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Build Muscle, Great Posture & Resilience to Injury | Jeff Cavaliere
02:17:04
Jeff Cavaliere, MSPT, CSCS, is a physical therapist and certified strength and conditioning specialist and one of the world's leading public educators on resistance training to build muscle size and strength, avoiding and overcoming injuries, and improving your posture and movement patterns (biomechanics).
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A
Longevity ultimately is being able to maintain function as you age, because again, it's not the number of years, but the quality of the years. So all muscles in your body serve a function. You're training these muscles to get stronger and you're training your balance and these are all skills that can be learned and improved. They're all trainable. If it's trainable, it's fixable.
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff Cavaliere is a Master of Science in Physical Therapy and a certified strength and conditioning specialist. He is considered one of the world's foremost experts in training for both men and women to increase the strength and size of their muscles, their overall health and longevity. Today we discuss some of the things that are not often discussed and considered the small things, but that are actually the big things because they allow you to do the big things for your health and fitness and longevity decade after decade after decade, and to do so pain free and while making continual progress. We also discuss the typical big things, the specific multi joint exercises and cardio workouts that create the greatest results. Today you'll learn some simple exercises that will strengthen and protect your back, your shoulders, even improve your foot strength, which most people don't think about but turns out to be foundational for everything. Your pressing and pulling movements, training and your cardio. And that will allow you to live your daily life with vigor and ease at any age. I must say I'm a longtime fan of Jeff's work, which he's been publishing to YouTube and elsewhere as Athleanx. As you'll soon realize from today's episode, Jeff is far more than just another fitness trainer. He has deep knowledge of human physiology and kinesiology and he really understands that everybody's situation and body is different and thus needs different tools to address and solve their specific problems and to achieve their desired results. I should also mention that Jeff and I went to the legendary Gold's Gym in Venice, California where he took me through an arm workout, so biceps and triceps and forearms.
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And he showed me what has become
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his kind of signature move, which is face pulls, which are essential for improving your posture, for your rear delts and for general stability of the shoulders. So you can find a link to those workouts in the show. Note captions before we begin, I'd like to Emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for today's discussion with Jeff Cavaliere.
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B
Jeff Cavaliere, welcome back.
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A
Thank you for having me this time. Actually, nice to come out to California. Yeah. Get a little workout in.
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B
Yeah, we have a studio this time. Last time I think we were in a, in a rented apartment in New York City.
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It worked.
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B
I said it then, I'll say it again. You're the man. I've been watching your videos and following your training advice for many years. I would say Mike Menser, Dorian Yates and you.
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That's, that's.
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B
I've merged the principles and very high
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humbling praise for me, for sure.
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B
Well, you're 50, never touched gear. That's slang for steroids. You're not on trt, you've never done it, and you look amazing. I know you're very disciplined with your diet, your training, but, you know, you're married, you have two kids, you put in the work all over life and, you know, you're a testament to what's possible if people do things right. So today I want to talk about a number of things, but something that I believe is not discussed enough, which you discuss a lot, and it's just been transformative for me because I also happen to be 50, is we both know that the big things like doing the regular compound multi joint lifts regularly, that's all critical. We know the big stuff is critical and people talk about the big stuff all the time, but you talk about the small stuff that makes the big stuff possible for decade after decade. And I credit you for fixing my back pain. I credit you for the fact that I basically have no pain despite training very hard for more than three decades. So let's talk about the small stuff, which is not actually the small stuff. These, I think of it as the, the kind of hinges and, and bolts on the system that allow that system to work. So low back, shoulders, neck, these are the pieces that nobody wants to train, no one wants to think about, no one wants to talk about. So let's start right there. How can we keep our lower back strong and pain free while also doing things like deadlifts and squats, etc.
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A
I'm glad you're talking about all of this. Obviously it's like, it's such music to my ears, but I think the background of Being a physical therapist is. Is what set the stage for my focus on these things. Because when I was younger, pre physical therapy days, I did all the dumb stuff too. And I did all the things, just the big things, and realized that it wasn't necessarily a path to longevity, but in the. In the immediate. And in my 20s, I was literally breaking down then. Like, I had knee pain, then I had back pain, then I had shoulder pain then. So I think people who are in their 20s these days have the luxury of having access to videos like this where they don't just say, oh, that's just maybe a hard workout. Now they start to say, well, maybe I'm actually doing some damage here, right? Maybe I do need to pay attention to the smaller things. And when you have enough videos out there that showcase these small things. For instance, you mentioned back pain. We talk about a major cause of back pain not being structural back pain, right. A lot of the times, the back pain that we suffer from in our lives is not surgical. It doesn't need surgical treatment. It just needs the right addressing of the muscles that contribute to that or how we allow muscles to get tight that shouldn't get tight if we did full range of motion on certain exercises, right? So in particular, I mentioned the glute medius, right? And the glute medius is a muscle that is going to control hip position, hip movement. So if it's controlling the position of our hips, that means it's controlling our pelvis. And if our pelvis is tilted or twisted or forward or backward, obviously the spine is literally adapting to the position of the pelvis beneath it because it's connected through the sacrum. So how is that not important? Right? So all these muscles that connect to the pelvis that change its position are inadvertently going to change the position of the low back directly the lumbar spine. That is going to likely cause dysfunction down the road if you don't address that. So it is these little tiny muscles and these little tiny exercises. So I made a video years ago about an exercise that you could do to help to loosen up if there was a knot in the glute medius, right? An area of spasm, a localized area of spasm. Because when the spasm's there, you adjust the way you move, right? You're in pain, so you're trying to move around that spasm. Something as simple as a leg raise down and back while holding down that. That pressure point on the glute medius helps to alleviate some of that discomfort in that spasm to the point where you could restore normal motion again, because you're not avoiding pain. And all of a sudden the back pain goes away. There was nothing structurally there. Fine. That's a great video. It helped. I think 50 million people have seen it.
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We'll put a link to it. This is the one where people, everyone, you should watch the video. This literally erased my back pain. What I thought was going to require surgery. You lie on your side. One leg is in front of the other, toe down on the ground, you put it up and back. Jeff provides a beautiful description of what is essentially a very simple movement. But if you do it properly, the pain evaporates. It's wild. And I thought it was a back issue, but it was a glute medius issue.
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Yeah. Again, you could feel referred pain anywhere. But what happens next is great. You solved that area of spasm. Why do we get spasm? Oftentimes it's because we're providing artificial stability to an area of weakness. Because spasm is basically the muscles holding on and saying, I need to protect this area. And so if the muscles around the low back are protecting that area, there's a reason for it. It's probably because the muscles that are supposed to be stronger are not strong enough. So that doesn't mean that you do this one thing, you're done. Yes, you might have no back pain that day, or you might have relieved that episode, but it means that there's an area of weakness that could benefit from strengthening it. So you come back, you start to do glute media strengthening. I demonstrate an exercise where you put yourself up against a wall, right? And you stand on the leg outside the wall, furthest away from the wall, and you let yourself drop. Just let your hips drop, right? They get lazy when they drop like that. You're the only way you can get them level again is to slide yourself back towards the wall. And that's abduction of the hip that way to get you back to level again. That is the glute medius dysfunction. To get you back to that level position. Well, ironically, every time you lift a foot off the ground to walk, you're getting a pelvis that drops side to side. Right. Every time you go on single leg stance, the pelvis is going to drop a little bit. The people that have less control of that have more of what they call a Trendelenburg gait, where the pelvis rocks side to side as they walk.
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If you were looking at them from the back, you know, pick your preferred opposite gender folks, and then the butt
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swinging from side, you might look at on Instagram. But it's not gonna. It's not gonna do good for your back, right? So you go back and forth. Well, all that uncontrolled motion starts to wreak havoc, and eventually those muscles start to say, I got to, I got to provide this artificial stability. So what do I do? I spasm. And so if you don't extend the plan beyond the fix, how do you then build that strength up to prevent it from coming back? And so I'm all about not just the fixes, but. But really about the preventative things you can do to, to, to stave this off long term.
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B
So we'll talk about the structure of a base, a really good basic program. And many people talk about that, you know, sets, reps, splits, et cetera. But let's just assume for that somebody listening to this is training their lower body twice a week. They're doing compound exercises and some isolation exercises. But they're dealing with some back pain, or they're not 20s, they're in their 20s or 30s or structurally, they're blessed and they're not dealing with it. What are some additional things that we would call small things that make the big things possible for much longer and also make people stronger at the big things that people can do. Would you say back hyperextensions? Would you say, watch your video on medial glute medius training? What would be the exercise to insert and how many times per week to do it and when?
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A
That's a good question. So, yeah, reverse hypers are an amazing exercise. I like doing them because they're very easy to do anywhere you don't have to have resistance on them. They make a great machine that actually provides resistance straps over your legs that you can lift additional weight on. But the challenge for most people, remember, they're chronically weak in these areas. So even just the body weight lifting of their own legs is going to be a significant enough challenge to get overload. But you can literally do it on, like, your bed. In the morning, you can get up. You lay enough of your torso on top of the bed so that you're not falling off the bed, but you can just have your legs hanging off your bed and your body up on top of the bed and do a reverse hyper.
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So raising the heels, raising the heels that they're parallel with the floor as
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level as you can get them. You know, again, the bed's a little, a little soft, so sometimes you kind of dip down as you're lifting your Legs up, but it's sturdy enough that you can get to almost a parallel position to the floor. I like to make sure we'll talk about this but like you're moving, the muscles are doing the work and not momentum, right? So you want to hold that contraction briefly at the top to convince yourself that you actually were able to perform the movement. So you get up, hold it for, for a second. And I think what's important on that too is people who don't have the strength in their glutes because it really is a glute weakness issue, not necessarily a low back issue. A lot of times it's weakness in the glutes that's transferring the load to the low back that can't handle it. And people get the symptoms in the back, but it's the weakness somewhere else that's causing that. So I like to focus first and foremost on the glutes. Glute max glute medi is to make sure that they're strong enough. And again, if you test even big time athletes, we would test their rotational strength of their hips. Some of the strongest athletes, some of the biggest squatters, some of the best lungers, right, they're lunging over 200 pounds. They, you put them in position, you try to bend their, their, their hip into internal or external rotation of their bent knee. They can't resist it at all. So they, it just goes to show you that all the squatting, all the big lifts aren't enough to counteract the smaller muscles, right? There are different functions. A rotational muscle of the hip is not a sagittal plane muscle of the hip. It has a different function. So they all have to be strengthened. So along that line we will do the, the, the reverse hyper as a good sagittal plane exercise, focusing on the glute when they get to the top and I tell you to contract it, squeeze. So you know that's the glute that's squeezing and doing the work, not that you're arching at the low back, that you're using the muscles that are already overworked in the first place. So get that up there, squeeze. Reinforce that it's the glute that did the work. Great exercise. The glute medius, like I said, the hip bump, super easy exercise. You could do it anywhere against the wall. You could do anywhere against the wall. Any, anything you can do it is like a bump.
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B
You raise the leg that's closer to the wall, like 90 degrees outer one, you're standing. It's almost like you're trying to slide that hip along the, that's closer to the wall, up the wall. So it's like. Yeah, it's like a kind of like side booty bump to the wall, but sliding it up.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And this is sometimes where you have to invest in. This is the small things, but you know, they're also small investments. A little mini hip band, you know the little elastic bands, they're just loops, the little fit loop they're called. Put it around your heels, lay on your belly, bend your knees to 90 degrees and then just try to open your feet apart. Right, Spread your feet apart. So now you're strengthening. Rotation of the hip or hold one steady, Let one leg, it's a little hard to show here, but let one leg come a little bit in front of the other and then try to cross it over the other one. So now you're getting external rotation of that hip. So you're working extra rotation against resistance and internal rotation against resistance. Super easy things to do. You can, you can attach a band around your, around your ankle and then you can do lateral hip swings, but with a component of rotating against the resistance of the band too. So I'm moving my leg out and rotating out at the same time. How do you do that? Just focus on your toe. If your toe is turning out, your hip is turning out. If your toe is turning in, your hip is turning in. So you don't have to focus so much on how do I move that? Just focus on what the foot is doing and you turn it. As long as the knee is going with the foot right, you're not just spinning the foot. The knee and the foot go together. So there's, there's simple things. And again, you might need a band or mini band or something to get these smaller muscles more specifically. But it's $10, $15 for a band. It's well worth the investment if you can get rid of these long term recurrent issues that could come, you know, back and, and causing agony every two, three months. As a reminder of what you're not
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once I realized that the glute medius was causing for me back spasm issues that were severe enough that it was immobilizing but Then it was resolved by the information you provide in your videos. I started doing the hip slide up the wall movement. I still do that. The reverse hyper and. And the one that you put in a video. And again, we'll put links to these that I found. A little bit more of a setup, but seems really useful, is where you take some sort of rope or dog leash and you put it around your waist and then you actually have a weight between your legs hanging a couple inches off the floor. And then the goal is to walk. It makes you kind of have to kind of monster walk or. And the idea is to not let the weight swing and hit your feet. I know that sounds really awkward, but it really works. And I know it works for a number of reasons. And by the way, all this strengthened other lifts for me dramatically. I was kind of at a sticking point with a number of lower body lifts and upper body lifts. And it really seems like it helped create a real stability in the lower back glute area. What is that dog leash thing doing? It's very simple, right? Just tie a weight between your legs and then you're trying to walk but not let it swing. Why does that work?
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A
Anytime you could take these smaller exercises and bring them a little closer to actual function, I think it's better, it's better carryover. So if you're talking about actually being on your feet and walking, that's a step towards function. That's, that's, you're going to be more useful, I think. But what you're doing is, as I mentioned before, every time you pick up a foot off the ground, you're in single leg stance. So when you're in single leg stance, if you're not contracting the glute medius on the side that you're standing on, your pelvis is going to drop and drop in the side because you're, you're not balanced anymore. You're going to drop towards the up leg. You may not drop if you're consciously trying to stay level because you're firing the glute medius. But for someone that has a weak glue, you just have them stand on that one leg and you're going to see that pelvis drop. So when you're doing this test and you're adding the weight to the equation here, the weight is really to create a pendulum effect, right? Because when you start to move anything, that weight's going to want to go in an exaggerated way. So what, what we're trying to reinforce is, okay, can you do this and take These slow steps in these single alternating single leg stance and prevent that that weight from shifting so much. That is because you're dropping too much that it would hit or bang into the other leg. So you have to be able to walk slowly through single leg stance and not allow enough of a drop. By having good contraction and control of the glute medius so that it would minimize the weight itself, it would qu motion of the weight itself. So you're reinforcing. How hard can I keep this thing engaged as I walk? And you know, if you could do this, the faster you could move yourself and still have minimal displacement of the weight would be a good indicator that wow, you're really starting to get good control and strength in those in that glute medius. Another thing I like to do is we call it a, a suitcase lunch, right? So you do a, a lunge where you offset the weight on one side so you carry it in the. If I'm going to lunge forward, I put it on the opposite leg, right? Hold on the opposite side. What that's going to theoretically do is obviously when I lunge forward I'm going to want to fall to the side of the weight picture having even like a 50 pound weight or a 60 pound weight in your hand, it's going to want to go that direction in this lunge position. If I can straighten myself out and keep my torso rigidly in place the whole time, then I can really strengthen that glute medias on the opposite side. And what's cool about it, that is it's also done on a, in conjunction with a sagittal plane lunge. So now I'm starting to plan train in multiple dimensions and planes at one time. So a lunge in this direction, suitcase carry offset, only one dumbbell, not on the other side. Obviously you're going to get that desire for the body to fall towards the side of the offset weight. And again that starts to shift the pelvis up. The only thing will keep it down is by keeping the hip in abducted and level and that pelvis stays level. So we'll do that with a lot of our athletes and work up to some pretty heavy weights there too. And again it is a kill two birds with one stone type exercise because you still get the benefits of the lunge, which I, I love as an exercise.
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So let's say somebody is going to do some hip slide up the wall or, and, or reverse hypers, if they're lucky enough to have a gym with a reverse hyper machine or, or Even a. Just a high bench hyperextension machine. Right. Classic hyperextensions, you just go face inward. Yeah. So the upper body moves. And for classic hyper heels, which I
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A
like too by the way, like that's more direct low back strengthening, which is always good. We can always strengthen our low back, so those muscles need to be strengthened. But again, I would say more often times the source of the low back pain is coming from the muscles beneath them that are weak, chronically weak, like the glutes.
- [23:08]
B
Okay, so reverse hypers, the hip sliding up the wall approach. Maybe the dog leash with weight between legs. It doesn't have to be a dog leash, folks, but you get the idea to try and minimize the hip sway. Should those be done at the end of a lower body workout when the lower back and glutes are partially fatigued or very fatigued, or done separately at a time when they're really fresh?
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A
Two times, I think, I think you could do them on a dedicated day at a dedicated time. So I approach my ab training as ab training and I always keep it separate. I just like to focus on. I'm going to do five to 10 minutes of core strengthening right now, here and now separate from my workout because I don't want it to be an afterthought. I think it should be. It's a, it's a key component of what I do to keep a strong core. So I want to focus it and I don't want to add it to the end of my workout when I'm already mentally checked out. Right. So I do that. I think when you start to have these issues that require special programming. Right. Then you should own that special programming because it's yours, it's what you need specifically. Others might need things for their shoulders or for the rotator cuff. But like whatever special programming is, do it as a small routine on its own day, at its own time. Or even it could be on a workout day, but a separate time that you just go through as a routine. Five minutes to seven minutes, three times a week or so. That's it. If you want to put it on a training day, it's actually not a bad idea to put these smaller muscle exercises or smaller focused exercises after your bigger training because a, you're not going to compromise your big training and the goals that you have for, for that. But you also are pre fatiguing some of those bigger muscles that are going to want to dominate these small movements anyway. The compensations that you're going to see on these small movements are always Going to be the big muscles trying to kick in and do what they've always done, which is take over and you're trying to get them to not. So if you can pre fatigue them a little bit prior to doing these small exercises, you're actually setting the smaller muscles up for more success.
- [25:10]
B
Yeah, if I could travel back to my teens and I started lifting when I was 16 and 20s and 30s, I would have started doing all of these things a couple times a week or even just once a week, even before there were there was any pain because I had the same. I don't know if it's arrogance or just ignorance that, oh, you know, pain, like that's what old guys talk about. Like, I have no pain, I feel fine. Like, you know, But I think by training a certain way without pain for a very long time, it's almost like the spring is getting compressed. Because it means that unless someone has perfect mechanics and they're covering all their bases through other sports and things of that sort, it's almost like the stronger, stronger, stronger you get, you're just setting yourself up for one of these things to go. And in my case it was this lower back thing. And for some people it's their shoulder.
- [25:56]
A
When you're young, those things that, that appear as post workout soreness even can be masquerading for long term pain problems and dysfunction down the road. Right. Because you're, again, when we're young, we just feel, hey, I'm sore, I had a hard workout yesterday, I'm a little stiff again. We get through it, we manage it. It's not that interruptive of our life at that point. So we move on. But I believe that those are many examples of what is potentially happening beneath the surface, that if you continue down that road, that normal workout soreness becomes more chronic joint pain, discomfort, movement limitations. And we also lose range of motion as we get older. So if we're not focus on actually trying to maintain that, it just starts to pile up. And it's one of those things where you look back, we look back years later and go, wow, I can't believe I've lost this much range of motion. Or I can't believe I've gotten to this state when it really was just accumulation of many, many of those days of doing things where you weren't paying attention to all the little things. So it doesn't really creep up on anybody. It's like it's happening and it's happening every day. It's not like you can't intervene, you Just have to be aware of what you need to do to intervene.
- [27:08]
B
You have a post that really humbled me, and people are gonna laugh. They're gonna be like, I can't believe you can't do that. Well, now I can do it. I'll explain what it is in a moment. But a longevity test.
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A
Oh, boy.
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B
That includes test of balance, strength, and inner fortitude. And that's the. Put your shoes and socks on, standing on one foot, obviously one foot, then the other, not sitting down, but doing that in the morning every day. And I'll tell you, if you're training hard, that lower back's gonna ache a little bit when you first, you know, first thing in the morning. This is a very cool test, and I force myself to do it now. And I have to say, a lot of mornings I'm like, I just wanna sit down and put my shoes on, you know? And I got this puppy now, and he's grabbing my shoelaces, which makes it even more dynamic. But in all seriousness, it's. It's a very interesting, very simple test. If you could just explain what it is, folks, trust me, you want to do this every single day.
- [28:05]
A
Call the old man test is. Is gender neutral, though it could be a woman test. Everybody is fair game. The goal here is to simply put your sock and your shoe on the floor on both sides, lay them down in front of you, untie your shoes, make them sure they're. They're loose enough that you could get them on your foot. Stand on one foot to begin the test, lean over, pick up that shoe, or pick up that sock, Put the sock on, Pick up that shoe, put it on, tie it, and then put the foot down. Only after you've tied the shoe can put it down and then go and do the other side. And it is difficult. It is very, very difficult. It happens to be one of the tests that I do a little bit better than other tests. But we were joking before. I told you that about twice a year. I still get back pain every now and then, and mine came from leaning over to put my sock on the other day. And my whole back felt like it was going to blow up on me like that. So there's a lot going on inside the body when you're doing this, right? Why would my back all of a sudden seize up on me when I'm going to put on my sock? Because you don't realize the responsibility that those lumbar paraspinal muscles have in trying to control even just leaning forward. And they're Trying to make sure that you're doing it at a pace that's safe for your spine. So doing this every day is a little mini workout for those muscles. And again, I think we tend to get so lazy as we get older and complacent and so that once you start sitting down, you're just going to sit down. When you put on your socks and shoes, what's the need to get up and do this every day? If I'm comfortable putting it my, you know, doing this sitting down or wow, this was easier because I sat down today. You can't be seeking easy. If you seek easy, you're going to get old a lot faster. So this test is testing your balance. It is testing against some of the mini dynamic control from those muscles in the low back. It's just, it's testing your ankle mobility in a way, because you're going to get a lot of this going on, the perturbation through your ankles and your knees. And it's testing your hip strength because again, once you go on one leg, you're now talking about pelvic control the same way we did before. So you have to have good strength there. But it's not uncommon for people to not be able to pass this test. But with practice, like anything else, you're training these muscles to get stronger and you're training these, your balance, and these are all skills that can be learned and improved. They're all trainable. I actually put a video out not long ago about different measures of longevity, and one of them was that test. Another one was pull ups. Another one was the number of push ups you could do. We could talk about these after, but the number one was going back to your glute media strengthening. Can you lay in a side lying plank position with the top leg up about 45 degrees? You could keep it stacked. It's a lot easier to stay in a plank position. You raise that leg off of the other. Now it's all relying on that lateral pillar strength of the underside hip, the one closest to the floor.
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B
So one arm down.
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A
One or elbow on the elbow.
- [31:08]
B
Okay. Heels stacked at first?
- [31:10]
A
Yeah, at first. Okay.
- [31:11]
B
On your side. So side plank, not just lying on your side? No, it's not the, the picnic date stance. It's lying on your. So side plank. And then you're going to raise the top leg up to make a 45°.
- [31:25]
A
45° and see if you could hold that even for just 30 seconds. And it's difficult. You'll feel a lot of shaking. You'll feel a lot of sagging of that bottom hip because you're asking your glute medius on that underside leg to hold you up into that position. So the beauty about that series of tests, though, is that they're all trainable. So if it's trainable, it's fixable. You can improve as you have. Right. You're now much better at the test. Yeah.
- [31:55]
B
Oh, yeah. Old man test. Yeah, definitely. There are mornings when I want to cross one leg over the other, kind of go into, like, what do they call it, that, like, kind of pseudo crow pose they talk about in yoga. Just, like, rest the ankle and then it's like, yeah, yeah. And sometimes people are probably laughing at this. Go try it. Yeah. No, some people might do it just right away. It's very easy. Many people will find this difficult, like, to the point where you're like, I don't think I can do this, but get good at it.
- [32:21]
A
Yeah. Strength is not even like a determining factor or predictor here either. You could be very, very strong and do incredibly poorly on this test because you're not strong in these areas, or you could just have bad vestibular balance. Right. You could. It could be that alone. Once you start to lean forward or look down, you don't have good control. But it is testing a variety of things. And if you do poorly on it, you can look a little deeper, investigate a little deeper through additional tests to try to find out exactly where your weakness is. But it's a good broad spectrum test to see how good your functional balance is.
- [32:56]
B
Yeah. Some people might wonder, how do you work up to it? There's something called Velcro shoes. No, I'm just kidding. Or slippers. It's easier.
- [33:04]
A
Right.
- [33:04]
B
It's going to be quicker.
- [33:05]
A
Right? Right. Yeah.
- [33:06]
B
I think it's definitely worth trying. And I think identifying these weak points, I think is just so critical. And I'm probably gonna say this 20 times during today's recording, but for the young guys and gals who are thinking, oh, like, that thing is so easy, Trust me, with time, it's the gradual creep of little things that you stop doing. I'm gonna add the side plank in because I just haven't been doing much planking, not much isometric stuff. And I'm sure that I've got a weakness somewhere along the chain of muscles that's required to do that properly. And what I love about these sorts of small things that support doing the big things for much, much longer, hopefully forever, is that they don't have to be done as part of the standard workout. And they can be incorporated into, like you're watching something on Netflix and you just kind of move some furniture out of the way and you just do these at that time, which is really cool and important because it's not just about like an additional workout. Because people are slammed. They've got so much to do. And like, how am I supposed to do all this stuff and view sunlight and this and that? But it's straightforward.
- [34:06]
A
Yeah, well, that. Look, I think the thing that you've done better than anybody is practical implementation of the things that are going to benefit people that are not time consuming or overly time consuming. They're easily implemented. A lot of what I focus on is when we're talking about these drills or exercises to do, a lot of them are body weight or a lot of them are done in minimal space. Because the more elaborate it becomes or the more time consuming it is or whatever it is. There's just so many reasons for people not to do them. And they are going to be viewed as the extra stuff until they become adopted and they realize how much they're helping them. It's always gonna be viewed as the extra stuff originally. So to get someone to buy into the concept, open up the time frame where they can do them, let them do it during watching Netflix. Let them do it while me, while I'm on the floor doing some crunches after I've already done my workout. Like, open up the restrictions so that you're still getting the effect, but you're, you're, you're minimizing the, the, the prescription of it. So it's so demanding. People don't want to do it.
- [35:08]
B
So one thing that we, I don't think we've ever talked about on this podcast is that many people don't just work out, they also play a sport. Maybe they do golf or maybe baseball or softball. Maybe they swim in every sport. They're obviously dominant patterns of movement. And there's a lot that's out there about how to train to improve those patterns of movement. I'd like to ask the opposite question. Let's say somebody played baseball or golfed or whatever their sport was, and now they have imbalances that are the consequence of having done some activity like a golf swing over and over and over, standing in a particular way, and they have pain and they are thinking about longevity, not just of their golf game, but of everything else. Tennis, whatever. People just pick your sport. I think this is very common and not, not commonly discussed. What can people do to compensate for these unilateral movements or for these, you know, you know, always left foot forward type stance, things that won't compromise their, their game, but also overcome any pain and imbalances. I've always been curious about this.
- [36:16]
A
That brings up the point of like how sport specific training has evolved over the years. There was a time when sports specific training meant doing everything that you could to replicate the motions of the sport and trying to strengthen those movement patterns. I think gladly we've moved past that stage of training because you can get better at that movement pattern by simply doing that movement pattern. You can increase the strength of your entire body by increasing the strength of your entire body. So the focus of the weight room can be to do your general strengthening bilaterally, regardless of what movement pattern direction your sport favors and improve the strength there and the function there because the carryover to your movement pattern is there. Like when you get stronger and then you go back to swing a bat, you're gonna still have the increased strength that you built in the weight room in your swing of the baseball bat. And you can throw harder if you're a pitcher, or you can throw further if you're a quarterback. If you improve your overall arm strength and your upper body strength. A lot of upper body throwing strength has nothing to do with your arm. It has to do with the stability of your core. So if you're getting much stronger in your core, you can have more torque generation to throw the ball further without having to do anything to your arm. So I think the strategy should be that when you're playing a sport and devoting a lot of time to it, whether at the professional level or not, you still should be focusing the majority of your strength training and conditioning work towards your overall balanced physique, trying to get strong across your entire body. Let the skill work be the skill work. And if you want to focus that, there are certainly few things we mentioned a couple when we were at the gym yesterday, but a few things that specific athletes can do to improve their specific skill. And that's fine from a strength training perspective, and that's fine. Like maybe more forearm work. If you're having to swing a racket or a bat, that right, that's fine. That can be done in addition to your basic core lifting. But to go back to the days where the strength training was was basically replicating the motions of the sport. Especially nowadays where you've got athletes who never stop playing their sport, it's young athletes, they're playing baseball year round through all these fall leagues and winter leagues and like there's way too much repetition of the same movement pattern. And that doesn't end well because you can see what's happening these days with pitchers. Like it's almost a rite of passage when how many years are they going to be able to pitch before they have to have a Tommy John surgery?
- [38:54]
B
What is the Tommy Johnson or collateral
- [38:57]
A
ligament, you know, basically being replaced or it tears in their elbow, they're out for an entire season. But it's like some of these pictures, it's like you want, they want to get it done early so they can hopefully come back and then have a string of years where they can dominate. It's, it's, it's crazy but I think a lot of it is coming from a lot of overuse, a lot of repetition, not enough moving into other sports and movement patterns to balance off the strains and stresses that they're going doing in that sport, their chosen sport. And it's, and it's, and it's causing a, a lot of avoidable, avoidable stress that again, just fixing it through a more managed, well balanced approach in the weight room is probably key.
- [39:37]
B
Number one, it's interesting. That's not the answer I expected, but really cool to hear that. So doing the classic all around weight training, you know, squats, some deadlifts, the
- [39:49]
A
goal should be to strengthen, to strengthen your body, to improve your flexibility everywhere. To you know, if you're talking about, let's say a situation with a pitcher where you have hypermobility of your shoulder because you're, you're move your throwing requires a lot more range of motion than, than a non throwing shoulder. You don't have to say, well I'm mobilizing my shoulders now so I have to do a lot of mobility work on my throwing shoulder. That might not be necessary. In some cases you might want to not do that because it's already mobile enough because of the skill work. So it's not like a broad, you do everything you do here, you do there on each side. You might want to actually steer away from some of the things that you're repetitively using in the sport itself. But from a strengthening standpoint, you'll never go wrong sticking to the core lifts, building up your strength in those core lifts and bilaterally strengthening your body and your balance and your coordination and your explosivity and your power. You're not going to go wrong. That does transfer back over to the sport itself. People think that it has to be in this sport Specific motion to transfer back over there. That's not true.
- [40:58]
B
One thing I noticed yesterday when we were training as well as in your videos is that but whenever you have the opportunity to do a movement standing as opposed to seated, you'll do that. Whenever you have the opportunity to stagger your stance a bit, not fully lunging, but offset your stance a bit, you'll do that. And then you also talked about even on a, on a dumbbell curl, leaning a bit toward the side that you're curling up. Assuming you're doing alternating dumbbell curls can be very useful. Would you sort of explain the general logic for that and then maybe we can touch into a few of the specific examples.
- [41:30]
A
I have a phrase. If you want to look like an athlete, you have to train like an athlete, right? And, and the what that really means is like sure, people might want to look at, they want to have an athletic physique, they might want to have the six pack abs, they want to have what they think is an athletic looking physique. That's great because a lot, a lot of people want that. But you have to train for it. It comes at a price. You have, there's a way to get there. And I believe that the way to get there is by training like an athlete. Doesn't mean you have to start going out and doing again all these things that people thought is what athletes need to do to be athletic. You just have to start a caring a little bit more about what you do. So treat it like you're an athlete and these little things matter. It goes back to the original point. The little things matter just like they would if this was your contract on the line. Every little thing would matter. But more importantly, functionally, what do athletes do? They most athletes, not all, but most athletes are on their feet. Most athletes move around. You move around. You're not squared up with your feet right next to each other unless you're, I mean in one phase of an offensive lineman's duty, they stand up and their feet are square, but they quickly stagger their feet for more stability. So you need to be able to operate from that position I think as often as you can. Because it's not to produce professional athletes, it's to produce a body that's functioning the way it prefers to function. Why do we default do that? If I told you, Andrew, I'm going to come over here, I'm going to try to push you over right now, would you stand up like this or would you put one foot back like by default you would Instantly go to one foot back and you try to lean into me and get more stable because your body instantly knows that's a more stable position. If I can train with more stability, I know I can decrease injury risk no matter what I'm doing. You talked about even something as simple as the curl. When I. It's not just looking at the bicep, but when I turn towards the bicep and I kind of screw, I call it screwing down. As I screw down on that weight, I'm able to stabilize the torso a little bit more over this shoulder. I can even dig the arm into my side a little bit, engaging the lats, stabilizing the shoulder girdle so that when I lift the weight, I have more tension in the biceps, number one, but more stability that the biceps can work from by stabilizing the entire shoulder girdle. When I'm out in space like this, it's a little bit more of a freewheeling deal here where I don't have that stability. So is something going to happen or go wrong from doing that? No, but that's not creating the most functionally stable body. So by turning your body around that arm, keeping it stable in your side and curling, I'm able to create a little bit more stability there. I take it to the same way down to the ground with a lunge. Lunge. When you lunge and do my favor, a reverse lunge, which takes a little bit of the stress off the anterior knee. Stepping backwards, backwards rather than forward, just. Again, I'm sensitive to that because I have pretty bad knees from those early days in the 20s of doing things wrong with flat feet. You want to, as you step back, a, take a little bit of a wider step on that back leg. So you're creating a wider base of support, more balance. Right. Rather than being completely narrow, because not just staggering my stance, but staggering and widening my base of support.
- [44:38]
B
This is key. It's funny if you're, if you're, you're in the gym with people. I'm not a trainer, but occasionally I've shown some people how to do some things. And you say widen your stance, they immediately put one foot further out in front of the other. But what you're talking about is getting them where the space between the, the insides of your feet further apart. So what literally outside shoulder lengthening your stance, right.
- [45:00]
A
And, and, and especially as you lengthen your stance, widening them in, in conjunction is going to create a wider base of support, more stability. So when we do that, you step back you create a little bit of that width and balance. But as I go down into the lunge, you'll find if you don't lean your torso or turn your torso a little bit in the direction of that forward leg and kind of do that same screwing down effect that I talk about, that front leg will wobble a little bit. You'll feel that the hip is a little bit more unstable. Back to again, that single leg suitcase lunge we talked about, where that hip drops and you get a lot of that instability. I want to be able to turn and sort of screw down on that hip. And what I'm doing is basically kind of tying the muscles of the pelvis together, muscles of the hip co contracting and creating more stability so that now when I ask that quad and gluten hamstring to work and push me back to a standing position, it's working more efficiently because it's on a stable base. I've mentioned before, if we were going to jump and try to get the highest vertical jump we could, would you jump off this ground, this floor or this table? Or would you jump off of sand?
- [46:10]
B
Jump off a firm.
- [46:12]
A
If you jump off of sand, as soon as you try to place force down into the ground, it's going to dissipate because the ground itself is moving. When we want to create as much force, an efficient force as possible, we want to have a stable base. So all that co contraction of the hip, when you screw down into it, or even in the shoulder girdle, when you're going to then operate this, this elbow flexion, shoulder flexion, movement of a curl, then you basically get a more efficient movement. So stability is a key for more efficient movement and also, I think, long term, safer movement.
- [46:45]
C
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- [47:16]
B
in your daily nutrition.
- [47:18]
C
And of course, we should all eat high quality whole foods, but most of us are probably not getting enough prebiotics, vitamins and minerals and AG1 ensures that those gaps are filled. I get asked all the time by people. If they were to take just one supplement, what would my recommendation for that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1 because it's just been so critical for supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health and performance by covering those nutritional, what we call foundational bases. And I know from my own experience and from everyone I've heard that I recommended it to, that they simply feel much better in a number of different ways when they take it regularly. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.comhuberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a week's supply of AGZ, which is their sleep supplement, and a free bottle of vitamin D3K2 with your subscription. AGZ is something that I helped design. It tastes great and it's the only sleep supplement I take. It has a collection of different things in it that has dramatically improved my sleep, both my slow wave deep sleep and my rapid eye movement sleep. And I absolutely love it. Again, that's drinkag1.com Huberman to get a week's supply of AGZ and a bottle of D3K2 with your subscription.
- [48:28]
B
Jumping around a little bit here, but I'm recalling the many things that have reversed or eliminated pain that is very common in anyone that works out. And one of those you mentioned, it is pain at the kind of inner elbow point kind of forearm, inner elbow. And I figured I had an elbow problem. I had something going on with tendinitis of the elbow. And you know, it turns out it was further away from that. It was all happening at the level of the grip. And you said, and I listened fortunately on pull ups to not, not let the bar be at my fingertips to try and get my knuckles over the bar. Right, and you have a beautiful demonstration of this. It almost sounds like that trick that kids do where they go, hey, pull my finger. You know, it's not that trick folks, but where you got to put some resistance to each of your own fingers like your, your index finger, your middle finger, your ring finger and then your pinky finger. And when you do put that pressure on that pinky finger, you can feel it right at that elbow. And so sure enough, I was causing this elbow pain by doing, you know, pull ups and, and slipping off the bar a bit. And I'm at my fingertips. As soon as I took your advice and got my knuckles over the bar, even though it puts, requires a little bit of a wrist bend. Sure enough, I haven't had elbow Pain in a decade.
- [49:45]
A
It is one of those things that can happen so quickly too. Like you could go from having no elbow pain to the very next day having elbow pain or even right after the workout, doing elbow pain. If you're doing a lot of chin ups with, with this issue where the, where the bar is too far away and it's just an overload issue. Essentially the, the muscles, the flexors, the deep flexors of the forearm that run down into the fingers. It's actually the, the ring and fifth finger. So the fourth and fifth finger that tend to be the, the weakest and least resilient to that kind of stress. If you're gripping through there and that bar gets deep into the, into the fingers, or if you do it where you're doing a curl, even a bar sits too deep into your hand there and you try to curl heavy toward
- [50:25]
B
the ends of your fingers.
- [50:26]
A
To the ends of your fingers? Yeah. When you're in, not into the, the, into the actual meat of your hand, it's just a lot of strain. More than that, that muscle is really built for, to handle and those tendons get a little bit strained and it can immediately feel like a knife in the, in the elbow feel. And it takes a long time to go away because how many other exercises do you do where you're gripping and, and requiring their grip to be in place to do that? Now if you want to intentionally do this, you can do it intentionally. Let's say a, a, an underhand lat pull down, like they call it a hook grip. Because what people want to just discourage people from doing is pulling down too much with the bar. Right. Causing too much form involvement in whatever back exercise I'm trying to do. But in that case, you're really trying to hook through the stronger fingers of the index finger, middle finger. Right. And even the, just, you know, you're getting a little bit of assistance on the ring finger, but you're really trying to hook through there. All four fingers might be on the bar, but most of the force is being held through there and you're, you're still pulling down a lot through your lats to build, to pull that bar down. So it's not like you're just letting it hold all the weight, but that, that little hook grip is meant to discourage any meaningful wrist flexion that would take over and take away some of the work of the lats. But if you got a history of elbow issues, you don't need to use that grip. Like that's just, it's just not worth it. The extra benefit of a little extra form involvement may not be worth it for you, but for people who find that they don't have elbow issues and they want to get a little bit of that, you can do it in an intentional way, but you really have to kind of steer away from making these fingers do the bulk of the work.
- [52:00]
B
How did you figure that out?
- [52:02]
A
By having that issue multiple times?
- [52:04]
B
Yeah, I mean, I was just, again, you know, just blown away. It's like, okay, I've got this inner elbow pain, and I'm, like, curling, and I'm doing my tricep work and my back work, and I'm wondering, okay, what's wrong with my elbows? And, you know, I'm at that time, you know, young guy, like, what's going on? And then. And then it makes perfect sense. As you pointed out, you know, ring finger, pinky finger are. Are taking too much of the. At the load, at the. Near the tips of the fingers, force myself to put the bar or the dumbbell in the meat in my hand.
- [52:33]
A
Now we take a more traditional grip, right? You're not like, relying on that, those distal tendons to have to do all that work and manage that load. Now, the hand. The hand can hold on to hundreds and hundreds of pounds, right? So if we can just get it into the meat of the hand. Now I'm getting all the assistance of the intrinsic hand muscles on top of it. So now it's no longer a strain or a stress to those particular tendons. But believe me, two things contribute to me figuring these things out. Number one, being a physical therapist changed everything for me because I had to think of things differently. Number two, when you're treating patients, not everyone. Everyone presents the same. So you have to come up with alternative ways to get to the same end result. I might be able to tell nine out of 10 people to do a Bulgarian split squat to alleviate knee pain, but for that 10th person, it just lights them up and they can't do it. You have to be able to figure out how to. How to work around that. And the second thing is that I had the unfortunate but fortunate experience of having to deal with a lot of these things from my life in the early years, and even still now, I mean, I still do things that. That cause inflammation and. And a need to reassess and look at what I'm doing and maybe why. And like you, I didn't. I knew I. When I first started experiencing that pain also in my 20s, like, that wasn't. I didn't have an elbow issue. Like, there's nothing structurally wrong with my elbow, so I had to look somewhere else. I didn't look then, but I looked when I got older and had way too many of those incidents happen. So it forces you to look and it forces me to look. I have to look because this is what I do for a living. But it forces me to look. Look and figure out what's causing this. And more importantly, what can you do to stop it?
- [54:08]
B
Well, I and many others are eternally grateful because that inner elbow pain, the lower back pain. Yeah. They're brutal. Like, they. They can really take the. They can really take the pleasure out of a lot of things because it's not just during training.
- [54:21]
A
Yeah.
- [54:22]
B
The shoulders. I'm gonna knock on wood in a second because I've been fortunate that my shoulders haven't given me issues. But that means it's probably just next. But perhaps that's also the consequence of having once again listened to your content. And whenever possible, I've tried to get into external rotation, which is. If I reference the fons. Will anyone know what I'm talking about? So thumbs out and, you know, giving the thumbs up, but thumbs rotated away from the belly button, away from the midline. Could you explain where the shoulder tends to be most vulnerable? And this business of internal thumbs pointing toward the belly button versus external rotation during all sorts of movements and also just daily life.
- [55:01]
A
Good point. Here too. Is on top of the thumbs is, you know, not just the flipping of the hand itself through supination and pronation of the forearm, but literally letting the elbow kind of travel with that. Right. So you're letting everything move together because it's the. It's the rotation that's happening in this joint. This ball and socket up top.
- [55:20]
B
Shoulders got to rotate out with it.
- [55:22]
A
With it. Right. So we're not just elbow.
- [55:24]
B
We're not just talking about moving your thumbs away from your belly button out. For those just listening, we're talking about getting the elbows in a bit more as those thumbs go out. The shoulders externally rotating as well.
- [55:36]
A
Yeah. Which is key. And the. The issue with internal rotation, external rotation is that it's in. They're both motions of the shoulder. Right. We're needed. We need both of them. We need to be able. If you go back to the picture, he needs to be able to externally rotate and then, of course, internally rotate to throw the ball. I'm not saying that internal rotation is. Is. Is the devil. What we need, though, is the ability to control internal rotation. We need to Build the ability to have enough external rotation strength to hold that position for longer or to. Or to be able to control. Right. The X. The eccentric control from the external rotators is what actually controls the internal rotation.
- [56:15]
B
The eccentric control from the internal rotator.
- [56:17]
A
Rotators from the external rotators, which controls internal rotation. Because as we're lengthening the external rotators, we're controlling. If we have good control, the E center control of that, then we're slowing down the internal rotation or at least controlling it at a certain pace. That's extremely important when it comes to pitching. We have this rapid internal rotation going
- [56:38]
B
on is that essentially the thumb is moving toward the midline to throw, and so is the. So is the elbow, so is your shoulder.
- [56:45]
A
So if the external rotators are eccentrically strong, they can control that and control the pace of that and make sure that it's not outpacing what your. Your shoulder itself can. Can structurally protect. So it's important to have that too. But internal rotation in the world of the. Of. Of the non athlete is particularly problematic if a. You're posturally holding that position for way too long throughout the day. And which is what we all chronically are suffering from. Whether we're texting, typing, not focusing ever on the external rotators of our, you know, in our training, you're just getting chronically tight and internally rotated. And then when you go to do even basic things like lift your arm up over your head, you're creating an internal shoulder environment that's more prone to creating less space and inflaming tissues that wind up getting pinched in that position. That basically, when you're tight internally, you get changes to the shoulder capsule itself, which is all the ligamentous structures that surround it that make you more internally rotated and tight. You can't get out of that position. So now when I go to raise my arm up, there's just less room in here. For instance, I think I. We might have done this before, you and I, but if I were to have you just lean forward like this or slump your shoulder and then raise your arm as high as you could in front of you, you're gonna. That's as far as you get right. And you're limited, not because of anything that's necessarily tight right there, but structurally, there's a little bony bump on the top of your humerus that's actually getting stuck on the upper portion of your shoulder joint there. So now bring your arm down, open up your chest as much as you can. Turn your arm out a little bit. Now raise it up overhead, and it goes higher. Why? Because you just created external rotation inside the joint that allows it now to go up in a higher position. Well, what happens if you're chronically in this position of internal rotation and you go to raise your arm, you go to wash your hair, you go to get stuff out of the cabinet, you go to do all the things you do every day. Every time with there being less space in there, there's more likelihood to pinch on a supraspinatous tendon, there's more likelihood to be pinched on a bursa, or there's more. And every time we pinch, we potentially inflame and cause more swelling inside that joint, which causes less joint space. Right. So you're inflaming those tissues. More. More compression in that joint and then more pain ultimately. And then that winds up causing down the road, things like partial thickness tears and tears of the. Of the rotator cuff that we don't want. So internal rotation in this elevated position is not good. Having external rotation abilities or strength that can help to centralize. What it really does when people talk about rotator cuff training is, yes, you're working the external rotators, but what its main job is to actually keep that ball centered in the middle of the socket.
- [59:45]
B
I see.
- [59:46]
A
So as you go and you raise your arm up in an internally rotated, dominated dominant shoulder, it will migrate up. Why? Because the deltoid, it pulls up, up. So as you're raising your shoulder up, the deltoid is pulling that humerus up, and the internal rotation of the other muscles are already too tight, chronically tight, or just keeping it in the front side. Anyway. So you're lifting your arm up and you're getting very little space. What the external rotators will do is they'll keep it centered so that as you raise, instead of it migrating up, it's countering the force of the deltoid. So staying in the middle. And it basically can rotate and stay right in the middle where it has to be. You're not getting this migration or pinching going on. So that's the real function of the rotator cuff, is to maintain a more centralized position with less of this pinching. So you really have to focus on. When we're talking about avoiding shoulder issues, the biggest thing you can do is start training the rotator cuff, not stop training the rotator cuff. And if you're doing a lot of heavy pressing or a lot of work with exercises that tend to internally rotate your shoulders now, then you have to do even More work for the rotator cuff to try to maintain that balance. If you're doing all kinds of delt work, you're never doing it rotator cuff work. You're just creating more and more of that imbalance. So I think the biggest thing you can do is maintain mobility of the shoulder. Mobility of the shoulder girdle itself. So the scapula being able to rotate and then having strength of the muscles of that shoulder girdle, which are the rotator cuff, those are the three main things you can do to keep that shoulder functioning well and staying out of this domination of internal rotation with elevation.
- [61:24]
B
What's your favorite external rotator exercise?
- [61:28]
A
My favorite is just simply attaching a band to a stable. Could be a stair, like a stair post, or it could be in the gym, just a rack, right? And you step away, you put the band in your hand from the anchor point. You're going to step out until there's good tension on the band. If you were to let it relax, it would pull your. Your hand towards your chest, towards your belly. You externally rotate to about back to neutral, or a little bit beyond, if you can.
- [61:58]
B
A little bit beyond your torso?
- [61:59]
A
Yep. Yeah, A little beyond your torso, if you can. That's even better. If you have that range of motion. Sometimes people don't. And when you get it there, you again hold it, right? You hold it for a second. Just so you know that you actually muscled it out there. You didn't just swing it out there. The number one thing people do here to cheat, and we talk about this, we talked about it in the gym quite a bit. Your body knows how to compensate. Like, if you ever want to know what you're doing wrong, just look at yourself in the mirror and then look and see what your body's trying to do. You realize the compensation is the direct opposite of what it's not doing. What the job is, is avoiding. So when the rotator cuff is trying to externally rotate the shoulder, the way I can avoid that is just lift my elbow away from my side. I can get my hand from here to here if I raise my arm out to the side. But now I'm using my Delt to do it and not the rotator.
- [62:46]
B
Keep that elbow pin.
- [62:47]
A
You got to keep the elbow pinned to the torso. So the easiest thing you can do is just put something underneath your arm, a little towel, fold the towel, put it underneath there, and then do the exercise. And if you find that your towel is dropping to the floor, it's obviously that because you're Lifting your shoulder, your elbow away from your body, and you're using the wrong muscle.
- [63:04]
B
Do this as a warm up. Do it at the end of the workout, how many sets, how many reps, how many times a week.
- [63:09]
A
There's different applications of it. You can do it before a workout. So if I'm going to press, like say bench press, I could use this as a good warm up before I go press almost as a neuroactivation technique to make sure those muscles are alert and firing so I can make sure that they're working when I go to press to keep my shoulders back in a better position. And especially as I raise my arms up in an overhead press, I can make sure that they're alert, they're fired up, they're. They're willing to contribute to keep that head centered when the arm's going up overhead. So I like to do them on pressing days as a neuroactivator before I train. And it's serving as a warm up too, or on other days, again, treating it as my special program, which is what I have to do because of all the issues that I've had with my shoulders. Again, not from this one, didn't come necessarily from bad training, but just dumb decisions. Trying to throw a baseball bat. Back with the Mets, I lost a bet. It's not famous at this, at this point, but like a player bet me that I couldn't throw the ball from. Well, let's rephrase that. I bet that I could throw the ball from right field to third base on the fly because it just looked rather short from where I was, but it's actually a lot longer. And only the better arms in baseball can actually do that really easily. So I have no idea why I thought I could, but I did. And literally the, that the moment I let that ball go, I feel like my labor went with it, right, and maybe landed somewhere near second base because it just felt like a burning zipper pain in my shoulder. And I've had to deal with it ever since.
- [64:36]
B
Did the ball get to the third base?
- [64:37]
A
Oh, no, no way. No, I think it landed with the labor at like second base, you know, like, oh, man, no way. So, you know, I learned my lesson. But the fact is it's something that you can, you can adopt pretty easily as a special programming type thing. And there's things you could do too, to make it a little bit more interesting. Like once you get into position where you could do the actual repetition, you could then hold it in a neutral position. Neutral for this exercise would Be not in, not out. So where your fist is pointing straight ahead and then, then take a big giant step away from the band. So you're increasing the resistance of the band dynamically, but still having to keep yourself in that same position because elbow's
- [65:20]
B
still locked to the side, fist out in front of you. You're holding the band. There's tension.
- [65:23]
A
Yeah.
- [65:24]
B
Step away from the bar that the band is fixed to. So there's additional tension.
- [65:27]
A
Yeah. And it's going to want to pull your hand back, but you keep it right where it is. And then the fun part of it is that I could then take it even further. I could jump out there. So now it becomes a little bit more ballistic and dynamic. So I can be in this position and then jump. And if I jump quickly, now really wants to pull me in, but I have to still keep that same position here. So it's mimicking a little bit more of a, of a ballistically dynamic force. So I could do that. I could start to change the angle. I could be here in this position now facing, facing the, the, the anchor point. And it still wants to pull me into internal rotation.
- [66:00]
B
Band in front of you, not to the side.
- [66:02]
A
Right.
- [66:02]
B
Okay.
- [66:02]
A
And I could jump back and see if it pulls me down this direction. Internal external rotation is, is, is, is, is done so many different ways. Again, I could be in this position here. I'm just reaching my arm out in front of me and turning my, my, my arm all the way, thumbs down to the floor, all the way back past the sky and then thumbs out towards my side. Right. That's internal external rotation. I don't even have a bent elbow. Right. Because we're talking about a shoulder movement, not an elbow movement. But when we, when we do it, we could do it down low. It's going to be easier for people to start. And the more things you start to do with external rotation, internal rotation with the arm elevated, the more challenging it starts to become. So you progressively move towards movements where you're internally or externally rotating against resistance in a higher and higher arm position.
- [66:50]
B
Love it. I want to take care of my shoulders. For me, neck training has been fundamentally important for avoiding injury outside of the gym. Got rear ended in a car. I just bought my first car. This is Many years ago, 2005cr v. I'm like driving my first new. Why I'd driven, you know, used cars before.
- [67:09]
A
Yeah.
- [67:09]
B
Parked at the light or stopped at the light rather. And all of a sudden just someone just ran into me. Person next to me ended up with some pretty bad whiplash and back pain. I was a little sore, but nothing really. And you know, it's not a controlled experiment, but I credit that. Been training my neck even back then. Now I learned how to do it properly from you and your video and we will definitely provide a link to it. I talk about this non stop. This video is so valuable. You don't need any special equip, some standard plates and towel. But this neck thing, it's not just for fighters. It's your upper spine posturally. I feel like people don't like nowadays everyone's posture is so terrible posturally. It makes your default posture better. It's something we're always all working on. But neck training for men and women, I think men probably would be okay with having a. Most of them would be like, oh cool, you know, slightly bigger neck. Women probably want to avoid that. Is there a way that women or men but tends to be women who want to have a, you know, great posture, a strong neck, but they want to maintain that kind of, you know, like elegant neck. They don't want a thicker neck. Is there a way that they can strengthen the neck muscles and achieve that without thickening the neck?
- [68:25]
A
Yeah, I think that women will be less resistant to the idea of having a stronger neck. I think as long as we weren't talking about building massive traps along with it. Right. And I think that they think neck and traps because they do feed into each other. The reason why men who train their neck tend to have a, a better or, or much thicker look to their neck better for men is that they're also in conjunction likely training their traps either directly or indirectly through some of the other movements to do it in a heavy way. Women who tend to train their neck directly and not not focused on building their traps at the same time, they're just going to have a stronger neck because they're not necessarily the biggest muscles in here that that grow substantially. And again, when you look at the proportional growth in muscles from men and women, there's already a difference in how big these muscles will grow, male versus female. But now in an area where the, where the, the muscles themselves don't grow to astronomically large proportions, you really aren't going to get that much size in the neck. And I think women are chronically under trained when it comes to the neck. I can't tell you how often that you'll prescribe some kind of an ab routine. And I'm not even thinking about the repercussions on the neck because for me it's like, it's no strain at all. But a lot of people will complain. And most often it's women that just doing the crunch because, yeah, I don't want them holding onto their neck and cranking on their neck during a crunch. They'll say, my neck is hurting, I can't do that. I can't do that routine. It's only hurting because of fatigue, not because their neck is being held in one position and their fingers are just basically touching back there to just keep them away from cranking. And it's also.
- [70:04]
B
That's how you want them people doing crunches. Not cranking, not pushing that. Yeah. So just touching the back of their head.
- [70:09]
A
Touching the back of your head lightly and you know what you're getting there also is a little extra weight. The way your arms back there is going to provide a little bit of extra resistance on a basic crunch. But it's also leaving the neck unsupported because so often people are used to holding the entire weight of their head. And then what happens is they start to fatigue and they're ab. Here we go again. What is the body's natural compensation? They know that the eyes have to get up when they're doing a crunch. The eyes have to raise up. So what do they do? They just pull on the head and the eyes come up and they're not doing any more work for their abs. But they've gotten to where they thought they were supposed to be. Natural compensation gone wrong. That's not what we want to do. So when women are encouraged to do it quote, unquote, right, and don't pull on your neck, they don't have the strength in their anterior neck to do that. So doing this next series that you're referring to is a. Is a great way to strengthen the neck. And again, depending on how much weight you use, you could just use a 5 or a 10 pound plate and have plenty of overload there to create a stronger neck without a lot of hypertrophy. And for those that aren't aware, the series is simply taking a plate. Let's just say we start really light. We take a five pound plate, we wrap it in a towel, nice cushy towel, so it's not uncomfortable at all. You lay on a bench and you're going to go basically in four different directions. You're going to rotate your body's position on that bench in four different ways to work the extensors, the flexors, and then the lateral neck muscles on both left and Right sides. So all you have to do is, let's say you're starting on your back. You lay on your back, head is off the edge of the bench. That nice cushy towel with the, the plate inside of it is put up on top of your forehead. You allow yourself to, to lean your head back, but as you come up, you want to also pull your chin down, right? Because you're not just trying to like overextend or hyperextend your, your neck at any point you want to. You the, the stability we talked about before, whether it be the hip screwing in or the shoulder screw, the stability you get here is the retraction of the chin that provides the stability to the neck. So you have the retraction of the chin, which is just pulling it straight back. It's going to feel like it moves only about a half an inch or so. That's the position there. And then you, you pull your head back up to neutral again. You flex your neck until you're back to neutral again. You do that. Twelve repetitions, however many, you know, sub fatigue here, but just enough to, to cause some, some fatigue. Turn onto your stomach. At that point, if you like, put the weight on the back of your head and then do the same thing. Retract first, make sure you got the stable neck chin closer to your adip. Good way to talk about it. And then you basically allow your, your head to sink down forward off the edge of the bench. And then you're going to extend your neck back up again to neutral, or in this case a little bit beyond into a little bit of extension. And then you go to your side and the same deal, you allow your head to just bend a little bit to the laterally like ear towards the shoulder. But you're laying on the bench, you do the same thing. Place the weight on top of the opposite side of your, of your head. And then you're going to lift up against that weight. These are just supposed to be done very slow, very controlled. There's nothing crazy explosive about these. You're just supposed to feel those muscles. And trust me, like, if you have not done these, you do one. You start with one round of this and then wait until tomorrow because, like, you don't want to do too much because I guarantee you're going to be sore. Back in the day when I played football, you didn't realize how weak your neck could get in an off season until you put the helmet on for the first time. And just one practice with the helmet on and you Know you're controlling all that extra weight of the helmet dynamically and the neck would be sore for, for two, three days. We had to accommodate even to the, to the weight of the helmet. So with neck training, it's a, it's a long, slow process. You just start very light, you start submaximal and you start building up your strength. And then when you talk about a crunch, that's a nothing exercise for maintaining stability and control. When you get into situations like you, where you have, have accidents and car accidents, you become not only just resilient but, but potentially life saving, you know, by having a stronger neck.
- [74:08]
B
Gosh, if I, you know, could highlight bold and you know, and, and underline this and send it out as far as I can, that the neck stuff, men and women, it's. You will be positively amazed at the transformations. Your pressing lifts will get stronger, your pulling lifts will get stronger, you get stronger aesthetically for guys, you know, I mentioned this in the video yesterday, but I'll say it again, that a lot of guys who work to widen their shoulders, if their neck strength is, isn't coming up proportionally, it looks like they got the wrong head on that body. It looks crazy. Guys, you look, you look ridiculous, especially in street clothes. Like, I'm not saying you need a giant neck, but there's, there's a proportion thing there that's, that's important if you care about that sort of thing. As I say this, I know that most people won't take the time to do it because it looks awkward. It's a tiny play.
- [74:55]
A
It's a great thing to do in the gym too. You know, it seems a little weird, but look at, people do a lot of weird stuff in gyms and, and this is one of the weirder things that the better weird things you can do if you're going to invest some time. Again, it doesn't take a lot. It really doesn't take a lot to, to pay big dividends here because it is an area that's pretty much untrained. Again, we're not talking traps. Traps get a lot of work, but those deep muscles of the neck don't get trained very often at all.
- [75:20]
B
Yeah, so much of what you teach is about winning the short game and the long game. And to me, winning the long game is about being able to come in and do the big stuff year after year, decade after decade. So that, you know, when you're 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, why not? Right? I mean, the experiment of whether people can have great strength and mobility, etcetera, into their 80s and 90s, with rare exceptions, has never actually been done. That experiment is happening now because resistance training, you know, especially for women, you know, a few years back, like, if it wasn't bodybuilders, nobody did. Now, everyone knows this is part of the longevity game. So I'm so excited that these, again, what sound like small things are getting out there, thanks to you, because they really do make a difference. And I believe that in our 80s and 90s and maybe even beyond, people can move right and feel right and be posturally right. There's a cool video. Forgive me for going long, but we'll put a link to it that I saw. No, it's not AI of a woman escaping from a Chinese resting home.
- [76:24]
A
Okay.
- [76:25]
B
So she's in her 90s, she's 92, and she's climbing over the front gate. She was caught on surveillance, and it's so cool.
- [76:31]
A
Surprised it hasn't come on my feed.
- [76:32]
B
Yeah. So she's crawling over the surveillance gate, and then she gets out and then she walks away. Now she's, she's got some. A little bit of frailty to her, but there was a drop down to the ground on this, a big iron gate, and she's just like, I'm out of here.
- [76:45]
A
But it doesn't. That's not to say that when you do the things I'm saying, you do the small things that you're not going to still have aches and pains and things that you, you have to be able to also manage that. Like, how can you show up each day and still manage the fact that, yeah, this shoulder's still a little bit sore, this shoulder is still. Or this, this knee is a little cranky, you have to continue to show up if you're going to play this longevity game, right? Because stopping is the fastest way to slow your body, right? So I think it's to slow your body down to a point of, of really poor quality of life. You have to figure out how to manage through these injuries and train around and through these injuries and, and, and a simple example of that, I always have to use an analogy of like a construction zone. If there's one street that's shut down, you're not gonna, you're not gonna shut the whole city down, right? You need to find a way to redirect traffic around there so the city can operate. So if it was, let's say, that shoulder, and you were doing a, I don't know, a dumbbell or a barbell overhead press you can't do it. It hurts. You have to have a way to reroute that. So let's say it's a machine press. Is that my first choice based on the things we talked about? You're sitting down, you're on a machine, you're in a fixed pattern. No, but if it allows you to still train, you're getting a lot of other benefits. Number number one, you're getting some additional strengthening of the inactivation of the deltoid. You're getting some movement through the joint itself, which we know bathes the joint surfaces and helps to provide nutrition to the joint. You're moving that capsule so it doesn't get stiff and tight. You're doing a lot of things right. Even though it might be choice B for the exercise, let's say you can't do any pressing at all. Again, you don't shut the city down. You just take a back road. Right? You just take another back road. The back row might be rowing. Rowing is going to still work the shoulder joint through extension. It's still going to provide some of those joint benefits. It's still going to provide the capsular benefits. It might not be stimulating the delts that way, but there's other exercises you could do for the delts that won't do that. So our job is to figure out how we can always have something we can do so that the option is not or the alternative is not nothing. Because that's when things really start to go. Go wrong, when you. When you opt for nothing. And that's when the aging process starts to really accelerate to the point of even just the functional aging, how you feel and the quality of her life will sink if you don't continue to figure out ways to do that. So I always felt my mission or my goal was to empower people with these options and these alternatives of how do you do these things? Because again, if someone came to me as a PT and my bag of tricks contained 1, 2 and 3 and they couldn't do any of them, then what do I do? I have to have options four and five there too. And I think that's always been my strength, is to figure out not just to have option 4 and 5 on reserve, but then also have 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 in case I needed those too. And if I could provide people with that information, then they know how to dip into those at the right time to keep going, keep training.
- [79:51]
C
I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Joovv Joovv makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology and our health. Now, in addition to sunlight, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near infrared and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health. These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduce pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improvements in vision. Nowadays, there are a lot of red light devices out there, but what sets JOOV lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use the specific wavelengths of red light, near infrared and infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Joovv whole body panel about three to four times a week, usually for about 10 to 20 minutes per session. And I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you would like to try Joovv, they're offering up to 400 off select products for listeners of this podcast. To learn more, visit Joovv spelled J-O-O-V-V.com Huberman Again, that's J-O-O-V dash V dot
- [81:10]
B
com Huberman do you do cardio? I mean, you're naturally pretty lean. I know you eat extremely well.
- [81:16]
A
Yeah.
- [81:17]
B
And we can talk about nutrition a bit as well. But what are your thoughts on cardio?
- [81:21]
A
Cardio is, is like the right foot to the left foot. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's very important for the overall picture of health. If you're, if you're avoiding cardio and conditioning entirely, you're not as healthy as you think you are. I don't do as much cardio as I should. It's always my big confession that I don't. And the reason why is simply because I have to choose based on time limitation. And for me, with priorities being to spend some time with my family and my boys and, and how much can I actually get done with work and in my workout time. I always will take a step in the direction of strength training and weight training. But I try not to ignore it entirely. When I do, I jump on a bike and I do stationary bike riding because I can, I like the fact that I can increase resistance on the, the pedals and kind of turn it into almost a pseudo, you know, again, the meathead side of me wants to turn into Some sort of a, a, of a resistance activity. But of course doing it for the duration to improve my, my cardiorespiratory health. But it's also good for my knees. My knees are quite beat up again. That's, that's something that I'll never be able to reverse, at least not without modern medicine. But I, I, I have to manage that. And anytime I try to do anything where I'm running or jumping, it tends to hurt a little bit. I do still love to jump rope. We talked about jump rope before. Jump rope happens to be a lot lower impact for me. As long as you can do it properly on the balls of your foot and absorb, absorb the shock of jump roping. But I would say between jump roping in and stationary bike at a higher resistance level and done an interval fashion. Those are my two favorite ways to do it.
- [83:00]
B
Yeah, jump rope's great. I haven't been doing it as much as I used to and now that I got this new pup, I've got him in his little penned area sometimes and I'll, and I'll skip rope. I don't let him run around while I do it because I'm afraid I'm gonna, I'm gonna whip them, you know, accident. I don't want to do that, but I'd forgotten how, how effective it is at getting heart rate up, especially if you're doing some double unders, you know, or speed it up or high knees and things like that. The coordination piece is awesome. You know, it's one of these things like back to the basics feels good.
- [83:30]
A
It's also, there's a gamification aspect like you want to, you know, you want to learn a new skill. Can I do it single leg? Can I do it side to side? Can I do it double under, as you said? Like there's, there's, there's little built in challenges that I think we inherently always try to like up the, up the level of what we're doing to see what we can do or what we can't. But that's built in, that's not really built in on a lot of the other modes of, of conditioning, which is why people who do skip it, skip it because it tends to be unapologetically kind of the, the most boring part of training. If you're used to doing lots of different exercises and feeling the, the weight in your hands, it could be a little bit boring. But there's ways to make that more fun.
- [84:09]
B
Do you like running?
- [84:10]
A
I actually like running, but again, I can't tolerate it. My knees are just. They feel like they want to detonate when I take about after about a quarter mile. Now I could do it on my. I have a Woodway treadmill which are incredibly forgiving. It's like, which one is it? Woodway.
- [84:24]
B
Woodway.
- [84:24]
A
Yeah. We have. We used to have them in all the MLB weight rooms. They're. They're basically. There's no deck underneath them, so they're. It's like running on air. And best treadmill also pretty super expensive, but they're. They're worth the money if people have the ability to invest in one they want to run.
- [84:40]
B
And they're just arced ones or are they straight?
- [84:42]
A
They make an arced one, but they're straight and they're just. There's just no deck in there, so it feels a lot lighter and more forgiving on your, on your feet. They actually have some amazing versions of. Of the Woodway that they called the altered G, where they actually take the gravity away. So you can run in a gravity free environment. Yeah. Which is crazy because if you think about injury rehab, we've taken players with lower body injuries, put them on the. The alter G and have them run with only 5% or 10% of their weight. So you can unweight their body, get them into the mechanics of foot on the ground and running and transmitting the force through the. The whole body, but do it in an environment that takes all of their body weight away and then progress. Up to now you got 10 of your body weight that you're running on and 20 of your body weight that you're running on. So you can actually progress them to not have to go from non weight bearing to fully weight bearing in a cool athletic way. Yeah.
- [85:39]
B
Because swimming's great, but you have to have access to a pool. And I miss swimming. I need to get back to that.
- [85:44]
A
I swam as a kid all the time.
- [85:46]
B
Like what? Yeah, every kid in my town did soccer and swim team. Those are kind of the big sports. I'm comfy in the water. I live near the ocean now, but unfortunately, the ocean hasn't been that clean since the fires. There's a bunch of hazards to ocean swimming that I've seen 1%. Our swim got hypothermia once. I'm like, I don't know. Yeah.
- [86:05]
C
I think that the cardio piece, the
- [86:06]
B
big debate seems to be whether or not if people have a limited amount of time, which most people have a limited amount of time, whether they'd be better off investing in some high intensity training, high intensity interval training or some, you know, so called zone two, zone three, kind of steady state stuff for. We know that caloric deficit is required for fat loss, but assuming caloric deficit, is there a best cardio for fat loss?
- [86:32]
A
The one that you're going to do is going to be the best one for sure. And I think it's hard to, it's, it's hard to sustain some of the higher zone 5 cardios for long enough to have a significant cardio or calorie burn effect. I did a famous video with Jesse where I had him do burpees, which is one of the, it's one of the most calorically demanding exercises you can do, which is for anybody that doesn't know the burpee. You basically quickly lower yourself down to the ground, you do a full push up, you push yourself explosively out of that push up, back to it, you jump up to your feet again and back to a standing position that can burn around. I believe it was 13 to 15 calories per minute.
- [87:16]
C
Minute.
- [87:16]
A
If you did them nonstop for a minute. Well, if you're doing burpees nonstop for a minute, you're likely not doing them nonstop for many more minutes than the first minute because it's a very demanding exercise. So while your heart rate will go soaring right through the roof very quickly, you're going to have, you can apply even intervals to do this right. You're still going to start to fatigue because of the anaerobic part of it too, through the muscles of the chest and the arms getting fatigued. He just can't really do it for more than, let's say 10 minutes, even an interval format. So what are you really burning there? If you did it even straight through for fifth for 10 minutes, 15 calories a minute, you're talking about 150 calories. So people who use their cardio for weight loss or caloric deficit are going to do better doing longer distance cardio at, at lower intensity levels. So getting on a bike and riding or getting jogging or running or even doing laps in interval fashion, where it's a jog and a run and a jog and a run, there's a lot of different ways to do that, but to sustain them for a lot longer periods, 45 minutes to an hour. But there again, I, and I, I'm, you know, I'm just, I'm a big believer that when you're trying to create the deficit relying on the conditioning, we're not talking about cardiovascular here, we're talking about just recruiting the deficit relying on the conditioning is a much more inefficient way to go about this than what's actually should be done, which is just to focus on your nutrition because it's, it's just so much more effective to create large deficits or large swaths of deficits from cutting back the crap you're eating right now than it is to try to get it through zone two cardio done for very long periods of time. Again, not to say that that's not beneficial for your cardio and your, in your cardiac conditioning. It's a separate issue. But when you're trying to create caloric deficits there I always tell people, first, you gotta work on what you're putting in your mouth. Because the old saying goes, you can't outrun a bad diet. And there's just, there's just no way to really do that effectively over time. So of the two forms, I'd say the, the zone two steady state longer form is going to do more absolute levels of caloric burn.
- [89:27]
B
I don't know if you've ever done this, but I know you're you. And everybody has to, you know, pay attention to their caloric needs and nutrition needs. But what, what does nutrition look like for you in a given day?
- [89:37]
A
So I don't know how many calories I take in in a given day. I've never really counted past when I really first started out. And I think it's an important part of the process is people should count because it does two things early on. They should count because it gives you awareness. You may have no idea how many calories you're actually having until you actually count that. You also become aware of many of the things that you are taking for granted that you're just doing almost second nature. That is just not healthy. You're eating things that are repetitively that are just not healthy or drinking things that are just not healthy. And when someone asks you to log what you're eating, you become very aware of every calorie you put in your body. So that's part of it. The second thing is there's an education that goes into learning how many calories each food has. I can't tell you how many people, they, they'll think that chicken parmesan is the same as grilled chicken just because it's chicken. And they're very different in terms of their caloric impact. So educating yourself onto about what those macronutrient profiles look like for whatever food you're having is part of the process too. Because ultimately where you want to be able to get to is can you make equivalent swaps in your head on the fly, wherever you are. Right. That would be nutritional freedom. As far as what that day would look like. What I try to do is I try to build my base around protein. I always have. The reason for that is it's one of those macronutrients that I know I need to build lean muscle. It's one that I know can provide satiety. It's one that I know is important to everything I'm trying to pursue and what everyone really should be trying to pursue, that we're trying to be healthy. So they should base their meal around that. First, start with your protein. And I usually use a visual way of doing that where I just say, hey, take your plate and divide one third of that plate or that meal. If you're having it in separate plates or separate dishes, one third of that meal should come from a lean source of protein. And that could be chicken, fish, beef, whatever it is that you prefer. But have that be the, the, the, the one third and then divide the rest of your plate with carbohydrates, preferably in a 2 to 1 ratio with fibrous carbohydrates to starchy carbohydrates. So the fibrous being the green, the vegetables, asparagus, the broccoli, and then the starchy carbohydrates, the rice, potatoes, pasta. I don't believe me personally, I don't believe that I should eliminate my starchy carbohydrates. Again, inherently, I'm an athlete and I know that that's, you know, served a very important purpose for me for energy, for fuel, resources, for glycogen, for my muscles that I don't, I don't avoid that. Plus I know that I can never long term restrict myself from carbohydrates. So when I started out, I said, I have to adopt a plan here that I know I can stick to to. If it was taking away pasta and taking away oatmeal and taking away the things, there's no way that I could sustain that. So I don't think that people should try to start out on some change to their diet where they're restricting foods, they know they're never going to be able to maintain long term or keep away long term. So that if you can learn to manage them and eat them in a way that's more controlled because the rest of the stuff on your plate is actually helping to minimize your cravings for that or controlling your portion sizes there. That's the long term goal, I think. And then overarching over all that calorically just because it's a fact of nature. Fats are more calorically dense than carbohydrates and proteins. So just be aware of your fats. I know a lot of people who go down the path of healthy eating and they're putting olive oil on everything and avocado on everything because they're healthy foods. But they're putting so much of it because they want to feel like they're doing, they're doing the healthy thing. But you're also skyrocketing your calories. So you have to at least be aware where, where and how you're applying your fats because calorically they will add up. I have nothing against fat. I think everybody should have it. I think it should be part of every meal. I'm just saying it should be. You need to be aware of your fat content. I try to go low sugar as much as I possibly can. I do not try. I try to avoid processed foods. I try to avoid blatant sugars. Unless it's my birthday and I'm having my carrot cake, but for the most
- [93:46]
B
part it's really your only quote, unquote quote.
- [93:48]
A
That's not my, that's not my only. Like, you know that, that's a, that's become an urban myth a little bit. Maybe I'll have it twice a year, but. But no, I, I don't, I don't. I really try not to indulge in those things, but I'm not missing it. I really enjoy it when I have it. But I'm not depriving myself of it along the way. If people felt deprived and have it more often, you could have. I could have a piece of carrot cake once a week and probably not have anything happen to my physique week. So the fact that I don't is just really more out of habit than anything else. But if you're in a plan where you feel so deprived that you know you're pulling your hair out and you're trying to like that the first chance you get to just jump off your diet and eat all the things that you really were keeping yourself away from, then you're on the wrong plan. So I think that no matter what it is, whether it be keto, whether it be the what I. I guess you'd call this a bodybuilder style diet that I eat or whatever, or I
- [94:40]
B
call it clean omnivore.
- [94:41]
A
There you go. Yeah.
- [94:42]
B
You know, like, you're not. Like. I basically eat the same. Same as you. Although I suppose I probably a little. A little high on the fat sometimes just because, I mean, I love, you know, nuts and.
- [94:52]
A
Yeah.
- [94:52]
B
Parmesan cheese and a little bit. A little bit of butter and some olive oil and stuff.
- [94:56]
A
Which. Which are all good foods. It's just that calorically there's an impact there. And if you're going to eat them, what I always recommend people do is again, you could just cut back a little bit on some of the other portion sizes to just to accommodate calorically for what you're doing. But I do think that that concept of the equivalent swaps is big because if you learn to eat the way I just suggested, and there's no magic behind what I do, it's just been very. I've been very consistent with it, is that you'll be able to make swaps when you go anywhere. What's a protein I could have here today? What's the restaurant have? Oh, they only have pork chops. Okay, fine, I'll have a pork chop like, like you. You can. You're visually just replacing equivalents on the plate sometimes. It doesn't always work. I just did a video where I talked about a steak and a grilled chicken breast are potentially the same protein in terms of the protein content, but they're not the same calorically because the steak has a lot more fat than the chicken breast does. So you might have a smaller steak to make that equivalent swap out, but that's only going to come through your understanding and knowledge of the foods and what they contain. So that that early phase of learning what they have is important there. But ultimately, nutritional freedom comes from the ability to be consistent with what you do. I talk a lot about the fact that we can get to the gym, we can train for an hour. It's not easy for people, especially to do it at a high enough intensity level, but we can train for an hour, go home and feel like I did my work today. I feel good. I did what I was supposed to do. Great. Your nutritional job just started. You now have to figure out, how do I navigate the next 23 hours, whether I'm asleep or I'm awake, but how am I going to navigate the next 23 hours? Because that's what nutrition is. That challenge is infinitely harder. And the reason why a lot of people struggle with their weight is because they have to figure out how to get that right and do that in a repeatable way day in, day out, day in and day out. And I've been doing what I've been doing here now with my nutrition approach for 30 years. 30 years. So when people ask me is it hard? For me, it's not hard at all. But it wasn't super easy in the beginning. It just, there's a process to go through to get it there. And I was willing to go slowly but also not sacrifice the things that I really knew I wouldn't be able to live without. So therefore I can live with it for forever. And I think people make way too aggressive changes when it comes to nutrition. Basically you're not just changing your diet, you're changing your habits and you're changing your lifestyle. So when you go and you start making these radical changes to your nutrition plan because you're on a diet, it does not work.
- [97:29]
B
Listen, what you described, what I'll just call clean Omnivore is I think is it's just an awesome way to approach nutrition for a couple of reasons. One, it works like you said, it's flexible even with travel. You can always make some adjustment toward that. It handles the protein needs thing pretty much on its own. I mean you have to make sure you eat enough of those meals and enough protein. But, but as you were saying it, I realized that it gets people, if they adopt this mindset that you do that you have for nutrition, it gets them out and away from the marketing based draw of nutrition. Because people say like, oh, like protein bar or you know, high protein yogurt. And listen, there's some great yogurts. I love Bulgarian yogurt. It's like Greek yogurt's great Bulgarian yogurt. No disrespect to the Greeks love Greek food by the way too.
- [98:16]
A
But Bulgarian yogurt is so good.
- [98:18]
B
Full fat Bulgarian yogurt or low fat Bulgarian. Amazing. And yeah. And it, you know, the Bulgarians are known for their strength in many ways, but you get outside that the marketing pole and you start thinking about food for its macronutrient content.
- [98:33]
A
Yeah.
- [98:34]
B
And its micronutrient content and quality as opposed to like the packaging based stuff. Because even the non processed or non highly processed foods, mostly we're reaching for them because of what's on the label, like the colors, the words and these guys. And what you're describing is completely different. It's getting to the, the, the actual food.
- [98:52]
A
Yeah.
- [98:52]
B
I think that's a very, very important, not so subtle distinction. And once people make that switch, they're really in the driver's seat. It's not like you're like, have to go prepare every meal, this kind of thing.
- [99:02]
A
Yeah. I mean, and again, even with some of the, the push towards higher protein foods now, again, the packaging is bragging, bragging about the protein content, but they've also increased the sugar, they've increased the fat, and it's like you've, you've, all you've made is a higher protein. I mean, even Snickers has a higher high protein bar.
- [99:18]
B
Are you serious?
- [99:19]
A
Yeah. And Snickers are Milky Way. They have a high protein bar. It's like, okay, this is, this is insanity.
- [99:24]
B
So show me the sea suite of the Snickers. You know, I'm going to get in trouble for this, but whatever. I, I want to see how fit these people actually look, you know, and if they're eating that stuff, you know, it's like something tells me they're not. Yeah. Thank you again for, for being a voice of reason in, in the nutrition space.
- [99:41]
A
Yeah. And I'm not a nutritionist, you know, I, I, I, and people are quick to remind me of that when I, whenever I speak of nutritionist. So I'm only speaking from my experience both with myself and anybody I've ever advised on how to do that. It works, it's, it's sensible and it's something that could be sustained. So for me, that's what's most important with nutrition. And again, I don't fixate on any one particular way. If doing keto works for you, great. As long as you can sustain your, your eating that way, great. Because all we're trying to do is manage our weight long term and, and, and not sacrifice other elements of our health in the process. So if it works for you, cool. But this is what's worked for me.
- [100:18]
B
I'm starting to see more content out there about foot strength. You've mentioned you have flat feet. I, I had some foot injuries from skateboarding years ago. Broke my left foot twice. Some quote unquote snapped arches. It's not really a thing, but, and have started to think about, you know, foot health and foot training and stability and so on the one hand it seems kind of silly. It's like, oh, really? We're going to start training our feet. But on the other hand, you know, our feet are always in contact with at least our shoes, if not the ground. So what are your thoughts on this notion of flat feet, foot strength and how it plays into stability and, and performance and just overall ability in life?
- [100:56]
A
Yeah, it's Actually something I wish I had done more of at an early age. One of the easiest ways to test this is to, especially for someone like me who has, I mean I have flippers for feet flat out. Just.
- [101:06]
B
Is that genetic sports based?
- [101:09]
A
I think it is partially genetic. My mom had pretty flat feet and then I also think that it was years of doing things without addressing that. So I was, I was, as I started to lift weights and applying a lot of external force and load onto those feet that were not able to support that, it just got worse and worse. They definitely, they didn't always, they weren't always as bad as they got to. But I wish I had done more for it at an early age because even now if I were to go back and try to train the intrinsic foot muscles more, it's, it's just not going to reverse the damage that I've done in the knee to this point. So I'm less motivated to try to do it because I've also figured out how to manage with the flat feet now to decrease the impacts of it. So I'm not so motivated to go jump in now and spend extra time on something that may not have a huge impact for me. But for someone who's just starting to, you know, deal with flat feet and the weakness in the, in their feet, I would definitely jump in and do something. And, and the easiest test is simply to put a towel on the floor. Put your foot on a barefoot, try to scrunch up the towel with your feet. And if you start to rapidly cramp up in those foot muscles of yours, it again, it goes back to what we talked about before. In the low back, the cramps are coming from a lack of, of strength. They're trying to provide support in an area that doesn't have it. So if you don't have intrinsic support or arch strength, then you're trying to ask the foot to do too much of what it can. Even a simple scrunching or activation of those muscles to scrunch the towel together is too much for you to handle. Kind of like the weak neck on a crunch, you have very weak feet and you would benefit from doing a lot of those activities that help to do that. Some people recommend running in sand, some people recommend using these towel drills. Just, even just balancing barefoot and doing single leg balance drills barefoot are going to not just cause ankle strength improvements, but intrinsic foot strength improvements. They're all good things to do because you can improve their muscles. There are literally muscles too. You can improve the muscular strength of your feet. And when you do, I think you can start to restore some of the natural arch that you've lost to the foot. If it's because of tendinous dysfunction that's there, or inherited, as you said, a genetic predisposition to this. You may not be able to have the arch of somebody who has naturally better arches, but you could certainly create enough of an arch where all the arch is really doing is just changing the position of your ankle joint itself. Right. So of how the tibia sits on your ankle if the, if the foot collapses, the tibia is now torqued essentially on, in the, in its relationship to the foot. And so now every time you step, whatever forces are, are being incurred on the ground are being sent up through the ankle, into the knee, into the hip, into the back. So you're just trying to maintain a better, more natural alignment between the tibia and the foot itself. So that's what happens with the, with the, the, the, the weakness of the foot is you're basically allowing it to collapse too far to start to create that torque in its relationship to the tibia. So if you can start to increase the strength of those muscles resting, they can basically maintain a higher arch or a more natural position that's more aligned with the tibia. And that's where the benefits come from. Something I knew nothing about back in my 20s, nothing I didn't think for, at all to do that. All I did was go put an orthotic in. Right. Which basically put me in a better position for that. It lifts the foot up and it puts me in a better alignment to try to start decreasing some of the ongoing damage I was doing to my knees by being in that torque position, but did nothing to actually fix the problem itself.
- [104:57]
B
It's like wearing braces.
- [104:58]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [104:59]
B
So not mouth braces, but like a neat.
- [105:01]
A
I was gonna say. Right, yeah. Like a mouth brace actually would actually.
- [105:04]
B
Yeah, right.
- [105:04]
A
Create some long term change. But this is doing nothing but.
- [105:07]
B
Yeah, limbrace.
- [105:08]
A
Yeah.
- [105:09]
B
You know, this is something I've been thinking about and reading up about a lot, but you might find interesting and I don't know, maybe since you're so much more versed and formally trained in, in and strength training and these, offsetting these unhealthy compensations and spending a lot of time looking at how the human body degenerates as it gets older. Because I'm trained as a developmental neurobiologist and what you learn is that development doesn't just stop at puberty or something or even when someone turns 25, our whole life is a developmental arc, and it really is an arc. And people who can offset that, that last third of the arc, have remarkably better lives in terms of their unassisted living, their ability to be there for others, et cetera, cognitively and physically. To make a long story short, it really appears that both at the level of the spinal cord and brain, but also at the level of the muscles that the muscles that are furthest away from the midline degenerate first. And it's interesting, today we've been talking about neck. Yesterday we did forearm training. We'll provide a link to that. Grip strength goes. Calf strength goes. Foot strength goes. And this could be taken down to the motor neuron level, the spinal cord level, molecular level. There are data starting to emerge. So I'm of the mind that many of the things that you've been teaching and that we've been talking about today of working these distal muscles, especially as one gets older, but ideally one's entire life, are really going to be a big piece of the longevity game. I really am.
- [106:42]
A
Longevity ultimately is. Is basically, in my eyes, is being able to maintain function as you age, because again, it's. It's not the, the number of years, but the quality of the years. So all muscles in your body serve a function. They're all there for a reason, almost. I think there's one or two that were potentially. They don't actually even have a function. I forget which ones they are, but they're. But they're. But for the most part, they're there for. To serve a purpose. The idea that we don't train all of them in some way is a little bit crazy because, like, they're there. They need to be able to function for the lifetime of however long you're going to be here. Finding ways to do it where we don't have to do hundreds of different exercises to address all these muscles is the ultimate goal so we can become more efficient with our efforts. And we're not skipping them. But the idea that they're not necessary or they're not, they don't need to be maintained or, or maximized over a lifetime doesn't make sense to me either. Right. So I think we need to be able to just find ways that we can work them into what we're already doing. And again, I do think that we have different rates of decay too. You versus me versus someone else. So that's where I really believe people need to adopt these individualized plans. We all do. Let's say the, the, the, the basic strength training, but then your specialized plan that addresses your accelerated weaknesses is this group of exercises in my a specific plan to address my accelerated weaknesses of this specific exercise plan. So but they're all, they're all there to be to be worked on and they're all there to be maintained.
- [108:15]
C
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- [108:31]
A
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- [108:32]
C
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- [109:05]
B
where I want them.
- [109:06]
C
Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is just so important for health. I mean, how else are you going
- [109:11]
B
to know what's going on under the hood?
- [109:13]
C
And while I've been doing blood work for years, it used to be time consuming, complicated and expensive. In fact, I used to spend thousands of dollars per year trying to get this kind of data. And the data, frankly were not all that good.
- [109:24]
A
Good.
- [109:24]
C
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B
it as a savings.
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C
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- [109:54]
B
hours of content on the Internet about body part splits and ways to train. So I know you've covered essentially all of them, but maybe we could do a pseudo yes, no Q and A type thing for a moment about body type splits and rests and training to failure, et cetera. And then I have a very specific question about training splits that relates to real life and how to incorporate resistance training program into real life in a way that's truly sustainable. Okay, so first things first. How many warm up sets per exercise
- [110:27]
A
typically depending upon what you're doing. We're right off into the nuance of all this because the nuance is really everything here. When we talk about muscle splits and there's so many factors that contribute to this. But let's say you're doing, just for sake of argument, you're doing a pull workout. If, if I'm doing pull would be, let's say back and forth biceps and even rear delts if we want to put them on the same, same day. So you would warm up your bigger muscle group first. So let's say you start with back and you warm up the first exercise you're doing there. You could do a general body warm up like we did a little warm up for our arm workout yesterday, which is actually a shoulder warm up we talk about in that video. Why. But you do a little general warm up first and then you start the first exercise with lighter weights and warm up. I, I'm, I'm doing two or three warm up sets and I'm done. As long as I feel like I've sufficiently warmed up that movement pattern that I'm going to do before I start to load it, as long as I feel like the joints, I've got all the creeks out and I feel like I've done enough of an assessment of how everything feels for that day, then I'm ready to go. People spend way too much time warming up to work out. You just get yourself ready and what happens is the workout itself becomes the rest of the warmup you need for the subsequent exercises. Once you get through that first exercise, you're usually ready to go. And when we're talking about then shifting focus to let's say even the biceps, my biceps have been done, been working every one of my pulling repetitions whether I was rowing or doing pull downs in some way. So there's no more warmup after that
- [111:56]
B
train work sets to failure or stop with so called reps in reserve.
- [112:01]
A
Oh, this is a great one for me. I mean I'm failure. I'm just, I, I understand the science shows that they can get close, but it's also very heavily dependent upon meaning failure or not failure. Very heavily dependent upon volume. So when you're looking to do a workout that is going to have you can do it in 30 to 45 minutes, have a high impact in terms of its ability to stimulate growth. You're going to train to, if you're with me, you're going to train to failure. And I like objectively training to failure because I know I got to failure. I'm not talking about getting to a point where I don't recognize the exercise I'm doing where I'm compromising the, the, the quality of the exercise I'm doing. I'm not talking about doing it on the comp. The more compound or complicated exercises that do require synchronized movement for multiple muscle groups because it could you like let's say a row, a heavy row could start to get dangerous if you're losing body position because of fatigue. So we're doing it on the, the exercises that are the hypertrophy based exercises. A little bit more, more focused on one single muscle group. A little bit more isolated in nature. So for instance a, a single arm row versus a bent over barbell row. That'd be a good difference between.
- [113:15]
B
You won't take the bent over barbell row to failure.
- [113:18]
A
I wouldn't do, I wouldn't recommend taking that all the way to get close. I'll get close. Yeah. Oh yeah. For me it's always going to be close. My criteria there would be form breakdown. So as soon as my form started to break down, I might have had another two reps left or three reps left. But that's it for that on the barbell row. Whereas if I'm doing a. Here's a better example. If I'm doing a one arm cable pull down from my lats, which I love, that exercise gets a really good stretch in the lats and come down like I could, it could look a little ugly at the end where I'm just doing a couple partial repetitions or something just to, just to add a little bit more stimulus that with no extra risk to my, to my body from doing it. So there's the difference between them. But I'm always advising that you're training towards the, the, the high end unless you're training for strength, which is a whole different game. That's a whole different set of rules. It's a whole different stimulus that you're trying to build there that is high, high loads that you're trying to manage efficiently not with inefficiency to try to force muscle growth. So that's a whole different ball of wax and you're really trying to stay away from true failure there. It's actually not in the way you would actually build maximal strength strength because maximum strength relies on clean, efficient, well performed repetitions done cumulatively over time. That's how we get neurological.
- [114:30]
B
And a lot more volume.
- [114:31]
A
And a lot more volume, right. So that. That's a different. That's a different game here.
- [114:35]
B
So for squats and deadlifts, are you taking them to failure?
- [114:38]
A
No, same. Same concept as the row. Those big. Oh, those big presses like that. I'm not gonna.
- [114:43]
B
Or.
- [114:43]
A
Or leg movements. I'm not. I'm not doing true failure on those. I could do other exercises in different variations. I could do a Bulgarian split squat to failure, right? Because it's a. I love that. To failure because when I go down and I can't go up anymore, I just simply drop the weights right to the floor right next to me. So there's different ways to still do squatting patterns without having to put a bar on my back with the heaviest of loads that I can handle and
- [115:06]
B
do and do that and then total volume. I guess if you're going close to failure or failure per muscle group. And I'm not calling legs a muscle group, I'm calling quads a muscle group. Hamstrings a muscle group. Glutes a muscle group, group work. Set ranges per workout, per workout.
- [115:22]
A
Again, probably somewhere between 6 to 6 to 10 on some of the smaller muscle groups like the biceps, and a little bit more, maybe 10 to 10 to 12, 10 to 15 at most. If you're looking at some of the larger muscle groups like the quads, like the lats, I would. I would go a little bit more. So that breaks down into around. If you're doing roughly three sets an exercise, you're looking at three to four exercises to get to those larger muscle groups. And for the biceps, you can get away with doing two. Two exercises or three exercises for. For a total of around seven or eight sets. When we do our workout and did our workout like what we do to expose ourselves to more exercises, because we can influence the biceps in different ways. A little bit long head stretch, shorthead focus, heavier load, more concentration work. You can do that just by doing less sets of the exercise. And again, when you're properly warmed up. And if you have enough experience training, there is nothing magic about doing three, right? We all think three, but like, you could do two and then move on to a different exercise that stimulates the biceps differently. That's a better total effect than maintaining that. You have to do three of this and three of this and three and this, and then therefore limiting yourself to the three exercises. I could do four or five exercises that give all complementary functions to the biceps. Do two of them each and get a better Workout.
- [116:50]
B
Yeah, I like a couple of warm ups on the first exercise. Two, two work sets. Something else I tend to do, you know. And a few regular listeners of this podcast are probably thinking, well, how's this square with the conversation with Dorian where it was really like one, maybe two work sets per exercise. He's always insisting on taking the work sets to failure and often beyond failure with force reps. So when you start looking at it as like you were saying, like with squats and deadlifts or rows, you're not going completely to failure. And I'm not going to say they're equivalent, but there is some offset there.
- [117:27]
C
Right.
- [117:27]
B
It's either taking one, maybe two sets of complete failure with four straps per exercise and then another exercise. It wasn't like we just did one exercise for back.
- [117:35]
A
Yeah.
- [117:36]
B
Then we did the pullover and then, you know, we had a row, a pull down and then some rowing and, you know, and so forth. So it ends up being about six work sets with some pushing beyond failure. You're talking about, you know, 10 to 12, but maybe not so many sets where you're pushing past failure.
- [117:52]
A
Yeah. And I, I grew up watching Dorian Yates and doing the workouts and I loved it. I found it hard for me to maintain that kind of intensity, especially training alone. Right. Training in sport, straps are almost impossible alone unless you have machines that can allow you to do that. So it was more of a, of a, of a difficulty of being able to stick with that type of training or reproduce it over and over and over again. Dorian Yates is Dorian Yates for a reason, because in a six time Mr. Olympia for a reason, because he had the ability. It's like, it's like Michael, he's like the Michael Jordan of, of bodybuilding. Michael Jordan did the things he could do because he could do things other people couldn't. During Yates, I feel could do things that a lot of other people couldn't in terms of tapping into that pain, discomfort and ability to go further. When he wanted to quit, right when it got to be the hardest part of the set, he could like start to revel in it and go further and further and further. I don't know if everybody has that ability. I, I, I can do it intermittently, but I can't do it consistently. And so for me I just have to realize that and say, okay, I'm going to have to back off a little bit of the intensity. Some of the force traps increase my volume just a little bit because it ultimately comes down to a volume and intensity game. And it could be literally the extreme examples of this. Like, there's a lot of cyclists who cycle at 80 to 100 RPMs, but do hours and hours of that. That who blow up their quads and have amazing lower body size from their cycling. How is that working? Well, there's a metabolic effect they're getting, too, which we know is another stimulus for growth. But at the right amount of volume, even low levels of absolute load can create growth. Right. There's extreme examples, and I always go back and say she probably hates me for it by now, but I always use the example of my wife, who is a barber, and she used to cut 40, 40 haircuts a day, 30 to 40 haircuts a day. She was like a machine, but little girl, and she has like, these great traps, like really well developed traps. And it's not necessarily from the load of the scissors that weigh ounces, but it's the weight of the arm being held like this all day long. No direct trap work ever in her entire life. Massive traps that look great, by the way, baby. Look great. But they. But. But had great trap development because of that. That's an extreme example. That's eight hours a day, every day. That's no load or just, again, very minimal load, but extreme amounts of volume. So in terms of muscle growth, I always think there's always a possibility to get where you want to get, but you have to know how to balance volume and intensity.
- [120:30]
B
In terms of frequency of training a given muscle group across the week, I'll just say two things that most people don't think about. One, there's nothing special about a week. I mean, we use a week as a division of time, but muscles don't really care about we weeks. They care about stimulus and recovery, the adaptation, the hypertrophy, the strength. So I consider myself somebody with a relatively poor recovery quotient. I can hit each muscle group directly, hard, once per week, so sets to failure somewhere in between what say, Dorian does and what you do. You know, yesterday's workout felt slight, slightly higher than the normal volume that I would do. The workout I did with him was slightly lower. So somewhere in between. But there's a lot of indirect training. For instance, I'll train my legs really hard one day per week. But then I'll also do a hit workout on the assault bike. And yeah, it's not a squat workout, but my legs get some stimulation from that. My lat. My lats do, too. And I'll do a sprint workout one day per week. So that's what works for me, for you personally, before you make a suggestion, the larger world out there. How often can you directly hit a muscle group with the kind of intensity and volume that we did in the video that, you know, we provide a link to?
- [121:49]
A
I can only directly hit that muscle group the same as you, once a week with that level of intensity. Even in what we were doing yesterday, a lot of my focus is on you. I'm trying to focus on making sure you, you're doing what you're doing, right? I'm trying to like, you know, coach my way through what I'm doing. So it's like if it was just me in my own gym, I might have even zoned out a little bit more, gone a little bit harder, got a little bit uglier face when I was doing my repetitions that were hard. So it might be even a little notch above what, what was shown in our, in our video in terms of intensity. I can't do that more than once a week for a muscle group now.
- [122:26]
B
But you're also training back, you're also training chest, you're also training shoulders on a separate day.
- [122:30]
A
Well, that's the key, right? So what? So when people recommend higher frequency sessions or every, every 48 hours or twice a week minimum and all that, you are also forcing yourselves into some splits that have a lot more muscles being trained at once because in order to get back to them again in the same seven day week period, you have to do multiple in one day. So let's just say in a push, pull leg scenario, you have to do all your pushing muscles. So right off the bat, you're doing chest, shoulders, triceps in one day. I find even that to be a lot to ask for me at times, not all the time, but especially if I'm short on sleep and short on time that day, I can't get through all those and get an adequate stimulus because there's just too much work to be done. So that creates a need to have to condense into these multi muscle group splits that you go through the push, you go through the pole, you go through the legs. Now you got to have, let's say one rest day, come right back again. So you're training six days a week. Some people can't manage that either. But what I do is I say, all right, if I train, let's just say biceps like we did, and I do them really hard and I even just did biceps and triceps. Say if I did those two, I still have to get through legs, I Have to get through shoulders, I have to get through chest, I have to get through. I break legs and the anterior and posterior chains, sort of two workouts. I have to get through a lot more in the week. So if I had to get it all done in one week, I would run out of time. First thing I do is I extend beyond the seven days. So I break that rule because I realized, like you said, that our body doesn't know the difference. So it's okay if it takes me a little bit longer to wrap around before I do whatever the arms again, let's say in this case, the arms again. So I break that, that rule. It could be nine days for me in terms of my cycle. But I know that when I come back after biceps, if I do two, let's say I do posterior chain legs, and then I do. Let's say I do after that chest, even just a single muscle group when I come back and I do back. The reason why back is following chest is I'm going to give my chest a reprieve from the day before. I'm going to go pulling when I was just pushing neurologically. I'm giving myself a complete break.
- [124:45]
B
Break.
- [124:45]
A
But I also know that I'm looking backwards to when I did biceps and it was 48 to 72 hours prior that I did biceps. When I do my back, I know I'm going to get indirect work from my biceps again, guarantee. So. And if I don't know that, I can make sure I do by doing underhand rows. I could do underhand pull downs. I could do chin ups rather than pull ups if I feel like I didn't adequately stimulate my biceps that day. So I can make selections in these, these back exercises that indirectly hit the biceps. That's a lot of volume. That's enough like you're getting direct volume. There's no rule, again, that says that it has to be directly hit to contribute volume to the work being done by, by that, that muscle group. So I come back and I do my indirect volume there. And a lot of times these studies actually spoke to Brad Schoenfeld about this when he spoke at my event. They don't do a lot of accounting for the indirect work because we can't quantify what indirect work, direct contribution that Roe had to a bicep. So there's not a lot of data around that anyway about how much contribution the indirect work works towards. So when they do these studies and they look for how much total volume, they're looking at direct work for that muscle group. So I feel as if it's intuitively from my experience, I know that I definitely get another exposure for that muscle group and that contributes to the overall volume. And then again, if it takes me a little bit longer to wrap around based on how I'm pairing things together, then so be it. But I'm, but I'm getting that indirect work, but never twice directly.
- [126:15]
B
So in some sense you are similar to the Mike Mentzer philosophy. Not of one set to absolute failure because he was really, really on the far end of things.
- [126:27]
A
I did that too. I just couldn't sustain that.
- [126:29]
B
Right. But in terms of not making the seven day week, the, the, the holy grail of how you organize your schedule. Because you know Mike, I was fortunate enough to know him. I paid him for a consult and got to know him over the years, you know, before he unfortunately passed away. And he had me training like, I think it was like shoulders and arms rest two days.
- [126:49]
A
Yeah.
- [126:49]
B
You know, then it was like legs rest two days and then chest and back and rest two days.
- [126:54]
A
Mind blowing.
- [126:55]
B
Yeah, it was mind blowing. And the problem with that, I think at, for a beginner is you get results, you certainly get results, but you don't get the opportunity to develop the skill of training. I mean, there's as you.
- [127:06]
A
Or the enjoyment of it. Right.
- [127:07]
B
Or the enjoyment. So three, maybe four days a week of resistance training for me just is like the, the, the sweet spot. But as with you, I found that I can give myself permission. Like if travel comes up or a poor night's sleep or some extra workload or something like, okay, there can be an extra day after legs or you can, you can modify things. Which brings me to my other question. Yesterday, after we were training, I learned something remarkable, which is there are times when you will split your split simply based on real life constraints. And you gave a beautiful example. I'm smiling already. You said, you know, there are times when you're supposed to train at night, but you go in to read to your boys or spend some time with them before sleep and you'll like fall asleep next to them.
- [127:50]
A
That's more often than not.
- [127:51]
B
Yeah. So then you'll go into the gym, your home gym, at like 10 or 11 o' clock at night and you'll do half of your leg workout and then you'll split, literally split the split and come back and do the remainder of that workout a few days later. Yeah, I love this example because it's the real world.
- [128:09]
A
Yeah.
- [128:09]
B
And obviously you're prioritizing time with Your boys. And that's what really matters. That's why you're training in the first place. I mean, yes, to have your physique, et cetera, but you're, that's what motivates me. That's what motivates you to be around for a long time. So splitting the split, you wouldn't suggest it to people, but life happens. So what does that look like? Is it that you're doing like your quad workout and, and then you're. Normally you would also do something else, but you're doing the other stuff later or maybe doing three sets of squats and coming back two days later and doing the other three sets of squats.
- [128:40]
A
So here's the irony of it. I don't know if I wouldn't recommend splitting the split. You know, I feel like I'm starting to learn that splitting the split is me breaking a bad habit that I was unwilling to break a long time because it's of, because of the same mentality that led me to think of a seven day training week. Right. That I think what's happening and that I've been seeing is that splitting the split does a few things for me mentally. It recharges me on a night where I really don't have a lot in the tank. If I get over there and I was just sleeping for the last 30 minutes or 45 minutes, I'm not in the greatest state of mind to train. But if I know that the requirement is let's just get through. If I'm going to do my shoulders, let's say, let me get through half of what I would normally do, I'm going to focus today on the non strength focused stuff because I'm just not neurologically prepared to do that right now. So let's just work on the lateral raises, the strict lateral raises. In that case, the hip exercise I like is a hip hugger. It's just different exercises I would do that would be perceived as the non compound exercises. And I'll do those. And what I find very quickly is that because I can ease into those exercises, they're not as heavily loaded, but they're high intensity. It doesn't have to be come from the load, it comes from the effort. I can ease into them after one or two sets, I'm good and I'm like kind of into it. And I know that once I'm done with these six sets or so, I'm done for the night and I can come back and do my strength work when I'm ready, which could be two days later usually, sometimes the very next night. Really I'll just split it to the next night and whatever was planned gets bumped one spot. It's gonna extend that training week even further so that nine days can become, you know, 11 or 12. But I, we talked about recovery before. Like it seems to be working well with, with me for my recovery at this age. And again, I think this, I have very bad sleep habits only because the result of working out at 11 o' clock or 12 o' clock is you. And then, and by the way, eating daily dinner after that, that's my dinner time. Like eating dinner after that. I get to bed 1:30 in the morning and I'm getting up at 7 or I get up to bed at 2 o' clock and then I get up at 7. This might be what works for me best right now because I don't have the recovery through as much sleep as I should get now. I know a lot of people will yell and say, well, you need to work on your sleep and get better recovery. I understand that right now this little pattern is where I'm in. It can be fixed by me training earlier in the day, stepping away from work and training earlier in the day. I haven't found the time or the way to do that effectively at this moment. So this is what I have to navigate and I encourage people to do the same thing. Find what works with your current schedule. You can have an eye towards fixing it, but what works for your schedule to get you through this time period? I think it's working because I have more recovery time in a less recovered sleep state that seems to still be progressing because I could still live, lift heavier than I have been able to. I'm still able to, to, to create effective workouts for me. I feel, I feel good. My joints are actually feeling good. Things are feeling even a little better than they were. So it happens to be working for me. So I, I might be changing my mind a little bit about frequencies and volumes in terms of what I do in a given workout. And accepting the fact that it can happen over two days is so like, like relieving because it's like I don't have to bring it all today. I could just sort of get this much done today and it allows me to have a higher effort to handle again some of the lower volumes that we're doing. So it's like a win, win all around. And the kids like me more for it too.
- [132:12]
B
Yeah, well, and someday they'll see this and they're going to see so much of your content. I mean, they're, they're, they're great.
- [132:19]
A
They're totally disinterested right now.
- [132:20]
B
Yeah. But they're grateful for, I mean, they're going to be grateful for the fact that, I mean, you're out obviously prioritizing them and your wife and your family and that's a beautiful thing. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for the workout yesterday. I definitely learned a number of things.
- [132:35]
A
Fun.
- [132:35]
B
Definitely feeling we gotta do more of those. Yeah, we should do more. And thank you for coming back to educate us. And you know, some people, when they speak, like, not a whole lot happens except a bunch of exhales shaped into sound when you speak. People learn and they learn super valuable information. Everything from the basics all the way up to the nuance. You're constantly educating yourself already just a moment ago, you know, you're, you're still evolving the way you're doing things and you share that. And again, these so called small things that allow one to do the big things for much longer and much more effectively is really what it's all about. And, and you clearly walk the walk. You look awesome. You're 50, you know, steroid TRT free, all of that. And you look incredible. And so, you know, there are probably none people who are doing what you're doing. You're truly an N of one that you can encapsulate all this and you're just so generous with your time and your energy and so I'm very grateful for you coming on here again.
- [133:39]
A
I was so pumped. I've been wanting to come back here for so long and negotiating the travel is always a thing for me, but, but I was so excited to be able to do it, finally do it and get in the workout in and come back and sit down with you is always my favorite thing. So thank you for having me.
- [133:52]
B
Well, please come back again. You're an inspiration to me and like I said, you're a absolutely extraordinary educator. Thank you.
- [133:58]
A
Thank you.
- [133:59]
C
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Jeff Cavaliere. To learn more about his work and to find links to athleanx resources, please see the show note caption. In addition, you'll also find links in the show note captions to the workout that Jeff and I did and that was referenced a few times throughout the episode. So that's a link to a proper workout for the biceps, for the triceps, for the forearms, and Jeff's signature move, face pulls. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple. You can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre sale@protographsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Jeff Cavaliere. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.