Andy Galpin: 3 Ways to Lose Weight and Gain Muscle (the Fitness Plan You Will ACTUALLY Stick To)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You want to gain more muscle, you want to have
more energy, you want to have more mental focus. Okay,
why haven't you done that before? I want to find
what is that single thing that stops you from winning?
And that's all I want to work on. Professor of Kinesiology,
expert in muscle physiology, doctor Andy Gaalpin. What's going to
earn more calories walking a mile or running a mile?
Running a mile a calorie is energy walking a mile

(00:20):
running a mile. It's the same thing.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
If someone's listening right now and they're thinking fitness and
strength on my big goals this year, how do you
encourage them to think about it?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Number one predictor of success with training programs.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Is the number one health and wellness podcast, Jay Sheetty
Jay Shetty See one Only Shetty. Hey, everyone, welcome back
to On Purpose, the place you come to become the happier,
healthier and more healed. Today's guest is going to help
us do that for our physiology, for our body, for

(00:54):
our muscles. I'm excited for you to listen to this
episode because I know it's going to make a big
change in your life this year. Today's guest is Andy Galpin, professor,
podcast host, and leading expert in human performance science with
a PhD in Human bio energetics. Andy focuses on muscle physiology,

(01:14):
strength training, and performance science and he has worked with
elite athletes across sports, including Olympians, UFC fighters, MBA and
MLB all Stars. Welcome to On Purpose, Andy Galpin. Andy,
it's great to have you here.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
That's a pleasure, man. We have many friends in common.
It's about time.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much for being here,
and I want to dive straight in and today what
we did is we asked our audience to tell us
what they wanted to know from you, and we had
so many questions. People had so many things they wanted
to learn. And I think when we're releasing this, it's
going to be at a time when it's like kicking
off the year. Okay, this is a big goal for people.

(01:54):
This is what people want to achieve this year. They
want to be fitter, they want to be stronger. And
so the fast question I wanted to ask you is
what routine is the best for someone that wants to
gain muscle and lose weight.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
There is no specific direction to that, and I know
that was like the most deflated answer possible after that
enormous setup. But I'm saying that because I actually want
to empower people, not the opposite. Having done this for
many years, having taught for a very long time, one
thing that is very clear if you give hyper specific
answers to questions like that, When someone hears that and
they go, oh, I can't do that exercise because my

(02:28):
knee hurts, or I can't train like that because I
fill in the blanks right, then they often feel like
they can't do anything. And so what you do is
you take people from ten to zero, and I hate that.
I want to go everyone from zero to two. I
want to get somebody to ten, but I want all
the wins we can possibly get. And so if you
look at that combination of things, you said two various things,

(02:48):
specific things grow muscle, lose fat. Okay, great, That gives
you effectively every option under the table for your fitness routine.
There are some core things that will lay in that foundation,
though that will be true regardless of your approach. I
can hit those very quickly. This is a basic saying
that we will variations of this, but the concepts are

(03:09):
few and the methods are many. As long as you
hit these next couple of concepts, you can choose all
kinds of different methods. The methods are things like how
many days you do it, you use kettlebell, do you run,
do you go outside? Do you use group classes? Those
are all methods. Methods. They're important. We can get to
that detail, but concepts are few. Here's what that's going
to look like. Are you doing something consistently? If you

(03:33):
look across the literature for many years now, the strongest
predictor of success with training programs, fitness programs, exercise programs,
and nutrition programs. Number one predictor of success short and
long term is adherents. You have to be consistent. I
will take a consistent approach with a suboptimal program with
a bad program any day of the week for that

(03:56):
particular question. So be consistent. Second one is there's to
be some sort of progressive overload. That doesn't mean you
have to lift more weights, It doesn't mean you have
to train harder or more, but there has to be
some sort of intentional progress that could be done within
the day of the week, the month. You get lots
of ways to get there, but be consistent and try
to keep progressing. Eventually, outside of that, we're getting into

(04:20):
more nuance, and so now we're thinking about things like
you probably want to use really high efficient movements. These
are exercise types movement patterns that have a lot of
cloric expenditure with minimal time. Most likely, I'm inferring from
that question that person probably doesn't want to spend twenty
hours a week and their fitness, and so you want
to choose things. This is not typically isolation work, So

(04:44):
I wouldn't spend twenty minutes doing bicep specific exercises for
that particular person. You got to get a lot of
muscles worked and you got to burn a lot of calories.
So this could be a combination of some type of
strength training program and some type of cardiovascular program or
anything in between. The reality of it, though, is a
rate one more time. And because I've done this many
many times personally, this is consistent across the literature. Those

(05:06):
two goals can be achieved with no or minimal cardiovascar training.
These can be achieved with very minimal strength training. These
can be achieved with body weight training, with any other
combination of those things, you have tons of options there.
So if that is truly your goal. Pick something that's
going to give you a little bit of both sides
of that equation. Stay safe, don't get hurt. You still

(05:30):
got to work. And because this is our third one,
there's got to be consistent effort there, So be consistent,
keep doing it, try to be high productivity with that.
And then you got to try I need a six
to seven out of ten on an effort scale. We
love to see a little bit more, but I'll live
with six below six. We may not be having enough
actual stimuli to grow muscle or lose weight, but you

(05:53):
give me those three things and most people are going
to have a tremendous amount of success.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Absolutely, thank you for that. I appreciate the refresh answer
not having to be specific, and I agree with you.
I think that's a very fair way to go, and
it's actually their new truth and reality to it as well.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Yeah, you know, honestly, I have a hard time when
I get questions like that because I want at home
as a listener, when I hear people on podcasts, I'm like,
would just give me, like one example. Some sensitive do that,
But the reality of it is, that's not the most
honest answer it's not the answer scientifically and me coaching
people now, the people that I personally train in, the
non athletes, it's not real. That's not really how I

(06:30):
would approach them. So I tried to do my best
to give an honest answer, and I know that's not
always as tangible, but it is honest reality.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, if someone's listening right now and they're thinking fitness
and strength on my big goals this year, how would
you encourage them? Like the work the people that you
work with. If someone's like Andy, train me now, coach
me now, how should I be thinking about my goals
over the next twelve months? How do you encourage them
to think about it?

Speaker 1 (06:57):
There's a handful of ways. We will always start a top. Okay,
what's what's our biggest constraint? And that sounds a little
bit backwards, but we call these things performance anchors. So
you want a goal, right, and I use the soccer
example here football, maybe if you're listening, you want to kick,
you want a goal, and there's something in that way.
There's a defender, there's a goalie there. What's your goalie?

(07:17):
And I'm saying that to say, is it finances? Is
it time? Is it injury. Is it you've never been
to the gym before, and you're nervous because once I
know that, the entire path I'm taking is going to
be different based on that very first filter. You want
to gain more muscle, you want to fill in all
those planks. Okay, why haven't you done that before? Have
you tried in the past and failed? If you never tried,

(07:40):
that's the biggest lever we have to work on. If
it is a finance issue, I can't afford gym membership, Okay,
got it. Now I'm gonna take you on a totally
different route.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
If it is.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Unlimited finance like, okay, now we're doing next level stuff.
If it's somewhere in the middle, we have different answers.
So this could be a combination of saying, identify why
you fail in the past or why you've never started,
and overcome that barrier and I'm done. I'm gonna stop
right there. That'll give me six months. Right in this
initial case, and that person you laid out, I'm going

(08:12):
back to what I said earlier. Adherence is number one
and consistency over time. So I want this first January push,
this February push, towards fitness like New Year, New Me.
I want to win. I want wins, wins, wins. I
don't care if it's an optimal program. It doesn't necessarily matter.
We'll come to those details later. But I want you
to have an experience through fitness that went, yeah, that
was kind of it was okay, wasn't so bad, I

(08:35):
wasn't super sore, and I okay, now you're a believer.
Now I can get that two days a week to three.
Now I can get you invest fifty dollars and get
you a kettle bell at home. Okay, great, Like we
can start pushing the pace here if we do the
opposite and we give these big, huge charges, that can work.
If you're an all end type of person, you maybe
I could get you on that. All right, let's get

(08:56):
it personality wise. But if that's not your personality, oftentimes
that is a c and burned by February or March,
and that actually dissuays you probably more from starting again
the next time. So for the general population, as an
aggregate answer here, I want to find what is that
single thing that stopped you from winning? And that's all
I want to work on when we program this for

(09:18):
our executive clients and all those We look at the
year and we look at this whole thing and we
use what we call a quadrant model. So the quadrant
is you get ten total points and you can choose
to spend those ten total points across four areas. Right,
so ten total, not forty total. Here are your four areas.
And we do this practice before they start anything. They

(09:38):
don't get a workout, before any this question is answered.
We go through this exercise, We lay out their answer.
This gets posted on a note card. It goes in
their most vulnerable place. This could be their office. Where's
the point where it's gonna You were gonna work out
today and then you didn't. Is that your Netflix TV?
Is that the office? Because you wouldn't stop working? Is
it right? You could held the able to that, and

(10:00):
we're gonna hold you accountable that. Here's what card looks like.
Quadrant one is we'll just call it business. Whatever you
do for your life and your finances. Okay, that's business.
Quadron Number two is social family relationships, whatever that means
to you. Number three is your physical health. Again, these

(10:21):
these are wide ranging definitions and everyone gets to define
it for themselves. Quater number four is recovery. So we
start off by asking and we always do this and
if if you want to play long, you're welcome to.
This is kind of fun sometimes great, let's do that
right now for you. So you got ten total chips
to start with business? Of your ten, how many do
you want to spend. Let's say this is January and
you're gonna get kickstarted, Jay, where are you gonna put

(10:42):
and it's time?

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Am I thinking about it in terms of time? Well?

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Energy, it's all of it, right, So we intentionally keep
it vague. If I say you got life, energy, Yeah,
you got ten, right, It could be money, could be combination, focus,
attention resources, however that makes sense to you.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, it's business, family.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
Let's start with business, health and recovery.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Recovery, right, So business and I would end over what.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Period of time, it doesn't matter you define.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
It, okay, So i'd say, yeah, over the year.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
Let let's do look, let's do it a quarter, quarter, one.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Over the court? Okay. Yeah, So i'd say, honestly, well,
I'll probably prioritize, will be like.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
Five, great, Yeah, most common answers five okay, by far
the most common answers five. Nobody wants to say six
because in their head they'll go, haven't got enough left?
And no one and one knows it's not for yeah, right,
so we'd five for business. Now let's go on to relationships.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Relationships, I'd say, is well, my work business relationships are
very strong in that sense of my personal relationships. It's
an easy one for me. My my circle is small,
so I'd say two.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
Okay, great, We're are seven now, right, how many are
your fitness?

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Two?

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Great? Now we have an obvious one left. A couple
of rules we have in this one. By the way,
what you just gave is by far the most common
toal answer. Almost everybody has this problem. There's issues with
what you just said. We never let recovery be less
than half of our next highest category. I'm happy you
did two and one. That's great. Most people recovery end

(12:19):
up going to zero. What does recovery mean? It doesn't
necessarily mean a massage or asana or fine. That can
be it. Recovery can be a night out with friends.
Recovery can be I need a loan, time recovery tons
of ways. What is the thing that gives you energy back?
Is what we're trying to go after physical fitness, the
same sort of thing. There's always overlaps between these things.

(12:41):
We work through you on that one. So that routine
you laid out s's fine, Okay, you gave me two
for physical fitness. I'm going to construct a program now
that says this is at most twenty percent of day's energy.
If I come then and get you with this program
five days a week, I know I've lost Ready, you're
not going to get it. And if you are, are
you going to get it? For three straight months? You
just told me business was a really big priority. That's

(13:03):
the same token. When you come back to me and
you're asking and you're wondering why the program isn't getting
you the success that you want, I'm going to say,
you gave it twenty percent. What expectations did you have? Okay,
what do you want to take it from? If you're
not willing to move it from somewhere else, There's only
finite things that a human can do. So we're going
to walk backwards from that equation. So I might say, fine,

(13:23):
we're there. Now, we get to quarter two, and you
want to adjust that. You want more results, You want
to lose more fat fill in the blank for the adaptation.
I go, great, where are we going to pull it
from It's not going to come from recovery. Now. It
means less business, less friends. This is the ultimate dynamic
we have to play right. People don't want to do
the recovery and they don't want to pull it from there,
but then they expect massive gains and fitness. We can

(13:45):
get you through short periods of time. We have these
special scenarios all the time where it's like, hey, the
Olympics are coming, World champions. We can juice up this
a little bit with all kinds of little two tricks,
but those don't last and sometimes they burn you into
a bigger hole. So if for thinking long term strategy
with you, I'd say, great, I'm fine with two. We
would score for a little program. And in your brain

(14:05):
it goes to two and I'm watching and I'm like, Jay,
you didn't do this thing for recovery. It's been three days,
it's been a week. We're zero for recovery. Don't expect
fitness goals with no recovery. Bam. Jay'd been out, went
out again last night, went out a little again, took
another trip, friends has been at three or four. You
get the point here, right, so we can hold you
really accountable to that and saying if you're not getting
your fitness school number one starter is are you even

(14:28):
giving it a chance to succeed? If not, we have
a non starter and we have to change our expectations.
If you want more results, you got to give me
more pie, give me a bigger shot at it, and
we'll get more results.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
Yeah. Super smart. Yeah, I really appreciate the constraint approach too.
I found Mike Kid straight was travel and so I
haven't traveled for the last six weeks, and I felt
my absolute best with food, die everything.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
I've been on the road for probably eight straight weeks
and I'm the opposite.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, exactly. And that was my My life was like
I'd be working out for one week, eating right for
one week, everything's good, then traveling for one week and
then one week. So I was one week on, one
week off, and then I'd plan to spend these two
months in LA And it has been life changing from
a workout point of view, sleep point of view, recovery
point of view. Everything we just talked about I can do.

(15:21):
I have been doing five days of workouts a week,
you know, eating really well, whatever, because I'm in one place,
because I'm saying all of this to reiterate your point.
It was all about the constraint. Oh, it was all
about the constraint. I had the motivation, had the drive,
I had the discipline, I had all that stuff. But
travel was the thing that made me feel like I
was having gains for a week and then losing it,

(15:43):
and then getting discipline and then losing it, and that
was just exhausting.

Speaker 1 (15:47):
So let me run you through two specific examples on that.
I love you brought up travel. This is super easy.
We have a coaching program called ARATA. This is this
like excellence and kind of everything program. If you were
an RTA with us right now, I would say, great,
you've been home. I'm gonna change your entire program. It's
gonna be more gym stuff. We're gonna lift more weights.
We're gonna have a very specific plan. I'm gonna ask

(16:09):
you to report back exactly how much you lifted, and
we're gonna track it and we're gonna do heavy there.
Had we flipped the role and you were all of
a sudden on the road, I would say great, if
I gave you that same program. That's gonna be a
terrible one. It's not gonna work well because everywhere you
land you're gonna have to go to find a gym.
It's not gonna work. And then the hotel gym socks
like I've set you up for failure. That's bad coaching.
I would have send six weeks going. You know what,

(16:30):
here's what we do. It's called a flexible program. We
don't need anything more than a band and a kettlebell. Okay,
maybe not even kettlebell, and we're gonna rotate the days.
So what I mean by that is right now, if
you're at home, I would say, okay, Mondays are this,
Tuesdays are this, Wednesdays are this, And when you didn't
do that on Wednesday, I'd be calling you why didn't
you finish? Why didn't we train Wednesday?

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Do?

Speaker 1 (16:48):
But I don't care. I'm on it right That doesn't
working on the road. I would do more flexible program
where we have a concept we're trying to hit. We're
trying to get a strength training day in. You do
that strength training day, whatever day that comes up. As
soon as you get in, we check it off and
then we have say the next day is going to
be a long duration workout, great, you get that and
when you can. But we also have flexibility because when

(17:10):
you go, hey, you know what, I got an extra
hour today. There's no gym, but I went for an
hour walk. Boom, got that thing in. You have different
things you can plug in, play based on availability, time
and energy. Right, So that's the way to have you
success at the end of the six weeks. We wouldn't
have probably made a ton of progress on you if
you're on the road constantly, but we would have not
gone backwards anywhere. The literature is really clear, the science

(17:31):
is clear. You can maintain muscle size, you can maintain
muscle strength very very well. Cardiovascar fitness is incredibly stable.
With one or so training sessions per week, we could
have kept you right where you're at. And then we
would have looked at this and said, Okay, our expectations
for progress are not going to be high during jay
six weeks of travel. Let's all set expectation here. But

(17:53):
when we get home, we're getting after it and our
expectations are higher. So at the net end of both
of those, you add them together and you see where
I'm going with that, right, Yeah, So it's not just
expecting yourself to gain five pounds of muscle every single month.
It's unrealistic. We have looked at the whole quarter. The
whole year is what we in our tabe. We look
at the whole year for people and we go, okay, great,
quarter one is not the quarter. We're gonna go after it.

(18:16):
We're gonna work on mobility, We're gonna work on our
breath work, We're gonna work on thousands of other things
that can be done on the road, can be done
to traveling. We're gonna get our best gains in filling
the other blank when we've got maybe it's quarter three,
and we actually have goals for each quarter for the
year that are plotted out and so we give people
the best chance of success. The best example I can

(18:36):
give of that is quarter four is the worst possible
time to have fat loss goals in America. Like it's impossible.
You run into Halloween, I have a little bit of candy, right,
and then it's like, well, I'll get back on it.
But reality it is like Thanksgiving's gonna be he in
a couple of weeks. All the way out through New
Year terrible. If you try to have, for most people

(18:58):
a huge fat law school, you're gonna lose. So we
don't play that game. You know, we typically focus on
this part of the year. We're going to shift towards
muscle growth. That's when you need excessive calories. Right, let's
feed the beast. Let's not fight our life. Life will win.
We're going to go back typically, just as you know
big examples here, it's different for everyone. We will focus

(19:18):
more typically on fat loss quarter two. You know why,
no holidays, nothing around, and everyone has a little bit
of extra motivation to look a little bit better over
the summer when the sun comes out and they're more
likely have their shirts off, colding down. So it fits
life a little bit better. Is you see my point here?

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, seasons tall, seasons of when to shift and sometimes
we have one goal. It's really basic, it's really simple.
It's like I want to do this and it's not
possible throughout the year and we don't shift and mode it.
And I think, Andy, you know, I'm taking a couple
of steps back here, but it comes from this societal
view of what fitness is, right, Like that's and I

(19:59):
want to talk about that with you because I love this. Yeah,
because I just feel like, as I'm listening to I
know it's one of the biggest challenges is we don't
actually know. It's like every year there'll be a new thing,
like strength is really important, Protein's really important, this whatever, right,
and it just there's a new fad every year, and
I don't want to talk about that with you. But
I think for a lot of us, we don't really

(20:20):
know what the pillars of fitness are, like, we don't
know what defines someone as fit. We just have goals like, oh,
I want abs this year, I want this this year,
I want less belly fat this year. And you know,
for someone who grew up overweight, I grew up overweight
and then when I changed my diet started working out,
I just got super skinny and lean. It's like, to me,

(20:42):
there was a point in my life where I just
believed if I was lean and I wasn't overweight, then
I was healthy. Right. It was as basic as that,
And I think a lot of us carry that around
where it's like you see someone with abs or whatever
you want, and it's like, yeah, they're healthy, they're fit.
If you had to break down and say what is
the pursuit of fitness? What's the Hey everyone, it's Jay
Schetty and I'm throwed to announce my podcast tour. For

(21:05):
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(21:26):
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Speaker 1 (21:35):
Yeah no, I absolutely love that. So ats highest category.
We always define it as people generally want three things
in their fitness. They want to look good, they want
to feel good, and they want to perform good. Part
of my grammar right now, what does look mean? I
don't know. You tell me you want to have this
look or you don't want I do not care. But

(21:57):
at some point you want your body to look a
certain way or not like a certain way. Up to
you to define. You want it to feel a certain way.
You want to feel strong, you want it to feel fast.
You want it to feel mobile, you want it to
feel don't care. You define that. Then you want to perform.
What's that mean? You want to have more energy, you
want to have more mental focus, you want to have
a digestion problem to go away, you don't want that

(22:18):
knee pain gone. Okay, So it's a look of feel
or performance metric as ultimately everybody's after, right, Yeah, So
from our professional athletes to none, to the students that
work in my lab for our research questions. That's the
first lens I'm looking at what does that mean for you?
So when I'm designing a when we're designing a study,
or we're again work with the individuals. Filter number one,

(22:40):
What does fit? What does look mean to you? What
does feel? What does performed look to you? Now I'm calibrated,
right because I love this question so much. Fitness can
be I just want to be able to surf every day, amazing,
I'm in right. Fitness just means I want more energy
with my kids. I'm here for all of that. All
of that can be rooted performance. We have a saying

(23:02):
that if you have a body, you're an athlete, which
is to say, I don't care if you want to
use those physical abilities to shoot a basketball or hit
a golf ball like some of our lines, or you
want to use that to just run your business better,
be a better leader, make better decisions, be able to
work more hours and less fatigue. Fine, you're still asking
your body to perform. It's the exact same thing except

(23:23):
for a couple of little points at the end of
physical movement skill. Right, So that's answer number one. Now,
taking this question entirely differently, if you look at what
is generally true for most people, fitness is a combination
of a handful of things. You want to be able
to do activities and not pay major consequences, that is it, Right,

(23:44):
I want to be able to walk up this dang
hill and then not wake up tomorrow in screaming pain.
So it is a I want to do A and
then I don't want B to happen as a consequence, Right,
So I want to empower everyone to be able to
have that and then not pay major consequences, whether it's
injury or handful of other things. So for most people
to be execute a resilient physiology, that is to be

(24:08):
able to do many things. It's one of the reasons. Again,
we called it our tades. This is this concept of
I want to be able to do many things and
then not have some of your consequences. So you're gonna
have to have some semblance of physical strength number one. Right,
you don't any to be a powerlifter or a bodybuilder
or a weightlifter, blah blah blah, but minimal levels of strength.
If you want to look at this from the medical perspective,

(24:29):
I can make that argument. We can go into tons
of the research.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
I was about to ask you that, yeah, why is
strength so important? Because I feel like we've undervalued it
for a long time, and you don't. You could go your.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
Whole work, well, I would say that we as a
strength finishing field didn't help ourselves much. This was actually
the whole fun story here. In the early nineteen hundreds,
strength training was viewed as something that was really deleterious.
It was dangerous. There's a long story here, but you'll
have a heart attack. It's this thing, right, And that
stayed along for a long period of time. The science

(25:04):
said it was bad for you, and then the science changed.
In fact, there's a famous individual, namber doctor Karpovich, who
himself was a scientific advocate of this is dangerous, and
then collected more data and realized, actually, it's not dangerous,
and then, oh my gosh, there's all these health benefits
that happened in the nineteen fifties and sixties right after that.
On the back of it, you've got Arnold Schwarzenegger, you've

(25:25):
got pumping iron, you've got Conan, You've got these things,
and you went from bad for my health to oh
my gosh, I can become a superhero. And this empowered
a generation of men mostly oh my gosh, I can
become a physical superhero. That was awesome, But the downside
of that was everyone's association within with strength training was
muscle and bodybuilding, and that is a very limited perspective

(25:48):
of strength. So scientifically, the people in this field were
not strength training people. The exercise physiologists, the nutrition and
scientists for in most part the nineteen sixties through nineties
were all in durance folks, and so you had no
research being done. You couldn't make the argument anymore that
it was bad for your health, but there was no
argument that it was really great for your health. And

(26:09):
they had a whole generation of kids like me who
came up on that, but then also like science and
started saying like, why aren't we doing studies on strength
and high intensity stuff? And well, that only lasted so
long before work started coming out in that area. And
now it is so clear. We have mechanism, we have
epidemiological evidence, we have randomized control trials in men and
women young old, and that research goes on. Physical strength

(26:34):
is one of these single strongest upun intended predictors of
life span. And so you've got lifespan, which is how
long you're going to live. You have health span, which
people talk about now, which is how healthy are you
within those years? And now scientifically we call that strength span, right,
And what they're saying is strength span. It's not the
only thing that matters, but it's an important characteristic to

(26:57):
your health span. If you lack physical strength, number of
things start to happen. Number one. This is one of
the reasons why we look at for the record like
leg strength and grip strength as two of the most
ubiquitous predictors. You'll see this all across the literature as
statistically significant predictors of mortality, and in fact, some of
the papers that directly compare strength again mostly leg strength,

(27:21):
leg extension, and grip strength to VO two max oftentimes
but not always, but oftentimes will show strength as a
stronger predictor of mortality or all cause mortality than veotwo max.
So we've talked at nauseum, you know, in the last
bunch of years about important biot maxes, and it's absolutely true.
But strength is right there as an equivalent predictor of

(27:41):
how long you're going to live. So the question is why, Well,
you have correlation and causation here, lots of evidence on
both sides. If you are weak, say in your hands,
it is a proxy for overall strength. So that of
itself is true. It's also direct intervention. If you can't

(28:01):
carry a bag confidently, and you can't put a backpack
in an overhead compartment, you're not going to take the bus.
You're very less like you're much less likely to go
on an airplane. This now get least to secondary problems
with social isolation. You're not confident. One of the single
biggest predictors of one of the second biggest issues we

(28:21):
have with unsuccessful aging is that people when people start
to feel like they become a burden on society, they
start to withdraw rapidly. No one wants to be the
person in line holding everybody up. No one wants like
you just you know all those examples there, right, So
people are more likely to just socially withdraw. And now
we're having all the secondary problems of social isolation, and

(28:43):
even physical activity starts to go down because people don't
leave their house, they watch TV more, and this whole
cascade of things start to happen. So we have direct
and indirect mechanism there that say, again, you don't have
to be massively strong, but just maintain some semblance of
grip strength. Your legs are going to tell the same story.
This is your interface with the world, your legs in
your hands, and so your ability to locomot to move

(29:05):
throughout the world is mostly your legs. If you don't
feel confident that you can walk up the steps to
that museum slowly, you stop going on those trips. You
start doing that extra thing. It hurts too much, it's
too exhausting. Again, fill in all the blanks here. And
so having some sort of physical leg strength gives you
confidence that allows general physical activity, which then pays all

(29:25):
those additional benefits that doesn't even carry and count the
direct physical benefits. So if we start looking at muscles,
specifically muscle quality, and this can be defined a lot
of different ways. Is going to regulate in part things
like your blood glucose and you've I'm sure talked to
many people about the importance of metabolic health. Skeletal muscle

(29:48):
is going to explain about eighty percent of the variance
in your resting metabolic rate. That's that's your your faster
slow metabolism. Again, eighty percent of the variants is going
to be explained by how much lean muscle you have
for the most part, so you don't need to be huge.
But losing muscle is called sarcopainia. If you lose muscle
faster than you should be with aging highly associated with

(30:11):
inflammatory states, reduced resting metabolic rate, which then goes right
back to the equation glucose regulation, inflammation that all of
these things start to happen. Last fire host, I know
I'm going after it this little bit here, but this
is a topic of clear passion to me. Is you
have the presence of strength as well as the act
of the training itself. So going through the strength training

(30:33):
process has additional benefits to things like your central nervous system, brain,
and neurological system. The evidence is very clear your physical
brain will stay healthier in terms of white matter and
things like that. When you strength train, it will stay
around a lot longer. There's actually a lot of research
now that's starting the points to the fact that things

(30:56):
like dementia and Alzheimer's late on set specifically is highly preventable.
And that by highly I mean it's an extraordinarily high number.
You'd have to get a neuroscientist on to to really
get numbers there, but it is way more preventable than
we realize, specifically from physical activity and exercise as not
the only thing there, but a huge component to that. Lastly,

(31:20):
why remember the way that you move throughout the world
has three big components to it. So when you picked
your leg up like that and you just shifted your toe,
what ended up happening there is three things. Some signal
went from your central nervous system. This could be your brain,
spinal cord, it doesn't matter. Nerves sent a signal. That's

(31:40):
part one. Part two. Those nerves activate or turn on muscles,
and then the muscles contract. That's part two. Those muscles
are surrounded by connected tissue. The connected tissue actually is
tied in your bone pulling. The connective tissue is what
actually made your foot move like that. So connective tissue
is part three. So the reality is anytime your strength training,
you're keeping connected tissue healthier, you're keeping that muscle quality high,

(32:05):
and you're can continuing to keep that nervous system activated.
Keeping that nervous system alive is keeping your brain alive.
It's physically what you're doing. It's keeping your entire nervous
system around and fine tune. It's the same process. And
so when we tend to think about strength training as
something we're doing for our muscles, we cannot forget we're
also doing it for our joints, we're doing it for

(32:26):
our bones, and we're also doing it for our brains
and nervous system.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
It's h Yeah, I really appreciate that. I actually please
go into as much detail as you like. It's very
useful to get to that granular level to actually understand
the value of strength training because I think, like you said,
because of the bad pr that it's had for so long,
we've kind of we did ourselves. Yeah, we did ourselves. Yeah,

(32:52):
I was gonna ask you. You specifically spoke about leg
muscles and like strength training there, what's the difference between
in walking because we always hear walk ten thousand steps
if that's the least you can do. What's happening when
you're walking ten thousand steps versus running you know, a mile,
three miles, five miles, whatever it may be, versus strength

(33:13):
training with weights for your legs.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Great, I'm you're on fire. I love these questions so much.
Let me ask you trick question, and I'm telling you
I'm tricking you right now. Yeah, right, what's gonna burn
more calories walking a mile or running a mile?

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Running a mile?

Speaker 1 (33:28):
What's calorie?

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Oh? Walking? Sorry, my bad?

Speaker 1 (33:33):
A calorie is energy? Right, calories work?

Speaker 2 (33:36):
Right?

Speaker 1 (33:37):
Walking a mile? Running a mile?

Speaker 2 (33:38):
Oh, same thing, It's the same thing. Interesting.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yeah, Now it's a bit of a trick because you
probably would burn a few more calories walking rather because
there's a little bit of inefficiency in the system. But theoretically,
if you're simply looking for caloric work, this is why
we have so much evidence at this point, you can
manage calories anyway. You'd lie that'll hit people if you

(34:02):
like long duration slower stuff you like, you know, cardio
or her I hate those phrases, but if that's ringing
a BELTI things like cardio, okay, because it doesn't mean anything, right, well,
it's cardioask or training anything that uses your heart, like, well, fantastic.
That is literally every form of exercise right, Like, it
doesn't make any sense if you hate that, though you

(34:23):
don't ever have to do it. We can get this
same place. And the energy thing I just gave you
was just a little silly example of saying, hey, look,
if we really actually get down to the physiology and science,
these are not major differences like people think that they are.
So if I'm looking at fitness across the entire spectrum here,
I think it's helpful to break it up into three

(34:44):
global areas. If you can't tell by this point in
the show, I'm a teacher, so.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
Like systems and numbers, Yeah, it's great. Number one, what
you laid out when you said walking ten thousand steps,
I will bucket that into physical activity. This is human movements.
We should have a false state of human movement, right,
whether this is walking, standing, playing with our kids, gardening.
If you're in a laborer and you have a physical fantastic.

(35:08):
So if you're listening to this and you're thinking my
lifestyle is really active because I'm a construction worker or
I'm a nurse and I'm walking up, okay, you probably
don't need to go out of your way to do
a whole bunch of low intensity card of basket exercise.
You could. But if we're trying to get really efficient
saying kind of what's my minimal viable option here, I

(35:29):
could say if we got to give one up, let's
give that one up, because you're getting your ten thousand,
or fifteen or twenty thousand steps. If you've ever paid
attention to a teacher's my wife spent seventeen years as
a preschool special ed teacher. Her step count was outrageous
because her whole life was just going three steps at
a time trying to keep a kid from doing something

(35:49):
really naughty or dangerous or whatever. So there's a lot
of professions that are even outside of a true construction jobs,
that get a lot of physical activity. They don't realize it.
So said I'm gonna go we're good there. Maybe we're
gonna go float in category two, which is we'll just
call this structured cardiovascular exercise. This is intentionally going to
work out. This could be intervals, it could be swimming,

(36:12):
it could be pickleball, sports, wrestling, like any number of things.
It could be higher intensity stuff or even lower intensity stuff.
But you're you're going to work out, right, heart rate's
going to be much higher here. You're probably gonna break
a sweat or something like that. I hope you're not
breaking a sweat walking like that's physical activity, right. So

(36:33):
if if those things help you kind of understand the
general category of number two, that's what we're after. So
if we go back to that nurse or that teacher
and we're thinking, okay, we're good over there, but we
still didn't need to get one to two days a
week most likely of this structured cardiovascular training. If we
want to make it simple, give me one day where
we get a really high heart rate. I'd like this.

(36:53):
I'll call it max. It doesn't necessarily need to literally
be one hundred percent, but it's gonna have to be
well past comfort zone. One day a week is all
we really need up. There doesn't have to be a
long time. I don't care the method you pick. I
don't care the machine you go on. Do you want
to run sprints? I'm all for it. You want to
swing kettlebels to do it?

Speaker 3 (37:10):
Like?

Speaker 1 (37:11):
Great? What I'm looking at is did we get that
node knocked off?

Speaker 2 (37:15):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (37:15):
We got heart right up there? Cool. Category three is
more of our traditional strength training thing. And you asked
a little bit of a question earlier, but why is
that different? Why is it not the same. Why isn't
the walking and the higher intensity what I did sprints?
Why my legs are tired and sore? Why is that
not strength training? Well, there's a very specific reason. First

(37:36):
of all, it's pretty good. If that's all we can do,
I'll take it. That's a win. But your muscles are
actually constructed of hundreds of thousands of individual muscle fibers.
So I think of this like a ponytail. So a
ponytail you think of as like one thing, but in
reality is just a conglomerate of a bunch of individual hairs.
That's how your muscles work. You have lots of hair

(37:58):
we call a muscle fiber in there. Each one of
those muscle fibers can be broadly categorized as either fast
twitch or slow twitch. Fast twitch does what it sounds like.
Slow twitch is more has more modochondria in it. It
handles most of your basal physical activity. Right now, you
and I are using almost exclusively slow twitch fibers. Nothing

(38:19):
we're doing fast here right, and so they're not fatigable.
So if I ask you to take your finger, yeah,
maybe your right finger, left finger, we'll do left finger,
and reach up and touch your nose with that left finger. Now,
what you just did right there is you activated a
set of neurons that said okay, turn on the muscles
in combination to touch that nose. The neurons you just

(38:40):
turned on are very low threshold, which means they're easy
to activate. They're very energy efficient, but they're going to
activate generally those slow twitch fibers. Now, if I said,
grab that can of juice, will you or too sorry
to call a juice? Yeah, t yes, fucking yeah, okay, great,
put that back in your left hand. Now do the
same exact activity and raise it to your nose.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Boom.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
You just did the exact same process, but you needed
to produce more force. Why could you get an extra
eight ounces or something in that? So your body went,
wait a minute, I'm assuming nothing was going to be
in my hand. But then I realized there's an additional
amount of force needed. And so how did it increase
force production? Your muscle fibers can't squeeze any harder when
they contract. They contract as hard as possible every single time.

(39:23):
The only way that you increase force production is to
turn on more of those nerves. We just train our
nervous system. That's what it is, more of those nerves
turned on. If I were to now take that t
and we had it made it forty kilos, the only
way that you can continue to produce more force lifted
up to your nose is to turn on those additional

(39:44):
muscle motor neurons, which are going to be your faster
with muscle fibers. So if we extend this all out
when you're doing those other activities, you're not ever going
to get to that high threshold. You're never going to
use those muscle fibers. And so one of the things
we know, so what happens with aging when we omit
strength training or strength training like activities, those motor neurons

(40:07):
and those muscle fibers die, and this is why we
lose strength and power as we age. It's because we
never activate those neurons. I don't care about getting you
prs in the gym right now, we're trying to make
sure that we just don't lose any functional capacity fifty
years from now. The sprinting that got your legs or

(40:28):
was good, but those nerves are turned on when force
is required. We didn't get enough physical force production. This
is the exact same reason why things like body weight
exercise is great. It's good, it can take people a
long way, but eventually we're going to run out of
some options here, especially for our lower body, because we

(40:50):
just won't have enough load to activate all the nerves
or the motor units rather in the legs, to truly
get force production to keep them as strong and healthy
as possible. So that third category we were talking about Rember.
Category one was kind of physical activity. Category two is
that structured cardiovascular. Category three was in the structured strength
training stuff. You gotta give me one of those days

(41:12):
a week, right, So if we go back to this
kind of nurse lots of physical activity, one to two
days a week of that one to two days a
week of something related to strength, we'd be good.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
There.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
We change that scenario wop to somebody more like you
and I, it was probably not doing a lot of
steps throughout the day, sitting. Yeah, you and I are
going to have to engineer that back in our lives. Yeah,
so the fitness routine. I don't know anybody about how
your day is set up. I'm just assuming you're sitting.
More than that type of person that avatar I would
put more structured physical activity in life. We would maybe

(41:45):
do something like a ten minute walk three times a day,
two times a day. We would maybe, hey, let's add
in a walking treadmill. Maybe let's add in like we
would look for little games that we can Maybe we
need to add in one or two days a week
of an hour long high as part of your structured
fitness program to get that back right. So, what we're
always doing is again assessing the entire nature and saying,

(42:08):
those are the three big areas most people have, and
you got to move well within those categories and don't
get hurt and never lose your flexibility. And there's more stuff,
but categorically, these are the first layers of filters I'm
going through and saying, Okay, if we have to leave
one of these things out, maybe we can. Right, So
maybe you sit at a desk job, but then you
go in you do kickboxing class. Okay, we actually got No.

(42:30):
Two out of there. Maybe now we just put some
physical activity in there and put some strength training in there,
and we're actually, we're okay, we can survive with that, Right.
That's kind of the best way to think about your
lifestyle and think, am I getting any of these three great?
And then if okay, optimals not realistic to me? Then
what do I have to do to just kind of
get MVP out? And that's how I go about thinking it.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yeah, that's brilliant. That such a great breakdown, because I
think we often, like you said, we kind of live
in either extreme. Were dining a lot of number three
and one or two and not three, or however it works.
And I think I've been through every phase in my
life doing tons of one, ignoring two and three, doing
tons of two ignoring one and three, and then doing

(43:11):
tons of three and ignoring one and two.

Speaker 1 (43:13):
It's hard to be really good at all three. This
would go back to the quadrant and we say, okay,
what's the realistic goal. Okay, realistic goal is I'm at
five with business. Okay, well, then maybe we go look,
he doesn't have time to do three and a half
hours of Zone two and then do a strength training
and then do it. That's we're gonna lose that. But

(43:35):
we're not gonna let that be an excuse for never
doing it. So next quarter we're gonna come back and
you got to pay me back. We're gonna go back
into it. We're gonna now emphasize maybe chloric restriction. We're
gonna do more movement because it'll burn the same calories
and we have more time, and you got to promise
me we're gonna take business down to four. Deal. Great,
Now you have a window, you're looking at it. You're going, okay,

(43:56):
I got this one. I got this. You don't have
to feel bad about skipping this thing because there's a plan,
is a strategy, right. But then I'm also going to
be able to hold you accountable to something that was
realistic and making progress, So you don't have to have
those balances I talked about all year round. It's okay
to shift them different priorities, different times of the year.
Look at your schedule, look what you want, look at

(44:16):
what's realistic, and then set yourself up for the best
chance for failure. Yeah, work for success.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
Sorry, yeah for sure. What recovery aids or what supportive
environment do you need for strength training because, as you explain,
that's like the most intense or the one that's really
working you the hardest in that sense, what do you
need to support that to make sure it's effective? Right?

Speaker 1 (44:38):
So with recovery, when you think about strength training, recovery
in most people's mind is how sore was I Okay, However,
you got to remember with higher intensity cardiovascar stuff that
has a different recovery demand as well. So I don't
want you to think strength training or cards are recovery
because we've seen a lot of people burn themselves into

(44:59):
the ground with lots of high intensity cardiovascar training and
they have no idea why, right, especially your your hard
charging executives, decision makers, surgeons, high pressure jobs, high pressure,
high pressure, high pressure, high ventilatory rate, high sympathetic drive
all day and then leave straight to the gym, high high, high,

(45:22):
high high, probably how to pre workout and then guess what,
we can't sleep stunning, right, So there's a recovery requirement
for both pieces there, and they are separate, right, So
when we're thinking that higher intensity cardiovascar stuff, we're thinking
more systemic.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Right.

Speaker 1 (45:38):
So now I'm looking at is our overall chloric expenditure there?
Do we have recovery time? Are we down regulating throughout
the day? Are we not over indulging in stimulants? All
whole set of equations over there. From the muscle side,
Number one, if forgetting accessively sore, we might have issues
with our training program. We shouldn't be getting that sore
that often unless you're at a pretty high level. And

(45:58):
even then, which is very clear, the amount of muscle
soreness you get from after lifting weights has almost no
correlation to how much muscle growth you'll get from that workout. Wow,
so that's the terrible proxy for good or bad workout.
Of what is the proxy for a good or bad
work there's a there's a fantastic model that are heard

(46:18):
years ago from a friend of mine named doctor Mike Isratel,
And I'm stealing this directly from him, so I'll give
him his due credit for that. You can kind of
think of three things here we go with the list
again in the workout, if you're trying to grow muscle
you should probably feel that muscle. This sounds just crazy,
but you'd be stunned how many people have tried to say,

(46:39):
get a bigger chest, and they're benching, and they're benching
and they're benching, and it's they're never getting a bigger
chest from it, And like, are you feeling your chest contract? No? Well,
then for you that position, the way that your anatomy works,
your technique, whatever equipment you're using, it wasn't probably targeting
your chest. So then why do we expect your chests
to grow? Doesn't mean it has to be maximuly contract,

(47:00):
but there's gonna be probably some feeling of it's controlling,
like it's contracted. Number two, you probably want to feel
some sort of what we call a pump in there.
So after the session, that muscle should look a little
bit bigger. It should have contracted filled with blood, filled
the fluids, like, it should look a little bit bigger.
Number three, you should feel it something the next day.

(47:22):
A little bit tight. Good three out of ten in
terms of like how tight, how sore, it's probably good.
If it's seven, eight, nine out of ten, you may
actually be going backwards because you may take so long
to recover from that that it's going to compromise the
quality of the next training session. If you love the
stuff and you're into it, I'll take five ors five's okay,

(47:45):
but if more than that, if you're at zero, then
I might be thinking, Okay, maybe we didn't get actually
enough out of that session. Two to three is a
really good level of soreness out of that, So we're
initially thinking though those types of things. So Number one,
if you're getting extensively sore, my biggest tip for recovery
is making sure you're not actually getting too sore to

(48:06):
begin with. Second one, By far, there's nothing that will
land even close to as impactful as even moderate quality sleep.
You have to have that. If you look at any
of the scientists that work in this area of muscle growth,
if you look at many of the people that coach
people here. When you start seeing SOTALLID progress, you start

(48:27):
looking at sleep as your first before you look at supplements,
before you look at anything else, you definitely go to sleep.
And if you see compromises in sleep, you're going to
go back to that as your first area of emphasis.
And I know people hate to hear that, but I'm
telling you look at the people who are the best
in the world at growing muscle, there's a reason that

(48:47):
that's like one of the first places they're going after. Yeah,
so don't get over the sore number one. Make sure
you're prioritizing your sleep. After that. If you want to
go to nutrition, we can look at it. Okay, great,
maybe our chloric can take as low. That's generally where
we're going to start from a protein perspective. Oftentimes, as

(49:08):
long as it's reasonable.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
Will cus through the idea amount of protein we actually here.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Yeah, I mean reasonable is and this is a heavy
ish by the way, something like one gram per pound
of body weight or two point two grams per kilo
rough starting point. If you want to go below that,
I'm not going to argue. If you want to go
below that is. And let's say you're at point eight
point six, I can survive that they'd be closer to,

(49:35):
say to like one point six grams per kila gram
so point six would be grams per pound, right, So
both units there for you. I can live with that.
People can grow muscle like that, no question about it.
People can grow muscle very clearly on many food sources,
plant based, animal based like they're both effective. If you
go above that, you don't necessarily guarantee more growth either.

(49:59):
And so so what we're looking at with protein for
most people is like just be in the stratosphere. Don't
make it you're constrained, don't make it the problem. Once
you make it not the problem, then it's probably like
going up more. Sometimes that's helped with people, but it's
generally not been the thing that that has really been like, oh,
I was only at one gram per pound and I
went to one point five and I don't get sore anymore.

(50:20):
That can happen, but it's probably not what we're looking at,
so it it. It's again it's one of those things
where like just don't make it the contractor, and you're
probably okay.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Yeah, that was a big one for me because I've
definitely I tried to match my buddy weight in protein,
but I just couldn't take it every day. It just
wasn't possible for me.

Speaker 1 (50:38):
We got a lot of tricks we could get you
there if you will, how depends on how you're eating
it as why right, so we can sneak it in
in different places. A really good example this is how
many meals you eat a day, profly three meals. Okay, great,
So sliding in twenty five grams in between before after
a meal is not as hard as one thinks. If

(50:59):
you're trying to eat that in you know, eight ounces
of chicken breast, that's gonna be uncomfortable. But if we
get that in in terms of this is why protein
shakes p well, yeah, no problem, right, we can easily
get that. A friend of mine, doctor Mike Ormsby at
Florida State, has been doing research in an area for
over fifteen years now of protein feeding immediately before bed.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Now, a lot of people immediately like, who wha wha, wha,
wha what, Yeah, that's surprising.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
Fifteen years of research in this area. He's tested combinations men, women,
metabolically unhealthy people like and in general, most of his
studies point to the same thing. That is, forty grams
of protein about thirty minutes before bed. He's yet defined
any disturbances in sleep. Now, this is forty grams of protein.

(51:52):
There's one hundred and twenty one hundred and fifty sixty calories.
These are not five hundred calorie full meals, right, This
is a barely modest amount. Admittedly, I think the best
he's done with sleep so far are kind of questionnaires,
and so I know one of the things he's working
right now is more high fidelity sleep testing, because this
is one of the things that yeah, obviously I'm a

(52:14):
you know, I have a sleep company, Like, I'm very
interested in maximizing sleep. So in fairness there it's plausible.
But on the surface, so far, of all of his studies,
he's yet to report any significant disturbances in sleep. What
he has reported, though, is very little change in things
like fat oxidation. So one, there's this misnomer like if

(52:37):
you eat right before bed, your body won't use the
seal store dolls fat. And he's done so many studies
now that I think that door is about a slam
shut as possible that that that's just not going to
be the case. And so his research is also not
indicating some over the top advantage for muscle growth. It's
not going to increase muscle growth by twenty five percent,

(53:00):
none of that's true. It's a modest benefit. So for me,
when I summarize his work, I say, Okay, look, very
little detriment an opportunity to get in forty more grams
of protein if you're low on your protein targets. So
if you're okay on your protein targets, I don't think
you need to do this. I don't think that there's
a huge advantage. But if you're really struggling, this is

(53:23):
one of the things that we'll go to. And thirty minutes,
by the way, is an arbitrary number. If you go,
oh my gosh, I try that one time and I
don't do it, then like, absolutely not worth. There's not
a ton of benefit here, and I'm trying to make
that really clear, right, I don't like over selling. This
is just hey, there's no detriment really and it was
not messing with your sleep, and this helps you get

(53:45):
closer to your protein I would imagine. And by the way,
he's done this in plant based as well, same thing,
like basically the same results from plant based ones. So
maybe forty is too much for you, all right, give
me twenty five, give me twenty fifteen. We don't want
to like, don't get too lost in detail there, right,
The point is here, you go, you had dinner at

(54:08):
six six point thirty something like that probably, and then
maybe a couple of hours later you want to do
whole food great in his research, you know, scientifically he
uses protein powders just to control He's actually used whole
food as well. You want to do a yogurt thing,
you want to do whatever, your favorite soss protein is
one hundred and fifty hundred and sixty calories like these

(54:29):
are not all of a sudden like massively disrupt your
blood flow and stuff like that. There, So I think
it's a very viable option. It's not required, no special
magic benefit to it. But that's one of the many
little tricks we can use to plug in. And you
you kind of put together two or three of those strategies,
you'd be surprised sixty eighty grams of protein can kind
of come like that and you're like, oh, wow, like

(54:50):
that was ion.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Actually, yeah, that's surprising. I want to hit your thoughts
about another thing that I think people get hung up
on and maybe don't know the insides behind, is what
should you eat before and off or a workout.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
I have an old YouTube video up that is called
something like post exercise anabolic Window. I think it's like
twenty five minutes or something. So you want all the details,
you can go there I'll give you the two minute
version right for those that don't want to do that.
The post exercise anabolic window was this idea that there's
this magic It started off as thirty minutes window post

(55:24):
exercise where you had to consume your nutrients, specifically carbohydrates
in protein to maximize and there was good rationale molecular
mechanisms as to why we thought that existed. Summarize many
years later, it's very clear that that's that's just not
the case. And so the way you want to think
about this is total protein intake throughout the day is
going to determine almost all of your variance there. So

(55:47):
as long as you hit your total and even i'll
say total protein intake throughout the day is not even
that important. It's probably thought about it as like protein
throughout the week, So like its kind like maybe you're
a little bit lower today, a little bit higher tomorrow.
That's that's how real life actually.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
Works under the vent.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
Right, Yeah, end up having steak for one night and
got extra sixty gramds approaching the next night you had
a pasta dish and it'll be okay, right, So don't
get overly concerned about you were ten grams load today
or twenty like, you'll be fine, right, So that matters most.
There are some exceptions, though, when you are performing at

(56:25):
a high level of energy expenditure. Let us take some
of our baseball players. It's not a big deal because
the energy expenditure in baseball is not incredibly high. For
Major League Baseball NBA players, this is different, though. Are
UFC fighters way different? Are professional boxers way different? They're
training hard twice today almost always, right. Golfers a little
bit different. So if you're training really really hard, whether

(56:47):
you're an athlete or not, but you're you're a workout
or you're super active, you're on the walking treadmill, you
know you're you're an endurance but you burn all those calories,
your nutrition window might matter because you may not have
enough time to restore muscle glycogen. Remember, you store carbohydrates
in your muscle and you'll use some of those during exercise,
and if you're doing a lot of hard work, you

(57:09):
use a lot of it, and then if you're not
consuming nutrients, you kind of run out of time before
then the session happens again four hours later. So in
those particular cases, nutrient timing does start to matter. But
it's not a magic molecular signaling window as so much
as it is practical issue of just like you ran
out of time to refill those muscle glycogen stores and

(57:32):
so you're training for the next session went down because
we couldn't refuel. We actually just completed an intermittent fasting
study and it was the first of its kind because
we were looking specifically at There's been a lot of research.
Grant Tinsley in Texas Tech has done a lot of
awesome work and many others on sixteen to eight intermittent fasting. Right,

(57:53):
really really common. You eat all your calories in an
eight hour window. Let's just say you don't eat breakfast,
you start eating at eleven AM and you eat dinner
at seven, like really common thing. Lots of research on
that compared to normal feeding three meals a day, six, five, whatever,
and they evidence is pretty clear at this point the
intermittent fasting does nothing particularly special, doesn't help you lose

(58:16):
fat any faster or anything like that. Really no, not
at all. Wow, long as you quit for protein, you
quit for calories, you'll get basically the same result. Some
studies they're reported maybe like a half a kilogram extra
fat loss. Others not. But if you look at the
research on aggregate, it's about the same. If it fits

(58:39):
your lifestyle, if it has you even more, hear it tremendous,
I'm all for it. That's great. Nothing's super special about
it for color restriction, right, YEA. Probably fifteen to twenty
studies from different labs at this point, so like generally
they're all yeah, kind of saying the same thing. What

(59:00):
we were interested in, though, is what about if you're
trying to grow muscle, what happens, right, Because all those
studies have put people in a caloric deficit trying to
lose weight, right, so you bring them down there for
the most part orchloric maintenance. So we took young, highly
trained people that try we're trying to grow muscle. We
put them in a CLOrk surplus. We went way above

(59:20):
energy needs, put them on very high protein. One group
did sixteen eight, one group did not, And we did everything.
We took muscle biopsies, looked at molecular signaling, genetic signaling,
single fibers, adaptations, We looked at muscle size, we looked
at sleep, we looked that digestion, We looked at hunger,
we looked at happiness, complaints of how hard or easy

(59:40):
the diet was, we looked at all of it. Net result,
there were differences, but in terms of muscle growth about
the same.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
One of the biggest things with the fastening group was
there was just a lot of anecdotal like, oh, this
is hard, this is hard, And specifically the problem was carbohydrates.
It was hard for them to get their carbohydrates in
without getting a lot of GI distress. We have that
come up a number of times. Performance, specifically leg strength
started to come down in the fasting group, and I

(01:00:14):
think we have pretty good rationalist suggests if you're trying
to maximize, because we were progressively overloading them. Basically, you
can imagine this like you're in the gym training and
you finish every set. This isn't exactly what we did,
but it gives you the concept. You finish every set.
And let's say you do a leg press at two
hundred pounds and you do ten reps. Okay, next time

(01:00:35):
you come in, you're gonna do eleven. If you did eleven,
next time, we're gonna do twelve. So like every single session,
if they were getting they were gonna, so they were
training really hard for eight weeks. I just don't think
they had the recovery capacity. I think either there was
under reporting because it was just like I can't I'm
just going to write the number down, but I can't
really eat that food. That's always possible in like real

(01:00:57):
human studies, or there was actually and we had a paper.
We have pretty good rationale of think that this is
a real finding. So coming all the way back, like
if you're trying to maximize strength and muscle gain and
you're training really hard, both would work. In fact, actually
the inminute fasting group didn't put on as much fat.

(01:01:19):
So the reality of it is, it's my opinion, this
is how science, this is how nutrition really works. One
of the reasons I advocated so hard to ask sleep questions.
Fatigue was higher in the fasting group too. Oh, interesting,
energy got lower, interesting, harder throughout the day, more naps
and actually naps was saying, but just perceived energy got

(01:01:39):
lower towards in the study. People go into change. From
my worldview, that's exercised. That's nutrition. There's many forms of
change though. Right when you go into change, you often
do it because you're inspired. You heard something, you heard
your podcast and like, great, I'm gonna try that. That sounded awesome,
so you go into it with an expectation. The reality

(01:02:00):
of that is very few things are panaceus. So maybe
higher protein is better for muscle, but maybe it hurts
your digestion. Okay, maybe it hurts your sleep. Maybe it
then helps your hormone. I'm making those up. Yeah, but
that's the real, honest, true truth is how it works. Right,
So you're gonna have to make your selections, right. I
don't like to be the person of going like you

(01:02:21):
should optimize for this over that, right, but you should
have some knowledge of going, Okay, I'm gonna choose nimin fast. Okay,
I like it because I at A B and C,
but then I'm probably gonna lose TMB these things.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
Constantly experimenting it out. Yeah, I really appreciate that take,
because I think that's what it's been for me. I've
I've found that it's so many things that you've heard
and tried to do and felt it was right, and
it's like, well, actually I just want to feel and
it goes back to what you started with, Right, how
do I want to look how do you want to feel?
And was the third one perform? Perform? Right? Yeah, and

(01:02:53):
so I I spend a lot of time in that
how do I want to feel and perform? And so
many things that I'm told would help me. Look, bet
are not things that help me feel and performed better?

Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
That's probably pretty true.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
Yeah, yeah, and I know, but I just love to
take that. It's about figuring it out. How important is
hydration and how much water do we actually need?

Speaker 1 (01:03:13):
Okay, this is another one where if you want to
get scared, look at the hydration research. Scared in the
sense of you want to pick erect out of this function,
You want to pick headaches, you want to pick fact
there's there's actually a paper that I just saw a
week ago, two weeks ago, blessed then I actually, yeah,
I think it was about one percent dehydration will reduce

(01:03:37):
cognitive function in a statistically significant manner. Right, So if
you are less than one percent dehydrated, which is almost
functionally impossible for you to notice, you will see clinically
meaningful and statistically significant reductions and a number of different markers.
This is when I say cognitive function, I mean I
think I can't remember honestly, specifically this paper, but it's

(01:03:58):
often things like word rec hall, executive decision making, short
term memory, things like that. Right, So again, I can't
remember the exact metrics in this particular study. So you'll
see that you can pick thermal regulation, you can pick
I mentioned sexual function, and your current health body composition
is sleep like you'll you'll run yourself dead worrying about this.

(01:04:21):
That said, it's not as scary as it sounds because
when we typically report like one percent deidration, two percent deidration,
what we're talking about is percentage of your body weight,
not like, oh my god, I'm just tiny below optimal.
You have to be like pretty far below optimal to
be one percent of your body You have most of
your body is water, so to lose one percent of

(01:04:42):
that as you know, a leader or sort of more.

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
So that's to say, when we have done this a lot,
i'd probably say I'm making this number up. Somewhere between
five and fifteen percent of our people that we've coached
over the years have come in with problems and all
we had to do is get their hydration not terrible.
This is everything from headaches constant headaches to brain fog.

(01:05:06):
Brain fog is probably the biggest one. Brain fog and
energy are the most common ones. Ten percent, I'm comfortable
saying ten percent of the time has just been a
hydration issue.

Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
Wow, what is it? The other times.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Sometimes it is, by the way, sometimes it's overhydration interesting,
very like probably this is just anecdote here. This is
not my lab. I don't know the research on this
or if it exists or not, but this is just
what we've seen generally women have an issue with overhydration.
There's like my wife and her friends have these like

(01:05:40):
called emotional support models. It's like they go to work
or whatever. It's like a seven different a tea and
like a recovery drink, and their hydration it's like bottles everywhere, right,
I'm talking about you, Darren Danny. But sometimes that's the
case of like they just consistently drink water, water, water, water,
and so they get they get close to what's called hypenatremia.
That's the science word for salt, right sodium more specifically,

(01:06:03):
and hypo meaning low. So it ends up happening is
not that your salt or sodium gets low in your system.
By the way, this is actually really common in endurance athletes,
and every year somebody dies in an endurance race from
hype on a treatium, drinking too much pure water. You
drink too much pure water, it gets really dilute. Sodium
is half of the it's part of the equation. Rather

(01:06:25):
that causes an electrical gradient that lets muscles contract. Why
that kills you as your heart as a muscle. So
your heart will will stop contracting because there's no grading difference,
not a positive and negative charge from one side of
the cell the other side, so it won't contract and
transmit electricity. It's not really super common. You know, you're
probably not gonna dry drinking like a little bit extra water.

(01:06:47):
But if you remember back in the day of there
used to be things like fraternity rushes and things like
that where they make the new pledges drink a gallon
of water, or there's been terrible stories of parents like
punishing their kids. And again, it's not really common, but
people have died pretty routinely. Really, yeah, lots of fraternity

(01:07:07):
people died from these, Like that's terrible because your heart
will stop right you get super deluded, So most likely
you're not drinking. You're not going to kill yourself. But
what you can get is some way up that journey
to where electricity kind of screwing up some science here
on purpose for communication purposes. But if you can't send

(01:07:30):
electricity from one side of a neuron to the next one,
then why are you expecting cognitive function to be at
his peak? So we have seen this again many times.
It's not the most common. Maybe ten percent of people
its hydration issue. Of that ten percent, probably i'd say
seventy percent are under hydrating, so thirty percent of that.
It's small number, but it is real are just drinking

(01:07:50):
too much in the rest and the rest of that
are on the opposite of the equation, right, So they're
drinking insufficient amounts of water or they're having things that
look like dehydration that are this is gonna sound funny,
but that actually we'll call them anxiety related. There's a
very clear relationship between hyperventilation and this is resting hyperventilation.

(01:08:11):
So if you're sitting there and you don't realize it,
but your respiratory rate is actually like I'm exaggerating but
making a point, right, that can actually put you in
a position of where you're actually getting rid of too
much carbon dioxide. Because you're breathing in oxygen breathing out
carbon dioxide. You're getting carbon dioxide concentrations too low in
your system. This is going to put you into what's

(01:08:33):
called respiratory alkalosis. Okay, Respiratory alkalosis is oftentimes then matched
with metabolic acidosis, so that that entire side of equation
tries to balance the pH in your system. One of
the mechanisms that has to do that is then start
altering how your kidneys resorb and reabsorb electrolytes, salts, and

(01:08:53):
things like that, which then alters hydration. So some of
the times this comes back to us going I'm using anxiety,
like very inappropriately here, but roughly of saying, oh, okay,
this is a hydration issue. But that's not because you're
not drinking enough water or having enough salt or whatever
the case is. This is the fact that your system
is continually trying to dump fluids. That's the problem we

(01:09:16):
have to come backwards and solve so we can cover
the symptom, give you more salt or produce something like that.
But really we got to work all the way back
to the beginning and say, like, let's stop this problem
from reoccurring. That happens really commonly. We see that a
bunch in that you know, ten percent sort of people.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
What are some of the healthy solutions for brain fog?

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
Yeah, I mean we get this one a lot. So
it's funny, I would say of brain fog people, I
don't know. Again, I'm making a number up, but it
feels to me like ninety percent of the time they
think some thing unique in specials going on, some micronutrient
is at a whack. They've got some sort of toxic
thing floating around, a pathogen or gut bacteria thing, and

(01:10:02):
those happen. We see those, and that's a real thing.
Mostly it's the basics. And I really truly mean that
we have a very high success rate at RITA with
brain fog, really high success rate. And often the majority
of the time it is the okay for you. It
might be your sleep is completely as functional boom. You

(01:10:25):
maybe don't realize your sleep is functional gone, brain fag gone,
like that's it right. Maybe it has nothing to do
with your sleep. Your sleep is okay, maybe it's not great,
but it's okay. And your nutrition is really mixed with
your physiology great. Sometimes it is got microbiome related. Sometimes
we do see heavy metal toxins at high concentrations, Like

(01:10:45):
those things are real. I would say, if you don't
have access to a program like ours or advanced testing,
if you do the basics, really get your stress management
under control, quality water, like really all that stuff. And
I'm really trying to emphasize that because that's mostly free stuff.
You don't need to turn to coaching. You don't need
to turn to a stool sample, you don't need to

(01:11:07):
turn to a blood test, you don't need to buy
supplements yet, get your house in order. With movement, sunlight,
quality food, a large percentage of your brain fog is
probably gonna go away. If you've tried that and have
it had success, maybe you can take additional steps. But
really we've had we joke sometimes that like we've had

(01:11:28):
a lot of people spend a lot of money and
we're like, you knew the answer. Yeah, I told you
this coming in and you so past that. It can
be micro nutrient related. There's no question about that. There
We see that pretty routinely. That can look like all
kinds of different stuff. I'm wishing there was like one
or two I could pull out and say, Jay, it's

(01:11:48):
usually B six or B twelve. It's not the honest
answer though it has come up, but like sometimes it's
it's it's honestly, it's super sporadic. If you get your
breathing in order, though, if you get stressed in order,
you get reasonably close with hydration, reasonably close with quality foods,

(01:12:11):
and see some sun like most of you will probably
see really significant improvements.

Speaker 2 (01:12:16):
Yeah, Ane, I'm intrigued. We're talking about all of this
and wondering what's your schedule. Where do you prioritize.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
Well, I have a family, I have five companies, and
I have a research lab.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
So let's addswer with you your quadrant.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
Oh my quadrant stop? Yeah no, So that's actually really
cool because I do this practice.

Speaker 2 (01:12:39):
Just move.

Speaker 1 (01:12:39):
My family pretty recently moved my lab. So now my
lab is in I'm at Parker University in Dallas. Sex's
We're building a sixty five thousand square foot human Performance center.
It's gonna be open to the public. So really really
cool about that. Yeah, We're gonna be able to do
a lot of testing and stuff in there, graduate students,
a lot of research in there. We have a cool

(01:13:01):
visitor center that's gonna be a part of it. I'm
just like so stoked to be congrats, thanks you man.
So that all happened this quarter, and then my sleep company,
Absolute rest Our, blood work Company, Vitality, and our coaching program,
all this stuff came up. So this quarter is it
was quite frankly a seven in business. And I have

(01:13:23):
to give a huge shout out to my wife because,
like we knew coming to this quarter, I'm like, this
is gonna be rough. I'm not gonna say she hasn't
complained at all, but for the most part, so my
fitness has been a one, the lowest it's probably been
in my memory. I'm doing the best I can. My
coach Tim is like, cheez, are you ever gonna train?
I'm I doing, like doing sort of the best I can.

(01:13:45):
Everything the rest of it's won right, So it's one
one one all category recovery one. Relationships one. My relationships
personal things like that have been almost non existent. Very intentionally.
That said, I'm super stoked because I'm about fact when
I leave here, I'm going to be spending about seven
straight days with nothing but family.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
So I'm paying that back when the new quarter comes
and when we start off that that's going to go
back down to five from a business perspective, and that's
all going to come back up in training. So I'm
super stoked to get back after it. But we made
this decision in early summer just it's the unfortunate thing
of like the lab move and our family move and

(01:14:29):
two of our companies really taking off, like really taking off.
And I was like, I see where this is going,
and I'm just going to set expectations personally.

Speaker 2 (01:14:37):
Yeah, it's great to hear the reality of it, right,
Like that's the point, that's the reality of life that
you've kind of had throughout this whole conversation. I feel
like you've given no folk solutions, quick fixes. There's no
hacks and habits that are like, it's not who you are.
And I appreciate it because even in your life, you're like, yeah,
this is what it actually looks like when you are

(01:14:59):
working out insistently training every day. What does your workout
look like?

Speaker 1 (01:15:03):
So I have different phases is what I do right now?
One of my biggest things I look forward to every year,
my dad, my brother and I always go on a
hunting trip in the fall, right, like all kinds of stuff.
This year, we were up in about ten thousand feet
elevation in the in western Wyoming, and we're running up
and down the hills, biskit the whole time. So I
will generally schedule my entire year around that phase, which

(01:15:25):
means prior to that, it was a lot more long
duration rocking, moving training things like that, not emphasizing muscle growth,
not emphasizing even like BO two max or anything like that.
I need to be able to handle the mountain and
I need to be able to handle my respiration and
the elevation. So I'm geared towards that. Coming back off
of that trip, then I knew this quarter was going

(01:15:46):
to be awful. So this quarter was just about moving.
I'm trying to move. I did a little workout yesterday
in the hotel room. Today all I basically got in
was sauna for the most part, right no time, and
I had that's a lie. I did a path, I
did a bath. The hotel room's like the best I
could come up with. I had no break in meeting,

(01:16:06):
and I'm like, I can get a fifteen minute hot
bath in and like sweat move throughout the day. Okay,
that's how it is.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:16:13):
When I go back to start off after this refresher here,
it's generally gonna look something like this. I'm mostly going
to be lifting weights three to four times per week,
and I don't ever have a Monday's legs, Tuesday's arms
things like that, because that's never gonna happen. I just
have the next workout, and I get that thing done
the next time it's available. So I don't actually have

(01:16:34):
like seven day routines. I just have a thing I'm
trying to get done over across ninety days, and so
what then ended up looking like is generally like seventy workouts.
So I try to get done in ninety days. Sometimes
that's nine or ten or eleven days in a row
because I like have the space. And then I know
I'm gonna have two workouts in eight days, right, So
I'm just like, if I have a chance to train,
I'm going to train because I know, like schedule is

(01:16:56):
gonna eat me right now, So I do that. So
generally three or four days a week of lifting, generally
one to two days a week of trying to move
a ton. This could be a lot of steps up
and down the Mountain where I live. This could be
I will do many of my meetings where like people
always laugh at me because I'm just gonna like pace
back and forth. I love pacing when I work, So

(01:17:18):
I'm just like trying to crewe movement throughout the day
and then something at least once a week. Like I
said earlier, I touch maximum possible heart rate and a
lot of different varieties. The last probably year or so
of lifting specifically has been probably the most frustrating year
of more like almost a year and a half now,

(01:17:40):
because I made a conscious decision of saying, you know,
I feel good, everything is great, but I need to
be thinking about the next sixty years. And so I
have a couple of little asymmetries and a couple of
little things that I know are not moving how they
should be moving. So I have a coach and all
of my programming is just correcting those things. So the

(01:18:03):
workouts are just infuriating because it's all the stuff you
suck at. It's none of the stuff that like feels
these big rewarding things out of it. But it is
a saying, it's me stepping back and going what if
you spend a year, what if you spend many year
and you weren't trying to maximize growth or maximize strength,
You're really trying to maximize joint health and function. Would
you regret that forty years from now? I doubt it, right,

(01:18:27):
And so it was just like looking back and going,
let's run the counterfactual. What if you didn't do that,
you probably regret it. Yeah, so then you make that choice.
So lifting for me specifically, the last year has just
been like so not fun, but like that's the conscious
decision I made of investing myself.

Speaker 2 (01:18:44):
So thanks man, Yeah, man, Yeah, I really appreciate it.
It's great to hear, and I think everyone who's listening
can give themselves a bit more grace as well, because
you know, you know all of this, and I think
often people look at people who know a lot and
doing so much research and have good healthy abbits. Yeah,
but there's a reality of you know, and I I

(01:19:06):
you know, same for me, like in the work that
I do, like it's you know, I'm constantly trying to
share the moments where I'm like, you know, probably didn't
respond as well as I could have, or wasn't as
mindful as I should have been. Sure, you know, that's
the reality of what it means to be alive, and so.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
It's a practice, man, It's always a practice, right.

Speaker 2 (01:19:23):
Yeah, absolutely, Andy, We end every episode with a final five.
But before we do that, there are a few more
questions that I kind of wanted to loop back to,
and so one of them was, why do you suggest
that we don't work out at night.

Speaker 1 (01:19:36):
You can work out at night, but you want to
just be careful of how much is disrupting your sleep
and what type of workout you're doing, especially if your
day is laid out. The example I think I gave
earlier was really high intensity, sympathetic fight or flight type
of day. If you're then always matching that with additional
sympathetic drive. Some people that's okay, but a lot of

(01:19:59):
people on our experience that has been there, you know,
quote unquote root cause of filling the blank. Right, So,
low testosterone, brain fog sleep sort of like, okay, when
you're on gas pedal all day, maybe for you right now,
your exercise needs to be a little bit more restorative
rather than the opposite. It's not always the case, though,

(01:20:20):
I can train at night with generally no issues whatsoever.
I like it. I almost always train at the end
of the day, so it can be just fine. Just
be mindful of if you're looking at your system and going, okay, great,
I can do really high intensity stuff I can do.
We've like, our sleep technology is pretty outrageous, so I

(01:20:40):
can verifiably say these things. I can do lots of
stimulatory stuff. I can watch Lord of the Rings in
eight K on a ninety eh screen. I don't have this,
but like right in front of my face a minute
before bed, and I have zero issues with blue light.
I have zero issues with stimulation. And that's just how
you're wired. Sleep architecture is going to be fine. Sleep durations,

(01:21:01):
sleep quality, the amount of time, the depth within each
sleep phase. I attract all these every night, right, no
change for me. So intensity of exercise is going to
have no bearing on me. But that's specifically, yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (01:21:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:17):
What I've seen though for a lot of our people
is not always, but many people it's the opposite, where
we have to be a little bit more mindful. And
so what we might have to do is say, okay,
we can train, but your training has to look like this.
We have to redefine what training is for you. We
have to do our higher intensity stuff earlier or at minimum,
And this is what we do for our athletes because

(01:21:37):
they don't have an option. They have to their competition
is at night, right NBA plays at seven o'clock. Or
you get the idea, let's at least match the high
intensity work with down regulation post exercise. If we just
walk off the court or walk out of the gym
and go right now, now we finally see our kids
for the day or whatever. Like you're just asking for

(01:21:58):
disaster here me five minutes, three to seven is what
I say. Give me three to seven minutes. Can we
downregulate it a little bit? And we have really found
that can give us eighty percent of what we need
to get. It's not one hundred. But if all those
things are refused, you're like, that's it. That's my only
time to day and I'm not giving up my Okay, fine,

(01:22:18):
give me my five minutes post training. You can do
this in a car. You can do this in the
locker room or wherever it is, lights down, cover your
face with our athletes will put just their shirt or
their towel over their face. Lye on your back. I
would love to give you a specific and highly designed
down regulation breathwork routine. That's what that's our gold standard.

(01:22:40):
But if you can't do that, it won't do that.

Speaker 2 (01:22:42):
Just give me this stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:22:43):
Fine, Just breathe through your nose, all right. You want
to do a double extented exhale, so you want to
do a cadence like a four second inhale, eight second exhale.
Generally the longer you're exhaling, the more downregulatory. It is, like, okay, great,
Like we have lots of protocols, we can go into
tons of customized breathing programs. We do that a lot.
But if not, can you make it as simple as

(01:23:05):
go sit in your car, close your eyes and just
breathe through your nose, set a timer for four minutes.
That actually is a stunning amount of effectiveness to that.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
Well, I love that, man, That's great. Yeah, I definitely start.
I was playing pickaball at night. I was doing my
morning workout in the gym, and then yeah, pickable in
the evening was destroying my sleep, Like I yeah, it
would take me two hours. Like I'm someone who thankfully
falls asleep pretty quickly. And it's like I would get
into bet at like nine thirty and I wouldn't get
to bed to like eleven thirty twelve because I was

(01:23:35):
just like wired from playing pickaball for like seven to
nine or whatever it was, And so I'm having to
figure out I've just stopped playing because yeah, it's having
such a big impact. But I appreciate try to try
that out. I will try it out.

Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
Yeah, you'd be surprised. It might not be enough for you.
You might you might have to do fifteen or twenty minutes.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
Yeah, or it might not work at all.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
But give it a go. You might. We've seen enough.
I'm well, I'll try.

Speaker 2 (01:23:57):
Another audience question we had to answer was what do
you suggest for women with pcos in terms of an
ideal workout?

Speaker 1 (01:24:04):
So when you get into situations like that, whether it's PCOS,
whether it's just simply really difficult menstrual cycles to manage,
whether it's a menopause or you know, you know, if
we're going through things like that. This area of research
is so tricky because symptomology is so wide ranging. Defining
menopause is physiologically easy, but even understanding you know, it

(01:24:27):
could be six months or ten years, like, it's a
really hard thing. Symptoms are up and down the menstrual
cycle alone independent pcos you're adding on top of those things.
I have yet to see a clear cut specific this
is better crdit and just sort of like if you
want to follow some guidelines and you're feeling better, I'm
all in, like that's great. If not, though, I don't

(01:24:50):
have a specific thing that says you have to do
this this way. We on are yet to give women
different styles of training while we're here. We don't train
them differently just because they're women. We don't do anything
different throughout the metal cycle with training or nutrition just
because they're women. We do everything that's based on the individual.

(01:25:12):
So if we need to do sustuff, we absolutely will.
But we do not walk them in and say, oh, okay,
our women do this solid training, our men do this.
We absolutely do not. And I know that wasn't what
you're asking, but.

Speaker 2 (01:25:21):
No, no, but that's really useful. Yeah, I didn't know that.
I'm no, I'm intrigued. We definitely do have different protocols.
You have it it's so individual, it's not based on gender.
It's not like oh this is better for your strength
and female.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Yeah, yes, like men and women have massive differences and
We're always gonna acknowledge and pay attention to those things,
but I'm always just coaching you, and what.

Speaker 2 (01:25:40):
All the differences that people should be aware of.

Speaker 1 (01:25:43):
You have clear hormonal differences generally, right. One of the
things that we have seen in our research, and I
will say this, it's held true in our coaching practices.
A lot of the times women handle volume better from
an exercise perspective. And when I say handle, I mean
you can give them more reps, more sets, they can
train more often, their recovery is faster. The other way

(01:26:04):
you can flip that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):
Why is that?

Speaker 1 (01:26:06):
Well, we've actually done some work here and nobody really knows.

Speaker 2 (01:26:09):
I noticed that my wife. My wife's like that, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:26:12):
You honestly, like it's pretty true. My friend Brett Contreras
made a really awesome post recently, and I'm like, wow,
this is great specifically on this point. Again, I want
to give him credit because I'm like, oh, actually, he
nailed this. When people say things like, oh, we don't
train men and women differently, like I just said, I
generally hear that, go, okay, you never trained women like
you never trained women. If you're gonna say that, that's

(01:26:34):
exactly what Brett's post was, I'm like, okay, because honestly
we sort of do now walking in we do not,
but I know that oftentimes we can bring the volume up. Also,
it oftentimes means they need more volume. Not always, but
I'm hedging quickly of going okay, we got to start
probably thinking more volume here. And if I'm not getting
responses as quickly as you want, We're pretty quick to

(01:26:57):
just go to volume and it oftentimes when oftentimes that
I'll go the other direction when it comes to performance too,
women because of that generally don't need as much of
a taper. They don't need to have to, they don't
have to back off as much to get that super
compensation that that peaking day. Again, these are very yeah,
broad generalizations, right, We're always coaching the individual.

Speaker 2 (01:27:18):
Yeah, we can't get specific.

Speaker 1 (01:27:19):
Without totally in front of us exactly. So those are
someones that we kind of like pop out to immediately
where we see differences. I've coached world champion females in
probably six or more sports at this point, so we've
done powerlifting and the UFC and a bunch of different sports.
I'm wrestling. I can also say most often women are

(01:27:44):
more in tune with their body than men, they generally
give better feedback. Yeah, if you go ask one of
our male athletes, like, how you feeling today, Like I
know what, they're gonna say, pretty good, coach, like whatever,
where women are more likely to be like, I feel
pretty good. But back's a little bit tighter here. Energy
is just a touchdown. You're like, oh, and they're really
in tune with this. Things a little bit off over here.

(01:28:06):
Men are like kind of blunt instruments. A lot of
the times. Women will be more responsive to changes in
caloric intake, where again men are a little more robust
to those things. So you have to be really careful.
You have to be really careful of lowering colories too much,
too long. For women. You gotta be careful not in men,
but you can get away with it a little bit

(01:28:29):
more so when it comes to just sort of these generalities,
those are the ones that pop up are the most
some things that are counterintuitive. Actually, since we're here and
there's a lot of research on this that I'd say
empirically our coaching practice scientifically, we actually just published a
men analysis. I was a co author on this one,
so somebody else led this one. But you don't really

(01:28:52):
see much of a difference in rate of increase between
men and women in terms of strength and muscle. It's
not that different. You grow it about this relative rate.
It's just that men are generally bigger. So if you
both gain ten percent, your absolute amount is is far
much higher. So it looks like you just got up there.
There are some subtle differences there within that analysis. You

(01:29:15):
can read the details if you're a nerd like that,
but the take hold message for that is it's it's
pretty much the same. Yeah, And I would say our
coaching experience has seen that we don't see women on
average struggling to put on more muscle relative to men
or strength. If the training and the nutrition and all
the other factors are equal, they're going to progress pretty

(01:29:37):
much equally for a long long period of time. The
last one that would jump out to me is on
a similar note there is we generally see women through
aging are a little bit more successful against joint injury.
Oh interesting, men are gonna be a little more banged
up for the most part. So I think that's a
believable story too. I don't know why, but well, I

(01:29:58):
I could guess. But on a little more aggressive, probably
worse decision making, but you get it. So categorically those
would be some of the differences.

Speaker 2 (01:30:05):
Got it, Thank you, And I want to ask you
a final five. These questions have to be answered in
one word to one sentence maximum. Oh boy, So the
vice question is what is the best health advice you've
ever heard, received, or given?

Speaker 1 (01:30:19):
The notion of adaptability and plasticity is far greater than
people realize. Your genetics play a big part, of course,
but your lifestyle is far more important to your end
story than your genetics. So you have the ability, the
capacity within reach to make a significant improvement in any
aspect of that. Look, feel perform that you choose some

(01:30:41):
work there, but you have autonomy in your body.

Speaker 2 (01:30:44):
That's very hope giving. I love that question. Number two,
what's the worst health advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:30:52):
Oh boy, I'm gonna cheat with my answer here and
give a antithesis to my first answer, which is the
idea that there is a certain food you can or
can't eat, that all of us in humanity have to
be eating or sleeping, or training or living a certain
way or we're going to be unhealthy. That is colossally untrue, unfair,

(01:31:13):
and unhelpful.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
Great on to question number three. For someone who's really
trying to lose some stubborn belly fat, what should they do.

Speaker 1 (01:31:22):
This will sound a little bit counterintuitive, but a large
portion of your resting metabolic rate. Your metabolism is defined
by how much muscle you have, So getting those last
few pounds off the belly, maybe try to put some
muscle on. My guess is you've already done everything else,
so try that option.

Speaker 2 (01:31:43):
And would you recommend how or that's case specific?

Speaker 1 (01:31:46):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (01:31:47):
Question number four, what's something you used to believe to
be true about health that you disagree with now?

Speaker 1 (01:31:55):
I have a lot of answers. I've been open honest,
probably should do more about things that change. I was
very against a cardiovascular exercise that like strength training is
the only thing you need to do. That that's very wrong.
I was also very against low carbohydrate diets in any form.

(01:32:15):
I was very against intermittent fasting, and I think I
wasn't totally wrong on that. But those are viable strategies
for most people. They're not perfect for all goals, but
those things are options. So I'd say those three specific
ones but in general, I was simply too closed minded
about assuming I knew what everyone wanted in terms of

(01:32:36):
the outcome and the goal. When you do that, you
start limiting options and you are working too much off
of hubris. The more you realize people are looking for
different things, then you start to realize, oh, okay, these
are potentially acceptable. They just aren't going to get to
where I thought everyone wanted to go, and that was
not the appropriate approach. So all of your questions, by

(01:32:58):
the way, I'm in like sentence nine, ha.

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):
But I love it, man. It's a good fifth and
final question. It's a question we ask everyone who's ever
been on the show. If you could create one law
that everyone in the world had to follow, what would
it be.

Speaker 1 (01:33:11):
You know what's quite funny about this answer is I
literally sent a tweet out with it yesterday that said,
I think we should make it illegal for people to
recline their seats on airplanes.

Speaker 2 (01:33:21):
A that's so good.

Speaker 1 (01:33:23):
It's on my top of my mind.

Speaker 2 (01:33:24):
I'd be really mad at you for that. Love God,
I hate that. But you can recline yours too.

Speaker 1 (01:33:29):
That's not because you're smashing into my lap and I can't.

Speaker 2 (01:33:32):
Work a right. Oh you're a worker, that's yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:33:35):
I'm like playing time is perfect, work time.

Speaker 2 (01:33:38):
Plain time is the only time I switched to entertainment.
Oh really, yeah, I'll read a book or I'm watching
something or no.

Speaker 1 (01:33:44):
Man, I hate it. So my chicking answer here would
be able to make it illegal to recline seats on airplanes.

Speaker 2 (01:33:48):
I love it. Andndy Gallup and everyone, thank you so
much for listening and watching Andy. Thank you for all
your incredible insights wealth wisdom. I hope that you will
take away one thing and apply it from this episode.
Remember that that's my request. You won't be able to
do all of it. You won't be able to do everything.
Try and pick the one thing and just apply it
to make a shift in your life. Follow Andy across
social media, his podcast, everything else he has going on

(01:34:11):
to make sure that you're connected to his insight. I'm
sure it's had a big impact on you. I know
it has on me and Andy, I look forward to
having you on the show many many times. Thank you
so much.

Speaker 1 (01:34:21):
That's my pleasure. Man, I can't wait to come back.

Speaker 2 (01:34:23):
Thank you. If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my
interview with doctor Daniel Ahman on how to change your
life by changing your brain.

Speaker 3 (01:34:31):
If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with
a healthy brain. You know, I've had the blessing or
the curse to scam over a thousand convicted felons and
over one hundred murderers, and their brains are very damage

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