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

hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast I'm your host Peter [Music] AA Andy awesome to have you back for um what is very unlikely to be part two of two uh this will just be part two of n uh where n is an integer greater than two and it'll be TBD on what that looks like um in our first discussion which I think truthfully was pretty technical uh but I still think formed a very important basis for what we're going to talk about today so I I predict that today's discussion will be a little less

technical but we'll assume that the viewer listener has some familiarity with what we've talked about but for those maybe who a listen to it you know a couple months ago and have forgotten or B are not listening to it I think it's probably worth investing a little bit of our time in going over some of the major Concepts so um feel free to diverge from kind of the the line of questioning but everything I want to talk about right now is just to give people enough background so that we can get into the meat of

of of a discussion that you and I have already spent some time planning so um let's start by explaining what the cells of muscles look like and how they function yeah sure so when we say the term muscle we're typically referring to is a collective group so when you think about like your quadricep or your thigh that's actually Four muscles there that's why we call it a quad right so we say bicep like I you to bicep say it's actually multiple bicep muscles and orientation insertion so in general the way that humans move is muscles

will contract and muscles actually at the end of them will come together to form a tendon those tendons actually connect to Bone so when you contract muscle it pulls that connective tissue the tendon that pulls the bone and you move and so you've got muscles you know throughout your body up and down they have different orientations and they have different responsibil ities so some are meant to be what we call anti-gravity so this is to keep you up all day and they don't produce a lot of force or speed but they're meant to be non-f

fatigable and others are the opposite so explosion power propulsion if you just look at like the lower shank uh so the calf muscles there the gastrus that big one in the middle if you point your toe to your face that pops out at you that's meant to be for power and sprinting and jumping and the one that's actually lower uh is meant near soul I is meant to be on all day so you can stand and walk all day and not get fatigue despite the fact that both of them come together to form the Achilles

that wraps around the bottom of your heel inserts the bottom of your foot and that's what makes your foot go sort of up and down so in general muscle is meant to create movement muscle actually does a lot of other things though that are vital to health including pumping fluid up and down so uh blood will pull because of gravity towards the lower part of your body muscle contraction is in large part what squee squeezes the blood back up into your heart and into your lung there it is the amino acid Reserve so it's the

place where you store amino acids so that you can use them to create red blood cells or immune cells or anything else and it's also the primary primary Place actually where you regulate blood glucose storage and and all carbohydrates so I could go on and on but muscle in general has um a very important function in your body for movement there and as well as signaling so the last part to acknowledge here is we typically will call muscle an endocrine organ meaning it'll actually send signals out through the body through what are called mykines or

what some people will call exines if they're coming out as a responsive exercise and that's sending signal to your liver or kidney or brain or lung or anywhere else so at the big whole muscle level is what we call that that's the general function now within that each individual muscle so pick the Solus or whatever one you want is actually made up of of billions if not more individual muscle fibers and those fibers or cells that's the same actual term um myofiber cell fiber I'll use those interchangeably those are actually just basically long cylinders and

so if you think about this like a ponytail so I don't have much hair left you know I'm in the same boat as you there Peter but if I had some you'd see a big long ponytail and you would call that one ponytail really a ponytail is nothing but a collective whole bunch of individual hairs and actually you can think of skeletal muscle at least cardiac and smooth muscle are quite different but skeletal muscle um looks very similar to a hair so it is a long long cylinder it's very strong um in this case it

actually contracts where hair doesn't but that's the basic U function of that and So within that you have a whole bunch of organel that do things so um if you look at the whole muscle what actually happens is that's surrounded by a bed of capillaries and so if you talk about blood into a muscle and it comes in to be a big artery going to go through a bunch of capillaries and those capillaries are really surrounding and mixing in and out that whole pony tail so they're kind of all over and so they're circular uh

around the individual fibers and that's going to get you nutrients in like glucose or anything else and get you waste products out like carbon dioxide Etc right so within that big long cylinder the capillaries are around it you've got a whole bunch of things and probably the most pertinent is you've got what are called nuclei so these are my nuclei and so if you remember basic biology the nucleus is what controls uh any cell so most cells in the world have one nucleus skeleton muscle is unique because you've got infinite number of them basically spread

throughout the duration of the muscle and that gives you a lot of uh what we call plasticity and so the more nuclei you have the more control centers to have the easier it is to respond to stressors damage adaptations Etc that's why skeletal muscle is so uh again adaptable to various whether this is good stimuli or bad stimuli like in the case of space flight or physical inactivity or whatever you want to be so in addition to that you've got of course your mitochondria which you've You Know spoken at length out over your your career

and that's what's going to be able to use a lot of your or produce a lot of your cellular energy and then you finally you've got what we call the contractile units and so the things that make your muscle fibers contract together and on top of each other are actin and mein and so these are two molecules that kind of reach up the mein grabs the actin it pulls it together um smashes it literally on top of your and that's why when you Flex say a bicep muscle it actually gains height because you're stacking things

on top each other and that requires the muscle to go vertically so that's uh I guess the big picture of of what muscles are and then what they actually look like at the cellular level yeah that that was much more efficient than I would have done it um let's layer on another question you drew a contrast between the Solus and the gastric nemus and although you didn't use the exact terms you alluded to it uh that one is sort of slow to fatigue and one is fast to fatigue which of course is now part of

another division we would layer on this so can you explain at that uh cellular level what the difference is between the gastrus and the Solus sure so if you were to think about this um we call muscle fibers you know oneon-one but really um there's distinction between them so maybe we'll just take a quick Jun back into history and I won't make this too long although I I I love to um so all the way back to the invention of the microscope Anton Von Le hook famous guys gets many people discover things but you get

it he gets the credit well one of the first things to actually use that microscope for was he started looking at uh individual cell he started looking at muscle actually in whales and and codfish and a bunch of other stuff and he started to notice that some of these cells are really small and some of them are really big and that's the very first time we really started to functionally distinguish between at that time it was just sort of big fibers and small fibers and then pretty quickly after that he started to realize well some

of them are really red and some of them are more white and so for a big number of centuries really we kind of distinguish muscle as these fiber type or these fibers these cells either red cells or white cells and it took a long time to figure out why that mattered or what that meant but eventually it became clear that the ones that are red are Red because they have more of those capillaries they have more blood flow they have more mitochondria they have more iron all those things go into it so they give an

actual look of being red the other ones have less of it it actually didn't we didn't know for a long time after that though functionally what that meant and so if you were to look back in some old textbook or had an old uh you know Professor one from Anatomy or something a long time ago they might call fibers white fibers and red fibers and so you'll hear them distinguished based on color that's the first distinction well as soon as histology came around and we started getting better microscopes and Technology we started to realize that

wait a minute we can actually test the individual muscle fibers for their power output so this is their contraction so this is you take them out of the muscle you put them in a Petri dish you tie one end to a force transducer you tie the other end to a fixed unit and you put it in a whole bunch a bath of calcium and ATP and a bunch of other stuff and those fibers just start attracting unlimited and you can actually measure how much force is being produced and so now we went from distinguishing these

fibers via color red versus white to now distinguishing them by their contractile properties is what that term means so are you Contracting with a lot of force or a small amount of force and in fact Force wasn't really the distinguishing Factor it was speed and so because of that we started the nomenclature evolve to now describe them as fast twitch or slow twitch and that really specifically describes the twitch or the contraction speed so two two ways to distinguish the fibers now color or contractile speed and then eventually we started to figure out their enzymatic

differences and so the ones that had more mitochondria were better at using aerobic metabolism so this is carbohydrate and fat metabolism those are both aerobically needed and the ones that were white or fast were much better at using glycolysis from the anerobic part of the equation so this is in the cytoplasm outside of the monondach these things via entic properties and so you can call them a fast witch fiber you can call them a white or red fiber or you can call them aerobic or anerobic or oxidative or glycolytic and so again depending on if

you ever had maybe some of this stuff in high school or college class you might have heard them describ as fast oxidative or fast glycolytic and there's like why is all this nomenclature exist and that's exactly why it all happens and so to come back to the the beginning here this is where it's going really matter initially when this distinction was drawn it looked like there was two types there's type one and type two that's just what they called them and type one is the slow twitch uh the red fibers the oxidative fibers type two

were the fast twitch all the opposite right well in the 1950s is area we started to figure out well wait a minute there's actually a third distinct fiber type and that fiber type was more closely aligned uh to the fastwitch fiber than the slow twitch and so we started to delineate a little bit more so you have your type one and they'll stay way over here and then over here you have a type 2 A and A type two B right again they are distinct and different enough from each other that they need to be

called their own thing but they're closer together than they are close to the to slow TCH fiber so instead of I don't why they called it type one and type two and not type three it's because they wanted to make sure people recognize they're really close to each other but they're distinct so we'll call them 2 a and 2 b there well some years passed and we actually eventually realized that humans don't have to be um so again depending on the X book you the excise physiology book you might currently be using they might still

be using the nomenclature of type 2B despite the fact that we've had genetic information since 1990 that humans don't even have the gene to express 2B so like 2B is just a nonstarter with humans however we do have what's called a 2X and so this is sort of um and this actually this is foundation stuff that you're going to need later in the conversation when we talked about some of the the second half um so humans to summarize have type one type 2 a and type 2x all right well Felines and animals and bears and

stuff we've done biopsies and stuff on Bears H do have the 2B um urines have 2B and so most other animals have four distinct ones they have a really really fast one these B's are Ultra fast uh 2x is pretty fast two a is slower but fast and then one is slower so if you run the entire Continuum it pretty much lines up so the ones that are pure type one have generally more mitochondria and they are less fatigable they don't produces much force um relative to well they do relative to size but uh they're

slower and they do that as you move to 2A and to 2x they become faster but they become more fatigable because they're more relying upon on um glycolysis in carbohydrate metabolism so that's generally what we're looking at with fiber types so when you ask the distinction between how does the Solus and the gastrock compare the gastrock in most humans is something like 60 to 70 or maybe even up to 80% 2A fibers and so they are very very fast um and so the gastrock will again cause a fast contraction um but they won't hold on

for very long because it get fatigable the Solus can be up to 90% slow twitch and so this is a great comparison because um most muscles in your body are some combination of fast and slow twitch but the Solus and the gastrock are probably the best example of the two extremes um if you look in animals like mice you can see a Solus that is 100% slow twitch but for what for a number of reasons humans never get that far down the line and so if somebody was if I biopsy somebody in the sius and

they were 80% slow twitch I'd be like w that's that's pretty high um and if they were 70% fast twitch in gastra I would say that's pretty high so um that's uh what you can sort of expect in terms of um muscle physiology differences between the Solus and the Gastro and again why that functionally matters if you have a compromised Solus you're probably less likely to be standing you're going to sit you're probably going to be less generally Physically Active uh if the Solus is compromised it's hard to move fast and powerfully how modifiable is

that distribution is it purely genetic or is there a trainable component to the ratio of fast to slow twitch fiber in a given muscle it's extremely trainable um it's just comes down to exposure which means stimuli and time and the more stimuli you give it the more time you give it the more uh it will change now like anything else an ASM toote exists here so if you are very untrained right and you're pretty inactive physic maybe even take to an extreme you go into a cast for two months or space flight and you're like

literally inactive that movement happens faster uh if you are pretty trained and well trained and and months and years go on you start changing really really slowly because you get closer at the end of the spectrum but there is really I mean functionally no limit to how far they'll go given enough total exposure um to put you into like some realistic numbers um if you were to do the solu is kind of hard actually the gastro is a better one if you were say completely untrained and and you hadn't exercise for say five plus years

uh and then you did eight weeks of exercise I don't even care what it is it really doesn't matter that much I would bet 10 to 15% change in fiber type in that in that kind of a time span it wouldn't be that crazy and sorry just to make sure I understand what's actually happening there andy is it turnover meaning are you literally just expressing more type two and expressing less type one so that if you compare the muscle biopsies across those eight weeks you've actually just displaced two into one due to making new cells

and apoptosis of the old cells uh okay really good question generally no um so there's this idea called hyperplasia um so hyperplasia is when you would grow a new cell and that is very very uncommon in normal human situations it can happen with extreme Ecentric training um looks like it probably happens with a lot of exogenous testosterone use over many many years um but outside of like sort of extreme examples um you can get it in cell culture and you can get it in animal models but in human like normal situations hyperplasia is very uncommon

um so what more happens is the current fiber type itself will transition uh its type which is sort of tricky because this like not sure how far you want to go here but the reality of it is remember how I said there's three fiber types that's not actually true either there's a whole combination of what we call hybrids and so if you were to take any one individual muscle cell it might be entirely say two a on one end of the cell but it might be what we call a one 2A so this is a

single muscle fiber that expresses both type one and type two um so in depending on the length of the cell it may be different different spots so they're not always the same type so uh the same thing can happen with 2 a2x by the way that that is in fact you can have a triple hybrid you can have a one 2 a tox so you and they basically have the potential to differentially express themselves based on stimulus yep or lack of Y yeah um okay let's talk a little bit about how everything you just said

factors into some of the metrics we're going to talk about different type of performance in athletes let's start with hypertrophy if you took a biopsy of my biceps and then you took a biopsy of a professional bodybuilder biceps how do our muscle fibers look different are his significantly at the level of the cell and the fiber significantly that much bigger does he have more of them but they're about the same size but in aggregate they're bigger in cross-section of course is it a combination of both well this is a lot of really interesting questions let's

use the VL the vast lateralis the outside quad muscle as a better example just because we have thousands of biopsy studies from there all right um so you asked a lot of really cool questions um okay a couple things to understand number one counting muscle fibers total is a very challenging thing because the only true way to do it is I need to take your entire muscle cut in half and count it now we can do some estimates you can take whole muscle size take the average size of the muscle fibers and then y account

for fluid and stuff but that's sort of tricky at best so we have good data on these from animal models cats actually dogs and things like that humans it's challenging um in general fast twitch fibers let's just keep it fast and slow for now to to not confuse people are generally bigger than slow TCH fibers by diameter so they're generally wider than them but when you throw training into the equation that all goes out the window um I have I have analyzed I can't tell you how many thousands of slow twitch fibers and they are

bigger than fast R fibers in that individual person now does that tell us anything about that individual for example if you look at an extreme athlete you know like an endurance athlete who is getting as much potential out of their slow twitch muscle fibers as possible is that generally the scenario where you will see remarkable hypertrophy of the type 1 fiber that's exactly what it is okay yep and so one of the things we see happen is um fiber type specific hypertrophy with your classic endurance training so throw kind of intervals and other things out

the window for now just because scientifically it's hard to do but if you do your steady state Runner cyclist swimmer rower things like that um I I would generally be looking for their slow to fibers be very large uh if if not the same size as their fast fibers often times larger at a baseline it's not the case um now at the like when you're actually pulling out one muscle fiber at a time you'll see some really wild stuff um so that can happen individually but on an average that would that would be your answer

if you were to invoke any kind of strength training and it doesn't really actually you can distinguish between powerlifters or bodybuilders or any of these things it won't actually really matter because at the level of the cell while we're going to distinguish between all those like probably here pretty soon at the level of cell it's not that different it's close enough to being the same thing if you compare it to how different it is than steady state cycling or something and so in both those cases I would basically say hey the 2A fibers is going

to be very large but you wouldn't be able to pull a 2-way fiber and be like oh that's a bodybuilder and that's a powerlifter and that's a weightlifter you would have absolutely no chance uh to do that the only thing that kind of throws a wrench here is uh specifically exogenous testosterone um that will change the game in a number of important ways specifically satellite cells are going to be changed and total muscle fiber size is probably going to get exceptionally large um which will throw it out there but so again just to make sure

I understand if you're going to compare my voo to the voo of you know Jay Cutler right so world class bodybuilder if you do an ultrasound there's no question that the total size of his muscle is so much bigger than mine if you can start yanking fibers out is it it sounds like it's he probably has more fibers probably because he's using exogenous testosterone and I'm not but it also sounds like his type two fibers are bigger than my type two fibers I I would I would be very comfortable with that prediction they they will

be very very large we actually um we biopsied one individual uh powerlifter SL bodybuilder and his some of his fibers were so large the closest comparator we had were rhinoceros muscle fibers they were so not all of them but a handful of them where they were so large we were like what I mean it's like C can you give me a sense of scale H H how many how many microns are we talking about here as a fiber or compare it to a hair if that's easier it would be honestly fairly similar to a hair

uh if if I were to pick up so meaning you can see it with your naked eye it's so big oh 100% yeah yeah yeah if I already if I had it right now on camera if you get if you're watching this at home um and if I had my tweezers out I could pick one up on my pach dish and hold it in the camera and you would be able to see it in this camera no no question so they can be very very large um even the smaller ones in human skeletal muscle like

the VL especially you would see all the smallest one no doubt all right so now let's talk about another component of hypertrophy which is what you know this is sort of funny taking a step back there is no other cell in the body that we spend so much time thinking about the actual size of the cellular unit like we don't really care about the size of your hepatocytes we care about the functional units and how they integrate we care about the function of the hepatocytes individually and collectively but we're not really sitting there specifically thinking

about it and therefore I don't think I've ever given much thought to are my hepatocytes the same size as your hepatocytes and if mine get bigger or smaller why is that you know what's happening and and I'm guessing in in the case of you know Naf D there's going to be some changes where there's both intra and extracellular fat accumulation but when we now think about a given individual who undergos hypertrophy training and so objectively their muscles have gotten bigger let's keep this quote unquote simple and not assume the use of exogenous testosterone so we're

not really talking about hyperplasia and the creation of denovo cells by definition of course now we know that the uh fibral the myof fibral has gotten larger it has expanded in diameter what has actually led to that how much of that is water intracellular water how much of that is the synthesis of new organic matter Visa the amino acids or something else all right so there's two main ways that a muscle would hypertrophy and we're going to distinguish chronic hypertrophy or permanent hyper hypertophy from acute hypertrophy being you know you just left the gym right

now and your muscles are bigger you know full of fluid this is what that would be caused so you've got sustained muscle growth over time um this is either going to be a result of what we call contractile hypertrophy or psyop plasmic hypertrophy in either case the muscle cell got larger the diameter is expanded it's going to happen that way the question now is what actually changed inside that cell that caused it to or allowed it to be permanently larger well in the case of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy this is uh very new uh that we even

thought it existed folks have been talking about this um from the bodybuilding perspective in those communities for a very long time and we always called it sort of proos Science and then turns out we actually some folks you know Mike Roberts and his lab at Auburn and stuff started looking into it and found it actually was happening and so there's another Vindication for you Pro Sciences out there that sometimes those guys are on the things um just because science isn't there yet doesn't mean it's wrong it's like a very good example right just hadn't really

been studied so that actually happens a contractile hypertrophy happens as a result of increasing proteins on those mein and actin and so it's maybe important maybe not but the mile filaments here um you don't add more actin or myosin you just add more protein globulins to them and actually just sort of increases their diameter what happens then is you can imagine masas and acting working um almost like you had a circle of friends and you were to reach your arms extend your arms out to the the side grab your friend's hand and when you brought

your hands closer to your midline your friends would then come closer to you and if everybody did it at the same time the entire diameter of that Circle would get really small and expand okay great well if I were to double my size but my friend stayed the same distance away from me and then my friend doubled her size what you can actually see happen is is all of a sudden when I go to reach my hand out to grab them I'm already touching them because we were so much larger if the whole circle didn't

expand and so this is called lattice spacing so the spacing between AC my is very very important so if I just continue to get larger what I would eventually do is tell my friend next to me hey you scoot over a few inches cuz you're sort of crowding on my personal space and then that friend would say hey friend over same thing same thing so what happens is just the standing Circle starts to expand and so probably the the biggest explanation for why muscle increases in its diameter is exactly that you've put more proteins in

the contractile units in order to maintain optimal spacing so they can reach out and grab each other and pull in for contraction the whole thing needed to space out a little bit right it's like you invited a few too many friends to the party everyone's uncomfortable now we have to knock down a wall make the whole thing bigger have we bring in more friends we got to continue to knock the wall down and expand the size or else we just get too uncomfortable next to each other and so Andy when you when you experience contractile

hypertrophy based on everything you've just described it sounds to me like that comes with contractile Force as well because you're putting more hooks basically you know you're basically creating more anchors I.E act meas and filaments to grab and contract is that is that essentially you know to A first order approximation a true statement yeah and this is actually true uh easily explainable for a number of ways number one um in general especially early in someone's exercise and career as you get stronger you'll add more muscle mass and those are very highly length now that that

R score is not 100 it's not 99 like there it's not 100% the same thing and we'll differentiate that later optimizing for muscle growth is not the same as optimizing for strength optimizing for strength is not the same for mus optimizing for muscle growth so at some point they start to diverge more and more and more but at the very beginning they're very tightly linked and so if somebody just wanted to be economical in their training you could probably get a little bit of both Well you certainly would get a little bit of both if

you wanted to optimize for one then that is a little bit different and we'll distinguish all that we'll talk about that you know later now as you continue on with your training career and you get stronger and stronger and stronger then the link between muscle size and strength does start to go away but it never goes away entirely because of exactly what you mentioned if you're tacking on more contractile units it's not maybe optimizing strength but it's going to come with some increases in force and the easy way to think about this is just look

at whether it's powerlifting strong man wrestling uh MMA you're generally going to see people as you go up in physical size you go up and strength right that doesn't mean you couldn't find a 155lb athlete who's stronger than 170lb athlete you clearly could but if you look at like the world record as the weight classes go up the world record scores go higher and higher and higher and so there's an intrinsic length there but or connection between mass and strength although it's not 100% right it's not the same thing so yeah you're you're going to

put those things on um and I guess one important note here is early in your training career you really don't need to distinguish between the two because both is going to come along for the ride you add on some muscle you're going to get stronger and if you do strength train you're probably going to attack on some muscle as well they're both going to come along for the ride so um you can be a little economical that way um Andy go back to the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy for a moment uh just give me the background story

on that I was totally unaware of that uh because it's been you know so it's been a while since I've been uh you know when I was in high school of course all I did was read muscle and fitness and you know bro science was my life um but I've been I've been a little away from it tell me what it was that the bodybuilding Community was uh proposing that science you know basically only really came to recognize sure so in general um for a long time myself and many other exercise scientists uh were sort

of proping that if you wanted to get muscle hypertrophy 8 to 12 repetitions per set is the optimal range but yet if you look at bodybuilders they're doing all kinds of other stuff they'll do set to 20 or 30 or they'll do different styles of training and according to us scientists like that that was not hypertrophy that was muscular endurance or that was strength and those would not result in hypertrophy and then eventually more and more research came out and Brad shenell did much of this work he's he's incredibly prolific and Brad showed well actually

hypertrophy uh is pretty much equal from anywhere between five repetitions per set to up to 30 repetitions per set if other things are aced for Pro provided the rpe gets to the same point right the the or reps in reserve has to basically you have to get pretty close to failure not failure necessarily but but you can't you know at the end of 30 you need to be hurting as much as you would be at the end of seven yeah and it's very hard because you're going to start hurting 15 yeah exactly you got to

just bear with it yeah it's much more time under tension and in some ways it's also more taxing to your cardiovascular system depending on the lift yep it certainly can be certainly can be um so what the bodybuilding Community would say are things like hey if you lift in this fashion um five to 10 reps you might increase contractile units and that's why you're getting stronger however if you were to go higher repetition ranges it's going to be coming from ccop plasma uh hypertrophy and why that matters is that's almost exclusively explained by increases in

fluid retention and so it is non-contractile hypertrophy so this is why you can get bigger but you're not getting strong yeah right so that's that's the functional distinction and again that's like something that we were just like no no no no it doesn't happen um there had been like a couple of papers but but the technology wasn't there honestly to measure it until till some assay came around and Mike really got that stuff going and it was like oh crap and now it looks like the story is actually pretty clear um of the sort of

and Mike has a wonderful review paper on this stuff and you can actually see a graph he's developed and you can look at sort of when psychop plasmic hypertrophy happens when contracti happens and what happens over the course of your training experience and I think actually explains what's happening pretty nicely all right I think that was the perfect intro to what I think would be a really elegant framework for now how to talk about a series of rows and a series of columns that make up a matrix right so in our first podcast we spoke

about the different types of athletes and then we talked about the different variables that go into training stress what we didn't do because there simply wasn't enough time was fill in that Matrix and that's what I'd love to do today so what I went back to is what are the different phenotypes of Interest so we're going to go with a powerlifter an Olympic weightlifter a strongman a bodybuilder a CrossFit athlete a track and field athlete and then we're going to look at them according to you know the following how if you're if you're training to

be specifically that athlete what's your frequency of training what's your intensity for example as a percent of 1 RM or V2 Max what's the volume you're doing how are you thinking about sets and Reps what's the rest recovery and is there any other sort of skill-based training adaptation that's necessary I acknowledge this might take us a while but you know I think this is a very elegant way to synthesize so many of the concepts that were in the first episode of our of our sitdown um and I think in many ways this is kind of

the rubber hitting the road now I'll tell you that my ultimate goal in doing this Andy is to now extract from each of those phenotypes the learnings for what I consider personally the most important phenotype which is not powerlifter Olympic weightlifter strong men bodybuilder Etc but rather what I call the centenarian to cathete in other words even though I'm only 50 so much of how I think about training is for the 90y old version of me right what do I want to be able to do at 90 I have a pretty good sense of what

it is it's quite audacious what am I need to what do I need to do for the next 40 years to make sure that at 90 I'm functioning to be honest with you like a very fit 70y old that's the aspect inspiration so we'll end with that if we have time if not that'll easily be part three um but let's um let's start with the order that you presented them in which was starting with the powerlifter so again just for folks listening powerlifting is a very very specific sport it consists of three and only three

lifts and you are scored on the basis of the total amount of weight you move in a deadlift a bench press and a squat and that's it nobody cares what you look like nobody cares how fast you can do that nobody even cares how many reps you can do right there's nothing that goes into it except it's a number a plus b plus C equals total and that's it now those guys are strong as hell for what they do um maybe give people a sense of numbers like pick two different weight classes and explain to

people just how strong a powerlifter is in those three lifts yeah sure so to really clarify when we say strength uh you could also think about Force I'll say those interchangeably and while in the real world if somebody were to be able to drag a train or something I'd be like well that's a strong person but technically maximal strength is what's the maximal amount you can do one time and and I know you said that a second ago but I really wanted to make sure that the audience heard that because the name power lifter is

a bit misleading here which I think you're about to explain why that's EX exactly right um Power the difference between force and power is speed and so another way to say this is if you take speed multiply that by force or strength that's how you get power and so implicit in that is power is comprised of both strength and speed so there's a speed component to it in the case of the the exercises you listed in powerlifting there's no speed component to it really they're trying to move as fast as they can but they're not

scored on speed there's no clock it doesn't matter at all how fast they move it is EXP licitly a test of pure and absolute strength what is the most amount you can lift one time there are three different exercises we Tred it in but you don't get to do it for three or four reps or it's not you know who can complete it the fastest it is who's the maximum thing you can live so to give you some examples uh I have worked with uh Stephie Cohen a little bit not much but just a little

bit in my career uh and she has 25 or 27 World Records uh one of her competitions I think she weighed 119 pounds and I think she deadlifted 525 in that competition she's deadlifted 585 I believe so getting in the stratosphere of you know five well over 5x body weight here which is absurd um you know she's she Pro deadlift is her thing so but she's still probably benching 200 something and and squatting well over the 400s so um as 120b you know female that's pretty simply unbelievable actually it it's totally I was deadlifting today

right today just happens to be deadlift day for me and because I no longer can like I peaked at 18 it's a little depressing right like I just that was that was my peak in so far so far well I mean I don't know that I even care to lift as much as I did but but now I do different things right like so today the main set was four rounds of one minute as many reps as possible with 315 oh so it's a it's a different stress make no mistake about it it's it's it

hurts in a totally different way um but it's yeah do 315 as many times as you can in 60 seconds rest three minutes and keep doing that over and over again but like there's no way got a razor got fired for that one of the two there's no way I'm doing no actually I told Beth after and she was like what was your intention with this and I was like actually uh you know anyway but but like even at my strongest I could wouldn't do 525 and and and I at my strongest I weighed 160

PBS so that's a staggering amount of movement and you've got good levers for pulling you got long arms you're probably like pretty efficient at deadlifting dead lifting was my best of the three by far yeah yeah for sure yeah bench is probably your worst b i i i i will embarrass myself by saying how much I could bench it's uh yeah so I guess I should finish the story two 270 was my best bench at a weight of 160 um which is not that good I mean let's be honest it's not that good well yeah

it's not that terrible though either I mean it's okay um you so if you want to look at like the crazy topend SC let's talk let's tell people more of like what and and I guess in powerlifting it is a little complicated because you do have to consider tested versus untested athletes it's a pretty big difference yeah let's let's just give you the maximum human potential on all the steroids who cares on every the gear all the s squat suits and whatever um my friend AJ Roberts uh I think his best squat was 1250 1240

it's just hard to believe that's possible I think he was 308 pounds for that meet so this is you know 4X squat um I don't know what the like alltime alltime alltime record is right now because it's so hard but I think it is north of 1300 at this point um it's it's not common people have pulled deadlifted a thousand and people have benched a thousand um there's a lot more people who have been who have squatted like 1100 plus there's a there's a decent number of those people but there are a handful of people

who have deadlifted a thousand and a handful that have benched a thousand with all the the gear and and all the stuff but who cares it's like a th half a ton they're taking off the bar holding it touching it's abely absurd Okay so we've established that despite the the hiccup in the nomenclature these people are insanely strong and again I would encourage everyone who's listening or watching you may never desire to do a maximum rep deadlift bench presser squat I personally have no desire to ever do it again ever there's never a day I'm

G to put enough weight on a bar in any of those three lifts to even come close to that that said the principles of how they train matter a lot to me so let's start with well you can take them in any order you want Andy but let's just talk about frequency how what what are the sort of The Guiding principles for how you take an athlete um who comes to you and I guess maybe for the purpose of this discussion Andy let's assume that all of the guidance we're going to provide is not for

a worldclass athlete with an enormous training age conversely let also assume it is not for someone who has never lifted a finger again I think just for the sake of Simplicity why don't we assume that in every situation you're taking a person who has some exercise exposure but not specific to this endeavor so in this case you're talking about a person who grew up playing sports maybe um they're reasonably fit they still muck around you know they they they play some pickup basketball maybe they they do a little bit of this and that they're no

stranger to the gym they understand what lifts and things are but truthfully they've never been to a powerlifting meet and they're coming to you saying hey I would really I'd like to compete in the 50 and up you know or 50 to 55 powerlifting thing okay so so guy shows up with that tell me how you're walking about his training program yeah sure so um I want to make two slight distinctions inside of that this is distinction one is what is theoretically technically optimal distinction two is what's probably more realistic practical okay let's let's always

feel free to give both of those um I I distinguish these in my world as efficacy versus Effectiveness so max efficacy is exactly the former there theoretically if you can do everything to Perfection you will have the best results Effectiveness is in the real world when you stay up late at night because your kids are sick and you got a little extra deadline at work and that's going to cut into your training what's the best you can do yeah did you just described last night for me by the way so one thing that's going to

hold true throughout all this Matrix we're going to cover is specificity is always your answer uh if you want to get better at writing you need to write if you want to get better at sprinting you need to Sprint if you want to get stronger and you want to get better at picking up a weight one time the heaviest you can pick it up that is by far the most direct route to go meaning in this case uh you should practice every single day picking up 100% of your max wow theoretically that's what specificity would

tell you okay distinction two that's not realistic right uh that the volume the injury for this person you described injury frequencies to I now if you are a truly Elite athlete you might do something close to that if you look at um the Bulgarian method uh this is would be weightlifters not powerlifters but similar they're going to do a one rep max and snatch Clan jerk and Squad every day this is what they do right now again these are people probably on assistance they're they are five six seven eight nine years into their training career

and in between they're getting massages and like so like in theory if you really wanted to maximize specificity you could do that and many have done that NE suam Manago one of the pocket Hercules that guy you know he didn't do it for all of his training for all year but certain phas of his training that's that's what you would do right High specificity you're going to get better at those things no question so to peel that back anything besides that is less specific but you have to then start hedging towards okay am I going

to get hurt that's not realistic for the Avatar you described and all the Practical implications so what you want to do though is get as close to that as you can while not inducing overload injury uh all that stuff so realistic scenario probably something like one to five um days per week you you work that movement pattern right so realistically two would be good for a lot of people so if you want to get stronger at squatting squat twice a week if you recover well and you squat well your mechanics are well three days a

week that would be a really really really good program but you could get very strong very strong doing two days a week uh in that movement so if you wanted to do all three like in powerlifting maybe bench twice a week maybe deadlift once a week maybe squat once a week something like that maybe if you wanted to squat twice a week and deadlift twice a week you could maybe get away with that depending on other variables so it could be as little as two days a week of training because you could do a bench

squat day and a bench deadlift day potentially you could yeah you and for a lot of people the person you're describing they would get stronger wouldn't be optimal mhm but it would be certainly effective if they said Andy I'm willing to be in the weight room four days a week because I'm I'm really optimizing on this if if I'm going to be in the weight room four days a week are you basically going to figure out a split where one you know you get three of each in those eight sessions or something to that effect

you would want to I I will tell people to look into what's called a conjugate all right so this is the there's many forms of this but this would be the Westside barbell Lou Simmons form of conjugate and that's almost exactly what they describe right so it's a little bit of pure strength work at the beginning there's a muscular endurance phase basically um uh there's a speed phase to it and then there's a strength phase to it and they just build that in and they actually just sort of rotate it through bench squat deadlift bench

Squat and they just power it through that way so that's a very easy model and sorry you're you're saying that that they would do that in any given workout or across the week it's spread out that way sorry yeah across the week okay so basically you'd walk in the gym you're going to do a Max deadlift and then you're going to do some assistance work in your low back or your GL Bo your hamstrings or whatever is needed and then the next day you come in it's maybe a max bench then tricep work shoulder work

rear delts neck or whatever Etc yep and then the day you come in you know you kind of follow it that way um so that'd be very very effective and they're not necessarily anyways yeah okay no no this is this is super interesting okay so the next question is um is the only time you're GNA have this athlete moving insanely heavy weights in the three formal lifts or do you have them do very heavy things that are accessories so I'll give you an example do you have them do very heavy hip thrusters or very heavy

incline bench press or very heavy military press or very heavy front squats I.E things that they are not going to compete in but have a high degree of overlap with what they're competing in specificity wins here so you're gonna say no for because you're not a professional athlete who has all the time in the world just do the lift I would say stick most mostly to the lift now even for this not person who not because they're not a professional outl you could make the argument they need variation more actually because who really cares if

they optimize your strength gain I'd rather push it a little bit more towards overall safety and variation will give you that because it's less overuse of the same movement pattern the same loading pattern the more variation you get the less specificity so the Less Direct adaptation but the less likelihood of overuse so in this particular person I would probably either but if we really said this I would say it here maybe I'll say it this way the core of our day when we come in is going to be that exact movement it's going to be

a you know barbell back squat in your stance the way that you're going to compete great certainly within maybe the eight weeks prior to this competition outside of that though when we call offseason we would introduce variation do other stuff um while they're in that specificity phase though we might do our primary lift is what we kind of call it and then after that we would do a ton of accessories so we might do our hard work on our barbell uh back squat and then maybe we go to a goblet squat maybe we do split

squat maybe we do lateral Lunes and we would do other stuff reverse hypers and things like that so you would want to use all those but those would be what we call accessories uh or supporting stuff and you would probably go to higher repetition ranges for those so you would you wouldn't do a Max effort step up right you might do set to five eight something like that to really support the joints and make everything feel good but you keep your pure pure strength work to that core lift and when you're in that let's just

pick one let's just pick the deadlift for example what's the rep range you're going to have them working in at what point is there a rep R is there a number of reps that is so high that it's getting you too far away from max strength five is sort of the number five un less okay you get starting past five you start losing uh Force production and and if my I used to know these tables off by heart from when I was younger I believe five reps is that 80 is that 85% of typically one

RM that you do five for it totally depends actually depends a lot on fiber type okay that's actually sort of funny off but it depends on the movement um the same is not true for a deadlift versus a bench yeah okay those those numbers go way off so it's a roughish number there's actually a chart um called prelin chart p uh you guys can find it the chart does it tells you yeah it's really really cool it's on um there's been a handful of studies on it out of New Zealand or some power lifters and

stuff but it's uh this is from the Russian literature I believe originally but anyways it tells you how many reps to do throughout the week total at a percent given percentage so in other words hey between 70 to 80% accumulate this many reps between 80 and 90% accumulate this many reps accumulate 90 95 Etc and it gives you a range of reps to stay within in terms of total per week and that's pretty good cuz it'll tell you sort of like here's the amount of Max effort you can get away with and then here's how

much supporting work you need to do to make sure that stuff can happen and and that's it's a very it's um yeah it's generally pretty effective now to do this you need to know your one RM because you're okay so um this is a bit of an aside but it it might be relevant um there there are these devices I forget the name of it I actually have one and I and I enjoy using it I can't remember the name of it though it's a little thing that sits on the ground and it has a

strap that goes on the bar and it's oh velocity transducers yeah yeah yeah and I can't remember the name of the one I have but I I I quite fancy gware Jim aware is the most popular one is it no I have a different one it starts with a V I think but anyway um so anyway if I do a set let's say I'm doing a set of fives if I if I want to do five sets of five one day it's measuring the speed in feet per second or meter per second of each rep

it knows the weight so I tell it how much weight I'm putting on and it's measuring the velocity and it's telling me based on each rep uh two things that matter to me right one is what's my projected 1 RM based on the speed that I'm moving that and what's my level of fatigue um as I've learned the lower the weight the less accurate it is like if if you have 135 pounds on the bar and you're warming up there's no there's no amount of speed you can put on that that will get you anywhere

within what its prediction is but once you get into that five rep range it's pretty accurate do you think that's accurate enough for someone like me who doesn't actually want to do a 1 RM or do you think I'm just being a wussy you are being a wussy yeah but um the other thing you can do is just do a rep max test so there's any number of online calculators put a weight on your comfortable with and do it uh anywhere between three to 10 reps and then you can say okay I did 200 pound

for eight reps and it'll say this yeah that's that's your one RM and then go off that okay yep yep and and now one one cave I'll give you those estimates will go up to like 20 reps per set um but the accuracy is awful so if you're going to do a rep max test I generally recommend staying below eight reps uh if you can stick between like the three to three to eight range that's going to give you a pretty accurate score for most people and and I I think you said something earlier that

I now I think kind of resonates I have never found those calculators to work for me um they always tend to oh you're a slow twitch guy yeah ex's no way I think I'm a slow twitch guy and therefore they I can do way more reps than you would expect and therefore it tells me I should be able to lift more at 1 RM and I can't yeah there's no chance right like you're you're whatever you're doing for at you're 85% like you're doing 15 reps and like I'm gonna do four because I'm a I'm

a super fast switch guy y yeah so that's that's the other thing I think that is you need to couch that with your own genetics and and training history as well okay um how many sets are we talking about here so if if if um if I'm coming into the gym saying okay well today's the deadlift day and let's just say I'm doing kind of the the Westside barbell approach where it's going to be the main set of the day the working sets are around my deadlift and then I'll do the accessory ner and stuff

later we've established you don't want me going above five reps once I've done my warm-up how many working sets would you have for me in that day yeah so maybe I could answered the very beginning um you could you could answer this whole Matrix for strength with just this thing called three to five so the three to five concept 3 to five days per week 3 to five exercises 3 to five reps per set three to five total sets and then three to five minutes rest between each set it's pretty Universal that can take you

as low as three days a week you're going to do three exercises for three sets of three now the intensity has got to be high Y it's got to be a lot of load right it can take you all the way to five days a week five exercises five sets of five and that volume is going to be really taxing um if if again if you're loading it appropriately since we're under the powerlifting category but just to be clear Andy that's the strength Matrix or that's the that's the strength column here is regardless of which

of those athletes you are when you want to focus on your strength part of what you do which every one of those athletes has to be strong including the Sprinter you've got to be in the three to five that yeah now you could also say again I already said earlier one to five so it's great M but this just makes kind of the rule super easy for people to to understand um I certainly didn't invent this this has been around for a very very very long time you'll find this in books in the 090 1990s

and well earlier than that but it's an easy one kind of oneliner for people to remember so it's days exercises reps rest sets sets yep okay yep all that right so again since we're in powerlifting and since we're in strength that 3 to five only works though if you're loading that heavy y if you're going light that's not it's not going to work and just to be clear let's explain to people what that means would you do you do you prefer RP or reps in reserve as either way okay so you want to just explain

to people what what those two mean and how they can use it to think about this RP rating of perceived exertion how hard is it you could do this scale of 6 to 20 it's the original bork scale do it 1 to 10 you could do it one to five um whatever the top end of the scale is the hardest repetition you could ever do and you scale back so you don't NE technically need to always be at the high end of the scale there um but you can't be you know if if you're going

on a scale one to five you can't be at two on this thing four is probably the Sweet Spot uh reps and Reserve is another similar idea where it says like if you thought you could do 10 reps on this and I want you to do two reps in reserve that means I want you to stop at eight reps right so you left two repetitions in reserve you left them on the T table there um same thing would be strength right so like Hey we're going to do a set of four here I want you

at a one rep in reserve so you're going to get that into four and go I would have had one left but I wouldn't had two I I certainly wouldn't had three I would have had one left but I'm going to stop right there so similar idea just a different way to express it yeah rep in reserve for me has always made a little more sense I think it's easier to explain to people but at the same time you have to know what failure is it's it's not something you can figure out by yourself you

have to have the experience of dropping a bar on your chest and having the guys run across the gym to pick it up like you got to know what that's sort of like well there are easier ways to learn that's but you know what I mean like you sort of have to have been through the ringer of I think I have one more and you do versus I think I have one more and you don't and obviously it's much safer to figure that out on a dead lift than on a squat for example um yeah

I mean honestly like just go on a machine who cares like just get a rough idea right you want to get super safe if if you're not familiar with all this stuff that's a great Point go go on a leg press machine go on a leg extension machine as much as like yeah you know we don't love that uh just get close because you're you're right uh RP and R um both fail epically when people are not highly trained yeah because they don't really they think oh that's probably close and really you thought that was

a two R but that was like a seven like you're not even close most people are just stronger than they realize actually they have more they have much more in reserve so okay so we're assuming that for everything we're talking about with respect to strength the athlete the individual will get to the point where they truly understand how many reps they have in reserve and now for the 3 to five system to work are you talking one to two reps in reserve are needed that's probably pretty close probably closer to one okay um less the

the the less comfortable you are fine but remember you're not going to get stronger by going at Sub sub maximum weights yep you're not going to optimize so like the whole idea of getting stronger is like you got to see you got to test the limits of of sort of where you're at um with within a safe range you know of course and if you're just starting take your time ramp up you know takes six weeks takes eight weeks like you have a lot of time it's not you know you got 50 more years Peter

like we're not in a rush here I only have 40 years but yeah okay um uh you get it though like so so do all the caveats asides be smart with this stuff um we already put one other caveat that I always make sure to say here earlier in the conversation which is hey if you want to get stronger and you're really untrained you you don't have to go this heavy you can get very strong doing sets of 20 you'll get there but this Avatar was someone who he said was past that point a little

bit so they needed to really get closer to Optimal strength so this is why we're going a little bit heavier in regard there um so let's let's before we leave the powerlifter I want to bring a few other things into this so again we're not in this discussion specifically optimizing on Total Health right we're really optimizing around this person being a powerlifter so so now I come back you and I say Andy okay I got it man I'm all in on this I'm going to do four days a week and I'm going to you know

do the the you know I'm going to basically do three to five exercises sets reps Etc um but I said hey look on the other uh four days a the other three days a week uh is it cool if I do a bunch of cardio and again I'm not talking about this through the lens of Health I'm saying will it make me a better powerlifter or would I be better off you a better powerlifter no yeah exactly so so what would you advise that I do on my off days if the objective is maximizing my

strength so there's interesting um when I was kicking around these scenes a lot powerlifters were notorious for being the laziest sons of you ever seen in your life right like if they're not lifting One Max they they're going to be circling Walmart for two and a half hours to get a closer parking spot like no like like that that is not a joke I've been in that jeep I've been in that jeep and just driving around you're just like oh my God just like saving every calorie right okay great um I think more recently people

of in that Community start to realize like I need some level of Fitness because I can't handle the training volume I can't get through my if you're pouring sweat getting through your warmup and tying your shoes you you probably shouldn't be doing one rep Maxes all day like we need to get fit first right um that's they have to have some level of Fitness so what I would say is this um do do the stuff we talked about maybe finish each one of those workouts with a set of eight to 10 or 12 just to

pump a little bit of volume in there that'll get you in a little a tiny bit of Fitness will be achieved kind of from that stuff on your off days if you truly want to maximize strength and you're fit enough then just rest uh do other stuff maintenance you know Mobility you know breath work BL like all the other recovery stuff just hedge heavy as you can if you're just ansy got to move got to move got to move fine um but this is be like a zone two or lower movement right just don't do

much work because every amount of work you're doing is just contributing to systemic fatigue and remember it's not just about thing doing things like preserving muscle glycogen which you have to do but it's not a huge deal if we're doing say three sets of three it's not going to drain you that much muscle glycogen but your nervous system requires carbohydrates for metabolism um everything else has got to be optimized here that stuff takes a long time to recover we got to restore muscle glycogen and phosphocreatine and and ATP all that happens so there's just no

reason that you it would give you an advantage to do more endurance work in between as long as you have some baseline Fitness and that's the one time where people do see gains from it is again because they're so untrained you're so out of out of shape if you will uh that they feel better they can train more they can train harder they can recover faster because they have an aerobic system so that caveat of side rest I remember when I was in high school the gym I worked out in um which was a a

powerlifting gym which is why I got into it but really my primary goal was training for boxing so I was doing infinitely more volume and the powerlifters their main they would mainly train in the evenings sort I think it was Tuesday Friday evenings or something it's exactly as you described I first of all the two things that stand out to me even to this day you know 50 years later um I'm being a bit fous it was only 32 years ago um is the obvious how incredibly and insanely strong these men were and two was

how little they did like I couldn't believe how little they did yeah they would come in they would put their slippers on put their suits on Chalk up do a set rest for what seemed like an hour do another set rest for what seemed like an hour do another set and leave and admittedly they were lifting cars in there they were so damn strong but I just remember thinking like how can you do so little but I think you're answering that question in what in what they were doing that's every single match has to go

into burning for that flame has to now let me think about this you're trying to put a thousand pounds on your back there's just no room for a percentage of fatigue there's nothing I it's the consequences are quite dire here right but even if it's not um I'll think about it this way even though say th000 pounds represents one% their one rep max it's 100% and you could do 250 pounds and that's your One Max this is not the same thing it's not the same thing because even though it's both 100% of your one R

Max there's an absolute load that is on a physical human body uh that is not does not scale and so like there is a major difference that's right the connective tissue is not scaling linearly at all here right they still have tendons and bones that are not that much different from mine correct they're a little bit but not that much exct different so when they go do their yeah when they go do their heavy squat day or their deadlift day remember if they're if they can squat a, lb do you know what they're doing for

70% that's a 700 lb squat day and so like those are their light reps those are their you know maintenance reps and they're still putting that so that load is it just takes so much more rest than when you do your 70% and you could come back tomorrow and squat and be fine because it was 220 pounds um so that relativeness doesn't scale even if you're talking people about people that aren't like crazy strong let's say they're a 700 PB squatter that's still absurdly heavy and their their practice reps are 520 pounds like that's just

that's just a ton of load on a human body and that takes a lot to recover from before we go on to the Olympic weightlifter let's pause for a moment here and just ask the question what do you think is the long-term consequence in uh in a powerlifter is it the case that look if your mechanics are great you can live a perfectly long healthy life that is free of Orthopedic disability in the final decade of your life or do you believe that at some point if you're really putting 500 plus pounds on your back

repeatedly the probability of injury is high enough and I don't mean acute injury I just mean the chronic wear and tear you know that you know what the likelihood that you're going to make it into the last decade of your life without significant limitations brought on by either spine or joint injury are pretty high like what's your take on the not having watched a number of athletes go through this so scientifically we don't have really any data to speak of so this is all anecdotal we just don't have enough to walk on that um I

don't think you would find a very highly competitive powerlifter who is under the illusion that this is great for their health that's just not a not a thing really they sort of either ignore it or accept it having said that um I I could name you a ton of people who feel fine who you know world record holders multiple World Records or I can name you a ton of people who just Liv kind of recreationally in the gym who were all beat to hell too so like it's a little bit of uh well okay I

could find examples on both sides here um and because we don't have randomization we don't know if the people who are just doing great would be doing great no matter what they did and the people who are all beat up to hell are GNA be beat up regardless of what they do yeah and there's also a level of insanity right so you have the people like Louis Simmons and you're like well okay you he you trained with a broken back a known broken bone in your back like so like I don't even count you guys

like that that's not the the normal you know response um if you're trying to break World Records all those people are training hurt yeah like I I could say the same thing about professional fighters it's like well I mean it's a hurt sport like that's yeah but then I could tell you a bunch of them who are wrecked their whole life afterwards and then a bunch that are like feel okay yeah so uh it's hard to say um I'll put it this way you take any sport you take cycling you take swimming and you push

it to the extremes like that I mean you're asking to not be able to use your shoulders rest of your life like that so it's not the sport per se it's the extremity really that I think is I completely agree um anything you want to add to the training requirements of this athlete before we move on to weightlifters I could but I think we've we've covered the big stuff okay um okay remind people what Olympic weightlifting is again the nomenclature here gets very unhelpful yeah but why is it that these are probably among the most

powerful athletes in the world sure so this is now similar to powerlifting this is what most people think of when they think of powerlifting that's because they're going to do two exercises one of them is called the power clean so I have great sympathy for you people who get all these confused um the difference here is similarly to powerlifting uh Olympic weightlifting is a competition of who can lift the most amount of weight one time that that's it right there are two exercises one's called the snatch one's called the clean and jerk the clean and

jerk has two parts so it has sort of two names but it's one exercise in competition right whoever lists the most snatch whoever livs the most in the clean jerk you add those two up and that's who gets our gold medal all right it's one rep you know your best score in one repetition and it's the most amount of weight you can put on the bar that's it the difference is though why is this not powerlifting why is this not truly a maximum strength test is because both movements require you to take the bar from

the ground and throw it over your head and catch it and so in order because you're doing that there is a speed requirement that has to happen you simply can't throw a maximum weight over your head and catch it slowly you can absolutely deadlift slowly it doesn't really matter you can bend slow you can squat slow you know you want to go try you want to try to go fast but it is not required the thing so if you look at the sport of powerlifting that in order to take a especially a snatch which is

um Apples to Apples the snatch is the single highest power producing exercise that has ever been studied so nothing else produces more power per exercise than a snatch and that's because you have to take the bar from the ground and throw it over your head and try to cat it right you just can't do it slowly your feet get to leave the ground so you don't have to worry about staying in contact but the bar doesn't crash down on you like if you do a speed Squat and jump and you jump in the air the

bar would smash you in the back of your neck and your head and that hurts bench press you can't accelerate through the end of the range of motion because the bar would leave you so you actually decelerate towards the end of a bench anything where you're holding on to the Implement it's going to slow down right uh things like throwing a medicine ball are great and they are very powerful but they're not as powerful as a snatch because the load gets so low so let's remember power is force times velocity so a medicine ball throw

has a high velocity but it's a six or eight or maybe 20 PB ball with a snatch you might have 300 lb on there might have 100 pound it's just a lot heavier so the force component higher so the power output is significantly higher and so it it is the best way to produce Force so because of that those athletes are again you quote unquote the most powerful because they're doing the most powerful movement so if you were to look at like the vertical jump height on these individuals uh it's just it's it's absurd how

high they can jump while still being exceptionally strong so you're still talking about people who aren't squatting a thousand pounds um but at the same same weight they might be squatting 7 or 800 900 pounds and also they're doing it at at a speed that's not as high as say they're not jumping as high as like a basketball player but they're doing it with with six 600 pounds know 400 lb 500 pounds so that's why it is it is quotequote more powerful so you could find higher jumpers you could find higher squatters but they have

this wonderful combination of really strong and really fast and that's why they produce so much power now going back to what we said earlier they have to be strong and so presumably they still have to follow the exact same principles we just talked about for strength they're not going to optimize their strength doing 12 reps they're going to have to be in sub five um I guess here my question is same thing right we've got the same you know Avatar as you describe it the the you know middle-aged woman now let's just say who was

an athlete in college and you know but you know wants to try a new sport this is the sport she wants to do she's trained you know she's not you know she's not a stranger to exercise but she's never done weightlifting meaning Olympic weightlifting she's never done these two movements um I'm assuming that you're doing a lot of the movement learning with very light load right you're doing a broomstick perhaps the first time you do a clean and jerk or a snatch totally how is she training her strength in those movements right so when you

talk about Olympic weightlifting or weightlifting this is of all the top things we're going to talk about this is by far the most technical component and so we have to I'm going to almost kind of leave that part of the ation because it's we're just going to get bogged down there but we do acknowledge it right it is a ton of technical work to get there because your point is right if you are simply snatching a PVC pipe uh you're not going to generate any strength that's pretty easy to understand you're not even going to

produce any power really because the load is way too light it's super fast it's just it's honestly hard you can't actually throw a PVC pipe over your head very fast it's very awkward trust me you can't Jerk It overhead like it's super awkward so once the technical component is sort of acquired What will what you would have to do to answer your question is build the technical skills and then get strength doing say a front squat and doing a push press or an overhead press or stuff like that a more traditional why you're building the

technical ability because what's going to happen is you won't have the technical ability to even get heavy enough on the snatch and clean a jerk for quite some time because you're going to be so limited by technique rather than strength or speed and so that's going to hold you back for a long time and this is why a lot of folks will frankly not use these movements which I think is a mistake I think it's a ma major mistake but if you were the classic kind of personal trainer and you know you got a client

coming in once a week geez like are you really going to invest three months in a teaching them how to snatch before they actually burn any calories gaining muscle or get stronger well it's probably a losing Endeavor yeah but if you have somebody for a year more importantly have somebody says I'm committed to doing this and I'm I'm going invest okay you know five years 10 years this type of stuff then it's probably a worthwhile Endeavor um there because it is total body it's a deadlift mixed with a vertical jump mixed with an overhead press

and a catch mixed with an overhead squat you're moving you're jumping up and then down and then you're catching yourself so balance and propr reception are also there um it's a your lats are going to go to keep your position in the back uh the core has to be there to overhead squat it it's very very well rounded with the exception of horizontal pressing it covers just about everything else and so it's a very economical movement and also it's it's it's Peak concentric and Ecentric because the amount of deceleration you have to do in that

movement is insane whereas for example in powerlifting you don't really get to test the Ecentric phase to the same extent yep there's no Landing there's no absorption um and there's no movement in space right which is very important for neural control brain keeping your brain healthy and everything like that catching yourself in a fall um so yeah super productive my brother at one point became obsessed with setting his you know School record um when he was in law school he played he played he still man he had an year of Eligibility left so he played

football for another year and um for some reason one of the tests that they were putting the team through was like you know uh clean and jerk and he won I forget how much he moved it was a lot for for he was about 185 pounds and it was about twice his body weight or close to it but here's what was interesting and it it what you said is what reminded me of this all he did was the following to train he would put 135 on the bar as the max amount and do that as

perfectly and quickly as possible so you know he would be filming himself making sure elbow you know bar travel was perfectly straight and then do insanely heavy front squats and shrugs and all sorts of other accessory movements and then on the day of the competition he just went up they've got three and a half plates on the bar and he just did it that one time and that was it but he never had trained above 135 I was amazed by that but it sounds like that's not an unreasonable strategy here it wouldn't be my strategy

okay it wouldn't at all um pushed more in training higher and higher okay yeah yeah so but he got kind of lucky I guess like it it worked for him no no I wouldn't say that I would say this he let's say he did he's 185 pounds let's say he did 350 or something it was probably around 350 yeah 350 great okay he probably could front squat 450 at that time he could probably was probably back squ in 500 I don't know y he was probably so limited by his technique though rather than his strength

it wasn't it was a smart idea to invest a lot in technical proficiency so that's probably why he got so many more strides in technique uh because it was so far behind in terms of the two things you have to have to do that movement you have to have technique and then you have to have horsepower y he had way more horsepower than he had technique so he invested heavily there that's was probably why he would have got away for it um to give you some numbers here like we did with powerlifting uh if you

want to look at a good cllean jerk like a really good one um at the lower weight classes triple body weight triple is where we're after body weight oh my God now if you go the this again this doesn't scale with size so if you look at like um Lasha the best guy in the planet for the last six or eight years um kind of the number we always throw over there is like 265 that' be kilos so like five I think that's 570 is range something like that but he probably weighs 350 right so

like if you're 350 pounds you're never going to D you're not g to go do double body weight um I don't think sorry 585 like 585 is the pounds yeah but you're saying the but but the guys that are like 140 pounds can actually get to three times their body weight oh yeah yeah yeah for sure wow like for example I was able to clean a jerk double body weight and that got me like seventh in the nation so like that that's not and that was 20 now it wouldn't even get you to the competition

right not even close um so like you you want to get to a national level competition as a male you're probably doing you know certainly double body weight um two two and a half you want to like Place internationally probably much closer to that three I mean there's not a lot of people do triple just be so how are we going to train this woman now so it sounds to me like we're going to we're not going to load her up on the clean and jerk and on the snatch she's going to be using you

know more weight than a PVC pipe and a and an empty bar but you know we're using 10 pound bumpers for most of the time here till we get that working just right um how are you training her strength so that you're building up the horsepower to match the technique you're building is it I mean I I shouldn't say I know how we're doing it in terms of reps and sets based on the three to five what exercises are you doing to to most uh meet the needs of what she's ultimately going to do when

her technique is good enough yeah so think about it this way if you look at Peak power production so when I say this um you take the force so how much load is on the bar and you take the velocity on and we plot it against each other okay at some point if it's too light but very very heavy not powerful opposite in the Spectrum same thing happens so the question is where is that crossover point which there's enough power or there's enough velocity and enough Mass well this is actually hyp specific to the exercise

and since we're on the power the weightlifter and kind of getting on power if you do an exercise like a bench press or even like a tricep extension that's probably going to happen at somewhere like 30 to 40% of your one rep max okay you'll have Peak power when you have about so if you can bench press 200 pound and you want to train power on the bench press you should probably put 120 sorry you um you should probably put you know 80 pounds on the bar something like that 30% if you move up to

a more compound Movement Like a squat instead of being at 30 to 40% it's more like 40 to 50% for most people of your Peak so if you're again if your max is 200 lb in the squat maybe you put 100 lb in if you go to a clean jerk or or snatch that number gets much higher to like 80 to 90% so a lot of folks won't hit Peak power in a snatch until they get to like 90% of their win Max you do 90% of your One Max on a bench plus you are

going to be moving super slow and you will not be producing any power so the optimum number and by the way the more trained you are the more that curve gets shifted to the right right so you can produce more power at a higher load relative load so the the the how heavy to put it on the bar to maximize power is very dependent upon the movement so in the in the question you ask like how are we gonna get this person stronger this is it's not going to come from these exercises if that's the

technical limitation you may have to get a kettle bell and do like a heavy kettle bell swing maybe you want to do an RDL maybe a deadlift um maybe a step up or any number of exercises like that until they can get to a technical proficiency to where they can get 50 60 70% or probably even higher um then you're not really going to be truly testing strength because you're still going to be super limited by technique because you're not even at the peak power yet and you'd put again just going back to that that's

a I'm super interesting and I've never thought of it through the lens of how that varies so much by exercise but bench press tricep press down maybe bicep curl you're going to hit Peak power lower in that range 30 40% you go to a leg press or squat or deadlift you're 40 to 50% yep and and one once you move to something so insanely technical you got to get close to 80 maybe even 90% of 1 RM yep that's right yeah and that's because of the nature of the exercise right you get to you get

to explode it's what we call a triple extension right it's an explosive hip knee and Ankle extension there um it's going to be so limited by the the skill that you got to go heavy before you're getting to Peak power let alone Peak strength you know last year I swapped out my leg press machine for one of the Kaiser ones um so the you know pneumatic device and I love it because it's it's giving me power by rep and it's so funny now I I haven't been able to figure out the exact formula for max

power but that's generally what I'm trying to hit right I usually use power as the metric I'm training to and then I look at the fall off and fatigue um so now I'm going to pay more attention to that which is am I truly hitting Peak power at I 50% of 1 RM and that kind of stuff so that's that's that's so cool I can't wait if you're pretty trained I'd bet you're probably you might even be closer to 60% and is it like the front squat machine the Kaiser front squat machine no it's the

seated leg press machine um it's like yeah yeah seated leg press yeah oh seated leg press yeah yeah yeah you might be higher like you probably be somewhere okay that range kind of just depends I I'll look for that that's cool um you know I'll give you since we're here uh 20 plus years ago uh I was in a facility training professional athletes and we had some of those machines and I went probably personally I don't know six maybe eight weeks straight of ju just using that Kaiser machine and all I did for training was

try to hit the highest watt output I could do didn't care how many reps it took didn't care how many sets I would take a break I would rest would try it again and I would go until I got a higher number come back the next week and I went up for eight weeks just by trying to optimize uh Power output the thing you talked about earlier the velocity transducer there's another way of training here for strength or for power that is velocity Based training which is almost exactly like we're talking about which is instead

of worrying about the weight or the rep ranges we're simply trying to hit the largest power output possible we're going to do as many reps as we can there with brakes and that's how we're going to maximize power output and it's it's a very very effective method rather than just putting an arbitrary number of reps down it's you're going to go Peak power output well well that's that's sort of how I use the device now right which is I say for for this load should be this many meters per second and when I can't do

that twice consecutively it's the set's over and sometimes that means the set ends at five and sometimes that means the set ends at eight but do you agree that like and I don't know this sort of stems from my belief which might be totally unfounded that I'm quote unquote sort of wasting reps if I'd be better off resting and coming back and doing it again faster and harder in 3 minutes than eeking out more slow reps is is there any validity to that that oh it's not unfounded at all there's there's strong science on that

there there's a um Brian man at the University of Miami has done a ton of great stuff on velocity Based training you could check out a lot of his work but there's a there's a training concept called cluster sets and so clusters have been shown uh to be highly effective for strength power and even hypertrophy surprising enough but what a cluster is is this let's say you were going to do six repetitions in your set let's say five just to keep it consistent five reps you could do you know one 1 2 3 4 5

no breaks in between or a cluster set says you're going to do one rep you're going to take a 5 to 20 second rest you'll do the next rep 5 to 20 5 to 20 5 to 20 so you're still doing quote unquote five but you might but you have micro micro brakes that's what clusters are and they are extremely effective because they do exactly what you just mentioned the quality and when I by quality here I mean power output velocity output Etc goes up because you you reduce fatigue in specifically reps three four and

five those will be much higher quality so the old way we wouldd say it is instead of getting five reps you get five first reps yeah which is much more important right so you get five higher quality ones so the aggregate quality uh Force output total achieved velocity whatever is is much higher um so it's very very effective now what's funny is weightlifters Olympic weightlifters have done this naturally for 50 years so when they do a set of like say triples of a clean or snatch no one ever goes boom boom boom you drop it

kind of reset Shake Your Hands regrip take a breath reset and it takes five to 10 seconds and and you do so your three reps like Takes a Minute yeah he's like PR triple it's like you got to sandwich in between reps it's not a triple like what are you doing you checked your email between those reps come on it's that a that a p double you two sets of one but there's a reason good it's there um now may not be optimal for may not be opt for hypertrophy may not be optal for Pure

strength but we're but here we're talking about the most powerful movement yeah super effective for Pure strength super effective more rest so so so just to be clear would you even Advocate this in if you're if you're trying to increase your deadlift you think it if you're going to do if you're saying I'm going to do five five reps on this deadlift you would actually say it be better to do five ones like with 10sec break in between if you're going for Pure strength no doubt about it yeah good research on that okay well that's

actually okay so that's that's super interesting to note okay now again the little caveat here we're getting a little deep you kind of like exactly like what your coach said earlier what was the goal here all right because if the goal was pure pure pure strength great if the GE was though like some strength with a bit of muscular endurance yeah yeah then you would not maybe not want to take that that break so um everything matters I guess is one way to say it so I love that by the way she just like what

was the goal here I love like that's like the best coaching thing ever like what were we trying to do here today uh suffer it's great coaching advice um so what um how often do you want this woman in the gym so here's the fun part oh this is really good because um the total load is low you can you can do this every day right you're talking about a small number of reps not to fatigue not at all to fatigue you're talking about a lightweight you could go every day there there's no reason why

you couldn't go do some power training I mean pick any power sport uh basketball yeah I was just about to say this is no different than saying I'm gonna go play basketball every day no different it's fact it's it's better because there's even less fatigue than because there's a lot of fatigue in a basketball game um so as long as you keep these high quality now if you are doing these two fatigue set to 20 you know 5 Seconds rest in between then like then that's a whole different thing but if you're doing these non-

fatiguing which is what you need to have for power and skill so this is a very important point for power and skill development they need to be non- fatiguing if if you're if you're getting to fatigue you're not doing either one of those things now you can get to fatigue if you're trying to produce a different adaptation which is maintenance of power through fatigue which is fine but that's not the same thing you're not going to improve your Peak Power by fatigue doesn't happen so these sessions are kind of like quote unquote boring you're not

going to get a big sweat you're not going to get a big pump you're not going to have like a you're not going to throw up on the floor afterwards it's sort of like okay like and you go home like damn and this is honestly why they're generally not very popular um like I got powerful but I don't look any different I'm losing weight I'm not covering I don't have any these other feedback mechanisms that says suggest I got a good workout in despite the fact it is very high quality uh training you're just not

get feedback so in power Training Power development stuff very very low fatigue that's the goal um which type of athletes that are not weightlifters do you have doing these exercises oh basically everyone I mean it's hard to pick a sport where power development is not important um caveats here uh if you're your heavyweight champing a Bellator like you're you're a professional UFC fighter am I throwing maximum weight over your head and catching it all the time I I wouldn't hesitate to do it but a lot of times they just simply have yeah trauma not going

to happen um I don't hesitate to do it with professional baseball players don't hesitate to do with pitchers though many of them don't have shoulder um so without getting too technical your shoulder needs to slide and move in a very specific way um especially when you're pitching and if they don't have that then we would walk away from this or if they don't want to it's fine you can get away from it um but other than that uh football player wrestlers um skiers tennis players same thing if you're a shoulder athlete and you have any

number of reasons you don't want to great we can walk away from it but there's really anyone else can can really go after these things um if it's all done appropriately then it's a fantastic exercise or set of exercises rather want to talk about something that ties into both weightlifting and powerlifting that I used to do and I don't remember if it was just Bro Science but empirically it seemed to be true I used to have this set that I really enjoy doing so it was um a heavy deadlift so it was either a two

three or four rep deadlift and it was super seted with um trying to think would I do it as a jump Pio or a drop but basically it was a plyometric in between and the empirical observation was it both helped each other so it doesn't sound like that should be the case it doesn't sound like my rest between deadlifts are plyometrics but yet it did seem to make me stronger now maybe that was psychological but there was a sort of Bro Science belief I had that that was doing something to the muscle fiber to get

it ready to lift heavy is there some it sounds like there might be some validity here oh yeah no there's a lot of science here so what you're referring to is a phenomenon we call Post activation that's right post activation potentiation yep okay cool been around for a long time very classic elw Henman size principle okay okay so 1950s 54 56 58 sort of a series of papers back then U but basically the way that U remember earli in the conversation we talked about fast twitch and slow twitch fibers all right well there are things

called motor units so when a nerve comes down and goes into a muscle it has a whole bunch of muscle fibers in that so the ner nerve and all the fibers collected together is called a motor unit all of the fibers in that motor unit are of the same fiber type so all the fast switch ones all the slow switch ones whatever and these just spread throughout the muscle so what happens is when you do low velocity exercise or low velocity movement like right now right I'm doing all these things I'm using low threshold motor

units and these tend to be slow switch ones so makes sense if I go to scratch my eyeball I don't want to be producing Max Force and not a good strategy right and so fact the best strategy is you start with the lowest Force output humanly possible and then you work your way up and that's because this principle another one called all or none which means when a muscle fiber contracts it contracts with a 100% effort you can't regulate it up and down there's no dimmer switch it goes on off on off so the only

way you regulate Force production is to increase or decrease the total amount of motor units that are activated because when you activate a motor unit all the fibers get activated and all of them get activated at 100% contraction right so what happens is I go to scratch my eyeball and I activate the muscle fire the M units that are the smallest and weakest it's not necessarily like that but yep it's proof of concept here okay and now I realize oh I'm not scratching my eyeball this time now I'm actually picking up a medicine ball okay

I'll activate those same initial motor units and I'll activate some other ones and some more ones and then I realize I'm not picking up medicine ball I'm picking up a car off the ground now I'll activate more and more and more and more these higher threshold motor units and those tend to be the more the fast switch fibers all right so in the case of post activ post activation potentiation what's happening is you're doing that deadlift I think you said deadlift and then a deadlift and a plyo yeah ply box jump yeah you do that

deadlift and because of the size principle and you're and you're requiring Force production you are activating higher threshold motor units then when you put the barbell down and you go to do your jump those are still engaged AC so now you can actually jump with more force and velocity because you've you've sort of turned them on initially you've activated them and so it's 100% And there's a lot of science my um Lee Brown whose lab i i s run now brought me over to calate fullton is is done legendary he's a Lifetime Achievement Award winner

um legendary work in this area you can Al it also goes the other way so this is fun when it comes to power training or speed training people tend to think about things like resistance so in other words um if you've ever done sprinting and you've like drug a sled or had a parachute on great you've done vertical jump training you've had like the bands that hold you down this is all added resistance and that's fine for teaching you acceleration which is moving over inertia quickly however the other side of the equation is if you

want to get fast and we're sort of I'm sort of jumping the gun here we're kind of moving into our speed one but it's it's fun right you actually want to also practice moving faster than you can currently move yeah this I had a friend who was a sprinter in college and they would do downhill Sprints like they would do 40 yard dash down an incline of six% six six is pretty aggressive yeah but but yeah yeah you either way maybe it was four but it was it was like basically their legs were turning over

at a speed that they would normally not even be used to turning over yep so instead of dragging the parachute you turn around and have the the bungee cord pull you a little bit or you run downhill or you do something with we actually had a device in our lab that is a harness that came down to you and we could reduce your body weight by 5 10 15 20% and you could do all your vertical jump training which we did with the volleyball team wow for one semester and you're jumping higher than you've ever

jumped so it's the same actually sort of post active activation potentiation or papap in Reverse so you're actually learning to move faster than you can possibly move so then when you go to actually do your work you move faster and the best example of this with Lee's work was you've seen baseball players swing a baseball bat and before they go up to play or they go up to their at bat a lot of times they'll put donut yeah donut on them right and so you swing that thing and it feels heavy and you take it

off and your baseball bat feels light and that's great right awesome well he actually looked at whether or not if you swing a whiffle ball bat so this is a plastic bat super light which you can swing really really really fast prior to that actually improved baseball bat velocity more so than the dut did so post active intti Pap uh that's the donut great super effective but also unloaded super super fast is equally effective as well at getting so if you want to maximize you probably should play with a little bit of both in the

Spectrum um you can do this with bands and chains like a lot of things times we'll do just take like a heavy band that you deadlift with and you can put underneath your lats and hook it to a thing above you and you can do assisted vertical jump training and just start flying in lots of other ways you could do it um so yeah that's a very real phenomenon and the reason I brought that up is because you mentioned you felt like the deadlifts helped the Pio yeah they seem to make each other better yeah

but that's the point so the the plyo helped the deadlift because of the over speed thing uhhuh I see so that's why this it's a loop here so they absolutely so yeah this is a this is called complex training not complex as in like multiple body parts and not a complex as in like a stack of different exercises which is a kind of a different term here um but this is yeah complex or there's a different kind of strategy you could do called contrast training but this specifically refers to like a complex where you would

do if you're going to do this you need to stick within the same principles so your total reps per set should still be around three to five so in other words you could do like two deadlifts and then three vertical jumps or whatever but don't do five deadlifts and then five vertical jumps you're gonna start now your total set is like 10 right but yeah you can do this all kinds of ways um so we'll we'll do this you know bench press and then medicine ball put um or rotational movements tons I mean the thought

that I had at the time was this is so ridiculous but why does a sprinter not 30 seconds a minute before they hit the blocks do a heavy set of three deadlifts um well the first of all they do do they oh okay yeah when when they can okay but the reason why they don't see it as often is because uh logistically you have to have a bunch of dumb bar you know but yeah like it's not uncommon depending on what facility they're in they'll be in the back they hit those head those and then

they'll walk right out and like get going yeah which is so counter it's so counterintuitive right I mean you hear this yeah yeah yeah so you can't do this and then an hour and a half later go run and go faster so you have a window you can do it in you got your spikes and like so there's some like theistic things but um it's very common in training you know when it's easier away with so it's super super effective okay so let's move on to strong man um again I I think we can we

don't have to focus specifically on like an actual Strongman Competition but maybe focus on like Feats of Strength that also tend to require a lot of stamina right so I don't know would the classic strongman activity be like an enormous sled pull or something like that you know pulling a truck uh picking up a barrel and throwing it and walking over and picking it up again and throwing it I mean you have I don't know there's there's a lot I can think of my favorite was Tire flipping I used to there was a 450 pound

Tire the gym I used to belong to and whatever how long it would take you to do 25 flips was a metric of youring insanity yeah I love it yeah Farmers carries there's tons of rope pulls all kinds of good stuff yeah so now we're starting to get from highly highly specific where powerlifter you've got three things weightlifter you've got two things now we're really getting into more breadth there's almost no limit to what a quotum quote strong man strong woman can do and maybe one would argue this is more functional this is more versatile

this is more engaging you're also probably not now starting to expand the interest of the Gen pop into what we're talking about so you at the outset said the three things that mattered most were specificity specificity and specificity when you're dealing with something that has so many components how do you wrap your mind around specificity versus generality yeah so this is why strongman is great it it's um I mean probably like like you a little bit one of the reasons I got on this field is because of the strong man being played on ESPN at

3 in the morning you know the the 1990s like thank you Bill Casmir like this is a whole generation of us who like what is this stuff this is incredible right um so there still is some specificity like when you get to those competitions because you kind of know what you're gonna do but yeah this is why they're dope right like someone who's optimized for grip strength uh who can you know hold the atlas stones or something is is not going to be the person who's optimized for the deadlift carry or or the the deadlift

competition or the the overhead press or whatever right like you'll see people who win three straight competi or three straight events and they'll get dead last in another one CrossFit has a very similar feel here right so we're going to test you in bu of different planes here and if you're great at deadlifting you're probably going to be poor at pressing that's just sort of how it goes the inverse right so um in this particular case you have real strong men who are in fact based on the definitions we said earlier not technically quote unquote

the strongest in the world because the the way you win in strong man or woman is how many reps typically can you do at a very heavy load which is still a it's a global feat of strength but it's not to the same level of high Precision so if you were to then technically take everyone from a strong woman competition and the same weight classes everyone from the same equivalent level of powerlifting competition they the squat would probably be higher on aggregate in the powerlifting competition however if you said let's put on 95% of your

one at Max and see how many reps you could do the strong women would absolutely smash again on Aggregate and you could pick one individual person or something but as an average and so what we're doing here is saying we're going to take extremely heavy loads and we're going to ask you to do it to fatigue um but we're probably going to do a little bit safer than we would typically do so you don't generally see like a bench press to fatigue uh on a strong man you don't see a deadlift to fatigue often you're

going to see something like uh a car lift and the reason they do that is because you can actually load the bar a lot higher in the air and so it ends up being almost closer to like an RDL um so you take that knee cross out of it and allows you to do a lot more reps it's still brutal still like insane but that's that's why they do some funky stuff like that a farmer's carry you can do that as heavy as possible and drop it when you're done so they they they they kind

of hedge in that direction um same thing you why you would never see a snatch or a clan jerk and like it's just way way way too risky right it's going to be a a log press overhead right awkward and weird but you get there and that's why like even the tire flip like I remember people would say like come on how can you flip a tire that's 450 lbs and it's like well remember you're never fully lifting a 450 lb thing off the ground like when the the first movement of the deadlift it might

be 250 pounds that you're lifting up and then by the time you're pushing it you've got the momentum helping you so yes it's infinitely safer and you're ultimately you're you're fatiguing at least for me my cardiorespiratory and muscular fatigue hit almost at the same time 100% yeah you're gonna you're gonna feel blown up your forearms will be gone uh in fact you know what's actually really cool is maybe five or six years ago they started putting heart rate monitors on people in these competitions and then they'll broadcast them yeah yeah and they are just they're

just pegged the whole time they're like 180 the entire time it's max heart rate it's lovely it truly is yeah um which is actually one of the another reason why one could argue if you wanted to look at something that is generally better for Global Health it's a pretty good Endeavor here you're going to get a lot it is human movement it is varied it requires stabilization and all kinds of random movements but it is super super heavy and to to to high levels of fatigue um so yeah it's a great M so now let's

talk about this one again through the training of a person who is new to this so guy comes to you and he's never power lifted he's never weight lifted he's never done a strong man he's you know he goes to the gym to you know do a little bit of cardio and do a little bit of strength training but there's never been specificity to the training um he doesn't have any injuries that we need to worry about let's just put that in there at the moment um so there's nothing that's truly off limits but he

has no technique he's not coming in on a foundation of he knows what it's like to deadlift at least twice his body weight or something like that he he just assume he doesn't have that but he says you know Andy I'm interested in this both because I think it would be a fun competition to do um but also I think it it's more line with my long-term health goals so I don't want to get injured I definitely do not want to get injured doing this and I want to be able to do it for quite

some time yep cool so what you want to do is build a week of frequency and uh what exercises you do throughout the week so that you are not um doing too many things too often in the same Moon patter so for example if you're going to work on your farmer carries that's great uh today but you then probably wouldn't want to work on a movement like a deadlift maybe the next day because you're going to be fatigued with your grip MH okay great so then maybe you pick a non fatigue maybe that's yoke walk

or something like that the next day loaded up there so you just want to kind of be a little conscious of that how many days in a row are you hinging how many days in a row are you holding or pressing directly overhead and just kind of move um the or vary the movement patterns is the first step I'd say um repetition range I would probably stick in the like five to eight window initially for this person because you can get enough little fatigue you can also bail pretty easy it's heavy and you're practicing this

is a big distinction you want to practice perfect repetition and so what I mean by that is instead of going to like an r r or um RP I'm going to go to technical failure yeah so we're going to do a goblet squat we're going to do 100 100 pound sandbag or 150 pound medicine ball in front of you and we're going to do front squats and we're going to do the goal here is to do eight or so but as soon as I see you break technical you're done and that's going to get that

person a lot of fatigue a lot of strength but also keeping them very very safe and they're going to learn to feel I don't get to win anymore when I break technique so they're just going to continue to learn hold technique hold technique hold position and I would do the same for their overhead pressing all that stuff right we start to get into bad positions in our low bat all right we're done and so getting them to technical failure is the phrase that we would use here is the way I'd go about it um and

you can actually do these more frequently than the average same exact Avatar could in powerlifting because the the movements are more varied see the recovery is probably going to be a little bit higher rather than getting the same exact locked in position and just sort of moving uh in one plane um you're going to get sore but but there's also not as much of a um typically like Ecentric Landing demand like there is in weightlifting there's Ecentric but it's typically controlled um or it's intentionally uncontrolled right the case of dropping or something and right and

and so you can get away with more volume because your recovery is going to be a little b a little bit higher there tell me going back to our weightlifter and powerlifter why would we not also or maybe we do and we just didn't state it explicitly why would we not also Force technical failure into the mix is there ever a time when you know we just we would want to we would tolerate a Breakin form where we see you know more lumbar kyphosis or lower dosis than we think is actually healthy but we we

want to learn how to grit through that because sometimes a single rep max sucks no matter what yeah so with the case of Olympic weightlifting it almost takes care of it for you so if you have a break in position you're probably going to miss the lift so it's self-limiting that way a little bit right um especially when you get past a certain load like you could do 30% of your One Max with very poor technique but as you you start getting up higher and higher it becomes um again a little bit more self-limiting you

definitely want to make sure you're you're holding position in all of them um but the technical demands of something like a bench breast are fairly low there's only a couple of joints that really need to be taken care of as long as they're okay you're there when you get into something like um a snatch every joint has to be in the right spot or you're you're kind of out of you know think can go wonky um a deadlift is the same thing like the deadlift is not as complicated a squat is fairly complicated um so

but there's also variations you're going to do probably you're going to do um some sort of box squat or chair squat you're going to limit the range of motion and so the last thing I want to say about that is since the goal of powerlifting is to achieve a one r at Max you're actually not trying to achieve optimal range of motion in fact you go the opposite so physics wise work is force multiplied by distance so if you're trying to maximize Force you minimize distance because you minimize the amount of work you have to

do and so they are intentionally limiting range motion so they're actually doing this like pseudo technique which is not to maximize actual human strength it's to maximize the score on the barbell which is not necessarily the same thing and so you're you're probably going to be working so hard on that technique that it almost keeps you out of the squirly areas because you're trying to just instead of getting this like big long range of motion things like you're just trying to yeah get through the stuff you're going to go all the way down and touch

but you're going to set yourself up in a position that minimizes range of motion which is actually putting your joints in the right spot so it's it's a little bit there taken care of what percentage of powerlifters uh deadlift with a traditional narrow grip versus a Sumo I don't know an actual number there um I would say I don't know um is that simply a a leg length to arm length difference like for me Sumo is so much more comfortable than narrow yeah well generally it's going to be right um it just gets easier on

the L back but it also depends it depends on three factors it depends on your shank to femur ratio it depends on your femur to upper back basically and then it depends on your arm so all three of those things get wonky and then it depends really on your hip versus back string so strong hips do well with sumo weak hips are going to get smashed with sumo um so yeah a lot of ways you can go about it interesting okay there's a whole argument we could have here but we'll probably skip it we'll save

that for the next one um okay so um our our strongman is training very frequently it's highly varied we're in more reps and we're training to technical failure meaning we're not pushing lowquality reps when we break technique the set is over yeah and let me okay let me differentiate the reason why I brought technical failure up in this one is because you're doing a combination of high load and high fatigue yeah it's too risky yeah it's just too risky to break form correct if you break form a little bit and you're doing two reps oh

okay like the load is high so that's the danger but now you're combining both danger which is load and fatigue and so that's why like I wanted to plant that distinction for that Avatar this is also an athlete who just talked to me about volume um how many hours a day are they training th this is this is not the guy who's driving around Walmart uh for two hours trying to find the parking spot this this person's fit and they're they're burning matches all day right yeah they're going to have to be to get through

this kind of training no science here so you're you're going to walk completely away from science unlike the previous ones like we could talk about which we didn't get into number of reps uh in terms of total volume to hit per month for like a weightlifter things like that um you're going to have any science on this because like how do you quantify U holding a 100 PB medicine m in your chest and step taking how many steps see how many steps you can take like how do you quantify all these things if you do

something like weightlifting it's I can go and I can say how many reps did you do over 70% of your one rep max and that's the number we're going to qu it's because there's two exercises that it's very easy with this one like how do I equate time how do I equate the fact that you did one exercise and you did it for 40 yards with the other exercise you did it for seven reps yeah I don't know um so I would give you basic progression recommendations here which is 10% so in general regardless of

physical exertion if you increase your total volume by more than 10% per week you tend to start getting into problems and so that's that's the thing I would flag is is like keep it below a 10% progression per week and start lower than you think and then just add that up and again how are we even thinking about volume here it's not hard it's CU in lifting like I'm keeping a mental tally of sets and Reps per body part sort of thing or whatever right lower body body how are you doing that with 100 pound

medicine ball for seven steps versus 50 pound medicine ball for 25 steps they both hurt about the same what what does that mean yeah this is the problem we have in exercise science comparing lifting to endurance how how do I compare a 3 set to 10 at 70% to 45 minutes at 65% V to I don't know like what what is the you have no comparator there so yeah this is this is sort of where in cycling as I'm sure you know um we use something called the the TSS right so the training stress score

and then we have a chronic and acute training stress store so so as a cyclist I used to have a dashboard basically that would take the data from my power meter so every day I'd come in from my training and I'd hook the power meter up to the computer I'm sure this is all done via Bluetooth now but it would take a lot of data that was really relevant so it knows a couple of things about me it knows my maximum heart rate and it knows what's called my FTP my functional threshold power which is

the highest number of wattage I can average for 60 minutes it's a super important number everything as you know in cycling is metric on that FTP number when I come in from a ride that ride might say well Peter you went and rode for you know three and a half hours you utilized this many kles of energy your average power was this many watts and your normalized power was this many watts and normalized power is just a it's a it's a power function calculation that takes into account the variability so the more the normalized Power

different is different from the average power the more up and down spiky you had so normalized power gives you more of a physiologic sense of what you did well these algorithms now were so good when you had that data at telling you where you are in terms of overtraining under trining and so it if there was just some way we could get that out of more complicated movements um and again I'm just thinking like obviously you could get that out of heart rate you could probably get that out of heart rate variability you could probably

get that out of ventilation so if there was some way to capture ventilatory rate um but other than that like we we're missing power I mean that's the bottom line is we just don't have the metric for power that that output is what's making that I guess so difficult right yeah in this particular case you would jump to physiology you would go to to HRV certainly like heart rate would probably not be a great one but you would have to go to what's a physiological response rather than the actual metric which is one could argue

better right so like who cares if if you're at x amount of reps per week if your physiology is fantastic yeah who cares so there um the other thing is you know I'm sure people who who are uh spend their career coaching in this area probably have better answers for you um but yeah if it was me coaching them I would go to physiology we're taking physiology metrics and we're GNA see what happens yeah it's interesting I think um one of the things we used to do before we had our HRV to look at was

look at resting heart rate in the morning and look at um I forget the term was for it but it was basically willingness to train oh yeah yeah sounds silly but it turns out to be very highly correlated with burnout it still is like it's still it's still like the single best metric you can take yeah totally oh wow okay absolutely we only used a score of zero to three if I recall it wasn't like rocket science right yeah yeah it doesn't have to be crazy at all like we will take this metric still to

the day I die of anyone ever um yeah there's manipulation that can happen there of course and we always do something else but it is it's going to tie very very tightly typically to even something like HRV resting heart rate's okay um it's just too slow and the magnitude of change is too little and so HRV is much more sensitive that way um you're not going to see a change in resting heart rate until you get far down the road MH like you're you're pretty into like you're getting cooked here um you can see them

very quickly matter of days um certainly within a week with HRV where you would may or may not necessarily see the the heart rate but nonetheless yeah the mood how much you want to train any number of ways you can ask that how do you feel today that's a good one just like how do you feel today yeah don't don't don't give any context what do you mean Phil no no just like how do you feel that's that's it and like track that down and you're going to see that thing um in fact you can

actually do this we've done this with like giant data sets that number alone like it basically is going to run the same as HRV like over a big enough thing the number most so if you're with a B group of people and you don't have HRV say like middle school kids or or you know something like that or people that's just ask that and you're going to get again there'll be some outliers day-to-day and some squirely people and all that but you're G to get a pretty good sense of yeah I mean the takeaway here

for someone listening right is knowing how you feel the day of and listening to how you feel the day of is really important if you do not feel like pushing yourself hard in the gym on a given day that's a really good sign that you shouldn't be yeah you have to be a little bit careful here right CU you'll slide like the way that I say it is like well yeah yeah I say sort of give it the warm-up right like give it the warm-up phase and and then make the decision yeah before you get

anyone who's lifted anyone who's ever well exercised knows plenty well like some of the days you feel awful are PR days like you're going to eventually set a record that day and there's a little bit of like on the Joo scale of like okay like you just suck it up like you know mental toughness all that stuff but then there's also like you don't want to just like go nuts but I would say that that doesn't you know just because you feel crappy doesn't mean you don't exercise that day it's a question of how hard

are you pushing that day like because there are days you're going to push and there are days you're not going to push um I would argue there's no day you shouldn't be doing something um yeah and and as I said yeah you got to get through the warm-up phase before you make the distinction of whether it's a it's a it's a hard day or not yeah this is where Auto regulation training becomes so awesome so if you if you use things like say you have your velocity transducer and you know that when you're at 50%

you're typically at y you know one meter per second BL blah blah and if all of your metrics are down y it's a pretty good indicator of like all right it's just not today you feel terrible you don't want to be there you're you're truly giving an effort but all the numbers are down y okay we're bagging it today that that that's a nice way to do it okay let's talk about CrossFit obviously there's a pretty decent overlap between CrossFit and strongman in that CrossFit is there are there are events that take a really long

time uh you know a set there are certain sets that can take 20 minutes that are metabolically as demanding as what most people could barely do in an hour um so tell folks a little bit about how CrossFit Works um and and and I guess I don't know if we distinguish between CrossFit with a Capital C and Crossfit with a little C because there's a lot of CrossFit like stuff that isn't maybe branded CrossFit but I think for our purposes let's just make it all the same yeah we we'll call it and I don't mean

this as any perjorative but we'll just call it like competitive circuit training and just anything like that is a sort of thing um this is one actually thing that's really cool about sports is we get to invent new ones all the time and we get to like continue to test human capability in a lot of ways it's really really fun um so CrossFit is scored a little bit differently um it is it's a nice combination there are some weightlifting movements so you might see one of the competitions being a one rep max snatch that's it

whole thing right um You might see it as like an endurance event so you might have to run a marathon or cycle a marathon or or something like that right and then you might see some of these more of um you know circuit training type of you know 20 kettlebell swings plus three snatches plus a vertical jump and 20 pull-ups and there many rounds that you can do in 10 minutes so like you know some things like that so the idea is you try to combine a bunch of these things and every event gets scored

just like strongman and at the end of the three or days or whatever it is Whoever has the highest amount of points just like strongman so it's similar to strong men like that it's not one of them it's m it's many it's not one single structured exercise it's a lot it's typically a combination of exercises in the same exact one um similar to weightlifting and Tech they use barbell movements it's typically big complex movements and all that um and it's similar to uh um to Cross or to uh um to to to powerlifting in terms

of like hate sometimes Max rength matters so it's a little bit of like a combination of all these things so um one thing that they do though if we compare this to strongman is the absolute loads are lower and so when you see a strong man it's probably going to be doing something where the winner of the competition might win with like five to 15 reps like not always but something like that right so if it's a log press you know you're probably not doing a hundred reps log press and winning you know some people

might even not even able to press the log once or twice and the winner typically has five or six or 10 or 12 reps like you roughly here CrossFit competition volume tends to be way higher it is hundreds of repetitions per event sometimes right and so what we've done is it's still very very strong it's still very very powerful but it is less Absolut low um you won't see anybody ever touch 600 lb in a CrossFit competition every event in strong man has 600 PB Plus like you might see 1600 pounds like it's just it's

way way way higher right but you won't see strongman ever reach you know 65 reps in an exercise it just never happens so it's hedged that way um if you look at the avatar for a highly competitive male crossfitter 59 to 511 190 to 210 pounds like um you know strongest men it's 66 it's 62 it's 330 380 400 like they're just different things right so there's no weight class in strong men there's no weight class is there a weight class there are there are some there are some weight classes in strong men now okay

for sure there's like a it's kind of like big medium little I think it and and what about in in CrossFit besides the gender difference no uh gender and age is the only distinction got it that that you have in those ones and I and I guess the reason CrossFit can get away with that is you're going to get punished the heavier you are in some of the endurance events and you're going to get punished the lighter you are in some of the strength EV so the idea is that's probably why everybody kind of coales

is around 200 pound or 190 pounds the other part of it is they have a lot of gymnastics based movements and a lot of hanging and pulling things and you're going to get hammered if you're over 200 pounds and you have to do 100 pull-ups in you know five minutes just you're just going to get crushed on that stuff so that's um it's a thing there's now CrossFit is wonderful um this is actually a nice point to talk about another point if you would have taken athlete in any of these categories there's a misconception here

because I I got a lot of from our first conversation I a lot of people were like oh my gosh you're disregarding crossfitters their V2 Maxes are Elite they're blah blah blah blah like no they're not okay like they're they're unbelievable athletes and they are way more cardiovascularly fit than strong men and certainly way more than power lifters and weight lifters but you're not going to find the average crossfitter that has the same V2 Max as the average cycl equivalently high Cy no ch right so what you're what you're misrepresenting here is not that they

have done something that we have never seen before it's the fact that they are just phenomenal athletes like just absolutely phenomenal athletes um the reason I'll say this is you know these numbers better better than I you can maybe correct me here but if you were to take a highlevel cyclist their their Peak power is astronomically High despite the fact that these are you know quote unquote pure endurance athletes that the wattage that they can kick out on a 20c peak burst on a bike would torch anything any of you have ever seen like it's

insanely High the wattage like like what would be my greatest my greatest regret in speaking about this stuff is that I have yet to come up with a way to explain to people what wattage feels like you see I think people have an intuitive understanding of what 500 lounds feels like because you've been to Home Depot you picked up the 50b bag of salt and you can sort of say wow deadlifting 500 lb would sort of be like picking up 10 of these at once however when I try to explain to somebody that when Bradley

feels like well even when Bradley Wiggins absolutely smashed the one-hour record which is generally regarded as the most pain a human being can indure in any sport the one-hour record in cycling is that Mark and he held 440 Watts for one hour crunched in a tuck position with his iliac vessels folded on top of each other I can't tell you what that's like if you've never pedal like I can't I I have to say look come and sit on a bike and I'm going to I'm going to set the urg to 440 Watts let's see

how long you can go and the average person is going to not make it one minute not even close they will not come close to Lasting a minute the average person is going to be dead at 20 seconds they will fail and now and by the way they might weigh 180 pounds and I'm going to say he weighed 138 pounds or whatever he weighed he might have weighed 145 Wiggins was tall he was probably 6'1 but the point is he looked like a beanpole and the force he could gener for 60 minutes is more than

you canate for 30 seconds and I I don't have a way to explain what that feels like because shy of doing it shy of putting watts to to pedals you can't feel it yeah I mean a thousand like you put a thousand up there that that's a big big number and that would not be a I mean that wouldn't be a crazy number for a cyclist if if you did a you know 2 second birth not only that he's a cyclist is doing that after riding six hours yeah and after riding six hours at an

average wattage of 250 Watts which again for most people they can't hold 250 Watts for two minutes no way so this is a good example of this is not suggesting cycling training is great for power development what it's suggesting is when you take world really World caliber athletes they're really good at a lot of things they're just really really athletic and so what you when you're comparing your power output to that person you're thinking oh my God that guy's so powerful and and he is but I promise you I could put a whole bunch of

athletes on there that can kick 1,200 1300 for sure way way way higher than that if you had a if you had a highly power trained person so um when you say like these crossfitters are the these Miracle like they're not they're just unreal they're so fit they're so strong I think what makes them special is they're great generalists there's nothing that the best at right the gymnast is better at gymnastics the weightlifter is better at weightlifting the powerlifter is better at powerlifting the strong man is better at strong man and the endurance athlete is

better at endurance there's no question yeah because we hear the comment too about like well they could do this CrossFit competition and then they could go do a weightlifting competition the next day like yeah but they're not winning medals right not not not at National events they're not going to right I mean like occasionally they might make a world team or something like that but that's one person right the they're not what makes them special and it's worth ackn in is how good they are at so many things they're so good yeah so so good

I don't know if you you probably didn't follow but like back in the original days um like the stuff that they would come with come up with to try to get Rich Froning to lose it just didn't matter they made up all kinds of stuff and he smashed everything like you you can't come up with enough accolades to describe how talented these people are you can't like it's it's not it's not that at all the men the women like what they can do is it's phenomenal it just comes back to what you said at the

outset right which is ultimately specificity wins and I actually write about this in my book I was like look when I was cycling and it was all I was doing I was a really one-dimensional athlete yeah my upper body was useless I could it's not wanted to be yeah yeah I wanted it to atrophy away um totally you know I was not good at running even even though I had the engine running was hard for me the impact was not not pleasant I couldn't I couldn't get my if I was sprinting I couldn't get my

heart rate over 130 because I didn't have the leg pounding strength to cope with it um you know no lateral movement no flexibility no balance like there is no other dimension to it other than turning pedals over quickly again not to take anything away from the best cyclist in the world they're marvels of human physiology but it's super super specific and again I think that's true for every athlete we're talking about once we get into these strong men and Crossfit you know know athletes though you start to see what in some ways impresses me a

little bit more which is just broad remarkable uh Feats of strength and endurance across you know a great range just I mean think about uh last examples just think about an elite marathon time let's call it two hours to make math easy because it's getting there yeah basically technically it's been broken right yeah chogi sort of did it once yeah I mean unofficially right yeah with some caveats stuff there uh you break that down that's uh what four minute 440 I don't know 440 miles no maybe even quicker maybe 434 something like that it's insane

like call call it four and a half yeah most people I don't know hard any people in my life who could do that once not only that I don't know most people hold that pace for a quarter mile for four that's what I was gonna get out so you break it down even further like you're you're talking 60 5c 400 met Dash you will not find many people in this this Earth that can run a 65c 400 m dash one time you walk that down even further that's a 12C 100 m Dash so that's that's

like a number that you might be a little more familiar with right like I mean the best marathoners in the world would smash almost everyone you know in 100 meter dash and and and every virally everybody in a 400 I mean yeah in a quarter mile it's it's insane it's the same thing as it's the same thing as the Bradley Wiggins example or the you know any of the cyclist thing is like we just don't understand how far we are I think the difference is in the running I think most people can understand because they

can remember back to high school gym class how hard it was to run 66 seconds for a quarter mile yeah yeah go go I tell people all the time like go run a 400 meter dash like next time go time it's not hard like everyone's like oh yeah I can be 60 and it's like they come in 85 seconds like yeah like you're very far off this number so don't conflate world class like the best we've ever known athletes um and to thinking these concepts are then wrong right because we're talking about general concepts um

with in this case not CrossFit so so going back to this CrossFit athlete how are they able to balance the volume because they're now pushing the envelope so much between strength power and endurance that at some point you're robbing Peter to pay Paul I mean you have to right so is the tradeoff that you have to make in that training a function of your incoming athleticism your genetics and maybe your goals you might say look I'm going to index to be better at these events than that events is that the only way you can basically

do it and there is no true way to have a global optimization strategy we don't have any science um on any of this stuff and I've never coached crossfitters so uh having said that there are some really really really smart really smart people uh that are coaching crossfitters so they they could probably walk you through what's going on here but I don't have any science to go off of um in general though if you just look at physiology specificity it does matter right so if you were going to optimize somebody for strength you could have

one of two philosophies you could say look we're really really really strong and we're good at this stuff and we recover well from it so we're going to stay doing more of these strength type things because we can actually get more total volume in because you recover well from it as an example or you could do the authors you could say hey look we're going to go do a lot of strength because that's the weakest part we have and we're going to try to bring our weakness up so it's kind of a coaching philosophy of

maximize strength or try to minimize your um biggest limitation in terms of like actual total volumes you get per week and stuff like again I don't have any actual numbers on that um you know everyone does this quite differently what I can say is it's it's so beautiful CrossFit in the sense that you need to have a ton of Baseline aerobic capacity you need to have some Peak power you need to have some strength and you need to be highly anerobic and you need to have real high recovery from anerobic efforts and so you you

have to find some sort of combination which is like to me one of the most if not the most fasing part of the whole thing is like what do you do and and nobody has an answer it's just strategy right like we're going to try to go here the other strategy they have is just like we're just going to hammer everyone and see who see who's left and you're going to be you're going to be ready to go there so um obviously it's more what um what do we know about heart rate recovery as um

a model of fitness and I'm guessing within within the CrossFit athlete that's a very important part of it right is the the you know as you pointed the Anor robic recovery is essential yeah it's a strong metric it is it is very good in fact you'll see this um there's a number of different places around the country where you can just go and get a V2 Max test done mhm you go in and pay $100 or something which is great and a lot of the times they'll actually if they're good they'll look at one two

and three minute heart rate recovery as well because you can glean a lot of insight uh from there do you know do you know off the top of your head what the metrics are that we care about for 30 60 120 second recovery 80 80% in two minutes 80% back to you mean within 80 within 20% of Baseline yeah I want I want you back down so if if you were at um if you're at 200 yeah to make 200 right um there's no reason you should be above 160 2 minutes in so 2 minutes

recovery you should be well below 160 beats if your max was 200 so that would be 80% of your max you should be well below that by the oh that's much slower than I would have thought I would have expected within two minutes you that that would be like minimum minimum okay what's considered EXC what's considered excellent 60 okay so uh in in the functional case you're going to be down to in this thing 120 beats which is like almost as going to feel like you're resting after that you're going to feel like you're barely

even ventilating yeah but that would be a solid number to be at if you're above 80 though it's like Sound the Alarm this is this is a a real big problem um and you can walk yourself down and that's interesting I mean do we care what an athlete's maximum heart rate is in particular or do we care much more about for example heart rate recovery and what they can do at their max heart rate in other words I'll give you one example right so um you know V2 Max surprisingly is not that correlated with speed

it's vvo2 Max that is right so velocity at V2 Max matters much more in running than V2 Max in cycling yeah turns out V2 Max not nearly as important as pvo2 max power at V2 Max um but at least when I was training we were not looking at heart rate recovery um meaning I wasn't and my coach wasn't but um I wonder if like that's a metric that we should have been paying more attention to in addition to kind of pvo2 Max and FTP and all those other metrics yeah if you look at V2 Max

specifically the I can't come on the cycling I don't know those those data that literature well but I I do know the the running literature um you're going to have three main components they going to predict endurance running and and v2x is only one of them you know running economy is very very important as the other one so they're all three and lactic threshold of course is like the sort of triangle of of things any one of them on its face is not going to get you anywhere and all three of them are still not

going to get you everywhere um so movement economy on a bike it's probably similar but that's probably more your on a bike it's actually less believe it or not on a bike it's it's FTP to weight that's pretty much it yeah which is effectively efficiency like how how far can you travel on a bike per push yeah yeah it's it's it's but it's what makes cycling to me such a remarkable feat of engineering it's like it's basically just machines it's take your functional threshold power divide by how many kilograms you are that's a number that

if you line up everybody at the beginning of the tour to frons and rank them in that order that is the order they will finish barring an accident correct or a strategic blunder and you can make strategic blunders but but yeah for the most part yeah yeah because efficiency on a bike is super high where efficiency in human movement it's like 20% right something like super super low whatever that number is um yeah so that that that's is is a component of it when you when you actually start to pay attention like what metrics should

you should you pay attention to um max heart rate I mean like are you going to find that as a predictor of any kind of performance no with the exception of whether people stop way prior to hitting a max heart rate so that would be like if you're going to do a video to Max test um one of the five metrics you look for to identify to make sure it was an actual Max test is whether or not they get close close to their predicted heart rate Max and so you will see this occasionally people

stop at 150 155 heart rate you know 160 they should have been 175 or something yeah correct right that's that's also like can just happen normally um I I've had a lot of high level athletes Max hary 172 175 and you're like very fit Fighters you know five the championship Fighters kind of thing five five minute rounds are going to fight in the UFC and they're like all right like it's just sort of where you are um but they can also Cruise 168 for the whole round take one minute rest and do that for you're

like holy crap okay so their ability to hang on at 95% in this case it's like 98% they can just hang there for minutes where most people get to 98% and you have seconds of life before you're you're gasping for something um so it is a little bit of crude I've also had people myself included I I'm still well over 200 as a max heart rate like it's not my RR too like it's nothing I if I do a v to Max test and I am anywhere between like lower than 1.3 I know it was

not a Max test like I can just technically you're not supposed to get over 1.1 right like 1.35 1.38 like those are not crazy numbers for me to hit I just handle that stuff what's your is it still close to 7 75 75 typically those those numbers are like kind of all over place um I handle like my CO2 tolerance is also very very high so I I can handle a large buildup of waste but I I don't have my my V2 Max overall that's not particularly High relative to these things right so um 55

58 depending probably lower than that right now but I've never crossed 60 so it's it's not like it it's kind of relevant but it's also not right so the problem is as you're very whereare I'm sure when heart rate gets too high you start limiting time to fill yeah yeah you're you're pre-load is low and your stroke volume super low so stroke volume gets super low um so it's not always the best thing to be super high um and there's some other factors here in terms of like accuracy of measure and some other things to

pay attention to but yeah in general it's not a proxy um when we did uh I don't remember if we talked about the study I did in Sweden um with the cross country skiers in their 80s and 90s but I can't remember our I think our average max heart R was like 150 148 these are 89 year olds and they they they they were not they didn't care at all like they were at 150 and they were like it's amazing like like good there now lifelong athletes though these guys never got out of shape right

these guys were F Champs and never stopped totally world champions in the 1940s and 50s and are still competing every year in cross country skiing so never stopped yeah so these these guys have VO2 Maxes in the mid-30s probably still MH MH yeah insane for sure 92y old old I think his V2 Max was 38 yep I remember correctly something like that um several of them over 40 you know 8688 plus year olds crushing I I I we had such a long conversation the first time I can't remember if I told the story so I

apologies if I did but I'm GNA tell it again but we had um one of them in particular so we were over in Stockholm doing this and these guys I don't speak Swedish and they didn't speak English and we're in a hospital so there's cardiologists there and we're trying to like as you do VX test like you're yelling and encouraging to go go go right whatever and one of them got done we were cycling he got off and he sat next to the hospital bed he took like three breaths he's like and then he was

like B he said something I asked what they said they like he said he didn't understand the instructions he wants to try again and he got up and he started getting back on the bike and we the they're like whoa like and I'm talking 15 seconds whatever it takes you to take three breaths he he's just like got back on the bike again when we ready to go I was like this guy and they're like no no no and I was like let's go to well let's let's see what he has but I love it

cardiolog just said no yeah so um does the does the does this person and I again I think the CrossFit athlete in some ways is of all of the athletes we're talking about here the one that is most representative of maybe what our long-term realistic goal is not necessarily at that extreme because obviously I think when people think CrossFit they think of stuff that they're never going to do but in terms of being a generalist I think that's the closest one we're going to see so is there anything that is off limits in other words

words um if you exclude pre-existing injury so you know we're not talking about somebody with a laboral injury that can't be doing you know power cleans and snatches um how much of your time and energy is going to go into max rep powerlifting movements uh relatively heavy uh weightlifting movements given that you need to do so much other stuff and build that base of endurance and let's just assume for the purpose of this discussion your optimizing around being the most well-rounded not being a spike in one particular domain over another okay 70210 this is the

number 70201 um I got this from my friend Kenny Kane who uh ran CrossFit La um for I think it's was like the eighth or ninth CrossFit or something like one of the original Ones Still coaching to this day so been long it and the way that he programs it um he's in Santa Monica so he doesn't have a lot of CrossFit competitors um the Avatar you explained is pretty much his client so why I came to this right it's it's people are 30 to 50 and all those things okay um his model works perfectly

here so what he says is 70% of the time you're in the gym you're there for practice and what I want to point out here is that doesn't mean we're like practicing barbell only and things like that you're going to go through a full workout you're going to sweat W you're going to get tired but the core of what we're after here is practicing so we're getting better at say technical proficiency with a little bit of fatigue we're getting better at hip hinging we're getting better at breath mechanics we're getting better at pressing overhead we're

going to use fatigue and load to get better at something 70% of the time we're practicing 20% of the time we're going to uh compete all right which is you're going to try to get your best score on that workout right so we're going to put it up there you know 10 minutes how many rounds you can get to whatever uh and you're going to try to get the best number you can in that workout which is very different now notice the shift here practice is 100% emphasis on quality who cares about the score 20%

of the time though it's the opposite it doesn't mean we're going to let technique go it's just the mind frame is different we're out here we're trying to conserve our efficiency so if we're doing say box jumps for reps we're not jumping up as high as we can every time we're actually kind of doing the minimum amount we can to get up get back down we're being careful and calm and holding our you like we're trying to get the highest score on this workout we can 10% of the time we go to death basically which

is like we're going balls to the wall we're not trying to hold back we're not trying to like be strategic we're trying to get to death's door as fast as we can and just live in the suck basically so if you do that in your brain let's say the average person per month is going to work out 12 times so that means all right three times a week I'm going to go to the gym four weeks that's 12 all right so then like maybe eight of those workouts which is twice a week I'm going to

be practicing again you're going to get a good sweat you're going to get stronger you're going to build some muscle but the intention there then maybe three of the workouts left are going to be those competition ones and then one of them per month is when we really go like we go absolutely nuts um you know again we're trying to not hold back we're get after it and we're going to lay on the ground for an hour afterwards because it was just sort of awful I think that's a very very good way to think about

how You' want to train for a sport like Crossfit because the movements are what they are um you're going to get better in a lot of ways you're going to stay safe you're going to get a little bit of that like oh this is going to be crazy today like I I better not drink tonight like I'm gonna go to bed early because tomorrow is that comp great and then there's enough of the the 20% where it's like it's really really hard this week one day a week is super super hard because the other big

problem we see with with the people that that train like this that also have real jobs is how much time they spend in sympathetic drive and they end up just torching themselves because it's too much high intensity too often and they don't understand when to like dial it back so if you kind of have this model it's sort of like two days a week you're working out blood pumping you're getting feeling good it's recovery like you're going to feel great one day a week though you're going to push it harder and then one of those

four weeks that one hard day is really really really hard and and that's enough for for most people that have other life stressors you'll be able to recover from that stuff but also then feel like you're not just sort of like not getting anything out of your training so 70210 I think is is the perfect model for this so I'm glad you brought that point up because I think um it's so important and I think it's the when when I think about the difference between my life today and my life when I was 18 um

you know there are a lot of things that were better when I was 18 right I mean obviously just physiologically you're so much stronger and fitter and all the rest of it but but also a big part of it is there was no other sympathetic drive to your point right like you you know anyone who's got a teenager knows they're like the singularly most selfish creatures on the face of the Earth they're incapable of caring about anything that is not themselves uh so like all that mattered everything in my life revolved around my workouts um

tell you a funny story one day when I was coming home from school to do like the third of my four workouts for the day because every day had four workouts in it um I forgot my key and I couldn't get in the house so I actually broke into the house like actually smashed a window to break into my house to make sure I could do the workout like that and that didn't strike me as a weird thing to do like putting I can't remember if I used my fist or a brick but I literally

just broke the window got into the house didn't bother to clean it up and was in the basement hammering the weights when my mom came home and thought there was like a Breakin like that didn't occur to me as a random thing so again you there's no other stress in my life there's nothing else that matters other than training um but then you're 50 and all of a sudden life is stressful is there a way to quantify and help people think about that as it factors into the training load equation if you want to think

of it that way yeah actually scientifically there's a name for it called allostatic load or allostasis right that that's what it means scientifically of sort of all stressors combined lots of ways you can do this we have our own algorithm that I use that we actually factor in everything we actually break it up into what we call Visible and hidden stressors so visible stressors are visible because you see them or feel them um you know if you didn't sleep well last night you know if you're thirsty right now you know that um you know you

ate that food that visibly was probably not the best choice alcohol cigarettes like sort of all these things hidden stressors are things that you won't necessarily feel in the moment so maybe your carbohydrate to protein ratio is off or you're way too high in carbs or too low in carbs or something like that maybe you've got some medical conditions some pathogens some micronutrient deficiency excessive inflammation like something else you're just like I don't like my recovery sucks but I'm doing all the right things so we put all that stuff together we measure all of it

and we actually can kind of score them and we we base our programming based on those scores it's How We Do It um how would one do it if they didn't have blood work and saliva and urinary and kind of the whole thing that we have um you can't just go from the visible side and just try to put a score if you did something as simple as how was your sleep on a 10 how was your psychological and mental stress um how well did you eat and then how you know like overall recovery you

feel like that those four alone will get you like somewhat close um the the more because think about it this way adaptation in the body happens because of stress but because we just talked that stress bucket can be overfilled what you want to do is dump as much stress in from the type of stress you want and have as much of the other stress you don't want out so if you're already pre-filled with other stuff and you put a little bit of training stress on there you're already you're you're you're overfilling here if I can

dump that other stuff out of the equation though I can dump more and more and more training in before we start overfilling and so that's why it's very very important to keep that aesthetic load um not down you don't want it low because remember stresses you have to have stress to ad to cause adaptation you just want it filled with the right stresses that go in the right direction specificity right the more specific the stress can get the more specific the outcome can get um so those are the like the big rocks I'm sure you've

talked about you know trillion times but that's why that stuff is very very important um paying attention to the total allostatic load all right so um I'm gonna skip the track athlete at this point right so this is basically we can do it we can do it in two minutes if okay all right let's do it and should we just limit it to not the field side but just the track side so we're talking sprinters right so Bingo yeah these are these guys are insanely strong if you put them on a force plate treadmill I've

heard Usain Bolt is literally hitting at four times his body weight on a force plate treadmill I don't know if that's true but it's oh I would believe it yeah yeah so um what are we saying here this is highly technical High meaning technique really really matters efficiency really really matters and then it's forced to wait I assume close there's some more factors at play here um because force is not the real driver here speed is okay so you have you have absolute acceleration and then you have Peak velocity um when Usain comes out the

gates that's acceleration right he's not particularly strong relative to his other folks and acceleration probably because his Force production is not like exceptionally High relative to the other ones however once he gets vertical his Peak velocity is so outrageous and his ability to maintain Peak velocity in fact if you go look that's the thing that really separated him he maintained that Peak velocity so much longer than anyone else did so it looked like he was passing everybody they were just field is slowing down so you have Peak velocity and you have acceleration um and then

for other field sports you have change of Direction and Agility right the difference there being your determination versus reac acting to stimulus and changing direction that way okay so that's where we're at um in terms of yeah are they strong too yeah you have legendary stories of 100 meter dash SP squatting 600 pounds 700 like it's the same thing we talked about earlier fallacy of like when you're an elite athlete like you're probably good at a lot of things but that doesn't mean you're optimized for it so they need to be strong because they have

to overcome Force what a 100 me Das 200 me Das boom acceleration piece but then they have to have true Elite Speed which is a function of how fast you can turn your feet over and running as well as your stride length and so there's like a technical component to it as well but training for Peak speed is just those two components so you use a little bit of resistance fairly light lighter than power or at the low end of the power Spectrum 30% or less to train the acceleration part and then you move as

fast as you can you either use normal or over speed training to treat Peak velocity which should make you know intuitive sense now that we sort of walk that conversation so you train those two aspects of speed and depending on where they ended with vity is they may need a little more force or they may need a little more um actual of the of the peak velocity stuff and then you use that on your force velocity profile to figure out where that athlet needs to train and then just to finish quickly if you go back

through the entire Matrix speed training and power training are almost identical you can do them at a very high frequency you want to do complex movements you don't want to do typically isolation single joint movements you're want to do things you can move as fast as you can you can do them very frequently if you're a very elate Sprinter you know you got to be careful of your hamstring and stuff like that but for the most part physiologically it's low fatigue it's low total volume it's high quality and you just now are going lighter so

that you can move faster that's really the only difference and and Sor just just to be clear are you saying that the workout of actual running like for example using an assisted you know you know sort of a like a slight tug run that that type of workout could be done frequently yeah yeah yeah there's there's no fatigue really there's no joint beat up there's no systemic fatigue so just to contrast this to like one distinction we made with Crossfit that's very important the reason why we talked about only doing high-intensity stuff so often in

CrossFit it's because it's the first one we've talked about the only one really of this group maybe some strong man but it's the one that has the most systemic fatigue associated with it the rest of them are pretty much localized so you your back might get tired because you had a heavy load in your back for a back squat and your hamstrings might be tired because you sprinted maximally right now but you're not going to see your HRV get tanked you're not going to see a global total body fatigue like you would if a like

in a CrossFit scenario because it is whole muscle it is cardiovascular driven there's an endocrine response that's massive and that doesn't happen so because of that you have systemic fatigue so that's that distinction is why is why I made that that's why I made that and you also at the I forget I think it was on the powerlifter weightlifter we we talked about sort of the the neurologic component of this can you say a bit more about that right so when we get into powerlifting a little bit now really into weightlifting and certainly in as

we've gone down the Spectrum here into true speed stuff there is such a high component to neural activation to make sure that we're not only optimizing all the motor units we need but in the case of speed you have to do them in the right sequence and so movement mechanics and being smooth and the Rhythm that you have to have to move actually fast as a human is very very challenging and so that rhythm is very important so this is what we call synchronization you have to be firing the right muscles in the right group

in the right order throughout your gate if it's say running and that's not necessarily the casee in powerlifting or even so much a little bit weightlifting but more not much in powerlifting because kind of everything's on on a maxim L and you're just sort of controlling everything but like Rhythm uh that's like the common word you'll hear in like sprinters right or or running like you got to be in the right Rhythm and and you might get faster without actually improving your your velocity ability by just getting in better Rhythm and what they're meaning by

that is learning what to fire what to relax and having that fire relax fire relax so a joint can move and then be ready to strike again but is this autonomic or conscious it can be both yeah absolutely be both it's mostly though the the idea would be to make this as subconscious as possible so you're just in the moment relaxed and moving and everything is understanding when to contract and when to relax so initially though when you learn it it's going to be very conscious and so what is the what is the most taxing

workout that the Sprinter is doing during the week that you know what is the recovery or what is the workout from which they need a recovery probably their true Peak speed stuff really going true Peak speed um there's a little bit of risk there but the the the fatigue and being able to come back and reproduce Peak speed because here's here's the distinction if you did a crossfit workout and you were able to maintain 95% of your Peak speed from today to tomorrow to the next day so let's say you did a workout today and

you had a little bit of residual fatigue tomorrow when you came back and if you're 5% reduced you could still probably do your workout because you could use other components you could use your strength you could use recovery you could use all kinds of things if you're trying to train maximum speed and you're 5% slower tomorrow then we're not training maximum speed anymore and so it's just a level of recovery that has to be higher um to be able to achieve what we're trying to go after here which is hitting a new actual Peak velocity

and so it's not the fact that you're like super sore but it's the fact you might you generally you're going to feel fine mightbe a little sore but your numbers are 3% lower and you're like damn not recovered enough yeah where in almost every other sport You' be like we're great that's totally fine go play so let's kind of now tie this all together for a totally different type of athlete that most people aren't thinking about right which is the centenarian athlete um and I'm not assuming that we're starting from the standpoint of having been

worldclass Olympic CrossCountry skiers in our 20s who never sto I'm talking about somebody who's in their 40s who I don't know kind of has the Epiphany that says wait a minute like it's cool to be a powerlifter it's cool to be a weightlifter it's cool to be a crossfitter a strongman an elite Runner cyclist swimmer whatever but I'm going to pick a different sport I'm going to pick a sport where the optimization is around my ability to be as physically robust as possible in the last decade of my life which you know means I want

to be able to do a bunch of things that most people can't even fathom when they're you know 80 or 90 years old um that that you know that means like I can run up an escalator if it's broken carrying my luggage I can put the 25 pound bag in the overhead compartment of the airplane I can pick a grandchild up out of a crib I can play on the floor and stand up on my own no issues right I can go for a hike on Rocky terrain and I'm not going to slip and fall

you know again things that you would do blindfolded today but the number of people in the last decade of their life that can do this you can count on a few hands so I'm G to argue that to train for that you have to make tradeoffs right one of the biggest trade-offs you have to make is optimizing against getting injured because the compounding effect of training is so strong that it's rivaled only by the compounding effect of not training in other words correct yeah you know exactly what I'm saying but for the listener um you

will lose it way faster then you will gain it and therefore you could argue rule number one of what I'm proposing is you can't ever stop training to to have an injury that Sidelines you for three months is an unacceptable risk even if the concessions you make for that cost you some Peak Performance okay so armed with all of those caveats what would we beg borrow and steal from each of these phenotypes into our centenarian decathlon so we're going to work backwards which is physiology first so you have three things you need to train and

if you you train those three things you can steal from any of those areas you'd like to get those three things done and you can mix and match and I would argue you should so thing one is you have to have high quality functioning muscle tissue okay number two nervous system and by that in large part when we typically think about the nervous system for exercise we often think peripheral I'm even talking Central and and Vis the brain okay and then four cardiopulmonary sorry three cardiopulmonary so we need to make sure that got muscle we

need to make sure that our motor control is very very astute and then we need to make sure that our cardiopulmonary system is is high functioning you do all three of those things you're going to be able to do all those activities you talked about a second ago um the distinction of the brain is very very important because if you were to go to an a sport like powerlifting the downside is while there's a lot of neural activation required for Peak Force the lack of variation and the lack of range of motion is a problem

one of the things that is become very clear preserving brain health um I'm not sure actually there's a recent paper by my friend do you know Tommy wood I do know Tommy wood very well and I've been I've been meaning to have Tommy on the podcast I need to get him on the podcast oh too Tommy would smash yeah um he did you see his paper on late onset uh Dimension yep yep yeah super clear clear in my opinion that one of the key components to maintaining brain function throughout life is pro receptive interation and

so you need to be moving in space and learning your site so if you think about this from the exercise perspective if the octen the 100y old 90y old you need to have some physical activity that is uncontrolled and by uncontrolled I don't I don't you don't want to be moving up and down same foot positions all the time this could be an outdoor hike where we're engaging with the environment plus the steps are non-uniform terrain is slippy whatever it could be a sport could be surfing could be badmon it could be anything else but

you need one physical activity in your plan that requires you to react to the world um strong man probably checks that box a little bit probably a lot right maybe not maximally but a lot weightlifting checks that box pretty well Olympic weightlifting um running sprinting checks the Box decently right you're moving especially you're kind of over and so you can kind of walk through the rest of um cycling probably wouldn't check that list very well right so we want to think about that that's that's the first thing that's what's needed the second thing that's needed

then is high Force production right so you preserve your nerves by asking them to do a lot of different things Tommy's paper and by asking all the motor units to work so something throughout your week has to be high Force production and by high Force production I'm going to say greater than 80% of your max that could be powerlifting could be weightlifting could be strong man could be CrossFit no problem could be any of those things could be different petrics and stuff like that all right nervous system is checked those two components cardiovascular system I

think the cardiovascular system needs to be able to do two primary things maybe we'll call it three I'll split into three it needs to be able to sustain consistent work output over a minimum of 30 minutes with no interval like no break back down call this Zone whatever I don't care but this is no break whatsoever okay weight lifting does not check that power lifting does not check that strongman maybe but you're probably going to be taking some breaks uh CrossFit you might be able to get away with it you might be able to do

a 25 minute workout with almost no dip but you may actually need to integrate more classic steady state stuff here this might be an air bike this might be a sled push this might be a jog a swim like something like that so that's one component cardiovas system has the other one has to be able to get to max heart rate you got to get all the way up there right so CrossFit absolutely strong man absolutely powerlifting kind of if you're going heavy enough uh you you'll get up there um I you get blood pressures

of 450 over 350 during One Max deadlift you can get complete occlusion basically but probably not the place I'm starting for my Max r r training and how many times a week do we think a person needs to experience their max heart rate uh for yeah not not not talking about a real athlete that is just even just once a week of hitting that Max heart rate yeah it takes the um systemic fatigue out of it uh I would love to two would be really really good if you can really handle it if the all

static loads low three would' be fine but I'd say minimum one most people shoot for two think that's great I would say the same thing for the steady state pce one's good two might be better it depends on what you're doing like if you're also doing a lot of like long just walking and things like you might head your bets there a little bit uh and then the third one maybe in this category is recovery from high intensity stuff so not only just be able to get your heart rate up high once being able to

come back down regulate yourself come back up regulate yourself back down and that could be certainly done with Crossfit certainly done with strong man um maybe done with a few other things but that's kind of where we're at there so if we were to kind of go back to beginning one day a week playing as some uncontrolled thing one day a week's got to be really high Force One Day a week's got to be max heart rate one day week got to be sustained heart rate those could all also be combined there's no reason why

you can't go in do 10 minutes of pure strength training check that box and then go play some pickle ball check that box you could do uh you know max strength stuff for 10 minutes and then go do a CrossFit at 20 minute am ramp great so so it doesn't have to be like 100 days we we could do this whole thing in 40 minutes easy so we do those two things we've checked off cardiovascular health we've checked off neuromuscular or neurological Health then the third one is muscle health and the muscle needs to be

able to do a handful of things it needs to be sufficiently strong which we sort of already talked about it needs to be a sufficient size okay now we don't need to be excessively large but there's some requirement we have to have as we age do do you think about that from the standpoint of like almi where you really want to see somebody above I mean we we we hold patients to a very high standard we want our patients above the 75th percentile for almi you see a big step up in mortality benefit above that

how how do you quantify that for for folks so you can look at that um depends on how much data you can get on them ffmi is also like crudely okay sure you know like if you get in the above average or higher I'm good but is it is it literally something as crude as ffmi and almi as a anthropometric measurement of size I think it's totally fine okay yeah what you're going to see generally is a tighter line between strength yes like then you will see size y As you move up um we probably

are out of time but there's a whole discussion the whole idea that like too much muscle mass is detrimental to your health at ages is like a giant misnomer there are nine other topics that I want to discuss that we won't but we'll come back and do them in round three and that's one of them right so you've just hit two of the nine remaining topics one of them is exploring the uh myth of strength is paradoxically harmful as you age or too much strength right strength athletes struggle as age so I want to we'll

we'll go through the debunk of that and then super easy to debunk too not and then also talk about the uncoupling of strength and size because both of them are so highly correlated with longevity as is cardiorespiratory Fitness measured by V2 Max um but I love the idea of uncoupling them a little bit because my reading of the literature is that strength trumps size um and that you know but anyway we we can sort of get into that so strong and and enough size and I also think one of the one of the arguments that

says size still does matter goes back to the non-functional uh or non-structural component of muscle which is the metabolic component so it's as we can never lose sight of the fact that this is our greatest glucose Reservoir and the metabolic benefits of having a huge glucose snc are enormous yeah you want to keep your inflammation low there you go that's a key component to it um so the the last part to round out is your skeleton muscle needs to have muscular endurance so it needs to be able to do something for 20 repetitions in a

row or something and this is very important for again walk fcking up 15 flights a step or 15 you know steps 20 steps this is not going to be cardiovascular limited it's going to be limited by the local muscul endurance it's going to be limited by your strength actually it's like another total Miss Thing um when people think like wow I walked up a flight of stairs and I was out of breath I'm so out of shape no you're weak right because what happened is every step was 85% of your one rep max and so

that became very very you just did you know 12 reps at 85% um if you were stronger and that was 50% you wouldn't be out of breath that's such a a really great distinction yeah I'm really glad you're making that point yeah just get strong and all of a sudden while you're like that task was not as hard and and even with with the steps what makes it so elegant is it's actually strength to weight ratio right so you might even say well but I am kind of strong and it's like n not for your

weight you're not and the gravity now makes it your strength to weight ratio is not high enough and correct that's that's that's where your fatigue is coming from yeah which is a precursor to like the the whole uh you know curve j-shaped thing of of too much muscle mass getting large as you age is higher mortality it's like you're looking at bigger people yeah this what you're really looking at but anyway so what what are some of the do Nots right so we've talked about what they need to do but if you go back to

this caveat that I've placed on you which is I'm going to make you Zar for the day on training here but I'm going to say I don't want to see people getting injured I don't want to see you know I I want to make sure that there's no interruption of training um yeah because again I'm going to argue that the older we get anytime we have interruptions in training the cost of regain is so high so how do you factor that into a strategy around training for this person okay injuries exercise induced injuries happen in

a couple of ways um it's very very rare that it's muscle that's the problem okay the only problem that you have with the cardiopulmonary system or cardiovascular system is system fatigue that's not really its fault right systemic fatigue so if you're not overdoing it globally and this would be your run down this is maybe you're getting sick really often any number of hormone Cascades or out of whack cortisol testoserone estrogen all off like things like that mood can't sleep appetite like that is those are some of the markers we look for of global fatigue so

if that's not what we're talking about here you're talking about I got hurt through my back go knee hurts yeah neck is this knee is that back is that right what your talking about is joint all right so the only reason joints really get hurt is repetition over bad movement patterns so as long as you're moving well in those joints or not moving well depending on the joint not moving at all rather then you can really do unlimited amounts of volume theoretically until the point you hit systemic fatigue because it's not going to be muscle

that's going to be the problem you'll have some muscle strains and stuff like that but this is not putting out for three months unless you tear something off the bone or whatever connective tissue so it's connective tissue or it's going to be joint so how do we keep those things integr we need to move properly um so the the first step I would do if we really had this like 40 year time frame is I would invest heavily heavily in understanding proper movement patterns and then I would load them very specifically so step number one

you need to make sure you can do the movement pattern perfectly with assistance so this is let's do a squat and put your hands on the on the on the rail and squat all up and down so you know hold on to the band grab up okay great you can do it with assistance awesome how about body weight only great step two you did it with body weight only step three now we can add a little bit of Ecentric load so I want you to just lower the thing down down to its full range of

motion we're all in good positions you're under control we're great here and as if you can do things eccentrically I don't care what the load is but you can control it could be your body weight still you can control the Descent of the push-up you're holding proper position shoulder neck low back all the spine which is generally the problem right that's all in the right position great fall on the floor start back at the beginning great we're under control we're good there at that point we can now look to get into unilateral okay great so

you did it great when you had two limbs can you do it great when just your left side yeah can you do it great with your right side oo no okay now we're going to start predicting given enough time and enough volume and repetition we're going to start seeing a weakness which means we're going to have a compensation and movement which means we may start getting all of a sudden low back is hurting now or why is your left knee hurting why is your right ankle hurting something was probably moving slightly wrong in one position

so we're going to do an A A unilateral um evaluation here making sure we're fine there load or check both light loaded okay we haven't we haven't even got the loaded yet okay we're just seeing can you do it can you do the movement once you pass all that now we introduce load okay great we also now once you can do all those things and you pass it with load now we ask speed into the equation so can you do these things in the exact same positions when I ask you to go as fast as

possible second to last step is then you add fatigue now you notice what's the vast majority of time people start a new workout the vast majority of the way that they progress is they add volume right I'm going to go for a mile I haven't ran in forever I'm just going to start working on what to do I'm going to run for a mile U tomorrow I'll run mile and a half and after that they just start adding volume when you're adding volume on top of dysfunctional movement what do you expect is going to happen

six weeks six whatever you know if you can do all those things then I know you move perfectly well eccentrically and concentrically you can do it in bilateral or unilateral position you can do it with load when I ask you to go fast and when you get tired rip and Roar now like we can do whatever we can do absolutely anything and we're going to do that through a variety of movement positions so overhead pressing overhead pulling horizontal pressing and pulling lower body hinging lower body pressing rotational unilateral support diagonal all over those things and

once we're clear there now we can start saying okay okay we can put any of these exposures on you that you want you want to go after cardiovascular system first probably a good strategy in fact there's actually data suggesting paper came out recently showing that six weeks of pure steady state endurance training I think this was a cycling like 45 minute cycling um prior to hypertophy training resulted in more muscle growth at the end of the hypert training than the group that didn't do anything so being in good aerobic fitness is is quite powerful and

important even if you're trying to get muscle mass um so you could go after those other goals later and by the way in that study was it because the cycling trained group had a higher work capacity when they were doing the hypertrophy training I I think actually let me get back to you but um don't hold me exactly to this but I think the total workload accomplished in the actual hypertrophy training study was the same they controlled for that so they almost PA matched them to I yeah I'm pretty sure which was the interesting okay

um that that don't hold me to that one exactly okay we'll take that one offline um so you know because one of the injuries that I think a lot about and I see it happen you know it's I I don't know if this is the classic middle-aged guy injury but it's that torn Achilles right it's the and and it's usually I don't want to stereotype it because I'm sure there's someone in whom it hasn't happened this way but it always seems to be the athlete who's been a little inactive for a while and then he

goes right back to that indoor soccer match and like boom just you can hear it across the gym it's so loud right so you you're going from not you're going asking a connective tissue in this case the KE ston from never Contracting more than 50% of its Max for years to all of a sudden going to a maximal contraction on a hyper loaded Ecentric stop and change not not going to happen right like it's just you're going to you're going to tear something somewhere probably won't be in a uh an ACL because ailles is gonna

go first right that's that's why you see that in that age you see like you don't rarely you don't as often see in Pro Sports Achilles go um because it's going to handle Lo ACL is going to go first so in your case it's the opposite yeah um yeah that that is tissue tolerance right so it's very very easy to avoid with some some small amount of tissue tolerance which is basically a fancy way of saying like just expose the tissue to that demand slowly and increase that demand over time and it's gonna be just

fine yeah the one of the things that I I just find so great for this um especially as I'm getting older is always warming up with some sort of jumping and it's just multipler right so it's you know really simple is back and forth back and forth back and forth side to side side to side side to side and then it's one leg out one like doing the clock I don't know if you know that drill right you've got one leg going out to 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 and by 5 and six o'clock you're

actually having to spin yourself backwards and you're always coming back to the center of the clock if that makes sense so and again these aren't huge jumps like but the goal is just to introduce lower leg variability and tension within the tendons and the connective tissue with a lower leg at unusual angles this is actually why I am a more of a proponent now of running than I used to be for health um I initially was apprehensive against it because if you look at all forms of exercise nothing even compares with injury rate than running

running is by far the highest nothing will cause more injuries than running for the average exercise for a lot of reasons right so I'm like it's stupid actually changed my thought on that now for this exact reason um just a small amount of running is enough to keep tissue tolerance through most of the lower half to be able to do anything like that um so this is a few miles a week I think it's first of all like something I think the normal human should be able to do is run a mile yeah like decently

um sprinting too like a little bit of sprinting and I don't mean like 100% over speed sprinting even if this is as simple as um you know Sprint the straightaways walk the corners kind of thing and you did two laps that that's pretty good like you're going to stay away from a lot of foot and achilles related injuries yeah Andy um not surprisingly we uh we left nine questions on the table kind of getting through uh technically only about three but these were big ones so um I guess I'll just say thank you very much

and um I hope everybody enjoys this at least half as much as I did and um I'll see you back for round three we maybe we might need to do this in person you got to come up with a reason to come to Austin right there can't be can't I'll make iten yeah all right all right I'll make it happen we'll commit to round three in person so we can get a workout in at the same time yeah yeah I'd love to see the spot too okay all right thanks Andy [Music]