239 ‒ The science of strength, muscle, and training for longevity | Andy Galpin, Ph.D. (PART I)

hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast I'm your host Peter [Music] AA well Andy uh you know it's wonderful to see you uh here on video we were supposed to do this in person but we got a good laugh as to why that didn't pan out but that's okay uh perhaps there will be an in-person chance the next time yeah yeah I'm excited to be here this way it would have been more enjoyable in person but we'll make it work you know I've wanted to speak with you for for quite a while and and I

think listeners to this podcast are not uh not strangers to the idea of how much of an emphasis I place on exercise um I've said it many times before I'll continue to reiterate it until the data suggest otherwise that there's really no more potent tool to improve uh longevity meaning extending the length of life and improving the quality of life and exercise and that includes nutrition that includes sleep and that includes the entire entire pharmacopia of medications supplements drugs hormones Etc so it's probably for that reason that I would say that exercise makes up a

disproportionate amount of the content on our podcast and of course within exercise I tend to divide it really down into these different pillars of of strength stability uh and uh cardiorespiratory Fitness which of course then gets further subdivided by the by the metabolic State and energy state of it of course what we're going to probably talk a lot about today is is strength but also all of the things that kind of stem from that like hypertrophy and uh and and various things like that which I think are of huge interest to people but maybe for

folks who don't know you can you give us a sense of your path uh even you know frankly out of high school college like you know what was your athletic background and what what made this be something that you have you know kind of dedicated all of your time to sure I I guess initially I need to State a conflict of interest which is I'm an exercise scientist so if you want to start giving more credit to exercise for longevity and wellness like I cannot be more biased into that lane um especially within actually assigned

strength training so I've been waiting for 30 years for this to happen the field so now I get to prove that all my preconceived notions are actually holding true and I will refuse to change despite what you said I will refuse to change despite what the data suggests um no for for real I grew up in a very small town in Southwest Washington uh so I played everything in high school uh football basketball baseball track and field the whole thing um I went to a small school in Oregon where I played college football and got

my undergraduate degree in exercise science and then after that I made some stops in um Arizona and worked at a facility training professional athletes I went back and got my master's degree in human movement Sciences which is just a another fancy way of saying Kinesiology or exercise science and then got my PhD in human bioenergetics so in 2011 I got that came out um here to California and I've been working at Cal State flein ever since so I've been for a while now the director for the center for sport performance there as well as my

lab which is a biochemistry and molecular exercise physiology lab so that's the the condensed version of the academic path um now I think probably more important your question was college football and then training professional athletes started uh at that point as well and then I started compe and weightlifting which locally is Olympic weightlifting that version of it and then Combat Sports a lot after that so I've continued to work with athletes the entire time I'm still over the last 10 years you know running my labs running our research I've worked with professional athletes um in

just about every sport with the exception of racing I have yet to get into Formula One um but um sa young winners MVPs all Pros you know the whole the whole thing Olympic gold medalists ET so my my research actually and my interest really come back from the exact same point and so I'm going to return to the very beginning here which was I was a decent athlete uh but I actually feel like I was in the perfect spot because I wasn't so good that these details didn't matter I was going to be an all

pro I was going to you know go to the next level no matter what that wasn't the case so when I did things better was more effective with training more effective recovery it mattered I saw differences on the field right it was a difference between me being a starter and being not a starter or whatever the case is I also was good enough to know where I got rewarded so if you're not good enough then it's just like doesn't matter what you do you're not going to play the next level so I was in that

perfect scenario so I was totally obsessed with making sure I gave myself every Advantage possible to have some success I knew I was never going to be you know professional level caliber or even division one but I was like the difference is do you want to play college football or not that's going to be the difference so if you can do these things you might be able to do it if not you're going to have no chance and where I'm from people don't don't really go to college in general and they certainly don't play college

sports um there's no Advanced degrees and so to me I was like wow you got a chance to do something really special here and do something that no one else you really know has done that often so that's what that initial passion came from uh Additionally the the town I grew up with my parents and everybody I knew it is a very workingclass place and so losing was always fine there's always better than you but losing because you didn't prepare was totally unacceptable um we all most of the kids I grew up with we worked

on farms or we cleaned stalls we did something before school you know my parents worked in construction we built things so that whole idea of like you fend for yourself and you get what you earn and all that sort of stuff was just something I grew up with and so moving that into sports and Academia was like if you want a chance like it's on you and nobody else and so do the work or don't do the work so that's what all pushed me to get here and then as I'll as I'll finish up the

the background is then when I started moving past my athletic career and I start started finding athletes who wanted to pursue these tremendous goals like go to the Olympics but in a sport like women's wrestling like no one's going to help them they don't have funds and so I I just became very interested in these people because I'm like man I can help you a lot no one else cares about you there's no money on the back end here there's no Fame there's no social media at the time I just want to get help you

here in this journey because that's something that's going to reach my soul of let's give everything we can have to do something really special that no one's going to care about besides you and I and like your team and your family and so that's what drove it initially and that's what really put me in this position and that's what put me in the position to continue to go and get my masters to get my PhD was you got to learn more there's more things going on here you've got to find all the answers you know

that you can and if you're doing anything less than that what are you doing you're just giving up so that's that's the background of sort of how I got here and and what I do now now you mentioned briefly um Olympic lifting uh we've had Lane Norton on the podcast several times Lane obviously is a very successful powerlifter I think folks are kind of familiar with powerlifting having the three lifts and it's really about um you know these three lifts and what your total is in those three lifts can you contrast that a little bit

with what Olympic lifting is and I think more importantly what are what are the physiologic differences between those two and and I'll preface the question for The Listener by saying again even if you never plan to powerlift or Olympic lift this is going to be Germaine to our discussion yeah so this is very uh we there's actually a fairly recently we published the most in-depth analysis of muscle composition of Olympic White Li so we can actually come back to that and we can talk more specifically about muscle composition but in general as some background if

you think about powerlifting It's tricky because we're about to run some loops on your brain here so technically you have Force production which is in the case of lifting it is one rep max so it's the most amount of weight you can lift one time period not repetitions not how many times you can do it not how fast you can do it just what can you get up and the sport of powerlifting like what Lane does it is three exercises know the deadlift bench and the squat and is how much weight can you lift one

time you get a couple of tries at it but it's that's effective what it is right so it's really an expression of pure strength it's not really an expression of power at all because the speed component is very poor in fact the deadlift can take as long as you want it doesn't matter did you get it up or did you not squat Etc so we're already at the gates we've confused people because the name of the boort is called powerlifting despite the fact it is not a power exercise nor is it determined by power when

you move over to Olympic way I think it's the same basic idea there are now two lifts instead of three one lift being called the snatch and the other one's called the clean and jerk it's called the clean and jerk because it has two parts you clean it to your chest and you jerk it over your head but it's still considered one lip name of the game is still one rep max so whoever can lift the most amount one time is the winner and there's no repetition method to it the difference is though this is

now more expression of power because although it's all about one or Max it's difficult to lift something over your head as high as possible slowly so there's a speed component required to the movements to perform whether it's the clean or the snatch and so it is an expression of tremendous strength but there's a force or velocity component to it so when you multiply force by velocity now you've got power and so technically the weightlifters Olympic weightlifters are significantly more powerful than a powerlifter despite the fact the powerlifter is in a sport called powerlifting so the

confusion there is and this gets worse when we start roping in things like strong man so strong man is fantastic because again you think strength and you think that must be the biggest expression of strength but in fact it's not because strong man is contested over multiple repetitions so it is an expression of very very high strength repeated several times very very high strength but it's not technically a true one rep max that actually goes to back to the powerlifters so now you've already confused powerlifting weightlifting and um strong man and none of those three

things are actually explaining what what they do correctly um we can keep going on with multiple Sports here but this is this is the G the de core of the problem the reason you're I think you're bringing this up is this also explains training adaptations this exactly it's a perfect way to outline to understand what's happening so if you train like a powerlifter that's probably represents the best way to get truly strong if you train like a weightlifter it represents the best way to get powerful if you train like a strong man it represents a

fantastic way to get very very strong in more what we'll say life functional movements so walking carrying uh lifting objects uh and doing it probably multiple times so the only difference between all those three and the last part I'll add to is with Olympic weightlifting the amount of coordination required because you're going to take a weight from the ground throw it over your head and catch it over your head in a full squat so when it comes to things like balance and propri reception and Ecentric catching it is uh the advantage goes to weight lifters

you know big time there you're not going to see that powerlifting is very controlled it's a very specific foot position hand position there's no movement ideally and it's very U it's typically you're minimizing range of motion intentionally because you want to minimize work right so work being force times distance and if the game of the game is who can create the most Force you can minimize the distance you're going to win that's why they take those funny positions that's why Lane has both of his feet six miles apart and and does it he calls it

a deadlift even though it's a fake movement just kidding L Lane and I go back many many years so um he would laugh at that joke I promise so that's the basic Foundation of of the difference here you have a very sport specific application for powerlifting weightlifting is very Sports specific but it's a much greater range of motion has those other components and strong man is is kind of position I didn't know I know you didn't ask about strong man round I love that you brought that in um before going to my next question let's

put one more little bow on that we've talked a lot about who's the strongest who's the most powerful who has the most functional strength uh you want to throw in a little bit on hypertrophy within the that Trio yeah great so you can actually add a couple of more scenarios here hypertrophy would be more of your bodybuilding which lane has also done Holly I think you just have Holly on right so Holly can smash with physique whether you want to call it bodybuilding or general physique or any stuff it's simply improving um generally leanness and

total muscle mass and then there's a component of symmetry and shape things like that that don't really matter for this conversation so if you add that on top of it now you're talking about who can optimize muscle size as well as leaness which is really really important with no consideration for function doesn't matter if you're strong or fast or athletic or any of those things it's there in fact this is it's so interesting here that you started the conversation like this because this is day one of my strength add conditioning courses the academic semester I

spend the first week actually just on going over these different categories of sport because it does exactly like what you're setting up here is it outlines exactly how to train and the last two pieces just to throw this in there would be actually if you think about the competitive circuit training sports like CrossFit for example totally no offense I'm just meaning as a sense of they are very strong they have a lot of muscle but they're not nearly as strong as powerlifters you know like y as a general statement they're not nearly as strong as

world's strongest men but they do a lot more repetitions and so a World's Strongest Man is going to win an event doing something like five to 15 repetitions like something you know kind of depending in CrossFit you might have to do 90 reps in a given workout like way more and so it's way higher up that scale of of number of repetitions they do some of course that are one repetition but you get the point is is a very crude explanation of what's Happening uh a lot of function a lot of different movements and a

lot of workouts repeated in the same day and so it's a very different test of recovery over three or four days of just brutal onsa um and asked to do things in a lot of different areas and a lot of different Energy Systems and movement patterns and things like that so it's a really interesting test of of Total Physical Fitness and the last one that I like to throw in there is either is basically track and feel and now you have the truth expression of of velocity these are the people who are going to be

the best at getting you truly fast and so if you think about this now what do you need to have as a functional human being for lifespan longevity or Sport and if you want to think about this in a spectrum how do I get absolutely fastest how do I get the most powerful how do I get strong how do I add muscle size slash lose body fat how do I improve my muscular endurance and now how do I improve my cardiovascular metabolic endurance this is now occupied in all of those Sports and so we can

just look at them as a model for training and saying the best in the world at getting stronger have been doing this the best in the world at getting faster Peak speed the best in the world um at getting able to recover multiple days in a row okay we have so we have different models of that so that is a nice foundation for all training really yeah I I love it and and there's a matrix Brewing right now in my head as you go through that so we're going to come and kind of start to

fill in some of this Matrix as we go um let's um simultaneously go back to the fundamentals but do so with um without any remorse for how rigorous we need to be that's the greatest setup ever so let's talk about muscles what is a muscle what is the functional unit how does it it generate Force what are the metabolic demands what makes these cells that are so ubiquitous in our body different from say the cells in our liver the cells in our gut the cells in our brain you know what what are these what are

these cells that we almost take for granted sometimes all right now you're asking me to do like a two semester course 20 20 minutes look I me I did ask you to do a week in minutes so by that logic we could be here a while but yeah let's see what we can do yeah all right hopefully you're ready for part two three four and five of this uh podcast um I'll give you what I can give you and then we'll come back let's think about it this way um number one I like to play

a little trick you ever ask people kind of like that Jeopardy question of what's the biggest organ in your body and people generally are going to say scan yeah exactly that's what I would have said actually yeah right well us again exercise scientists and if I didn't give you enough of a bias earlier about being exercise scientist I'm also musle physiologist so I'm gonna give all the credit in the world the muscle and none of it to anything else so so basically the brain the heart the liver the lungs only but they're just there to

support the muscles 100% And if you start talking my worst enemy the nervous system I'm probably going to hit and record and go home those neuroscientists just take credit for everything it's garbage hot garbage right give it all the muscle um so you've heard my biases if you want to stop listening now you can if not understand that's as going here so in general if you think about it this way again muscle is is going to be the largest organ in your body and you've talked about this a number of times on your show but

it's doing everything from supporting function and so Locomotion getting you throughout the world to being your biggest reserve for amino acids what you need for building any cell any functional cell in your body your brain your liver your immune system all that has to come from somewhere to regulating glucose being your biggest dump and reserve for regulating metabolism controlling function um I could go sort of on and on and on about the the the physiological the Practical the general health benefits of of skeletal muscle and don't be bashful this is a good time to to

to say those things and to expand on them because I've said everything you've said but I think 's more to it uh and I think one of the things you've said I I don't think probably is as appreciated which is the storage Depot for amino acids um because we don't really think of it that way right we we sort of you know and Lane did a great job talking about this in the podcast which is we're constantly breaking down and constantly adding new so there's this pool of turning over amino acids and it's very difficult

to study them from a flux perspective but clearly some of those things get getting spun off in the mo you know if you're working out it's at least a plausible scenario that amino acids are being broken down I meaning proteins are being broken down amino acids being released they may not be resynthesized right back into that same piece of skeletal muscle they may be used for another application well it's not even a May it's like yeah it's a pretty much guarantee like that that's going to happen um if you kind of think about it this

way if uh so I'll give a quick energetic analogy here so I have a like a Cheesy video I did 10 years ago where I sat in my backyard and shot this and put it on YouTube so we'll we'll link to it if you uh yeah you'll send it to us and we'll link to it in the show notes yeah yeah yeah okay that's that's we'll find out somewhere bar in eight year ago YouTube land or something um so if you think about the very basics of energy if you were going to be out camping

um you're an Outdoorsman right absolutely you're yeah yeah you and I okay great so if you're out if you're out hunting which I'm actually even a couple days from my hunting trip so this is front of mine is why this analogy comes up um and you wanted you know you may need to create a fire you have a handful of of options and the very first one being if you had a match right A match is very easy to light and if anyone lights a match on fire it's going to give you instantaneous energy the

fire and it's going to last some amount of seconds before it burns out I don't know what those seconds are 5 Seconds 10 12 doesn't matter some some a short amount seconds worst case scenario you need energy great um the downside is you have limited supply of them they're kind of finicky and you better hope they don't get wet and they're just not reliable at best case if none of that happens you're still going to get some amount of seconds um if you need that energy right now though that's where you start in terms of

your tissue that's going to be ATP that's going to be your phosphor creatine Energy System so the stomry is one to one there you break down one fossil creatine you're G to get one mole of ATP out of that um that's great that's stored internally in your muscle so that's already right there in fact it's generally loaded right up on the mein head um or close to it and so it can contract tissue we can come back to what all that stuff means well yeah we'll we'll we'll talk about actin meas in a minute because

I want people to actually know what this physically looks like but let's go back to the energy 100% great so that's your little energy boost system now if you had a little bit more um forward thinking you would say okay let me use that match to then actually just light a newspaper if you newspaper or something like that and if you're in the woods papers same thing you get fairly quick light not as fast as a match and it would give you some few minutes of energy doesn't matter what these numbers are it's just conceptual

stuff here and that's great that's going to be carbohydrate right so carbohydrate is stored both in the cell as well as outside the cell in three major areas but in in the cell it's going to give you a lot more energy that is your most direct fast sty geometry is a little bit better but not much actually and so you're going to get a couple of moles of ATP per molecule of carbohydrate and that's not it's better but it's like you're sort of splitting hairs here a little bit um if that gets low you can

now pull glucose out of the blood and for a little bit of terminology here glycogen in the tissue is what it's called Uh glycogen in liver is what it's called if we put that in the blood that's called glucose blood sugar roughly talking the same things here so we can pull that out of the blood and then we can actually if that gets low we can pull that out of the liver so that's the basic like energy pathway in the liver then functions as kind of your backup storage system for glucose to make sure that

you can regulate blood glucose while you're changing concentrations of glycogen in tissue that's really what it's doing because you don't want obviously you've talked about a million times a bunch of instability and blood glucose that's a bad thing it's one of the four things that your body will regulate almost over almost anything else in addition to pH and blood pressure Etc right and electrolyte concentrations like they don't like to mess with those things at all so everything else will move around those things to keep those stable all right so if we're in the tissue now

and we've got past our newspaper the next thing it would be a giant piece of wood so if you had firewood or something like that lighting firewood in the wild is very difficult to do it doesn't happen in seconds you need to kind of know what you're doing but it's going to give you exponentially more fire length that then you could put a Log on the Fire and that could literally be on going the next morning when you wake up it give you hours think about that as fat now I like this whole analogy is

if you know a little bit about the chemistry of fat versus carbohydrate they're both big long chains of carbon just like a paper is actually made of wood is sort of just a separate piece of the same thing so you get a small six carbon chain from GL glucose you can get any number of lengths of chains of of fat right 18 carbon fatty acid chain you can put three of those on a back one of all and you've gotten yourself 50 carbon molecules per triger something like that um so stomry gets better here you're

going to get something like three or 400 ATP per molecule of fat and that's where things get actually better okay the fat is actually coming mostly though from outside of the muscle so energy from fat mobilization comes throughout the body somewhat evenly glucose comes mostly from the intra muscle itself and then a little bit from the backup supplies if it gets low phosphor creting directly from the muscle all that energetic background is say when you start moving you start trying to create exercise where's the last piece we forgot here oh that's protein so protein actually

in this analogy would be functioning more like a piece of metal so if you had metal in the woods and you needed a fire and you had absolutely nothing else you can in theory melt metal with the fire you're going to get some but it is a very very low wind proposition the if you absolutely have to do it you can do it to survive but if that's your fueling strategy you're in a big big problem because you're going to run out of metal very quickly in the woods right you just you're out of it

it's also the only thing you have to create shelter and stability and to fend for food and everything else and so it is a plausible way to provide energy it's just a terrible one um it's mostly there for you to reconstruct new tools and so if you're in the woods and you have metal and you need to make a knife we can fashion that okay now we need to melt that thing down and make a roof we can fashion that now we need to melt that back down and make a shovel it's meant to be

kind of broken back down recreated in the same in different forms of the same basic item and so that's really what we're looking at the ability to play back and forth of carbohydrate and fat as different fuel system that's really like probably we don't have time to get to that today it's not really the best thing but the ability and the need and the the point of protein in tissue it is not fuel although it can be for what I explained it's really that it is is taking it and saying we need it mostly for

this task right now we need it mostly um for skeletal muscle um we need it mostly for immune system we need it mostly for these other functions and so one of the ways to quickly lose muscle is to put yourself in a compromised position because it's going to say if it if we're choosing between keeping that 24-in bicep or clearing up something we need immunologically it's going to go towards that um this is also why we see protein redistribution across muscle so if you see like say you spend a bunch of times on your bicep

your biceps get really really big and you don't train your calf and your calf is actually unless just say your protein intake is insufficient you will start redistributing proteins from the calf up to the bicep to actually enable that growth and so you're thinking you're getting bigger but you're really just taking it from other places if protein intake itself is not sufficient and so it really is a corn Stone and if you look at the research like you're going to see this bear through like very clearly as something if you ever wonder why some of

these people are just like so diligent about protein intake why this has become such a big deal is is this is It's the raw material you really can't get anywhere else and you can get carbohydrates and fat and you can go through that whole thing in a lot of ways you can't fake protein though it's it's very challenging to do so and the last little piece I'll say there is why this is so important to me is you can't f muscle most specifically without the protein and when we start losing muscle now we enter a

whole Cascade of problems um from physical performance you know your interest is more of like aging and Longevity that whole Cascade becomes a a problem and we can certainly talk about the specific changes in muscle and past some of the details you've actually covered before um with that but that yeah those are things like it just becomes a really big deal so it just doesn't make any sense to skimp on that one um as a as a place to go yeah I'll just stop there because I can keep going but yeah no I think it

it does uh it's it's worth repeating right that um when you look at people across their lifetimes and you evaluate for muscle mass and you you know divide people up and categorize them by the amount of muscle mass they have uh and we should talk about this because of course my interpretation of the data is that once you normalize for strength it's the strength wins but it's sort of easier to measure muscle mass we kind of you know all you need to do is put somebody in a dexa and you sort of can figure out

their almi and so we tend to look at survival curves based on Al almi uh which for The Listener just means the amount of lean muscle you have in your arms and legs normalized to your height appendicular lean mass index um you know there there's no ambiguity about the fact that more muscle means a longer life it it's you know it's as it's as clear as high VO2 max means a longer life um so let's now go back and make sure people understand the structure of a muscle because I want to talk about different fiber

types as well just to round out some of the physiology um so in an effort to understand the difference between a fast twitch and a low twitch fast twitch and a slow twitch muscle fiber which has a metabolic difference I'm curious as to what the structural difference is is and maybe just kind of explaining how myofibrils work and things like that yeah sure so let me go back just a little bit to understand whole human function movement um I won't go as deep into this one though if you just think about how you actually create

movement it really has three core functions so number one you have to have some sort of direction or signal and this is going to be coming from your nervous system and so whether this is Central peripheral whether this is autonomic whether this is a controlled sematic action response it doesn't really matter for this conversation the nerve has to tell it what to do so nerves you get that one that's it don't take anything else nervous system right you get that control now that nerve then has to go into a muscle fiber and tell the muscle

fiber to contract okay the muscle fiber then is part two so the cell actually has to contract itself but that actually doesn't cause movement muscles are not attached to Bone that's not how it works so muscle fibers are are surrounded by connected tissue all those connected tissue are bundled together in like a package so if you imagine buying a bunch of strips of bacon from The Butcher and they would wrap that up and kind of Saran Wrap together that's actually kind of what a muscle looks like so you got that saran wrap connecting it so

if you pulled on one piece of bacon youd notice the whole package moves and that's that's sort of the point you're transferring force from muscle through connective tissue that connective tissue comes together um into a tendon that tendon then attaches to Bone and so the third part for human movement is actually connected tissue and so you have to have a signal you have to have a muscle contract that has to make connect the tissue pull on a bone that actually is what generates human movement well if you look at the the front end we'll leave

the neural science to other people you look at the connective tissue and it's very difficult to understand what's happening there for a number of reasons but mostly it's it's it's not plastic when we look at muscle it's tremendously plastic and what I mean by that is it adapts it changes very quickly quickly and rapidly and responds to a lot of things connected tissues doesn't have a blood flow Supply doesn't have energetic demand it's just it's kind of just there it's there's more to that story but we'll just kind of leave it like that the core

of the issue of adaptations whether they are pro or negative is going to be in skeletal muscle and so here's what that actually looks like a nerve will come down and actually attach and inate to a whole host of muscle fibers and so you can imagine skeletal muscle fibers are some of the largest cells in bi biology by diameter they're tremendous in humans in fact what's actually very interesting about humans that makes this special is our muscle fibers are what's called multinucleated so you probably remember this term from like med school or something like that

um in fact I whenever I talk to biology people about this that like their head is blown because I forget how lost in exercise science I get like us nerds but it's it's very uncommon in nature to see cells that have more than one nucleus and the nucleus is the is the the core or the cell if you will that's what holds your DNA that's what controls and tells you when to replicate proteins um to grow shrink D repair so the whole control center so the fact that skeletal muscle has many of them per cell

in fact it's not a few it's not two or three it is Thousands per cell so skeletal muscle can be extraordinarily large um you can actually I have a video of this somewhere I can't remember actually there might have been a picture in a men's health thing we did there's a video somewhere we actually we'll find that and we'll also put that in the show notes okay um I can actually pick up a indiv a single muscle fiber from a human with tweezers and you can see it with your naked eye so we could hold

this in fact I could do it right now if I had one I could hold in front of the camera you'd be able to see an actual whole muscle cell they're that large in fact they can be very very long so they can be several inches and let's help folks understand what defines a cell because normally outside of the muscle we kind of Define a Cell by a cell membrane has a single nucleus I mean we kind of know what the constitutive elements here this is defined also by a cell membrane but it's a sort

of a longer looking tube as opposed to a sphere and oh yeah just sort of yeah thank you yeah yeah good good distinction there I sort of again get lost in exercise science here um so yeah if you if you remember like you're back to high school biology and you think of a cell as like a circle or an oval um this is more it's like that it's c circular but it's a tube so it's a very long tube the way to think about it is like a ponytail so if you think about a ponytail

you think about it as one thing it is a ponytail but it's made up of a whole bunch of long tube individual hairs and they all wrapped together to make a ponytail that's what a cell a skeletal muscle cell looks like which is actually quite different than a cardiac cell those are more rectangular if you will they're shorter and wider um skeletal muscle fibers are very long very narrow but still circular they still have a cell membrane they have bunch of nuclei most of the organella are the same as any other thing the the contracti

units we can get to in a second but yeah that's the basic setup of them and and just is it give me the typical length of a muscle cell a skeletal muscle cell you you can't really give a typical because depending on what you'll see with skeletal muscle is structure is function so if you can contrast this to cardiac tissue so cardiac tissue is actually quite interesting because it is what we call the ultimate slow twitch fiber and so all the cardiac tisue is slow twitch in fact the slow twitch are even more slow twitch

than skeletal and they're tend to be fairly uniform so you could give specific numbers on cross-sectional area a diameter length on those skeletal muscle if you look at like your sartorious which is that kind of muscle that goes from that pointy part of the front of your hip down to the inside middle of your knee um theoretically those fibers could run the whole length a single cell correct can run that whole length yeah even if it runs half that length that's that's extraordinarily long right you go back though and you go to like an ocular

muscle then it's going to be minute it's going to be extremely small and length if you go to um muscles in in your digiti your fingers they're going to be very very very very short so it's sort of there is no like classic range it could be from millimeters to literally inches in length so what so so presumably the reason that these cells have multiple nuclei is you know basically to decentralize the actions of uh cellular construction right so you've got DNA making RNA in the proximity of that nucleus coming out onto the g g

making protein and if you had for example um you know even a 1 cm long cell which is enormous um you you couldn't simply make all of that work with one nucleus so the question is does that mean these nuclei act independently like what's the where's the Central Command on this it seems like a a remarkable problem okay boy remarkable problem remarkable Advantage right it's the same yeah hard to control but amazingly adaptive exactly this is exactly right so if you want to dive down the entire nucleation question uh this gets very very interesting because

a handful of things we've we've actually shown in our lab that a lot of professional athletes have more nuclei per volume and so this is one of the things that I posit is maybe this is why they can adapt so well why they can handle the volume that they can handle is they just simply have more of these nuclei around and you believe that that is how much genetic and how much adaptation to training boy I would love to give you an answer there we we we have like anything that's is going to be okay

so there's going to be a component to both we actually know of numerous lifestyle factors are influence these things but the more recent data are showing this in general we have thought that nuclei have a couple of things so one um it's not just nuclei count that matters which is what we previously thought the shape matters and so different there's like spheres there's ovals there all kinds and it looks like the shape determines the function the location determines the function and so it looks like there are subtypes of nuclei that surround for example the mitochondria

and they're going to be very specific to mitochondria repair and then there's other types that are more specific the periphery that'll do cell wall damage and then there are some actually that are regulating injury specifically this is what it looks like right now and so there are subtypes and this is very very recent understanding um and this is probably why some folks recover respond to injury more than others is they just simply have more of the subtype um now your question of nature versus nurture that's what's challenging about that is the measurement Fidelity here is

difficult and the attch is moving uh quickly but it's sort of like every couple of years when the the the microscopes get better we sort of realize that whole the three previous years are now invalidated and so so there's just a lot of movement back and forth and in fact if you look at this related to cell growth in other words hypertrophy there seems to be tremendous confusion about the role of these things in growth or not so there used to be a thing that we referred to as a myonuclear domain limitation so in other

words a cell would only grow so this would be your fiber it would only hypertrophy or grow in diameter to the extent at which the nuclei could control it and so in order to gain more growth you actually have to get more satellite cells to come in and add nuclei right and then when you drain that cell goes back down in diameter but you preserve the monuclear number and so then now retraining is easier than it was the first time so th I mean this is unbelievable but this is the old adage of you know

muscle memory quote unquote it's easier to regain muscle you once had than to put on muscle you never had and I've never heard a molecular uh explanation for that but if that that's a very plausible mechanism right which is you retain the nuclei it looks like that's not correct interesting so there's like it's very um it's very back and forth is the way I'll say it so something is there the story I just outlin to you like it makes intuitive sense I got really hot on it for a number of years and then it was

like some more challenging data came out and it was like well we don't think so um I'm just gonna have to say like TBD this is like a like every week another paper comes out and it's just like okay now we're back on it and now we're back off it and now we realize there's subtypes of where and they're like oh okay but it's it will lend itself obviously to a um a longitudinal type study I mean in an ideal world you would take relatively young presumably pliable athletes you know in their teens and study

them over time under different training demands uh you know obviously the dream case is doing it with with identical twins so that which we've done you have yeah so I could just totally interrupt you we go to that yeah well actually let's put a pin in it because I want to come back to making sure people still understand how these things work so we've now established that muscle cells are kind of unlike any other cell in the body um how hungry are they for energy yeah you know so for example when we look at the

liver you know I always think of the liver as a beautiful organ maybe not quite as cool as the muscle but but it has a special place in my heart um because I've always argued that the reason there is no extracoporeal support for the liver is we simply can't replicate its complexity right so for listeners extracoporeal means outside of the body so dialysis is extracoporeal support for the kidney uh you know a vad or an ECMO is extracorporeal support for the heart or heart and lungs combined a ventilator extracorporeal support for lungs we can't do

that for a liver right if a patient tragically overdoses on Tylenol in an attempt to take their life and they reach a point of irreversibly damaging the liver you can't put them on liver support until they get a transplant that patient will be dead in about two days if they don't get a transplant and I think it comes down to a lot of the stuff you already talked about I mean glucose homeostasis one of the most important bits of homeostasis in the body is controlled with a level of precision I can't fathom I I can

sit and talk about the liver with the same level of excitement that you talk about the muscles um and yet here's what's interesting the liver is not a metabolically greedy organ it really doesn't on its own consume much energy um the brain by contrast a very complex organ an incredibly metabolically greedy organ um which is probably why we need the liver to support the brain without the liver being so good at maintaining glucose homeostasis our brain would have either needed an adaptation strategy away from glucose uh where we we wouldn't have brains as large as

we do where does the muscle fit into this hierarchy where where is the muscle a high maintenance organ yeah so you know what's cool about the liver is uh it's it's kind of like a a professional fighter where like you can beat it up a lot that's right you can't do much to the kidneys that's right they just don't have sustain ability right um so I I have like a secondary love for the liver because it's the closest thing in the body to skeletal muscle in terms of like fact that it is it is listening

and it will respond and it can change um and as you said very adaptive right I mean U you you'll appreciate this if you didn't already know it when we when I was in my residency um we would do quite a number of uh live donor Li liver transplants so uh this would be an operation where an individual would donate a third to a half of their liver to another individual where there was a really good uh HLA match well here's what was really interesting the speed with which that portion of their liver would regenerate

was so staggering that if you didn't anticipate it with inhumane doses of intravenous phosphorus they would have an enormous metabolic crisis oh yeah totally I Mak sense yeah yeah so so basically we could it just you there was no amount of food you could give this person to allow them to have enough phosphate backbone to go and make you know for for the uh DNA and RNA and protein synthesis that was going to be necessary to reproduce their liver so um yeah you just had to basically be giving them IV Foss non-stop because they could

sounds like what we have to do the fibers when we doing our single fiber experiments like you have to bathe them just have to have a permanent bath phosphorus that's right and they could regenerate a third of their liver in two weeks yeah it's it's simply staggering and now of course the caveat for the person listening is this only works when the architecture of the liver is preserved so once you cross into the path of therosis and inflammation uh it's over that so unfortunately that person whose liver has been so beat up for example uh

status post na Nash or alcohol liver disease you get to a point where it no longer has that capacity to regenerate yeah you know the kind of the nice part about the story is though if you fix it before that you you have a good chance absolutely like so you can mess up for a long time and but if you do take that action before you hit that level you can you can get I I shouldn't even say it this way but like you can almost get back to scratch like you can get a lot

of regeneration there you're right and and and the and the kidneys you know being so sensitive to blood pressure pressure so sensitive to the damage of high glucose uh the lungs being so sensitive to smoking and things like that yeah um I I I I don't know for me I just think the liver is an unsung hero of the body well it's the thing that keeps you like it's the Bonk right like you you know those from Endurance Sports like when the liver is finished it doesn't matter how much mental strength you have like it

is a wrap you are going down um if you get hit in the liver if you watch any uh Sports you get hit in the liver instantaneously you're crippled um doesn't matter you could be like mentally you're there but your body will seize and shut you down so it's a very same thing doesn't happen yeah I feel like that isn't that what happened to Oscar De La Hoya against Bernard Hopkins do you remember that fight um I don't remember that fight but I've seen it 50 times I've seen it 500 times I work a lot

with UFC fighters and a number of I have actually um headline fight this weekend for one of my guys uh yeah I've seen it in those Sports a ton I've seen a little toe just the tip of a toe click the liver and world champions just get locked up and fall ground yeah so it does not like being AG aggravated like that but it it will handle a beating you know for the most part you can you can beat it up pretty good and if you see like any blood chemistry stuff and if you're looking

at alt stuff and you're like ah you're pretty it'll come back quick if you take the right steps the kidney is the one you see when you're like uh oh like we're not coming back from this one so any all right so going back to muscle um yeah it is it's a tremendously responsive to everything you're doing and it's listening so your question of how energetically demanding it is well there's a couple of things to say about this people will talk a lot about hey if you add more muscle mass then that's going to base

that's going to elevate your basil metabolic rate so you'll burn more calories just sitting there um that is true but it's not to a level that you actually think it's probably like you're I think the numbers are something like 30 calories with with how much increase in muscle mass like per pound per pound okay I think it's like something like that uh it's it's like like it's not actually level and you can make the ARG well after three or four years that is that extra five or 10 pounds okay like sure but it's not like

I feel like some people think it's going to go from their basil metabolic rate is going to go from 1,500 calories a day to 25 00 because they put on five ponds muscle like that that's just way outside the realm of what's going to happen there are many reasons you probably want to put some muscle on but like adding the metabolic boost and that's because the question is how energetically demanding are they actually think about it the opposite like skel muscle is pretty lazy it wants to be as efficient as possible because if you think

about functionality of physiology you want your brain running full course as often as you possibly can right you want continual interception of what's happening in your outside world as well as introspection going on it's also making decisions Etc skeletal muscle is simply like a backup system it's think more about it as like what do you need done boss you need something done to elevate your function or on it if not we're going to sit down and shut up and wait to be sort of told a little bit and so what that means is if you

need energy now muscle will jump to action it'll get you going um we see this from everything from meat right it's like if you have this energetic need to burn 200 calories your photos start tapping you'll start doing sort of all these things that's skeletal muscle going tell folks what neat is it's just non- exercise energy so it's energy you're burning um that's not physical activity or exercise or the energy needed to survive to breathe to digest to go through basic stuff so it is the it is that other 10 or so percent of energy

throughout the day that accounts for people losing weight or not losing weight or gaining weight um that fluxes pretty well depending on your metabolic Health depending on your total size depending on your other stuff so if you ever see those people who are like man they just can't sit still those are like colloquially the people that probably have a pretty high knat so they're just burning energy kind of sitting here other people are more stoic physically are going to have sort of a lower thing this is also one of the things that explains how people

can maintain the same amount of physical training like exercise performance as well as as health at tremendously different levels of calorie intakes and because we can adjust neat very quickly and your body is it's a it's kind of like a it's a uh the last bit of Polish last bit of paint yeah so it's a huge there's huge buffer in there where you can increase decreas yeah yeah it depending on what you're needing to do right um so we can kind of change our metabolic set point if you will um to keep you at the

same po size depend irrelevant of going up and down in calories and I'm sure you guys covered that a thousand times with with Lane um so that's that's generally we're at so let's talk about contraction how does a contraction actually work and why why does a contraction require ATP what part of the contraction needs it yeah so if we go back nerve is coming into skeletal muscle right and it would in some instances like the eye actually we have what's called a motor unit so we have a motor unit across all these things so motor

unit is the the nerve that's coming in as well as all of the single fibers that that nerve is inating so what that means is in the eye for example you have motor units as small as almost one to one which means there's a single motor unit coming in and activating a single muscle fiber that gives you extraordinary control of dexterity right and so you have a lot of nerves coming in to control a very small number of Fibbers that makes you have real high Precision with exactly where you're controlling you contrast that to muscles

like the glutes you need a lot of strength Force production out the glutes but very low Fidelity you don't need accuracy of hip extension there's basically just one thing it's contract not contract I mean do it with as much force as possible but I not yeah like but that's basically the only Dimension you have to regulate is what is the force and speed of contraction whereas with the eye which is a great example I'm glad you made that contrast our eyes have insane Fidelity to and and of course you have multiple interocular muscles so it's

you know you have all of these muscles above Below on the side of the eyes and the amount of tuning that has to happen to allow humans to be able to do what we do so well which is very subtly pick things up with our eyes um if you contrast that to like your your fingers which we need to have it's the second highest level of fidelity we have to have the eyes are still in order of magnitude higher in terms of fidelity and accuracy of movement it's not even close right like I need to

be very precise with my fingertips but my eyes are on a whole new level of precision where we have to be um so yeah if there's one to one or one to two in the eyes it could be thousands per motor unit in the glutes on off yeah on 50% 20% so you can stand W while having some sort of like 20% level of glute contraction to full hip extension vertical jump explosion squat deadlift the case God that's so that's so fantastic okay continue so nerve comes in so nerve comes in and does that now

here's a couple of other layers um without going too far into nerve you're familiar I'm sure with said principle so you have specific adaptation for closed to man there's another principle in here called henan size principle so eldwin henan is one of my favorite scientists and his principle basically says there's low threshold and high threshold motor units and what that means is there are some motor units that are very easy to get turned on and some that you have to just aggravate the out of them to get them to turn on let's make sure people

understand what that means in terms of what's an action potential how how does a nerve actually deliver its signal yeah so it's it's we have this fun interplay between chemistry electricity and chemistry that that's exactly how contraction works right so you have to go from electro signal to chemical signal back to Electro signal so what happens is you've got sodium and potassium and chloride are your main players right and chloride is a negative charge uh potassium of course is positive and sodium is positive um the fun way to look up this and pay attention to

this if you ever forget here is p you're probably more familiar with this than I am but look at patient assisted suicide with Dr Goran right you give a giant bis of potassium to somebody and they're just going to slowly stop their heart's going to slowly stop Contracting why because the amount of potassium intracellular is going to become fairly equivalent to the amount of extracellular potassium and so the the change in uh gradient electrically between the outside of the cell and inside of the cell becomes neutral and so no action potential is what this the

things things called no no action potential occures and so what you need to have happen is a change in electrical volt from outside the cell to inside the cell and typically we're talking like3 molts inra cell is kind of the number and once enough of the sodium potassium start moving in the correct directions then the electricity changes because our positive is moved nor negatives in moov so you get the idea and boom we hit this flit this switch and this is what we call all or none and so skeletal muscle fibers can't contract at different

levels of force what I mean is once you flick them on they go on fully and that's the only way they can contract and so the analogy we use here in our undergradu classes is a light switch so once you hit that certain threshold a molt the muscle fiber contracts as hard as it possibly can there is no way there's no dimmer switch here you can't go 80% 85 50 it's 100% once you get to that action potential right you actually see the the molts just rock it back up then there's this whole Cascade of

um recovery this is what your sodium potassium pumps are doing to try to reset that gradient put them back in the right direction so you can have another contraction again this is actually what explains tety so if you contract that fiber multiple times in a row before it gets back to reset then it just feels like it's in an isometric contraction or it's not actually how it works but it's going to feel like that um what actually totally off topic but what actually happens is you have so many muscle fibers and they're Contracting and relaxing

at such a fast rate to your muscle it feels like the whole thing's just locked up but they're actually flicking on flicking off just at of really high rate of turnover but anyways um so that's that's in general how you're getting a muscle by the way just so folks understand uh explain to folks how despite an all or none action potential an all or none contraction of a single fiber you can still get variable degrees of strength again whether you're talking about yeah at the level of the muscle yep so this is the next part

this is why we had to bring up penamon size principle so Within These motor units you have um sizes now what's interesting is most of the time in normal situations all the muscle fibers in that motor unit are of the same fiber type so all your if you had let's say we had two motor units um one of those motor units is slow twitch and one of those motor units is going to be fast switch fibers at interface so if we had five fibers in that motor unit or 500 it doesn't really sort of matter

right now we have a couple of factors actually coming on but they're going to be of all like type generally within that same motor unit so the only way that we relegate force production is this we have to know that all five of those muscle fibers once they get turned on are going to contract at full speed so the only way we actually change how much force we're creating a whole muscle is by altering how many of these motor units get turned on so the size principle tells us we're going to turn on the low

threshold units first and so if you go to do what you just did so you reached over and grab a glass of water it's probably best we don't turn on our high threshold High Force production generally large not always but generally larger motor units that have generally fast fibers that are generally bigger number one or two reasons why you don't want to do that number one is we produce unnecessary Force so instead of slowly touching that glass to your lips you'd smash it off your face because there's no way to re you can't go down

so if that motor unit could produce five pounds of force and you need two pounds of force there is no way to go backwards so you always start at the smallest unit possible and turn on more motor units if more Force production is required secondarily it just burns energy so fast- TCH muscle fibers are more metabolically demanding than slow touch muscle fibers and so you're going to waste gas doing that this is exactly why your car starts off in first gear second etc etc we lose efficiency as we go up but we gain performance yeah

yeah so so so let's yeah yeah so let's use that example when you're talking just going back really quickly to the athlete so um how quickly is that response modulated when I want to deadlift something yeah so you you can you can see this in real life you can actually see this I have a video of a deadlift actually a friend of mine doing this where um so the initial step that's going to happen here are you're going to activate slow touch uh sorry lower threshold motor units which are going to be almost exposive to

Sage fers the only way that we really know to increase that is through Force production demands and this is going to like we're going to come back to this when we get to fiber type stuff eventually for aging U and some of the stuff that came out even this week that you you may have not seen yet but um the challenge with fast switch muscle fibers is they are only then based on this logic activated under high threshold demands which are high Force demands you can do anything to activate and and the data will show

this on Aging you see virtually no reduction in slow twitch fibers with aging you see no reduction in size in fact there's some more than a few papers showing a hypertrophic effect of soled fibers of agent there is no loss in V there's no loss in specific tension which is like force per unit of size there's no loss in power so it it just appears to be very easy with any level of activity to maintain and preserve health of sulate fibers but because fast fibers require Force production and you generally don't get high Force production

in activities of daily living then those fibers go unutilized for long stretches of time eventually they go away and so what we see happen is this really interesting thing called fiber type grouping where the nerve will basically say okay that Fiers is being like not used and so that that whole motor unit will Decay and the fibers will be preserved the other neighboring motor units will actually grow new expansions activate some of the previously un gone motor units and then convert those fibers into whatever fiber type happens in that previous motor unit so in general

what we see Happening Here is slow chouch fibers start absorbing or slow chouch motor units start absorbing fast switch fibers and bringing them to their mon unit and so we see these large patches of single fiber types throughout the muscle and so the last part of that puzzle is in a motor unit those fibers are connected by the same neuron and they're the same fiber type but they're not laying next to each other you don't want them in the same spot they're sort of dispersed throughout the muscle and so that gives you smoothness of contraction

and so one of the things that happens is if you start punching like the entire right side of your bicep is one motor unit the entire left side is when you contract that motor unit alone you get super out of control and you get Twitchy um and unregulated movements and so when we see this uh fiber typee grouping thing occur with aging it's almost exclusively a problem of fast fibers not loss of slow fibers and so that also explains lack of fidelity as well as potentially some problems with fine uh unit movements and what is

the heterogenity of fast and slow twitch mixtures within different areas so presumably the ey is all slow twitch it's not particular it doesn't particularly require much force and it you know it doesn't require much force but it it does require a lot of speed yeah so you need to be able to dart back and forth quickly so I actually don't know the okay but let's Okay so's let's look at a big skeletal muscle like the lats or the glutes is there is there so we have two things you have to pay attention to here is

we have a huge amount of personto person variation okay so you you and I within what bracket though give me a sense of like presumably everybody has at least 20% of each I'm making that up but is the yeah so let me do the second part we'll come back to that first part so there's actually as you're alluding to a second ago there's also tremendous difference between muscle to muscle and so some muscles if we look at it like if we compare my Solus your Solus um you might be 90% slow twitch in your Solus

I might be 70 and that would be a large variation in that muscle if you look at um animal models cell culture you murine like you're going to see 100% slow twitch in a Sol and the reason is because we walk the Solus has got to be a majority slow twitch muscle fiber you know we just spend too much time ambulatory to risk any inefficiency in that system 100% if you look at the at the shank and general you've got two primary muscles of movement there the Solus being the smaller one they both attach the

bottom of your foot that's your right so goes through there if you were to take your foot and your toe and like point it towards your face and you to flex your calf that one that pops up that has that kind of U shape if you have a nice calf anyways that big one that pops up to the middle that's your gastrock the one that kind of sits behind it's underneath the very bottom where your Cal stop kind of ends and it goes into that long piece that's the Solus and the gastrock is is almost

the opposite it is almost exclusively fast twitch but not nearly as exclusive as your soles so the Solus is what we call postural or anti-gravity for the exact stuff you mentioned like you it needs to stay up and it needs to be on uh and in fact you can actually have a Solus contracted for hours and be totally totally fine and you won't even realize it for the most part it's actually good metabolically but you would not realize it if you contracted your gas TR for more than a few seconds you're you're probably going to

feel the burn like pretty quickly so the variation in something like a Solus could be that um I think probably if you saw somebody who's 30% fast twitch in the Solus that's a very very high number um I wouldn't be surprised if I saw somebody 95 though if you contrast that to a muscle like the VL so the vast lateral the quad the outside quad muscle as you know but for the audience um now the variation gets extraordinarily large wow so in general the VL is like what we typically say is 50-50 fast flow TCH

and the record it gets far more complicated than fast twitch slow twitch but we're just kind of keeping it at that level for now um we have shown actually in our lab a couple of things so one we we biops seed a whole bunch of people who are Olympians and World caliber National caliber uh in our lab men and women and um some of those individuals are 80 plus perc 85% fast Tor and by the way just did you also do VM and why is there a difference between VL VM and intermediates yeah just due

to access generally access and safety yeah a lot more potential things to hit yep in in the medial yep nothing out the outside I Nick anything I'm we have problems yeah so um you could be up to 80% fast witch on your VL if you're and by the way is that true across all sports like if you had the tour to France Champion would you expect him to even though he's the best of the best and his VL is a monster osity would you expect him to have that high a fast twitch so in the

some of the folks we biopsy in the more endurance space they are as high as 90% slow twitch in the ah okay so that that's yeah so that's that's when I was like it's it's basically zero to zero yeah like you you can run the whole gamut of composition in the v so and we're back to the same question which is if you had a time machine and you could go back and biopsy them as 5-year-olds we really don't know what they looked like then well this is what our twin study did rather than biopsy

them five years old biopsy them twins yeah we got monoa twins who presumably had enough differences in what they were doing that you could see a signal if there was about 35 years difference of training and what did you see so and if we compare this now that I can go back into the you've been in Labs you'll appreciate this um one of our graduate students who been in our lab for probably three or more years was sitting next to my colleague Jimmy Bagley and they're pulling muscle fibers right sort of like the things that

come up when you're staring on a microscope pulling out individual muscle fibers with tweezers for hundreds of hours on time like your brain goes into weird spots and so she was sort of just telling him oh yeah like my dad's a twin or whatever oh cool whatever and it's like oh yeah like monozygous like yeah so monozygous means their DNA is exact so not just brothers that got born at the same time so you have genetic replication so we have that category locked and then Jimmy was sort of like oh cool did they exercise and

she's like oh yeah well like I think I can't remember which one it's like well my dad doesn't exercise but my uncle has been competing in Iron Man's for 35 years and Jimmy was like what it's a dream experiment wait wait yeah so so let me get this straight you have identical twin parents or father one of them has been 30 plus years of documented endurance exercise the other what's he do she's like no he's never exercised since high school and we're like and you've been in my lab for three years and this is the

first we're hearing about this this is the first we're hearing about this like you're you're fire you're not graduating um so we were able to pull them into the lab and bring them in and so he was one of these classic endurance nerds every workout had been documented for 30 years he's got 50 journals written down so we knew the caloric expenditure we knew the miles we just had everything and phenotypically how different did they look ENT almost identical even with all the training they still looked I mean I'm saying not in the face of

course but just muscularly how did they appear phen phenotypically no I know what you're saying um they were almost identical The Only Exception was um the the non-exercising twin was LE a little bit less lean I think he had God I can't remember exactly but something like three or four more kilos of body fat isn't that kind of amazing too just it really speaks to the hereditary nature well yeah yeah so so I want to come back to that because that's what's important but at the surface think about that right you have these two guys

that are genetically identical presumably both looked good right and one is by all intents and purposes a fanatic around exercise the other is a couch potato but on the outside they look relatively equivalent tells you a couple of things one um body habitus is remarkably hereditary I mean it is I believe more hereditary than it's certainly on par with height and eye color in terms of how hereditary it is the second is what you're about to tell us I suspect which is that the outside is but a fraction of the story so here's what we

did I got super excited and I was basically like I'm going to take every measure possible this is Dex of scans this is vertical jump V2 Max blood chemistry muscle biopsies like we we did psychological evaluations we did IQ tests we just did everything we could possibly do by the way you you created just a random IRB to do this like what oh yeah I mean like like we did it we took time to design the study put an IRB through like the whole sort of thing how long did it take just so people understand

the pace at which science moves from the microscope discussion until you've got these guys in your lab maybe eight months oh wow that's really fast you already you already had the funding I assume yeah I didn't care I'm like I'm paying for this you're we're gonna pay this out of my pocket yeah this is for sure 100% like in fact I I literally did pay for their plane flights out of my pocket I didn't want to deal with the stuff I was like just book the flights right now we got to schedule the work like

put it on my credit card I don't care I'm not missing this chance so what did you see so the what's interesting was that again body composition L the untrained person was again five six pounds more fat Mass something like that maybe three kilos was too high I can't remember so I'm like oh that's interesting what was the difference in on on dexa what was the difference in muscle mass like gr you're basically you're at the detection limit of dexa so they're essentially Way Beyond yeah yeah they were almost identical and totally in muscle mass

right now interesting the endurance guy did not lift at all no strength train whatsoever strictly running cycling swim like a very classic can you imagine just the the the the gonan experiment of triplets where you had a third guy here that only lifted weights can you just imagine I can like this was like an hour of her thesis defense this was that question right there God okay all right we we actually did a uh another study in Stockholm Sweden with lifelong skiers um I won't get too derailed here but these are people who are world

champions the 1940s and 50s in cross country skiing Olympic gold medalists and didn't stop competing now they're in the age of 85 Plus up to 92 years old we're still competitive years and compar them to AG matched healthy folks um over here in America so I I've spent a little bit of time in this like aging athlete yeah and I I I actually wrote a little bit about that that cohort in my book The SK yeah yeah no it's it's insane they capable I could tell you a lot more behind the scenes on that one

I'd love to yeah let's come back to walking into the hospital across the street and just like jumping off the curb because there was Ice you're like oh you're in 90 and you just decided to jump that curb for fun like when no one was watching you cuz we could like see them from the window coming in I'm was like just so just like uh one guy finishing a video to Max sitting on the chair taking like two breaths and going I didn't understand the test let me try it again I'm trying to get back

on the bike this is like 12 seconds after VI to maxess and a whole bunch of other stuff like like that was incredible um okay so back to the twin stud so that that was identical um in general you could categorize some things so I'll kind of make this a little bit shorter if you looked at muscle quality so this is Echo intensity on an ultrasound this is vertical jump this is leg extension strength it was either identical or it favored the non-exercising twin right everything else that you would classically associated with an exercise adaptation

favored the exerciser blood lipid panel blood pressure body composition certainly VO2 to Max was significantly higher resting heart rate like all the classic textbook endurance exercise say A B and C get stacked up exactly as you'd think the neutral stuff total muscle mass um that was basically on point then blood glucose was favored for the exerciser like all that stuff you would predict but just to make sure I understand the non-ex exerciser was Stronger stronger better jumper um higher quality muscle U more power again go into go go into the higher quality again so make

sure I understand that beyond the metric driven stuff was that is is that is that a subjective assessment of muscle quality no no no no no no no um so there's a you can actually measure this via an ultrasound okay and so this is like a measure it's called EO intensity it's a measure of it's akin to measuring how much intramuscular fat is inside the actual tissue what that's what eens guys basically tell you so so you're saying the exercising guy had more uh intramuscular lipid right now but just to play Devil's Advocate isn't that

an adaptation to his endurance training where he wants to have more intramuscular lipid because he wants to have more logs near the fire he's burning those logs totally yeah yeah and and you wouldn't have to dig hard to find support for that yeah and I think that's different from the intramuscular lipid we see in the diabetic for example or in the insulin resistant there's a level when you cross right when there when there's no exercise there then there's a different reason that that happens yeah yeah but in terms of functional output but still what's interesting

to me is that the strength metrics also favored the non-ex exerciser yeah it's it was all favored to neutral yeah like it's like either some of the metrics were similar or not statistically different but like they hedge towards a non- exerciser so you could say at best they were neutral to favoring the non- exerciser is I think the most Fair way but there's not a metric there that favored the the exerciser on that side of the house so what is your yeah biopsy related yeah let's talk about the biopsy it gets very different so um

I'll give you the quick version there's a more interesting version um the non- exerciser was almost identical to what you'd seen in the literature and what we've done a ton of time times where you have something like you're fairly mixed in terms of phenotype so you've got some percentage of fast swi some percent of his slow twitch but in fact he had about if I remember correctly something like 20% of his fibers are in what we call this hybrid format and so I sort of loaded this earlier there's fast fibers there slow fibers but The

Story Goes much deeper that's not really how the whole thing plays out um so these hybrid fibers are a single individual cell so one muscle fiber that coexpresses fast and slow twitch and in fact it'll it'll Express that in different areas of throughout the length of the fiber so it'll be exclusively fast twitch in one portion fast and slow in another portion and then exclusively slow twitch in another portion Etc let's let's make sure people understand what the difference is between a fast and a slow twitch fiber let's Y and we'll come I want to

come right back to where we are but I just want to make sure we haven't lost that thread yeah in general there's a lot of ways to describe it but um the easiest way is to describe it by the name so fast twitch means that the twitch or the speed of contraction is higher and so those these fibers can contract and squeeze together with through the mechanisms we haven't got to yet we'll get there masas and actin um at a much faster rate having said that the fast switch fibers tend to be larger though not

always and certainly not in endurance training individuals and definitely not with aging um that they tend to be almost they almost always are more glycolytically driven and so they're going to have more of the enzymes responsible for anerobic glycolysis they're going to have more glucose in the cell they're going to have less intramuscular triglycerides and they're going to be having they generally have more phosphocreatine slow twitch fibers are fatigue resistant which means these are the ones that they can contract kind of all day long because they don't use as much glucose so they do use

quite a bit still they are much better at using fat as a fuel they are uh they tend to have more and larger mitochondria and um the downside is they don't contract with as much velocity in general so that's the the functional that's why we call them twitch and just to be clear the force difference between them is it doesn't matter it's just velocity or is there a force difference as well so the yeah no well so a couple of things um in in large part Force production from muscle fibers is determined mostly by size

cross-sectional area so getting the fiber bigger is the to get it faster having said that power is markedly different and so if you're talking because power is based on velocity as well that's yeah you times the multiply the force by the velocity so if you use this metric that we'll use in single fiber experiments called specific tension which is sort of like relative strength so you you take the size portion out of the equation um what you're going to see is a true slow twitch so these are also called type one fibers um if you

compare those to a type 2 a so that's a fast twitch muscle fiber um you're going to see something like 5 to 6X power between these two so it's not when you normalize for size you normalize for cross if you go if you go to the two x fibers which is a special class of fast switch fibers now you're talking 20x that power curve and that is mostly explained by more metabolic apparatus what enabling the speed why does the 2x fiber go faster yeah it's all has to in fact the way that we differentiate muscle

fibers in the laboratory is we measure What's called the meas and heavy chain and so to to kind of actually come back to micro Anatomy here so the way the muscle fibers work is this is all in a 3D sequence right so you can imagine that cylinder I'm going to explain it to you in 2D just so you understand but this is actually occurring in 3D and so what happens is you've got two these microfilaments called actin and myosin all right now what happens is they're overlap so they're not touching each other and you've got

mein um kind of laying in the middle and it's this big thick tube and it's got these heads that flick off the top of it all right now these heads reach up and they extend again in 3D but if just think about in 2D they reach up and grab on what's called actin all right and so the idea when you contract the muscle is the myosin will reach up and they're going to reach out sort of outward so if you're watching this video you're seeing my hands kind of reach up and away from my body

like I'm stretching my arms like I'm doing a big te if you will and my hands would then grab onto the actin and then if I were to squeeze my hands and bring my hands closer to my face that's the mein is actually then pulling the act in closer together so what actually happens in real life is those start stacking on top of each other and that's why when you squeeze your bicep it actually glows larger vertically because those muscle fibers are stacking on top of each other and that's actually elevating the size and so

what determines Force production versus velocity is what we call cross Bridges so the amount of time that these meas and heads grab onto actin that little place of connection is called a crossbridge the more those cross Bridges you have the more effectively you can pull the actin closer to each other the the more effectively you do that the faster the contraction the more forceful the contraction is going to be so primary thing explaining Force production is the amount of cross Bridges so the thicker your myosin the more likely you are to grab actin the faster

the stronger the hold if you will so the better connection your hand has to that thing it's grabbing onto rather than you can imagine like a couple of fingertips on it and trying to pull something closer to you versus having your whole hand wrapped around it a strap on it chalk on it and like you're GNA be able to rip that thing down quickly now there are six actin that surround and I Circle each in human skelet muscle so again a picture that 3D structure so you can imagine if I'm standing up in a room

and I'm my and six people are forming a circle around me like they're going to jump me or celebrate me or whatever that's what it looks like and my arms can sort of reach out and no matter where my arms are there's going to be somebody that I can grab and you only have two arms still in this you only have two mein filaments you have a ton okay okay you so you have one mein filament sorry you only have um two heads or how many heads do you have okay so you have billions of

heads to grab on to six potential targets so you're always going to grab a Target you're you're going to grab one right now you can't increase the amount of those acon that are around you but we do see that in other animals so this is one of the reasons that explains why like fruit flies spiders and things like that can contract with so much more Force relative to humans is they might have eight or 10 or 12 or 20 M or acent per meas and ants which we always think of as like for their size

being insanely strong totally they'll do that so so Evolution's tool to make things stronger is give more actin because you already have an infinite number of Myas in heads the more things I can give you to grab on to the stronger you are the stronger you're gonna be yeah you you realize there's somebody out there using crisper right now trying to figure out how to double the number of these things in humans right so I'm not going to say this officially all I'm going to say is well officially the world knows about the bare muscle

studies that we've worked on so there have been be tissue come through and under my microscope put it that way um bar tissue is actually quite unique so they actually have a so humans have that 2A and they have that 2x which is formerly 2B right incorrectly identified as 2B MH that's correct most other animals do actually have in fact 2B and the 2B is even faster than the 2X and bears have a lot of them so this is one of the other reasons why not only do you have that they simply have a simp

a fiber type that is much faster than any of the fastest ones we have cheetah yeah and um other cats like that have like 20 to 60% of these two B fibers just extraordinarily high amounts and they and in those do they have more act in targets I think actually I think cats are pretty close to Six to1 but we could fact check that one but I'm pretty sure that part of it's fairly it tends to be fairly similar um similar kind of man mammals it's when you get to the insects and things like that

I think where that number jumps off but my comparative physiology is not the sharpest so don't trust me there so um yeah that's a great description of the micro anatomy and I want to remember let me finish the speed thing this what happens so what determines the speed so on those little mein there where it kind of connects to the ACT it's called the mein head okay now a part of that is a bunch of stuff that you guys don't need to know about but a part of that is is called the heavy chain so

there's a light chain portion and a heavy chain all right now on the tip there the way that we can get a muscle to contract is ATP so what happens is the mein are kind of loosely connected to the actant at all times but in order for it to grab and pull you need a strong connection and for that connection to happen and for that to be able to pull it together it requires energy so pardon the the somewhat crude analogy but the way that it kind of works is if you imagine cocking a pistol

so in order to actually the pistol versus fire the the trigger the squeezing the trigger actually produces it takes a lot less energy than cocking it back if you've ever cocked a thing like it actually you have to pull pretty hard so the energy that we need actually for muscle contraction is not the pulling together that's actually almost passive it is the cocking back part that takes energy right and so that energy comes from ATP so on the little tip of that mein head is an enzyme called ATP a as you know you hear Ace

you think kise like you think like something enzyme that's going to work that's the molecule that hydrolyzes ATP uh splits ATP rather right so um to make that simple so what you have to do is actually invest in ATP that gives you energy use that energy to that myosin back into place and now it's kind of sitting there but it can't bind strongly until calcium comes into the picture it gets released from the sarcoplasm reticulum that has to come to the equation it has to cause this confirmational change and act in and move these T

tubules or that comes from T tubules we move some other things around once those things get moved around by the Cal theas is like oh boom it connects something and then it just almost subconsciously snaps as hard as it possibly can and that's why you can't regulate Force production is like it's just going to catch and snap catch and snap in order for that to go back you actually have to invest more ATP this is also side note what explains RI mortis so this happens it gets contracted you don't have the energy to then pull

it back in so then you stay in this locked sort of skel muscle contraction position so now the speed at which you can do that that atpa thing that's what determines single muscle fiber contract out speed that's also that mice and heavy chain is what we measure in the lab and that's how we determine fast switch versus slow twitch so if you were to use a technique that we use called gel electropheresis basically you put a gel between two pieces of glass and you just pour gel in there and it gets like solidified just like

hair gel like a little bit thicker and then you put each individual muscle fiber in its own vertical lane and then you put a little bit of positive charge on the top end a little bit of negative charge in the bottom end or inverse doesn't matter and then you actually put a little bit of chemical bath around the muscle fiber that has a charge you turn the electricity on positive goes to negative Etc and so those fibers run down vertically through the Gill we hit stop at a certain time point and the smaller ones have

gone further because smaller molecular will go through the gel faster and so we stop basically put it we develop it like you would develop a picture like like old school photography stuff literally the same silver nitrate ET that you use and we can see the ones that have gone further down are slow twitch the ones that want stay up higher are fast twitch and of course we use molecular weight markers to to confirm and all that but that's effective what we're looking at so what that means is the my and heavy chain molecular weight determines

fiber type and that regulates its twitch ability the the more of those the faster those heavy chains work the faster atpa can operate the faster the whole thing can contract the faster the muscle fiber contracts and there you go and that's why muscle fiber type is not predicated on signs it is specific to either metabolic abilities in the olden days or now more specifically twitch velocity so I guess all of this now brings us back to a better position in in in which we can understand the biopsy studies in these identical twins so if you

if you look at the fiber profile of the untrained twin It lines up very close to what you'd see in a textbook right so it's around 50% slow twitch about 30% of these fast twitch 2 a form but then about 20 or so percent H A or 2x 2 a oh okay so here's one of the things that's interesting when you get into the 2x conversation um there are clearly humans have the ability to express 2x it's just extraordinarily rare So it tends to Happ happen is this if you find somebody that has what we

call Pure 2x fibers so these are single fibers that are expressing only 2x a couple of things have happened they've number one they've probably had that muscle fiber de inovated for decades that's really the only time we see it in fact if you look at spinal cord injury folks who've you know had a dinator thing for decades there is high as 50 or 60% of their total fiber type being 2X and so this seems to be the default strategy of if you don't activate or utilize the muscle it eventually is going to fall to 2x

why we have absolutely no idea I could guess do we don't seem to know we see it sometimes in older folks and again 2x sorry 2x is the hybrid single single fiber hybrid 2x is a pure fiber type it is the ultra fast ah okay okay it is the one so any Hy hbd is going to be called something like there's a 1 2A hybrid there's a 2 a2x hybrid and there's even a triple hybrid 1 2 a 2X it has all three fiber types in the same cell those are those are fairly uncommon a

12a hybrid and a 2 a2x hybrid are very very common a pure 2x by itself though is extraordinarily rare in fact we've done hundreds of thousands of individual fibers in my lab and have probably seen in total 20 or 30 P 2x fibers you're talking generally something like 0.1% of fibers something like that are pure 2x now if you dive in literature here you're going to get confused very quickly because a lot of people don't use detailed enough laboratory methodologies to differentiate these and so they're going to see oh there's all kinds of 2x fibers

they're really not they're very clearly 2 a2x fibers they just didn't run High Fidelity enough to actually differentiate between hybrids and so you'll pick up to a2x fibers as having some portion of 2x and so it's a difference between does that fiber contain 2x versus is it a purely 2x F which is sort of a semantic difference but in all world it's it's a big deal um if you find somebody with a high percentage of 2x fibers um something on is is going on The Only Exception here is there's no data really on truly fast

people we have a lot on powerful people we have a lot on kayakers and bodybuilders and weightlifters but as we discussed at the beginning that's actually not true we don't have data on sprinters no why great question it's hard to get these folks in the lab I guess um people interested in it it's not a thing we just don't have them the only thing we have is there was a case study there's a case study done on a a guy who I think he still owns a world record um it's not hard to figure out

his name though I can't technically say it um 110 meter hurdles I think and 60 meter hurdles at the time had the world record in both I think still has one of them um he's the only one I know and I actually uh I was a graduate student at the time so I didn't run the study but certainly had my hands on fibers plenty of times um and he had something like 24% Pier 2x fibers um so what did like see that replicated so so so the untrained guy was 50% slow 30% 2A 20% hybrid

ax uhuh okay 2 a 2X 2 a2x yep and then what was the trained cardio only trained twin about 95% pure slow twitch okay so right there you have the explanation for why he was weaker he just couldn't generate the force it's a couple of things so it answers a handful number one do they change yes like we know this this is highly malleable now yeah not even close um we actually know that there's data on nutrition there's nutritional aspects that will alter fiber type composition anything that's going to go activate pgc1 Alpha in that

whole Cascade it's going to activate increase soate fibers like it's just going to happen right uh there's actually a study came out very recently r veratrol doing it not in humans but like a very reasonable dose five grams of the veratrol I think in in cattle is like not that much at all for a 2,000 pound animal um cause significant changes in fiber type profile and there's a whole host of nutritional interventions the question of okay does it change the physical activity like it's it's been answered so many times for so many decades now it's

just like very clear and in our case okay how much how much can I really change an important amount well I don't know what these people's default is because one could argue the untrained guy was actually in a in an adaptation State he would have yeah he had a higher state yeah and he he de he deviated away from his potential right because one thing that seems to be very clear is these 2 a2x fibers are generally associated with poor health and so we see this concentration go up whereas anyal activity or space flight a

2X by itself is not a 2X is basically irrelevant because they just don't exist okay got it and if you have some if you have them it's generally bad news so you don't want to train into them so the ideal scenario here is 2A those seem to be the place you want to train into um if you do any sort of physical training those hybrids tend to go down especially 2 a2x is they kind of go away and so I'm not surprised that that the trained individual had none of them um and I'm also surprised

the untray one so it lined up pretty textbook so the magnitude of change is Meaningful so it's a case study all that what what's your hypothesis if you had a third brother a triplet who was a um let's see who was a weight lifter or a powerlifter this I don't the distinction actually don't think would matter a ton yeah you're going to get the same answer I would not be surprised if that third was 70% F switch 2 a um and 30% type one yeah with probably very few hybrids if they're trained now the one

distinction is the 2 a2x fibers tend to be a little more responsive to a little bit of workload and so you have to hit sufficient volume to really get them to go all the way away but it's not that much so if you're just like kind of like a l Fair lifter you'll still have something around but if you're training seriously um those things are going to be go away yeah so so I don't really think given enough time and exposure I don't really think that there's a limit to the plasticity among fiber types even

within a normal human condition now this was 35 years yeah yeah so like you know do we have a sense about the window in which you are maximally susceptible to it so if someone listening to this is 50 years old and they've kind of been sedentary a lot of their lives but because they listen to this podcast they've now got the motivation to become BigTime exercisers how much can they you know Bend The Arc of their fiber curve so fiber type is actually really quite cool because it doesn't seem to matter what age you are

so training studies in 70 year olds we see dramatic changes in fiber type in six weeks eight weeks certainly and the magnitude of change doesn't seem to differentiate in fact the way that you want to think about this is it's kind of like an the less trained you are the quicker you ini faster things yeah the faster the initial adaptation the closer to your Edge so if you're a weightlifter in fact we saw this differentiated so with our world caliber lifters compared to national caliber lifters the world caliber lifters had been lifting at a very

high level for like eight or so years the national caliber had been lifting more like four years they were close to fiber type but the national calibers had more fast s fibers so what this tells you is initial changes happened very quickly but getting from that last few percentage up took years for that second group but we will see this again four to six weeks to see a demonstrable change in fiber type composition is and it doesn't seem to matter with age in fact as you age it probably gets easier um because your your level

of untrained is so high if that situation is there um one other thing I want to ask you about on the microanatomy side Andy is uh explain you you sort of have talked about it indirectly but if a person hasn't maybe caught it can you just explain how hypertrophy fits into this so when a person wants to have bigger muscles what's happening at the cellular level with their muscle fibers right so there's an interesting um discussion here that the easy answer is when we generally say hypertrophy we're referring to is diameter a cross-sectional area and

so if you remember if you think about the muscle fiber as being that cylinder the width of the cylinder just expands and so that circle gets larger is the way to think about it um AC crude analogy is getting fatter means each atopy is getting bigger it's taking on and storing more triglyceride yep yep exactly so from a skeletal muscle perspective it the diameter gets larger um there's actually interesting work we actually have some tissue on its way to Auburn right now because one of the things that's been interesting it's like a broscience thing for

years of piroplasm hypertrophy versus contractile hypertrophy and so what this is really positing is is the change really coming from fluid retention basically or is it actually enhanced of the contractile tissue which in this case would be an act amiin um seems to have some initial work there it's a little bit of both and it happens at different phases of training so question do different types of training increase sarcoplasmic versus contractile hypertrophy or is the broader question you know hey is a bodybuilder a bodybuilder because their sarcoplasmic reticulum is huge but their contractile units are

not that much bigger than the average person I'm not sure I want to make sure I understand the question yeah so it's close not the coplas reticulum that's what we call piroplasm hypertrophy so this Su just be an increase in diameter with additional fluid inex so it is close to what you're saying okay so in other words does this thing even exist in other words or is all increases in muscle size through strength TR assuming it's like a normal positive adapation that's yeah yeah sort of weird thing is it actually happening because Myas and act

are getting thicker I see I got it can't wait that's amazing we don't know the answer to that question yet we don't more data have started coming out wow but even a few years ago the the idea that sarcoplasmic hyy was a thing was thought of as like garbage rosid meaning the idea the the the sort of assumed belief was anytime muscles got bigger they were getting bigger in the contractile units correct well by the way I'm not I'm not I'm not shocked that that was the default hypothesis I'm shocked that it wasn't definitively known

it was a it was a technology issue okay it was it was an assay problem like figuring out how to actually measure this um when you take a muscle fiber even with an electron microscopy you couldn't do this that's not the problem it's the standardization of fluids that's the issue when you Sample When You sample the tissue it's how do you lock the fluid into place basically correct yeah how do you take this cell out of a living human and preserve fluid architecture yep without contaminating it I got it and you couldn't do that with

like liquid nitrogen immediately that flash freezes yeah so if you get crystals in there you actually lice you screw the whole thing got it so beautiful so what was just just because I'm such a freaking nerd I can't stand it how did you guys solve this problem uh well I didn't solve it um first of all Mike Roberts out of Auburn um has produced a lot of really interesting work in this area his lab's just extraordinary um but they just figured out they were able to kind of take an assay from the colleague of his

uh figure out how to preserve it in liquid nitrogen is actually fine um but then from there you have to thought correctly and you have to do it so he he troubles shot this whole thing for a couple years I see so Li you accept the crystals that'll blow up the size because of course if you free them correctly but it's it's how you thought that uh yeah oh God so so so cool like this so it gets very detailed it m and I hope there's some high school college kid listening to this who's studying

chemistry who's realizing just how cool and interconnected all of these worlds are you know chemistry biology physics they're just so linked yeah yeah I always joke that like there's only one thing in this world there's only one science it's just math like as much as I hate math the chemistry is math Energy's math like it's all just biome mechanics is math like it's just it's that math and reductionism but that's it those the two things um yeah so to go back uh what the question is and here here's like where the exercise scientist C comes

in why is it a bodybuilder can have more muscle yet they're not stronger than a strong man or a weightlifter like how do this actually happen and this is where this whole thing comes about like how is it that my hypertrophy can exceed yours but somehow your strength and and the the easy like sophomore answer is oh neurological adaptations okay fine sure but like there's there's nothing happening intercellularly well I don't think that's correct um and in fact it doesn't look to be the case and so there is some sort of combination because here's the

here's the JX position there's a thing called Lattis spacing which is there's an optimal distance between that mein and act in other words if I was trying to produce a powerful contraction but I was buttered up next to each other I can't actually squeeze that hard because there's nowhere to go if I'm too extended then I actually can't yeah it's it's the same idea as preload in a heart right which is 100 100% preload is going to determine stroke volume like everything Inc coming in right so this spacing if you're going to start adding contractile

units one way or the other you have to preserve spacing somehow and so the kind of the idea yeah the idea is it will exceed it will expand hypertrophic but if it actually compromises your because there H going back to math I promise you there's a mathematical optimization for the exact strike distance between actin and masin to not be overextended or undere extended and to have that perfect preload for maximum contraction and if your hypertrophy I'm this is now I'm totally making this up but if your hypertrophy training interfered with that and compromised it you

might gain size at the expensive potential strength right or if that hypertophy was coming simply from excessive fluid and not actually contracti then you would actually have a larger muscle and um when I say fluid regen I'm not talking about like acute fluid retention I'm not saying like you're bloated today you've water loaded I mean just there's there's enhanced fluid in a homeostatic balance inside the tissue because diameter has gotten larger but it wasn't met with an equal amount of increase in contract by units so if that number gets off yeah I think another physiologic

Point that's worth explaining to people is how much people are familiar with the idea that 23 to 70% of our weight right I stood on the scale this morning like that number on the scale 2/3 to 70% of it is H2O yeah and then people say okay well wait how can that be because I get that my blood plasma is water that can't be where it all is no most of it is in the cells of our body and the muscle is of course no exception given that it's such a ubiquitous cell totally and in

fact given that it occupies the vast majority mass in your body yeah so giving the fact that that in order for it to store its primary unit of energy it needs to bring water with it being right and and just tell folks how that differs from like what the again going back to bodybuilding you know uh I I love following Jay Cutler on Instagram because I was just such a fan of his as a bodybuilder and he's just one of these guys who in retirement is still like training hard paying attention to his nutrition and

uh it was an interesting video so he went into like In-N-Out burger and he was like it's my cheat day today I'm going into in Out burger and he places this monster order but what I what what caught me was how much he said no salt no salt no salt no salt so he was like two burgers here fries here but no salt no salt no salt noell clearly this guy's knows this guy knows something about the effect of sodium on fluid retention that's a different fluid than what you're what we're talking about now so

yeah well yes and no in the sense of like he he probably has an either direct or indirect understanding of if you smash down seven grams of salt right now like bad things are about to happen in a lot of areas um like more specifically if you just look and we're getting sort of maybe after but if you look at hydration and and dealing with the athletes that I deal with a white cut is a huge deal right like managing um a 15 or more pound reduction in water over a course of 48 hours and

then putting that back in if you don't understand being hypoosmotic or hyperosmotic or osmotic like you're going to cause a whole host of problems from kidney issues to diarrhea to bloating to all kinds of problems so you have to actually understand what you put back in them has to be the same thing as what's intracellular or not going to drive fluid you're not going to drive fluid into tissue and and you get into situations where guys are peeing girls are severely dehydrated they're peeing yet they put very little fluid actually back into tissue because blood

volume got so large it expanded so quickly they have a a sense to excrete because total volume gets too high quote unquote but they didn't actually balance electrolytes and so nothing goes intracellular which is where you're trying to get it to outside of organs once your organs have um functional organs rather and are there any rules of thumb on that so you know we were talking before the podcast started how you know I had food poisoning um yeah and in a span of like two days I lost s pounds and my weight is about the

most stable metric in my like it just doesn't fluctuate a pound so to lose seven pounds in 2 days uh basically due to the fluid losses of being sick and having to go to the bathroom about every seven minutes coupled with not really wanting to eat during that period of time um what is your best guess as to how much I mean let's just posit that much of that seven pounds six and a half of it is water what's the ideal strategy to replenish that in terms of um hyper hypo uh or or isoosmotic if

I'm going to try to replenish that in in in the form of liquid yep handful of things number one you need to go slowly yeah right so you got to make sure that you don't get excessive so I don't want a pound four lers of worth of four grams of sodium in the first six six hours I'm feeling better yep so number one you you want to shoot for some something like the neighborhood of 110% to 125% of fluid W weight like that's because you're going to lose some to ur it's going to happen so

let's say you lost seven like my my brain is like okay we're gonna go to eight and a half nine pounds like something like that like you want to round this and call this a gallon okay like we're a gallon all right we're going to bring that in over the course of three hours or two gallon maybe four is that I've lost my is a pound a quarter gallon well four liters in a gallon is little over couple gallons right so you're going to be you you don't want to bring that in well yeah I

mean a gallon is again a gallon is four liters a liter is a kilo so you're talking four kilos yeah so so you would do that over how many you could do that over two days no no no no like three hours oh you could you you can you can you can bring it once once your GI system settles down so you would have Fighters that would I guess they have to if they're going from a way into competition they've got to bring that no no no yeah we for sure like um for sure last

week guy in Abu Dhabi 100 waited 136 pounds is 152 pounds within probably five hours and what was the osmolarity with no urine like no no diara no GI what was the what was the osmolarity of the fluid he took in um so it depends the guy going through it this week as well you we actually measure that so we actually will measure run a basic sweat test and you can figure out sodium concentrations and then the amount that they get back is actually dependent upon them um so that number can fluctuate depending on if

they're a high salt low salt sort of sweater it also depends on how much salt we've had to pull out the week of or not um so obviously we don't pull out salt five or six days away or like anything bananas like that but if if you have seven to eight% of your body fat you have to lose or sorry 7 to eight% of body fluid if your body weight INF fluid you have to lose like we're going to take some salt out for a couple days just to get a and salt out tell me

how many grams per day they're down to in sodium zero you're GNA get down to zero on those last couple days so you're going to get down to like a classic example is we might have them at like uh two and a half grams kind of like fight week per day it's like not unreasonable but the day before like water cut day it's it's zero it's as much as like you're boiling chicken to get as much possible stuff out of there um you're eating as much like as low as as close to zero as we

possibly can for that 24 hour period and that ideally you don't have to go that sometimes you have that's a bigger impact than cutting calories which you don't really want to do at that point yeah yeah I don't care about calories the calories are irrelevant at that point it is simply physical weight of food MH and this is a fluid manipulation game uh if we can keep them at like a gram to that last day like cool but a lot of times you're staring down the barrel of an 8 to 15 pound water cut on

a day like you just need every Advantage wa I'm sorry 8 to 15 pounds of water you can cut in a day oh yeah yeah for sure in a guy that starts out as little as like 160 pounds like if you're taking if you're trying to get 160 to 147 you're doing that in a day you can it's not ideal but you can okay let's make it ideal if you did it would two days be ideal to do that now so ideally in the situations you start off um you you come into fight weak in

the proper situation so you need to come into fight week hydrated on normal or like even maybe slightly higher salt normal or higher carbohydrate you need to come in healthy you need to come in recovered not overtrained all that stuff because you have like you have to play a whole bunch of games here Monday through sort of Thursday you're going to start getting as much of this off passively as you possibly can and so you're going to typically keep carbohydrate very low 50 or less grams sort of depending on what they're doing and you're going

to deplete glycogen that alone is going to start helping you pull some water so you're going to passively do it you can play games with fiber and so you have these low residue diets the last couple of days and so you can make sure you're not holding on to food in your gut that can buy you a couple of kilos depending a kilo depending on the size of the person and so ideally for example if you came in Monday a fight week at 170 lbs hopefully we can kind of get you down to like 164

165 by Thursday with like just passive stuff yeah yeah and now you're you're talking like we've got nine to do over 24 hours well you're going to float a couple throughout the day just urinating and stuff because you're been you're being very hydrated you're going to float one or so overnight this of that so really there goes three right there so now you're talking like we got to do six or seven of like Active water dropping in that situation so that really is a 15 pound week but it's not that bad okay but where do

those six Come Those six come just from taking straight water pure s that that is the sodium complete sodium restriction well you're gonna have to you're gonna have to add in some sort of sweating component okay so you're going to have to do y something like that if if you're already down the ideal situation is you do need a little bit of physical activity maybe to burn any last little bit of glycogen without getting like too terrible feeling and then from there uh ideally it's sort of like a what you'll see a lot is what's

called a mummy wrap so you basically lay down you put a bunch of blankets on yourself it's like very easy to regulate blood pressure and make sure you're okay you're not a risk of passing out you'll sweat like a pretty good amount that and then weigh in is Friday what time morning Friday morning 9 9 o' in the morning usually um a lot of times if we actually do this best you don't do much of that the night before you wake up the next morning and you say four pounds over and you can actually sweat

out four pounds pretty easy in a sauna 20 30 minutes like something like fight is Saturday night so you've got yep you know 18 hours plus to put it back on oh wait yeah more like 30 36 because they're going to yeah yeah and typically if we do this again correct um that all these all these scenarios don't always play out by the way it's it can get quite chaotic um but yeah you would you would ideally be back to your normal Monday weight within four to five hours after that weighin so you're only touching

that final scale number for a very short amount of time um so you're you're kind of Faking the scale so you're back to that normal fight neighb and then um by the next morning like you're well back normal now the only difference the only thing here is like recovering muscle glycogen in 36 hours is close enough like you can get if you if you do this correctly you can get a pretty good way you can actually get body weight back no problem the difficult part is getting brain fluid back um I'm not totally convinced that

gets all the way back in 36 hours so that's the like little bit of a challenge that you have but there's just no way around that so is there an advantage to be be made for a fighter who I'm just making up the weight of 147 but just pick a weight right to live train and show up at 150 instead of 160 so that okay the drawback is he's going to be in the ring at less weight but the advantage is he went through less metabolic fluid shift in the two days prior and maybe he's

actually just physiologically better so there's actually a good amount of research on that of looking at exactly what happens than doing performance testing um Prem Bose it's not that bad actually from a performance perspective as long as you stay within certain Reigns uh if you get excessive then yeah um there's been a number of folks look at if you follow the UFC look at Frankie Edgar um he's won multiple World Championships significantly undersized right so that that works in general though it starts to become challenging because in the sport of MMA the the weight classes

are so large in boxing you've got a weight class every four to seven pounds so if a guy's really six pounds heavier then you a that big a deal in boxing no if a guy is 15 pounds heav you in a grappling sport it's huge it's it's it's just and you'll see this like he held Me Against the Cage I couldn't she she just held me down she didn't be ideal situation is nobody Cuts weight but IDE situation is that's all gone but how do you ever do that because somebody will be like well I'll

take that advantage so I ideally if you do it right and you can come in fight week at 6% over fight weight it should be no problem um performance- wise you should get there other than like the pain in the ass it is to deal with you start getting to 8% fight week okay you it's 10% fight week like um all right it's it's going to be really really challenging um but yeah all right let's bring this all back because I I I know I'm guessing you know that that we've gone probably a lot deeper

into the physiology the anatomy the microanatomy of the muscle but I think it's worthwhile I think this was an investment that was worth making because now it becomes a lot easier to talk about some of the things that are effectively the application of this and I really want to kind of go back to um how we started talking about this which was through the lens of different types of athletes that are effectively the beacon of excellence in anything that has to do with muscle so we talked about a powerlifter powerlifter despite the bad nomenclature is

ostensibly the strongest athlete at the allout max one rep don't care how long it takes movement you then go to that weightlifter who's also doing a one rep but boy he or she she is also got to be incredibly coordinated and therefore by definition because of the nature of the movement incredibly explosive but it's just one rep the strong man um he's you know throwing Boulders and having to pick them up and throw them again and again again insane amount of strength but you you're not just relying on one Energy System you've got to also

have a little bit of endurance both muscularly cardiovascularly the cross fit you know athlete also very strong also agile mobile has the explosivity but not you know basically isn't as good at anything as those first three but has something that none of them have which is a greater degree of endurance I think we looped in the bodybuilder which aesthetically looks like you know better than all of them has bigger muscles than all of them but has to meet no other requirement and then I think I like that you brought in finally the Sprinter which is

the pure you know you could argue the highest ratio of power to weight and Locomotion optimized okay I will never be half as good as any of those six I think there's six right one two yes there's six of them um and most people listening to this don't need to be but we probably want bits of each of them in us right so let's now talk about hypo thetical ways to train and let's I did this with Lane and people really liked this approach um so maybe we'll try to do the same thing let's go

through some hypothetical case studies right so person comes to you and says Andy I want you to design a training program for me here's what I look like now here's what my goals are and the goal is a No Holds Barred approach to what they need to do in other words don't don't unless I specify it as part of the problem don't hold back you know all right so we'll start with the easy one which is the untrained individual um who comes to you and says okay I bought it you know I'm I'm all in

on this um I'm willing to to go to the gym you know Peter's always already got me doing a couple hours a week of zone two on the bike but I don't even know how to approach this strength training thing I'm willing to I don't know put three hours a week in the gym I want to get bigger because I you know I had a dexa scan and it really showed that my almi was about the 40th percentile and I really you know looking at the literature I think being at or above the 75th percentile

for lean mass is a better place to be so that's where I'd like to be in in a year two years three years um but I also want it to matter you know I want to be stronger I want to be able to do stuff when I get older I don't just want to get bigger I want to be able to um never enter a competition I'm not here to enter the Strongman Competition but like I never want to hurt I want to be able to chop wood in my backyard I want to be able

to carry stuff around I want to be able to travel with a backpack on BL any any other questions you have for me before you design my program Andy how many days per week did you say um I I could be up to going into the gym like three days a week an hour at a time three days total Okay cool so you've basically described every one of our executive clients and our rapid Health optimization program so so I can nail this one um I obviously at most of my career with professional athletes but we

we deal with this problem all the time at rapid so here here's what I would say you've already got zone two stuff yep we steady state great copy that um here's what you need to pay attention to you described muscle was insufficient so we got it in our brain we're automatically thinking we've got to put on muscle mass you also said that unin though and one of the things you're going to see is quite clearly oh sorry I I sort of left out um like I I was active in high school and college like I

it's not like I've never done anything but you know I've been working really hard at my job started a family and so over the last 10 years my only exercise has been um like activities of daily living which include sometimes hiking and playing with my kids but yes I have I haven't been in the gym I haven't been in the gym in a decade perfect yeah you still described everybody okay in Rapid Health optimization right no problem so the way that I'm just going to walk you through sort of I'm gonna break the fourth dimensional

wall here my brain is immedately thinking all right we need hypertrophy this is the base and Foundation of everything you're going to get stronger by doing hypertrophy at this stage of your training like we talked earlier those are not always coupled you can get stronger without getting more muscle mass very clearly and you can get really a lot of muscle without optimizing strength we talked about that at the end of those spectrums you're you're at this end of the spectrum the opposite those are going to be basically linked at this phase in your training so

we don't have to do both you can do one and get both adaptations at the same time because I'm so low on the curve anything is going to give me a bit of both in fact we can get that from not even lifting weights because in fact of our training studies you'll see that you'll see equal adaptations in muscle size hypertrophy from even steady state cycling initially right for six to eight weeks you'll see equal um all of our concurrent training models and studies will show the same thing like not only is there not interference

and interference effect at this stage it's a complimentary in fact a study came out more recently showing six weeks of endurance exercise steady state cycling prior to hypertrophy actually enhanced end result muscle growth hm so spending time initially getting physically fit before trying to add muscle mass for someone like this it's it's a very fruitful investment great so the fact that I've been doing my zone 2 for two months actually has you pretty happy super happy okay okay I'm also thinking all right you mentioned longevity physical function as we move down you also mentioned you

said three years from now or something which tells me your mind is really thinking about longterm investment that's right Peter has me committed to you know this is not about looking good in my bathing suit in six weeks I'm not in a rush copy that y right so one of the things that you'll see very specifically with aging is a loss of physical function and that's more Geared for power in fact the rate of you've probably covered this before uh rate of loss of muscle mass as you age is something like a half to 1%

per year loss of muscle strength is double to Triple that loss of muscle power is triple that and so what are you seeing you see a very precipitous drop in muscle power and why is that happening a little bit of loss of speed aha so preserving in fact you can do this you can go look at the world records of all sports across age groups so if you look at like track and field what's the world record in the 100 meter dash and what's the world record for the 30 to this what's the world record

for the 40 to 50y Old range 50 to 60 and what you'll see is strength sports like powerlifting the world record through age doesn't go down that much the world record in speed and jumping Sports just falls off a clip yeah so preserving speed in addition uh my friend Gregor siki just published a paper this week in Journal of physiology a blue ribbon journal in our field right the high as you get and this was actually looking specifically at single fiber contractile function changes with aging and the data here are extraordinarily clear have been a

long run you see very little loss of function in cro fibers through aging regardless of exercise or not I sort of mentioned this earlier but you see a dramatic reduction in fast tge fibers and you actually don't see um a drop of power and so there's nothing internal to the muscle fiber that's going down so another way to say this is if you take the problem it's the fiber size the atrophy of fastr fibers is the almost exclusive the problem with aging in muscle you have got to maintain fast twitch fiber sies now there are

some loss of total fibers but that is actually very difficult to find scientifically counting total amount of fiber fibers in a live human muscle is extraordinarily difficult so what really what we're after here is anytime I'm thinking longevity I'm thinking primarily absolute force and power um has to be preserved and that's this is a fast fiber atrophy issue um this is a so these are the things spinning in my head so how is this three-day a week combination going to look okay and sorry just to just to make sure we translate that Andy because I

think that was so uh important what you just said you're basically looking I'm 50 and you're looking down the barrel of my life saying you want to live another 40 years and you want to be functioning the most important thing I can do for you in the gym is not focus on the things that you're going to get for free it's focus on the things that are declining so rapidly and and I will as a corollary to that get a bunch of that other stuff for free but I have to focus on the atrophy of

your fast twitch muscle fibers because it's already happening and we need to save that off and we need to put in the gym systems to support the reversal of that process because if I just ignore that you know I might as well be that highly exercise twin guy who's you know doing all his cardio but at the end of the day he can't jump off the curb he can't you know he's going to be this the hyper cardio athlete who's still a decrepit person in the last decade of their life to make it even better

or worse those fibers require specific types of training unless you specifically do that you just don't have any chance of those tissues the other tissues aren't as uh like hypertrophy hypertrophy is pretty non-specific in terms of your training application but if you want to make sure that you're targeting fast fibers like this this requires very specific protocol or or like have no chance fast slow touch fibers are going to get activated with any activity of daily living they're going to get activated with any amount of physical extreme whether you're doing intervals zone two zone six

it doesn't matter right Zone 28 pick whatever you want so are good it's the faster fibers that require intention and that's why I yeah I make such a big deal of it because you can't accidentally get those yep that's right it's sort of like what we say in fighting is like you can sometimes accidentally knock somebody out there are fuk punches there are no accidental submissions there like there's no fluke arm bars like like you have to know what you're doing there or not so coming back to our our Avatar by the way I love

that line because I often say that to especially my female patients who are completely untrained borderlining on ktic um afraid of lifting weights you know they just want to do yoga all day and when I say look we have a problem here you're osteopenic um and you're so weak I am worried for your life and they say I I just don't want to lift weights because I just don't want to get too big and it's like I have good news for you the myth the myth of accidental muscle has been fully debunked fully me and

every other guy out there can tell you we're waiting for it to happen it hasn't happened the the odds that you're going to wake up and think God damn it I'm too muscular it's just it just won't happen the vast majority of us sitting around hoping and praying and devoting most of our waking hours and non- waking hours to this goal that you think might accidentally happen you're good yeah you're totally safe here um all right so we know we have to preserve past muscle fibers for the long term we know we have to take

care of V2 Max this is another I'm sure you cover this in depth important thing for longevity y all right but we got some constraints we also have to be considerate of I have not trained in 10 years I'm going to get very sore very quickly and if I become too sore that it dissuades further training now I'm going to lose you I bought in but that was too hard I was so sore I couldn't even walk blah blah blah blah blah right I think in your show with Holly she talked about making sure you

start with a very low volume like like way lower volume than you think y we have time like we just need to move I'm going to be very cautious of Ecentric movements because they will um they will generate more soreness than relative and the last part before I give you some direct answers is we want to start building movement patterns that we're going to need over time and so this is an investment we can get all that done by doing the same sort of training we're we're practicing movement patterns we're getting that stuff grooved so

we don't pick up injuries later we're not getting excessively or we're building some muscle mass because we're going to get that anyways and we don't need to so if this was a six-month program because you can't write the same program for the next 50 years right what's the first six months I guess is if that's your question y all right Zone two's out of the way um I would probably stick to fairly similar uh to what Holly said initially which was okay something like one to three working sets of probably four exercises a day something

like that um we want to spread those across upper lower and kind of some different movement patterns and we want to practice the compound movements I'm not going to isolated single joint movements yet I'm going to let's learn how to do a goblet squat okay this is a squat you're going to hold the dumbbell sort of in front of your chest great we're going to learn to do a hip extension we're going to learn to do basic overhead press or some bent rows things like that and I'm going to spend 30 minutes on those things

I don't even really care about tracking progression at this point we're going to track um did you get to get the movement pattern down right did you brace as our as our spine in the proper position are you breathing through um through your nose and through proper positions is your neck in the right spot great all this foundational stuff that feels like not a big deal at all right now because it shouldn't be but we're making sure boxes are checked so that when we start progressing load later that neck doesn't start getting irritated we're just

being in that position we're going to do that right okay so we're basically completely optimizing movement patterns we're making sure we don't hurt ourselves um we're learning new skills right we're learning skills of exercise let's now go to the next six months so I come back to you Andy and I say um you know this has been great like this is not as difficult as I thought it was going to be I I really I've kind of enjoyed going to the gym and honestly like I even see a little more definition in my arms and

my legs and I'm a little hungrier so I've been eating a little bit more I haven't lost any weight or anything but my pants fit a little bit better um I'm I'm I'd like to take this up a notch I can't commit more time though Andy so I'm really kind of you know 3 60 Minute spots is all I can get because I still got to you know get my kids from school and and work is just as demanding as ever um but how do I increase the desire to be even bigger and even stronger

and even more functional great so now we have to start investing that 60 Minutes in those three workouts into different sections per workout so we need to start doing something to start addressing power and speed um I'm going to give that the first 10 to 15 minutes though we don't need to go nuts now but we need to introduce those movement patterns and those velocities and those that that TI tolerance what we call it so your ability to land and absorb it's not creation of power but it's the back end how did I stop that

movement how did I land from it we're going to continue to invest in in the muscle growth now we can start pushing the pace a little bit and then we're going to actually at the end start investing in either muscular endurance and or interval stuff so if we're still continuing to do zone two that's great but we haven't worked on getting heart rate up coming back down and regulating that whole piece so what's that look like the first 10 or so minutes of of all three workouts per week we're going to do something in basic

movement patterns so let's imagine a box jump right we'll do a box jump we're going to jump from the ground and land on a box that's say 18 inches in the air right we're going to practice that movement pattern I want you landing on the box not on the ground that reduces the Ecentric Landing because you're going to be absorbing way less so you're not going to get out sore but you're going to have to pop a little bit you're going have to jump to get up there and we're bracing that movement pattern I want

to probably do something how are you determining that height Andy 18 in seems really high to me how do I know if I shouldn't be 12 to start what what level of fatigue how many times would I do this so that I can gauge how high it needs to be there should be no fatigue this is simply about high this is load tolerance this is load tolerance then load tolerance and it's it's introducing power okay so you're G to start learning how to move fast but you're going to do it in a a safe thing

where you're not going to pull a hamstring and and just to be clear Andy I you know I I I don't I don't need to compete in sports I don't play basketball anymore I'm not are you sure you need me doing this because all I'm trying to do is I just want to be able to pick up my grandkids in 30 years or 20 years yeah 100% so in order to pick up your grandkids you need to not be in the hospital right you need to be not living in assisted living home you know what

puts people in assisted living home falling and breaking a hip the connection between morbidity mortality with a hip break is extraordinary after the age of 60 it's not even 90 it is 60 is um reason large reason people fall is they actually don't have foot speed what do you mean if you catch yourself your toe on the corner or you slip you have to have the foot speed to be able to put your other foot or that foot back out in front of you in the proper position then you have to have the Ecentric strength

to stop that fall and so I need foot speed to get there and I need Ecentric stength to brace the fall you don't land and break your hip that's what's going to keep you playing with your kids when you're 60 got it so even though yeah so I it's not even though I don't want to be a a quote unquote explosive athlete I still have to kind of train like one in some part and I'm asking for 10 minutes of your workout okay right so I want to keep you there um you can imagine the

I can continue to give you examples and analogies but this is if you want to go for a hike again and you you trip or you need to be able to get up and do a little scramble you know your your your 10-year-old grandkid is going to want to go up that rock like you got to have a little pop to get up there too want to be able to pull yourself like all these things right that's what's going to keep you from going so what are some I'll just sit down here and wait you

go ahead yeah exactly exactly I had a patient once say something that I loved um I asked him kind of what were his goals for aging and he said um to always be able to go to my kids and grandkids and he meant it both micro and macro right meaning I never want to be in the position where I can't get on an airplane and travel and go wherever they are and I never want to not be able to go physically in the moment to where they are I I thought it was just a very

elegant explanation that second part is brilliant yeah that's so good because that's the example there I'll wait here versus no I'm gonna come with you up that little rock yeah it's it's the water slide it's I don't want to climb up those stairs it's seven of them but like it's all the little stuff right um I have two little kids so I'm very I'm very in the world of like what a four-year-old will do so what are some other things that we would do in that first 10 to 15 minutes so I love the idea

of the box jump with landing on top so you don't have that huge Ecentric de massive deceleration um what about bounds skips things like that would all be in there yeah yep medicine ball throws are great medicine ball Slams are great medicine ball tosses up in the air high as you can go as far as can go behind you um these are reinform reinforcing movement patterns you built the previous six months proper hip extension versus low back extension Etc it is also doing what we call Triple extension so you're simultaneously explosively extending the hip knee

and ankle and this is a very important human movement pattern um you can do that without jumping and Landing by throwing a Ming ball tossing it yeah um if you go to to to Plyometrics um you have to be a little bit careful here Plyometrics are totally safe for all ages as long as you account for volume you just can't do too many of them uh at too high of of an intensity in this case Ecentric load so um jump rope a f minute jump rope is just Plyometrics right now when you go single leg

to single leg you start increasing risk like so if you're to jump from your right leg and land on your right leg alone risk but twole to twole is very easy I mean for for Pete sake you can play hopscotch you Hopscotch is just two-legged plyometric to single leg to back to forward progression lateral it's it's a wonderful little isn't it interesting when you go to a playground and watch kids play to realize the they're not being told to do this just the inherent ability that they have to be explosive and as you said how

that deteriorates with age like you just can't imagine watching a group of 40y olds sitting around just decid let's go play this fun game where we jump around I mean you do that if you're playing a sport you do that if it's part of your pre-programmed workout but it's not the equivalent of neat right where you just there no spontaneous yeah it's not spontaneous yeah um last one I love is actually don't get thrown off by this word but I love sprinting and I just just just give me 70% you would be surprise of like

whoa it feels like great SL terrible but if you can get on like a wood w or or a controll um situation like that and you can just do some like 70% sprit just getting through the motion kind of uh Tempo is what you if you're a runner like you call it that type of stuff for for very short distances I'm talking like a 15 seconds just kind of strride it out okay slowly come back down wait a minute or two fully recover here okay ready roll back into it two three 4 seconds and then

give me pick it up for 5 seconds six seconds okay slowly back down just getting used to handling movement and being an athlete and moving and not being everything is locked a position where it's structured and secure and all that stuff so I really really like movement athletic movement and in multiple planes um for people the last example I'll give you is just back to like High School Middle School sports gave me we're going to play 10 minutes of of basketball go to the court we're going to shoot dve it up and down like we're

going to play Ra balls are warm up today we're going to play Bad mitton you get over there I get over here like two on two bad like you can do a lot of little different things that are going to be multipler it's going to be speed agility quickness at this point so you're going to get change of Direction all this stuff is the foundation piece you need to get to when we actually do some Speed and Agility drills next year or wherever we're going to get to right like which is going to be part

of your plan so those are all a bunch of examples um I would recommend doing a different one each day of those three so it's Mondays we're going to do medball stuff cool Wednesdays it's going to be pickle ball and then Fridays we're going to do um you know some some some jump stuff and some medicine ball horizontal throws like whatever the case is uh May or it can be jump rope it's going to be Hopscotch you know things like that some um I'm not against bounding broad jumps I typically want to start here two

on two so twole leave two leg land for this person but you they can they don't have to be forward they can be lateral jumps they can be combinations they can be all kinds of things um you honestly you be surprised like I want to say this too loud in case somebody hears but that stuff's actually kind of fun like it's it's pretty fun you're gonna get a lot of Giggles like I haven't jumped like this you like like they going to feel weird and it's going to be way different than what they're thinking the

SL train thing is like you'll get some Giggles um so that would be my opener that's that's 10 to 15 minutes okay now we're hot now we're ready okay now we're going to move into uh a strength training and so what I would still do is keep the same structure total body on all three days because here's what's also going to happen once a month you're going to miss one of those days for more your kid's gonna get sick I got too busy at work blah blah blah blah blah if you do body part splits

you'll start missing all day you're going to miss chunks so I like in these situations these people I want whole body every day you're going to recover just fine um I would do a different rep range so I would do something like Monday is going to be say three to four sets of five to seven reps you're going to be able to go heavier you're going to have a a minute and a half rest between each one Wednesday though what RP do you do there s to eight okay so meaning just just for folks listening

at the end of that you're finishing with maybe two reps left in the tank yep okay yep like I want to like for the working sets yep for Wednesday let's go 15 to 20 reps per set right so now you're actually going to have less you're probably going to drive less soreness because you're activating probably less faster ters you're going to get more of a pump you can actually like push the repetitions and you can work harder and probably get a little bit less sore and you'll feel more of an acute satisfaction for a lot

of people right like you feel the feeling and your risk has gone down a little bit and then the third day um you could go really wild and you could do something like uh isometrics where you're just holding positions very good for joint very good for connected tissue and very good for just doing something different all three of these are equally effective for hypertrophy so your gains and muscle size are going to be identical across the board and now you introduced three different elements let's talk a little bit about isometric I'm I'm now going to

deviate from my patient into back to being Peter uh and interviewing um we didn't talk about it but everybody's probably heard of an isometric it's Force generation or muscle contraction without movement big part of my recovery from shoulder surgery I had a labal repair uh you know a while ago and this was the first thing I was permitted to do um was begin uh you know humoral extension and flexion without movement and um you know interestingly I hadn't really spent much time doing isometrics outside of that with a few Exceptions there were some dedicated a

lot of isometric deadlifts I was using as a precursor to deadlifting just a great way to sort of warm up um but I don't think I was actually aware that isometric training could generate or elicit the same hypertrophy response as isotonic or movement based contraction um why is that the case uh how does one know where to be in the range so for example if I do a bicep curl I can get every range of the bicep but do I know if there's an isometric benefit to being here versus here versus here yeah so are

you 10% flexion 30% flexion 110% flexion where at I have so much to say on this one um we good for another two and a half three we go another three hours good I will say this we're we're clearly going to do a part two of this podcast so we'll well yeah there's a whole a whole show on this area um because because of this so you actually sort of invertedly asked what's actually driving muscle hypertrophy and is not it's not the workout per se it's a stimuli right so then what are those stimuli that's

a whole conversation and the reason hypertrophy is training wise in terms of what reps to do what type of exercise I consider to be the least scientific interesting is because it takes the least Precision because the mechanisms are so spread across different areas that it's s of like you can go from a b or c you don't have to have all three you can also have a and b or you can have a and C or you're going to get there um the muscle is very much listening to that signal it's not so much for

other things and so it it's very easy to kind of land accidentally in a hyper range as long as a couple of things happen as long as sufficient overload occurs like you're going to get there so this overload can happen over time it doesn't even matter how you achieve the overload more volume more reps per set more weight extra range of motion like all these things are different strategies for progression and if that happens you're going to be in a pretty good spot um so like baring the mechanism is we're just going to get like

so far down the road here we're never going to come back and answer your your patient question um but that's that's one thing to think about so isometrics this the Shor answer is they're they're going to be activating a number of those same mechanisms so you're going to cause the same amount hopy where do I be in that range of motion well there's no answer there this is the primary where you mix it up presumably certainly mix it up in general muscles respond best to being at the highest stretch so if you can have that

thing at the the highest level of extension generally but it kind of depends on the muscle um you're going to generate there you're putting more in fact you can actually take a muscle fiber and hang it vertically and hang a weight at the end of it and it will grow so being stretched that long is a very strong signal to grow and so when you generally train a muscle over a large range of motion you're putting the muscle on a larger stretch and so that signal alone activates uh that whole anabolic Cascade for hyper so

my default if you're going to do an isometric is to do it closer to the end range of motion of of um where it feels the most tight if you will not not the finish position but it very much depends on what what you're after because the thing that gets tricky here is many muscles are single joint and so if you look at the Solus we talked about earlier that crosses the ankle joint only but if you look at things like the gas rock it crosses the and ankle joint so putting the the the Solus

in the right position is only dependent upon the ankle putting the gastrock in the right position is dependent on the ankle and the knee and so if the knee is flexed um you're never going to get the the gas Rock to contract properly you can't get a full contraction of the gas rock and a reflex knee you have to have an extended knee and extended ankle because it's going to just get short on one end of that spectrum and same thing happens with the Bice translation a seated calf rays only works the Solus a standing

CFR works both gastr and Solus correct the same thing with like a tricep push down versus an overhead tricep extension behind neck right now you're talking the triceps muscles across the shoulder joint are now going to be put on stretch when you go behind the neck and B so that's why I recently saw a study that looked at tricep extension in uh a flexed versus extended humoral position and the difference in muscle mass was significant when the arm was up when the humoris was flexed yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah right right um we see this

at the hamstrings we see this at the glutes like muscles like to be put on stretch well they don't like but they respond to it yeah you get the better you get the better compensation now that changes in a situation like what you were dealing with because like example I use often times like imagine somebody who's kind of get like a nagging elbow pain you're like man like every time I do a lot of bicep curses stff my elbow just gets me like okay great H can we actually train the biceps without aggravating the elbow

hard to do because no matter which break your radialis SP break like they're all going to cross the elbow what if that's a nagging shoulder problem aha well now if we do like a preacher curl which is when your arm is out in front of you you're shortening the biceps part that cross the shoulder joint and you can still work across the elbow joint and it will not aggravate your shoulder if you were to do like an incline curl where your shoulder and arm is behind you you're putting it on stretch across the shoulder joint

now those bicep curls are going to aggravate your shoulder like theoretically so going back to isometric question it depends on your specific surgery and whoever your obviously talented therapist or whoever was running that had you on it was I'm sure they were putting you in the position to get a little bit of activation in the joint that they wanted but not actually aggravate and let the thing recover so that that's the angle you pick is dependent upon a number of factors it could be sport specific so if you take the case of like a powerlifter

like you may just want to train in your final position of your Squat and get very used to being strong there going extra depth is only just going to make you worse as a lifter because you're now traveling further distance you got to do more work so there's no easy answer that's one of the reasons why we generally frown on isometrics is they just take a lot of intention where if I generally just say do a normal P range squat then you don't have to guess so if you were if if if you but if

you had an athlete who said look I'm even at this stage I'm really willing to to do a little bit of isometric um y let's say using the squat as an example you're going to load the bar in a low position they're going to stand under a weight that is much heavier than that they could ever lift and basically push up against the bar I mean how are you doing an isometric squat for example uh so okay you do this in a number of ways so you can do a bench you can do squat you

do anything um so typically what we'll do is you'll put the Barb in the rack and so you can imagine like a squat rack and you raise the arms of the rack yep yep and you have safety pins that run horizontal perpendicular to the ground right y so instead of putting the bar on top of those y you put the bar below them and so you just lift up against the rack and nothing moves and so you can set your position whether you're putting it behind your neck for a squat whether you're putting a bench

below it and you just push up on those we actually have these built in the lab and on the bottom is a force plate and those allows us to do an extra movement called that's how you can tell how how heavy they're pushing right and so we can measure force produced into the ground at various positions does isometric offer any other advantage over uh safety yeah there's a ton of advantage to it the advantage is you have less degrees of freedom less moving parts so if I get you in a position say in a squat

and your spine looks good and everything looks good there's a very low likelihood you're going to get out of position if I ask you to do a a back squat is extraordinarily complicated yeah there's a lot of moving parts we have degrees of freedom at the ankle knee hip low back ribs shoulder neck in an isometric nothing moves all we have to deal with is compression sometimes compression is aggravating axial loading being specific but axial loading is also fantastic for balens so the reason I threw isometrics in for a client kind of working back to

is you were talking about you mentioned that as one of the problems it's like okay great we know we can smash actually on these people with very low risk and get a lot of stimuli there and not have to worry about getting in position at different parts and we have this thing called the strength curve when when you do a typical isotonic movement so same like a normal lift of a normal dumbbell something um you're only going to be challenged in the areas in the range of motion where you're the weakest so if you look

at our study um on lifting with bands like heavy bands from a deadlift you're going to lift at the very very bottom and you're you're going to have very low load in fact like you could have as much as a 40% reduction and load at the bottom but when you come up and you start crossing the knee joint and you start gaining mechanical advantage it becomes extraordinarily easy but the bands start getting heavier and so the actual tenic that happens throughout the entire thing is is fairly equal if not well certainly greater at the top

so you can train that whole area of the strength curve with things like this is why people use bands and chains and things like that is to be able to produce more uh resistance in areas where they're stronger and they're not being held back by the weakest position that they're in to wrap that up then you can actually then train that so then you can go into that weakest position and do an isometric in that weak position without having to put a whole bunch of load on your body like you would need to get getting

two and from it yeah yeah right so it's it's nice because with people like this you could put her in like an RDL position like a hinge position which is a kind of a complicated movement and just be like grab and Pull and nothing moves and they can pull as freely and as hard as they want it's very difficult for people with a low training age to truly Express maximum Force output on a on a free range motion because there's to many variables and the right position is my back safe am I losing my balance

if I just say grab this bar pull on this bar it's hard as you possibly can and nothing's going to move people can just go so walk me through how you do that for an RDL for example you're going to do kettle bell dumbbell barbell RDL barbell okay barbell yep set the barbell in the squat rack put it underneath and set the height of those safety pins to whatever height feels comfortable for you and so you'll then get in there and do that RDL and you'll pull up against that bar and nothing will move and

your back will feel comfortable wherever that range of motion is for you your glutes can be there your feet can be in the right position we get Total Foot big toe activation you're doing this you're doing this two foot down you can do one like it yeah but you you would most likely start this thing two footed just to develop for this person um in this goal we're trying to let them Express Peak Force output and feeling comfortable and how long do they need need to stay in that isometric position three seconds to some of

the times we with our athletes we'll go up to five minute asymmetric holds up to what how much five minutes you can do like we'll do rear fit elev split squat hold isometric hold for up to five minutes which presents a a tremendous neurological challenge yeah yeah I'm I'm I'm generally up for things that are ridiculous I don't know that I could do at isometric hold for five minutes yeah you've probably done like you've ever done like super high volume lunges or split squats like hundreds yeah like I did a four minute set of split

squats the other day yeah okay so just get in that position where your foot elevated it just a little bit Y and then just hold it for two minutes to see it's a funas you you'll enjoy it yeah no I'm sure I will um what are they where are you creating the resistance for them you're just again same thing bar over shoulder in that particular scenario you don't need any I see time time will be your resistance oh in other words it's isometric only and that you're just holding a position yeah correct yeah yeah because

you're holding it's it's like doing a wall squat it's like a better version of wall squat so you can go for a long time so um to kind of come back to your your prepation here uh that's yeah this is interesting because I never so I can really see now how you could create a full day of isometrics if that's if you wanted to go down that rabbit hole it's easy that one of those days is purely isometric oh yeah I mean in this situation too even holding not that I'm you could hold a plank

yeah that is an isometric exercise right it's the one that people love um holding a hip extension position and just making sure you can actually continue to have your glutes on utilize um you mentioned a squat earlier so you can do this in a couple of ways you can actually go all the way down and truly hold that bottom position that is challenging though if people don't have the right positioning if you do it's a or you can close it's a great way to build it so I wouldn't be opposed to that if they're close

and doing okay 30 seconds but here's the difference I would cap that as failure not when they quit or get fatigued but when they break position yeah when their form changes that's exactly right yeah we this is one of the tests we do with our patients and the the the the excellent grade is two minutes in a full 90 degree squat um 90 degree yeah or no better than 90 lower than 90 right so like parallel a thigh parallel squat sorry so why thigh parallel um that's just the standard we've picked and yeah but the

failure as you said if you you know the goal is two minutes can you go two minutes and you you fail not when you give up you fail when you basically shoot your butt out lunge forward you know make a compensatory movement that is beyond that U but we use that we use that as a great test of strength without having to put people at risk totally yep yep so you could you could easily generate that day you can also do um so one of the things we haven't talked about yet is it's it's important

that you're moving in multiple planes and so there's there's three major planes of movement which is frontal sagittal and transverse right which B means you need to be moving like up and down like a squat or you need to be moving things away to you and towards you like a bench breast you also need to be moving things laterally so like a lateral lunge as well as twisting and rotation and so you want to pick a few things in these areas the other thing you want to keep in mind is single leg um versus either

split stance or unilateral and so there's no perfect number you have to hit here but you would want to select something across those three days where you're not doing everything is two foot supported so you mentioned one foot at Aros you can do step UPS you can do split squats you can do rear fit elevator split squats there's a single leg press single leg extension there's just a lot of ways you can do that so you'd want to keep kind of an eye on that going like all right is everything I'm using barbell and everything

I'm using to like okay maybe that's not ideal so maybe I'm going to use a cattle Bell over here because I can actually do this um uh this this movement over here with a rotation and press okay great but now I'm going to pick dumbbell for this movement and this movement over here I'll use a machine lovely great and now you're in a really really nice position where you're not getting held back so much by technical demands this person is only six months in a train you don't want their whole day being learning how to

do a movement and then boom that 60 Minutes goes up but you also don't want to be like well these are too hard so let's just stay on machines the whole time that's right like that's not a long-term investment right so we want to invest a little bit in growth you know 20% 60% is in what you need to be here 20% long-term development 20 other percent um is fun like that's how we generally think about that that 60220 split so that's how we split it so the last piece here to W this thing up

is I would finish every session with something that either gets close to a max heart rate or is a personal pain point so this is this is where my uh my uh I always close off with katsu and the 's some intense pain and then it but my last thing is always two minutes of bfr on the air bike which combines two beautiful personal pieces of pain yeah so it it is um what's the thing that they love to hate what's the area that they want to grow they hate their their triceps okay great like

we're going to finish the session with a tricep blast we're just going to smash it they just going to like feel like yep okay I got the thing done one thing people hate is when they're not listening to and when they come in they're like I like I want to get my my glutes scine to get stronger or whatever and you just like they're working them but they're not really so it's it's the Double Down concentrate on that yeah and it's one little session it could be whatever um we used to do this on Saturdays

with the NFL players because Saturdays were mostly a recovery regeneration day which means they would never show up and so it was like Hey Saturday is our gun show we're doing nothing but biceps and triceps like we would just do and we be like all right who show up today you pick one you pick one you pick one you pick a tricep you like everyone got to pick one and we just do these ridiculous madeup circuits just like things right and then they would all just get super pumped in their arms and it was like

all right now go do your 45 minutes go see your PT go see your athletic trainer like you know your work then right so like people are people let give them a little bit of what they want um and just make sure in one of those days we touch high heart rate one way or the other and when you touch high heart rate um a classic way that one might do this would be a Tabata type exercise where it's basically four minutes of you know intense work uh what are some what are some ways that

you might recommend getting high heart rate in there do you do it do you want to do it with jumping do you want to do it on a on a bike on a rowing machine what do you like to use we typically want to keep away from Ecentric so you know I don't love this is where CrossFit is done very poorly right it's just like you're putting your in a position of fatigue and very risky situations at a lot of times right um so something that's for this individual again let me clarify that comment was

regarding this individual be probably not a great thing like for other individuals it's fantastic you should tell her do um so yeah airbikes are fine rowers are fine here um if you really want to you can actually do specific breathhold manipulation so if you just alter breathing um so this is CO2 tolerance CO2 can get very very high um you can deal with the suck without doing any physical work this is all the stuff we've done at xpt live in the pool um you know we've done like you can do a lot of stuff with

with weights underwater and just changing what you're doing with ventilation and you can get to a level of pain very quickly that requires very little physical trauma so there there are lots of ways we can play that um simple examples would be do a 10-second Sprint on the bike and then go into a breath hole like you want to see your heart rate shoot up incredibly fast and then you're going to come back out of that and you got 30 seconds but you're going to go Nas only recovery breath how long breath hold by the

way well you're GNA see the the goal is Maxim okay in other words yeah so so go 10 seconds all out breath hold until failure 30 second recovery nasal only how many rounds are that let's see if you can get three okay like one might be the answer though like you might go like I'm not even close ready to do this again two might be there um you can also do that inhale hold prior to the Sprint so you can do an inhale hold breath in hold and then hit that Sprint um I mean there's

just a ton of ways you can get to to playing with CO2 tolerance if that's part of the equation and again you'll see your heart rate get up to damn near maximum that doesn't require much physical work so if you need a spare joint to spare soreness you need to spare energy but you want to get that sign this in um there's lots of tricks that way you can play so Andy and listeners I I think we have some really bad news and some really good news the really bad news is we've probably been talking

for three hours and um I think got one case study done yeah we've got one case study done and we haven't talked about a ton of physiology that I had in my 10 pages of notes here um what's really sad is I had 10 pages of single space notes that I wanted to talk about and we got into the first I'm not being factious we got into the first half of the first page at which point I threw it over and totally rerouted everything we were going to talk about based on your answer and we

have nine and a half pages of notes plus a whole bunch of questions that we got that we didn't get to here so the bad news is there's zero chance we're going to finish this podcast now the the good news is I hope you will come back and we can do this again relatively soon so that listeners can um have a part two of this discussion uh you know hopefully within a month or two months of part one is that something you're I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you this you're willing

to give us another another episode here well we I think we can I'll talk to my you talk to your people people talk to my people and then and then we'll figure it out all right Andy this has been um super interesting uh I like literally will be putting a few of these things into practice tomorrow for me in the gym and I'm if I'm putting things into practice that are in just the you know purview of the guy who's never exercised I can't wait to get into kind of more my phenotype which is hey

I do exercise but how do I take it to the next level so yeah there's um there's a lot of interesting things we can do when we get to that fun conversation about um everything from like if like if you want to see behind the veil of professional athletes you want to see what they really do for sleep you want to see what they really do for nutrition see if they really do for training we can go down that route too yep well Andy this has been amazing thank you very much for your time your

expertise and uh I'll see you again in uh hopefully a month or two sounds good man thank you all right [Music]