T and I, well, we have no problem going there.

Listen to levels to this with Sheryl Swoops and Tarika Foster Brasby. And Iheart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You can find us on the Iheartradio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, y'all. Nemeny here. I'm the host of a brand new history podcast for kids and families called historical records. Executive produced by Questlove, the Story Pirates, and John Glickman, Historical Records brings history to life through hip hop.

Fast slam, another 1 gone fast, bam.

Each episode is about a different inspiring figure from history. Like this 1 about Claudette Colvin, a 15 year old girl in Alabama who refused to give up her seat on the city bus 9 whole months before Rosa Parks did the same thing. Check it. Get the kids in your life excited about history by tuning in to historical records because in order to make history, you have to make some noise. Listen to historical records on the Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In a galaxy far, far away.

No, babe. That's taken. We're in our own world, remember?

Right. In our own world, we're 2 space cadets And totally normal humans. Sure. Totally normal humans. Embark on a

journey across the stars discovering the wonders of the universe 1 episode at a time.

We'll talk about life, love, laughter, and why you should never argue with your copilot.

Especially when she's always right.

Right. And if we hit turbulence,

just blame it on Mercury retrograde. Or Emily's questionable space piloting skills.

Hey. Join us on In Our Own World for cosmic conversations, stellar laughs And super corny dad jokes. Listen to In Our Own World as a part of the My Cutura Podcast cast network available on the Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't worry, we promise to avoid any black holes most of the time.

Why is strength so important? Because I feel like we've undervalued it for a long time, and you don't you could go your whole

life without I would say that we, as a strength conditioning field, didn't help ourselves much. This was actually the whole fun story here. In the early 1900, strength training was viewed as something that was really deleterious. It was dangerous. There's a long story here, but you'll have a heart attack.

It's this thing. Right? And that stayed along for a long period of time. The science said it was bad for you. And then the science changed.

In fact, there's a famous individual named doctor Karpovich, who himself was a scientific advocate of this is dangerous, and then collected more data and realized, actually, it's not dangerous. And then, oh my gosh. There's all these health benefits. That happened in the 19 fifties sixties. Right after that, on the back of it, you've got Arnold Schwarzenegger.

You've got pumping iron. You've got Conan. You've got these things. And you went from bad for my health to, oh my gosh, I can become a superhero. And this empowered a generation of men, mostly.

Oh my gosh. I can become a physical superhero. That was awesome, but the downside of that was everyone's association with them with strength training was muscle and bodybuilding. And that is a very limited perspective of strength. So scientifically, the people in this field were not strength training people.

The exercise physiologists, the nutritionist scientists for in most part, the 19 sixties through nineties were all endurance folks. And so you had no research being done. I mean, you couldn't make the argument anymore that it was bad for your health, but there was no argument that it was really great for your health. And they had a whole generation of kids like me who came up on that, but then also like science. Start saying, like, why are we doing studies on strength and high intensity stuff?

And, well, that only lasted so long before work started coming out in that area. And now it is so clear. We have mechanism. We have epidemiological evidence. We have randomized controlled trials in men and women, young, old, and the research goes on.

Physical strength is 1 of the single strongest, pun intended, predictors of lifespan. And so you've got lifespan, which is how long you're going to live. You have health span, which people talk about now, which is, you know, how how healthy are you within those years. And now, scientifically, we call that strength span. Right?

And what they're saying is strength span is not the only thing that matters, but it's an important characteristic to your health span. If you lack physical strength, a number of things start to happen. Number 1. This is 1 of the reasons why we look at, for the record, like, leg strength and grip strength as 2 of the most ubiquitous predictors. You'll see this all across the literature as statistically significant predictors of mortality.

And in fact, some of the papers that directly compare strength, again, mostly leg strength, leg extension, and grip strength to VO 2 max. Oftentimes, but not always, but oftentimes will show strength as a stronger predictor of mortality or all cause mortality than VO 2 max. So we've we've talked ad nauseam, you know, in the last bunch of years about important VO 2 maxes, and it's absolutely true. But strength is right there as an equivalent predictor of how long you're going to live. So the question is why?

Well, you have correlation and causation here. Lots of evidence on both sides. If you are weak, say, in your hands, it is a proxy for overall strength. So that in itself is is true. It's also direct intervention.

If you can't carry a bag confidently and you can't put a a backpack in an overhead compartment, you're not gonna take the bus. You're very less like you're much less likely to go on an airplane. This now get leads to secondary problems with social isolation. You're not confident. 1 of the single biggest predictors or 1 of the single biggest issues we have with unsuccessful aging is that people when people start to feel like they become a burden on society, they start to withdraw rapidly.

No 1 wants to be the person in line holding everybody up. No 1 wants like, you just you know all those examples there. Right? So people are more likely to just socially withdraw. And now we're having all the secondary problems of social isolation and even physical activity starts to go down because people don't leave their house.

They watch TV more and this whole cascade of things start to happen. And so we have direct and indirect mechanism there that say again, you don't have to be massively strong, but just maintain some semblance of grip strength. Your legs are gonna tell the same story. This is your interface with the world, your legs and your hands. And so your ability to locomote, to move throughout the world is mostly your legs.

If you don't feel confident that you can walk up the steps to that museum, slowly you stop going on those trips. You start doing that extra thing. It hurts too much. It's too exhausting. Again, fill in all the blanks here.

And so having some sort of physical leg strength gives you confidence that allows general physical activity, which then pays all those additional benefits. That doesn't even carry in account the direct physical benefits. So if we start looking at muscle specifically, muscle quality, and this can be defined a lot of different ways, is going to regulate in part things like your blood glucose. And you've, I'm sure, talked to many people about the importance of metabolic health. Skeletal muscle is gonna explain about 80% of the variance in your resting metabolic rate.

That's that's your, you know, your fast or slow metabolism. Again, 80% of the variance is gonna be explained by how much lean muscle you have for the most part. So you don't need to be huge, but losing muscle is is called sarcopenia. If it's you lose muscle faster than you should be with aging. Highly associated with inflammatory states, reduced resting metabolic rate, which then goes right back to the equation.

Glucose regulation, inflam like, all of these things start to happen. Last fire hose, I know I'm going after it this little bit here, but this is a a topic of clear passion to me, is you have the presence of strength as well as the act of the training itself. So going through the strength training process has additional benefits to things like your central nervous system, brain, and neurological system. The evidence is very clear. Your physical brain will stay healthier in terms of, white matter and things like that when you strength train.

It will stay around a lot longer. There's actually a lot of research now that's starting to points to the fact that things like dementia and Alzheimer's, late onset specifically, is highly preventable. And that by highly, I mean, it's an extraordinarily high number. You'd have to get a neuroscientist on to to really get numbers there, but it is way more preventable than we realize, specifically from physical activity and exercise as a as a not the only thing there, but a huge component to that. Lastly, why?

Remember, the way that you move throughout the world has 3 big components to it. So when you pick your leg up like that, you just shifted your toe. What end up happening there is 3 things. Some signal went from your central nervous system. This could be your brain, spinal cord.

It doesn't matter. Nerves. Send a signal. That's part 1. Part 2, those nerves activate or turn on muscles, and then the muscles contract.

That's part 2. Those muscles are surrounded by connective tissue. The connective tissue actually is tied in your bone. Pulling the connective tissue is what actually made your foot move like that. So connective tissue is part 3.

So the reality is, anytime you're strength training, you're keeping connective tissue healthier, you're keeping that muscle quality high, and you're con continuing to keep that nervous system activated. Keeping that nervous system alive is keeping your brain alive. It's physically what you're doing. It's keeping your entire nervous system around and fine tuned. It's the same process.

And so when we tend to think about strength training as something we're doing for our muscles, we cannot forget we're also doing it for our joints. We're doing it for our bones, and we're also doing it for our brains and nervous system.

It's, yeah. I I really appreciate the I actually please go into as much detail as you like. It's it's very useful to get to that granular level to actually understand the value of strength training because I think, like you said, because of the bad PR that it's had for so long, we've kind of

We did it ourselves. Yeah.

We did it ourselves. Yeah. I was gonna ask you, you specifically spoke about, leg muscles and, like, strength training there. What's the difference between walking because we always say, walk 10,000 steps if that's the least you can do. What's happening when you're walking 10,000 steps versus running 1 you know, a mile, 3 miles, 5 miles, whatever it may be, versus strength training with weights for your legs.

Great. I'm out of you're on fire. I love this question so much. Let me ask you a trick question. And I'm telling you I'm tricking you right now.

Yeah. Right? What's gonna burn more calories? Walking a mile or running a mile? Running a mile.

What's calorie? Oh, walking. Sorry. My bad.

A calorie is energy. Right. Calorie is work. Right. Walking a mile, running a mile Oh, same thing.

It's the same thing.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Now it's a bit of a trick because you probably would burn a few more calories walking Yeah. Or rather running rather because there's a little bit of inefficiency in the system.

Right. Right. Right.

But theoretically, if you're simply looking for caloric work, this is why we have so much evidence at this point. You can manage calories any way you'd like. Mhmm. That'll hit people. If you like long duration, slower stuff, you like, you know, cardio or heart I hate those phrases, but if that's ringing a bell to you Which phrases do you hate?

Things like cardio.

Okay.

I Because? It doesn't mean anything. Right? What's cardiovascular training? Anything that uses your heart.

Like, well, fantastic. That is literally every form of exercise. Right? Like, it doesn't make any sense.

Right. Right. Right.

If you hate that, though, you don't ever have to do it. We can get this same place, And the energy thing I just gave you is just a little silly example of saying, hey. Look. If we really actually get down to the physiology and science, these are not major differences like people think that they are. So I if I'm looking at fitness across the entire spectrum here, I think it's helpful to break it up into 3 global areas.

If you can't tell by this point in the show, I'm a I'm a teacher, so I love it. I like systems and numbers. Yeah. It's great. Number 1, what you laid out when you said walking 10,000 steps.

I will bucket that into physical activity. This is human movement. We should have a default state of human movement. Right? Whether this is walking, standing, playing with our kids, gardening, if you're in a laborer and you have a physical fantastic.

So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, my lifestyle is really active, because I'm a a construction worker or I'm a nurse and I'm walking up. Okay. You probably don't need to go out of your way to do a whole bunch of low intensity cardiovascular exercise. And you could, but if we're trying to get really efficient saying kind of what's my minimal viable option here, I could say if we got to give 1 up, let's give that 1 up because you're getting your 10000 or 15 or 20,000 steps. If you've ever paid attention to teachers, my wife spent 17 years as a preschool special ed teacher.

Her step count was outrageous because her whole life was just going 3 steps at a time trying to keep a kid from, you know, like, doing something really naughty or dangerous or whatever. So there's a lot of professions that are even outside of a true, like, construction jobs that get a lot of physical activity. They don't realize it. So that person, I'm gonna go, we're good there. Maybe we're gonna go float on category 2, which is we'll just call this structured cardiovascular exercise.

This is intentionally going to work out. This could be intervals. It could be swimming. It could be pickleball, sports, wrestling, like, any number of things. It could be higher intensity stuff or even lower intensity stuff, but you're you're going to work out.

Right? Heart rate's gonna be much higher here. You're probably gonna break a sweat or something like that. I hope you're not breaking a sweat walking. Like, that that's physical activity.

Right? So if you if those things help you kinda understand the general category of number 2, that's what we're after. So if we go back to that nurse, or that teacher, and we're thinking, okay. We're good over there, but we still may need to get 1 to 2 days a week, most likely, of this structured cardiovascular training. If we wanna make it simple, give me 1 day where we get a really high heart rate.

I'd like to I'll call it max. It doesn't necessarily need to literally be 100%, but it's gonna have to be well past comfort zone. 1 day a week is all we really need up there. Doesn't have to be a long time. I don't care the method you pick.

I don't care the machine you go on. Do you wanna run sprints? I'm all for it. You wanna swing kettlebells to do it? Like, great.

What I'm looking at is did we get that node knocked off? Yes. We got high, high, high up there. Cool. Category 3 is more of our traditional strength training thing.

And you asked a little bit of question earlier, but why is that different? Why is it not the same? Why isn't the walking and the higher intensity why I did sprints. Why my legs are tired and sore. Why is that not strength training?

Well, there's a very specific reason. First of all, it's pretty good. If that's all we can do, I'll take it. That's a win. But your muscles are actually constructed of 100 of thousands of individual muscle fibers.

So think of this like a ponytail. So a ponytail you think of as, like, 1 thing, but in reality, it's just a conglomerate of a bunch of individual hairs. That's how your muscles work. You have lots of hair, you know, we call them muscle fibers in there. Each 1 of those muscle fibers can be broadly categorized as either fast twitch or slow twitch.

Fast twitch does what it sounds like. Slow twitch is more has more mitochondria in it. It handles most of your basal physical activity. Right now, you and I are using almost exclusively slow twitch fibers.

Mhmm.

But nothing we're doing fast here. Right. And so they're not fatiguable. So if I ask you to take your finger, you know, maybe your right finger left finger. We'll do left finger.

And reach up and touch your nose with that left finger. Now what you just did right there is you activated a set of neurons that said, okay. Turn on the muscles in combination to touch that nose. The neurons you just turned on are very low threshold, which means they're easy to activate. They're very energy efficient, but they're gonna activate generally those slow twitch fibers.

Now if I said, grab that can of juice, will you? Or too sorry to call juice.

Yeah. What? Tea? Yeah. Sparkling tea.

Yeah. Okay. Great. Put that back in your left hand. Now do the same exact activity and raise it to your nose.

Boom. You just did the exact same process, but you needed to produce more force. Why? Because you got an extra 8 ounces or something in that. So your body went, wait a minute.

I'm assuming nothing was gonna be in my hand, but then I realized there's an additional amount of force needed. And so how did it increase force production? Your muscle fibers can't squeeze any harder. When they contract, they contract as hard as possible every single time. The only way that you increase force production is to turn on more of those nerves.

We just train our nervous system. That's what it is. More of those nerves turned on. If I were to now take that tea and we had it made it 40 kilos, the only way that you can continue to produce more force to lift it up to your nose is to turn on those additional muscle motor neurons, which are going to be your fast twitch muscle fibers. So if we extend this all out, when you're doing those other activities, you're not ever gonna get to that high threshold.

You're never gonna use those muscle fibers. And so 1 of the things we know happens with aging, when we omit strength training or strength training like activities, those motor neurons and those muscle fibers die. And this is why we lose strength and power as we age is because we never activate those neurons. I don't care about getting you PRs in the gym right now. We're trying to make sure that we just don't lose any functional capacity 50 years from now.

The sprinting that got your legs sore was good, but those nerves are turned on when force is required. Yeah. We didn't get enough physical force production. This is exact same reason why things like bodyweight exercise is great. It's good.

It can take people a long way. But, eventually, we're gonna run out of some options here, especially for our lower body, because we just won't have enough load to activate all the nerves or the motor units rather in the legs to truly get force production to keep them as strong and healthy as possible. So that third category we're talking about, remember, category 1 was kinda physical activity. Category 2 is that structured cardiovascular. Category 3 was structured strength training stunt.

You gotta give me 1 of those days a week. Right? So if we go back to this kind of nurse, lots of physical activity, 1 to 2 days a week of that, 1 to 2 days a week of something related to strength, we'd be good there. We change that scenario up to somebody more like you and I, who's probably not doing a lot

of steps throughout the day because we're sitting.

Yeah. Yeah. You and I are gonna have to engineer that back in our lives.

Yep.

So the fitness routine, I don't know any anybody about how your day is set up. I'm just assuming Yeah. You're sitting more than that type of person, that avatar. I would put more structured physical activity in your life. Mhmm.

We would maybe do something like, a 10 minute walk 3 times a day, 2 times a day. We would maybe hey. Let's add in a walking treadmill. Maybe let's add in like, we would look for little games that we can maybe we need to add in 1 or 2 days a week of an hour long hike as a part of your structured fitness program to get that back. Right?

So what we're always doing is, again, assessing the entire nature and saying those are the 3 big areas most people have. And you gotta move well within those categories and don't get hurt and never lose your flexibility. And there's more stuff. But categorically, these are the first layers of filters I'm going through and saying, okay. If we have to leave 1 of these things out, maybe we can.

Alright? So maybe you sit at a desk job, but then you go and you you do kickboxing class. Okay. We actually got node 2 out of there. Maybe now we just put some physical activity in there, and put some strength training in there, and we're actually we're okay.

We can survive with that. Right. Right? That's kind of the best way to think about your lifestyle and think, am I getting any of these 3? Great.

And then if okay. Optimal is not realistic to me, then what do I have to do to just kinda get MVP

Yeah.

Out? And and that's how I go about thinking it.

Yeah. That's brilliant. That's such a great breakdown because I think we often like you said, we kinda live in either extreme. We're living a lot of number 3 and not 1 or 2 and not 3 or however it works. And I think I've been through every phase in my life of doing tons of 1, ignoring 23, doing tons of 2, ignoring 1 and 3, and then doing tons of 3 and ignoring 12.

And so It's

hard to be really good at all 3. Yeah. This would go back to Quadrant. And we would say, okay. What's the realistic goal?

Yeah. Right.

Okay. Realistic goal is I'm I'm at 5 with business. Okay. Well, then maybe we go look. He doesn't have time to do 3 and a half hours of zone 2.

And then do a strength training and then do that's we're gonna lose that. But we're not gonna let that be an excuse for never doing it.

Yeah. Yeah.

So next quarter, we're gonna come back, and you gotta pay me back. Mhmm. We're gonna go back into it. We're gonna now emphasize maybe caloric restriction. We're gonna do more movement because it'll burn the same calories, and we have more time.

And you gotta promise me we're gonna take business down to 4.

Mhmm.

Deal. Great. Now you have a window. You're looking at it. You're going, okay.

I got this month. I got you don't have to feel bad about skipping this thing because there's a plan. There's a strategy. Right? But then we're also gonna be able to hold you accountable to something that was realistic, in making progress.

So you don't have to have those balances I talked about all year round. Mhmm. It's okay to shift them. Different priorities, different times of the year. Look at your schedule.

Look what you want. Look at what's realistic, and then set yourself up for the best chance for failure. Yeah. What for success. Sorry.

Yeah. For sure. What recovery aids or what supportive environment do you need for strength training? Because as you explained, that's, like, the most intense or the 1 that's really working you the hardest in that sense. What do you need to support that to make sure it's effective?

Right. So with recovery, when you think about strength training, recovery in most people's mind is how sore was I.

Mhmm.

K? However, you gotta remember with higher intensity cardiovascular stuff, that has a different recovery demand as well. So I don't want you to think strength training requires my recovery. Because we've seen a lot of people burn themselves into the ground with lots of high intensity cardiovascular training, and they have no idea why. Got it.

Right? Especially your your hard charging executives, decision makers, surgeons, high pressure jobs, high pressure, high pressure, high pressure, high ventilatory rate, high sympathetic drive all day, and then leave straight to the gym, high, high, high, high, high. Probably had a pre workout. And then guess what? We can't sleep.

Stunning. Right? Like so there's a recovery requirement for both pieces there, and they are separate. Right? So when we're thinking that higher intensity cardiovascular stuff, we're thinking more systemic.

Right? So now I'm looking at is our overall caloric expenditure there. Do we have recovery time? Are we down regulating throughout the day? Are we not overindulging in stimulants?

A whole set of equations over there. From the muscle side, number 1, if we're getting excessively sore, we might have issues with our training program. We shouldn't be getting that sore that often unless you're at a a pretty high level. And even then, the research is very clear. The amount of muscle soreness you get from after lifting weights has almost no correlation to how much muscle growth you'll get from that workout.

Wow. So that's the terrible proxy for good or bad workout of how sore I got.

What is the proxy for a good or bad workout?

There's a there's a fantastic model that I heard years ago from a friend of mine named doctor Mike Isratel. And I'm stealing this directly from him, so I'll give him his due credit for that. You can kinda think of 3 things. Here we go with the list again. In the workout, if you're trying to grow muscle, you should probably feel that muscle.

This sounds crazy, but you'd be stunned how many people have tried to, say, get a bigger chest. And they're benching and they're benching and they're benching. And it's they're never getting a bigger chest from a and, like, are you feeling your chest contract? No. Well, then, for you, that position, the way that your anatomy works, your technique, whatever equipment you're using, it wasn't probably targeting your chest.

So then why do we expect your chest to grow? Doesn't mean it has to be maximally contracted, but there's gonna be probably some feeling of it's feeling like it's contracted. Number 2, you probably wanna feel some sort of what we call a pump in there. So after the session, that muscle should look a little bit bigger. It should have contracted, filled with blood, filled with fluids.

Like, it should look a little bit bigger. Number 3, you should feel it something the next day. A little bit tight. Good. 3 out of 10 in terms of, like, how tight, how sore, it's probably good.

If it's 7, 8, 9 out of 10, you may actually be going backwards Because you may take so long to recover from that, that it's gonna compromise the quality of the next training session. If you love this stuff and you're into it, I'll take fivers 5 is okay. But if more than that, if you're at 0, then I might be thinking, okay. Maybe we didn't get actually enough out of that session. 2 to 3 is a really good level of of soreness out of that.

So, we're initially thinking those types of things. So number 1, if you're getting excessively sore, my biggest tip for recovery is making sure you're not actually getting too sore to begin with. 2nd 1, by far, there's nothing that will land even close to as impactful as even moderate quality sleep. You you have to have that. If you look at any of, the scientists that work in this area of muscle growth, if you look at many of the people that coach people here, when you start seeing solid progress, you start looking at sleep as your first.

Before you look at supplements, before you look at anything else, you definitely go to sleep. And if you see compromises in sleep, you're gonna go back to that as your first area of memphisis. And I know people hate to hear that, but I'm telling you, look at the people who are the best in the world at growing muscle. There's a reason that that's, like, 1 of the first places they're going after. Yeah.

So don't get overly sore, number 1. Make sure you're prioritizing your sleep. After that, if you wanna go to nutrition, we can look at it. Okay. Great.

Maybe our total caloric intake is low. That's generally where we're gonna start. From a protein perspective, oftentimes, as long as it's reasonable.

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Walk us through the ideal amount of protein we actually need.

Yeah. I mean, reasonable is and this is a heavy ish, by the way. Something like 1 gram per pound of body weight or 2.2 grams per kilo, rough starting point. If you wanna go below that, I'm not gonna argue. If you wanna go below that as in let's say you're at, 0.8.

0.6, I can survive that. That'd be closer to, say, to like 1.6 grams per kilogram. So 0.6 would be grams per pound. Right? So both units there for you.

I I can live with that. People can grow muscle like that. No question about it. People can grow muscle very clearly on on many food sources. Plant based, animal based, like, they're both effective.

If you go above that, you don't necessarily guarantee more growth either. And so what we're looking at with protein for most people is, like, just be in the stratosphere. Don't make it your constraint. Don't make it the problem. Once you make it not the problem, then it's probably, like, going up more.

Sometimes that's helped with with people, but it's generally not been the thing that that has really been like, oh, I was only at 1 gram per pound. I went to 1.5, and I don't get sore anymore. That can happen, but that's probably not what we're looking at. So it it it's, again, it's 1 of those things where, like, just don't make it the contractor Mhmm. And you're probably okay.

Yeah. That was

a big 1 for me because I've definitely I tried to match my body weight weight and protein, but I just couldn't take it every day. It just wasn't possible for me.

We got a lot of tricks. Yeah. We could get you there if you want. Like how? Depends on how you're eating it is why.

Right? So we can sneak it in in different places. A really good example of this is how many meals do you eat a day, roughly? 3 meals. Okay.

Great. So sliding in 25 grams in between before after a meal is not as hard as 1 thinks. Right. If you're trying to eat that in, you know, 8 ounces of chicken breast, that that's gonna be uncomfortable. But if we get that in in terms of this is why protein shakes On

plant based as well. Yeah.

No problem. Right? We can easily get that. A friend of mine, doctor Mike Ormsby at Florida State has been doing research in an area, for over 15 years now of protein feeding immediately before bed. Now a lot of

people Fascinating.

Media are like, woah.

Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. What?

Yeah. That's surprising.

15 years of research in this area. He's tested combinations, men, women, metabolically unhealthy people. Like, in in in general, most of his studies point to the same thing. That is? 40 g of protein about 30 minutes before bed.

He's yet to find any disturbances in sleep. Now this is 40 grams of protein. There's a 120 to a 150, 60 calories. These are not 500 calorie full meals. Right?

This is a fairly modest amount. Admittedly, I think the best he's done with sleep so far are kind of questionnaires. And so I know 1 of the things he's working right now is is more high fidelity sleep testing, Because this is 1 of the things that Yeah. Obviously, I'm a, you know, we have I have a sleep company. Like, I'm very interested in maximizing sleep.

So in fairness there, it's plausible. But on the surface so far, of all the studies, he's yet to report any significant disturbances in sleep. What he has reported, though, is very little change in things like fat oxidation. So 1, there's this misnomer, like, if you eat right before bed, your body won't use this. You'll store it all as fat.

And he's done so many studies now that I think that door is about a slam shut as possible that that that's just not going to be the case. And so his research is also not indicating some over the top advantage for muscle growth. It's not gonna increase muscle growth by 25%. Like, none of that's true. It's a modest benefit.

So for me, when I summarize his work, I say, okay. Look. Very little detriment. An opportunity to get in 40 more grams of protein if you're low on your protein targets. So if you're okay on your protein targets, you don't I don't think you need to do

this. Mhmm.

I don't think there's a huge advantage. But if you're really struggling, this is 1 of the things that we'll go to. And 30 minutes, by the way, is a arbitrary number. Mhmm. If you go, oh my gosh.

I tried that 1 time and I don't do it then. Like, absolutely. There's there's not worth there's not a ton of benefit here. And I I'm trying to make that really clear. Right?

I don't like overselling. This is just hey. There's no detriment, really. And it's if it's not messing with your sleep, and this helps you get closer to your protein

Mhmm.

I would imagine. And, by the way, he's done this in plant based as well. Same thing. Like, basically, the same results from plant based ones. So maybe 40 is too much for you.

Alright. Give me 25.

Mhmm.

Give me 20. 15? We don't wanna, like don't don't get too lost in detail there. Right? The point is, here you go.

You had dinner at 6, 6:30, something like that probably for and then maybe a couple of hours later, you you wanna do whole food. Great. In his research, you know, scientifically, we he uses protein powders just to control he's actually used whole food as well. You wanna do a yogurt thing? You wanna do whatever your favorite Yeah.

Source protein is? 100 and 150, 160 calories. Like, these are not gonna all of a sudden, like, massively disrupt your blood flow and stuff like that there. So it I think it's a very viable option. It's not required.

Mhmm. No special magic benefit to it, but that's 1 of the many little tricks we can use to plug in. And you you kind of put together 2 or 3 of those strategies. You'd be surprised 60, 80 grams of protein can kinda come like that. And you're like, oh, wow.

Like, that was actually sort

of part. Yeah. That's surprising. I wanna hear your thoughts about another thing that I think people get hung up on and and maybe don't know the insights behind is what should you eat before and after a workout?

I have an old YouTube video up that is called something like post exercise anabolic window. And I think it's, like, 25 minutes or something. So you want all the details, you can go there. I'll give you the 2 minute version. Right?

For those that that don't wanna do that. The post exercise anabolic window was this idea that there's this magic it started off as 30 minutes. Window post exercise where you had to consume your nutrients, specifically carbohydrates and protein, to maximize. And there was good rationale, molecular mechanisms, as to why we thought that existed. Summarized many years later, it's very clear that that's that's just not the case.

And so the way you wanna think about this is total protein intake throughout the day is gonna determine almost all of your variance there. So as long as you make your total and and even I'll say total protein intake throughout the day is not even that important. It's probably thought about as, like, protein throughout the week. So, like, like, as long as kinda, like, maybe you're a little bit lower today, a little bit higher tomorrow, that's that's how real life actually works.

A 100%. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. End up having steak for 1 night and got extra 60 grams of protein, the next night you had a pasta dish and what all It'll be okay. Right? So don't get overly concerned about your 10 grams load today or 20 like, you'll be fine. Right?

So that matters most. There are some exceptions though. When you are performing at a high level of energy expenditure let's just take some of our, like, baseball players. It's not a big deal because the energy expenditure in baseball is not incredibly high for Major League Baseball. NBA players, this is different, though.

Our UFC fighters, way different. Our professional boxers, way different. They're training hard twice a day, almost always. Right? Golfers, a little bit different.

So if you're training really, really hard, whether you're an athlete or not, but you're you're a work outer, You're super active. You're on the walking treadmill. You know, you're you're an endurance, but you'd burn all those calories. Your nutrition window might matter because you may not have enough time to restore muscle glycogen. Remember, you store carbohydrates in your muscle, and you'll use some of those during exercise.

And if you're doing a lot of hard work, you use a lot of it. And then if you're not consuming nutrients, you just you kinda run out of time before then the session happens again 4 hours later. So in those particular cases, nutrient timing does start to matter, but it's not a magic molecular signaling window as so much as it is practical issue of just like you ran out of time to refill those muscle glycogen stores, and so your training for the next session went down because we we couldn't refuel. We actually just completed intermittent fasting study. It was the first of its kind because we were looking specifically at there's been a lot of research.

Grant Tinsley in Texas Tech has done a lot of awesome work and many others on 168 intermittent fasting. Right? Really, really common. You eat all your calories

Mhmm.

In an 8 hour window. Let's just say you don't eat breakfast, you start eating at 11 AM, and you eat dinner at 7. Like, really common thing. Lots of research on that compared to normal feeding, 3 meals a day, 6, 5, whatever. And the the evidence is pretty clear at this point.

The intermittent fasting does nothing particularly special. Doesn't help you lose fat any faster or anything like that. Really? No. Not at all.

Wow. Long as you equate for protein, you equate for calories, you'd you'll get basically the same result. Wow. Some studies have reported maybe like a half a kilogram extra fat loss, others not. But if you look at the research on aggregate, it's about the same.

Mhmm.

If it fits your lifestyle, if it helps you maybe more adherent, tremendous. I'm all for it. That's great. Nothing's super special Yeah. Yeah.

About it for caloric restriction. Right? Yeah. Probably all 15, 20 studies from different labs at this point. So, like, generally, they're all Yeah.

Kinda saying the same thing. Yeah. What we were interested in though is, what about if you're trying to grow muscle? What happens? Right?

Because all those studies have put people in a caloric deficit trying to lose weight. Right? So you bring them down there for the most part or caloric maintenance. So we took young, highly trained people that try were trying to grow muscle. We put them in a caloric surplus.

We went way above energy needs, put them on very high protein. 1 group did 16 8, 1 group did not. And we did everything. We took muscle biopsies, looked at molecular signaling, genetic signaling, single fibers, adaptations. We looked at muscle size.

We looked at sleep. We looked at digestion. We looked at hunger. We looked at happiness. Complaints of how hard or easy the diet was.

We looked at all of it. Net result, there were differences. But in terms of muscle growth, about the same.

Wow.

1 of the biggest things with the fasting group was there was just a lot of anecdotal, like, oh, this is hard. Like, this is hard. And, specifically, the problem was carbohydrates.

Right.

It was hard for them to get their carbohydrates in without getting a lot of GI distress. We have that come up a number of times. Performance, specifically leg strength, started to come down in the fasting group. And, I think we have pretty good rationale to suggest if you're trying to maximize, because we were progressively overloading them. Basically, you can imagine this, like, you're in the gym training, and you finish every set.

This isn't exactly what we did, but it gives you the concept. You finish every set. And let's say you do a leg press at £200 and you do 10 reps. K. Next time you come in, you're gonna do 11.

If you did 11, next time we're gonna do 12. So, like, every single session, if they were getting they were gonna so they were training really hard for 8 weeks. I just don't think they had the recovery capacity.

Right.

I think either there was under reporting, because there's just, like, I can't I'm just gonna write the number down, but I can't really eat that food. That that's always possible in, like, real human studies. Yeah. Or there was actually and and we have in the paper, we have pretty good rationale to think that this is a real finding. So coming all the way back, like, if you're trying to maximize strength and muscle gain and you're training really hard, both would work.

Mhmm.

In in fact, actually, the intermittent fasting group didn't put on as much fat. So the reality of it is, it's my opinion, this is how science this is how nutrition really works. 1 of the reasons I advocated so hard to ask sleep questions, fatigue was higher in the fasting group too.

Oh, interesting. Energy got lower.

Interesting. Harder throughout the day. More naps. And actually, naps was in, but just perceived energy got lower towards

the end

of the study. People go into change. From my worldview, that's exercise. That's nutrition. There's many forms of change, though.

Right? When you go into change, you often do it because you're inspired. You heard something. You heard your podcast. You're like, great.

I'm gonna try that. That sounded awesome. So you go into it with an expectation. The reality of it is very few things are panaceas. So maybe higher protein is better for muscle, but maybe it hurts your digestion.

Okay. Maybe it hurts your sleep. Maybe it then helps your hormone. I'm making those up.

Yeah. Yeah.

But that's the real honest True. Truth of

how it works. Right? So right.

You're gonna have to make your selections. Right? I don't like to be the person of going, like, you should optimize for this over that. Right? But you should have some knowledge of going, okay.

I'm gonna choose intermittent fast. Okay. I like it because I get a, b, and c, but then I'm probably gonna lose d and b.

You're constantly experimenting and figuring it out. Yeah. I really appreciate that take because I think that's what it's been for me. I've I've found that that so many things that you've heard and tried to do and felt it was right. And it's like, well, actually, I just wanna feel and it goes back to what you started with.

Right? How do I wanna look? How do I wanna feel? And what's the third 1? Perform.

Perform. Right. Yeah. And so I I spend a lot of time in that. How do I wanna feel and perform?

And so many things that I'm told would help me look better are not things that help me feel and perform better. That's probably pretty true. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

And I know, but I just love to take that it's about figuring it out. How important is hydration, and how much water do we actually need? Okay. This is another 1 where if you wanna get scared, look at the hydration research. Scared in the sense of, you wanna pick erectile dysfunction.

You wanna pick headaches. You wanna pick in fact, there's there's actually a paper that I just saw a week ago, 2 weeks ago. Less than I actually yeah. I think it's about 1% dehydration will reduce cognitive function in a statistically significant manner. Right?

So if you are less than 1% dehydrated, which is almost functionally impossible for you to notice, you will see clinically meaningful and statistically, significant reductions in a number of different markers. This is when I say cognitive function, I mean, I think I can't remember honestly specifically this paper. But it's often things like word recall, executive decision making, short term memory, things like that. Right? So I'm again, I can't remember the exact metrics in this particular study.

So you'll see that. You can pick thermoregulation. You can pick, I mentioned sexual function, endocrine health, body composition, sleep. Like, you'll you'll run yourself dead worrying about this. That said, it's not as scary as it sounds because when we typically report, like, 1% dehydration, 2% dehydration, what we're talking about is percentage of your body weight.

And not like, oh my god. I'm I'm just tiny below optimal. You have to be, like, pretty far below optimal to be 1% of your body. You have most of your body is water. So to lose 1% of that is, you know, a liter or sort of more.

Right? So that's to say, when we have done this a lot, I'd probably say, I'm making this number up, somewhere between 5 15% of our people that we've coached over the years have come in with problems and all we had to do is just get their hydration not terrible. This is everything from headaches, constant headaches, to brain fog. Brain fog is probably the biggest 1. Brain fog and energy are the most common ones.

10%. I'm comfortable saying 10% of the time it's just been a hydration issue. Wow. What what is it the other times? Sometimes it is by the way, sometimes it's over hydration.

Interesting. Very like, probably and and

this is just anecdote here. This is not my lab. I don't know the research on this or if if it exists or not. But this is just what we've seen. Generally, women have an issue with over hydration.

There's, like my my wife and her friends have these, like, called emotional support models. It's like they go to work or whatever. It's like a 7 different water a tea and, like, a recovery drink, and their hydration is like bottles everywhere. Right? I'm talking about you, Darren, Danny.

But sometimes that's the case of, like, they just consistently drink water, water, water, water. And so they get they get close to what's called hyponatremia. That's the science word for salt. Right? Sodium more specifically, and hypo meaning low.

So what ends up happening is not that your salt or sodium gets low in your system. By the way, this is actually really common in endurance athletes. And every year, somebody dies in an endurance race from hyponatremia. Drinking too much pure water. You drink too much pure water, it gets really dilute.

Sodium is half of the well, it's part of the equation rather that causes an electrical gradient that lets muscles contract. Why that kills you is your heart is a muscle. So your heart will will stop contracting because there's no gradient difference. There's not a positive and negative charge from 1 side of the cell to the other side, so it won't contract and and transmit electricity. It's not really super common.

You know, you're probably not gonna die drinking, like, a little bit of extra water. But if you remember back in the day of there used to be things like, fraternity rushes and things like that where they make the the new pledges, drink a gallon of water. Or there's been terrible stories of parents, like, punishing their kids. And, again, it's not really common, but people have died pretty routinely.

Really?

Yeah. Lots of fraternity people died from these, like

That's terrible.

You just your heart will stop. Yeah. Right? You get super diluted. So most likely, you're not drinking.

You're not gonna kill yourself, but what you can get is some way up that journey to where electricity can I'm kind of screwing up some science here on purpose to for communication purposes. But if you can't send electricity from 1 side of a neuron to the next 1, then why are you expecting cognitive function to be at its peak? So we have seen this again many times. It's not the most common. Maybe 10% of people's hydration issue.

Of that 10%, probably, I'd say 70% are under hydrating. So 30% of that 10, small number, but it is real, are just drinking too much. And the rest? And the rest of that are on the opposite side of the equation. Right?

So they're drinking insufficient amounts of water, or they're having things that look like dehydration that are this is gonna sound funny, but they're actually we'll call them anxiety related. There's a very clear relationship between hyperventilation, and this is resting hyperventilation. So if you're sitting there and you don't realize it, but your respiratory rate is actually like I'm exaggerating, but Yes. You're making a point. Right?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

That can actually put you in a position of, where you're actually getting rid of too much carbon dioxide. Because you're breathing in oxygen, breathing out carbon dioxide. You're getting carbon dioxide concentrations too low in your system. This is gonna put you into what's called respiratory alkalosis. K.

Respiratory alkalosis is oftentimes then matched with metabolic acidosis. So that that entire side of the equation tries to balance the pH in your system. 1 of the mechanisms that has to do that is then start altering how your kidneys re reabsorb and and reabsorb electrolytes, salts, and things like that, which then alters hydration. So some of the times this comes back to us going, again, using anxiety, like, very inappropriately here, but Mhmm. Roughly of saying, oh, okay.

This is a hydration issue, but that's not because you're not drinking enough water or having enough salt or whatever the case is. This is the fact that your system is continually trying to dump fluids. That's the problem we have to come backwards and solve. So we can cover the symptom, give you more salt or reduce water, something like that. But, really, we gotta work all the way back to the beginning and say, like, let's stop this problem from reoccurring.

That happens really commonly. We see that a bunch in that, you know, 10% sort of people.

What are some of the healthy solutions for brain fog? Yeah.

I mean, we get this 1 a lot. So the it's it's funny. I would say brain fog people I don't know. Again, I'm making a number up, but it feels to me like 90% of the time, they think some thing unique and special is going on. Some micronutrient is out of whack.

They've got some sort of toxic thing floating around. They got a pathogen or gut bacteria thing. And those those happen. We we see those, and that's a real thing. Mostly, it's the basics.

And I and I really, truly mean that we have a very high success rate at Arte with brain fog. Really high success rate. And often, the majority of time, it is the okay. For you, it might be your sleep is completely dysfunctional. Boom.

You maybe don't realize your sleep is dysfunctional. Gone. Brain fog, gone. Like, that's it. Right?

Maybe it has nothing to do with your sleep. Your sleep is okay. Maybe it's not great, but it's okay. And your nutrition is really mixed with your physiology. Great.

Sometimes it is gut microbiome related. Sometimes we do see heavy metal toxins at at high concentrations. Like, those things are real. I would say if you don't have access to a program like ours or advanced testing, if you do the basics, really get your stress management under control. Quality water, like, really all that stuff.

And I'm really trying to emphasize that because that's mostly free stuff. You don't need to turn to coaching. You don't need to turn to a stool sample. You don't need to turn to a blood test. You don't need to buy supplements yet.

Get your house in order with movement, sunlight, quality food. A large percentage of your brain fog is is probably gonna go away. If you've tried that and haven't had success, maybe you can take additional steps. But, really, we've we've had we joke sometimes, that, like, we've had a lot of people spend a lot of money. We're like, you knew the answer.

Yeah. We told you this coming in, and you so past that, it can be micronutrient related. There's no question about that. There we we see that pretty routinely. That can look like all kinds of different stuff.

I'm I'm wishing there was, like, 1 or 2 I could pull out and say, Jay, it's usually b 6 or b 12. It's not the honest answer though. It has come up, but, like, sometimes it's it's all it's just honestly, it's super sporadic. Yeah. If you get your breathing in order though, if you get stressed in order, you get reasonably close with hydration, reasonably close with quality foods, and see some sun, like, most of you will probably see really significant improvements.

Yeah.

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Andy, I'm intrigued. We're talking about all of this. I'm wondering what's your schedule. What what do you prioritize? Well, I have a family.

I have

Yeah. 5 companies, and I have a research lab. So let's answer it with your your quadrant. Oh, my quadrant. Yeah.

We'll start there. Yeah. No. So that's actually really cool, because I I do this practice. Just moved my family pretty recently.

Moved my lab. So now my lab is in, I'm at Parker University in Dallas, Texas. We're building a 65,000 square foot human performance center. It's gonna be open to the public. So really, really excited about that.

Yeah. We're gonna be able to do a lot of testing and stuff in there. Graduate students, a lot of research in there. We have a cool visitor center that's gonna be a part of it. Just, like, so stoked to be Congrats, man.

That's awesome. Man. So that all happened this quarter. And then, my my sleep company, Absolute Rest, our blood work company, Vitality, and our coaching program, all this stuff came up. So this quarter is it was quite frankly a 7 in business.

And I have to give a huge shout out to my wife because, like, we knew coming into this quarter, I'm like, this is gonna be rough. I'm not gonna say she hasn't complained at all, but for the most part so my fitness has been a 1. The lowest it's probably been in my memory. I'm doing the best I can. My my coach, Tim, is sort of like, jeez, are you ever gonna train?

I'm like, I'm doing like doing sort of the best I can. Yeah. Everything the rest of it's 1. Right? So it's 1 on 1 all category.

Recovery, 1. Relationships 1. My relationships, personal things like that have been almost non existent very intentionally. That said, I'm super stoked because, I'm about well, in fact, when I leave here, I'm gonna be spending about 7 straight days with nothing but family. I love that.

So I'm paying that back. When the new quarter comes and when we start off that, that's gonna go back down to 5 from a business perspective, and that's all gonna come back up in training. So I'm super stoked, to get back after it. But we made this decision in early summer. Just it's the unfortunate thing of, like, the the lab move and our family move, and 2 of our companies really taking off, like, really taking off.

And I was, like, I see where this is going. And I'm just gonna set expectations personally.

Yeah. It's great to hear the reality of it. Right? Like, that's the point. That's the real that's the reality of life that you've kind of had throughout this whole conversation.

I feel like you've given no false solutions, quick fixes. There's there's no hacks and habits that are like it it's not who you are. And and I appreciate it because even in your life, you're like, yeah. This is what it actually looks like. When you are working out consistently, training every day, what does your workout look like?

So I have different phases is what I do. Right now, 1 of my biggest things I look forward to every year, my dad, my brother, and I always go on a hunting trip in the fall. Right? Like, all kinds of stuff. This year, we're up in, about 10,000 feet elevation in the in Western Wyoming, and we're running up and down the hills, basically, the whole time.

So I will generally schedule my entire year around that phase, which means prior to that, it was a lot more long duration, rocking, moving, training, things like that. Not emphasizing muscle growth, not emphasizing even like VO 2 max or anything like that. I need to be able to handle the mountain, and I need to be able to handle my respiration and the elevation. So I'm geared towards that. Coming back off of that trip, then I knew this quarter was gonna be awful.

So this quarter was just about moving. I'm trying to move. I did a little workout yesterday in the hotel room. Today, all I basically got in was was sauna for the most part. Right?

No time and I had well, that's a lie. I did a bath. I did a bath in a hotel room. It's like the best I could come up with. I had no break in meeting, and I'm, like, I can get a 15 minute hot bath in and, like, sweat move throughout the day.

Okay. That's how it is now. When I go back, to start off after this refresher here, it's generally gonna look something like this. I'm mostly going to be lifting weights 3 to 4 times per week. And I don't ever have a Monday is legs, Tuesday is arms, things like that because that's never gonna happen.

I just have the next workout, and I get that thing done the next time it's available. So I don't actually have, like, 7 day routines.

Mhmm.

I just have a thing I'm trying to get done over across 90 days. And it so what that end up looking like is generally, like, 70 workouts I try to get done in 90 days. Sometimes that's 9 or 10 or 11 days in a row because I, like, have the space, and then I know I'm gonna have 2 workouts in 8 days. Mhmm. Right?

So I'm just like, if I have a chance to train, I'm gonna train because I know, like, schedule is gonna eat me right now. So I do that. So, generally, 3 or 4 days a week of lifting. Generally, 1 to 2 days a week of trying to move a ton. This could be a lot of steps up and down the mountain, where I live.

This could be I will do many of my meetings where, like, people always laugh at me because I'm just gonna, like, pace back and forth. I love pacing when I work. So I'm just, like, trying to accrue movement throughout the day. And then something at least once a week, like I said earlier, where I touch maximum possible heart rate in a lot of different varieties. The last probably year or so of lifting specifically has been, probably the most frustrating year of more like almost a year and a half now because I made a conscious decision of saying, you know, I feel good.

Everything is great. But I need to be thinking about the next 60 years. And so I have a couple little asymmetries and a couple of little things that I know are not moving how they should be moving. So I have a coach, and all of my programming is just correcting those things. So the workouts are just infuriating because it's all the stuff you suck at.

It's none of the stuff that, like, feels these big rewarding things out of it, but it is a say it's me stepping back and going, what if you spend a year? What if you spent a year? And you weren't trying to maximize growth or maximize strength, but you're really trying to maximize joint health and function. Would you regret that 40 years from now? I doubt it.

Right? So it's it was just, like, looking back and going, let's run the counterfactual. What if you didn't do that? You probably regret it.

Yeah.

So then you make that choice. So, lifting for me specifically last year has just been, like, so not fun. But, like, that's the conscious decision I made of investing myself. So Yeah. Thanks to the audience too, man.

Yeah, man. Yeah. I really appreciate it. It's it's great to hear, and I think everyone who's listening can give themselves a bit more grace as well because, you know, you know all of this. And I think often people look at people who who know a lot and are doing so much research and have good healthy habits.

Yeah. But there's a reality of, you know and and I I you know, same for me. Like, in the work that I do, like, it's you know, I'm constantly trying to share the moments where I'm like, you know, probably didn't respond as well as I could have or wasn't as mindful as I should have been. Sure. You know, that's the reality of of what it means to be alive.

And so

It's a practice, man. It's always a practice. Right?

Yeah. Absolutely. Andy, we end every episode with a final 5. But before we do that, there are a few

more questions I kinda wanted to loop back to. And so 1 of them was why do you suggest that we don't work out at night? You can work out at night, but you wanna just be careful of how much is disrupting your sleep and what type of workout you're doing, especially if your day is laid out. The example I think I gave earlier was really high intensity, sympathetic fight or flight type of day. If you're then always matching that with additional sympathetic drive, some people, that's okay.

But a lot of people in our experiences, that has been their, you know, quote, unquote root cause of fill in the blank. Right? So low testosterone, brain fog, sleep, sort of like okay. When you're on gas pedal all day, maybe for you right now, your exercise needs to be a little bit more restorative rather than the opposite. Mhmm.

It's not

always the case, though. I train at night with generally no issues whatsoever. I I like it. I almost always train at the end of the day. So it can be just fine.

Got it. Just be mindful of Yeah. If you're looking at your system and going, okay. Great. I can do really high intensity stuff.

I can do we've like, our sync technology is pretty outrageous, so I can verifiably say these things. I can do lots of stimulatory stuff. I can watch Lord of the Rings in 8 k on a 90 inch screen. I don't have this, but, like, right in front of my face, a minute before bed. And I have 0 issues with blue light.

I have 0 issues with stimulation, and that's just how you're wired. Sleep architecture is gonna be fine. Sleep duration, sleep quality, the amount of time, the depth within each sleep phase, I I attract all these every night. Right? No change for me.

So intensity of exercise is gonna have no bearing on Got it. On me personally.

You specifically. Yeah. Totally. Yeah.

What I've seen, though, for a lot of our people is, not always, but many people, it's the opposite where we have to be a little bit more mindful. And so what we might have to do is say, okay. We can train, but your training has to look like this.

Mhmm.

We have to redefine what training is for you. We have to do our higher intensity stuff earlier or at minimum, and this is what we do for our athletes because they don't have an option. They have to their competition is at night. Right? NBA plays at 7 o'clock or you get the idea.

Let's at least match the high intensity work with downregulation post exercise. If we just walk off the court or walk out of the gym and go right now now we finally see our kids for the day or whatever, like, you're just asking for disaster here. Give me 5 minutes. 3 to 7 is what I say. Give me 3 to 7 minutes.

Can we down regulate a little bit? And we have really found that can give us 80% of what we need to get. It's not a 100, but if all those things are are you're fused, like, that's it. That's my only time today, and I'm not giving up my okay. Fine.

Give me my 5 minutes post training. You can do this in the car. You can do this in the locker room or wherever it is. Lights down. Cover your face with our athletes.

We'll put just their shirt or their towel over their face. Lie on your back. I would love to give you a a specific and highly designed down regulation breath work routine. That's what we that's our gold standard. But if you can't do that or won't do that, just give me other stuff.

Fine. Yeah. Just breathe through your nose. Alright. You wanna do a double extended exhale.

So you wanna do a cadence, like, a 4 second inhale, 8 second exhale. Generally, the longer you're exhaling, the more down regulatory it is. Like, oh, okay. Great. Like, we have lots of protocols.

We can go into tons of customized breathing programs. We do that a lot. But if not, can you make it as simple as go sit in your car, close your eyes, and just breathe through your nose, set a timer for 4 minutes? That actually is a stunning amount of effectiveness to that.

Wow. I love that, man. That's great. Yeah. I I definitely I was playing pickleball at night.

I was doing my morning workout in the gym and then Yep. Pickleball in the evening. It was destroying my sleep. Like, I Yeah. It would take me 2 hours.

Like, I'm someone who thankfully falls asleep pretty quickly, and it's like I would get in a bed at, like, 9:30, and I wouldn't get a bed till, like, 11:30, 12. Oh. Because I was just, like, wired from playing pickleball for, like, 7 to 9 or whatever it was. And so I'm having to figure out I I've I've just stopped playing because Yeah. It was having such a big impact, but I appreciate it.

Try that. Try that out. I will try it out.

Yeah. You you you'd be surprised. It might not be enough for you. You might you might have to do 15 or 20 minutes. Yeah.

Yeah. Or it

might

not work at all. Yeah. But but give it a go. You might we've seen enough. I'm

might work. I'll try it out. Another audience question we had to answer was, what do you suggest for women with PCOS in terms of an ideal workout?

So when you get into situations like that, whether it's PCOS, whether it's just simply really difficult menstrual cycles to manage, whether it's a menopause or, you know, you know, know if we're going through it, things like that. This area of research is so tricky because symptomology is so wide ranging. Defining menopause is, physiologically easy, but even understanding, you know, it could be 6 months or 10 years. Like, it's a really hard thing. Symptoms are up and down.

The menstrual cycle alone, independent PCOS, you're you're you're adding on top of those things. I have yet to see a clear cut specific, this is better. Got it. And just sort of like, if you wanna follow some guidelines and you're feeling better, I'm I'm all in. Like, that's great.

Yeah.

Yeah. If not though, I don't have a specific thing that says you have to do this this way. We on are yet to give women different styles of training while we're here. We don't train them differently just because they're women. We don't, do anything different throughout the menstrual cycle with training or nutrition just because they're women.

We do everything that's based on the individual. So if if we need to do Sussup, we absolutely will, but we do not walk them in and saying, oh, okay. Our women do this, solid training. Our men do this. We we absolutely do not.

And I know that wasn't what you're asking. But No.

No. But that's really useful. Yeah. I didn't know that. I'm no.

I'm intrigued. We definitely do have different protocols. You have it. It's so individual. It's not based on gender.

It's not like, oh, you're male, so this is better for your strength than female.

Yeah. It yes. Like, men and women have massive differences, and we're always gonna acknowledge and pay attention to those things. But I'm always coaching you.

And What are the differences that people should be aware of?

You have clear hormonal differences, generally. Right? 1 of the things that we have seen in in our research, and I would say it's it's held true in our coaching practices. A lot of the times, women handle volume better from an exercise perspective. And when I say handle, I mean, you can give them more reps, more sets.

They can train more often. Their recovery is faster. The other way you can flip that Why is that? Well, we've actually done some work here, and nobody really knows.

I noticed that with my wife. My wife's like that.

She's Yeah. But you you honestly, like, it's pretty true. My friend Brett Contreras made a a really awesome post recently. I'm like, wow. This is great.

Specifically on this point, again, I wanna give him credit because I'm like, oh, actually, he he nailed this. When people say things like, oh, we don't train men and women differently like I just said, I generally hear that and go, okay. You never train women. Like, you never train women if you're gonna say that. That's exactly was Brett's post was.

I'm like, okay. Because honestly, we we sort of do. Now walking in, we do not. But I know that oftentimes, we can bring the volume up. Also, it oftentimes means they need more volume.

Not always, but I'm hedging quickly of going, okay. We gotta start probably thinking more volume here. And if we're not getting responses as quickly as we want, we're pretty quick to just go to volume.

Right.

And it oftentimes win. Oftentimes, men, that'll go the other direction. When it comes to performance too, women, because of that, generally don't need as much of a taper. They don't need to have they don't have to back off as much to get that super compensation, that that peaking day. Again, these are very Yeah.

Yeah. Broad generalizations. Right? We're always coaching the individual.

Yeah. We can't get specific without a Totally. Avatar in front of us.

Exactly. So, those are some ones that we kinda, like, pop out to immediately where we see differences. I've coached world champion females in probably 6 or more sports at this point. So we've done power lifting and UFC and and a bunch of different sports, wrestling. I can also say most often women are more in tune with their body than men.

Mhmm. They generally give better feedback. Yeah. If you go ask 1 of our male athletes, like, how are you feeling today? Like, I know what they're gonna say.

Pretty good coach, Rick. Whatever. Yeah. Where women are more likely to be, like, I feel pretty good, but, back's a little bit tighter here. Energy's just a touchdown.

You're, like, oh. And they're they're really in tune with this thing is a little bit off over here. Men are, like, kinda blunt instruments. A lot of the times, women will, be more responsive to changes in caloric intake, where, again, men are a little more robust to those things. So you have to be really careful.

You have to be really careful of lowering calories too much too long for women. You gotta be careful not in men, but you can get away with it a little bit more. So when it comes to just sort of these generalities, those are the ones that pop

up Got it. The most.

Yeah. Some things that are counterintuitive actually since we're here. We and and there's a lot of research on this that I'd say empirically, our our coaching practice, scientifically, we actually just published a meta analysis. I was a co author on this 1. So, somebody else led this 1.

But you don't really see much of a difference in rate of increase between men and women in terms of strength and muscle. It's not that different. You grow at about the same relative rate. It's just that men are generally bigger. Mhmm.

So if you both gain 10%, your absolute amount is is far much higher. So it looks like you just got it there. There are some subtle differences there within that meta analysis. You can read the details if you're a nerd like that. But the the take home message for that is it's it's pretty much the same.

Yeah.

And I would say our coaching experience has seen that. We don't see women on average struggling to put on more muscle relative to men or strength. If the training and the nutrition and all the other factors are equal, they're gonna progress pretty much equally, for a long long period of time. The last 1 that would jump out to me is on a similar note there is we generally see women through aging are a little bit more successful against joint injury. Oh, interesting.

Men are gonna be a little more banged up Mhmm. For the most part. So I I think that's a believable story too. I don't know why, but, well, I could I could guess. Go on.

A little more aggressive, probably worse decision making, but you get it. So, categorically, those would be some of the differences.

Got it. Thank you. Andy, I wanna ask you a final 5. These questions have to be answered in 1 word to 1 sentence maximum. Oh, boy.

So the first question is, what is the best health advice you've ever heard, received, or given?

The notion of adaptability and plasticity is far greater than people realize. Your genetics play a big part, of course, but your lifestyle is far more important to your end story than your genetics. So you have the ability, the capacity within reach to make a significant improvement in any aspect of that look, feel, perform that you choose. Some work there, but you have autonomy in your body.

That's very hope giving. I love that. Question number 2, what's the worst health advice you've ever had or received?

Oh, boy. I'm gonna cheat with my answer here Mhmm. And give a antithesis to my first answer, which is the idea that there is a certain food you can or can't eat. Mhmm. That all of us in humanity have to be eating or sleeping or training or living a certain way or we're gonna

be unhealthy. That is colossally untrue, unfair, and unhelpful. Great answer. Question number 3. For someone who's really trying to lose some stubborn belly fat, what should they do?

This will sound a little bit counterintuitive, but a large portion of your resting metabolic rate, your metabolism is defined by how much muscle you have. So getting those last few pounds off the belly, maybe try to put some muscle on. My guess is you've already done everything else, so try that option.

And and would you recommend how? Or that's case specific in

Yeah. Totally.

Question number 4. What's something you used to believe to be true about health that you disagree with now? I have a

lot of answers. I've been open, honest, and I probably should do more about things that change. I was very against cardiovascular exercise, that like, strength training is the only thing you need to do. That that that's very wrong. I was also very against low carbohydrate diets in any form.

I was very against intermittent fasting. And I think I wasn't totally wrong on that, but those are viable strategies for most people. They're not perfect for all goals, but those things are options. So I'd say those 3 specific ones. But in general, I was simply too closed minded about assuming I knew what everyone wanted in terms of the outcome and the goal.

When you do that, you start limiting options and you are working too much off of hubris. The more you realize people are looking for different things, then you start to realize, oh, okay. These are potentially acceptable. They just aren't gonna get to where I thought everyone wanted to go, and that was not the appropriate approach. So all of your questions, by the way, I'm on, like, sentence 9.

I have 10. But I

love it, man. It's all good. 5th and final question. It's the question we ask everyone who's ever been on

the show. If you could create 1 law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? You was quite funny about this answer is I literally sent a tweet out yesterday that said, I think we should make it illegal for people to recline their seats on airplanes. That's so good. So my top of my brain.

Be really mad at you for that long. God. I hate that. But you can recline yours too.

That's the

whole point.

Not because you're smashing into my lap, and I can't work.

Alright. Oh, you're a worker. That's Yeah.

I'm a I'm like You're a plane. Time is perfect work time.

So now, like time is the only time I switch to entertainment. So

Oh, really?

Yeah. I'll read a book or I'm watching something. Or

No, man. I hate it. So my my cheeky answer here would be how to make it illegal to recline seats on airplanes.

I love it. Andy Galpin, everyone, thank you so much for listening and watching. Andy, Thank you for all your incredible insights, wealth of wisdom. I hope that you will take away 1 thing and apply it from this episode. Remember, that's my request.

You won't be able to do all of it. You won't be able to do everything. Try and pick the 1 thing and just apply it to make a shift in your life. Follow Andy across social media, his podcast, everything else he has going on to make sure that you're connected to his insight. I'm sure it's had a big impact on you.

I know it has on me. And, Andy, I look forward to having you on the show many, many times. Thank you so much.

That was my pleasure, man. I can't wait to come back.

Yeah. Thank you. If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with doctor Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.

If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain. You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over a 1,000 convicted felons and over a 100 murderers, and their brains are very damaged.

Hey, friends. I'm Jessica Capshaw.

And

this is Camilla Ludington. And we have a new podcast, Call It What It Is. You may know us from Graceland Memorial, but did you know that we are actually besties in real life?

And as all besties do, we navigate the highs and lows of life together. Big or small, we're there. And now here we are opening up the friendship circle.

To you, listen to call it what it is on the Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Captain's log, stardate 2024. We're floating somewhere in the cosmos, but we've lost our map.

Yeah. Because you refused to ask for directions.

It's space, Gem. There are no roads. Good point. So where are we headed?

Into the unknown, of course.

Join us on In Our Own World as we uncover hidden truths, navigate the depths of culture, identity, and the human spirit. With a hint of mischief, 1 episode at a time.

Buckle up and listen to In Our Own World on the Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Trust us. It's out of this world.

What's up y'all? This is Questlove, and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Fontigolo, Bill. And we, you know, at Crest Love Supreme, like to nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes.

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