Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia, this podcast, my website and My Weekly Newsletter, all focus on the goal of translating, the science of longevity into something, accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoyed
This podcast, we created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are or if you want to learn more now, head over to Peter attea, m.com forward, slash subscribe. Now without further delay, here's today's episode by returning, guest this week is dr. Andy Galpin, Andy was a previous guest back on episode 239, not that long ago in January of twenty twenty-three.
Where we discussed the structure of muscle fibers. The difference between the different types of muscle, fibers hypertrophy and how to start strength training. I wanted to have a Andy back because we never really got to finish what we started in our first discussion. And the reason for that frankly is because we went a little deeper than either of us expected into the basic physiology of muscle. And I want to be clear. I have no regrets about doing that. I think that's an obligation that I feel is imperative through our podcast, our podcast is known for going.
Deeper into subject matter then you'll typically find another podcast and so we did that but the price you have to pay for that is sometimes you have to spend a little bit more time, talking about think. So that's what we needed to do in this discussion. So we start here by providing a very quick but important recap of the first conversation around, muscle cells functions, types of fibers hypertrophy things like that. But then we use that to go into the rest of the discussion which gets into the construction of a matrix. Now, you may remember if you heard the first discussion, we talked about the different phenotypes, the powerlifters, the weightlifters,
Strongman the CrossFit athletes sprinters. And what we do here is we build out the principles of training in terms of frequency intensity, volume, rest recovery, everything that has to do with it. We then organize all of that information. And ask the question, how would you tie that in for someone who's training for the centenarian decathlon? Because as you'll recall, at least for me personally and for my patients, really less interested in becoming powerlifters. Weightlifter strongman CrossFit athletes etcetera. What we're
Really interested in doing is becoming centenarian. The Catholics were interested in being the most strong physically fit able people who in the final Decades of their life are functioning, like, people, who are two decades younger. As a reminder, Andy earn his Master's in health movement Sciences from the University of Memphis, followed by a PhD in human energetics from Ball State University. And he's a professor of kinesiology at California State University Fullerton, where his research spans adaptations from home us.
To Cellular level changes, which he has applied to his work, with professional athletes for more than 15 years. So, without further delay, please enjoy my follow-up conversation with Andy Galpin, which will surely not be our last Eddie. Awesome to have you back for. What is very unlikely to be part 2 of 2? This will just be part 2 of n where n is an integer greater than 2 and it'll be TBD on what that looks like.
In our first discussion, which I think truthfully was pretty technical. But I still think formed a very important basis for what we're going to talk about today. So I predict that today's discussion will be a little less technical, but we'll assume that the viewer / listener. Has some familiarity with what we've talked about. But for those maybe who a listen to it, you know, a couple months ago and have forgotten or be are not listening to it. I think it's probably worth investing a little bit of our time in
Going over some of the major Concepts. So feel free to diverge from the line of questioning but everything I want to talk about right now is just to give people enough background so that we can get into the meat of the discussion that you and I have already spent some time planning. So let's start by explaining what the cells of muscles look like and how they function
when we say the term muscle were typically referring to is a collective group. So when you think about like your quadricep or your thigh it's actually Four muscles there, that's why we call
On a quad we say bicep at the you do 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 the muscle, it pulls that connective tissue, the tendon that pulls the bone and you move. And so, you've got muscles throughout your body up and down, they have different orientations and they have different responsibilities. So some are meant to be what we call.
Like 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-fatigue able and others are the opposite so explosion power propulsion. If you just look at like the lower shank. So the calf muscles there, the gastrocnemius that big one in the middle. If you point your toe to your face, that pops out at you, that's meant to be for power and sprinting, and jumping, and the one that's actually lower. Your Soleus is meant to be on all day, so you can stand and walk all day and not get fatigued, despite
The fact that both of them come together to form the achilles' that wraps around the bottom of your heel, insert the bottom of your foot, and that's what makes your foot go sort of up and down. So in general, muscle is meant to create movement muscle. Actually does a lot of other things though, that are vital to health, including pumping, fluid up and down. So blood will pool because of gravity towards the lower part of your body muscle contraction is in large part. What squeezes the blood back up into your heart and into your lung. It is the amino acid Reserve.
So the supplies where you stored me on acids, so you can use them to create red blood cells or immune cells or anything else. And it's also the primary Place actually, where you regulate blood, glucose storage and all carbohydrates. So I can go on and on but muscle in general has a very important function in your body for movement there and as well as signaling. So the last part to acknowledge here is we typically will call muscle and endocrine organ. Meaning it'll actually send signals out through the body through what are called Mi.
As or what some people will call extra kinds. If they're coming out as a responsive exercise, and that's sending a signal to your liver, kidney your brain or long or anywhere else. So, at the big whole muscle level is what we call that that's the general function. Now within that each individual muscle. So, pick the Soleus or whatever one you want is actually made up of billions if not more individual muscle fibers and those fibers or cells, that's the same actual term, myofiber cell fiber, I'll use those interchangeably.
Those are actually just basically long cylinders and so if you think about this like a ponytail, so if I don't have much hair left him, I'm in the same boat as you there, Peter. But if I had some, you 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 least, cardiac and smooth muscular quite different. But skeletal muscle looks very similar to a hair. So it is a long long cylinder, it's very strong. In this case, it actually contracts. Where hair doesn't but
But that's the basic function of that. And So within that you have a whole bunch of organ out that do things. So if you look at the whole muscle, what actually happens is that's surrounded by a bed of capillaries. If you talk about blood going into a muscle, comes in be a big artery. Going to go through a bunch of capillaries. And those capillaries are really surrounding and mixing in and out that whole ponytail. So they're kind of all over and so they're circulating around the individual fibers and that's going to get you nutrients in my glucose.
Her anything else and get you waste products out, like, carbon dioxide Etc, 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 own nuclei, and so if you remember basic biology, the nucleus is, what controls any cell. So most cells in the world have one nucleus skeletal muscle is unique, because you've got infinite number of them basically, spread throughout the duration of the muscle. And that gives you a lot of what we call plasticity.
And so the more nuclei you have the more control centers to have the easier, it is to respond to stressors damage adaptations, Etc. That's why skeletal muscles. So again, adaptable to various whether this is good stimuli or bad stimuli like in the case of spaceflight or physical inactivity, or what is going to be. So, in addition to that you've got, of course, your mitochondria, which you've spoken at length, over your career and that's what's going to be able to use a lot of your produce, a lot of your cellular energy, and then you finally, you've got
We call the contractile units. And so, the things that make your muscle fibers contract, together, and squeeze on top of each other are actin and myosin. And so these are two molecules that kind of reach up. The myosin grabs the act, and it pulls it together. Smashes it literally on top of yourself and that's why when you Flex, say biceps muscle and actually gains height because you're stacking things on top of each other and that requires the muscle to go vertically. So that's I guess the big picture of what muscles are and then what they actually looked like at the cellular level.
There was much more efficient than I would have done it. Let's layer on another question. You drew a contrast between the Soleus and the gastrocnemius. And although you didn't use the exact terms, you alluded to it, that one is sort of slow to fatigue. And one is fast to fatigue, which of course, is now part of another division, we would layer on this. So, can you explain at that cellular level, what the difference is between the gastrocnemius and the
Soleus we call muscle?
Fibers one-on-one but really there's distinction between them. So maybe we'll just take a quick jaunt back into history and I won't make this too long on the like love to sew all the way back to the invention of the microscope, Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, many people discover things, but you get he gets the credit. Well, one of the first things to actually use that microscope for was, he started looking at individual cell either start looking at muscle actually in Wales and caught fish and a bunch of other stuff and he started to notice it. Some of these cells are really small and some really big and that's the very first time.
Really started 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 fibertite there. These fibers, these cells are either red cells or white cells. And I took a long time to figure out why that matter what that meant and eventually it became clear that the ones that are red are Red because they have more of those capillaries. They have
Or blood flow, and more Monarch andreea that more iron than all those things go into. So they give an actual look of being read. The other ones have less of it. We didn't know for a long time after that, though, functionally what? That meant, if you were to look back in some old textbook or had an old Professor one from Anatomy or something. On time ago, they might call fibers white fibers in red fibers, and so you'll hear them distinguish based on color. That's the first distinction. Well, 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 try the other end to a fixed unit and you put it in a whole bunch of a bath of calcium and ATP, and a bunch of other stuff. And those fibers just start Contracting unlimited. And you can actually measure how much force is being produced. And so now we went from distinguishing. These fibers be a color red versus white to now, distinguishing them by their contractile properties, as 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 involved. Now, describe them as fast twitch or slow twitch, and I really specifically describes the twitch for the contraction speed. So, two ways to distinguish fibers, now color or contractile speed, and then eventually we started to figure out there, enzymatic, differences. And so the ones that had more monocoque andreea, we're better at using aerobic metabolism. So this is carbohydrate and fat metabolism.
Awesome. Those are both aerobically needed and the ones that were white or fast. Were much better at using glycolysis from the anaerobic part of the equation. So, this is in the cytoplasm outside of the mitochondria. And so now we can distinguish these things via enzymatic, properties and so you can call them a fast, twitch fiber. You can call them a white or red fiber or you can call them aerobic or anaerobic, or oxidative or glycolytic again, depending on. If you ever had maybe some of this stuff in high school or college class, you might
I've heard them described is fast, oxidative or fast glycolytic, and there's like, why is all this nomenclature exist? And that's exactly why it all happens. And so to come back to the beginning here, this is where it's going to really matter initially. When this distinction was drawn, that looked like there was two types, there's type 1 and type 2, that's just what they call them and type 1 is too slow twitch the red fibers the oxidative fibers type 2 with a fast which all the opposite right? Well in the 1950s ish area, we
Figure out, wait a minute. There's actually a third distinct fiber type and that fiber type was more closely aligned to the fast-twitch fibers than the slow twitch. And so we started to delineate a little bit more so you have your type one and they'll stay way over here. And over here you have a type 2A and a type to be. Again, they are distinct and different enough from each other that they need to be called their own thing, but they're closer together than they are close to slow to driver. So instead of I don't why they called it type 1 and type 2.
To and not type 3. 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 him 2A and 2B. Well some years passed and we actually eventually realize that humans don't have to be. So again depending on the exercise physiology book you might currently be using. They might still be using the nomenclature of type to be despite the fact that we've had genetic information. Since 1990 the humans don't even have the gene to express to be. So like to be is just a non-starter with human.
However, we do have what's called a 2X, and it's actually this is foundation something, you're going to need later in the conversation when we talk about in the second half. So humans to summarize have type 1 type 2 a and type 2 x well, Felines and animals and bears and stuff. We've done biopsies and stuff on bears, do have the to be near rains have to be. And so most other mammals have four distinct ones, they had four really, really fast on these bees are Ultra fast. 2x is pretty fast, two A's slower but fast and then
one is slower. So if you run the entire Continuum it pretty much lines up. So the ones that are pure type 1 have generally the more model conned Rhea and they are less fatigue about, they don't produce as much force. Well, they do relative size but they're slower and I do that as you move to 2A and a 2X, they become faster, but to become more fatigue of will because they're more Reliant upon like causes and carbohydrate metabolism. So that's generally what we're looking at with fire.
Types. So, when you ask the distinction between, how does the Soleus in the gastroc, compare, the gastroc in most humans is something like 60 to 70, or maybe even up to 80% to a fibers. And so, they are very, very fast. So the gastroc will again cause a fast contraction but they won't hold on for very long because it gets achievable the Soleus can be up to 90% slow-twitch. And so this is a great comparison because most muscles in your body are some
The nation of fast and slow twitch, but the Soleus the gastroc or probably the best example of the two extremes. If you look in animals, like mice, you can see a Soleus that is 100% slow-twitch for a number of reasons humans, never get that far down the line. If I biopsied somebody in the Soleus and they were 80% slow-twitch, I be like, whoa, that's pretty high. If they were 70% fast which in the gastroc, I would say that's pretty high. That's what you can sort of expect in terms of muscle physiology differences between the Soleus and the gastroc. And again, why not functionally matters.
If you have the compromise Soleus, you're probably less likely to be standing. You're going to sit, you're probably gonna be less generally, Physically Active if the Soleus is compromised it's hard to move fast and powerfully.
How modifiable is that distribution? Is it purely genetic or is there a trainable component to the ratio of fast to slow twitch fiber in a given muscle?
It's extremely trainable, it'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 it will change. Now like anything else, an asymptote exist here. So if you are very untrained in your pretty in active physically, maybe even taken to an extreme. You go into a cast for two months or spaceflight and you're literally inactive. That movement happens faster. If you are pretty trained and well, trained and months and years go on. You start changing really, really slowly. Because you get
Closer to the other Spectrum but there is really, I mean, functionally don't limit to how far they'll go given enough total exposure to put you into like some realistic numbers. This holiest, it's kind of hard. Actually, the gastroc has a better one. If you were to say completely untrained and you had an exercise for say five plus years and then you did eight weeks of exercise, I don't even care what it is. It really doesn't matter that much. I would bet ten to fifteen percent change in fiber type in that kind of a time span. The wouldn't be that crazy.
Sorry, just to make sure I understand what's actually
Being there andy, is it turnover? Meaning are you literally just expressing more type 2 and expressing less type 1. So, that, if you compare the muscle biopsies, across those eight weeks, you've actually just displaced 2 into 1 due to making new cells and apoptosis of the old
cells. Really good question generally. No, this idea called hyperplasia. So hyperplasia is when you would grow a new cell and that is
Very, very uncommon in normal human situations. It can happen with extremely eccentric training. Looks like it probably happens with a lot of exoticness testosterone use over many, many years. But outside of, like, sort of extreme examples, 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 so it more happens is the current fiber type is self will transition its type which is sort of tricky because this measure how far you want to go here but
Value 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 to a on one end of the cell, but it might be what we call a one two, a. So this is a single muscle fiber that expresses both type 1 and type 2 depending on the this the length of the cell, it may be different spots, so they're not always the same type. So the same thing can happen to a 2X by the way. In fact,
I can have a triple here where you can have a 1 to a 2 x so you can have all three being co-expressed.
So they're kind of pluripotent and they basically have the potential to differentially express themselves. Yeah. Based on stimulant or lack of. Okay, let's talk a little bit about how everything you just said factors in to some of the metrics were going to talk about vis-à-vis, different type of performance and athletes. Let's start with hypertrophy. If you took biopsies
Oopsie of my biceps. And then you took a biopsy of a professional, bodybuilders 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 Lottery leads to questions. Let's use the VL, the vastus lateralis that the outside quad muscle. As a better example, just because we have thousands of biopsy studies from there. So yes, a lot of really cool questions. Okay. A couple things to understand. Number one counting muscle fibers, total is a very challenging thing because only true way to do it is I need to take your entire muscle and everything out half and Counting. Now, we can do some estimates, you can take a whole muscle size, take the average size of the muscle fibers.
And then account for our fluid and stuff but that's sort of tricky at best. So we have good data on these from animal models. Cats actually dogs, and things like that humans. It's challenging in general fast-twitch, fibers. Let's just keep it fast and slow for now. Do not confuse. People are generally bigger than slow-twitch fibers by diameter, so they're generally wider but when you throw training an equation battle goes out the window. I have analyzed. I can't tell you how many thousands of slow-twitch fibers and they are bigger than fast.
Libras and 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. And so one of the things we see happen is five or type-specific hypertrophy with your classic endurance training. So throw kind of intervals and other
He's out the window for now just because scientific it's hard to do. But if you order your steady state Runner cycling swimmer roller, things like that, I would generally be looking for their slow twitch fibers to be very large if not the same size they're faster. Drivers often times larger when you're actually pulling out one muscle fiber at a time you'll see some really wild stuff so that can happen individually. But on an average that would be your answer. If you were to invoke any kind of strength training, you can distinguish between powerlifters or bodybuilders, any of those things, it won't actually really matter because of the level of the
While we're going to distinguish between all those probably here, pretty soon at the level of cell. It's not that different. It's close enough to being the same thing. If you compare it to how different it is than steady-state cycling or something. And so, in both those cases, I would basically say here, the 285 is going to be very large, but you wouldn't be able to pull a, to a fiber and be like, oh, that's a bodybuilder. And that's a power lifter. And that's a weight lifter. But you would have absolutely no chance to do that. The only thing that kind of throws a wrench here, is specifically exoticness testosterone that will
change the game in a number of important ways. Specifically satellite cells are going to be changed and total muscle. Fiber size is probably going to get exceptionally large which will throw it out there. But
so again, just to make sure I understand if you're going to compare my V lo2, the vlo of Jay Cutler, so, world-class bodybuilder. If you do an ultrasound, there's no question that the total size of his muscle is so much bigger than mine. If you can start yanking fibers out, it sounds like it's
Probably has more fibers probably because he's using exoticness testosterone and I'm not, but it also sounds like his type. 2 fibers are bigger than my type 2 fibers.
I would be very comfortable that prediction. They will be very, very large. We biopsied one individual powerlifter / bodybuilder, some of those fibers were. So large, the closest comparator we have or rhinoceros muscle fibers are. So not all of them, but I have them where they were so
large. Can you give me a sense of scale? How many microns are we talking about? Here is a fiber.
Or compared to a hair if that's easier.
It would be honest. He's fairly similar to my hair.
So meaning you can see it with your naked eye. It's so
big. 100%. If I had a right now on camera, if you're watching this at home and if I had my tweezers out, I could pick one up on IP tradition, holding the camera and you would be able to see it in this camera. No question. They can be very, very large even the smaller ones in human skeletal muscle like the veal, especially you would see all the smallest one, no doubt. All
right. So now let's talk about another component of hypertrophy, which is, you know, it's sort of funny taking a step back there is no.
Other cell in the body that we spend so much time thinking about the actual size of the cellular unit. We don't really care about the size of your hepatocytes. We care about the functional units and how they integrate, we care about the function of the hepatocyte 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 our my hepatocyte the same size as your hepatocyte sand. If mine get bigger or smaller what's happening and I'm guessing
In the case of, you know, nafld e, there's going to be some changes where there's both intra and extracellular fat accumulation, but when we now think about a given individual, who undergoes hypertrophy training and so objectively, their muscles have gotten bigger, let's keep this quote-unquote simple and not assume the use of exoticness testosterone. So we're not really talking about hyperplasia in the creation of de novo cells by definition. Of course, now,
We know that the myofibril has gotten larger, it has expanded in diameter. What has actually led to that, how much of that is water intracellular water? How much of that is the synthesis of new organic matter, vis-à-vis, the amino acids or something else.
So there's two main ways that a muscle hypertrophy and we're going to distinguish chronic hypertrophy or permanent a tree from acute hypertrophy being, you know, you just left the gym right now in your muscles are bigger.
Full of fluid. This is what that would because so you've got sustained muscle growth over time. This is either going to be a result of we call contractile hypertrophy or sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. In either case, the muscle cell got larger, the diameter is expanded. It's going to happen that way. The question now is, what actually changed inside that cell, that caused it to allowed it to be permanently larger. Well, in the case of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, this is very new that we even thought existed folks have been talking about this from the body.
Perspective, and those communities for a very long time, and we always called it sort of Bro, Science. And then turns out some folks at Mike Roberts and his lab at Auburn and stuff started looking into it and found that actually was happening. And so there's, this is another Vindication for you, bro. Scientist out there. That sometimes those guys are on the things just go 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 myosin and actin and so is
Maybe important, maybe not but the myofilaments here, you don't add more actin and myosin you just add more protein, globulins to them. And actually just sort of increases our diameter. What happens then is you can imagine myosin acting working almost like you got a circle of friends and you were to reach your arms. Extend your arms, out to the side, grab your friend's hand. And when you brought your hands closer to your midline, your friends within come closer to you, if everybody get in 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
My friend stayed the same distance away from me and then my friend doubled her size but you can actually see happen is all sudden. When I go to reach my hand out to grab them. I'm already touching them because we're so much larger. If the whole circle, then expand. And so this is called lattice spacing. So the spacing between these actin myosin is very, very important. So if I just continue to get larger, what I would eventually do is tell my friend next to me, hey you scoot over a few inches because you're sort of crowding in my personal space and in that friend was a hey friend over, same thing, same thing. So what happens is just the standing
A circle starts to expand. And so probably the biggest explanation for why muscle increases in. Its diameter is exactly that. You've put more proteins in the contractile units in order to maintain optimal spacing. So they can reach out and grab each other and pull in for contraction the whole thing. Needed to space out a little bit. It's like you invited a few too many friends, 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 knock the wall down and expand the size or else we just get to uncomfortable next to each
other when you experience.
Fractile hypertrophy based on everything you've just described. It sounds to me like that comes with contractile Force as well because you're putting more hooks. Basically you're basically creating more anchors, IE actin myosin filaments to grab and contract. Is that essentially, you know, to A first order approximation a true
statement. Yeah. And this is actually true. He's explainable for a number of ways. Number one, in general, especially early and someone's exercising career. As you get stronger, you will add more Musk.
SMS and those are very highly linked that r squared is not hundred percent. Not 99, it's not 100% the same thing and we'll differentiate that later optimizing for muscle. Growth is not the same as optimizing for strength. Optimizing for strength is not the same from optimizing for muscle growth. So at some point they start to diverge more and more and more. But at the very beginning they're very tightly linked and so somebody just want 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 want it to optimize from one and that is a little bit different and will
English all that later. Now as you continue on with your training career and get stronger and stronger and stronger than 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 and strongman wrestling MMA. You're generally going to see people as you go up.
Up and physical size, you go up and string right now doesn't mean you couldn't find 155-pound athlete the stronger than 170 find out that you clearly could. But if you look at old records scores, go higher and higher and higher. And so there is an intrinsic link there but connection between mass and strength, although it's not 100%. So yeah, we're going to put those things on and I guess one important note here is early in your training career, you really don't even need to distinguish between the two because both is going to come along for the ride. You out on some muscle, you're going to get stronger.
If you do strength training, you're probably going to talk on some muscle as well. They're both going to come along for the ride so you can be a little economical, outweigh
any go back to the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy for a moment. Just give me the background story on that. I was totally unaware. That when I was in high school, of course, all I did was read muscle and fitness and Bro. Science was my life. I've been a little away from it. Tell me what it was that the bodybuilding Community was proposing that science basically. Only really came to recognize
in general for a long time, myself and many others.
Other exercise scientists. We're sort of reporting 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. I'll do sets a 20 or 30 or 40 different styles of training. And according to science, is that was not hypertrophy. I was most scared endurance or that was strengthened. Those would not result in hypertrophy and then eventually more and more research came out, Brad schoenfeld did much of this work, he's incredibly prolific and Brad. Showed well,
Actually, hypertrophy is pretty much equal from anywhere between five repetitions per set to up to 30 repetitions per set. If other things are required for
provided, the rpe gets to the same point, right? The Reps in reserve has to basically have to get pretty close to failure. Not failure necessarily, but exactly at the end of 30, you need to be hurting as much as you would be at the end of
seven. Yeah, it's very hard because you're going to start hurting at like, 15
much sooner. Yeah,
exactly. You gotta just bear with
it. It's much more time under tension and, in some ways
It's also more taxing to your cardiovascular system depending on the
lift. It certainly can be certainly can be. So what the bodybuilding Community would say are things like hey, if you lift in this fashion, five to ten reps, you might increase contractile units and that's why you're getting stronger. However, if you were to go higher repetition ranges, it's going to be coming from sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. And why that matters is that's almost exclusively explained by increases in fluid retention and so it is non contractile hypertrophy. So this is why you can get
Bigger, but you're not getting stronger. This is ruined. Yeah, right, that's the functional distinction. And again, that's like something that we were just like no, no, it doesn't happen. There had been like a couple of papers but the technology wasn't there, honestly to measure it. Tell some assays came around and like really got that stuff going and it was like, oh crap and now it looks like the stories actually pretty clear. Mike has a wonderful review paper on this stuff and you can actually see a carafe, he's develop. And you can look at when I'm sarcoplasmic, hypertrophy happens, when contractile happens in the what happens over the course of your
Training experience and I think actually explains what's happening pretty nicely.
I think that was the perfect intro to what I think would be a really elegant framework for now. How to talk about a series of rows in a series of columns that make up a matrix. In our first podcast, we spoke about the different types of athletes and then we talked about the different variables that go into training stress. What we didn't do, because there's
He wasn't enough time was fill in that Matrix and that's what I'd love to do today. So I went back to is what are the different phenotypes of Interest. So we're going to go with a power lifter and Olympic weightlifter, a strong, man, a bodybuilder, a CrossFit athlete, a track and field athlete. And then we're going to look at them according to you know, the following if you're training to be specifically that athlete. What's your frequency of training? What's your intensity?
City, for example, as a percent of 1rm or VO2 max, what's the volume you're doing? How are you thinking, about sets and Reps, what's the rest recovery and is there any other sort of skill-based training adaptation that's necessary? I acknowledge this might take us a while but I think this is a very elegant way to synthesize so many of the concepts that were in the first episode of our sit down and I think in many ways this is kind of the rubber hitting the road. Now I'll tell you that my ultimate goal in doing this Andy.
Is to now extract from each of those phenotypes, the learnings for what I consider personally, the most important phenotype which is not powerlifter, Olympic weightlifter, strongmen bodybuilder, Etc. But rather what I call the centenarian decathlete in other words even though I'm only 50 so much of how I think about training is for the 90 year old version of me what do I want to be able to do at 90? I have a pretty good sense of what it is. It's quite audacious. What do I need to do for the next 40 years?
To make sure that at 90, I'm functioning to be honest with you, like a very fit 70 year old, that's the aspiration. So we'll end with that if we have time. If not, I don't easily be part 3. But let's start with the order that you presented them in, which was starting with the power lifter. So again, just for folks, listening powerlifting is a very, very specific sport, it consists of three, and only three lifts and you are scored on the basis of the total amount of weight. You move in a deadlift, a bench press, and a
Ott. And that's it. Nobody cares. What you look like? Nobody cares how fast you can do that. Nobody even cares how many reps you can do. Right. There's nothing that goes into it except it's a number, a plus b plus C equals total and that's it. Now those guys are strong as hell for what they do, maybe give people a sense of numbers, pick two different weight classes and explain to people just how strong a powerlifter is in those three lifts.
To really clarify when we say strength you could also think about Force. I'll say those interchangeably and well in the real world if somebody were to be able to drag a train or something I'm like wow that's a strong person but technically maximal strength is what's the maximum amount? You can do one time and I know you said that a second ago but I really want to make sure that the audience heard that
correctly. Yeah, because the name powerlifters a bit misleading here which I think you're about to explain
why. That's exactly right.
How're 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 exercises you listed in powerlifting there's no speed component to it really? They're trying to move fast like a not scored on speed. There's no clock. It doesn't matter and I'll how fast they move. It is explicitly a test of pure and absolute
So strength. What is the most amount you can lift one time, there are three different exercises. We try it in but you don't get to do it for three or four reps or it's not a who completed. The fastest it is. Who's the maximum thing you can look. So to give you some examples, I have worked with stuffy Cohen a little bit not much but just a little bit of my career and she has 25 or 27 World Records, one of her competitions. I think she wait 119 pounds and I think she deadlifted 525 in that competition.
She's dead lift at 585, I believe. So getting in the stratosphere of five will over 5x body weight here, which is absurd. She probably left his her thing so, but she's still probably benching 200-something and squatting well over the 400s. So as 120 pound female. That's pretty strong. It's
simply
unbelievable. It's totally
unbelievable. I was dead lifting today, right? Today just happens to be deadlift day for me and because I no longer can like I peaked at 18.
I mean it's a little depressing, right? That guy, just so far. That was my peak in deadlift. Well, I mean, I don't know that I even care to lift it as much as I did, but now I do different things. So today the main set was four rounds of one minute as many reps as possible with 354. It's a different stress, make no mistake about it, it hurts in a totally different way. Yeah do 315 as many times as you can in 60 seconds, rest, 3 minutes and keep doing that over and over
again. I hope Beth got a razor, got fired for that. One of the two.
Whoever programs are for you. There's no way I'm doing no. Actually, I told Beth after and she was like, what is your intention with this? And I was like, actually yeah. Anyway, but like, even at my strongest, I couldn't do 525, but my strongest, I weighed 160 pounds. So that's a staggering amount of
movement. We've got good lovers for pulling you. Got long arms, you probably like pretty efficient at then lifting out assume
they're lifting was my best of the three Akbar.
Ya bench is probably your worst, I would assume based
on it is I will embarrass
Myself by saying how much I could bench. I guess I should finish the story 270 was my best bench at a weight of 160, which is not that good. I mean, let's be honest, it's not that
good. It's not that terrible though, either. It's okay. So if you want to look at like the crazy top end of the scale on familiar.
Yeah, let's tell people more about like what? And I guess in powerlifting. It is a little complicated because you do have to consider tested versus untested athletes. It's a pretty big difference.
Yeah, let's just give you the maximum human potential on all the steroids, who cares all the gear?
This W, it's whatever my friend, AJ Roberts. I think his best squat was twelve fifty, twelve forty,
just believe that's
possible. I think he was 308 pounds for that meat. So this is, you know, 4X squat. I don't know what the like, all-time all-time all-time record is right now because it's so hard, but I think it is north of 1,300 at this point. It's not common, but people have pulled a dead lifted 1000 and people have benched A Thousand Years, a lot more people.
Who have squatted like 1100 plus. There's a decent number of those people but there are a handful people who have deadlift 1,000, a handful of bench 2000 with all the gear and all the stuff, but who cares? It's like half a ton. They're taking off the bar, holding it touching it. It's absurd,
it's simply absurd. Okay? So we've established that despite the hiccup in the nomenclature, these people are insanely strong again. I would encourage everyone who's listening or watching you may never
Desire to do a maximum rep, deadlift bench, presser Squad. I personally have no desire to ever do it again ever. There's never a day I'm going to put enough weight on a bar in any of those three lifts to even come close to that that said the principles of how they train matter a lot to me. So let's start with well you can take them in any order you want Andy but let's just talk about frequency one of the sort of a guiding principles for how you take an athlete who comes to you. And I guess maybe for the
Purpose of this discussion. Andy, let's assume that all of the guidance were going to provide, is not for a world-class athlete with an enormous training age, conversely. Let's also assume it is not for someone who has never lifted a finger again. I think, just for the sake of Simplicity, why don't we assume that in every situation? You're taking a person who has some exercise exposure, but not specific to this endeavor. So, in this case,
Is you're talking about a person who grew up playing sports, maybe the reasonably fit, they still muck around, you know, they play some pickup basketball. Maybe they do a little bit of this in that, they're no stranger to the gym. They understand what lifts and things are. But truthfully, they've never been to a power lifting meet and they're coming to you saying, hey, I would really I'd like to compete in the 50 and up, you know, 45255 powerlifting thing. So guy shows up with that, tell me how you're walking about his training program.
I want to make two slight distinctions inside of that. This
Option one is what is theoretically technically optimal distinction to is what's probably more realistic and
practical. Okay, let's always feel free to give both of those. I distinguish these in my world as efficacy versus Effectiveness. So max efficacy is exactly the former there. Theoretically, if you can do everything to Perfection, you will have the best results Effectiveness is in the real world when you stay up late at night because your kids are sick and you got a little extra deadline at work and that's going to cut into your training. What's the best you can? Do
you just described last night?
So one thing that's going to hold true throughout all of this Matrix are going to cover is specificity is always your answer. If you want to get better at writing you need to write. If you want to get better at sprinting, you need to Sprint if you want to get stronger and you want to get better at picking up a weight one time, the heaviest you can pick it up that is by far the most direct route to go meaning. In this case you should practice every single day.
Picking up 100% of your max. Theoretically, that's what specificity would tell you distinction to that's not realistic. 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 the Bulgarian method, this is would be weightlifters. Not power that there's but similar, they're gonna do a one rep max in the snatch clean and jerk and Squad every day. This is what they do now again. These are people probably on systems they are
Five, six, seven, eight, nine years in their training career and in between there getting massages. And so like in theory, if you really want to maximize specificity, you could do that and many have done that and I am still the Mana glue. One of the pocket Hercules, if you want to go with that guy. I didn't do it for all of this training for all year round, but certain phases of his training. That's, that's what you would do. High specificity, you're going to get better at those things. No question. So to peel that back, anything besides that is less specific but you have to then start hedging.
Towards okay. Am I gonna 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, although some so realistic scenario probably something like 125 days per week, you work that movement pattern so realistically to would be good for a lot of people. So if you want to get stronger and squatting squat twice a week, if you recover well and you squat well, your mechanics are well,
Days a week that would be a really, really, really good program. But you could get very strong, very strong doing two days a week in that movement. So if you want to do all three like in powerlifting, maybe bench twice a week, maybe deadlift once a week, maybe squat once a week and like that. Maybe if you want to squat twice a week and then live 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, a
potentially could. And for a lot of people, the person you're describing
They would get stronger wouldn't be optimal, but it would be certainly effective for a lot of folks.
If they said, Andy, I'm willing to be in the weight room for days a week. I'm really optimizing on this. If I'm going to be in the weight room for days a week, are you basically going to figure out a split where you get, 3 of each in those eight sessions or something to that
effect? I like to tell people to look into what's called conjugate, there's many forms of this, but this would be the Westside barbell Lewis 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.
Durin's faced basically there is a speed phase to it and there's a strength-based to it and they just built that in and they actually just sort of rotate it through and squat deadlift bench but they just power through that way. So that's a very easy
model. It's you're saying that they would do that in any given work out or across the week it's spread out that
way. Sorry yeah across the week. So basically you walk in the gym, you're going to do a Max deadlift and then going to do some assistance work and your lower back or your glutes, your hamstrings or whatever is needed the next day. Come in, its maybe max bench and tricep work shoulder work. We work
Dealt snack, or whatever etcetera. And then they come in, you kind of follow it that way. The
next question is, is the only time you're going to have this athlete moving insanely, heavy weights in the three formal lifts, or do you have them do very heavy things that are 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. IE things that they are not going to compete in but have a high
Degree of overlap with what they're competing in specificity wins here. So you're going to say, no, because you're not a professional athlete. Who has all the time in the world. Just do the
lift. I would say, stick mostly to the left now, even for this person is not because they're not a professional out that you could make the argument. They need variation more, actually, because who really cares about Optimizer strength gain. I'd rather push a little bit more towards overall, safety and variation will give you that because it's less overuse of the same movement pattern. The same.
Loading pattern, the more variation you get the less specificity, so the Less Direct adaptation but the less likelihood of overuse. So in this particular person, I would probably. But if we really said this, I would say here. Maybe I'll say it this way, the core of our day. When we come in is going to be that exact moment, it's gonna be a barbell back, squat in your stance, the way that you're going to compete. Great certainly within maybe the eight weeks prior to this competition outside of that though when we call offseason we would introduce variation do other stuff while they're in that specificity.
So we might do our primary lift is what kind of call it. And then after that, we would do a ton of accessories. So we might do our hard work on our barbell, back, squat. And then, maybe we go to a goblet squat, maybe we do split squat, maybe we do lateral lunges, and we would do other stuff, reverse Hyper's and things like that. So you would we want to use all those but those who would be what we call accessories or supporting stuff and you would probably go to High repetition ranges for those. You wouldn't do a Max effort step up. You might do set 258, 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 their rep range? You're going to have them working in? Is there a number of reps? That is so high. That it's getting you too far away from max
strength. 5 is sort of the number five. Unless you get starting past five, you start losing horse
production. I used to know these tables off by heart from when I was younger. I believe five reps. Is that 85% of typically 1rm that you do 54
It totally depends, actually depends a lot on fiber type. It's actually sort of finding out, but it depends on the movement. The same is not true for a dead lift versus the bench. Those numbers go way off. So it's a rough if number, there's actually a chart called Pro open chart. Put in the show notes with a chart does, is it tells you there's been a handful of studies on it. At a New Zealand, has some power lifters and stuff but this is from the Russian literature, I believe originally. But anyways, it tells you how many reps to do throughout the week, total add a given percentage so in other
Words. Hey, between 70, to 80% accumulate, this many reps between 80 to 90%, accumulate, this many reps, accumulate, 1995 is cetera, and it gives you a range of reps to stay within in terms of total per week. And that's pretty good. Because, it'll tell you sort of, like, here's the amount of Max effort, you can get away with. And then here's how much supporting work you need to do to make sure that stuff can happen. It's generally pretty effective to get you close.
Now, to do this, you need to know your 1rm, okay? So this is a bit of an aside but it might be relevant.
There are these devices. I forget the name of it. I actually have one and I enjoy using it. I can't remember the name of it though. It's a little thing that sits on the ground and it has a strap that goes on the bar
velocity transducers. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. And I came up with the name of the one I have, but I quite fancy, the thing, probably Delaware, no, I have a different one. It starts with a V, I think, but anyway, so if I do a set, let's say I'm doing a set of five. If only 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, two things that matter to me, right? One is, what's my projected 1rm based on the speed that I'm moving that and what's my level of fatigue? As I've learned the lower the weight, the less accurate it is if 135 pounds on the bar and you're warming up, there's no amount of speed you can put on that that will get you anywhere within what its prediction is. But once you get into that 5 rep range, it's pretty accurate. Do you think that's accurate enough for someone like me who doesn't actually
Want to do a 1rm or do you think I'm just being a wussy? You are being watched. Yeah, but
the other thing you can do is just do a rep max test. So there's any number of online calculators put a weight on their comfortable with and do it anywhere between three to ten reps. And then you can say, okay, I did 200 pounds for 8
reps and it'll say that's your 1rm and then go off that.
Yep. Now one caveat give you their those estimates will go up to like 20 reps per set but the accuracy is awful. So, if you're going to do a Max test, I generally Act
And staying below eight reps. Even stick between like 328 range. That's going to give you a pretty accurate score for most people.
You said something earlier that. I now I think kind of resonates. I have never found those calculators to work for me.
Oh, you're slow. Twitch guy. Yeah, there's no
waves. No way. I think I'm a slow twitch guy and therefore I can do way more reps than you would expect. And therefore it tells me I should be able to lift more at 1rm and I
can't. Yeah, there's no chance whatever you're doing for at your 85%, you're doing 15 reps, I'm done.
I do for I'm a super fast which
guy that's the other thing I think that is you need to couch that with your own genetics and training history as well. Okay. How many sets are we talking about here? So if I'm coming into the gym saying okay, well today's the deadlift day and let's just say I'm doing the kind of the Westside barbell approach where the main set of the day, the working sets are around my deadlift and then I'll do the accessory Tinder and stuff later, we've established, you don't want me going above 5 reps.
Once I've done my warmup, how many working sets would you have for me in that day?
Yeah, so maybe I could answer the very beginning. You can answer this whole Matrix for strength with just this thing called 325. So the 325 concept 3 to 5 days per week, three to five exercises. Three to five reps percent 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.
Sizes for three sets of three. Now, the intensities got to be high, got to be a lot of load, right? It could take you all the way to five days a week, five exercises, five, sets of five. And that volume is going to be really taxing again, if you're loading it appropriately since we're under the powerlifting category,
but just to be clear in D, that's the strength Matrix. That's the strength column here is, regardless of which of those athletes, you are, when you want to focus on your strengths, part of what you do, which every one of those athletes has to be strong and
The Sprinter. You've got to be in the
325. Yeah. Now you could also say again I already said earlier 125, so it's great. But this just makes kind of the real super easy for people to understand. I certainly didn't invent this has been around for a very very, very long time. You'll find this in books in the 90s 1990s well earlier than that. But it's an easy one kind of one-liner for people to remember for strength.
So it's days exercises reps. Rest sets, sets
all that, right? So again since we're
In powerlifting and since we're in strength, that 325 only works though, if you're loading that heavy, if you're going light, that's not gonna work
and just to be clear. Let's explain to people what that means. Do you prefer rpe or reps in reserve, either way you want to just explain to people what those two mean and how they can use it to think about this
rpe rating of perceived exertion, how hard is it? You can do this scale of 6 to 20, its original Borg scale. You can get one to ten. You can do 125, what are the top end of the scale is the hardest repetition you could ever do.
And you scale back. So you don't technically need to always be at the high end of the scale there, but you can't be if you're going on a scale of one to five, you can't be at two on this thing for is probably the Sweet Spot representing. Reserve is another similar idea where it says like if you thought you could do 10 reps on this and I want you to reps in reserve, that means I want you to stop at eight reps, right? So you left two repetitions and Reserve, you left them on the Tank table. There. Same thing would be strength, right? So like, hey,
We're going to do a set of four here. I want you to one rep in reserve so you're going to get the end of four and go. I would have one left but I wouldn't have to I certainly wouldn't have three. I'm going to have one left but I'm gonna stop right there. So similar idea, just a different way to express it.
You have reppin reserved for me has always made a little more sense. I think it's easier to explain to people, but at the same time, you have to know what failure is. It's not something you can figure out by yourself. You have to have the experience of dropping a bar on your chest, and having the guys run across
Jim to pick it up. Like you got to know what
those are easier ways to learn but that's one of them.
Yeah but you know I mean like you sort of have to have been through the wringer of. I think I have one more and you do versus. I think I have one more and you don't and obviously it's much safer to figure that out on a deadlift than on a squat. For
example. I mean, honestly, like just go on a machine, who cares, like just get a rough idea, right? You want to get super safety if you're not familiar with all the stuff, go on a leg press machine, going to leg extension machine as much as like. You don't love that.
At just get close because you're right. RP and Ari are both fail epically. When people are not highly trained they think. Oh, that's probably close and really you thought that was a to our yard, but I was like a salmon are here. Like, you're not even close to
where you're at. Most people are just stronger than they relay stronger. They have much more in reserve. Okay, so we're assuming that for everything we're talking about with respect to strength, the individual will get to the point where they truly understand how many reps they have in reserve. And now, for the 32,
I've system to work. Are you talking one to two reps? And Reserve are needed.
That's probably pretty close. Probably closer to 1 the less comfortable. You are fine. But remember you're not going to get stronger by going at. So maximum weights, you're not going to optimize it. So like the whole idea of getting stronger, you got to test the limits of sort of where you're at within a safe range. Of course, and if you're just starting, take your time. Ramp up, take six weeks, takes eight weeks, like you have a lot of time.
You got 50 more years Peter like we're not in a rush here. But yeah eventually we got a
are only are 40 years but
you get it though. Like so to all the caveats and sides be smart with this stuff. We already put one other caveat that I always make sure to stay here earlier in the conversation, which is payte if you want to get stronger and you're really untrained, you don't have to go this heavy. You can get very strong doing such a 20 you'll get there. But this Avatar was someone who said his 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, and regard there.
Before we leave the power lifter. I want to bring a few other things into this. So again, we're not in this discussion specifically optimizing on Total Health. Correct? Correct. We're really optimizing around this person being a powerlifter. So now I come back and I say Andy, okay, I got it, man. I'm all in on this, you know, I'm going to basically do three to five exercises sets, reps etcetera. But I said, hey, look on the other three days a week, is it cool if I do a bunch of cardio and again, I'm not talking about this through the lens of Health. I'm
Saying, will it make me a better power
lifter, make you a better power lifter
know. Yeah, exactly. So what would you advise that I do on my off days? If the objective is maximizing my
strength when I was kicking around these scenes, a lot powerlifters when at Aureus for being the laziest, unzip you ever seen in your life, if they're not lifting one arm acts, they're going to be circling Walmart for two and a half hours to get closer parking spot. I
know
that is not a joke. I've been in that cheap. I've been that cheap and just driving around. You just like oh my God.
Saving every calorie. Okay, great. I think more recently, people have inaccurate, you start to realize, like I need some level of Fitness because I can't handle the training volume. If you're pouring sweat getting through your warmup and tying your shoes, you probably shouldn't be doing one rep. Max has all day like you, we need to get first. We have to have some level of Fitness. So what I would say is this, do the stuff we talked about maybe finish each one of those workouts with a set of eight to ten or twelve just to pump a little bit.
Volume in there, that'll get you in a little tiny bit of Fitness will be achieved kind of messed up on your off days. If you truly want to maximize strength and you're fit enough, then just rest to other stuff maintenance. No Mobility. Breathwork will move up, like, all the other recovery stuff. Just hedge heavy, you can. If you're just antsy, Gotta Move, Gotta Move, Gotta Move fine, but this is be like a Zone 2 or lower movement, right? Just don't do much work because every amount of work.
Doing is contributing to systemic fatigue. And remember it's not just about doing things like preserving muscle glycogen what you have to do, but it's not a huge deal. If we're doing say three sets of three, it's not going to drain you of how much muscle glycogen but your nervous system requires carbohydrates for metabolism. Everything else is got to be optimized here and that stuff takes a long time to recover. We got to restore muscle glycogen or phosphocreatine and and ATP. All that has to happen so there's just no reason. It would
Give you an advantage to do more endurance. Work in between as long as you have some baseline Fitness, and that's the one time where people do see gains from it is getting in because they're so untrained. So out of shape, if you will, that they feel better, they can train more, they can train harder, they can recover faster because they have an aerobic system so that caveat of side rest.
I remember when I was in high school, the gym I worked out in which was a powerlifting gym, which is why I got into it, but really my primary goal was training for boxing. So I was doing infinitely more volume.
And the powerlifters, they would mainly train in the evening. So I think it was Tuesday, Friday, evenings or something. It's exactly as you described. First of all the two things that stand out to me even to this day. You know, 50 years later I'm being a bit facetious. It was only 32 years ago, one is the obvious, how incredibly and insanely strong these men were and to was how little they did, I couldn't believe how little they did, they would come in, they would put their slippers on put their suits.
It's 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 and what they were doing? That's every single match has to go into burning for that
flight has to let me think about this.
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. Its consequences are quite dire here. Well, think about this way, even though say 1,000 pounds represents one there, one rep max, it's 100%. And you could do 250 pounds on that. You were wondering Max. This is not the same thing, it's not the same thing because even though it's both 100%, of your one rep max, there's an absolute load that is on a physical human body.
That is not does not scale. And so, like there is a major difference,
that's right. The connective tissue is not scaling. Well lie at all here, right? They still have tendons and bones. That are not that much different from mine.
Correct. They're little bit but not that much different and so when they go do, that's different. Yeah. When they go do their heavy squat, day are there dead. Lift day. Remember if they can squat 1,000 pounds? You know what they're doing for 70%? That's a 700 pound, squat. A and so like those are their light reps, those are the
Their maintenance reps. So that load is it just takes so much more rest than when you do your 70%, and you can come back tomorrow, it's going to be fine because it was 220 pounds so that relative newness doesn't scale. Even if you're talking about people, that aren't like, crazy strong. Let's say there are 700 pounds of water but still absurd the heavy their practice reps or 520 pounds. That's 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
In what do you think is the long-term consequence in a powerlifter? Is it the case that look? If your mechanics are great, you can live a perfectly long, healthy life, that is free of Orthopedic disability in the final decade of your life. Or do you believe that at some point if you're really putting 500 plus pounds on your back repeatedly? The probability of injury is high enough and I don't mean acute injury. I just mean the
Square and tear. You know what? The likelihood that you're going to make it into the last decade of your life without significant limitations brought on by either spine or joint injury are pretty high. What's your take on that? Having watched a number of athletes go through this.
So scientifically we don't have really any data to speak of. So this is all anecdotal just don't have enough to walk on that. I don't think you would find a very highly competitive powerlifter who is under the illusion that this is great for their health. That's just not a thing, really, and they sort of either
In order to accept it, having said that, I could name you a ton of people who feel fine, world, record holders, multiple World Records or close. I can name you a ton of people who just lift kind of recreationally in the gym. We're all beat to hell too. So it's a little bit of well. Okay, I can find examples on both sides here, it depends on how they train
and because we don't have randomization, we don't know if the people who are just doing great would be doing great, no matter what they did. And the people who are all beat up,
To hell are going to be beat up regardless of what they do.
And there's also a level of insanity. So you have the people like Louis Simmons and you're like, well, okay, Q trained with a broken back. A known, broken bone in your back. Like so like I don't even count you guys like that. That's not the normal, you know response. If you're trying to break World Records, all those people are trained hurt. I can say the same thing about professional fighters, it's hurt sport like it'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 Phil, okay? It's
Say I'll put it this way, you take any sport. You take cycling, you take swimming and you push it to the extremes like that. I mean you're asking not be able to use your shoulders, rest your life. So it's not the sport for say. It's the extremity really that I think is probably the issue.
I completely agree. Anything you want to add to the training requirements of this athlete before remove under
weightlifters, I could but just in the nick of time
with we've covered the big stuff. Okay? Remind people what Olympic weightlifting is again
When the nomenclature here gets very unhelpful, but why is it that these are probably among the most powerful athletes in the world?
Sure. So this is now similar to a power lifting. This is what most people think of when they think of powerlifting. That's because they're going to do two exercises, one of them is called the power clean. So I have great sympathy for you, people who get all these confused. The difference here is similarly to powerlifting. Olympic weightlifting is a competition of who can lift the most amount of weight one time.
That's it right. There are two exercises one's called the snatch one's called the clean and jerk. The cleaner goes to parts, so it has sort of two names but it's one exercise in competition. Whoever lives the most snatch over those. The most of the Clincher, you have those two up and that's who gets our gold medal. It's one rep. Your best score in one repetition and it's the most amount of weight you can put on the bar. That's it. The difference is the why is this not powerlifting? Why is this not truly a maximum strength test is because both movements require you to take the bar from the ground and throw it over your head and catch it.
Because you're doing that, there is a speed requirement that has to happen. You simply can't throw a maximum weight, over your head and catch it. Slowly, you can absolutely dead lifts slowly, it doesn't really matter. You can bench slow and you can swap slow. You don't try to go fast but it's not required the thing. So, if you look at the sport of powerlifting that in order to take a, especially the snatch, which is Apples to Apples, these snaps is the single highest power producing exercise that is ever been studied. So nothing else produces.
More power per exercise than a snatch. And that's because you have to take the bar from the ground and throw it over your head and try to catch it. You just can't do it slowly, your feet. Get to leave the ground. So you don't have to worry about staying in contact but the bar doesn't crash down on you. Like if you do a speed Squat and jump and you jump in the other bar with smash you in the back of your neck and your head in 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 the bench, anything were you holding onto the Implement? It's going.
Slow down, things like throwing a medicine ball are great and they are very powerful but they're not as powerful as the 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 pound ball with a snatch. You might have 300 pounds on there. We have 100 pounds, it's just a lot heavier, so the force components higher. So the power output is significantly higher. It is the best way to produce or so because of that those athletes are again, 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, it's absurd how high they can jump while still being exceptionally strong, so you're still talking about people who aren't squatting a thousand pounds, but at the same weight, they might be squatting 7 or 800 900 pounds and also, they're doing it at a speed. That's not as high as say they're not jumping as high as like a basketball player, but they're doing it with 600 pounds, 400 500 pounds. So that's
why it is quote more powerful. So you could find higher jumpers, you could find higher squatters, but they have this wonderful combination of really strong and really fast and that's why they produce so much power.
Now, going back to what we said earlier, they have to be strong and so presumably, they still have to follow the exact same principles. We just talked about for strength, they're not going to optimize their strength doing 12 reps. They're going to have to be in sub 5. I guess here my question is same thing.
We got the same Avatar as you described it, the middle-aged woman. Now, let's just say who was an athlete in college and you know, wants to try a new sport. This is the sport she wants to do. She's trained, 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. I'm assuming that you're doing a lot of the movement learning with very light load. You're doing a broomstick perhaps the first time you do a clean and jerk or a snatch. Totally. How is she
She training her strength in those
movements when you talk about Olympic weightlifting or weight, lifting of all the top things were going to talk about. This is by far the most technical component. And so we have to come on, almost kind of leave that part of the conversation. We're just gonna get bogged down there, but we do acknowledge it right. It is a ton of technical work to get there because your point is, right, if you are simply snatching a PVC pipe, you're not going to generate any strength. That's pretty easy to understand. You're not going to produce any power, really? Because the load is way too light, it's super fast.
It's honestly hard. You can actually throw a PVC pipe around very fast. It's very awkward, trust me. You can't drink it overhead like it's super awkward. So once the technical component is sort of acquire, what you'd have to do to answer? Your question, is build a technical skills and then get strength doing a say a front squat and doing a push press or an overhead press and stuff like that. At your 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&jerk for quite
Um, time because going to be so limited by technique rather than strength or speed. So that's going to hold you back or long time. And this is why a lot of folks will frankly not use these movements which I think is a mistake. But if you were the classic kind of personal trainer and you got a client coming in once a week cheese, are you really gonna invest three months in a teaching - match before they actually burn any calories gaining muscle or get stronger? Well, it's probably a losing Endeavor but if you have somebody for a year more importantly have something says I'm
Minutes doing this, I'm going to invest, okay, you know, five years, ten years, this type of stuff, then it's probably worthwhile Endeavor there because it is total body. It's a deadlift mixed with a vertical jump, mix with an overhead press and a catch mixed with overhead squat. You're moving. You're jumping up and down and then you're catching yourself. So balance and proprioception are also there. Your lats are going to go to keep your position in the back. Core has to be there to overhead squat. It it's very, very well-rounded, the exception of horizontal pressing it covers.
Is just about everything else. And so it's a very economical movement
and also its peak concentric and eccentric. Because the amount of deceleration you have to do in that movement is insane. Whereas, for example, in powerlifting, you don't really get to test the eccentric, phase, to the same extent.
Yep. There's no Landing. There's no absorption. And there's no movement in space which is very important for neural. Control brain, keeping your brain healthy and everything like that. Catching yourself in a fall. So yeah, super productive.
My brother at one point became obsessed with setting his school record when he was in law school and he had a year of Eligibility left, we played football for another year. And for some reason, one of the tests that they were putting the team through is like clean and jerk and he won, I forget how much he moved. It was a lot for he was about 185 pounds and it was about twice as body weight or close to it. But here's what was interesting in 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. 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. There wouldn't be
Strategy. It wouldn't at all but in his
particular sort of pushed more in training. Oh yeah. Higher and higher weight, but he got kind of lucky. I guess it
worked for him. No, I wouldn't say that. I would say this, let's say he did. He's 185 pounds and let's say he did
350 or something was wrong about 350 350. Great.
Okay. He probably could front squat 450 at that time was probably a back squat 500. I don't know. He was probably so, limited by his technique, they'll rather than his strength. It was a smart idea to invest a lot in technical proficiency. So that's probably
Why he got so many more strides in technique because it was so far behind in terms of the two things you have to have to do that moving have technique. And then you have to have horsepower. He had way more horsepower than technique. So he invested heavily in and that's probably why he would have got away for it to give you some numbers here like we do in our lifting. If you want to look at a good clean and jerk like a really good one at the lower weight classes. Triple body weight is where we're after
triple body weight. Oh my
God. Now this thing and this doesn't scale with size so if you look at like
Sasha the best guy in the planet for the last six or eight years, kind of the number. We always throw over there is like 265, then be kilos. So like, five against five 70ish range, something like that. But he probably weighs 350. So, like if you're 350 pounds, you're never going to double by the way. Sorry. 585 like 585 is the pounds. No one's ever.
But the guys that are like 140 pounds can actually get to three times their body
weight. Yeah, for sure. For example, I was able to clean and jerk double body weight.
And that got me like, seventh in the nation. Now, wouldn't you get you to the competition? Not even close. You want to get to a national level competition, as a male, you're probably doing, you know certainly do bodyweight to two-and-a-half you want to wake Place internationally probably much closer to that three. There's not a lot of people do triple just to be clear. That's not a
lot. So how are we going to train this woman now? So it sounds to me like we're not going to load her up on the clean and jerk and on the snatch she's going to be using more weight than a pea.
You see pipe and an empty bar, but we're using 10-pound bumpers for most of the time here till we get that working. Just right. How are you training her strength? So that you're building up the horsepower to match the technique your building. 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 most meet the needs of what she's ultimately going to do in her? Technique is good
enough. So think about it this way, if you look at Peak power production, when I say this, you take the force.
Course, so how much load is on the bar and you take the velocity and we plot it against each other at some point, if it's too light, but very, very heavy is not powerful opposite of the spectrum. Same thing happens. So the question is, where is that crossover point? Which there's enough power or there's enough velocity and enough Mass? Well this is actually hyper specific to the exercise and since we're on the power of the weightlifter and we're 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
40% of your one rep, max you'll have Peak power. So if you can bench, press 200 pounds and you want to train power on the bench press, you should probably put 80 pounds on the bar, something like that. 30%, if you move up to a more compound Movement Like a squat, instead of being a 30 to 40%, it's more like 40 to 50 percent for most people of your Peak. So if you're again, if you're Max's 200 pounds in the squat, maybe you put 100 pounds of if you go to a clean and jerk or a snatch that number gets much higher to like 80 to 90 percent. So a lot of folks won't hit Peak power.
Power in a snatch, until they get to like, 90% of their winter. IMAX, if you do, 90% everyone at Max on a bench plus, you are going to be moving super slow and you will not be producing a power. So the optimum number. And by the way, the more training you are, the more that curve is shifted to the, right? So you can produce more power at a higher load relative. Look the how heavy to put it on the bar. To maximize power is very dependent upon the movement in the question. You ask like, how we're gonna get this person stronger? It's not going to come from these exercises. If that's the technical limitation. You may have to
The Kettlebell and do like a heavy kettlebell swing, maybe you want to do an R DL, maybe a deadlift, 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 percent, or probably even higher. Then you're not really going to be truly testing strength because you're still going to be super limited by technique. Because you're not even at the peak power
yet and you'd put again just going back to that. That's a super interesting. And I've never thought of it through the lens of how that.
You so much by exercise but benchpress tricep press down. Maybe bicep curl, you're going to hit Peak power lower in that range 30 to 40% per load. Yeah, you go to a leg press or squat or deadlift, your 40 to 50 depending on the person. Yep percent of 1rm and once you move to something so insanely technical, you got to get close to 80 maybe even 90% of 1rm.
Yeah. And that's because the nature of the exercise, you get to explode. It's what we call a triple extension, right? So it's an explosive hip knee and Ankle extension there.
It's going to be so limited by the skill that you got to go having before you're getting the peak power, let alone Peak
strength. Last year, I swapped out my leg press machine for one of the Kaiser ones. So it's the, you know, pneumatic device and I love it because it's giving me power by rep, and it's so funny. Now, I haven't been able to figure out the exact formula for max power, but that's generally what I'm trying to hit, right? I usually use power as the metric. I'm training to and then I look at the fall off and fatigue. So now I'm going to pay more attention to that which is am I truly hitting Peak power?
Our at about 50% of 1rm and that kind of stuff. So that's so
cool. I can't wait. If you're pretty trained, you might even closer to 60% and is it like a front squat machine?
Because there's no, that's the seated leg press machine. It's
like, oh yeah, you might be higher. You probably be somewhere in that range. Kind of just depends
on what for that. That's cool.
That's what here 20-plus years ago I was in a facility training professional athletes and we had some of those machines and I went probably personally, I don't know, six maybe eight weeks straight just using that Kaiser.
Shame and all I did for training was try to hit the highest watt output I could do, didn't care how many reps it took. Didn't care how many sets I would take a break. I would rest I'll try it again and I would go until I got a higher number come back the next week and I went up for eight weeks just by trying to optimize power output. The thing you talked about earlier the velocity transducer there's another way of training here for strength or for power that is velocity Based training which is almost exactly what we're talking about which is instead of worrying about the
Wait 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 breaks, and that's how we're going to maximize power output. It's very, very effective method rather than just putting an arbitrary number of reps down, you're going to go Peak power
output. That's sort of how I use the device now, right? Which is I say for this load, I should be this many meters per second and when I can't do that twice, consecutively the sets over and sometimes that means the set ends at 5:00.
And sometimes that means the set ends at 8:00, but you agree that, and I don't know this sort of stems from my belief, which might be totally unfounded. That I'm quote, unquote, sort of wasting reps if I'd be better off, resting and coming back and doing it again faster and harder, and three minutes, then eking out more slow. Reps, is there any validity to
that? That's not on file at all? There's strong science on that. Brian man, at the University of Miami has done a ton of great stuff on velocity Based training. You can check out a lot of his work but there's a training concept called cluster sets.
And so clusters have been shown to be highly effective for strength, power, and even hypertrophy surprising enough. But at what cost Rose is this, let's say you were going to do six. Repetitions in your set. Let's say five just keep it consistent five reps, you could do we know one, two, three, four, five. No breaks in between, or a cluster set, says you going to do one rep, you're going to take a five to 20. Second rest will do the next rep, five to twenty five, to twenty five to twenty. So you're still doing quote-unquote five. But you might
Accumulated, you have micro braids micro breaks, that's what clusters are and they are extremely effective because they do exactly what you just mentioned the quality. And when I'm by quality here, I mean power output velocity output, Etc. It goes up because you reduce fatigue and specifically reps, three, four and five. Those will be much higher quality. So the old way we would say it is instead of getting five reps, you get five first reps, which is much more important, right? So you can five higher quality on, so the aggregate quantity.
Quality Force output, total achieved, velocity whatever is much higher. So it's very, very effective. Now let's funny is weightlifters. Olympic weightlifters, I've done this naturally for 50 years. So when they do a set of like safe 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 5 to 10 seconds and you do so your three reps like Takes a Minute. Yeah, he's like PR triple. It's like yes sandwich in between reps. It's not true.
Like, what are you doing? Mr.
Email between those are pure Donnell, two sets of one. But there's a reason now may not be optimal for
other may not be optimal for hypertrophy. May not be applicable for Pure strength but here we're talking about the most powerful movement.
Super effective for Pure strength, super
effective. It is so yeah. So just to be clear. Would you even Advocate this if you're trying to increase your deadlift you think it? Oh yeah, if your Samurai do 5 reps on this deadlift, you
I'd actually say it might be better to do five ones with ten second break in
between. If you're going for Pure strength, no doubt about it, good research on
that, okay? So that's super interesting to
know. Again, a little caveat here, get a little deep, exactly. Like what your coach said earlier, what was the goal here? Because if the goal was pure pure pure strength, great, if the juror was though like some strength but we need to accumulate
with a bit of muscular endurance,
then you would not maybe not want to take that break. So everything matters, I guess one way to say it, so I love that. By the way, just like what was the goal here? That's
Best coaching thing ever, like what we trying to do here today?
It's great coaching advice suffer. So, how often do you want this woman in the
gym? So here's the fun part. Oh, this is really good, because the total load is low. You can do this every day, right? You're talking about a small number of reps, not to fatigue, not at all to fatigue. You're talking about a lightweight you can go every day. There's no reason why you couldn't go do some power training, pick any power sport
basketball. Just about to say, this is no different than saying I'm gonna go.
Playback. So different, it's better because there's even less fatigued than you because there's a lot of talking about some, okay? So, as long as you keep these high-quality, now, if you are doing these two fatigue set to 25 seconds rest in between, and then that's the whole different thing. But if you're doing these non fatiguing, which is what you need to have for power and skill. So there's a very important point for power and skill development. They need to be non fatiguing. If you're getting to fatigue, you're not doing either one of those things. Now, you can get to fatigue if you're trying to produce a different adaptation, which is maintenance of power through fatigue, which is fine, but that's not the same thing.
You're not going to improve your Peak Power by fatigue doesn't happen. So these sessions are kind of like, quote, unquote, boring. You're not going to get a big sweat, you're not gonna get a big Palm, you're not gonna throw up on the floor afterwards. It's sort of like, okay, and you go home like damn and this is honestly why they're generally not very popular. Like I got powerful but I don't look any different and losing weight. I'm not, I don't have any of these other feedback mechanisms and says it suggests. I got a good workout in, despite the fact it is very high quality training. You just not getting that feedback so in
Earning power development stuff. Very, very low fatigue. That's the goal,
which type of athletes that are not weightlifters. Do you have doing these
exercises all basically everyone, it's hard to pick a sport where power development is not important. Caveat here, if your heavyweight champion of Bellator, your professional UFC fighter, and my throwing maximum weight overhead and catching it all the time. I wouldn't hesitate to do it but a lot of times they just simply have problem not going to happen. I don't.
Take to do with professional baseball players, don't hesitate to do a pictures though. Many of them don't have shoulder without getting too technical. Your shoulder needs to slide and move in a very specific way especially when you're pitching and if they don't have that then we would walk away from this or if they don't want to it's fine, you can get away from it. Other than that football player. Wrestlers skiers tennis players. Same thing if your 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 any one else can really go after these things. If it's all done, appropriately.
Lee, it's a fantastic exercise or set of exercises. Rather,
let's talk about something that ties into both weightlifting in powerlifting that I used to do. I don't remember if it was just Bro Science, but empirically, it seemed to be true. I used to have this set that I really enjoyed doing. So it was a heavy deadlift so it was either a two, three or four rep deadlift and it was super setted with. I think I do it as a jump plyo or a drop.
Basically it was a plyometric in between and the empirical observation was both helped each other so it doesn't sound like that. Should be the case. It doesn't sound like my rest between deadlifts are plyometrics but yet it did seem to make me stronger. Now maybe that was psychological but there was a sort of Bro Science belief I had that that was doing something to the muscle fiber, to get it. Ready to lift heavy. It sounds like there might be some validity here.
Now, there's a lot of science here. So what you're referring to is a
On we call Post activation potentiation.
That's right, post activation potentiation
around for a long time. Very classic Elmwood Hanuman size principle, so 1950s 54 56, 58 sort of a series of papers back then but basically remember her another the conversation we talked about fast which is slow twitch fibers. Well there are things called motor units so when a nerve comes down and goes into muscle it has a whole bunch of muscle fibers in that. So the nerve and all the fibers collected together, it's called a motor unit. All
The fibers in that motor unit of the same fiber type. So all the facets ones, all the selected ones, whatever, and these are spread throughout the muscle. So what happens is when you do low-velocity movement like right now, I'm doing all these things. I'm using low threshold motor units and these tend to be slow twitch ones. So make sense, if I go to scratch my eyeball, I don't want to be producing maxxforce and not a good strategy, right? The best strategy is you start with the lowest Force output humanly possible and then you work your way up. And that's because this principle, another one.
I'm called all or none which means when a muscle fiber contracts it contracts with 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 could activate it and all of them get activated at 100 percent contraction. So, what happens is I go to scratch my eyeball and I activate the motor units that are the smallest and weakest. It's not necessary like that, but
Proof of concept here. And now I realize, oh, I'm not scratching my eyeball this time. Now, I'm actually picking up a medicine ball. Okay, I'll activate those same initial motor units, and I'll activate some other ones and some more ones, and then I realize I'm not picking a medicine ball and picking up a car off the ground. Now I'll activate more and more and more and more of these higher threshold motor going to those tend to be the more, the fast twitch fibers. So in the case of post activation potentiation, what's happening is you're doing that deadlift. I think you said dad left and then a plaid looking apply. Oh, you do that deadlift.
And because the size principle, and you're requiring Force production, you are activating higher threshold motor units. Then when you put the barbell down and you go to do your jump, those are still engaged in activated. So now you can actually jump with more force and velocity, because you've sort of turned them on an issue, you've activated them and so it's 100%. And there's a lot of signs Lee Brown, whose lab is running out. Brought me over to Cal State, Fullerton is done legendaries, a Lifetime Achievement Award winner, legendary work in this area. You can go also goes the other way.
So this is fun when it comes to power training or speed training. People tend to think about things like resistance. So, in other words, if you've ever done sprinting and you've like drug, a sled, or had a parachute on great, you've done vertical, jump training, you've had like the bands and hold you down, this is all added resistance and that's fine for cheating, you acceleration which is moving over inertia quickly. However, the other side of the equation is if you want to get fast, I'm sort of jumping the gun here. We're kind of moving into our so you one, but it's fun, right?
You actually want to also practice moving faster than you can currently move. This is what we
call over here, because I had a friend who was a sprinter in college and they would do down hill Sprints, like they would do. 40-yard dash down an incline of
6%. Six is pretty aggressive. Either way, it's over
speed, maybe it was for it was like, basically, their legs were turning over at a speed that they would normally not even be used to turning
over. Yep. So instead of dragging the parachute, you turn around and have the bungee cord, pull you a little bit or you run downhill or you do something with
We actually had a device in our lab. That is a harness that came down to you, and we could reduce your body weight by 5 10, 15, even 20 percent. And you can do all your vertical jump training, which we did with the volleyball team for one semester and you're jumping higher than you've ever jumped. So it's the same Vex sort of post activation potentiation or Pap in Reverse. So you're actually learning to move faster than you can possibly move. So then when you go to actually do your work and you move faster in the best example of this, with Lee's work was you've seen baseball players swing a baseball bat and before
Go up to play or they go up there at bat a lot of times, they'll put it in what's called a donut that weighted thing on it. Yeah, don't it on the right and so you swing that thing, it feels heavy when you take it off and your baseball bat feels light, and that's great. Awesome. Well, he actually looked at whether or not if you swing a wiffle ball bat. So this is a plastic bat super light. But you can swing really really, really fast prior to that actually improved baseball bat, velocity more so than the donative so Pap, that's the donor. Great, super effective, but also unloaded super super fast.
Is equally effective as well. I getting. So if you want to maximize you probably should play with a little bit of both and in Spectrum you can do this with bands and chains. Like a lot of times we'll do is take a like a heavy band that you deadlift with and you can put underneath your lats and hook onto a thing above you. And you could do a system vertical, jump training and just start flying and lots of other ways you could do it. Yeah, that's a very real phenomenon and the reason I brought that up is because you mentioned, you felt like the deadlifts helped the plyo and I explain to you. It did
they both seem to make the
transfer?
A point. So the plyo help the deadlift because of the overspeed thing. This is called complex training, not complex as in like multiple body parts or things like complicated. Not a complex as in like a stack of different exercises which is a kind of a different term here. So there's a different kind of strategy you could do called contrast training but this specifically refers to like a complex where you would do. If you're going to do this, you need to stick within the same principles. So your total reps per set should still be around 325. So in other words, you could do like to deadlifts
And then three vertical jumps or whatever. Don't do five, deadlifts and then five vertical jumps. Your total set is not like ten. You certain the fatigue. Yeah, you can do this. All kinds of waves. So will this bench press and then medicine ball put or rotational movements
tons? I mean, the thought that I had at the time was, this is so ridiculous. But why does a sprinter not 30 seconds or minute before they hit the blocks, do a heavy set of three dead
lifts? Well the first of all they do, do they okay when they can? Okay, the reason why they don't see it
As often is because logistically, you have to have a bunch of dumb both barking. Yeah, it's not uncommon depending on what facility there in, they'll be in the back, the hit those, and those and then we'll walk right out, going. If you gotta put your spikes on, all that
stuff, it was just so counterintuitive, right?
Yeah. So you can't do this and then an hour and a half later go round and go faster. So you haven't window, you can do it any, get your spikes and like so there's some like to just things but it's very common to training when it was easier to way with. So it's super, super
effective. Let's move on to strong, man, we don't have to focus specifically on like an actual strong man.
Competition but maybe focus on Feats of Strength. That also tend to require a lot of stamina. I don't know with the classic strongman activity, be like an enormous sled pull or something like that. Pulling a truck picking up a barrel and throwing it and walking over and picking it up again and throwing it. I mean there's a lot I can think of my favorite was Tire flipping. There was a 450-pound tire. The gym, I used to belong to and how long it would take you to do 25 days. Lips was a
metric of your I love. Yes. Farmers carries.
There's tons of rope pulls all kinds of good stuff here.
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 breath. There's almost no limit to what a quote-unquote. Strongman 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 know starting to expand the
Of the Gen pop into what we're talking about. So you at the outset said, the three things that mattered most respess Affinity 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 strong man is great. I mean probably like you a little bit. One of the reasons I got in this field is because of the strong man being played on ESPN at 3:00 in the morning. 1990s, thank you, Bill Kazmaier like this.
This is a whole generation of us. We like, what is this stuff? This is incredible, right? So there is still is some specificity like when you get to those competitions because you kind of know what you're going to do. But yeah, this is whether don't write. Like someone who is optimized for grip strength, hold the atlas stones or something's not gonna be. The person is optimized for the deadlift, carry the deadlift competition or the the overhead press or whatever, right? You'll see people who win three straight events and I'll get dead. Last in another one CrossFit has a very similar feel here. So we're going to test you in month, two different planes here. And if you're great at deadlifting, you're probably gonna be poor.
Saying that's just sort of how it goes with this. Right. Right. So 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 way you went in strong, man or woman is how many reps typically can you do at a very heavy load. It's a global feat of strength but it's not to the same level of high Precision. So if you were to, then technically take everyone from a strong woman competition and the same way classes, everyone from the same equivalent level of power.
Lifting competition, they Squat and probably higher on Aggregate and the powerlifting competition. However, if you said, let's put on 95% of your winter Max and see how many reps you can do. The strong one would absolutely smash again on aggregate. You can 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 too fatigued, but we're probably going to do a little bit safer than we would typically do. So you don't generally see like a bench press to fatigue on a strong man. You don't see it.
Left to fatigue often. You're going to see something like a car lift and the reason they do that is because you can actually load the bar lot higher in the air. And so it ends up being almost closer to like an ordeal. So you take that knee cross out of it and allows you to do a lot more reps. It's still brutal still like insane. That's what I do. Some funky stuff like that. A farmers carry. You can do that as heavy as possible and drop it. When you're done, it kind of hedge in that direction. Same thing you why you would never see a snatch and clean&jerk way way way too risky. It's going to be a
log press overhead awkward weird. But
and that's why I, like, even the tire flip, like I remember people would say like, come on, how can you flip a tire this 450 pounds? It's like, well, remember, you're never fully lifting a 450-pound thing off the ground. Like, when the first movement of the deadlift, it might be 250 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 ultimately your fatiguing at least for me my cardio respiratory
Re and muscular fatigue hit almost at the same time.
Hundred percent, you got a full blown up, your forearms be gone. In fact, you're not actually really cool is maybe five or six years ago. They started putting heart rate monitors on people in these competitions and then they'll broadcast them. They're just pegged the whole time. They're like 180, don't know, it's entire time, max heart rate, it's lovely. The truly which is actually one of the, another reason why one can 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 very
Read it requires stabilization and all kinds of random movements, but it is super heavy and too high levels of Teague. So yeah, it's a great
moment. 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. You know, he goes to the gym to do a little bit of cardio and do a little bit of strength training, but there's never been specificity to the train.
He doesn't have any injuries that we need to worry about, let's just put that in there at the moment. So there's nothing that's truly off-limits but he has no technique. He's not coming in on a foundation of. He knows what it's like to deadlift at least twice as body weight or something like that. He just he doesn't have that. But he says Andy, I'm interested in this both because I think it would be a fun competition to do. But also I think it's more in line with my long-term health goals. So I don't want to get injured. I definitely do not want to get injured doing this.
And I want to build to do it for quite some
time. Cool. So what you want to do is build a week, a frequency, and what exercises you do throughout the week. So that you are not doing too many things, too often in the same about our. So, for example, if you're going to work on your Farmers carries, that's great today. But you then probably won't want to work on a movement like a deadlift, maybe the next day because you're going to be fatigued with your grip. Okay great. So then maybe you pick a non 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, or very the movement patterns, is the first up on say, repetition range? I would probably stick in the like 528 window initially for this person because you can get enough little fatigued. You can also bail pretty easy. It's heavy and you're practicing. This is a big distinction. You want to practice perfect.
Titian. And so what I mean by that is instead of going to like an ar ar ar or rpe, I'm going to go to technical failure. So we're going to do a goblet squat and we're going to do a hundred pound sandbag or 150 pound medicine ball in front of you. And we're going to front squats and we're going to do with a goal. Here is to do a torso, 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 bring
Technique. So there's going to continue to learn whole technique pull technique called position and I would do the same for their overhead pressing, all that stuff, right? We start to get into bed positions that are lopat. All right, we're done. And so getting them to technical. Failure is the phrase that you would use here is the way I would go about it and you can actually do these more frequently than the average, same exact Avatar could in powerlifting because the movements are more varied. See the recovery is probably going to be a little bit higher rather than getting the same exact locked in position and just sort of moving in one plane you're going.
Get sore, but there's also not as much of a typically like eccentric, Landing demand. Like there is a weight lifting there's eccentric but it's typically controlled or it's intentionally uncontrolled
cropping or something, right?
So you can get away with more volume because recovery is going to be a little bit higher there.
Tell me going back to our weightlifter and powerlifter. Why would we not also, or maybe we do and we just didn't state it explicitly. Why would we not also Force? Technical failure into the mix? Is there ever a time when we would
Tolerate a break and form where we see more lumbar kyphosis or lordosis then we think is actually healthy. But we want to learn how to grit through that. Because sometimes I'm single rep, max sucks, no matter
what, with the case of Olympic weightlifting, it almost takes care of it for you. So if you have a break in position, you're probably going to miss a lift. So it's self limiting that way a little bit especially when you get past a certain load. Like you could do 30 percent of your one or Max with very poor technique. But as you start getting up higher and higher, it becomes
It's again a little more self limiting. You definitely want to make sure your leg position in all of them but the technical demands of something like a bench press or fairly low. There's only a couple of joints that really need to be taken care of as long as they're. Okay, you there, when you get into something like a snatch, every joint has to be in the right spot or you're in can go Anki, a deadlift is the same thing. Like a deadlift is not as complicated. A squat is fairly complicated though but there's also variations are going to do probably going to do some sort of box quad or chair squat
You're going to limit the range of motion. And so, the last thing I want to say about that is since the goal of powerlifting is to achieve a one rep max, you're actually not trying to achieve optimal range of motion. 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 limited range of motion. So they're actually doing this like pseudo technique which is not to maximize actual human strength is to maximize the score.
On the barbell which is not necessarily the same thing and so you're probably going to be working so hard on that technique. That it almost keeps you out of the squirrely areas because you're trying to just, instead of getting this like big long range of motion things, like you're just trying to get through the stuff, you're going all the way down a 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 a little bit, they're taken care
of what percentage of powerlifters deadlift with a traditional narrow grip versus how
know,
Actual number there
is that simply a leg length to arm length difference. Like for me to mow is so much more comfortable than
narrow, generally. It's going to be, it just gets easier on the back, but it depends on three factors. It depends on your shank to femur ratio, 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 forces. Back string. So strong hips do well with sumo week hips are going to get smashed with some oh.
A lot of ways to go about it. There's a whole argument, we could have here but we'll probably skip it.
We'll save that for the next one. Okay, so our strong man is training very frequently. It's highly varied. We're in more reps and we're training to technical failure. Meaning we're not pushing low quality reps. When we break technique the set is
over. Okay, let me differentiate the reason why I brought technical failure up. And this one is because you're doing a combination of high load and high fatigue,
it's just too risky.
D to break correct
form if you break form a little bit and you're doing two reps, okay? Like the load is high, so that's the danger. But now you're combining both danger which is load and fatigued and so that's why I like around to plant the distinction from that Avatar.
This is also an athlete who just talked to me about volume. How many hours a day, are they training? This is not the guy who's driving around Walmart for two hours trying to find a parking spot. This person's fit their burning matches all
day. They're gonna have to be to get to this kind of training, the no science here. You're going to walk.
Away from science. Unlike the previous ones we could talk about which we didn't get into number of reps, in terms of total volume to hit per month for like a weightlifter, things like that, you don't have any science on this because like how do you quantify holding 100 pound medicine ball? Your chest and 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 and I can say, how many reps did you do over 70% of your one? Rep max and that's the number we're going to because there's two exercises. It's very easy with this one. Like how do I
Time. How do I quote the fact that you did one exercise, you did it for 40 yards with the other exercise? You did it for seven reps? I don't know. So I would give you basic progression recommendations here, which is 10%. So in general, regardless of physical exertion, if you increase your total volume by more than 10% per week, you tend to start getting into problems. That's the thing I would flag is like, keep it below a 10% progression per week and start lower than you think and then just add that
up and again,
Um how are we even thinking about it so hard here? It's not because in lifting like I'm keeping a mental tally of sets and Reps per body part, sort of thing or whatever. Right. How are you doing that with 100 pound medicine ball for seven steps versus 50? Pound medicine ball for 25 steps. They both heard about the same. Does that mean,
this is the problem we have. In exercise science comparing lifting to endurance. How do I compare three sets of 10 at 70% to?
45 minutes at 65%, VO2 max, I don't know. You have no compared to their.
This is sort of where in cycling, as I'm sure. You know, we use something called the TSS, right? So the training stress score, and then we have a chronic and acute training, stress torso as a cyclist. I used to have a dashboard basically that take the data from my power meter. So every day I'd come in from my training and I took 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.
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. So super important number everything is, you know, in cycling is metric tan that FTP number when I come in from a ride that ride might say, well, Peter you went and rode for three and a half hours, you utilized this, many kilojoules of energy. Your average power was this many watts and your
Power was this many watts and normalized power. It's a power function calculation that takes into account the variability. So, the more the normalized powered 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, we're so good when you had that data at telling you where you are in terms of overtraining under training. And so if there was just some way we could get that,
That out of more complicated movements. And again, I'm just thinking, like, obviously, you could get that out of heart rate, you could probably get that out of heart rate, variability, you could probably get that out of ventilation. So if there is some way to capture ventilatory rate, but other than that we're missing power, I mean that's the bottom line is we just don't have the metric for power that output is what's making that, I guess. So difficult,
right here in this particular case you would jump to physiology. You would go to HR V certainly like heart rate and probably not be great.
One, but you'd have to go to its official logical response rather than the actual metric, which is one could argue better. It's like who cares if you're at x amount of reps per week, if your physiology is fantastic, the thing is, you know, I'm sure people who spend their career coaching and this area probably have better answers for you. If it is me coaching, I would go to physiology. Like we're taking physiology metrics and we're gonna see what happens.
Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the things we used to do before we had our HRV to look at was look at resting heart rate in the morning and look it. I forget.
The term was for it but it was basically willingness to train, oh yeah, sounds silly. But it turns out to be very highly correlated with
burnout, it still is still like the single best metric. You can
take. We only used a score of zero to three if I recall. It wasn't like rocket science,
right? Yeah. It doesn't have to be crazy at all. Like we will take this metric still to the day, I die. Yeah, there's manipulation. That can happen there. Of course, and we always do something else, but it's going to tie very, very tightly typically, to even something like, HRV, it resting, heart rates, okay? It's just too slow.
And the magnitude of change is too little and so HRV is much more sensitive that way. You're not going to see a change in resting heart rate until you get far down the road. Like you're getting cooked here, you can see them very quickly matter of days, certainly within a week but they turned me where you wouldn't may or may not necessarily see the heart rate. I'm but nonetheless mood, how much you want to train any number of ways. You can ask that, how do you feel today? That's a good one. Just like how do you filter? Don't get many context. What do you mean feel? No, no. Just like how do you feel? That's it. Track that down and you can see that thing. In fact, you can actually
Do this, who done this with giant data sets that number alone. It's basically going to run the same as a, curvy over a big enough thing, like you're gonna see the same number the most part. So if you're working with like a big group of people and you don't have HRV, say middle school, kids or something like that or people just ask that again. They'll be some outliers day-to-day and some squirrely people and all that, but you're going to get a pretty good sense of.
Yeah, I mean, the takeaway here for someone listening is knowing how you feel the day of and listening to how you feel the day of is really important. If you do not
Like pushing yourself hard in the gym on a given day. That's a really good sign that you shouldn't be.
You have to be a little bit careful
here. It's a sort of give it the warm-up, give it the warm-up phase and then make the decision before you get to the working
since anyone has ever. Well, exercise knows plenty. Well, some of the days you feel awful our PR news, you're going to eventually set a record that day, and there's a little bit of, like, on the Jackal scale of, like, okay, like you just suck it up, mental toughness, all that stuff. But then there's also like, you don't want to just go nuts, you know,
but I would say just because you feel
Happy doesn't mean you don't exercise that day. It's a question of. How hard are you pushing that day? There are days, you're going to push in. There are days, you're not going to push. I would argue. There's no day. You shouldn't be doing something. You got to get through the warm-up phase before you make the distinction of whether it's a hard day or not.
This is where autoregulation training becomes so awesome. If you use things like, say, you have your velocity transducer, and you know that when you're at 50%, you're typically a one meter per second bubble. And if all of your metrics are down, it's a pretty good indicator of like, all right? This is not today.
I feel terrible, you don't want to be there, you're truly giving it an effort, but all the numbers are down. Okay, we're back in it today. That's a nice way to put to do
it. Okay, let's talk about CrossFit obviously there's a pretty decent overlap between CrossFit and strong man. And the CrossFit is, there are events that take a really long time. There are certain sets that can take 20 minutes that are metabolically as demanding, is what most people could barely do in an hour, tell, folks, a little bit about how CrossFit works. I don't know if we distinguish between
in CrossFit with a Capital C in CrossFit with a little C because there's a lot of CrossFit like stuff that isn't may be branded CrossFit, but I think for our purposes let's just make it all the same.
Well, call it and I don't mean this as any pejorative, but we'll just call it like competitive circuit training and just anything like that, this is what actually thing. That's really cool about sports as we get to invent new ones all the time and we get to like continue to test human capability and a lot of ways, it's really, really fun. So CrossFit is scored a little bit differently. It's a nice combination. There are some weight lifting movements so you
See, one of the competition's being a one rep, max Nach. That's it. Don't think, right? You might see it as like an endurance event. So you might have to run a marathon or cycle of marathoner or something like that, right? And you might see someone who's more circuit training type of you know, 20 kettlebell swings +3, snatches, post a vertical jump and 20 pull-ups and many rounds that you can do in 10 minutes, you know, some things like that. So the idea is you try to combine them into these things and every event gets scored just like strongman and at the end of the 30 days or whatever it is we're as high as 10 points.
It's just like strong man, so similar, strong, men like that. It's not one of mine. It's many. It's not one single structured exercise. It's a lot. It's typically a combination of exercises in the same. Exact one similar to weightlifting and technically use barbell movements, it's typically big complex movements and all that and it's similar to power lifting in terms of like hate sometimes Max rank matters. So it's a little bit of like, a combination of all these things. So one thing that they do, though, if we compare this two strong, man is the absolute loads are lower. And so,
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 Fifteen reps, not always, but something like that, right? So it's a log press, you're probably not doing 100 reps in the long press. Some people might even give valuable press the log once or twice and the winner typically has five or six or ten, or twelve reps roughly here. CrossFit, competition volume tends to be way higher. It is hundreds of repetitions per event sometimes. And so what we've done is it's still very, very strong.
It's still very, very powerful but it is less you won't see anybody ever touch 600 pounds and a CrossFit competition to every event in strong - 600 pounds plus you might see 1,600 pounds. It's way, way, way higher, but you won't see strong, man, ever reach 65 reps in an exercise that just never happens. So, it's hedge that way, if you look at the avatar for a highly competitive male, crossfitter 59 to 511, 190 to 210 pounds strongest men. It's 66
It's 62. It's 330 380, 400. Like the
just so there's no weight class in strong, man. There's no weight class. Is there a weight class in
CrossFit? There are some way classes in strongman. Now, it's kind of like big medium little. Okay.
And what about in CrossFit besides the gender
difference, gender, and age is the only distinction that you have those
ones. And I guess the reason CrossFit can get away with that is you're going to get punished. The heavier you are in some of the endurance events and you're going to get punished, the lighter, you are, and some of the strengths of n. So the idea is, that's probably why everybody kind of coalesces.
Around 200 pounds or 100
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 gonna get hammered. If you're over 200 pounds, you have to do 100 pull-ups in five minutes. They're just going to get crush on that stuff. Now, CrossFit is wonderful and it's actually nice point to talk about another point. If you were to take an elite athlete in any of these categories, there's a misconception here because I got a lot of from our first conversation and a lot of people were like, oh my gosh you're disregarding crossfitters there,
VO2, max has our Elite, the rubble. I like, no, they're not. They're unbelievable athletes. And they are way more cardiovascularly fit than strong, man. And certainly way more than powerlifters weightlifters, but you're not going to find the average crossfitter that has the same vo2max, as the average equals only high level cyclists. No chance. What you're misrepresenting here is not that they have done something that we've never seen before. It's the fact that they are just phenomenal athletes, like just absolutely phenomenal athletes. The reason I say this is you know these numbers
Better than I, you can bring me correct me here. But if you were to take a high level cyclist, their Peak power is astronomically High. Despite the fact that these are, you know, quote unquote, pure endurance, athletes that the wattage. If they can kick out on a 20, second Peak burst on a bike with torch, anything, any of you've ever seen, like it's insanely High, the wattage like my
greatest regret in speaking about this stuff is that I have yet to come up with a way to explain to people what wattage feels like.
You see, I think people have an intuitive understanding of what 500 pounds feels like because you've been to Home Depot. You picked up the 50-pound bag of salt and you can sort of say wow deadlifting 500 pounds would sort of be like picking up 10 of these at once. However, when I try to explain to somebody that when Bradley Wiggins thousand Watts feels like when Bradley Wiggins absolutely smashed the one-hour record, which is generally regarded as the most
In pain a human being can endure in any sport. The one-hour record in cycling is that Mark and he held four hundred and forty 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 peddled, I have to say, look, come and sit on a bike. I'm going to set the urge to
W. Let's see how long you can go. And the average person is going to not make it one minute, not even close. They will not come close to Lasting a minute. The average person is going to be dead at 20 seconds, they will fail. And by the way, they might weigh 180 pounds and I'm going to say he weighed 138 pounds or whatever, uat might weigh. 245 Wiggins was tall, he was really 61 but the point is he looked like a beanpole
And the force he could generate for 60 minutes is more than you can generate for 30 seconds. I don't have a way to explain what that feels like. Because shy of doing it, shy of putting W two pedals, you can't feel
it. I mean, 1,000 like you put 1,000 up there, that's a big, big number. I mean, I wouldn't be crazy number for cyclists peated at the 22nd burst or
whatever. Not only that he's a cyclist is doing that. After riding, six hours. And after writing six hours at an average wattage of
D w, 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 a suggesting is when you take really World caliber athletes, they're really good at a lot of things. They're just really, really athletic and so what you're comparing your power output to that person. You're thinking oh my God, that guy so powerful and he is but I promise you I could put a whole bunch of
Of athletes on there that can kick 1200-1300 for sure, way higher than if you had a highly power drain person. So when you say like these crossfitters our miracle that they're not, they're just so fit. They're so strong. They're on.
Really, what makes them special is? Their great generalists. Yeah, there's nothing that they're the best at the gymnast is better at gymnastics the weightlifters. Better at weightlifting. The power lifters better at powerlifting. The strongman is better at strongman and the endurance athlete is better at endurance. There's no question.
Yeah.
Hear the comment to about well, they could do this CrossFit competition and then they could go do a weightlifting competition the next day. Like, yeah, but they're not winning medals, not a national events are not going to occasionally. They might make a world team or something like that but that's one person.
What makes them special and it's worth acknowledging is how good they are at so many things so
good, so so good. I don't know if you probably to follow but like likely runs on days, like the stuff that they would come up with, to try to get Rich Froning to lose it, just didn't matter, they made up all kinds of stuff and he smashed
Everything you can't come up with enough accolades describe how talented these people are. You can't. It's not that at all the men, the women like what they can do is
phenomenal. It just comes back to what you said at the outset right? Which is ultimately specificity win. And I actually write about this in my book, I was like look when I was cycling and it was all I was doing. I was a really one-dimensional athlete. My upper body was useless. Well, you wanted to be, you know, I wanted it to atrophy away. I was not good at running even even though I had the engine
Running was hard for me to impact was not pleasant. If I was sprinting, I couldn't get my heart rate over 130 because I didn't have the leg pounding strength to cope with it. No lateral movement, no flexibility, no balance. Like there is no other dimension to it other than turning pedals over quickly. Again, not to take anything away from the best cyclist in the world, their Marvel's of human physiology. But it's super, super specific. And again I think that's true for every athlete. We're talking about. Once we get into these strong men and Crossfit athletes though.
So, you start to see what in some ways. Impresses me a little bit more, which is just broad, remarkable Feats of strength and endurance across a great
range. Think about last examples, just think about an elite marathon time. Let's call it two hours to make math easy, because it's getting there. Technically, it's been broken,
right? Tip shogi sort of did it once. Yeah, unofficially with some caveats.
Stop there, you break that down. What 4-minute 440 440 mile?
Yeah, maybe even quicker, maybe 434 something like that. It's insane.
We'll call for and a half. I don't know if hardly any people.
My
life could do that once most people couldn't hold that pace for a quarter
mile. Well, that's what I was going to get at so you break it down, even further, you're talking, 65 S 4 meter dash, you will not find many people on this Earth that can run a 65. Second 400 meter dash one time. You walk that down even further. That's a 12-second hundred meter dash. That's like a number that you might be a little more familiar with the best marathoners in the world with smash almost everyone. You know in 100 Ash there blazingly fast
Hey, everybody. In a 400 in a quarter-mile. It's insane. It's the same thing as the Bradley Wiggins example or, you know, any of the cyclists 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.
I'll tell you all the time, like go run a 400-meter Dash, like next time, Go Time so hard. Like I was like, oh yeah, I can be 60 things. Like they come in 85 seconds. You're very far off this number so don't conflate world-class the best we've ever known athletes.
To thinking these Concepts or then wrong. Because we're talking about general concepts with. In this case, I'll
CrossFit. So going back to this CrossFit athlete. How are they able to balance the volume? Because they're now pushing the envelope. So much between strength power and endurance. Then, at some point, you're robbing Peter to pay Paul. I mean, you have to, is that trade-off that you have to make in that training, a function of your incoming athleticism, your genetics, and maybe your goals you might
Look, I'm going to index to be better at these events than that events. Is that the only way you can basically do it? And there is no true way to have a global optimization strategy.
We don't have any science on any of this stuff and I've never coached crossfitters. So having said that there are some really really, really smart really smart people that are coaching crossfitters so they could probably walk you through what's going on here. But I don't have any science to go off of in general though. If you just look at physiology specificity, it does matter.
Right? So, if you were going to optimize somebody for strength, you could have one of two philosophies you could say, look, we're really, really, really strong or good at this stuff and we recover well, from it. So we're going to stay doing more of these strengths type things because we can actually get more total volume in because you recover. Well, from it, as an example or you can The Operators, you can say, hey look, we're going to go into a lot of strength because that's the weakest part we have and we're going to try to bring our weakness up. So it's kind of a coaching philosophy of maximize strength or try to minimize your biggest limitation in terms of like
actual total volume to get per week and stuff. Again, I don't have any actual numbers on that. Everyone does this quite differently? What I can say is it's so beautiful CrossFit in the sense that you need to have a ton of Baseline aerobic capacity, you need to have some Peak power. You need to have some strengths and you need to be highly anaerobic and you need to have real high recovery from anaerobic efforts. You have to find some sort of combination which it's like to me. One of the most if not the most fascinating part of the whole thing is like what do you do?
And nobody has an answer. It's just strategy. We're going to try to go here. The other strategy they have is just we're just going to hammer everyone see who's left and you're gonna be ready to go there.
So what do we know about heart rate recovery? As a model of Fitness, I'm guessing within the CrossFit athlete. That's a very important part of it. As you put it, the anaerobic recovery is
essential, it's a strong metric, it is very good. In fact, you'll see this there's a number of different places around the country where you can just go and get a VO2 max test done, I can go in and pay $100 or so.
Something, which is great. A lot of times, they'll actually, if they're good, they look at 12 and 3 minute heart rate recovery as well, because you can glean a lot of insight from there.
Do you also top of your head? What the metrics are that? We care about for 30? 60, 120 s recovery.
80% in two
minutes you mean within twenty percent of
Baseline, see your 200. There's no reason you should be above 162 minutes in. So, two minutes recovery. You should be well below, 160 beats if you're Max was 200. So, that would be 80% of your max, you should be well,
That by the to in a mark.
Oh, that's much slower than I would have thought. I would have expected within two minutes. You'd need
it would be like,
minimum minimum. Okay, what's considered?
Excellent 60. So in functional case, you're going to be down to this thing 120 beats, which is like, almost is going to feel like you're resting. After that, you're going to feel like you're barely even ventilating, but that would be a solid number to be at if you're above 80 though, it's like Sound the Alarm. This is a real big problem and they can walk yourself
down. Do we care? What an athlete's maximum heart rate is?
In particular or do we care much more about, for example, heart rate recovery and what they can do at their max heart rate. In other words, I'll give you an example, right? So vo2max surprisingly is not that correlated with speed, it's V vo2max that is right? So velocity at vo2max matters much more in running than vo2max in cycling, turns out vo2max not nearly as important as P. VO2, max power at vo2max but at least when I was
Training. We were not looking at heart rate recovery. Meaning I wasn't and my coach wasn't, but I wonder if like that's a metric that we should have been paying more attention to, in addition, to kind of p vo2max and FTP and all those other metrics.
If you look at vo2max, specifically, I can't come on a cycling. I don't know those data that literature. Well, I do not look running literature. You're gonna have three main components are going to predict endurance running and VO2 max is only one of them running economy is very, very important as the other one. So they're all three lactate threshold of courses. Like the sort of
triangle of things, any one of them on its face is not going to get you anywhere. And all three of them are still not going to get you everywhere. So movement economy on a bike, it's probably similar, probably more your power ratio, like, starts getting
on a bike. It's actually less believe it or not on a bike, it's FTP to
weight which is effectively efficiency. Like how far can you travel on a bike purplish?
That's what makes cycling to me. Such a remarkable feat of engineering. It's basically just machines, it's take your functional threshold. Power divided by how many kilograms you are? That's a number. If you line up everybody at the beginning of the
The
front and rank them in that order. That is the order. They will finish barring an accident head or a strategic blunder and you can make strategic
blunders because efficiency on a bike is super-high where efficiency and human movements like 20% er something like super super low, whatever that number is, when you actually start to pay attention, like what metrics do, you pay attention to max heart rate, you're going to find that as a predictor of any kind of performance know, with the exception of whether people stop wave prior to hitting a max heart rate. So, that would be like if you're going to do a VO2 max test, one of the
Five metrics. You look forward to identify, to make sure it was an actual Max test is whether or not they get close to their predicted, hurry Max. And so you will see this occasionally people stop at 150, 155 heart rate 160 maybe or something and they're not
when they should have been 175
correct. That's the like, can this happen normally I've had a lot of high-level athletes, Max Hardy 170 to 175, you're like very fit Fighters, the championship Fighters kind of thing, 5, 5 minute rounds are going to fight in the UFC and they like it's just sort of where you are, but they can also Cruise 168 for
Around take a 10-minute rest and do that for we're like, holy crap. Okay, so their ability to hang on at 95%, in this case, it's like 98% and they can just hang there for minutes or most people get to 98% and you have S of life before you're gasping for something. So, it is a little bit of crude. I've also had people myself included, I'm still, well, over 200 as a max heart rate. Well, my are to, like, it's nothing if I do a VO2 max test and I am like lower than 1.3. I know it was a not a Max test. Like technically you're not supposed over 1.1.
1.35 1.38. Those are not crazy number for me to hit. I just handle that stuff. Super well,
what's your resting rer is it still close to point seven point seven
five seven five typically you know as those numbers are like kind of over place that like my CO2 tolerance is also very very high. I can handles large buildup of Waste. My vo2max overall, does not particularly High relative to these things 55:58, depending probably lower than that right now. But I've never cross 60, its kind of relevant, but it's also
So the problem is, is you're very aware. I'm sure when heart rate gets too high, you start limiting time to fill
your pre load is low and your stroke volume goes down,
super low. So stroke volume gets super low so it's not always the best thing to be super high. You know, there's some other factors here in terms of like accuracy of measure and some other things to pay attention to. But in general, it's not a proxy. I don't know if we talked about the study, I did in Sweden with the cross-country skiers in their 80s and 90s. But I can't remember, I think our average max heart rate was like 150 140.
Date. These are 80 90 year olds and they didn't care at all. They were at 150 in there. Like,
it's amazing. Like, go lifelong athletes, though, these guys never got out. Oh yeah,
right. These guys were, these are from people who are world champions ever, stop totally world, champions, the 1940s and 50s and are still competing every year across country skiing. So never stopped to
Savages. These guys have VO2 max has in the mid 30s, probably still. Yep the same
92 year old. I think is vo2max was 38, I remember correctly, something like that. Several of them over 40.
T. 86 88, plus your bones crushing we have such a long conversation of the first time I can't remember if I told the story. So apologies, if I did Mama tell it again but one of them particular. So we were over in Stockholm doing this in these guys, I don't speak Swedish and they don't speak English and we're going to hospitals as cardiologists there. And we're trying to like as you do if your team accents like you're yelling and encouraging to go. Go go. Right. Whatever. And one of them got done. We are cycling, he got off. Except next the hospital bed, he took like three breaths. He's like
He said something I ask what they said. They like I said he didn't understand the instructions. He wants to try again and he got up and he started getting back on the bike. We're in the elk are like, whoa. Like I'm talking 15 seconds. Whatever it takes to take three breaths, he's just like God back on the bike again with her to go. I was like this guy and they're like no no and I was like let's go well let's see what he has, I love it. Cardiologist said
no again I think the CrossFit athlete in some ways is of all of the athletes, we're talking about here. The one that is most representative of maybe what our long-term
Our goal is not necessarily at that extreme because obviously, I think when people think CrossFit, they think of stuff that they're never going to do, but in terms of being a generalist, I think that's the closest one. We're going to see. So, is there anything that is off-limits? In other words, if you exclude pre-existing injury, so, you know, we're not talking about somebody with a labral injury, that can't be doing power cleans, and snatches, how much of your time and energy is going to go into max rep powerlifting.
Mints relatively heavy weight lifting movements given that you need to do so much other stuff and build that base of endurance. And let's just assume for the purpose of this discussion. You're optimizing around being the most, well-rounded not being a spike in one particular domain over another.
Okay 70/20/10. This is the number 70 2010. I got this from my friend Kenny Cain who ran CrossFit. La. So I think it's like the eighth or ninth CrossFit or one of the original Ones Still.
Coaching to this day, so been long it and the way that he programs it, he's in Santa Monica, so he doesn't have a lot of CrossFit competitors. The Avatar you explain is pretty much his client. It's people learn 3250 and all those things, his model works perfectly here. So what he says, is 70% of the time, you're in the gym, you're there for practice, and what I want to point out here is that doesn't mean we're like practicing barbell only and things like that. You're gonna go through a full workout. You're going to sweat, you're gonna 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 processing 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 compete 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 and you're going to try to get the best number. You can't in that workout, which is very different and I know
Notice the shift here, practice is 100% emphasis on quality, who cares about the score twenty percent of the time though? It's the opposite. What does it mean? We're going to 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 actually kind of doing the minimum amount we can to get up, get back down. We're being careful and calm and we're trying to get the highest score on this workout in the count. 10 percent 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 a sock basically. So if you do that in your brain, let's say the average person per month, it's going to work out 12 times. So that means all right, three times a week. I'm going to the gym for weeks S12. 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 gonna get stronger, you need to build some muscle, but the intention there, then maybe.
B3 of the workouts left are going to be those competition ones, and then one of them per month, we go absolutely nuts. Again, we're trying to not hold back or get after it and we're going to lay on the ground for an hour afterwards because it was just sort of awful. I think that's a very very good way to think about how you would want to train for a sport like Crossfit because the movements are what they are, you're going to get better in a lot of ways you can stay safe. You're going to get a little bit of that like
Oh, shit. This is going to be crazy today, like a better not drink tonight. Go to bed early because tomorrow is that cop? And then there's enough of the 20 percenters where it's like, it's really really hard this week. One day a week is super, super hard because the other big problem we see with the people that train like this, that also have real jobs is how much time they spend in sympathetic drive, and they end up just torturing themselves because it's too much high-intensity too often. And I 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 and blood pumping.
Getting feeling good. It's recovery that you're in for a 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 that's enough for most people that have other life stressors, you'll be able to recover from that stuff. But also then feel, you're not just sort of like not getting anything on your training, so 70-20-10, I think is the perfect model for this.
So, I'm glad you brought that point up. It's so important when I think about the difference between my life today, in my life, when I was 18, you know, there's a lot of things that were better when I was
18 just physiologically you're so much stronger and fitter and all the rest of it. But also a big part of it is there was no other sympathetic drive your point. Anyone who's got a teenager knows they're like the singularly most selfish creatures on the face of the Earth. Incapable of caring about anything that is not themselves. So, everything in my life, revolved around my workouts. Yeah, tell you a funny story one day when I was coming home from school, to do the third of my four workouts for the day. Because every day had four workouts in it. I forgot my key and I couldn't get in the house. So I
You broke into the house, like, actually smashed a window to break into my house, to make sure I could do the workout and that didn't strike me as a weird thing to do putting. I can't remember if I use my fist or a brick, but I literally just broke the window. Got into the house, didn't bother to clean it up and was in the basement hammering. The weights, when my mom came home and thought there was like a break, it didn't occur to me as a random thing. So, again, there's no other stress in my life, there's nothing else that matters other than training. But then your
50, and all of a sudden life is stressful, is there a way to quantify and help people think about that as it factors into the training load equation. If you want to think of it that
way, scientifically doesn't name for it called allostatic load Bravo, stasis, 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, we call it visible and hidden stressors. So visible stressor
Are visible because you see them or feel them you know if you didn't sleep well last night, you know, if you're thirsty right now you know you ate that food that visibly was probably not the best choice, alcohol cigarettes like sort of all these things. Hidden stressors are things that you don'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 on carbs or something like that. Maybe you've got some medical conditions, some pathogens, some micronutrient deficiency. Excessive inflammation like something.
Are you just like my recovery sucks? But I'm doing all the right things. So we put all that stuff together, we measure all of it and we actually kind of score them and we base our programming based on those scores. It's how we do it. How would one do it? If they didn't have blood work and saliva and urinary and kind of the whole thing that we have? You can't just go from the visible side and just try to put a score. If you did something, as simple as I was your sleep on to ten. How was your psychological and mental stress? How well did you eat? And then like, overall recovery field like those for
We'll get you like somewhat close because think about its way adaptation in the body happens because of stress. But because we just talked of 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 prefilled with other stuff and you put a little bit of training stress on their, you're already you're overfilling here if I can dump that other stuff out of the equation though, I can dump more and more and more training in before we start over filling. So that's why it's very, very important to keep that Alice dead.
Upload, not down. You don't want it low because remember, you have to have stresses caused a rotation, you just want to fill it with the right. Stresses that go in the right direction, specificity right? The more specific. The stress can get the more specific. The outcome can get. So those are the big rocks. I'm sure you've talked about a trillion times, but that's why that stuff is very, very important paying attention to the total allostatic load.
I'm gonna skip the track athlete at this point. So this is
we can do it in two minutes if you
want. Right. Let's do it. And should we just limit it to not the field side, but just the track.
I'd say we're talking sprinters pink also. These guys are insanely strong, if you put them on a force plate treadmill I've heard you saying bolt is literally hitting at four times, his body weight on a force plate treadmill. I don't know if that's true but I would believe it. So what are we saying here? This is highly technical it. 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 because force is not the real driver here. Speed is, you have absolute acceleration.
Oh, and you have Peak velocity, when you sing comes up a Gates. That's acceleration. He's not particularly strong relative to other folks acceleration. Probably because his Force production is not like exceptionally High relative to the other ones. However, once he gets vertical, his Peak velocity is so outrageous and his ability to maintain Peak velocity. In fact, if you go look, that's the thing that really separated him. He maintained that Peak velocity so much longer than anyone else did. So it looked like he was passing everybody, he wasn't the richest slowing down, feel the slow.
Now, so you have picked velocity and you have acceleration for other field sports. You have changed Direction and Agility. The difference. There are being your determination versus reacting to stimulus and changing direction now. Okay, so that's where we're at. In terms of, are they strong to? Yeah, you have legendary stories of 100 meter dash Spectra squatting, 600 pounds 70. Like it's the same thing we talked about earlier fallacy of like when you're an elite athlete, you're probably good at a lot of things, but does it mean you're optimized for it? So they need to
To be strong because it have to overcome Force. What 100 meter dash gonna Dash. BOOM, acceleration piece. But then they have to have true Elite Speed, which is a function of how fast you can turn your feet over and running as well as your stride length. And so, that is 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 the low in 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 and Peak velocity, which should make intuitive sense. Now, that we've sort of walk that conversation. So you train, those two aspects of speed and depending on where they any velocity is, they made a little more force or they may need a little more, actual adult Peak, velocity stuff. And then you use that on your force, velocity profile to figure out where that athlete needs to train. And then just to finish quickly, if you go back to the entire Matrix speed training and power training are almost identical. You can do this
Them at a very high frequency, you want to do complex movements. You don't want to do typically isolation, single joint movements, you want to do things, you can move as fast as you can. You can do them very frequently. If you're very late Sprinter, 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, its high quality and you just now are going lighter so that you can move faster. That's really, the only
difference just to be clear. Are you saying
That the work out of actual running. Like for example using an assisted like a slight tug run that type of workout could be done
frequently. Yeah. There's enough fatigue really? There's no joint beat up. There's no systemic fatigue. So just to contrast this to like one essentially made of 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, may be some strong man, but it's the one that has the most
stemming fatigue associated with it. The rest of them are pretty much localized. Your back, might get tired because you had a heavy load on your back for a back, squat. And your hamstrings might be tired. Could 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 let in a CrossFit scenario because it is whole muscle. It is cardiovascular a driven and it's an endocrine response that's massive and that doesn't happen. So because that you have systemic fatigue. So that's that distinction is why made that distinction earlier
and you also at the
I think it was on the power lifter, weightlifter, we talked about sort of the neurologic component of this, can you say a bit more about
that? So when we get into power lifting a little bit now, really into weightlifting, and certainly in, as we've gone down, the Spectrum here into true speed stuff. There are 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
I move actually fast as a human. It's very, very challenging and so that rhythm is very important. So this is cologne called synchronization. You have to be firing the right muscles in the right group in the right order throughout your gate. If it's a running and that's not necessarily the case of power lifting or even so much, a little bit weightlifting, bit more, not much in powerlifting because kind of everything is on a maximum and you're just sort of controlling everything. But like, Rhythm, the common word, you'll hear in like sprinters are running, like, you got to be in the right Rhythm, and, and you might get faster without
Improving your velocity ability by just getting in better Rhythm and what their meaning by that is learning what the fire. What's a relaxed and having that fire blacks fire relaxed. So a joint can move and then be ready to strike again and be ready to strike again.
But as this autonomic or
conscious it can be both. The idea would be to make this as subconscious as possible. So you're just in the moment, relaxed and moving and everything is understanding when it contract and winter relax. Initially though when you learn it, it's going to be very
conscious. What is the most taxing work out that the Sprinter is doing during the week? What is the word?
Go from which they need a recovery.
Probably their true Peak speed stuff really going. True Peak speed. There's a little bit of risk there but the fatigue and being able to come back and reproduce speaks because here's a distinction. If you did a crossfit workout and you were able to maintain 95% of your Peak speed from today to tomorrow to the next day. So let's say you did a workout today and you had a little bit of residual fatigue tomorrow. When you came back, if you're five percent reduced, you can still probably do your workout because you could use other components you could use your strength.
Use recovery use all kind of thing if you're trying to train maximum speed and your five percent slower tomorrow, then we're not trying maximum speed anymore and so it's just a level of recovery that has to be higher to be able to achieve what we're trying to go after your which is hitting a new actual Peak velocity. And so it's not the fact that you're like super sore General, you're going to feel fine maybe a little sore but your numbers are three percent lower you know like damn not recover enough where I almost every other sport you like, great. That's totally fine. Go play.
Let's kind of now
tie this all together for a totally different type of athlete that most people aren't thinking about which is the centenarian athlete. And I'm not assuming that we're starting from the standpoint of having been world-class Olympic, cross-country skiers in our 20s, who never stopped. I'm talking about somebody, who's in their 40s, who I don't know. Kind of has the Epiphany that says, wait a minute. Like it's cool to be a powerlifter. It's cool to be a weightlifter. It's cool to be a crossfitter, a strong man, an elite Runner.
Swimmer, whatever. But I'm going to pick a different sport. I'm going to pick a sport where the optimization is around my ability to be as physically robust as possible in the last decade of my life, which means I want to go to a bunch of things that most people can't even fathom when they're 80, or 90 years old. That means like I can run up an escalator. If it's broken carrying my luggage, I can put the 25 pound bag in the overhead compartment of the airplane. I can pick a grandchild.
Up out of a crib, I can play on the floor and stand up on my own. No issues. I can go for a hike on Rocky terrain and I'm not going to slip and fall. 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 going to argue that to train for that. You have to make trade-offs. One of the biggest trade offs, you have to make is
Rising against getting injured because the compounding effect of training is so strong that it's rivaled only by the compounding effect of not training, correct? You know exactly what I'm saying, but for the listener, you will lose it way faster than you will gain it. And therefore, you could argue rule number one of what I'm proposing is. You can't ever stop training to have an injury. That Sidelines you for three months is an unacceptable risk.
Risk. Even if the concessions, you make for that cost, you some Peak Performance. Okay. So armed with all of those caveats, what would we beg borrow and steal from each of these phenotypes into our centenarian
decathlon? We're going to work backwards which is physiology first. So you have three things, you need to train and if you train those three things you can steal from any of those areas you'd like to get those three things done and you can mix and match and I would argue
Shut. So thing one is, you have to have high quality functioning muscle tissue number two, nervous system. And by that, in large part, when we typically think about the nervous system for exercise, we often think peripheral. I'm even talking Central, vis-à-vis, the brain. And then for cardiopulmonary cirthree, so we need to make sure that we got muscle. We need to make sure that our motor control is very, very astute. And then we need to make sure that our cardiopulmonary system is this high functioning.
Thank you to all three of those things you're going to do all those activities. You talked about a second ago, the distinction of the brain is very, very important because if you were to go to a sport like power lifting, 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, I'm not sure, actually there's a recent paper by my friend, do you know?
Would I
do know, Tommy would very well and I've been meaning to have Tommy on the podcast. I need to get him
on the podcast. All to tell me. What smash did you see his paper on late onset? Dementia and part 2. Yeah, super clear my opinion. That one of the key components to maintaining brain function throughout life is proprioceptive information. 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 octogenarian, the hundred-year-old nine-year-old, you need to have some physical activity that is uncontrolled. You don't want to be moving up and down.
Down. Same for positions on the time. This could be an outdoor hike. We're engaging with the environment plus, the steps are non uniform, terrain is slippy, whatever it could be a sport, could be surfing, could be badminton, it could be anything else, but you need one physical activity in your plan that requires you to react to the world, strong men, probably checks that box a little bit, probably a lot, maybe not maximize, but a lot weightlifting, checks up box pretty well. Olympic weightlifting, running sprinting checks the Box decently
You're moving, especially being on over, so you can kind of walk through the rest of them cycling. Hmm, probably. Wouldn't check that list very well, right? So we want to think about that's the first thing, that's what's needed. The second thing that's needed then is high Force production. So you preserve your nerves by asking them to do a lot of different things, Tommy's paper and by asking all the motor units to work. So, something throughout your week has to be high Force production and by High Sports production. I'm going to say greater than 80% of your max. That could be powerlifting. Could be weight. Lifting could be strong, man. Could be CrossFit.
No, problem could be in those things could be different Plyometrics and stuff like that. All right, nervous system is checked those two components cardiovascular system. I think the cardiovascular system needs to be able to do two primary things. I'll split into three, it needs to be able to stay in consistent work output, over a minimum of 30 minutes with no interval, like no break back down. Call this Zone, whatever, I don't care, but this is no break whatsoever. Weightlifting does not check. That powerlifting, does not check that strong man.
But you're probably going to be taking some breaks. CrossFit might be able to get away with it. You might be under the 25 minute workout with almost no dip, but you may actually need to integrate more classic study stick stuff here. This might be an air bike, this might be a sled push, this might be a jog or Swim. It's like something like that. So that's one component. Cardiovascular system has, the other one is has to be able to get the max heart rate. You got to get all the way up there. So CrossFit absolutely strong, man. Absolutely powerlifting. Kind of keep going heavy enough.
If you'll get up there, I'm you get blood pressures of 450 over 350. During one of Mike's dead lift, you can get complete occlusion basically, but probably not the place. I'm starting it for my max, heart rate training, that's not really an option.
And how many times a week do we think a person needs to experience their max heart rate for this athlete? Again, not talking about a real athlete, but even just once a week of hitting that Max heart
rate, it takes the systemic fatigue out of it. I would love to to would be really, really good if you can really handle it. If the
A closed low 3 and be fine. But I'd say minimum one, most people should for to that's great. I would say the same thing for the steady-state piece once good to might be better it depends on what you're doing. Like if you're also doing a lot of like long this walking you might had your vents there a little bit and then the third one maybe in this category is recovery from high intensity stuff. So knowledge is be able to get your heart rate up. I want to be able to come back down, regulate yourself, come back up, regulate yourself back down, and that could be certainly, don't CrossFit, certainly, no strong man. Maybe down 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 a some uncontrolled one day weeks, got to be really high Force One Day weeks. Got to be max heart rate. One day, we got to be sustained, heart rate. Those could 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 pickleball, check that box, you could do max strength stuff for 10 minutes and then go do a CrossFit 20-minute amrap.
So he doesn't have to be like, a hundred days a week into this whole thing in 40 minutes easy. So we do those two things we've checked off, cardiovascular health, we've checked off neurological health, and the third one is muscle health, and the muscle needs to be able to handle 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 is some minimum requirement. We have to have as we age.
Do you think about that from the standpoint of like a LMI where you really want to see?
A above. We hold patience to a very high standard. We want our patients above the 75th percentile for a LMI. You see a big step up in mortality benefit above that? How do you quantify that for
folks? So you can look at that, depends on how much data you can get enough of em. I is also like a crudely okay. If you get in the above average or higher I'm
good. Is it literally something as crude as FMI in a LMI as a anthropometric measurement of Sighs?
I think it's totally fine. What you're going to say, generally is a tighter line.
In strength then you will see size. As you move up we probably are at a time but there's a whole discussion. The whole idea that like too much muscle mass is detrimental to help in ages conjoint 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 3. And that's one of them actually, you've just hit two of the nine remaining topics. One of them is exploring the myth of strength is paradoxically. Harmful as you age,
Age too much strength. Right? Strength, athletes, struggle is age, will go through the debunk of
that. Yeah, that's super easy to debunk to
and then also talk about the uncoupling of strength and size because both of them are so highly correlated with longevity. As is cardiorespiratory Fitness measured by VO2 max, but I love the idea of uncoupling them a little bit because my reading of the literature is that strength Trump's size. But, anyway, you can sort of get into that so strong and enough size. And I also think one of the arguments that says size still does matter goes back.
The non-functional or non structural component of muscle which is the metabolic component. So it can never lose sight of the fact that this is our greatest glucose Reservoir and the metabolic benefits of having a huge glucose sink are enormous.
You want to keep your information though. There you go. That's a key component to it. So the last part, the Roundup is your skeletal muscle needs to have muscular endurance, so it needs to be able to do something for 20 repetitions in a row or something. And this is very important for again, walking up 15 Steps, 20 steps. This is
Is not going to be cardiovascular with limited. It's going to be limited by the local muscle endurance. Stimulated by your strength. Actually. It's like another total mystery thing when people think like, wow, I walked up a flight of stairs and I was out of breath. I'm so out of shape. No, you're weak. Because what happened is every step was 85% of your one rep max. And so that became very, very interested. 12 reps at 85% if you were stronger. And that was 50%, you wouldn't be out of
breath. That's a really great distinction. Yeah, I'm really glad you're making that
point this get strong and all of a sudden why you're that task was not as hard,
even with the
It makes it so elegant is it's actually strength-to-weight ratio. So you might even say, well, but I am kind of strong and it's like that. Not for your weight, you're not. And the gravity now makes it your strength-to-weight ratio is not high enough correctness where your fatigue is coming from.
Which is a precursor to the like the you curve. J-shaped thing of too much muscle mass getting large. As you age is higher mortality. It's like, you're looking at bigger people, that's what you're really looking at. But anyway,
what are some of the do Nots? So we've talked about what they need to do, but if
You go back to this caveat that I've placed on you which is I'm going to make use our for the day on training here, but I'm going to say I don't want to see people getting injured. I want to make sure that there's no interruption of training. I'm going to argue that the older we get anytime, we have interruptions in training, the cost of regain is so high. So how do you factor that into our strategy around training for this
person exercise-induced injuries happen in a couple of ways? It's very, very rare that it's
That's the problem. The only problem that you have with a cardiopulmonary system or cardiovascular, system is systemic fatigue. That's not really his fault right system, 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 testosterone estrogen all off. Like, things like that mood, can't sleep, appetite. Like those are some of the markers we look for of global fatigue. So, if that's not what we're talking about here, you're talking about, I got hurt threw my back out.
Knee
hurts? Yeah. Neck is this knee? Is that back? Is
that what you're talking about is joint? So the only reason joints really get hurt is repetition, over bad movement patterns, so as long as you're moving well in those joints or not moving, well, depending on the joint, I'm 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 gonna be the problem. You'll have some muscle strains and stuff like that, but this is not putting off with three months that you
Or 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 in vain? We need to move properly. The first step I would do if we really had is like 40, your time frame, is that would invest heavily heavily and understanding proper movement patterns, and then I would load them very specifically. So step number one, you need to make sure you can do the movement pattern perfectly with assistance. Let's do a squat and put your hands on the rail and Squad all up and down. So you hold on to the band, grab it.
Okay, great. You can do with assistance. Awesome. How about bodyweight? Only great step to you did with bodyweight only step 3. Now we can add a little bit of eccentric load, so I want you to just lower the thing down down to its full range of motion. We're all in good positions, you're under control weird right here. If you can do things E centrically, I don't care what the load is. 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 to beginning, great, we're under control, we're good there. At that point, we can now look to get into the unilateral. Okay, great. So you did it great. When you have two limbs, can you do it? Great. When just your left side. Yeah. Can you do a great with your right side? Oh no! Okay. Now, we're going to start predicting given enough time and enough volume repetition. We're going to start seeing a weakness, which means we're going to have a compensation movement, which means we may start getting all the sudden low.
Back is hurting now. And why is your left knee hurting? Why is your right ankle hurting? Something was probably moving slightly wrong and one position. So, we're gonna do a unilateral evaluation here. Making sure we're find them. Once you check that loaded or unloaded. Both women got the loaded yet. We're just seeing. Can you do it? Can you do the movement once you pass all that? Now, we introduce load. Okay, great. We also, now once you can do all those things and you pass it with load, now we ask speed into the equation. So can you do these things in the exact same position?
And when I asked you to go as fast as possible, second 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 bad volume. I'm going to go for a mile. I haven't ran in forever. I'm just gonna start working on today. I'm going to run for mouth tomorrow. Run mile and a half. Did you start adding volume? We are adding volume on top of this functional movement, what do you expect? Is going to happen? Six weeks, six, whatever's if you can do all those things then I know you move, perfectly, well, eccentric lie in concentrically,
You can do it in bilateral or unilateral position. You can do it with load. When I asked you to go fast and when you get tired, rip and Roar. Now like we can do, whatever we can do, absolutely anything and we're going to do that through a variety of movement positions. So overhead pressing overhead, pulling horizontal, pressing and pulling lower body hinging, lower body. Pressing rotational unilateral, support diagonal all over those things. And once we're clear there, now we can start
Saying, okay, we can put any of these exposures on you that you want. You want to go after cardiovascular system, first, probably a good strategy. In fact, there's actually data suggesting clear account recently showing that six weeks of pure steady-state, endurance training. I think this the cycling like 45 minutes cycling, prior to hypertrophy training resulted in more muscle growth at the end of the hypertrophy training than the group that did do it. So being in good aerobic fitness is quite powerful and important even if you're trying to get
So Mass, so you could go after those other goals later. But the big thing
and by the way in that study, was it because the cycling trained group at a higher work capacity when they were doing the hypertrophy
training. I think actually, let me get back to you but told me I could do this but I think the total workload accomplished in the actual hypertrophy training study was the same.
They controlled for that so they were almost a match them
to I'm pretty sure which was the Z
key. Wow that's super interesting. Don't hold me to that one exactly though that may be wrong. We'll take that one off.
Line, you know, because one of the injuries that I think a lot about and I see it happen, you know, I don't know if this is the classic middle-aged guy injury, but it's that torn Achilles and it's usually I don't want to stereotype it because I'm sure there's someone in whom it hasn't happened this way, but it always seems to be the athlete who's been a little inactive for a while, and then he goes right back to that. Indoor soccer match and like, boom, you can hear it across the gym, it's so
loud. You think asking a connective tissue in this case? Cady Stanton?
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 eccentric, stop and change. How can it happen? You're going to tear something somewhere probably won't be in a sec. Oh because Achilles is going to go first. You do as often see in Pro Sports Achilles go because it's going to handle those issues going to go first. So in your case, it's the opposite that is tissue tolerance. It's very, very easy to avoid with some small amount of tissue tolerance, which is basically a fancy way of saying,
Saying like just expose the tissue to that demand slowly and increase that demand our time, and it's going to be just fine unless you excessive
one of the things that I just find. So great for this, especially as I'm getting older, is always warming up with some sort of jumping, and it's just melted cleaner. 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 one o'clock. Two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock five o'clock, and by
Even 6:00, you're actually having to spin yourself backwards and you're always coming back to the center of the clock if that makes sense. And again these aren't huge jumps but the goal is just to introduce lower leg variability and tension within the tendons and the connective tissue of the lower leg at unusual
angles. This is actually why I am a more of a proponent now of running that I used to be for health. I would naturally was apprehensive against it because if you look at all forms of exercise, nothing even compare.
There's 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 the stupid actually, I've changed my thought on that. Now, this exact reason, just a small amount of running is enough to keep tissue tolerance through most of the lower half to be able to do anything like that. So this is a few miles a week. I think it's first of all, like something, I think they normal human should be able to do, is run a mile decently sprinting to like a little bit of sprinting. And I don't mean like, 100% over speed.
Grunting even if this is a simple as you know Sprint the straightaways walk, the corners kind of thing and you did two laps. That's pretty good. Like you're going to stay away from a lot of foot and achilles related
injuries and he not surprisingly, we left nine questions on the table. Getting through. Technically only about three but these were big ones. So I'll just say, thank you very much and I hope everybody enjoys this at least half as much as I did, and I'll see you back for round three. We may be ready to do this in person. You got to come up with a reason to come to Austin, right? Oh my God.
Happen to be that hard. All right. I'll make it happen. Will commit to round 3 in person so we can get a workout in at the
same time. Yeah, yeah. I'd love to see the spot to
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