Essentials: How to Build Strength, Muscle Size & Endurance | Dr. Andy Galpin

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Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now, for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. Welcome, Dr.

Professor Andy Galpin. There are only a handful, meaning about three or four people who I trust enough in the exercise physiology space that when they speak, I not only listen, but I modify my protocols, and you are among those three or four people. I would love to have you share with us what you think most everybody or even everybody should know about principles of strength training and principles of let’s call it hypertrophy, power, and the other sort of categories of training. >> There’s about nine different adaptations you can get from exercise. First one to think about is well, we’ll just call it skill.

So, this is improving anything from say a golf swing to a squatting technique to running. This is just simply moving mechanically how you want your body to move. From there, we’re going to get into speed. So, this is moving as fast as possible. The next one is power.

And power is a function of speed, but it’s also a function of the next one, which is strength. So, if you actually multiply strength by speed, you get power. So, there’s carryover. So, like a lot of things that you would do for the development of strength and power um they are somewhat similar, but then there’s differences. Once you get past strength, then the next one kind of down the list is hypertrophy.

This is muscle size, right? Growing muscle mass is one way to think about it. After hypertrophy, you get into these categories of The next one is um these are all globally endurance-based issues, and the very first one is called muscular endurance. So, this is your ability to do How many push-ups can you do in 1 minute? You know, things like that.

Past muscular endurance, you’re now into more of an energetic or even cardiovascular fatigue. So, you’ve left the local muscle and you’re now into the entire physiological system and its ability to produce and sustain work. Think about this as um I call this anaerobic power, right? So, this is your ability to produce a lot of work for say 30 seconds to maybe 1 minute, kind of 2 minutes like that. The next one down then is more closely aligned to what we call your VO2 max.

So, this is your ability to kind of do the same thing but more of a time domain of say 3 to 12 minutes. So, this is going to be a maximum heart rate but it’s going to be well past just max heart rate. Then after that, we have what I call long duration endurance. So, this is your ability to sustain work. The time domain doesn’t matter in terms of how fast going you’re going.

It’s how long can you sustain work? This is 30 plus minutes of no break like that. So, as just an high-level overview, those are the the different things you can target. And again, some of those cross over and some are actually a little bit contrary to the other ones. So, pushing towards one is maybe going to sacrifice something else.

There is a handful of things you have got to do to make all of those things work. One of them is functionally called progressive overload. If you want to continue to improve, you have to have some method of overload. Adaptation physiologically happens as a byproduct of stress. So, you have to push your system.

So, if you continue to do say the exact same workout over time, you better not expect much improvement. You can keep maintenance but you’re not going to be adding additional stress. In general, you have to have some sort of progressive overload. This could come from adding more weights. This could come from adding more repetitions.

It could come from doing it more often in the week. It could come from adding complexity to the movement. So, there’s a lot of different ways to progress but you have to have some sort of movement forward. So, if you have this kind of routine you’ve built Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday or something and you just do that infinitely, um you’re not going to get very far. So, what are the progressive overload principles um, that are most effective over time for strength and hypertrophy?

You have what we call your modifiable variables. So, this is a very short list of all the things you can modify, the different variables within your workout that can be modified that will change the outcome. Fancy way of saying, if you do this differently, then you’re going to get a different result. Um, so modifiable variables, um, the very first one of those is called choice. So, this is the exercise choice that you select.

So, if you choose, I want to get stronger, I’m going to do a bench press. Well, if you do the wrong set range, the wrong repetition range, the wrong speed, you won’t get strength, you may be get muscular endurance and very little strength adaptation. So, the exercise selection itself is important, but it does not determine the outcome adaptation, right? It is the application of the exercise. What are the sets, what are the reps, what are the uh, rest ranges are you using?

That’s going to be your primary determinant. The second one is the intensity, and that refers to in this context not perceived effort, like, “Wow, that was a really intense workout. ” It is quite literally either a percentage of your one rep at max or a percentage of your maximum heart rate or VO2 max. So, for the strength-based things, you want to think about what’s percentage of the maximum weight I could lift one time, and that’s that’s what we’re going to call one rep max. Or it’s a percentage of my heart rate, right?

So, if I tell you to get on a bike and I want you to do intervals and I want you to get 75%, I’m typically referring to 75% of your max heart rate or VO2 max or, you know, something like that. If I tell you to do squats at 75%, that means 75% of the maximum amount of weight you could lift one time or close. The third one is what we call volume. And so, this is just how many reps and how many sets are you doing, right? So, if you’re going to do three sets of 10, that volume would be 30.

Right? Five sets of five, that volume is 25. It’s just a simple equation, how much work are you totally doing? Uh, the next one past that is called rest intervals. So, this is the amount of time you’re taking in between typically a set.

Um, then from there you have progression, which is what we started to talk about this progressive overload. Are you increasing by weight or reps or rest intervals or complexity? All of those things can be changed as a method of progression. And so, maybe you want to go um progressing from a single joint exercise like a a leg extension on a machine. And you want to progress by moving to a whole body movement like a squat.

That in of itself, you don’t have to change the load or the reps or the rest. That is a representation of progressive overload. And it’s probably a pretty good place to start because number one, especially for beginners, you want to make sure that the movement pattern is correct. Don’t worry about intensity. Don’t worry about rep ranges or any of these things.

You need to learn to move correctly and you need to give your body some time to develop some tissue tolerance. So, that you’re not getting overtly sore. In general, soreness is a terrible proxy for exercise quality. It’s a really bad way to estimate whether it was a good or a bad workout, especially for people in that beginner to middle to moderate. In fact, even the that for our professional athletes, um we do not use soreness as a metric of a good workout.

On the same token, because stress is required for adaptation, you don’t want to leave at the gym and fe