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

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Andy Galpin is a Professor of Kinesiology at California State University at Fullerton, where he studies muscle adaptation and applies his research to work with professional athletes. In this episode, Andy sets the foundation for the conversation by discussing the anatomy, microanatomy, and physiology of the muscle, including explaining what it actually means to undergo hypertrophy of the muscle. He then explains the difference between power, strength, speed, and hypertrophy and how those differences relate to what's happening at the cellular level and the functional unit level. Additionally, he discusses energy sources for muscles, the importance of protein for muscle synthesis, the various types of muscle fibers, and the factors that determine one’s makeup of muscle fibers. Finally, Andy wraps the conversation with how he would design a program for an untrained person committed to adding muscle and functional strength for longevity. We discuss: Andy’s path to expertise in exercise [3:30]; Contrasting strength, power, and force production and how they inform us about training for longevity [9:30]; Muscle energetics: Fuels that provide energy to muscles, and the importance of protein [17:45]; The structure and microanatomy of muscle, muscle fibers, and more [29:30]; Energy demands of skeletal muscle compared to other tissues in the body [39:45]; How a muscle contraction works and why it requires ATP [48:00]; Muscle fibers: modulation between fiber types with movement and changes in fibers with training and aging [53:15]; Andy’s study of twins demonstrating the difference in muscle fibers between a trained and untrained individual [1:02:30]; Microanatomy of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers [1:11:15]; Factors that determine one’s makeup of muscle fibers and how adaptable they are with training [1:22:15]; Hypertrophy and what happens at the cellular level when a muscle grows [1:30:00]; How athletes quickly cut water weight and the rehydration process [1:37:30]; Different types of athletes [1:47:30]; Training advice for a hypothetical client who’s untrained and wants to add muscle and functional strength for longevity [1:49:45]; Changes in muscle and muscular function that occur with aging [1:53:45]; Training plan for the hypothetical client [1:59:30]; What drives muscle hypertrophy? [2:12:15]; How to properly incorporate isometric exercises into a workout [2:19:00]; Additional training tips: movement patterns, how to finish a workout, and more [2:25:45]; Ways to incorporate high heart rate exercise into a workout plan [2:28:45]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain

what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Andy Galpin. Andy is a professor of kinesiology at California State University Fullerton, where his biochemistry and molecular exercise physiology lab researches the acute responses of chronic adaptations of skeletal muscle to high-intensity power or force and fatiguing exercise. And these research spans adaptations from whole muscle to cellular level changes, which he's applied to his work with professional athletes for more than about 15 years. In this episode, we focus our conversation specifically around one of the four pillars of

exercise, which is strength. And we focus a lot of the conversation around muscle. Now, at the beginning of this episode, which I really enjoyed, we talked pretty technically, I'm not going to hide that. We get into the anatomy, micro anatomy, and physiology of the muscle. And I think it's important, because I do think that this is a subject matter that I talk about a lot. I think a lot of podcasters talk about this stuff a lot, but I think it's important to really understand

some of the details. I mean, something as simple as what does it mean to undergo hypertrophy? What does it mean for a muscle to get bigger? What exactly is getting bigger? What is the difference between power, strength, speed, and hypertrophy? And how do those differences phenotypically relate to what's happening at the cellular level,

or at the functional unit level? So we talk about all of those things. We talk about muscles and their energy sources. We talk about the importance of protein on muscle synthesis. And we talk about the various types of muscle fibers, which is actually something where I probably learned more in this discussion on that particular topic than anything else that Ann and I spoke about. We had the conversation looking at a case study of how Andy would create a program for an untrained person who just started to do a few hours of cardio, but wanted to spend three days a week building strength with a focus on building strength for longevity.

Now we did this because that approach was so popular in some of our previous podcasts. I think listeners really like hearing how we take kind of this high-fluid science and now bring it back down to how can you apply this to your life. One final point I'll make here is that as is sort of common with me, I go into these podcasts with a long list of topics I want to explore and sometimes I don't get close to it. And that was certainly the case here, Andy, and I barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to cover. So this will be part one of two because I'll be sitting down again with Andy shortly to do the second part of this. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Andy Galpin.

my conversation with Andy Galpin. Well, Andy, it's wonderful to see you here on video. We were supposed to do this in person, but we got a good laugh as to why that didn't pan out, but that's okay. Perhaps there will be an in-person chance the next time. Yeah, I'm excited to be here this way. It would have been more enjoyable in person, but we'll make it work. You know, I've wanted to speak with you for quite a while and think listeners to this podcast

are not strangers to the idea of how much of an emphasis I place on exercise said it many times before. I'll continue to reiterate it until the data suggests. Otherwise, that there's really no more potent tool to improve longevity, meaning extending the length of life and improving the quality of life in exercise. And that includes nutrition, that includes sleep, and that includes the entire pharmacopea of medication, supplements, drugs, hormones, etc. So it's probably for that reason that I would say that exercise makes up a disproportionate amount of the content on our podcast. And of course, within exercise, I tend to divide it really down into these different pillars of strength, stability,

and cardio respiratory fitness, which of course, then gets further subdivided by the metabolic state and energy state of it. And of course, what we're gonna probably talk a lot about today is strength, but also all of the things that kind of stem from that, like hypertrophy and various things like that, which I think are of huge interest to people.

But maybe for folks who don't know you, can you give us a sense of your path, you know, frankly, out of high school college, like, you know, what was your athletic background, and what made this be something that you have dedicated all of your time to? Sure, I guess initially I need to say that conflict of interest, which is, I'm an extra scientist. So if you want to start giving more credit to exercise for longevity and wellness, like I cannot be more biased into that lane, especially with an excellent science strength training. So I've been waiting for 30 years for this to happen

to the field. So now I get to prove that all my preconceived notions are actually holding through. I will refuse to change, despite what you said. I will refuse to change, despite what the data's progressed. For real, I grew up in a very small town in South-West Washington, so I played everything in high school, football, basketball, baseball, track and field the whole thing. I went to a small school in Oregon

where I played college football and got my undergraduate degree in exercise science. And then after that, I made some stops in Arizona and worked in a facility training professional athletes. I went back and got my master's degree in human movement sciences, which is just a other fancy way of saying, can you see all the G or exercise science. And then got my PhD in human bioenergetics. So in 2011, I got that came out here to California and I've been working at Cal State Fullerton ever since. So I've been for a while now the director for the Center for Sport Performance there, as well as my lab, which is about chemistry

and molecular exercise physiology lab. So that's the commenced version of the academic path. My more burdened your question was college football and then training professional athletes started at that point as well. And then I started competing in weightlifting, which locally is a lintic weightlifting, that version of it. And then combat started competing in weightlifting, which locally is Olympic weightlifting, that version of it. And then combat sports, so I have that. So I've continued to work with athletes

the entire time. I'm still over the last 10 years, you know, running my labs, running our research. I've worked with professional athletes, and just about every sport with exceptional racing. I have yet to get into Formula One. Sai Young winners, MVP's, all pros, the whole thing, Olympic gold medalists, et cetera. So my research actually and my interests really come back from the exact same point. And if someone returns at the very beginning here, which was, I was a decent athlete,

but I actually feel like I was in the perfect spot because I wasn't so good that these details didn't matter. I was gonna be in all pros, gonna go to the next level no matter what. That wasn't the case. So when I did things better, it was more effective at training, more effective at recovery, it mattered.

I saw differences on the field. It was the difference between me being a starter and being not a starter or whatever the case is. I also was good enough to know where I got rewarded. So if you're not good enough, then it's just like, it doesn't matter what you do, you're not to write the next level. So I was in that perfect scenario. And so I was totally obsessed with making sure I gave myself every advantage possible

to have some success. I knew I was never going to be professional level caliber or even division one, but I was like, the difference is, do you want to play called football or not? That's going to be the difference. So if you can do these things, you might be able to do it. If not, you're going to have no chance. And where I'm from, people don't really go to college in general and they certainly don't play college sports. There's no advanced degrees. So to me, I was like, wow, you got a chance to do something really special here and do something that no one else you really know has done that often. So that's that initial passion came from. Additionally, the town I grew up with, my parents, and everybody I knew, it is a very working class place.

So losing was always fine. There's always better than you. But losing because you didn't prepare was totally unacceptable. Most of the kids I grew up with, we worked on farms, we clean stalls, we did something before school. My parents worked in construction, like building. So that whole idea of like you fend for yourself

and you get what you earn and all that sort of stuff was just something I grew up with. And so moving that into sports and academia was like, if you want a chance, like this on you and nobody else, and so do the work or don't do the work. So that's what all pushed me to get here. And then as I'll finish up, the the background is then when I started moving past my athletic career and I started finding athletes who

Wanted to pursue these tremendous goals like go to the Olympics, but in his fort like women's wrestling Like no one's gonna help them. They don't have funds and so I just became very interested in these people because I'm like man I can help you a lot No one else cares about you. There's no money on the back end here. There's no fame. There's no social media at the time. I just want to get help you here in this journey because that's something that's going to reach my soul of. Let's give everything we can to do something really special that no one's going to care about. Besides you and I and like your team and your family. And so that's what drove it

initially. And that's what really put me in this position. And that's what put me in the position to continue to go and get my masters, to get my PhD was, you gotta learn more. There's more things going on here. You've gotta find all the answers that you can. And if you're doing anything less than that, what are you doing?

You're just giving up. That's the background of how I got here and what I do now. Now you mentioned briefly, Olympic lifting. We've had Lane Norton on the podcast several times. Lane obviously is a very successful power lifter. I think folks are kind of familiar with powerlifting having the three lifts. And it's really about these three lifts and what your total is in those three lifts.

Can you contrast that a little bit with what Olympic lifting is? And I think more importantly, what are the physiologic differences between those two? And I'll preface the question for the listener by saying, again, even if you never plan to power lift or Olympic lift, this is going to be germane to our discussion. There's actually a fairly recently we published the most in-depth analysis of muscle composition of Olympic weightlifters. So we can actually come back to that, and we can talk more specifically about muscle composition,

but in general, as some background, if you think about power lifting, it's tricky, because we're about to run some loops on your brain here. So technically, you have a force production, which is in the case of lifting, it is one-ret max. So it's the most amount of weight you can lift one time, period. Not repetitions on how many times you can do it, not on fast, you can do it just what can you get up. And the sport of power lifting like what Lane does, it is three exercises. The deadlift

bench in the squat and it's how much weight can you lift one time. You get a couple of tries at it, but that's that's effective what it is. So it's really expression of pure strength. It's not really an expression of power at all because the speed components very poor. In fact, the dead lift can take as long as you want. It doesn't matter. Did you get it up or did you not? Squat, et cetera. So we're already at the gates which confuse people because the name of the sport is called

powerlifting, despite the fact that it is not a power exercise nor is it determined by power. When you move over to the Olympic way, that thing, it's the same basic idea. There are now two lifts instead of three. One lift being called the snatch and the ones called the clean and jerk, it's called the clean and jerk because it has two parts, you clean it to your chest and you jerk it over your head. But it's still considered one lit name of the game is still one rep max. So whoever can lift the most amount one time is the winner. There's no repetition method to it. The difference is though this is now more expression of power because although it's all about one or max, it's difficult to lift something over your head as high as possible, slowly. So there's a speed component required to the movements to perform whether it's a clean or the snatch. And so it is an expression of tremendous strength,

but there's this velocity component to it. So when you multiply force by velocity, now you've got power. And so technically, the weightlifters, the Olympic weight lifters, are significantly more powerful than a power lifter, despite the fact that power lifters and it's more called powerlifting. So the confusion there is, and this gets worse when we start roping in things like strong man. Strong man is fantastic because, again, you see strength and you think that must be the biggest expression of strength. In fact, it's not because strong man has contested over multiple repetitions. So it is an expression of very, very high strength, repeated several times, very, very high strength, but it's not technically a true one-rept max. That actually goes to back for power lifters. So now you've already confused power

lifting, weight lifting, and strong man. And none of those three things are actually explaining what they do correctly. We can keep going out of multiple sports here, but this is the core of the problem. The reason you're, I think you're bringing this up is this also explains training adaptations. It's a perfect way to outline

to understand what's happening. So if you train like a power lifter, that's probably represents the best way to get truly strong. If you train like a weight lifter, that's probably represents the best way to get truly strong. If you train like a weight lifter, it represents the best way to get powerful. If you train like a strong man, it represents a fantastic way to get very, very strong. And more, what we'll say, life functional movements, so walking, carrying, lifting objects, and doing it probably multiple times.

So the only difference between all those three in the last part of I2 is with the Olympic waylifting, the amount of coordination required because you're going to take away from the ground, throw it over your head and catch it, over your head in a full squat. So when it comes to things like balance and proprioception and eccentric catching, the advantage goes to waylifters, you know, big time there. You're not going to see that power lifting is very controlled. It's a very specific foot position hand position. There's no movement ideally. It's typically your minimizing range of motion intentionally because you want to minimize work. Working four times distance and if the game, the game

is who can create the most force, you can minimize the distance. You're going to win. That's why they think those funny positions. That's why Lane has both of his feet six miles apart. He calls it a deadlift, even though it's a fake movement. I'm just kidding. Lane and I go back many, many years. So he would laugh at that joke, I promise. So that's the basic foundation of the difference here.

You have a very sport-specific application for powerlifting. Waylifting is very sport-specific, but it's a much greater range of motion has those other components. And the strongman is kind of positioned. I didn't know you didn't ask about strongman, but I flew there and there because it kind of runs a little bit out. I love that you brought that in. Before I go on to my next question, let's put one more little bow on that. We've talked a lot about who's the strongest, who's the most powerful, who has the

most functional strength. You want to throw in a little bit on hypertrophy within the trio? Yeah, great. So you can actually add a couple of more scenarios here. Hypertrophy would be more of your bodybuilding, which Lane has also done. Holly, I think you just had Holly on, right? So Holly can smash with physique, whether you want to call it bodybuilding, or general physique,

or any stuff. It's simply improving generally leanness and total muscle mass, and then there's a component of symmetry and shape, things like that that don't really matter for this conversation. So if you add that on top of it now, you're talking about who can optimize muscle size, as well as leanness, which is really, really important, with no consideration for function. Doesn't matter if you're strong or fast or athletic or any of those things. And so, there, in fact, this is so interesting,

you started the conversation like this, because this is day one of my strength in addition, of course, is the academic semester. I spend the first week actually just on going over these different categories this morning, because it does exactly like what you're setting up here. It outlines exactly how to train, and the last two pieces, just throw this in there,

would be actually if you think about the competitive circuit training sports. The CrossFit for example. Totally. No offense, I'm just meaning it as a sense of they are very strong. They have a lot of muscle but they're not nearly as strong as power lifters as a general statement. And not nearly as strong as World Strongest Men, but they do a lot more repetitions.

And so a World Strongest Man is going to win an event doing something like five to 15 repetitions, like something, you know, kind of depending. And CrossFit, you might have to do 90 reps in a given workout, like way more. And so it's way higher up that scale of number of repetitions. They do some, of course, that are one repetition. But you get the point. It's just like a very crude explanation of what's happening. A lot of function, a lot of different movements, and a lot of workouts repeated in the same day. And so it's a very different test of recovery

over three or four days of just brutal on-salt and asked to do things in a lot of different areas and a lot of different energy systems, and movement patterns, and things like that. So it's a really interesting test of total physical fitness. And the last one that I like to throw in there is basically track and feel. And now you have the true expression of velocity. These are the people who are going to be the best at getting you truly fast.

And so if you think about this now, what do you need to have as a functional human being for lifespan and longevity or sport? And if you want to think about this in a spectrum, how do I get absolutely fastest? How do I get the most powerful? How do I get strong? How do I add muscle size, slash, lose body fat? How do I improve my muscular endurance? And now how do I improve my cardiovascular

metabolic endurance? This is now occupied in all of those sports. And so we can just look at them as a model for training and saying the best in the world that getting stronger have been doing this. the best in the world are getting faster, peak speed, the best in the world at getting able to recover multiple days in a row. So we have different models of that. So that is a nice foundation for all training really.

I love it. And there's a matrix brewing right now in my head as you go through that. So we're going to come and kind of start to fill in some of this matrix as we go. Let's simultaneously go back to the fundamentals, but do so without any remorse for how rigorous we need to be. That's the greatest set of effort. Okay. So let's talk about muscles. What is a muscle? What is the functional unit? How does it generate force? What are the metabolic demands? What makes these cells that are so ubiquitous in our body different from, say, the cells in our liver? The cells in our gut, the cells in our brain. What are these cells that we almost take for granted sometimes? All right. Now you're asking me to do like a two semester course in 20 minutes or so.

Look, I mean, I did ask you to do a week in seven minutes. So by that logic, we could be here a while. But yeah, let's see what we can do. All right. Hopefully you're ready for part two, three, four, and five of this podcast. I'll give you what I can give you and then we'll come back. Let's think about it this way. Number one, I like to play a little trick. You ever ask, I like that jeopardy question of what's the biggest organ in your body and people generally going to say skin? Yeah, exactly. That's what I would have said, actually. Well, us, again, exercise scientists. And if I didn't give you enough of the biased earlier about being exercise scientists, I'm also a muscle physiologist. So I'm going to give all the credit in the world, the muscle and none of it to anything else. So basically the brain, the heart,

the liver, the lungs, but they're just there to support the muscles. 100%. And if you start talking my worst enemy, the nervous system, I'm probably going to hit and record and go home. Those neurosciences just take credit for everything. It's garbage, hot garbage, right? Give it all the muscle. So you've heard my biases. If you want to stop listening, now you can't, if not, understand that's as we're going here. And so in general, if you think about it this way, again, muscle is going to be the largest organ in your body. And you've talked about this a number of times on your show, but it's doing everything from supporting function and so locomotion, getting you throughout the world,

to being your biggest reserve for amino acids, which you need for building any cell, any functional cell in your body, your brain, your liver, your immune system, all that has to come from somewhere. To regulating glucose being your biggest dump and reserve for regulating metabolism, controlling function, I could go on and on and on about the physiological, the practical, the general health benefits of skeletal muscle. And don't be bashful. This is a good time to say those things and to expand on them because I've said everything you've said, but I think there's more to it. And I think one of the things you've said, I don't think probably is as appreciated, which is the storage depot for amino acids, because we don't really think of it that way.

You know, and Lane did a great job talking about this in the podcast, which is we're constantly breaking down and constantly adding new. So there's this pool of turning over amino acids. And it's very difficult to study them from a flux perspective, but clearly some of those things getting spun off, you know, if you're working out, it's at least a plausible scenario that amino acids are being, I mean, proteins are being broken down, amino acids being released,

they may not be recenticized right back into that same piece of skeletal muscle they may be used for another replication. It's not even a maid. It's a pretty much guarantee that that's going to happen. If you kind of think about it This way, I'll give a quick energetic analogy here. I have a like a cheesy video. I did 10 years ago Or a set of my backyard and shot this and put it on YouTube. We'll link to it send it to us and we'll link to it in the show notes Yeah, okay. We'll find out somewhere very eight year ago YouTube bland or something

So if you think about the very basics of energy, if you're going to be out camping, you're not outdoorsman, right? Absolutely. Okay, great. If you're out hunting, which I am actually, even a couple days from my hunting trip, so this is front of mind is why this knowledge comes up,

you know, you may need to create a fire. You have a handful of options. And the very first one being, if you had a match, right, a match is very easy to light and if you anyone lights a match on fire, it's going to give you instantaneous energy, the fire, and it's going to last some amount of seconds before it burns out. I don't know what those seconds are, five seconds, ten, twelve, doesn't matter. Some of them are short amount of seconds. worst case scenario, you need energy. Great. The downside is you have limits, supply of them,

they're kind of finicky, and you better hope they don't get wet, and they're just not reliable. At best case, if none of that happens, you're still going to get some amount of seconds. If you need the energy right now, though, that's where you start. In terms of your tissue, that's going to be ATP. That's going to be your phosphocreatine energy system. So the stoichiometry is one to one there. You break down one phosphocreatine. you're going to have one mole of ATP out of that. That's great. That's stored internally in your muscle.

So, that's already right there. In fact, it's generally loaded right up on the myosin head or close to it, and so it can contract tissue. We can come back to what all that stuff means. We'll talk about actin myosin in a minute, because I want people to actually know what this physically looks like. But let's go back to the energetics. Great.

So, that's your little energy boost system. Now, if you had a little bit more forward thinking, you would say, okay, let me use that mask to then actually just light a newspaper. If you had newspaper or something like that, and if you're in the woods, papers, same thing, you get fairly quick light, not as fast as a match, and it would give you some few minutes of energy. It doesn't matter what these members are, it's just this particular stuff here. And that's great. That's going to be carbohydrate. So carbohydrate is store both in the cell, as well as outside the cell in three major areas,

but in the cell, it's going to give you a lot more energy that is the most direct fast. So I can't remember, which is a little bit better, but not much actually. And so you're going to get a couple of moles of ATP per molecule of carbohydrate. It's better, but it's like,

you're sort of splitting hairs here a little bit. If that gets low, you can now pull glucose out of the blood and for a little bit of terminology here glycogen in the tissue is what it's called glycogen in liver. As we just called it, we put that in the blood that's called glucose, blood sugar, roughly talking the same things here. So we can pull that out of the blood and then we can actually, if that gets low, we can pull that out of the blood, and then we can actually, if that gets low,

we can pull that out of the liver. So that's the basic, like, energy pathway in the liver, then functions as kind of your backup storage system for glucose to make sure that you can regulate blood glucose while you're changing concentrations of glycogen in tissue. That's really what it's doing, because you don't want, obviously, as you've talked about a million times,

a bunch of instability in blood glucose, that's a bad thing. It's one of the four things that your body will regulate almost, over almost anything else in addition to pH and blood pressure, etc. And electrolyte concentrations, they don't like to mess with those things at all. So, everything else will move around those things to keep those stable. All right, so if we're in the tissue now and we've got past our newspaper. The next thing it would be a giant piece of wood. So if you had firewood or something like that, lighting firewood in the wild is very difficult to do. It doesn't happen in seconds. You need to kind of know what you're

doing, but it's going to give you exponentially more fire length than you could put a log on a fire that could literally be on going the next morning when you wake up, and give you hours. Think about that as fat. Now, why I like this whole analogy is, if you know a little bit about the chemistry of fat versus carbohydrate, they're both big long chains of carbon. Just like a paper is actually made of wood, it's sort of just a separate piece of the same thing.

So you get a small six carbon chain from glucose. You can get any number of lengths of chains of a fat, 18 carbon fatty acid chain, you can put three of those on a back one of glycerol and you've gotten yourself 50 carbon molecules per triglycytor. Something like that. So a common drink gets better here.

You're gonna get something like three or 400 ATP per molecular fat and that's where things get actually better. Okay. The fat is actually coming mostly, though, from outside of the muscle. So energy from fat mobilization comes throughout the body, somewhat evenly. Gukos comes mostly from the intramussel itself

and then a little bit from the back up supplies if it gets low, phosphocreating, it comes directly from the muscle. All that energetic background is safe. When you start moving, you start trying to create exercise. Where's the last piece we forgot here? Oh, that's protein. So protein actually, in this analogy, would be functioning more like a piece of metal.

So if you had metal in the woods and you needed a fire and you had absolutely nothing else, you can in theory melt metal with a fire. You're going to get some, but it is a very, very low end proposition. If you absolutely have to do it, you can do it to survive. But if that's your fueling strategy, you're in a big, big problem because you're going to run on a metal very quickly in the woods. You're out of it. It's also the only thing you have to create shelter, and stability, and to fend for food and everything else. And so it is a plausible way to provide energy. It's just a terrible one. It's mostly there for you to reconstruct new tools. And so if you're in the woods, you have metal and you need to make a knife,

you can fashion that. Okay, now we need to melt that thing down and make a roof, we can fashion that. Now we need to melt that back down and make a shovel. It's meant to be kind of broken back down, recreated in the same and different forms of the same basic item. And so that's really what we're looking at. The ability to play back and forth with carbohydrate and fat as different fuel systems. That's really, we want time to get to that today. It's not really the best thing. But the ability and the need and the point of protein in tissue, it is not fuel, although it can be for what I explained. It's really that. It's taking it and saying, we need it mostly for this task right now. We need it mostly for skeletal muscle. We need it mostly for immune system. We need it mostly for these other functions. So one of the ways to quickly lose muscle is to put yourself in a

compromised position because it's going to say if we're choosing between keeping that 24 inch bicep or clearing up something we need immunologically, it's going to go towards that. This is also why we see protein redistribution across muscle. Like say you spend a bunch of times on your bicep, and your biceps get really, really big, and then you don't train your calf. And let's just say your protein intake is insufficient.

You will start redefinition proteins from the calf up to the bicep to actually enable that growth. And so you're thinking you're getting bigger, but you're really just taking it from other places if protein intake itself is insufficient. And so it really is a cornerstone. And if you look at the research, like you're going to see this, like very clearly as something.

If you ever wonder why some of these people are just so diligent about protein intake, then why does it become such a big deal is it's the raw material you really can't get anywhere else. And you can get carbohydrates and fat and you can go through that whole thing in a lot of ways. You can't fake protein. It's very challenging to do so. And the last little piece I'll say there is why this is so important to me is you can't fake muscle most specifically without the protein and When we start losing muscle now we enter a whole cascade of problems from

Physical performance your interest is more of like aging and longevity That whole cascade it becomes a problem and then we can certainly talk about the specific changes in muscle and Pass some of the ditches you've actually covered before. Yeah, those are things like it just becomes a really big deal. So it just doesn't make any sense to skimp on that one as a place to go. Yeah, it's worth repeating. When you look at people across their lifetimes and you evaluate for muscle mass and you divide people up and categorize them by the amount of muscle mass they have.

And we should talk about this because, of course, my interpretation of the data is that once you normalize for strength, strength wins, but it's sort of easier to measure muscle mass. You know, all you need to do is put somebody in a dexa and you sort of can figure out their ALMI. And so we tend to look at survival curves based on ALMI, which for the listener just means the amount of lean muscle you have in your arms and legs normalized to your height, at particular lean mass index. There's no ambiguity about the fact that more muscle means a longer life.

It's as clear as high VO2 max means a longer life. So let's now go back and make sure people understand the structure of a muscle because I want to talk about different fiber types as well, just to round out some of the physiology. So in an effort to understand the difference between fast twitch and a slow twitch muscle fiber, which has a metabolic difference. I'm curious as to what the structural difference is, and maybe just kind of explaining how my Fiberals work and things like that. Let me go back to this a little bit to understand human function movement. I won't go as deep into this one though. If you just think about how you actually create movement, it really has three core functions.

So number one, you have to have some sort of direction or signal. And this is going to be coming from your nervous system. And so whether this is central, peripheral, whether this is autonomic, whether this is a controlled somatic action or response, it doesn't really matter for this conversation. The nerve has to tell it what to do. So if nerves you get that one, that's it. Don't take anything else in the nervous system.

You get that control. Now that nerve then has to go into a muscle fiber, until the muscle fiber to contract. Okay, the muscle fiber then is part two, so the cell actually has to contract itself, but that actually doesn't cause movement. Muscles are not attached to bone. That's not how it works. So muscle fibers are surrounded by connected tissue. All those connected tissue are bundled together in like a package.

So a few imagine buying a bunch of strips of bacon from the butcher and they would wrap that up and kind of surround wrap together. That's actually kind of what a muscle looks like. So you've got that so ran wrap connecting it. So if you pulled on one piece of bacon, you'd notice the whole package moves. That's sort of the point. You're transferring force from muscle through connective tissue.

That connective tissue comes together into a tendon and that tendon then attaches to bone. And so the third part for human movement is actually connected tissue. And so you have to have a signal, you have to have a muscle contract that has to make connective tissue cool on a bone. That actually is what generates human movement.

Well, if you look out the front end, we'll leave the neuroscience to other people. You look at the connected tissue and it's very difficult to understand what's happening there for a number of reasons, but mostly it's not plastic. When we look at muscle, it's tremendously plastic. And what I mean by that is it adapts. It changes very quickly and rapidly in response to a lot of things. Connected tissues

doesn't have a blood flow supply, doesn't have an energetic demand. It's kind of just there. There's more to that story, but we'll just kind of leave it like that. The core of the issue of adaptations, whether they are pro or negative, is going to be an in skeletal muscle. And so here's what that actually looks like. A nerve will come down and actually attach and innervage to a whole host of muscle fibers. And so you can imagine skeletal muscle fibers are some of the largest cells in all of biology by diameter. They're tremendous in humans.

In fact, what's actually very interesting about humans that makes a special is our muscle fibers are what's called multilineucleated. And so you probably remember this term from like mesoscool or something like that. In fact, whenever I talk to biology people about this, they're like their head is belongs I forget how lost and exercise science I get. It's very uncommon in nature to see cells that have more than one nucleus. The nucleus is the core of the cell, if you will, that's what holds your DNA. It tells you when to replicate proteins, the cell, if you will, that's what holds your DNA.

It tells you when to replicate proteins to grow, shrink, die, repair, so the whole control center. So the fact that skeletal muscle has many of them per cell. In fact, it's not a few. It's not two or three, it's thousands per cell. So skeletal muscle can be extraordinarily large. I have a video of this somewhere, I can't remember. Actually,

I might have been a picture in a men's health thing we did. There's a video somewhere. We'll find that and we'll also put that in the show notes. Okay. I can actually pick up a single muscle fiber from the human with tweezers and you can see it with your naked eye. So we could hold this. In fact, I could do it right now if I had one. I could hold it in front of the camera and you'd be able to see an actual whole muscle cell at that large. In fact, they can be very, very long. So they can be several inches. Let's help folks understand what defines a cell because normally outside of the muscle, we kind of define a cell by a cell membrane as a single nucleus. I mean, we kind of know what

the constituent of elements here. This is defined also by a cell membrane, but it's a sort of a longer looking tube as opposed to a sphere. Good distinction there. So again, it lasts in exercise science. If you remember like back to high school biology, you think of a cell as like a circle or an oval, it's like that. It's circular, but it's a tube. So it's a very long tube.

The way to think about it is like a ponytail. So if you think about a ponytail, you think about it as one thing. It is a ponytail, but it's made up of a whole bunch of long tube individual hairs. And they all wrap together to make a ponytail. That's what a skeletal muscle cell looks like, which is actually quite different than a cardiac cell. Those are more rectangular, if you will, that they're shorter and wider. Skellal muscle fibers are very long, very narrow, but still circular. They still have a cell membrane. They have a bunch of nuclei. Most of the organelles are the same as any other

thing that contract all units we can get to in a second. But yeah, that's the basic setup of them. Give me the typical length of a muscle cell, a skeletal muscle cell. You can't really give it typical because depending on what you'll see with skeletal muscle is structure as function. So if you contrast this to cardiac tissue, so cardiac tissue is actually quite interesting because it is what we call the ultimate solutech fiber. And so all the cardiac tissue is slow to it, and in fact the solutech will treat even more slow to it, then the skeletal.

And there tend to be fairly uniform, so you can give specific numbers on cross-sectional area a diameter length on those. Skeletal muscle, if you look at your sartorias, which is that kind of muscle that goes from that pointy part of the front of your hip down to the inside middle of your knee. Theoretically, those fibers could run the whole line. A single cell. Correct. Can run that whole length. Yeah, even if it runs half that length,

that's extraordinary. You go back, though, and you go to like an ocular muscle, it's going to be minute. It's going to be extremely small. And like go to muscles and your digitine, your fingers, they're going to be very, very, very, very short. There is no like classic range. It could be from millimeters to literally inches and like. So presumably the reason that these cells have multiple nuclei is basically to decentralize the actions of cellular construction. So you've got DNA making RNA in the proximity of that nucleus coming out onto the Golgi making protein. And if you had, for example, even a one centimeter long cell, which is enormous, outrageous.

You couldn't simply make all of that work with one nucleus. So the question is, does that mean these nuclei act independently? Where's the central command on this? It seems like a remarkable problem. Remarkable problem, remarkable advantage. It's the same thing here. Hard to control, but amazingly adaptive. Exactly. This is exactly right. So if you want to dive down the entire nucleation question, this gets very very interesting because we've actually shown in our lab that a lot of professional athletes have more nuclei per volume. And so this is one of the things that I pause it is is maybe this is why they can adapt so well. It's why they can handle the volume that they can handle is they just simply have more these nuclei around. And you believe that that is how much genetic and how much adaptation to training.

Well, I would love to give you an answer there. There's going to be a component to both. We actually know numerous lifestyle factors are your influence these things, but the more recent data are showing this. In general, we have thought that nuclei have a couple of things. So one, it's not just nuclei count. That matters, which is what we previously thought. The shape matters. There's like spheres, there's ovals, there are all kinds.

And it looks like the shape determines the function. The location determines the function. And so it looks like there are subtypes of nuclei that surround, for example, the mitochondria. And they're going to be very specific to mitochondria repair. And there's other types that are more specific to periphery that'll do cell wall damage. And then there are some actually that are regulating injury,

specifically. This is what it looks like right now. And so there are subtypes, and this is very, very recent in understanding. And this is probably why some folks will respond to injury more than others is they just simply have more of the subtype. Now, your question of nature versus nurtured

what's challenging about that is the measurement fidelity here is difficult. And the tech is moving quickly, but it's sort of like every couple of years when the microscopes get better, we sort of realize that a lot of the three previous years are now invalidated. And so there's just a lot of movement back and forth. And in fact, if you look at this related to cell growth

in other words hypertrophy, there seems to be tremendous confusion about the role of these things in growth or not. So there used to be a thing that we referred to as a mild nuclear domain limitation. So in other words, a cell would only grow. So this would be your fiber. It would only hypertrophy or grow in diameter, to the extent at which the nuclei could control

it. So in order to gain more growth, you actually have to get more satellite cells to come in and add nuclei. And then when you detrain, that cell goes back down in diameter, but you preserve the amount of nuclear number. And so then now retraining is easier than it was the first time. I mean, this is unbelievable, but this is the old adage of muscle memory, quote unquote, it's easier to regain muscle you once had than to put on muscle you never had. And I've never

heard a molecular explanation for that, but that's a very plausible mechanism. Now, it looks like that's not correct. You retain the nuclear. It looks like that's not correct. You retain the new Clia. It looks like that's not correct. Interesting. It's very back and forth. This is the way I'll say it. So something is there. The story I just outlined to you, like, it makes intuitive sense. I got really hot on it for a number of years.

And then it was like, some more challenge. Data came out and it was like, well, we don't think so. I'm just going to have to say, like, TBD, this is like every week, another paper comes out. And it's just like, OK, now we're back on it, now we're back off, and now we realize there's subtypes of land in the play area, and they're like, oh shit, okay. It will lend itself obviously to a longitudinal type study. I mean, in an ideal world, you would take relatively young, presumably pliable athletes

in their teens and study them over time under different training demands. Obviously the dream case is doing it with identical twins, which we've done. So I could just totally interrupt you and go to that twin study if you want. Let's put a pin in it because I want to come back to making sure people still understand how these things work. So we've now established that muscle cells are kind of unlike any other cell in the body. How hungry are they for energy? So, forget about when we look at the liver, you know, I always think of the liver as a beautiful organ, maybe not quite as cool as the muscle, but it has a special place in my heart. Because I've

always argued that the reason there is no extra-caporial support for the liver is we simply can't replicate its complexity. For listeners, extra-caporial means outside of the body. So dialysis is extra caporial support for the kidney, a vad or an ECMO is extra caporial support for the heart or heart and lungs combined, a ventilator, extra caporial support for lungs. We can't do that for a liver, for a patient, tragically overdoses on Tylenol in an attempt to take their life. And they reach a point of irreversibly damaging the liver, you can't put them on liver support until they get a transplant.

That patient will be dead in about two days if they don't get a transplant. And I think it comes down to a lot of the stuff you already talked about. Glucose homeostasis, one of the most important bits of homeostasis in the body, is controlled with a level of precision. I can't fathom. I can sit and talk about the liver with the same level of excitement that you talk about the muscles. And yet, here's what's interesting. The liver is not a metabolically greedy organ. It really doesn't, on its own, consume much energy. The brain, by contrast, a very complex organ, an incredibly metabolically greedy

organ, which is probably why we need the liver to support the brain. Without the liver being so good at maintaining glucose on a stasis, our brain would have either needed an adaptation strategy away from glucose, where we wouldn't have brains as large as we do. Where does the muscle fit into this hierarchy? Where is the muscle fit into this hierarchy? Where is the muscle, a high maintenance organ? What's cool about the liver? It's kind of like a professional fighter where like you can beat it up a lot. That's right. You can't do much for the kidneys. They just don't have sustainability. I have to link a secondary level for the liver because it's the closest thing in the body to skeletal muscle in terms of the fact that it is

listening and it will respond and it can change. And as you said, very adaptive. Super adaptive. You'll appreciate this if you didn't already know it. When I was in my residency, we would do quite a number of live donor liver transplants. So this would be an operation where an individual donate a third to a half of their liver to another individual where there was a really good HLA match. Well, here's what was really interesting. The speed with which that portion of their liver would regenerate

was so staggering that if you didn't anticipate it with inhumane doses of intravenous phosphorus, they would have an enormous metabolic crisis. Oh, yeah. Totally. That makes sense. There was no amount of food you could give this person to allow them to have enough phosphate backbone for the DNA and RNA and protein synthesis that was going to be necessary to reproduce their liver. So you just had to basically be giving them IV, phosph nonstop because Because they can be- It sounds like when we have to do this, fibers,

and we're doing our single fiber experiments. Like you have to bathe them. You just have to have a permanent path of FOS, so they won't go on work. That's right. And they could regenerate a third of their liver in two weeks. It's simply staggering. And now, of course, the caveat for the person listening

is this only works when the architecture of the liver is preserved. So once you cross into the path of cirrhosis and inflammation, it's over. So unfortunately, that person whose liver has been so beat up, for example, status post-naffledy, Nash, or alcoholic liver disease, you get to a point where it no longer has that capacity to regenerate. You know, the kind of the nice part about the story is though, if you fix it before that, you have a good chance.

Absolutely. So you can mess up for a long time, but if you do take that action before you hit that level, I shouldn't even say this way, but you can almost get back to scratch. You can get a lot of regeneration there, a lot of recovery. You're right. And the kidneys being so sensitive to blood pressure, so sensitive to the damage of high glucose, the lungs being so sensitive to smoking and things like that.

I mean, I just think the liver is an unsung hero of the body. It's the thing that keeps you like, it's the bulk, you know, those from a journalist's sports, like when the liver is finished, it doesn't matter how much mental strength you have. It's a wrap. You are going down. If you get hit in the liver, if you've got any sports, you get hit in the liver instantaneously, you're going down. If you get hit in the liver, if you watch any sports, you get hit in the liver instantaneously, you're crippled. It doesn't matter. You could be mentally you're there, but your body will season, shut you down. Isn't that what happened to Oscar Delahoye against Bernard Hopkins? Do you remember that fight? I don't remember that fight, but I've seen it

500 times. I work a lot with UFC fighters and a number of, I've actually had line fight this weekend for one of my guys. So yeah, I've seen it in those sports a ton. I've seen a little toe just the tip of a toe click the liver on world champions just get locked up and fall crowd. It does not like being aggravated like that but it will handle a beating for the most part. You can beat it up pretty good and if you see like any blood chemistry stuff and if you're looking at ALT, AST stuff and you're like, I you're pretty, it'll come back pretty quick if you take the right steps. The kidney is the one you see when you're like, oh, we're not coming back in this one. All right, so going back to muscle.

It's a tremendously responsive to everything you're doing and it's listening. So your question of how energetically demanding it is, there's a couple of things to say about this. People will talk a lot about, hey, if you add more muscle mass, that's going to elevate your basal metabolic rate. So you'll burn more calories just sitting there. That is true, but it's not to a level that you actually think. It's probably, I think the numbers are something like 30 calories.

With how much increase in muscle mass? Per pound. Per pound, okay. I think it's like something like that. It's not actually level. And you can make the article, old after three or four years. That is at extra five or 10 pounds. Okay, sure, but it's not like,

I feel like some people think it's gonna go from there based on medical upgrades, gonna go from 1500 calories a day to 2500, because they put on five pounds of muscle. That's just way outside the room of what's gonna happen. There are many reasons you probably wanna put some muscle on, but like adding the metabolic boost. And that's because the question is, how energetically demanding are they?

Actually, think about it the opposite. Skylid muscle is pretty lazy. It wants to be as efficient as possible because if you think about functionality of physiology, you want your brain running full course as often as you possibly can. You want continual interception of what's happening in your outside world, as well as introspection going on. It's also making decisions, etc. Skeletal muscle is simply like a backup system. It's think of more about it was like, what do you need done bus?

You need something done to elevate your function or on it. If not, we're going to sit down and shut up and wait to be sort of pulled a little bit. And so what that means is if you need energy now, muscle will jump to action. It'll get you going. We see this from everything from meat. It's like if you have this energetic need to burn 200 calories, your photos start tapping, you'll start doing sort of what we say. That's scale to muscle going. Tell folks what need is. This is non-exercise energy. So it's energy you're burning. That's not physical activity or exercise or the energy needed to survive, to breathe, to digest, to go through basic stuff. So it is the other 10 or so percent of

energy throughout the day that accounts for people losing weight or not losing weight or gaining weight that fluxes pretty well depending on your metabolic health, depending on your total size, depending on your other stuff. So if you ever see those people who are like, man, they just can't sit still. Those are like, cloaked with the people that probably have a pretty high knee. So they're just burning energy kind of sitting here.

Other people are more stoic physically, are going to have sort of a lower thing. This is also one of the things that explains how people can maintain the same amount of physical training, like exercise performance, as well as health at tremendously different levels of calorie intake. Because we can adjust neat very quickly in your body is it's kind of like a last bit of polish, last bit of paint. Like what do we need to do here? There's a huge buffer in there where you can mass increase the

creatures. Yeah, depending on what you need to do. And so we can kind of change our metabolic set point, if you will, to keep you at the same body size irrelevant of going up and down in calories. And I'm sure you guys cover that a thousand times with land. So let's talk about contraction. How does a contraction actually work? And why does a contraction require ATP? What part of the contraction needs it? If we go back nervous coming into skeletal muscle and it would in some instances like the eye actually, we have it's called a motor unit. So we have a motor unit across all these things. So motor unit is the nerve that's coming in as well as all of these single fibers that

that nerves innovating. So what that means is in the eye, for example, you have motor units as small as almost one to one, which means there's a single motor unit coming in and activating a single muscle fiber. That gives you extraordinary control of the X-Tarity. So you have a lot of nerves coming in to control a very small number of fibers. That makes you have real high precision with exactly where you're controlling. You contrast that to muscles like the glutes. You need a lot of strength for production. The glutes have been very low fidelity.

You don't need accuracy of hip extension in terms of... There's basically just one thing. It's contract, not contract. I mean, do it with as much force as possible. Or not. And so you're gonna have hundreds. That's basically the only dimension you have to regulate is what is the force and speed of contraction,

whereas with the eye, which is a great example, I'm glad you made that contrast, our eyes have insane fidelity. And of course, you have multiple interocular muscles. A lot. You have all of these muscles above below on the side of the eyes and the amount of tuning that has to happen to allow humans to be able to do

what we do so well, which is very subtly pick things up with our eyes. If you contrast up to like your fingers, which we need to have, it's the second highest level of fidelity we have to have, the eyes are still in order of magnitude higher, in terms of fidelity and accuracy of them. It's not even close. I need to be very precise with my fingertips,

but my eyes are on a whole new level of precision, of where we have to be. So, if there's one to one or one to two in the eyes, it could be thousands per motor unit in the glutes on off on 50% 20% so you can stand erect. I was some sort of like 20% level of glue contraction to full hip extension vertical jump explosion squad deadlift. Where the case. That's so fantastic. Okay, continue.

So nerve comes in. So a nerve comes in and does that. Now here's a couple of other layers without going to far into nerve. You're familiar, I'm sure with off and some that you have to just aggravate this shit edible to get them to turn on. Let's make sure people understand what that means in terms of what's an action potential. How does a nerve actually deliver its signal? We have this fun interplay between chemistry, electricity and chemistry. That's exactly how interaction works. So you have to go from an electrical signal to a chemical signal back to electrical signal. So what happens is you've got sodium and potassium and chloride are your main players. And chloride is a negative charge. Potassium, of course,

is positive and sodium is positive. The fun way to look up this and pay attention to this, if you ever forget, here is here you're probably more familiar with this and I am, but look at patient assisted suicide with Dr. Morgan. You give a giant bowl of sip of potassium to somebody and they're just going to slowly stop, their heart is going to slowly stop contracting. Why? Because the amount of potassium intracellular is going to become fairly equivalent to the amount of extracellular potassium. And so the change in gradient, electrically, between the outside of the cell inside of the cell becomes neutral and so no accidental curves. And so what you need to have happen is a change in electrical volt from outside the cell to inside the cell.

And typically we're talking like negative 30 millivolts in cell. Now there is this kind of a number. And once enough of the sodium potassium start moving in the correct directions, then the electricity changes because our positive is moved more negatively at the idea. And boom, we hit this flip of this switch, and this is what we call all our none.

And so skeleton muscle fibers can't contract at different levels of force. What I mean is once you flick them on, they go on fully. And that's the only way they can contract. And so the analogy we use here in our undergraduate class is the light switch. So once you hit that certain threshold of millivolts, the muscle fiber contracts as hard as it possibly can, there is no weight, there's no dimmer switch here. You can't go 80% 8550. It's 100% once you get to that action potential. You'll actually see the millivolts just rock it back up. And then there's this whole cascade of recovery. This is what

your sodium potassium pumps are doing to try to reset that gradient, put them back in the right direction so you can have another contraction. Again, this is actually what explains technique. So if you contract that fiber multiple times in a row before it gets back to reset and it just feels like it's in an isometric contraction or it's not actually out works, but it's going to feel like that. What actually totally pops up, but what actually happens is you have so many muscle fibers and they're contracting and relaxing at such a fast rate to your muscle, it feels like the whole thing is just locked up. They're actually flicking on flicking off.

And by the way, just so folks understand, explain to folks how despite an all or none action potential and an all or none contraction of a single fiber, you can still get variable degrees of strength at the level of the muscle. So this is the next part. This is why we had to bring up a peniman size principle. So within these motor units, you have sizes. Now what's interesting is most of the time in normal situations, all the muscle fibers in that motor unit are of the same fiber type.

This is, say, we had two motor units. One of those motor units is slow twitch, and one of those motor units is going to be fast-witch fibers at an interface. So if we had five fibers in that motor unit or 500, it doesn't really sort of matter right now. We have a couple of factors actually coming on, but they're going to be of all like type generally within that same motor unit. So the only way that we relegate force production is this. We have to know that all five of those muscle fibers, once they

get turned on, are going to contract at full speed. So the only way we actually change how much force we're creating a whole muscle is by altering how many of these motor units get turned on. creating a whole muscle is by altering how many of these motor units get turned off. So the size principal tells us we're going to turn on the low threshold units first. And so if you go to do it, you just did see, reach over and grab a glass of water. It's probably best.

We don't turn on our high threshold, high force production, generally larger, not always, but generally larger motor units that have generally faster fibers that are generally bigger. Number one, or generally larger motor units that have generally faster fibers that are generally bigger. Number one, or two reasons why you don't want to do that. Number one is we produce unnecessary force. So instead of slowly touching that glass of your lips, you'd smash it off your face.

You can't go down. So if that motor unit can produce five pounds of force and you need two pounds of force, there is no way to go backwards. So you always start at the smallest unit possible and turn on more motor units if more force production is required. Secondarily, it just burns energy. So fast-tritch muscle fibers are more metabolically demanding than slow-tritch muscle fibers. And so you're going to waste gas doing that.

This is exactly why your car starts off in first gear, second, etc, etc. When you lose efficiency as we go up, but we gain performance. So let's use that example when you're talking just going back really quickly to the athlete. So how quickly is that response modulated when I want to deadlift something? You can see this in real life. I have a video of a deadlift actually in front of mine doing this where so the initial step that's going to happen here are you're going to activate slowchitch sorry lower threshold motor units which are going to be almost exposed to the selected fibers. The only way that we really know to increase that is through force

production demands. Like we're going to come back that it's when we get the fiber type stuff eventually for aging and some of the stuff that came out even this week. You may have not seen yet. The challenge with fast switch muscle fibers is they're only then based on this logic activated under high threshold demands, which are high forced demands. You can do anything to activate and then the data will show this on aging. You see virtually no reduction and slow to its fibers with aging. You see no reduction in size. In fact, there is some more than a few papers showing a hypertrophic effect of slow to its fibers of aging. There is no loss in Velo. There's no loss in specific tension, which is like forced per unit of size.

There's no loss in power. It just appears to be very easy with any level of activity to maintain and preserve health of sulfate fibers. But because fast-rich fibers require force production and you generally don't get high-force production and activities that daily living, then those fibers go unutilized for long stretches of time. Eventually, they go away.

And so what we see happen is this really interesting thing called fiber type grouping, where the nerve will basically say, okay, that fibers being not used that whole motor unit will decay. And the fibers will be preserved the other neighboring motor units will actually grow new extensions activate some of the previously gone motor units and then convert those fibers into whatever fiber type happens in that previous motor unit. So in general what we see happening here is slow-chitch fibers start absorbing or slow-chitch motor units start absorbing fast-twitch fibers and bringing them to their motor unit. So we see these large patches of single fiber types throughout the muscle.

And so the last part of that puzzle is in a motor unit, those fibers are connected by the same neuron, and they're the same fiber type, but they're not laying next to each other. You don't want them in the same spot. They are sort of dispersed throughout the muscle. And so that gives you smoothness of contraction. And so one of the things that happens is if you start punching like the entire right side of your bicep is one motor unit, the entire left side is when you contract that motor you're going to loan, you get super spastic out of control and you get twitchy and unregulated movements.

And so when we see this fiber type grouping thing occur with aging, it's almost exclusively a problem of faster drivers, not loss of slow to five percent. So that also explains lack of fidelity as well as potentially some problems with fine unit movements. What is the heterogenaity of fast and slow twitch mixtures within different areas? So presumably the eye is all slow twitch. It doesn't particularly require much force. It doesn't require much force, but it does require a lot of speed. So you need to be able to

start back and forth quickly. So I actually don't know. Let's look at a big skeletal muscle like the laths or the glutes. So we have two things to get the pay attention to here. We have a huge amount of person to person variation. Within what bracket, though, give me a sense of presumably everybody has at least 20% of each. I'm making that up. But is there a second part? We'll come back to that first part.

So there's actually, as you're alluded to, a second ago, there's also tremendous difference between muscle to muscle. And so some muscles, if we look at it, like if we compare my soleus, your soleus, you might be 90% slow twitch in your soleus, I might be 70. And that would be a large variation in that muscle. If you look at animal models, cell culture, you know, you're right, like you're going to see 100% slow twitch and a solid and the reason is because we walk the solias has got to be a majority slow twitch muscle fiber, you know, we just spend too much time ambulatory to risk any inefficiency in that system. 100% if you look at the shank in general, you've got two primary muscles in movement there,

the solias being the smaller one, they both attach on the bottom of your foot. That's your front areas, right? So close through there. If you were to take your foot and your toe and like point it towards your face and you're to flex your calf, that one that pops up that has that kind of U shape, if you have a nice calf, anyways,

that big one that pops up to the middle, that's your gastroc. The one that kind of sits behind it's underneath the very bottom where your calf's up kind of ends and it goes in that long piece. That's the soliast. And the gas truck is almost the opposite. It is almost exclusively fast switch, but not nearly as exclusive as your soliast. So the soliast is what we call postural or anti-gravity. For the exact stuff you mentioned, it needs to stay up and it needs to be on. In fact, you can actually have a soliast contracted for hours and be totally, totally fine. And you won't even realize it for

the most part. It's actually good, rather than medically, but you would not realize it. If you contracted your gastrointestine for more than a few seconds, we're probably going to feel the burn pretty quickly. So the variation in something like a solace could be that. I think probably, if you saw somebody who's 30% fast switch in a solius, that's a very, very high number. I wouldn't be surprised if I saw somebody 95 though. If you contrast that to a muscle like the VL, so the vastest lateral is that the quad, the outside quad muscle, as you know, the, the audience, now the variation gets extraordinarily large. So in general, the VL is like, what we typically say is 50, 50 fast switch low pitch. And the record, it gets far more complicated than fast switch low

pitch, but we're just kind of keeping it at that level for now. We have shown actually in our lab a couple of things. So one, we buy up seed, a whole bunch of people who are Olympians, worlds caliber, national caliber, and our lab men and women. And some of those individuals are 80 plus percent, 85 percent fast switch. And by the way, just did you also do VM and why is there a difference between VL, VM and intermedia? Just due to access? Generally, access and safety. A lot more potential things to hit in the medial, of the outside. I need anything on we have problems.

You could be up to 80% fast switch on your VL if you're and by the way, is that true across all sports like if you had the tour to France champion. Would you expect him to even though he's the best of the best and his VL is a monstrosity, would you expect him to have that high a fast switch? So in some of the folks we biopsy didn't have more endurance space, they are as high as 90% slow twitch in the VL. It's basically zero to zero. You can run the whole gamut of composition in the VL. And we're back to the same question, which is, if you had a time machine and you could go back and biopsy them as five-year-olds, we really don't know what they looked like then. Well, this is what our twin study did. Rather than biopsy them at five years old, we got lucky.

You biopsy them as adults as twins. We got models like us twins. Who presumably had enough differences in what they were doing that you could see a signal if there was? About 35 years difference of training. And what did you see? If we compare this now that I can go back and tell you at least you've been in labs, you will appreciate this.

One of our graduate students who've been in our lab for probably three or more years was sitting next to my colleague Jimmy Bagley and they're pulling muscle fibers. Sort of like the things that come up when you're staring at a microscope, pulling out individual muscle fibers with tweezers for hundreds of hours on time, like your brain goes into weird spots. So she was sort of just telling him, oh yeah, like my dad's a twin or whatever. Oh cool, whatever.

Oh yeah, like monozigus, like yeah. So monozigus means they're DNA is exact. So not just for others, like I've born at the same time. So you have genetic replication. So we have that, got to be locked. And Jimmy was sort of like, Oh, cool. Did they exercise? And he's like, Oh, yeah, well, like, I think I can't remember which one is like, well, my dad has an exercise.

But my uncle has been competing in Iron Man's for 35 years. And Jamie was like, what? To dream experiment. Wait, wait, so let me get this straight. You have my Danico twin parents, brother, one of them has been 30 plus years of documented endurance exercise. The other, what's he do? He's like, no, he's never ever fast. That's so cool.

And we're like, and you've been in my lab for three years. And this is the first we're hearing about this. You're fired, you're not graduating. So we were able to pull them in a lab and bring them in. And so he was one of these classic endurance nerds. Every workout had been documented for 30 years. He's got 50 journals written down. So we knew the caloric expenditure, we knew that miles, we just had everything, half

marathons, marathons, all this. And phenotypically, how different did they look? Almost identical. Even with all the training, they still looked, I mean, I'm saying I'm not in the face, of course, but just muscularily, how did they appear phenotypically? No, I know you're saying they were almost identical. The only exception was the non-exercising twin was a little bit less lean. I think he had, I can't remember exactly that, some like three or four more kilos of body fat, maybe less.

Isn't that kind of amazing too? Do you know what their muscle look like though? It really speaks to the hereditary nature. Well, yeah, yes. So I want to come back to that because that's what's important. But at the surface, think about that. You have these two guys that are genetically identical, presumably both looked good. And one is, by all intents and purposes, a fanatic around exercise. The other is a couch potato. But on the outside, they look relatively equivalent, tells you a couple of things. One, body habitus is remarkably hereditary.

I mean, it is, I believe more hereditary than, it's certainly on par with height and eye color in terms of how hereditary it is. The second is what you're about to tell us, I suspect, which is that the outside is but a fraction of the story. So here's what we did. I got super excited and I was basically like, I'm going to take every measure

possible. It's this Dexascans, this is vertical jump, VO2 max, blood chemistry, muscle biopsies, psychological valuations with an IQ test, we just did everything we could possibly do. The total amount of lean mass. By the way, you'd created just a random IRB to do this. Like what? Oh, yeah. I mean, like we took time to design the study

for an IRB through the whole sort of thing. How long did it take just so people understand the pace at which science moves from the microscope discussion until you've got these guys in your lab? Maybe eight months. Oh, wow. That's really fast. You already had the funding, I assume? Yeah, I didn't care.

Like, I'm paying for this regardless, 100%. Like, in fact, I literally did pay for their plane flights on my pocket. I didn't want to deal with the stuff. I was like, just book the flights right now. We got to schedule the work, put it on my credit card. I don't care. I'm not missing this chance. So what did you see?

What's interesting was that already composition wise, the untrained person was again five six pounds more fat mass Something like that maybe three kilos was too high. I can't remember. So I'm like, oh, that's interesting undecse What was the difference in muscle mass like a hundred grams? I think the number was 71 you're at the detection way beyond it. So they're essentially identical They were almost identical and totallying muscle mass, right? Now, interesting, the endurance guy did not lift at all. No strengthening whatsoever, strictly running cycling's one, like a very classic. Can you imagine just the Gdonkin experiment of triplets where

you had a third guy here that only lifted weights? Can you just imagine? Like, this was like an hour of her thesis defense. Oh, Oh, this was that question right there Okay, all right. We actually did a another study in Stockholm Sweden with lifelong skiers I won't get to do around here But these are people who were world champions in the 1940s and 50s and cross-country skiing Olympic gold medalists and didn't stop competing Another in the age of 85 plus up to 92 years old and we're still competitive skiers and compared them to age match healthy folks Over here in America, so I've spent a little bit of time in this like aging athlete thing I actually wrote a little bit about that cohort in my book. Oh really the skiers. Yeah. Yeah, that's us insane

What they're capable. I could tell you a lot more behind the scenes on that one. I'd love to you know Let's come back to it Walking into the hospital across the street and just like jumping off the curb, because there was eyes, and you're like, oh, you're in 90. And you just decided to jump that curb for fun. Like when no one was watching you, because we could like see them from the window coming in. And I'm just like, just so just like one guy finishing a view

to max sitting on the chair, taking like two breaths and going, I didn't understand the test. Let me try it again. I'm trying to get back on the mic. This is like 12 seconds after a few two minutes. I'm happy. And a whole bunch of other stuff. Like, oh, it's incredible.

So back to the 200 studies. That was identical. In general, you could categorize some things. So I'll kind of make this a little bit shorter. If you looked at muscle quality. So this is echo intensity and an ultrasound. This is vertical jump. This is leg extension strength.

It was either identical or it favored the non-exercising time Everything else that you would classically associate is an exercise adaptation favored the exercise or Blood lipid panel blood pressure body composition certainly veiled to max was significantly higher resting heart rate like all the classic Text book and during sexercise B, and C, it stacked up exactly as you'd think. The neutral stuff, total muscle mass, that was basically on point. And then a blood glucose was favored to the exercise or like all that stuff you could predict. But just to make sure I understand the non-exerciser was stronger, Stronger, better jumper, higher quality muscle.

Go into the higher quality against me, to make sure I understand that, beyond the metric driven stuff. Is that a subjective assessment of muscle quality? No, no, no. You can actually measure this via ultrasound. This is like a measure called echo intensity. It's a measure of,

it's akin to measuring how much intramuscular fat is inside the actual tissue. That's what I'm talking about. He's basically telling you. So you're saying the exercise in guy had more intramuscular lipid. Right. Just to play devil's advocate, isn't that an adaptation to his endurance training where he wants to have more intramuscular lipid because he wants to have more logs near the

fire. He's burning those logs. Totally. And you wouldn't have to decar to find support for that. And I think that's different from the intramuscular lipid we see in the diabetic, for example, or in the insulin resistant. There's a level when you cross, when there's no exercise there, then there's a different reason that that happens. But still, what's interesting to me is that the strength metrics also favored the non-exerciser. It was all favored to neutral. Either some of the metrics were similar or not statistically different, but they hedge towards the non-exerciser. So you could say,

at best, they were neutral to favoring the non-exerciser. I think the most fair way. But there's not a metric there that favored the exercise on that side of the house. So what is your biopsy related? Yeah, let's talk about the biopsy. It gets very different. So I'll give you the quick version. There's a more interesting version. The non-exercisor was almost identical to what you'd seen in the literature

and what we've done a ton of times where you have something like your fairly mixed in terms of phenotype. So you've got some percentage of fast switch, some percentage is low, which in fact, he had about, if I remember correctly, something like 20% your fairly mixed in terms of phenotype. So you've got some percentage of fast switch, some percentage of slow twitch, but in fact, he had about, if I remember correctly, something like 20% of his fibers are in what we call this hybrid format. And so I sort of alluded to this earlier,

there's fast switch fibers or slow twitch fibers, but the story goes much deeper. That's not really how the whole thing plays out. So these hybrid fibers are a single individual cell. So one muscle fiber that co-expresses fast and slow twitch. And in fact, it'll express that in different areas throughout the length of the fiber. So it'll be exclusively fast twitching, one portion, fast and slow in another portion, and exclusively slow twitching, and other portion, et cetera. Let's make sure people understand what the difference is between a fast and a slow twitch fiber.

I want to come right back to where we are, but I just want to make sure we haven't lost that. In general, there's a lot of ways to describe it, but the easiest way is to describe it by the name. So fast twitch means that the twitch or the speed of contraction is higher. These fibers can contract and squeeze together through the mechanisms. We haven't got to yet. We'll get there. Am I a sin act in?

Not a much faster rate. Having said that, the fast twitch fibers tend to be larger, though not always, and certainly not in endurance training individuals, and definitely not with aging, they almost always are more glycolidically driven. And so they're going to have more of the enzymes responsible for anaerobic glycolysis. They're going to have more glucose in the cell. They're going to have less intramuscular triglycerides. They didn't have more phosphocreatine.

Slow-trich fibers are fatigue resistant, which means these are the ones that contract all day long because they don't use as much glucose that they do use quite a bit still. They are much better at using fat as a fuel. They tend to have more and larger mitochondria. The downside is they don't contract with it as much velocity in general. So that's the functional. That's why we call it twitch.

with it as much velocity in general. So that's the functional. That's why we called it Twitch. And just to be clear, the force difference between them, it doesn't matter. It's just velocity or is there a force difference as well? So a couple of things. In large part, force production from muscle fibres is determined mostly by size cross-sectional area. So getting the fiber bigger is the play to get it faster. Having said that power is markedly different. Because power is based on velocity as well. The multiple of the force by the velocity. So if you use this metric that we'll use in single fiber experiments called specific tension, which is sort of like relative strength, you take the size portion out of the equation. What you're going to see is a true slow twitch. So

these are also called type one fibers. If you compare those to a type two A, so that's a fast twitch muscle fiber, you're going to see something like five to six X power between these two. So it's not a small. When you normalize for size, when you normalize for cross sectional diamond.

If you go to the two X fibers, which is a special class of fast twitch fibers, now you're talking 20X, that power. And that is mostly explained by more metabolic apparatus. What's enabling this speed? No. Why does the 2X fiber go faster? In fact, the way that we differentiate muscle fibers in a laboratory is a measure that's called the myosin heavy chain to kind of actually come back to the micronatomy here. So the way the muscle fibers work is this is all in the 3D sequence. So you can imagine that cylinder. I'm going to explain it to you in

2D to see you understand, but this is actually occurring in 3D. And so what happens is you've got two of these microfilms called actin and myosin. What happens is they're overlaps, they're not touching each other. And you've got myocene kind of laying in the middle and it's this big thick tube. And it's got these heads that flick off the top of it. Now, these heads reach up and they extend again in 3D, but they just think about it in 2D. They reach up and grab on what's called actin. The idea when you contract the muscle is the myocene will reach up and they're going to reach out outward. So if you're watching this video, you're seeing myosin will reach up and they're going to reach out outward. So if you're watching this video, you're seeing my hands kind of reach up and away from my body,

like I'm stretching my arms, I'm going to be a big tee, if you will. And my hands would then grab onto the actin. And then if I were to squeeze my hands and bring my hands closer to my face, the myosin is actually then pulling the actin closer together. So what actually happens in real life is those starts stacking on top of each other. And that's why when you squeeze your bicep, it actually glows larger vertically. Because those muscle fibers are stacking on top of each other, and that's actually elevating the size.

And so what determines force production versus velocity is what we call cross bridges. So the amount of time that these myos and heads grab onto actin, that little place of connection is called a cross bridge. The more those cross bridges you have, the more effectively you can pull the actin closer to each other. The more effectively you do that,

the faster the contraction. The more force will the contraction is going to be. So primary thing explaining force production is the amount of cross bridges. So the thicker your myosin, the more likely you are to grab actin, the faster the stronger the hold, if you will, so the better connection your hand has to that thing that's grabbing onto, rather than you can imagine like a couple of fingertips on it and trying to pull something closer to you versus having

your whole hand wrapped around it, a strap on it, chalk on it, here you'll be able to rip that thing down quickly. Now, there are six actin that surround and a circle each myosin in human skeletal muscle. And so again, a picture of 3D structure. So you can imagine if I'm standing up in a room and I'm myosin and six people are forming a circle around me like they're going to jump me or celebrate me or whatever. That's what it looks like.

And my arms can sort of reach out. And no matter where my arms are, there's gonna be somebody that I can grab. And you only have two arms still in this. You only have two myos and filaments. And you have a ton. So you have one myos and filaments. I'm sorry, you only have two heads or how many heads do you have?

The Gilliams. Okay, so you have billions of heads to grab on to six potential targets. So you're always gonna grab a target. You're going to grab one right now. You can't increase the amount of those actin that are around you, but we do see that in other animals. So this is one of the reasons that explains why like fruit flies spiders and things like that can contract with so much more force relative to humans as they might have eight or ten or twelve or twenty mice or actin per mice or act in

per mice. And ants, which we always think of as like further size being insanely strong, they'll do that. So, evolution's tool to make things stronger is give more act in because you already have an infinite number of mice in heads. The more things I can give you to grab onto the stronger you are, the stronger you're going to be. You realize there's somebody out there using CRISPR right now trying to figure out

how to double the number of these things in humans, right? So I'm not gonna say this officially. All I'm gonna say is, well, officially, the world knows about the bare muscle studies that we've worked on. So there have been bare tissue come through and under my microscope, put it that way. Bare tissues actually quite unique.

So they actually have a so humans have that two a and that have that two X, which is formerly to be right incorrectly identified as to be. That's correct. Most other animals do actually have in fact to be and the to be is even faster than the two X and bears have a lot of them. So this is one of the other reasons why they simply have a fiber type that is much faster than any of the fastest ones we have cheetahs, other cats like that have like six to one. We could fact check that one, but I'm pretty sure that part of it tends to be fairly similar. My animals, it's when you get to the insects and things like that. I think that number jumps off, but my comparative physiology is not the sharpest. So don't trust me there. That's a great description of the micro anatomy, and I want to remember.

Let me finish the speed thing because this is what I's about. So what determines the speed? So on those little myosin, we're kind of connected to the act that is called the myosin head. Now part of that is, a bunch of stuff that you guys don't need to know about, but a part of that is called the heavy chain. So there's a light chain portion and a heavy chain. On the tip there, the way that we get a muscle to contract is ATP. So what happens is the myosin are kind of loosely connected to the actin at all times. But in order for it to grow up and pull, you need a strong connection.

And for that connection to happen, and for that to be able to pull it together, it requires energy. So pardon the somewhat crude analogy, but the way that it kind of works is if you imagine a cocking a pistol. So in order to actually cock the pistol versus fire the trigger, the squeal isn't the trigger, it takes a lot less energy than cocking it back. If you've ever cocked a thing like it actually, you have to pull pretty hard. So the energy that we need actually from also contraction is not the pulling together.

That's actually almost passive. It is the cocking back part that takes energy. And so that energy comes from ATP. So on the little tip about myosin head is an enzyme called ATPase. As you know, you hear A's, you think kinase, like you think something that enzyme that's going to work. That's the molecule that hydrolyzes ATP. Let's ATP, rather. So to make that simple. So what you have to do is actually invest in ATP. That gives you energy. Use that energy to cock that myosin back into place. And now it's kind of sitting there. But it can't mind strongly until calcium comes into the picture and gets released from the sarcoplasm particular. That has to come to the equation. It has to cause this conformational change

and act in and move these T2 bills or that comes from T2 bills and use some other things around. Once those things get moved around by the calcium, the myosin is like, oh, boom, it connects something and then it just almost subconsciously snaps as hard as it possibly can. And that's why you can't regulate force production is like it's just going to catch a snap. In order for that to go back, you actually

have to invest more ATP. This is also, so I know what explains her to mortis. So this happens, it gets contracted. You don't have the energy to then pull it back in so then you stay in this lock. It's got a muscle contraction position. So now the speed at which you can do that, that ATPase thing, that's what determines single muscle fiber contractile speed. That's also that mice and heavy chain is what we measure in the lab and that's how we determine fast switch versus slow switch. So if you were to use a technique we use called gel electrophoresis, basically you put a gel

between two pieces of glass and you just pour gel in there and it gets like solidify, just like hair gel, like a little bit thicker. And then you put each individual muscle fiber in its own vertical lane and then you put a little bit of positive charge on the top end, a little bit of negative charge in the bottom end, or inverse, doesn't matter. And then you actually put a little bit of chemical bath around muscle fiber that has a charge. You turn the electricity on, positive goes to negative,

et cetera. And so those fibers run down vertically through the gel. We hit stop at a certain time point. And the smaller ones have gone further, because smaller molecular weight will go through the gel faster. And so we stop, we develop it like you would develop a picture like old school photography stuff, literally the same silver nitrate sector that you use. And we can see the ones that have gone further down are slow to it.

The ones that once say a higher are faster, which of course we use molecular weight markers to confirm all that. But that's the fact that we're looking at. a pyre or faster, which, and of course, we use molecular weight markers to confirm all that. But that's effective. We're looking at. So what that means is the myosin heavy chain molecular weight determines fiber type and that regulates its twitch ability. The more of those and the faster those heavy chains work, the faster ATPase can operate,

the faster the whole thing can contract, the faster the muscle fiber contracts, and there you go. And that's why muscle fiber type is not predicated on the signs. It is specific to either metabolic abilities and the old days more now, more specifically, twitch velocity. So I guess all of this now brings us back

to a better position in which we can understand the biopsy studies in these identical twins. If you look at the fiber profile of the untrained twin, it lines up very close to what you've seen at textbook. So it's around 50% slow twitch, and about 30% of these fast twitch 2A form, but then about 20 or so percent in this hybrid form. 2A or 2X?

2A. So here's one of the things that's interesting. When you get into the 2X conversation, there are clearly humans have the ability to express 2X. It's just extraordinarily rare. So what ability to express 2x. It's just extraordinarily rare. So what tends to happen is this. If you find somebody that has what we call pure 2x fibers. So these are single fibers that are expressing only 2x.

A couple of things have happened. Number one, they've probably had that muscle fiber de-intervated for decades. That's really the only time we see it. In fact, if you look at spinal cord injury folks who, you know, had a de-intervated for decades. That's really the only time we see it. In fact, if you look at spinal cord injury folks, you know, how to deintervate a thing for decades, there is highest 50 or 60% of their total fiber type being 2x. And so this seems to be the default strategy of if you don't activate or utilize a muscle, it eventually is going to fall to 2x. Why we have absolutely no idea. I could guess, but we don't seem to know.

We see it sometimes in older folks, but even then. Sorry, 2x is the hybrid, single fiber hybrid. 2x is a pure fiber type. It is the ultra fast. Oh, OK. It is the one. So any hybrid is going to be called something like, there is a 1, 2A hybrid.

There's a 2A to X hybrid. And there's even a triple hybrid, 1, 2A to X. It has all three fiber types in the same cell. Those are fairly uncommon. A 1, 2A hybrid and a 2A to X hybrid are very, very common. A pure 2X by itself though is extraordinarily rare. In fact, we've done hundreds of thousands of individual fibers in my lab. And if probably seeing in total 20 or 30, pure 2x fibers, you're talking generally something

like 0.1% of fibers, something like that are pure 2x. Now, if you dive in literature here, you're going to get confused very quickly because a lot of people don't use detailed enough laboratory methodologies to differentiate these. And so they're gonna see, oh, there's all kinds of two X fibers. They're really not. They're very clearly two X fibers. They just didn't run,

I've had only enough to actually differentiate between I words. And so you'll pick up two X fibers as having some portion of two X. And so it's a difference between, does that fiber contain 2x versus is that a purely 2x fiber, which is sort of a semantic difference.

But in all real, that's a big deal. If you find somebody with a high percentage of 2x fibers, something odd is going on. The only exception here is there's no data really on truly fast people. We have a lot on powerful people. We have a lot on kayakers and bodybuilders and weight lifters. But as we discuss at the beginning, that's actually not truly.

Meaning we don't have data on sprinters? No. Why? Great question. It's hard to get these folks in the lab, I guess. People have been interested in it. It's not a thing. We just don't have them.

The only thing we have is there's a case study done. A guy who's, I think he still owns a world record. It's not hard to figure out his name. Like I can't technically say it. 110 meter hurdles, I think, and 60 meter hurdles at the time. How the world record are both, I think, still has one of them. He's the only one I know. I was a graduate student at the time. So I didn't run this study, but I certainly had my hands on the fibers plenty of times. And he had something like 24% pure 2x fibers. I'd like to see that replicated. So the untrained guy was 50% slow, 30% to a 20% hybrid AX, 2A2X, 2A2X, and then what was the train cardio only trained? About 95% pure slow twitch. So right there, you have the explanation for why he was weaker. He just

couldn't generate the force. It's a couple of things. So it answers a handful. Number one, do they change? We know this demonstrable. This is highly malleable. Yeah, not even close. We actually know that there's data on nutrition. There's nutritional aspects that will alter fiber type composition. Anything that's going to go activate PG-1 alpha and not a whole cascade, it's gonna activate increased a social fiber cycle. This is gonna happen. There's actually study came out very recently and was Veritrol doing it,

not humans, but like a very reason with those five grams of this Veritrol, I think in cattle, just like not that much at all for a 2000-ton animal, cause significant changes in fiber type profile. And there's a whole host of nutritional interventions. The question of, okay, does it change the physical activity? It's been answered so many times for so many decades now.

It's like very clear. And in our case, okay, how much? How much can it really change an important amount? Well, I don't know what these people's default is because one could argue the untrained guy was actually in an adaptation state. Yeah, he had a higher state. He deviated away from his potential.

Right. Because one thing that seems to be very clear of these two A2X fibers are generally associated with forehelt. And so we see this concentration go up with any kind of physical activity or spaceflight. Whereas at 2X by itself. At 2X is basically irrelevant because they just don't exist. If you have them, it's generally bad news. So you don't want to train into them.

So the ideal scenario here is 2A. Those seem to be the place you want to train into. If you do any sort of physical training, those hybrids tend to go down, especially 2A, 2Xs, they kind of go away. And so I'm not surprised that the trained individual had none of them, and I'm also not surprised that the entry one.

So it lined up pretty textbook. So the magnitude of change is meaningful. It's a case study, all that, but it matters. What's your hypothesis if you had a third brother, a triplet, who was a weight lifter or a power lifter? The distinction actually don't think would matter a ton. You're going to get the same answer. I would not be surprised if that third was 70% Fast switch two a and 30% Type-1. Yeah, with probably very few hybrids if they're trained now the one distinction is the two a two x fibers

tend to be a little more responsive to a little bit of workload You have to his sufficient audience to really get them to go all the way, but it's not that much So if you're just like kind of like a lousy fair lifter You'll still have some there now, but if you're training seriously, those things are gonna be go away. So I don't really think, given enough time and exposure, I don't really think that there's a limit

to the plasticity among fiber types, even with that in normal human condition. Now this is 35 years, so like, do we have a sense about the window in which you are maximally susceptible to it. So if someone listening to this is 50 years old and they've kind of been sedentary a lot of their lives, but because they listen to this podcast, they've now got the motivation to become big time exercisers. How much can they bend the arc of their fiber curve?

So fiber type is actually really quite cool because it doesn't seem to matter what age you are. So training studies in 70 year olds, we see dramatic changes in fiber type in six weeks, eight weeks, certainly. And the magnitude of change doesn't seem to differentiate. In fact, the way that you want to think about this is, it's kind of like an asymptote. The less trained you are, the faster things- Fast to the initial adaptation. The closer to your edge, so if you're a wait-lifter, in fact, we saw this differentiated. So, with our world caliber lifters, compared to national caliber lifters. The world caliber lifters had been lifting at a very high level for like eight or so years.

But the national caliber had been lifting more like four years. They were close to fiber type, but the national calibers had more faster fibers. So what this tells you is initial changes happened very quickly, but getting from that last few percentage up took years to that second group. But we will see this again, four to six weeks

to see a demonstrable change in fiber type composition is and it doesn't seem to matter with agent fact. As you age, it probably gets easier because your level of untrained is so high if that situation is there. One other thing I want to ask you about on the micro anatomy side Andy is you sort of have talked about it indirectly but if a person hasn't maybe caught it can you just explain how hypertrophy fits into this. So when a person wants to have bigger muscles what's happening at the cellular level with their muscle fibers.

So, there's an interesting discussion here that easy answer is, when we generally say a hypertrophy, what we're referring to is diameter, a cross-sectional area. And so, if you remember, if you think about the muscle fiber as being that cylinder, the width of the cylinder just expands. And so, that circle gets larger,

is the way to think about it. An accrued analogy is getting fatter means each out of a site is getting bigger. It's taking on and storing more triglyceride. Yep, exactly. So from a skeleton also perspective, the damrigates larger. There's actually interesting work. We actually have some tissue on us way to Auburn right now. Because one of the things that's been interesting is like a a bro science thing for years

of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy versus contractile hypertrophy. And so what this is really positing is, is the change really coming from fluid retention basically or is it actually enhanced of the contractile tissue, which in this case would be actinomycin? Seems to have some initial work there that's a little bit of both and it happens to different phases of training. Is the question do different types of training increase sarcoplasmic versus contractile hypertrophy? Or is

the broader question, hey, is a body builder, a body builder because their sarcoplasmic reticulum is huge, but they're contractile units are not that much bigger than the average person. I want to make sure I understand the question. So it's close, not the sarcoplasmic reticulum. That's what we call sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. So this is just being increased in diameter with additional fluid impact.

So it is close to what you're saying. So in other words, does this thing even exist? In other words, all increases in muscle size through strength and assuming it's like a normal positive adaptation, not some sort of weird thing. Is it actually happening because myus and act into getting thicker? Remember, you can't add act. I got it. Okay. Wait, that's amazing. We don't know the answer to that question yet. We don't. More data have started coming out, but even a few years ago, the idea that sarcophaism I've heard from you was a thing was thought of as like garbage row science. Meaning the idea, the assumed belief was anytime muscles got bigger,

they were getting bigger in the contractile units. Correct. But by the way, I'm not shocked that that was the default hypothesis. I'm shocked that it wasn't definitively known. It was a technology, it was an assay problem. Like figuring out how to actually measure this. When you take a muscle fiber out of a human Even with an electron microscopy you couldn't do this. That's not the problem. It's the standardization of fluids

That's the issue here when you sample the tissue. It's how do you lock the fluid into place? Basically, correct. How do you take this cell out of it living human? Get it into some petri dish and preserve its fluid architecture without contaminating it I got it and you couldn't do that with like liquid nitrogen it's fluid architecture without contaminating it. I got it. And you couldn't do that with liquid nitrogen immediately. That flash freezes. So if you get crystals in there, you actually lice.

You screw the whole thing, got it? Just because I'm such a frickin nerd, I can't stand it. How did you guys solve this problem? Well, I didn't solve it first of all. Mike Roberts out of Auburn has produced a lot of really interesting work in this area, his lab's his extraordinary. But they just figured out they were able to kind of take

an assay from the colleague of his figure out how to preserve it and liquid nitrogen is actually fine. But then from there you have to thought correctly and you have to do it. So he troubleshot this whole thing for a couple of years. You accept the crystals that'll blow up the size because of course the day. If you freeze them correctly. Yeah, it's how you thought. Chemistry's hard like this. So it gets very detailed. Mike could give you a better. I hope there's some high school college kid listening to this who study in chemistry who's realizing just how cool and interconnected

all of these worlds are. Chemistry, biology, physics, they're just so linked. I always joke that like there's only one thing in this world. There's only one science. It's just math. It's the most I hate math. Chemistry is math. Energy is math, biomechanics is math. It's that. Math and reductionism. But that's it. It's two things. So to go back what the question

is, here's where the exercise science is comes in. Why is it a bodybuilder can't have more muscle yet they're not stronger than a strong man or a weightlifting? Like how is this actually happening? And this is where this whole thing comes about. Like, how is it that my hypertrophy can exceed yours, but somehow you're strength and that the easy like sophomore answers, all neurological adaptations. Okay, fine. Sure. But like, there's nothing happen and interestingly, well, I don't think that's correct. And in fact, it doesn't look to be the case. And so there is some sort of combination, because here's the juxtaposition.

There's a thing called lattice spacing, which is there's an optimal distance between that Maya center and an active. In other words, if I was trying to produce a powerful contraction, but I was buttered up next to each other, I can't actually squeeze that hard, because there's nowhere to go. If I'm too extended, then I actually can't.

So that's the same idea as preload in a heart. 100% preload is going to determine stroke line, everything incoming in. So this spacing, if you're going to start adding contract out units, one way or the other, you have to preserve spacing somehow. The idea is it will exceed, it will expand hypertrophically, only to the level.

But if it actually compromises your going back to math, I promise you there's a mathematical optimization for the exact strike distance between actin and myosin to not be overextended or underextended and to have that perfect preload for maximum contraction. 100% and if your hypertrophy train, I'm this is now I'm totally making this up, but if your hypertrophy training in your fear with that and compromised it, you might gain size at the expense of potential strength. Right. Or if that hypertrophy was coming simply from excessive fluid and not actually contractile with this, then you would actually have a larger muscle. When I say fluidity,

I'm not talking about like a chute fluid retention. I'm not saying like you're bloated today. You've water loaded. I mean, there's enhanced fluid and a homeostatic balance inside the tissue because diameter has gotten larger, but it wasn't met with an equal amount of increase in contract by you. So if that number gets off, yeah, I think another physiologic point that's worth explaining to people is how much people are familiar with the idea that two thirds to 70% of our weight, I stood on the scale this morning yet. That number on the scale, 2 thirds to 70% of it is H2O. And then people say, okay, well,

how can that be because I get that my blood plasma is water? That can't be where it all is. No, most of it is in the cells of our body. And the muscle is of course, no exception, given that it's such a ubiquitous cell. Totally. And in fact, given that it occupies the vast majority of mass in your body, and giving the fact that in order for it to store its primary unit of energy, it needs to bring water with it, being glucose. That's going to pull them.

And just tell folks how that differs from, again, going back to bodybuilding. I love following Jay Cutler on Instagram, because I was just such a fan of his as a bodybuilder. And he's just one of these guys who in retirement is still training hard, paying attention to his nutrition. It was an interesting video. So he went into like in and out burger and he was like, it's my cheat day today. I'm going into in and out burger

and he places this monster order. What caught me was how much he said no salt, no salt, no salt, no salt. So he was like two burgers here, fries here, that no salt, no salt, no salt, no salt. Clearly, this guy knows something about the effect of sodium on fluid retention. That's a different fluid than what we're talking about now. Yes, no. In the sense of like, he probably has the neither director, indirect understanding of if you smash down seven grams of salt right now, bad things are about to happen in a lot of areas, like more specifically, if you just look

and we're getting maybe after it, but if you look at hydration and dealing with the athletes ideal with, a weight cut is a huge deal, managing a 15 or more pound reduction water over a course of 48 hours and then putting that back in. If you don't understand being hyposmotic or hyposmotic or isolusmotic, like you're going to cause a whole host of problems from kidney issues, to diarrhea, to bloating, to all kinds of problems. So you have to actually understand what you put back in

them has to be the same thing as what's intracellular or... There's going to be a huge shift as what's intracellular or... There's going to be a huge shift. You're not going to dry fluid in the tissue. And you're getting in a situation where guys are peeing and girls are severely dehydrated. They're peeing yet they put very little fluid actually back into tissue because blood volume got so large and expanded so quickly. They have a sense to excrete because photovolume gets too high or in court

but they didn't actually balance electrolytes and so nothing goes intracellular, which is where you're trying to get it to outside of organs. Once your organs and functional organs are either as heavy, good, good. Are there any rules of thumb on that we were talking before the podcast started how at food poisoning and in a span of like two days, I lost seven pounds. And my weight is about the most stable metric in my life. It just doesn't fluctuate a pound. So to lose seven pounds in two days, basically due to the fluid losses of being sick

and having to go to the bathroom about every seven minutes, coupled with not really wanting to eat during that period of time, what is your best guess is to, I mean, let's just posit that much of that seven pounds, six and a half of it, is water. What's the ideal strategy to replenish that in terms of hyper-hypo or iso-osmotic? If I'm going to try to replenish that in the form of liquid.

Handful of things. Number one, you need to go slowly. So you got to make sure that you don't get excessive. So I don't want to pound four leaders worth of four grams of sodium in the first six hours. I'm feeling better. Yep. So number one, you want to shoot for something like the neighborhood of 110% to 125% of fluid walk weight. Because you're going to lose some degree. It's going to happen.

So let's say you lost seven. My brain is like, okay, we're going to go to eight and a half nine pounds, something like that. You want to round this and call this gallon. Okay, we're going to bring that in over the course of three hours, maybe four or two gallons, right? Well, four liters and a gallon, ish, a little over change, two point. So a couple gallons. Yeah, I mean, a gallon is four liters, a liter is key though. So you're talking four kilos. You could do that over two days. No, like three hours. Oh, you could. Oh, yeah. Once your GI system settles down, so you would have fighters that would, I guess they have to, if they're going from a way into competition, they've got to bring that in. For sure, last week, Guy and Abhoudavi weighed in 136 pounds, there's 152 pounds

within probably five hours. And what was the osmolarity of... With no urine, no diarrhea, no GI, none of those things. What was the osmolarity of the fluid he took in? So it depends, the guy going through it this week as well, we actually measure that. So we actually will measure, run a basic sweat test and you can figure out sodium concentrations and then the amount that they get back is actually dependent upon them. So that number can fluctuate depending on if they're a high salt low salt sort of sweat. It also depends on how much salt we've had to pull out the week of or not. Obviously we don't pull out salt five or six days away or like anything bananas like that. But if you have seven to eight percent of your body fat you have to lose or sorry seven

eight percent of body fluid, if your body weight infl, you have to lose. We're going to take some salt out for a couple of days just to get us down there. And salt out, tell me how many grams per day they're down to in sodium. Zero. You're going to get down to zero on those last couple of days. So you're going to get down to like a classic example is we might have them at like two and a half grams, kind of like fight week per day. It's like not unreasonable, but the day before water cut day, it's zero. It's as much as like your boiling chicken to get as much possible stuff out of there. You're eating as much, as close to zero as we possibly can for that 24 hour period. If you have to go there, ideally, you don't have to go that low, but sometimes you have to.

That's a bigger impact than cutting calories, which you don't really want to do at that point. Calories are irrelevant at that point. It is simply physical weight, a food, and this is a fluid manipulation here. If we can keep them at like a gram, to that last day, like cool, but a lot of the times you're staring on a barrel of an eight to 15 pound water cut on a day, you just need every vantage possible. Well, I'm sorry, eight to 15 pounds of water you can cut in a day. Yeah, for sure. In a guy that starts out as little as like 160 pounds. If you're trying to get Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, So ideally in the situations you come into fight week in the proper situation So you need to come into fight week hydrated on normal or like even maybe slightly higher salt Normal or higher carbohydrate. You need to come in healthy. You need to come in recovered not over trained

All that stuff like you have to play a whole bunch of games here Monday through sort of Thursday You're gonna start getting as much of this off passively as you possibly can. And so you're going to typically keep carbohydrate very low, 50 or less grams, sort of depending on what they're doing. And you're going to complete glycogen. That alone is going to start helping you pull some water. And so you're going to passively do it.

You can play games with fiber. And so you have these low residue diets the last couple of days. And so you can make sure you're not holding on to food in your gut. That can buy you a couple of kilos depending on the size of the person. Ideally for example, if you came in Monday a fight week at 170 pounds, hopefully we can kind of get you down to like 164 or 165 by Thursday. Just passive step. Yeah, and now you're talking like we've got nine to do over 24 hours.

Well, you're going to float a couple throughout the day, just urinating and stuff because you're being very hydrated. You're going to float one or so overnight, this because of that. So really, there goes three right there. So now you're talking like we got to do six or seven of like active water dropping in that situation. So that really is a 15 pound week, but it's not that bad. Those six come just from taking that is the sodium complete sodium restriction. You're going to have to add in some sort of sweating upon it. So you're going to have to do something like that. The ideal situation is you do a little bit of physical activity, maybe, to burn any last little bit of glycogen without getting too terrible feeling. And then from there, you see a lot of what's called a mumbure app. So you basically

lay down and you put a bunch of glycats on yourself. It's like very easy to regulate blood pressure and make sure you're okay, you're not a risk of passing out. You'll sweat. I could pretty good amount like that. And then weigh in is Friday morning, nine o'clock in the morning usually. A lot of times if we actually do this best, you don't do much about the night before, you wake up the next morning and you're say four pounds over and you can actually sweat out four pounds pretty easy in a sauna, 20, 30 minutes, 20 minutes of sauna, 10 minutes long down. And then fight is Saturday night. So you've got 18 hours plus to put it back on. My 3036 because they're going to weigh in at 9 o'clock in the morning, Friday. And typically, if we do this again, correct, all these scenarios don't always play out.

It's making me a quite chaotic. You would ideally be back to you in normal Monday, wait within four to five hours after that weigh in. So you're only touching that final scale number for a very short amount of time. You're kind of faking the scale. So you're back to that normal fight neighbor. By the next morning, like you're certainly well back normal. Now the only difference, the only thing here is recovery muscle glycogen in 36 hours is close enough. If you do this correctly, you can get pretty good way. You can actually get body weight back, no problem. The difficult part is getting brain fluid back. I'm not totally convinced that gets all the way back

in 36 hours. So that's the like little bit of a challenge that you have, but there's just no way around that. So is there an advantage to be made for a fighter who I'm just making up the weight of 147, but just pick a weight to live, train, and show up at 150 instead of 160 so that, okay, the drawback is he's going to be in the ring at less weight, but the advantage is he went through less metabolic fluid shift in the two days prior, and maybe he's actually just physiologically better. So there's actually a good amount of research on that of looking at exactly what happens been doing performance testing

Preem post it's not that bad actually from a performance perspective as long as you stay within certain rains If you get excessive then yeah, there's been a number of folks Follow the UFC look at Frankie Edgar. He's won multiple world championships significantly under size So that works in general though multiple world championships significantly undersized. So that works in general though. It starts to become challenging because in the sport of MMA, the weight classes are so large. In boxing, you've got a weight class every four to seven pounds. So if a guy is really six pounds heavier than you, so that big deal on boxing, you know, if a guy is 15 pounds heavier you in a grappling sport. And you'll see this like he held me against the cage. I couldn't,

she just held me down. She didn't even beat me. I deal situation as nobody cuts away. I deal situation as that's all gone. But how do you ever do that? Because somebody will be like, well, take that advantage. So ideally, if you do it right and you can come in at Fight Week at 6% over Fight Weight, it should be no problem. Performance wise, you should get there other than like the pain and the acid is to deal with. You start getting to 8% fight week. Okay, it's 10% fight week. Like, it's going to be really, really challenging. All right, let's bring this all back. We've gone probably a lot deeper into the physiology, the anatomy, the micro anatomy, the muscle. But I think it's worthwhile. I think this was an

investment that was worth making because now it becomes a lot easier to talk about some of the things that are effectively the application of this. And I really want to kind of go back to how we started talking about this, which was through the lens of different types of athletes that are effectively the beacon of excellence in anything that has to do with muscle. So we talked about a power lifter. Power lifter, despite the bad nomenclature, is ostensibly the strongest athlete at the all out max one rep. Don't care how long it takes movement. You then go to that weightlifter who's also doing a one rep, but boy, he or she is also got to be incredibly coordinated and therefore by definition because of the nature of the movement incredibly explosive, but it's just one rep. The strong man, he's throwing boulders and having to pick them up and throw them

again and again and again, insane amount of strength, but you're not just relying on one energy system. You've got to also have a little bit of endurance, both musculatively, cardiovascularly, the CrossFit athlete, also very strong, also agile mobile has the explosivity, but not basically isn't as good at anything as those first three, but has something that none of them have, which is a greater degree of endurance. I think we looped in the body builder, which aesthetically looks like better than all of them has bigger muscles than all of them, but has to meet no weather requirement. And then I think I like that you brought in finally the sprinter, which is the pure, you could argue, the highest ratio of power to weight and locomotion optimized. Okay. I will never be half as good as any of those six.

And most people listening to this don't need to be, but we probably want bits of each of them in us, right? So let's now talk about hypothetical ways to train. And I did this with lane and people really liked this approach. So maybe we'll try to do the same thing. Let's go through some hypothetical case studies, right? So person comes to you and says, Andy, I want you to design a training program for me. Here's what I look like now. Here's what my goals are. And the goal is a no holds barred approach to what they need to do. In other words, unless I specify it as part of the problem, don't hold back. So we'll start with the easy one, which is the untrained individual who comes to you and says, okay, I buy it, I'm all in on this. I'm willing to go to the gym.

Peter's already got me due in a couple hours a week as zone two on the bike, but I don't even know how to approach this strength training thing. I'm willing to put three hours a week in the gym. I want to get bigger. I had a Dexascan, and it really showed that my ALMI was about the 40th percentile. And I'm looking at the literature, I think, being

at or above the 75th percentile for lean mass is a better place to be. So that's where I'd like to be in a year or two years, three years. But I also want it to matter. You know, I want to be stronger. I want to be able to do stuff when I get older I don't just want to get bigger. I want to be able to never enter a competition. I'm not here to enter the strongman competition But like I never want to hurt. I want to be able to chop wood in my backyard I want to be able to carry stuff around I want to be able to travel with a backpack on any other questions you have for me before you design my program Andy how many days per week did you say?

I could be up to going into the gym like three days a week and hour at a time. Three days total. Okay, cool. So you've basically described every one of our executive clients in our Rapid Health Optimization Program. So I can nail this one.

Obviously that's most of my career with professional athletes, but we deal with this problem all the time and rapid. Here's what I would say you've already got zone two stuff knocked out. That's steady state. Here's what you need to pay attention. You described muscle was insufficient. So we got in our brain right now thinking we've got to put on muscle mass. You also said they're untrained though. And one of the things you're gonna see is quite clearly. Oh, sorry. I sort of left out. I was active in high school and college. It's not like I've never done anything,

but I've been working really hard at my job, started a family, and so for the last 10 years, my only exercise has been activities of daily living, which includes sometimes hiking and playing with my kids. I haven't been in the gym. You're still describing everybody in rapid health operation, no problem. So I'm just gonna to walk you through,

I'm going to break the fourth dimensional wall here. All right, we need hypertrophy. This is a basic foundation of everything. You're going to get stronger by doing hypertrophy. At this stage of your training, like we talked earlier, those are not always coupled. You can get stronger without getting more muscle mass, very clearly.

And you can get really a lot of muscle that are optimizing strength. We talked about that at the end of those spectrums. You're at this end of the spectrum, the opposite. Those are going to be basically linked at this phase in your train. So we don't have to do both. You can do one and get both adaptations at the same time. Because I'm so low on the curve, anything is going to give me a bit of a... In fact, we can get that from not even lifting weights. Because in fact, in our training studies, you'll see that equal adaptations and muscle size hypertrophy from even steady state

cycling initially. For six to eight weeks, you'll see equal. All of our concurrent training models and studies show the same thing. Not only is there not enough clearance effect at this stage, it's a complimentary. In fact, our study came out more recently showing six weeks of endurance, exercise,

steady state cycling, prior to hypertrophy, actually enhanced end result muscle growth. So spending time initially getting physically fit before trying to add muscle mass for someone like this, it's a very fruitful investment. So the fact that I've been doing my zone two for two months actually has you pretty happy. Super happy. Okay. I'm also thinking, all right, you mentioned longevity, physical function as we move

down. You also mentioned, you said three years from now or something, which tells me your mind is really thinking about long-term investment here. That's right. Peter has me committed to this is not about looking good in my bathing suit in six weeks. I'm not in a rush. So one of the things that you'll see very specifically with aging is a loss of physical function. And that's more geared for power. In fact, the rate of, you've probably covered this before. The rate of loss of muscle mass as you age is something like a half to 1% per year. Loss of muscle strength is double the triple that. Loss of muscle power is triple that.

And so what are you saying? You see a very precipitous drop in muscle power. And why is that happening? A little bit of loss of speed, aha. So preserving, in fact, you can do this. You can go look at the world records of all sports across age groups. So if you look at like track and can go look at the world records of all sports across age groups. So if you look at like track and field, what's the world record and the 100 meter

dash and what's the world record for the 30 to this, what's the world record for the 40 to 50 year old range 50 to 60. And what you'll see is strength sports like powerlifting, the world record through age doesn't go down that much. The world record in speed and jumping sports just falls off a cliff. So it's preserving speed. In addition, my friend Greg Rassicki just published a paper this week in journal physiology, a blue ribbon journal in our field, right?

So how did you get? And this was actually looking specifically at single fiber contractile function changes with aging. And the data here are extraordinarily clear, have been along. You see very little loss of function in slow to a fibers through aging, regardless of exercise or not. I sort of mentioned this earlier,

but you see a dramatic reduction in fast-twitch fibers. And you actually don't see a drop of power. And so there's nothing internal to the muscle fiber that's going down. So another way to say this is, if you take an individual muscle fiber loss, that's the problem. It's a fiber size. The atrophy of fast-fetched fibers is the almost exclusive, the problem of aging and muscle. You have got to maintain fast-twitch fiber size.

Now there are some loss of total fibers, but that is actually very difficult to find scientifically. Counting total amount of fibers in a life human muscle is extraordinarily difficult. Really, what we're after here is, anytime I'm thinking longevity, I'm thinking primarily absolute force and power has to be preserved, and this is a faster fiber attribution. This is a target. So these are the things spinning in my head. So how is this three- a week combination at a low? Just to make sure we translate that and because I think that was so important what you just

said, you're basically looking, I'm 50 and you're looking down the barrel of my life saying, you want to live another 40 years and you want to be functioning. The most important thing I can do for you in the gym is not focus on the things that you're going to get for free. It's focus on the things that are declining so rapidly. And I will, as a corollary to that, get a bunch of other stuff for free, but I have to focus on the atrophy of your fast twitch muscle fibers because it's already happening and we need to save that off and we need to put in the gym systems to support the reversal of that process. Because if I just ignore that, I might as well be that highly exercise twin guy who's doing

all his cardio, but at the end of the day, he can't jump off the curb. He's going to be this the hypercardio athlete who's still a decrepit person in the last decade of their life. To make it even better or worse, those fibers require specific types of training. Unless you specifically do that, you just don't have any chance of those tissues. The other issues aren't as hypertrophy. A hypertrophy is pretty non-specific in terms of your training application. But if you want to make sure that you're targeting fast-rich fibers, this requires very specific protocols or like you have no chance. Fast-rich slow-chatch fibers are going to get activated with any activity of data level.

I'm going to get activated with any amount of physical strain, whether you're doing intervals, zone two, zone six, it doesn't matter, zone 28, pick whatever you want, so that you're good. It's the faster fibers that require intention. And that's why I make such a deal of it because you can't accidentally get those. It's sort of like what we say in fighting.

You can sometimes accidentally knock somebody out. There are fluke punches. There are no accidental submissions. There's no fluke arm bars. Like you have to know what you're doing there or not. So coming back to our avatar. By the way, I love that line because I often say that to, especially my female patients who are completely untrained, borderlining on chakak dick, afraid of lifting weights, they

just want to do yoga all day. And when I say, look, we have a problem here. You're osteophenic and you're so weak, I am worried for your life. And I say, I just don't want to lift weights because I just don't want to get too big. And it's like, I have good news for you. The myth of accidental muscle has been fully debunked. Fully. Me and every other guy out there can tell you, we're waiting for it to happen.

It hasn't happened. The odds that you're going to wake up and think, God, damn it, I'm too muscular. It just won't happen. The vast majority of us sitting around helping and bragging and devoting most of our waking hours and not waking hours to this goal that you think might accidentally have. You're totally safe here. All right, so we know we have to preserve faster to muscle fibers for the long term. We know we have to take care of VO2 max There's another I'm not sure you can't be this in depth. Important thing for longevity. All right, but we got some constraints

We also have to be considered of I have not trained in 10 years I'm going to get very sore very quickly. And if I become too sore, that it dissuades further training, now I'm going to lose you. I bought in, but that shit was too hard. I was so sore, I couldn't even walk. I think in your show with Holly, she talked about making sure you start with a very low volume. Way lower volume than you think. We have time. We just need to move. I'm going to be very cautious of eccentric movements. They will generate more soreness than relative. And the last part before I gave you some direct answers

is we want to start building movement patterns that we're going to need over time. And so this is an investment. We can get all that done by doing the same sort of training, where we're practicing movement patterns, we're getting that stuff through, so we don't pick up injuries later, we're not getting excessively sore, we're building some muscle mass because we're going to get that anyways, and we don't need that. So,

if this was a six month program, because you can't write the same program for the next 50 years, what's the first six months, I guess, if that's your question. So in two, it's out of the way. I would probably stick to fairly similar to what Holly said initially, which was, okay, something like one to three working sets of probably four exercises a day, something like that. We want to spread those across upper, lower, and kind of some different movement patterns. And we want to practice the compound movements. I'm not going to isolate it, single joint movements yet.

Let's learn how to do a goblet squat. Okay, this is a squat. You're going to hold the dumbbell sort of in front of your chest. Great. We're going to learn to do a hip extension. We're going to learn to do a basic overhead press or some bent rows. Things like that. And I'm going to spend 30 minutes on those things.

I don't even really care. About tracking progression at this point. We're going to track, get to get the movement pattern down right. Did you brace as our spine in the right proper position? Are you breathing through your nose and through proper positions? Is your neck in the right spot? Great. All this foundational stuff that feels like not a big deal at all right now because it shouldn't be. But we're making sure boxes are checked so that when we start progressing low later, that neck doesn't start getting irritated. And we're just sure boxes are checked so that when we start progressing low later, that neck doesn't start getting irritated.

And we're just being in that position. Okay, so we're basically completely optimizing movement patterns. We're making sure we don't hurt ourselves. We're learning new skills. We're learning skills of exercise. Let's now go to the next six months. So I come back to you and Andy and I say, you know, this has been great like this is not as difficult as I thought it was going to be. I've kind of enjoyed going to the gym and

Honestly, like I even see a little more definition in my arms and my legs and I'm a little hungrier. So I've been eating a little bit more. I haven't lost any weight or anything But my pants fit a little bit better. I'd like to take this up a notch I can't commit more time, though, Andy, 360-minute spots as all I can get, because I still got to get my kids from school and work as just as demanding as ever. But how do I increase the desire to be even bigger and even stronger and even more functional? So now we have to start investing in that 60 minutes industry workouts in the different sections per workout. So we need to start investing in that 60 minutes and those three workouts into different sections per workout.

So we need to start doing something to start addressing power and speed. I'm going to give that the first 10 to 15 minutes though. We don't need to go nuts now, but we need to introduce those movement patterns and those velocities and those tissue tolerance, so we call it. So your ability to land and absorb. It's not creation of power, but it's the back end. How did I stop that movement? How do I land from it? We're going to continue to invest in the muscle growth. Now we can start pushing the pace a little bit. And then we're actually at the end, starting investing in either

muscular endurance and or interval stuff. So if we're still continuing to zone two, that's great, but we haven't worked on getting right up, coming back down and regulating that whole piece. So what's that look like? The first 10 or so minutes of all three workouts per week, we're going to do something in basic movement patterns. So let's imagine a box jump. We'll do a box jump. We're going to jump from the ground and land on a box that's say 18 inches in there.

We're going to practice that movement pattern. I want you landing on a box, not on the ground, that reduces the eccentric landing because you're going to be absorbing way less. So you're not going to get out of eccentric landing, because you're going to be absorbing way less. So you're not going to get out of sore, but you're going to have to pop a little bit. You're going to have to jump to get up there and we're bracing that movement pattern. I'm going to probably do something. How are you determining that height and the 18 inches seems really high to me?

How do I know if I shouldn't be 12 to start? What level of fatigue, how many times would I do this so that I can gauge how high it needs to be? There should be no fatigue. This is simply about high. This is low tolerance then. Low tolerance and it's introducing power. Okay. So you're going to start learning how to move fast, but you're going to do it in a safe thing we're not going to pull a hamstring. And just to be clear, Andy, I don't need to compete in sports. I don't play basketball anymore. Are you sure you need me doing this? Because all I'm trying to do is I just want to be able to pick up my grandkids in 30 years

or 20 years. Yeah, 100%. So in order to pick up your grandkids, you need to not be in hospital. You need to be not living in an assisted living hall. Do you know what puts people in assisted living home, falling and breaking hip? The connection between morbidity and mortality with a hip break is extraordinary after the age of 60. It's not even 90. It is 60. Yes. Large reason people fall is they actually don't have foot speed. What do you mean? If you catch yourself your toe on the corner or you slip,

you have to have the foot speed to be able to put your other foot on that foot back out in front of you in their proper position. Then you have to have the eccentric strength to stop that fall. And so I need foot speed to get there and I need eccentric strength to brace the fall so you don't land and break your hip. That's what's going to keep you playing with your kids on your 60. Got beach? Yeah, it's not even though I don't want to be a quote-unquote explosive athlete, I still have to kind of train like one. In some part, and I'm asking for 10 minutes of your workout. Okay. So I want to keep you there. You can imagine the, I can continue to give you examples and analogies,

but this is if you want to go for a hike again, and you trip, or you need to be able to get up and do a little scramble. Your 10 year old grand kid is going to want to go up that rock. You got to have a little pop to get up there too. You're going to be able to pull yourself like all these things. That's what's going to keep you from going. No, you know, I'll just sit down here and wait you go and go. Yeah, exactly. I had a patient once say something that I love. I asked him kind of what were his goals for aging. And he said,

to always be able to go to my kids and grandkids. And he meant it both micro and macro, meaning, I never want to be in the position where I can't get on an airplane and travel and go wherever they are, and I never want to not be able to go physically in the moment to where they are. I thought it was just a very elegant explanation. The second part is brilliant. That's so good. Because that's the example there. I'll wait here versus no, I'm going to come with you up that little rock. It's the water slide. It's, I don't want to climb up those stairs. It's seven of them, but like, it's all the little stuff. I have two little kids, so I'm very in the world of like, what a four year old will do.

So what are some other things that we would do in that first 10 to 15 minutes? So I love the idea of the box jump with landing on top so you don't have that huge, massive deceleration. What about bounds, skips, things like that would all be in there? Yep, medicine mouth rows are great medicine mouth slams are great medicine mouth tosses up in the air. High as you can go as far as you can go behind you. These are reinforcing reinforcing movement patterns you built the previous six months. Proper hip extension versus low back extension, etc. It is also doing what we call triple extension. So your simultaneously explosively extending the hip, knee and ankle.

And this is a very important human movement pattern. You can do that without jumping and landing by throwing a medicine ball. Passing it. If you go to plyometrics, you have to be a little bit careful here. Ployometrics are totally safe for all ages as long as you count for volume. You just can't do too many of them at too high of an intensity. In this case, the eccentric as you count for volume. You just can't do too many of them at too high of an intensity, in this case, the eccentric load.

So jump rope. A five minute jump rope is just polymetrics. When you go single leg to single leg, you start increasing risk. So if you're going to jump from your right leg and land on your right leg alone, risk, but too leg to too leg, it's very easy. For pizza, you can play hopscotch.

The hopscotch is just too leg and polymetric to single leg to very easy. For piece like you can play hopscotch. The hopscotch is just two leg and plyometric to single leg to back forward progression lateral. It's a wonderful little exercise. Isn't it interesting when you go to a playground and watch kids play to realize the they're not being told to do this, just the inherent ability that they have to be explosive. And as you said, how that deteriorates with age, you just can't

imagine watching a group of 40 year olds sitting around just deciding, let's go play this fun game where we jump around. I mean, you do that if you're playing a sport, you do that if it's part of your pre-programmed workout, but it's not the equivalent of neat. There's no spontaneous. Yeah, it's not spontaneous. Last one I love is actually, don't get thrown off by this word, but I love sprinting. Just give me 70%. You would be surprised of like, whoa, it feels like great, slash terrible.

But if you even get on like a wood way or a controlled situation like that, and you could just do some like 70% for it, just getting through the motion kind of a temple is what you hear a runner like you cough, that stuff, for very short distances. I'm talking like 15 seconds. Just kind of stradded out.

Okay, slowly come back down. Wait a minute or two, fully recovered here. Okay, ready, roll back into it, two, three, four seconds and then give me pick it up for five seconds, six seconds. Okay, slowly back down. Just getting used to handling movement and being an athlete and moving and not being everything is locked into a position where it's structured and secure and all that stuff. So I really, really like movement, athletic

movement and multiple plans for people. The last example I gave you is just back to like high school medical sports. We're going to play 10 minutes of basketball. Go to the court, we're going to shoot, grab it up and down. We're going to play racquabals or warm up today. We're going to play bad men. You can over there or get over here like two and two bad. You can do a lot of little different things that are going to be multi-planner. It's going to be speed, agility, quickness at this point. So you're going to get change in direction. All this stuff is the foundation piece you need to get to when we actually do some speed and agility drills next year or wherever you're going to get change in direction. All this stuff is the foundation piece. You need to get to when we actually do some speed and agility drills. Next year, or wherever we're

going to get to, which is going to be part of your plan. So those are all a bunch of examples. I would recommend doing a different one each day of those three. So it's Mondays. We're going to do MedBall stuff. Cool Wednesdays. It's going to be pickable. And then Fridays, we're going to do some jump stuff and some medicine for horizontal throws, whatever the case is or it can be jump rope. It's going to be a hopscotch, things like that. I'm not against bounding broad jumps. I typically want to start here two on two.

So two leg leave, two leg land for this person. They don't have to be forward. They can be lateral jumps. They can be combinations. They can be all kinds of things. You want to see the surprise. Like, I want to say this too loud in case somebody hears, but they can be all kinds of things. You want to see you be surprised. Like, I want to say this too loud in case somebody hears, but that stuff's actually kind of fun. It's pretty fun.

You're going to get a lot of giggles. You're like, I haven't jumped like this, like, kind of feel weird. And it's going to be way different than what they're thinking. This is like training thing is you'll get some giggles. So that would be my intro to every single day. That's your opener. That's 10 to 15 minutes. Now we're hot now we're ready. Now we're going to move into strength training.

And so what I was still do is keep the same structure, total body on all three days, because here's what's also going to happen. Once a month, you're going to miss one of those days for more. It kids are going to get sick. I got to visit work blah, blah, blah, blah. If you do body parts splits, you'll start missing big things. You're going to miss chunks. So I like in these situations, these people, I want whole body every day, you're going to recover just fine. I would do a different rep range. So I would do something like Monday is going to be say three to four sets of five to

seven reps. You're going to be able to go heavier. You're going to have a minute and a half rest between each one. What are PE? Do you do there? 7-8. Just for folks listening. At the end of that, you're finishing with maybe two reps left in the tank. Yep, like for the working set. For Wednesday, let's go 15 to 20 reps per set. So now you're actually going to have less, you're probably going to drive less soreness because you're activating probably less faster drivers. You're going to get more of a pump. You can actually push the repetitions

and you can work harder and probably get a little bit less sore and you'll feel more of an acute satisfaction for a lot of people, right? Like you feel, the feeling and your risk is gone down a little bit. And then the third day, you could go really wild and you could do something like isometrics, where you're just holding positions. Very good for joint, very good for connective tissue, and very good for just doing something different. All three of these are equally effective

for hypertrophy. So your gains and muscle size are going to be identical across the board, and now you've introduced three different elements. Let's talk a little bit about isometric. I'm now going to deviate from my patient into back to being Peter and interviewing. We didn't talk about it, but everybody's probably heard of an isometric. It's forced generation or muscle contraction without movement. Big part of my recovery from shoulder surgery, I had a labral repair a while ago, and this was the first thing I was permitted to do was begin humoral extension and flexion without movement. And interestingly, I hadn't really spent much time doing isometrics outside of that. With a few exceptions, there was some dedicate, a lot of isometric deadlifts I was using as

a precursor to deadlifting, just a great way to warm up. But I don't think I was actually aware that isometric training could generate or elicit the same hypertrophy response as isotonic or movement-based contraction. Why is that the case? How does one know where to be in the range? So for example, if I do a bicep curl,

I can get every range of the bicep. But do I know if there's an isometric benefit to being here versus here versus here? So are you 10% flexion, 30% flexion, 110% flexion, I have so much to say on this one. We go for two and a half, three, we go another three hours. I will say this, we're clearly going to do a part two of this podcast. There's a whole show on this area because of this. So you actually sort of inadvertently asked what's actually driving muscle hypertrophy. It's not the workout per se. It's a stimuli. So then what are those stimuli?

That's a whole conversation. And the reason I purchase fees training wise in terms of what reps to do, what type of exercise I consider to be the least scientific interesting is because it takes the least precision. Because the mechanisms are so spread across different areas, you can go for A, B or C. You don't have to have all three. You can also have A, A and B, or you can have A and C, or B. You're going to get there. The muscle is very much listening to that signal. It's not so much for other things. And so it's very easy to kind of land accidentally and hypertrophy range as long as a couple of things happen. As long as sufficient overload occurs, you're going to get there. So this overload can happen

over time. It doesn't even matter how you achieve the overload, more volume, more reps per set, more weight, extra range of motion. All these things are different strategies for progression and if that happens, you're going to be in a pretty good spot. Farring the mechanism session is we're just going to get so far down the road here we're never going to come back and answer your patient question. But that's one thing to think about. So isometrics, this the short answer is they're going to be activating a number of those

same mechanisms. So you're going to cause the same amount of on a virtue where do I be in that range of motion? Well, there's no answer there This is the primary downside of isometric. This is where you'll mix it up presumably Certainly mix it up in general muscles respond best to being at the highest stretch So if you can have that thing at the highest level of Extension generally, but it kind of depends on the muscle, you're putting more. In fact, you can actually take a muscle fiber and hang it vertically and hang away at the end of it, and it will grow. So being stretched that long is a very strong signal to grow.

And so when you generally train a muscle over a large range of motion, you're putting the muscle on a larger stretch. So that signal alone activates the whole anabolic cascade for hypertrophy. So my default, if you're going to do an isometric, is to do it closer to the end range of motion, where it feels the most tight, if you will, not the finished position. But it very much depends on what you're after, because the thing that gets tricky here is many muscles are single joint. And so if you look at the soleus,

we talked about earlier, that crosses the ankle joint only. But if you look at things like the gastroc, it crosses the knee and ankle joint. So putting the soleus in the right position is only dependent upon the ankle, putting the gastroc in the right position is dependent upon the ankle and the knee.

And so if the knee is flexed, you're never gonna get the gastroc to contract properly. You can't get a full contraction of the gastroc in a reflex knee. And so if the knee is flexed, you're never going to get the gastroct to contract properly. You can't get a full contraction of the gastroct and a reflex knee. You have to have an extended knee and extended ankle, because it's going to just get short on one end of that spectra. And the same thing happens with the biceps muscles. So translation, aceted calf raise only works the soleus, a standing calf raise works both gastrocin soleus. Correct. The same thing with like a tricep push down versus an overhead tricep extension behind neck.

Now you're talking the triceps muscles across the shoulder joint are now going to be put on stretch when you go behind the neck and by the being that I've been. So that's why I recently saw a study that looked at tricep extension in flexed versus extended humoral position. And the difference in muscle mass was significant when the arm was up when the humorous was flexed. Right. We see this in the hamstrings. We see this in the glutes. Muscles like to be put on stretch. Well, they don't like it, but you're going to get they respond to it. You get the better compensation. Now that changes in a situation like what you were dealing with because, example, I use oftentimes like imagine somebody who's kind of like a nagging elbow pain, like man, like every time I do a lot of bicep curls and stuff, my elbow just gets me.

Okay, great. Can we actually train the biceps without aggravating the elbow hard to do? Because no matter which break your radialis, my sister's break, they're all going to cross the elbows. What if that's a nagging shoulder problem? Uh-huh. Well, now, if we do like a preacher curl, which is when your arm is at front of you, you're shortening the biceps part that cross the shoulder joint, and you can still work across the elbow joint and it will not aggravate your shoulder. If you were to do the incline curl where your shoulder and arm is behind you, you're putting it

on stretch across the shoulder joint, and now those bp curls are going to aggravate your shoulder theoretically. So going back to isometric question, it depends on your specific surgery. And whoever your obviously talented therapist or whoever was running that had you want to, I'm sure they were putting you in a position to get a little bit of activation in the joint that they wanted, but not actually aggravate and let the thing recover. So the angle you pick is dependent upon a number of factors. It could be sport specific. So if you take the case of like a power lifter, you may just want to train in your final position of your squat and get very used to being strong there. Going extra depth is only just going to make you worse as a lifter because you're now traveling further distance and you've got to do more work. So there's no easy answer. That's one of the reasons why we generally found eye semedrics is they just take a lot of intention where if I generally just

say do a normal orange squat then you don't have to guess. But if you had an athlete who said look even at this stage I'm really willing to do a little bit of isometric. Let's say using the squat as an example, you're going to load the bar in a low position. They're going to stand under a weight that is much heavier than they could ever lift and basically push up against the bar. How are you doing an isometric squat, for example? You lose a number of ways. So you can do a bench, you do squat, you do anything. So typically what we'll do is you'll put the barbell in the rack, and so you're gonna imagine like a squat rack.

And you raise the arms of the rack. Yep, and you need to have safety pins that run horizontal, perpendicular to the ground. So instead of putting the bar on top of those, you put the barbell over, and so you just lift up against the rack and nothing moves. And so you can set your position whether you're putting it behind your neck for a squat,

whether you're putting a bench below it, and you just push up on those. We actually have these built in the lab and on the bottom is a force plate and those allows us to do an exercise movement called. So that's how you can tell how heavy they're pushing. Right. And so we can measure force produced

in the ground at various positions. Does isometric offer any other advantage over safety? Yeah, there's a ton of advantage to it. The advantage is you have less degrees of freedom, less moving parts. So if I get you in a position, saying a squat, and your spine looks good, and everything looks good, there's a very low likelihood you're going to get out of position. The back squat is extraordinarily complicated. There's a lot of moving parts.

We have degrees of freedom at the ankle, knee, hip, low back, ribs, shoulder, neck. In an isometric, nothing moves. All we have to deal with is compression. Sometimes compression is aggravating, axial loading being specific, but axial loading is also fantastic for moment on that. So the reason I threw isometrics in for a client kind of rubbing back to is you were talking about, you mentioned that as one of the problems. It's like, okay, great. We know we can smash actually on these people with a very low risk

and get a lot of stimuli there and not have to worry about getting a position at different parts. And we have this thing called the strength curve. When we do it, typical isoponic movement, like a normal lift of a normal dumbbell lift, something. You're only going to be challenged in the areas in the range of motion where you're the weakest. So if you look at our study on lifting with bands, like heavy bands from a deadlift, you're going to lift at the very, very bottom. And you're going to have very low load. In fact, you could have as much as a 40% reduction in load at the bottom. But when you come up and you start crossing the knee joint and you start gaining mechanical advantage, it becomes extraordinarily easy, but the bands start getting heavier. And so the actual tenacity that happens without the entire thing is for the equal if not, well certainly greater at the top. So

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

Getting to and from it. So it's nice because with people like this, you could put her in like an already out position, like a hinge position, which is a kind of a complicated move and just be like grab and pull. And nothing moves and they can pull as freely and as hard as they want. It's very difficult for people with a low training age to truly express maximum force output on a free range motion. Because there's too many variables, and when they're at position is my back safe, and my lose my balance.

If I just take grab this bar, pull on this bar as hard as you possibly can and nothing's going to move, people can just go nuts. So walk me through how you do that for an RDL, for example. You're gonna do kettlebell, dumbbell, barbell, RDL. Barbell. Set the barbell in the squat rack, put it on underneath,

and set the height of those safety pins. To whatever height feels comfortable for you. And so you'll then get in there and do that RDL and you'll pull up against that bar and nothing will move. And your back will feel comfortable wherever that range of motion is for you. Your glutes can be there, your feet can be in the right

position, we get total foot, big toe activation, get that whole arc. You're doing this two foot down. You do one like it. You would most likely start the same two footed, just to develop for this person. In this goal, we're trying to let them express peak force output and feeling comfortable. And how long do they need to stay in that isometric position? Three seconds to some of the times we, with our athletes, will go up to five minute isometric holds.

Up to what? Five minutes. You can do like, we'll do a rear-fit element of the Swiss Quad hold isometric hold from up to five minutes, which presents a tremendous neurological challenge. I'm generally up for things that are ridiculous. I don't know that I could do it isometric hold for five minutes. You've ever done like super high volume lunges or split squats like hundreds

things like that. Yeah. Yeah. I did a four minute set of split squats the other day. Yeah. Okay. So just get in that position or foot elevated. Just a little bit. This hold it for two minutes to see. It's a fun task. You'll enjoy it. No, I'm sure I will. Where are you creating the resistance for them? You're just again, same thing bar over shoulder. In that particular scenario, you don't need any. Time will be your resistance. Oh, in other words, it's isometric only and that you're just holding a position.

Correct. This is like doing a wall squat. It's like a better version of a wall squat, if you'll. So you can go for a long time. To kind of come back here, right, in here. That's where we'd have those three separate days. Yeah, this is interesting, because I never, so I can really see now how you could create

a full day of isometrics. If you wanted to go down that rabbit hole, it's easy that one of those days is purely isometric. In this situation, too, even holding, you could hold a plank. That is an isometric exercise, right? It's the one that people love holding a hip extension position and just making sure you can actually continue to have your glutes on and utilize. You mentioned a squat earlier. So you can do this in a couple of ways. You can actually go all the way down and truly hold that bottom position.

That is challenging though if people don't have the right positioning. If you do, it's a, or you can close, it's a great way to build it. So I wouldn't be opposed to that if they're close and doing 30 seconds, but here's the difference. I would cap that as failure, not when they quit or get fatigued

or when they break position. This is one of the tests we do with our patients and the excellent grade is two minutes in a full 90 degree squat. What do you stop at 90? No, better than 90, lower than 90. So, parallel, thigh parallel squat, sorry. Why thigh parallel?

That's just the standard we picked. But the failure, as you said, the goal is two minutes. Can you go two minutes and you fail not when you give up? You fail when you basically shoot your butt out, lunch forward, make a compensatory movement that is beyond that. We use that as a great test of strength without having to put people at risk. You could easily generate the day.

You can also do. So one of the things we haven't talked about yet is it's important that you're moving in multiple plants. There's three major plans of movement, which is frontal, sagittal, and transverse. Which basically means you need to be moving up and down like a squat or you need to be moving things away to you and can torture you like a bench press. And you also need to be moving things laterally,

so like a lateral lung as well as twisting and rotation. And so you want to pick a few things in these areas. The other thing you want to keep in mind is single leg versus either split stance or unilateral. And so there's no perfect number you have to hit here, but you would want to select something across those three days where you're not doing everything is two foot supported. So you mentioned one foot and already else. You could do step ups. You can do split squats.

You can do rear-fedalovated split squats. There's a single leg press, single leg extension. There's just a lot of ways you can do that. So you'd want to keep kind of a night. I'm not going like, all right, is everything I'm using barbell and everything I'm using to, okay, maybe that's not an ideal. So maybe I'm going to use a cattle bell over here because I can actually do this, moving over here with a rotation or press. Okay, great. But now I'm gonna pick dumbbell for this movement and this movement over here, I'll use a machine. Lovely, great. And now you're in a really nice position

where you're not getting held back so much by technical demands. This person's only six months in a train. You don't want their whole day being learning how to do a movement. And then boom, that's 60 minutes goes down. But you also don't wanna be like, well, these are too hard to let's just stay on machines

the whole time. That's not a long-term investment. So we want to invest a little bit in growth. 20%, 60% is in what you need to be here. 20% long-term development. 20 other percent is fun. That's how we generally think about that 60, 20, 20 split. So that's how we split it.

So the last piece here to wrap this thing saying, I would finish every session with something that either gets close to a max heart rate or is a personal pain point. I always close off with Katsu and there's some intense pain. But my last thing is always two minutes of BFR on the air bike, which combines two beautiful personal pieces of pain. What's the thing that they love to hate? What's the area that they want to grow? They hate their triceps. Okay, great. Like, we're going to finish the session with a tricep blast. We're just going to smash it. They did. It's going to feel like, yep, okay, I got the thing done. One thing people hate is when they're not listening to. And when they come in, they're like, I want to get my

boots in to get stronger or whatever. And you just like, they're working them, but they're not real. You want thing to walk out? It's the double down concentrate on. It's one little session. It could be whatever. We used to do this on Saturdays with the NFL players because Saturdays were mostly a recovery regeneration day, which means they would never show up. And so it was like, hey, Saturdays are a gun show. We're doing nothing but biceps and triceps. We're like, all right, who should have to? You pick one, you pick one, you pick one, you pick a tricep, like everyone got to pick one and we just do these ridiculous made up circuits. And then they would all just get super pomp in their arms and it was like, all right, now go do your 45 minutes, go see your PT, go see your 8th athletic training,

like people are people, give them a little bit of what they want and just make sure in one of those days we touch high heart rate. One way or the other. And when you touch high heart rate, a classic way that one might do this would be a tabata type exercise where it's basically four minutes of intense work. What are some ways that you might recommend getting high heart rate in there? Do you want to do it with jumping? You want to do it on a bike on a rowing machine, what do you like to use? We typically want to keep away from eccentric. This is where CrossFit has done very poorly. It's like you're putting in a position of fatigue and very risky situations at a lot of times. So something that's for this individual, again, on the clarifying, that comment was regarding

this individual, probably not a great thing. Rather individuals, it's fantastic. You should tell them. Airbikes are fine. Roars are fine here. If you really want to you can actually do specific breath hold manipulation. So if you just alter breathing, so this is CO2 tolerance, CO2 can get very very high. You can deal with the suck without doing any physical work. This is all the stuff we've done at XPT Live in the pool. You can do a lot of

stuff with weights underwater and just changing what you're doing with ventilation and you can get to a level of pain very quickly that requires very little physical trauma. There are lots of ways you can play that. Simple examples would be do a 10-second sprint on the bike and then go into a breath hole. You want to see your heart rate shoot up incredibly fast and then you're going to come back out of that and you've got 30 seconds but you're going to go nasal only recovery breath. How long breath hold, by the way? Well, you're going to see the goal is maximum. Okay. In other words, go 10 seconds all out. Breath hold until failure. 30 second recovery nasal only. How many rounds of that?

Well, let's see if you can get three. Okay. One might be the answer though. If you might go like, I'm not in close to ready to do this again. Two might be there. You can also do that inhale hold prior to this print. So you can do an inhale hold, breath in, hold, and then hit that sprint. I mean, there's just a ton of ways you can get to playing with C2 tolerance if that's part of the equation. And again, you'll see your heart rate get up to damn your maximum. And that doesn't require much physical work.

So if you need to spare joints, you can do do spher assornous, you can just spare energy, but you want to get that. So in this end, there's lots of tricks that way. So Andy and listeners, I think we have some really bad news and some really good news. The really bad news is we've probably been talking for three hours and we've got one case study done. Yeah, we've got one case study done. And we haven't talked about a ton of physiology that I had in my 10 pages of notes here. What's really sad is I had 10 pages of single space notes that I wanted to talk about.

And we got into the first, I'm not being facetious, we got into the first half of the first page, at which point I threw it over, and totally rerouted everything we were going to talk about based on your answer and we have nine and a half pages of notes plus a whole bunch of questions that we didn't get to you. So the bad news is that zero chance we're going to finish this podcast now. The good news is I hope you will come back and we can do this again relatively soon so that listeners can have a part two of this discussion, you know, hopefully within a month or two months of part one. Is that something you're, I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you this. You're willing to give us another episode here.

I think we can. I'll talk to my people. You people will talk to my people and then we'll forget it. Yeah. And this has been super interesting. Literally, we'll be putting a few of these things into practice tomorrow for me and the gym. If I'm putting things into practice that are in just the purview of the guy who's never exercised, I can't wait to get into more. My phenotype, which is, hey, I do exercise, but how do I

take it to the next level? There's a lot of interesting things we can do when we get to that fun conversation about everything from like if you want to see behind the veil of professional athletes, you want to see what they really do for sleep, you want to see what they really do for nutrition, you want to see what they really do for training, we can go down that route too. Well Andy, this has been amazing. Thank you very much for your time, your expertise, and I'll see you again in hopefully a month or two. That was good man, thank you. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive.

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