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The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
04:15:13
In this episode, my guest is Pavel Tsatsouline, a world-renowned strength and conditioning coach, former military special forces training instructor, author, and founder of StrongFirst—an online school focused on “low-tech, high-concept” training to build strength for men and women of all fitness levels.
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- [00:00]
Andrew Huberman
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Pavel Satsulin. Pavel Satsulin is considered one of the premier strength training and fitness coaches in the world. He has pioneered the development of various programs to improve strength, which he calls the mother of all fitness. Indeed, today you will learn about strength as a practice, as a skill that can be applied to sports, that can be applied to general fitness, to getting leaner, to getting faster, and to improving your endurance. As Pavel Satsulin explains, by building one's strength through bodyweight exercises, free weight exercises and occasionally machines, one can develop incredible levels of fitness at any age. We discuss some of the spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing strength feeds like a hundred pull ups per week. And we emphasize that one does not have to be seeking hypertrophy. One does not have to be seeking getting larger muscles in order to get exceptionally strong. I myself these days am focusing primarily on trying to get stronger and build endurance for sake of health and for general life reasons. And because getting really strong turns out to be very beneficial in every aspect of life. Today you're going to learn how to get extremely strong. You can add muscle if you want in parallel with that, or as Pavel Satsulin explains, you can pursue strength and flexibility for their own sake. And there's tremendous value for doing so. So today's discussion pertains to women, to men, and frankly to people of all ages. I do think that pursuing strength as its own thing, independent of muscle growth, right, which we hear so much about these days. Everyone wants hypertrophy, grow muscle this and that. Pursuing strength as its own thing is a tremendously valuable endeavor today. You're going to learn how from the world's premier expert in this topic. You're in for a very special episode with Pavel Satsulin. He is truly in a class all his own when it comes to fitness and strength training. 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, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Pavel Satsulin. Pavel Satsulin, welcome Andrew.
- [02:32]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Pleasure to be on your podcast. I respect your work a lot.
- [02:35]
Andrew Huberman
Thank you. Likewise.
- [02:36]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you.
- [02:36]
Andrew Huberman
I will say that you and perhaps one other person have truly changed the way that I think about fitness, the way that I train. And I'm super excited to talk to you today. So I'm withholding excitement. There are a bunch of different ways to think about this thing that we call fitness. Strength, endurance, hypertrophy. And there's so much information out there now. How do you conceptualize fitness? Meaning do you look at things through the lens of are we focused on nervous system, bone, connective tissue or muscle? Do you look at things through the lens of anterior chain, posterior chain, hypertrophy, strength? I would just like to get your sort of high level conceptualization of this thing that we call fitness with the idea in mind that most people would like to have some level of endurance, some level of strength and feel healthy and presumably look however they want to look. But let's set aesthetics aside for the moment. How do you think about this thing we call fitness?
- [03:37]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, first of all, Andrew, is strength is the mother quality of all the other qualities. So this is again, it's a statement by Professor Matveyev, Leonid Matveyev, going way back and without a foundation of strength, you cannot build anything. So any athletic event requires a base of strength. Of course, that shot putter is going to need much more strength than triathlon athlete, but they all need strength. Speaking of which, in triathlon, in marathon running, in distance, in cycling, it's been proven that putting athletes on a heavy, low repetition strength regimen, the kind that doesn't really add muscle, but just makes you stronger neurologically and it makes them race faster. So once you're stronger, everything becomes easier. How much stronger you need to get that will vary. In the Soviet Union, they had something called the model athlete. So they figured out that for every particular event, you, your odds of succeeding are going to be much higher if you're able to squat this much or bench this much and jump this high and so on and so forth. And this is easy enough to find these numbers for your individual sport and talk to various coaches. For people who are not competitive athletes, who just want to enjoy life, you just need to think about having a reserve of strength for whatever it is that you might do. So look at some PT standards in, let's say in the military or in law enforcement and possibly apply them to yourself. I don't want to impose my set of standards because there are many different, like I might prefer, you know, pull ups and x and Y and z. But if we're looking at strength as the foundation for general physical preparation, right? So there's such a thing as general strength preparation. That's part of that. There's also, you know, special strength, which is sports specific work that's different and there are different ways of getting this done. But as you and I know that certain exercises are going to have a great carryover outside these particular exercises. So as long as you're mobile, as long as you're symmetrical, and those are the things you have to address first you need to look into work of Greg Cook, for example. Then strength has to be your priority. Once you have reached a certain level of strength that's appropriate for your sport or appropriate for your lifestyle, at that point you can just maintain it and focus on other qualities. So I will give you an example. Soviet scientists Vysoich and Janisinka, they measured a number of athletes in 20 different sports, athletes of different levels. So they evaluated various quality. One was absolute strength, another was rate of force development, pretty much power. And the third was the rate of muscular relaxation. So how quickly the muscle can relax after contraction, which is very, very important. And they have found that strength grew just very little from the intermediate level to the advanced level. There's not a lot of improvement. Power increased a little bit more, but the speed of relaxation is just, just shot up as the athlete became more advanced. So it's again so strength, it is the mother of all qualities. But that's not the end all for everybody. So reach the level that is appropriate for your sport or activity, then just maintain it efficiently and focus on something else. If we talk about strength, if we could talk about other qualities, well, we'll get to them later.
- [07:19]
Andrew Huberman
What movements do you believe if they exist, all people should include in their weekly routine someplace when thinking about how to develop, perhaps maintain. But for most people it's going to be the goal of still achieving some strength. Okay, strength increase. Excuse me.
- [07:37]
Pavel Tsatsouline
I think there has to be a very low quantity of exercises, just very few exercises you want to focus on. And I'm going to give you some options to choose from. So what we try to do at Strong first in my company, my school of strength is we try to provide people with various simple, very low tech, high concept ways of addressing reaching their knees. Because for one reason or another, for this individual, the barbell is the preferred tool. For another, it's a kettlebell or body weight or some or something else. So I'm not going to say that if you don't do kettlebell swings or barbell squats, you'll never amount to anything. That's just not true. But you can pick some, you can pick some events. So you definitely ought to do something for a posterior chain. You absolutely do. If we are looking at, at the barbell, I would start out with the narrow Sumo deadlift.
- [08:28]
Andrew Huberman
So this is narrow grip, not narrow.
- [08:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Grip, pardon me, but your stance is just wide enough to let your arms through. Your arms stay parallel to each other and so you just find a very comfortable stance for yourself. So Professor McGill has been in your podcast, he explained to you about the different hip architecture and so on. So you have to find whatever works, whatever works for you. And when people talk about functional strength training and then they start standing on a bowl and juggle oranges, doesn't make a lot of sense to me because that doesn't look like my life or yours probably right. But if you have to get a heavy bag of groceries or something, you got a deadlift and the narrow Sumo deadlift. So if you look at power lifters, an example would be, classic example would be Edcone. That's a narrow stance Sumo. I'm not talking about wide Sumo. That's a very sport specific event. And you practice that. First you learn how to hip hinge. It's extremely important to learn how to hip hinge. Again, Stuart stressed that how important it is for your back health and for your longevity. So you learn to do that then whether you decide to pursue the deadlift or not. If you decide not to pursue high numbers in the deadlift, maybe it's not appropriate for you or maybe you lack in the coaching. Fantastic exercise for everybody is a Zercher squat. So in the Zercherture squat, you hold the bar like this in the crooks of your elbows, so it's resting right here. It's possible to pick it up off the ground, but it's, you know, it's an advanced skill, that's, it's an advanced skill better just to walk it off the rack. The advantage of the Zercher squat over, let's say the back squat or the front squat is even if you have messed up shoulders, wrists, elbows, you still can do that coaching. The Zercher squat is very easy, very simple, and you have tremendous reflexive stabilization of your midsection. It's just very, very powerful. So you acquire that skill of getting tight. So getting high numbers on that exercise in the zerter. So let's say an athlete could shoot for double, double body weight. That's a really good goal.
- [10:31]
Andrew Huberman
And the bar, for those listening, not watching, is cradled in the, in the crooks of the elbows, in Front of the body are the arms.
- [10:37]
Pavel Tsatsouline
You can hold them like this, you can hold them like this, or different ways of holding them, you definitely would want to get proper coaching. You don't want to, you know, you don't want to bruise yourself. You want to be comfortable, you want to do it right. But it's not. Doesn't take a lot of skill to do that. You find some pressing exercise. And again, if we're sticking with the example of the barbell, the bench press has gotten bad reputation, you know, thanks to the gym bros. And you know, all gym bros do is they bench pretty much well these days. They also check out their phones, I.
- [11:07]
Andrew Huberman
Guess every set, between every set, the 11th rep, I joke. People checking their phones.
- [11:14]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yeah, there we go. But if you look at athletes, athletes who also do some lower body work, some posterior chain work and something for the midsection, and again, Zurich's squad could address that. They are making a great use of the bench press. So it's nothing. It's a very simple exercise. Well, not very simple. It's a relatively simple exercise. And unlike other pressing exercises, it allows you to make strength gains with a very low volume of training. So you can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger. Good luck doing that in the overhead press or in the one arm push up or something like that. So those are just a couple examples. There are many other examples you can do snatch grip deadlifts. You can list is very, very long. We can address the same thing in the same way with kettlebells. You can look in the body weight exercises, but you need to find several exercises that have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond the ability to do this exercise. If you just do curls, you know you're going to do, you're going to get better at curls, but not in much else. So Canadian, Canadian scientists back in the 80s, Duke Bissell and his team made some interesting discoveries. And they just found that doing something leg extension is not going to carry over to the squat. It's just not. The coordination is so radically different. So you find several exercises that you enjoy that don't hurt you, that you have the equipment available that you got the proper coaching for, and you pretty much stick with them. And there is absolutely no reason for you to change these exercises. It's possible to change them on the margins, you know, from wide grip bench press to narrow grip bench press squats with a pause and so on and so forth. But you don't really have to do a great variety of things variety. It's a good topic. We can discuss this later, but like looking at the example of weightlifting, as much as we can find many reasons why a variety could be beneficial. Improved neuroplasticity, reduced risk of repeated strain injury and so on. But the Soviets did the statistics in weightlifting. There's no correlation between the number of exercises and the platform results. And for people outside the sports it's going to be the same. So find this limited, just limited battery of exercises that you can you can do well, you can do pain free and just enjoy them for years.
- [13:47]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night. Now, one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase about 1 to 3 degrees. 8 Sleep makes it very easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle and end of the night. I've been sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly four years now and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod cover called the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity. I find that very useful because I like to make the bed really cool at the beginning of the night, even colder in the middle of the night and warm as I wake up. That's what gives me the most slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. It also has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, go to 8sleep.comhuberman to save up to 300 doll $50 off their pod 4 Ultra Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's Eight Sleep.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in both your short and long term health is your body's ability to manage blood glucose or blood sugar. To maintain energy and focus throughout the day. You want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or crashes. I first started using levels about three years ago as a way to understand how different foods impacted my blood glucose levels. And it's proven incredibly informative for determining my food choices, when I eat specific foods and how I time eating relative to things like my workouts, both weight training and cardiovascular training, things like running and when to eat before I go to sleep to allow for the most stable blood sugar throughout the night. Indeed, using levels has helped shape my entire schedule. So if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a CGM yourself, you can go to Levels Link. Huberman Levels has just launched a new CGM sensor that is smaller and has even better tracking than before. Right now they're also offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's Levels Link, spelled L I N K Huberman. To try the new sensor and two free months of membership. Would a combination across the week of some sort of squat, let's say the Zercher squat, a perhaps a kettlebell swing or something else for posterior chain pull up and dip, be a very fairly comprehensive program?
- [16:47]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Absolutely.
- [16:48]
Andrew Huberman
I'm a fan of dips. I like dips a lot. I heard you say that you were some years ago you said that you were using dips for economy of time and I started getting into dips. I haven't quite figured out the best way to load dips once because once you get past 15, 20 repetitions of the body weight dip, it gets, I don't know, turns into something else.
- [17:08]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Sure, absolutely.
- [17:09]
Andrew Huberman
Turns into aerobic exercise perhaps.
- [17:12]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, Luke Eames, he was a powerlifter from the golden age of American powerlifting. He says anything over six reps is bodybuilding.
- [17:20]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I'm trying to stay in the lower rep range today. I'll talk about this with you more because I think a growing number of people, both men and women, who are starting to do weight training or really incorporate strength training into their program are seeking a combination of strength and perhaps endurance as well without putting on too much size. Maybe size in some select body parts.
- [17:39]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, Andrew, I think they need to do possibly several different types of types of training. But going back to your examples, dips are fantastic if your shoulders can handle them, if you know how to do them, it's a great exercise, but not particularly democratic. That's the problem. So either you can do it safely or you can't. And possibly it's possible to coach some people to do, to do the dip. So if you're coaching somebody to do the dip, the first prerequisite is to build up to a full skin the cat. So it means you're hanging upside down, you know, look up what it means, folks on a bar. So you got to be able to get yourself in that position. So if you're able to do that and if you're able to get out of the position, you know, strongly and confidently, there is a good chance that you can start up and doing dips and be coached into that. If you can't, probably not. So either try to build up to that, unless there are medical restrictions or not. You mentioned the example of pull ups. Absolutely. Pull ups are one of the best general strength exercises. And again, to your listeners, general versus special. Special in Soviet terminology just means sport specific. So the carryover, when you start doing pull ups, when you excel at pull ups or the dips, you are going to get a carryover so far beyond these exercises, which is exactly the reason you do that. So I like your choices very much. Yeah.
- [18:58]
Andrew Huberman
What about specialized training for grip strength? I believe that if somebody's large, if they can squat 500 pounds, if they can deadlift 600 pounds, I don't really care if the question is, can you open the pickle jar?
- [19:13]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Sure.
- [19:14]
Andrew Huberman
This is a critical.
- [19:15]
Pavel Tsatsouline
I just get my wife to do it. So grip strength is extremely important. And you being a neuroscientist, you know, the disproportional representation, the motor cortex of your gripping muscles and the forearm and everything. So. And there is another reason why grip is so important. So if you make a fist, if you make a very tight fist, you're going to feel, you're going to feel the overflow of tension, irradiation going to other muscles. So pretty much by gripping tighter, you are instantly increasing your strength in anything that you do. And so a very simple example for your listeners, Take some pedestrian exercise like curls, and do as many strict reps as you possibly can, do what you normally do them, and then start just crushing that bar or that dumbbell or whatever that you're curling, you will immediately be able to knock off several more reps. So that makes you so much stronger. And again, the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important. For whatever reason. Obviously it correlates with longevity. We don't know why. We have no idea. Correlation is not causation. So we don't know Whether getting stronger, a stronger grip is going to make us live longer. But statistically it's worth a try, right? So one can either find exercises that train the grip in the context of developing something else or train the grip directly. So either way is great. So the first examples would be climbing the rope or doing pull ups and weighted pull ups on a rope. That's a great way to train, obviously. So what you do, the way you program it is, let's say once a week you climb the rope and a couple days a week you do pull ups. That's a good way to go about it and you don't need to do anything else. And another example would be some exercises like the kettlebell snatch. When you start snatching a heavy kettlebell and you drop it from overhead, that eccentric loading is very, very powerful and that develops grip very, very well. And again, right now we're talking more about what people in the grip world call the crushing grip. You know, how you squeeze something. There are other types of grip that they differentiated, but this type of crushing grip is what's going to help most athletes and non athletes than most. And I also warn you that hanging on the bar and doing farmer's carries, beneficial as they are for many reasons, it's not going to do that much for interesting.
- [21:49]
Andrew Huberman
I started incorporating farmers carries thinking it was going to improve my grip.
- [21:53]
Pavel Tsatsouline
But they're healthy. If you look at McGill's work, he will tell you that carrying too heavy objects, it's going to really pound your spine. But on the other hand, asymmetrical carry, it appears to be very beneficial. Then there's another interesting example. Now right now I'm not talking about grip training at all, not even talking about strength training, but I'm talking about sort of a former run doctor, Mike Prevost, who used to work with the US Marine Corps Navy, he developed this very interesting protocol and it's test called the Kettlebell mile where you take a kettlebell that's approximately 30% of your body weight. And he, he has good reasons for why it has to be that way. And you pretty much run with this kettlebell and you switch hands as much as often as you want. And it's a fantastic way to improve your running posture, to develop very stabilizing muscles and to improve your ability to rock. But it doesn't beat you up as much rocking does. You know, rocking carrying heavy weight, that's, it's rough on the body. So it's a fantastic way, it's a fantastic way to, to train your endurance an additional way.
- [23:02]
Andrew Huberman
How heavy is the kettlebell?
- [23:03]
Pavel Tsatsouline
30%. Because he says when you start going heavier, it's going to affect your gait. So you're not really, you know, you have to, you have to kick your hip over to the side. It becomes, it becomes something else.
- [23:14]
Andrew Huberman
That's a heavy kettlebell.
- [23:15]
Pavel Tsatsouline
30% of your body weight.
- [23:16]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I mean, I'm 210 pounds. It's not, not trivial.
- [23:20]
Pavel Tsatsouline
It's probably something like 62 pounds or something like that 70 pound kettlebell. It's not. No, no, no. It's not trivial by any means, but it's also not something you jump into immediately. And also what's very cool is because you get to switch hands very often. You're not destroying your Ql and other stabilizers are contracting isometrically. And so what we're doing right now here is kind of a form of anti glycolytic training. If your muscle contracts briefly and then relaxes, contracts, relaxes with. And the contraction cycles are really short, you're able to avoid glycolysis. You're able to keep that muscle working aerobically for a long time and not beat yourself down. So to listeners who'd like to try it, start by walking with a kettlebell pass, you know, switch hands off and then eventually build up to running and obviously build up gradually.
- [24:09]
Andrew Huberman
Held like a suitcase.
- [24:10]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yes, only, only like a suitcase.
- [24:13]
Andrew Huberman
Okay. Yeah. There's a podcast led by a guy named Cam Haynes. He's a bow hunter. He's one of the people that really brought extreme fitness and ultras to the sport of bow hunting and is legendary there. And for his podcast, he has you carry the 72 pound rock up a. It's about a thousand feet of elevation in the Oregon wilderness. And I've done it. It's, it's hard because of the shape of the thing. And so you're moving it from shoulder to, to, you know, to football carry, to, you know, infant carrying. You're not talking about that. You're talking about suitcase on the right.
- [24:45]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Correct.
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Andrew Huberman
Are you trying to crush the grip while you're doing.
- [24:47]
Pavel Tsatsouline
No, no, this is not, this is not developing a grip.
- [24:50]
Andrew Huberman
And then. And you're running at a. 10, 20 minutes, 30 minutes.
- [24:53]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, he's go. He says run for a mile. That's the goal. And he has some numbers. I can give you a link. You can look it up to Mike Prevost and direct grip strength strength training is great as well. So, for example, the best products for that would be the captains of crush grippers. From Iron Mind. Iron Mind. Iron Mind is the company that started serious grip training pretty much in modern era. And their grippers are the golden standard. Some years ago, my colleague as strong first Brad Jones and I, we decided to get serious about it and see what that feels like. And we spent many, many months, we were both able to build up to closing the number three gripper from apparel set. So that means that gripper takes 280 pounds to close. And when you're using very small muscle groups, it's extremely, extremely hard. And the observations that we both made and other colleagues and people have made, that once you are able to do that, everything becomes so much easier. However, the training itself is extremely hard because people are thinking that when you're training the grip, it's just some kind of isolated thing. You can drive the car and you can kind of squeeze this little a pink thing that you picked up at the department store. No, when you train with a heavy duty gripper like the one from Iron Mind, it's a full body effort and you need to use pretty much every neurological trick in the book in order to exert yourself. So for example, if you, if you've ever seen the Sanchin stance in karate, which is, it's a stance where the knees are kind of pulled inward and shoulders are pressed down, there's a lot of, a lot of tension. Everything, everything's very, very seriously engaged. The toes are gripping the ground, so you're pretty much gripping the ground with your toes. You're contracting your glutes, you're bracing very, very hard. You're compressing your viscera, your lattice firing and you're sending this, all this effort, everything. The only thing, they're not working like, you try to keep your traps and face out of this and you're directing this effort into your grip. You get just as tired from doing that work as from doing like heavy squats or something. That's remarkable. But if you like that, it's a fantastic thing to do.
- [27:13]
Andrew Huberman
Wow. The motor neuron recruitment that you are describing is phenomenal. I have one reflection on this relationship between grip strength and longevity. Just a little bit of neuroscience. You may be familiar with this, so forgive me if you are, but for the listeners as well, the motor neurons that control movement of the torso lie closer to the midline on both sides of the spinal cord. The motor neurons that are responsible for more distal muscles that is further from the midline sit outside of those as you get out to the movement of the digits, the fingers and toes. Those are the Most distal from the midline. The rate and pattern of degeneration of motor neurons as a function of aging, even if there's no ALS or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or anything, is always outside in. We don't know why this is. It may relate to the presence of the enzyme sod, superoxide dimutase. But it does seem that people that train their peripheral strength, they can offset some of that outside to, in or distal to more close to the midline degeneration. So I believe, and this is just a belief, that it's not just correlative, that when one trains their periphery, they actually can offset some of the degeneration. It's also the way it's mapped in the brain, which is a kind of a discussion outside of here. We need to get some diagrams up for people to really conceptualize that. But it's also the case if you look at older people, 70, 80, 90, their calves are generally atrophied, even if their torso is still very thick and muscular. If they did training. So I feel like obviously training the core and the torso is so key, but training the peripheral muscles, at least from the perspective of longevity, it makes sense why that would be important.
- [29:01]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, there are so many reasons obviously to do that. So I think that whether you choose to do that directly with grippers or. And there are some other devices, obviously unlimited number of devices and exercises, or as a part of another exercise like climbing the rope, definitely strongly encouraging your listeners to do that.
- [29:21]
Andrew Huberman
I'm going to try this running with the kettlebell on one side for. I'll go out for a mile with it on the right and then.
- [29:27]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Oh, no, no. You switch all the time. Switch as much as you want.
- [29:29]
Andrew Huberman
Okay?
- [29:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Because if you try to do it on one side, you are going to pound your stabilizer. Just pound them. You're not going to recover forever. And this way. This is one of the secrets to developing isometric endurance is very rapid switching, you know, short contractions and brief rests and over and over and over. That way you are not, you know, the muscle doesn't go into ischemia and, you know, keeps getting oxygen pretty much.
- [29:59]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to talk about concentric versus eccentric portions of a movement, concentric generally being the lifting phase and eccentric, of course, folks, the lowering phase. Is there a case for just doing concentric movements? Yes. Is there a case for emphasizing the eccentric portion? How does one balance those when thinking about soreness, recovery and frequency of training?
- [30:22]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Okay, well, first of all, the case for concentric only is if you're trying to minimize muscle growth and if you also are trying to minimize soreness. So for athletes in weight classes or athletes in sports where you get punished by carrying extra weight, it's a very good idea. So for example, when Barry Ross coached Allison Felix, at that point she became the fastest, she won the 200 meters in the world. She was 17 years old, I think she was the youngest. And so he would have her do deadlifts and they were concentric only and she would have her drop the bar. And the reasoning for that is exactly that you're able to get stronger. You're not putting on extra muscle mass. Also, it's safe. It's really very, very safe way to train. And in programming protocol for somebody who's not necessarily in that boat, it's still just for the sake of variety, you may want to choose to avoid the eccentric on certain days, like you're trying to recover, accelerate the recovery. So you lift the weight, but then you step down. So you could definitely do that eccentric work. It's supposed, supposedly very helpful to promote hypertrophy. But there are a lot of ifs and buts in there. I'm going to talk right now about the eccentric strength. Eccentric work for strength specifically. It's very. Because the muscle is strongest whenever you're lowering the weight, it's very easy to do something knuckleheaded and get hurt, which is Jim Bros do that all the time. And instead of doing that, what the wise, much wiser approach is to get a perfect spotter, great competent spotter and put on after you've done your normal couple of low repetition, heavy sets, add maybe 5, 10 pounds over your maximum and make a perfect eccentric with an intention of lifting it. So you're lowering this bar that you just, you know, the bench press, bench press barbell, you're lowering it to your chest and you're loading yourself like you're ready to press it back. You pause on your chest without losing tension, you're ready to blast it back and then your spotters take it off you and you do this about, do this about two, three times. This, this sort of a strategy or variation of it was used by Rick Will. He was, he was able to bench press over £500 wearing a T shirt at the body weight of buck 81 back in the 80s, one of the great greatest bench pressers who was extremely intelligent about his training. And he did the same thing with his heavy attempts as well. And incidentally, even better, not even better, I should say, you do this in a Different day when you combine this same type of eccentric with a very perfect assisted trap, not forced trap like bros do. It's oh, you, bro. You know, the guy's shaking there and dying. But no. So again, let's say that your best bench press is, you know, 315. So you load up 325, you lower it perfectly and you're not. And you're lowering at the speed of your max attempt. So you're not going very, very, very slow. You know how guys do it, they take the first quarter of the range of motion very slow and then they fall through. That doesn't do anything at all. No, you lower it at that rhythm of your maximal weight. You pause and then you press it. And your training partner gives you enough assistance to make it feel like it's about your 90%. So the fact is you're not, you get to feel a supra maximal weight, but you're not experiencing any psychological stress. It's very, very powerful. And again, you do this maybe for one or two singles. This also ties with the Soviet research and gymnast. They came up with something called artificial controlling environment. So they compared a group of gymnasts that was working up to some strength demanding skill with doing typical regressions. And at the same time they were also working on typical strength training, weighted pull ups and so on. And the other group would have the coach provide this perfect assistance to enable the athlete to perform the skill at a higher level, as they put it, living their motor future. Motor future, but with enough help not to, to make it hard but not stressful. And the difference in gains were just, just, just dramatically so much gain, so much faster. So I would say that would be a very good way to use eccentric work. Isometric, isometric training calls can also be very powerful for strength. And a great value of isometric training is in its ability to coach you to live properly and not just lift properly, other other athletic events as well. If, let's say that you're trying to learn to throw front kick and you're doing it all over the place. But if you place your foot on a wall and if your coach or sensei positions your body, your foot in a certain way and teaches you to start, to start applying pressure to that wall and the ground at the same time and kind of pulse it against the wall, adjust your body and then you relax, shake off your muscles and you go hit the bag and suddenly you're going to do so much better. The same thing, let's say that you're trying to Optimize your position for the bottom of the deadlift. So you load up more weight that you could possibly lift. And then you wedge yourself under and you start applying pressure and it doesn't feel good, so you change a little bit. So isometrics are very powerful for not just restrainting the sticking points, but also for optimizing the angles. Then we're also dealing with something that there is also great disinhibition effect. So what your listeners might not know is, so there are two. You have two pedals in your nervous system. As in, pardon me for telling you this, you don't obviously know all this, but. But there's the excitation inhibition, there's the gas pedal and the brake pedal. And there are various influences, some of them psychological, but not all of them that are taking away from your strength. That's called inhibition. And under certain circumstances, there are documented cases, like a lady lifting off the front of a 3,600 pound car to save her son. And there are documented cases of that. So that disinhibition takes place. So isometrics does have some disinhibition effects properties very, very powerful. Also, isometrics teaches you not to give up on a heavy attempt because if you put the experiments were done in a safe manner on the machines, obviously. But if you put an inexperienced person and the machine is moving at a slow rate, so when the speed starts approaching zero, that inhibition takes place. So pretty much the subject thinks the gig is up. I'm not going anywhere. That's it, I'm done. I'm just giving up because I failed. But training with isometrics allows you to develop this kind of a neural drive endurance that you need to grind through safely through a heavy attack. So very, very powerful. How would you incorporate isometrics into it? So you can do this as a part of your warmup? You can also do pause drops. They're fantastic. It's when you combine, combine eccentric, concentric and isometric contraction all in one. So perfect example for the squat, you lower to parallel and you stay tight and you stay there for three to five seconds and then you explode upward. So that. That's a great way to train.
- [38:39]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is an all in one vitamin, mineral probiotic drink with Adaptogens. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still take AG1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement. What that means is that AG1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health. AG1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status, your metabolic health, your hormone health, and much more. So I've consistently found that when I take AG1 daily, my digestion is improved, my immune system is more robust, and my mood and mental focus are at their best. In fact, if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.comhuberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2 with your order of AG1. Again, go to drinkag1.com Huberman to claim this special offer. I'd like to talk about neural drive. I attribute you with popularizing. Maybe you invented it, but certainly popularizing the term. Like greasing the groove in one of your books. And by the way, we provide links to Pavel's books in the show. Note captions I'm a collector of your books.
- [40:14]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you.
- [40:14]
Andrew Huberman
I love them. Some of them are getting to be collector's items. They're a little bit harder to find, but you'll have to compete with me on ebay. But some of them can be found elsewhere and we'll provide links to those. But this notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength training because I was weaned more or less trying to run cross country during the cross country season. Only ran it once, but I greatly enjoyed it and continued that sort of training or trying to put on strength and size. Kind of a numbskull young male approach to things, but that's what it would.
- [40:47]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Do at that age.
- [40:48]
Andrew Huberman
It served me reasonably well. I'm grateful that I included both. However, I was so tuned to this notion of training a body part, creating an adaptation, then waiting for the adaptation to occur, and then training the body part again. The arguments are all over the Internet two times a week, three times a week. And then I came across this concept of greasing the groove, which as a neuroscientist felt so intuitively correct and turns out to be correct. You'll explain what it is, but the idea that more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of opportunities for development of strength, of size, hypertrophy, if one wants, and I would say just generally more flexibility over one's total fitness program. Once one understands this concept, you no longer look at this split or that split, or this many reps or that many reps, or this volume or that volume. All that is important. But you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous system. And to me it was like water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together all these different concepts. So could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is? And then I think the implications of it will become obvious. But we'll also spell out, Andrew, please.
- [42:01]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Interrupt me because this is about to become a. This might get really long. So please interrupt me at any time. So first I'll talk about the neural component, then we're going to talk about the frequency and the morphological adaptation, structural adaptations as it leads. So, ladies and gentlemen, Grease the Groove. We are talking about. Let's use an analogy. Let's imagine that you are a bow hunter and you work in your garage, and then you walk out of your garage and you shoot an arrow and you just go back to going about your business just working in your garage. Or let's say you're a kid who practices martial arts and every, on every break between classes, you just go in the corner and you practice your kata. This is the best way to practice your skill in small portions, in a spaced out manner. What's really fascinating is traditional education and traditional strength training. It's based on the cramming model. So remember, cramming for an exam. So you're studying at night and you somehow squeak by and you pass it, okay, great. And then a couple of days later, you happily forget everything. So in contrast, imagine that you are, let's say you're studying a foreign language. You write words on cards, and at every opportunity you're standing in line in the bank. So the lesser mortals are fooling around on their phones. You're just going through your deck like, oh, can I translate this word? Go, put it back in the deck, flip it over. The next time you are in some other place, you do this again. So this is an example of space practice versus the traditional mass practice. And the evidence of the superiority of space practice is just overwhelming. It goes back to the 19th century and there is at least like more than a thousand papers published on that. And still very few people do that. Which is really sad. And strength is a skill. Two interesting things happened in the 50s. One is Thomas Rush. He was an American exercise physiologist. He proposed that strength adaptation was largely skill. He looked at pretty much the adaptations. He noticed that there's no correlation between the muscle growth and strength. Then at the same time, as Soviet scientist, Stepanov was his last name, he was measuring the electrical activity in the muscles of weightlifters who were pressing overhead. And back then, the press was one of the competition events. And what he found is as the athletes got stronger after some months, the EMGs started dropping off when they're lifting the same weights. So pretty much he found out that the nervous system activity became more economical. They were able to try less hard, yet still live the same weights, or pretty much they could try harder and lift even heavier weights. Hypertrophy could not explain that, because in the 50s, the Soviets were very anti hypertrophy. They were just doing doubles, triple singles. Pretty much if we look at what's going on, it's the hebron mechanisms. So pretty much every time that you activate a particular connection, synaptic connection between the neurons, that connection becomes stronger. So if you do it over and over and over. So the grease, the groove is the analogy is that command that's coming in from your brain to your muscles, that's the groove. That's that pathway. And the more you use it, pretty much the more grease it becomes. So it becomes a superconductor. So in the future, you don't have to try as hard to lift the same amount of weight, or you can try the same amount and you can lift harder. So we haven't even addressed the neural drive yet. We just pretty much made the motor neurons more responsive to it. And it's a very easy and very simple way to train. And strength comes very easily and very, very unexpectedly. To make sure that it does happen, you have to address the issue of specificity. So specificity pretty much means without getting too much into the weeds to get stronger. First of all, you need to lift weights that are heavy enough. And if you're looking about percentages of one rep max, we're looking at like 75 to 85. Typically, if you go too light, you don't make the impression on your nervous system, and it's just not specific enough. If you go too heavy very quickly, you're just going to burn yourself out. And so pretty much like it's a weight that's heavy enough to respect and light enough not to fear. And the second of all, and this is very surprising is you only do about half or fewer reps that you possibly could do. So for example, let's say that you're lifting 80% of your one rep max and let's say that you're able to do 8 reps maximum with it. That's your that which is fairly, fairly common. Well, you're only going to do about 3, 3 to 4 reps per set and that's it. And the gym bros at this point go crazy. Like, where's the intensity? Well, intensity and strength training is just how heavy the weight is. It has nothing to do with the effort. And it's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard you're exerting yourself. There are times for that, there are absolute times for that. But if the weight is heavy enough and if you do half the repetitions that you possibly could do, you're going to get stronger, it's very safe and you're not going to burn out psychologically. And it's also very easy on your body. So also that builds muscle as well, purely because you're able to do a very high volume of work. I'm not able to explain the mechanism, why it builds muscle, but as the Soviets found out in weightlifting research, there's a correlation between the volume and Bravo Troman, between the volume and the hypertrophy. Everything else being equal, you're going to get bigger. So almost every day you're doing the sets of three, four reps, maybe even five, and they start adding up and before you know it, you're stronger and at the same time you have developed muscle. So to summarize, the grease, the groove, you're trying to train moderately heavy as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible. And if you decide to do it in the gym, a very simple protocol would be a set every 10 minutes. It sounds really bizarre, like why would you rest for so long? This apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation. There's so much is still unknown. So we do know the grease, the groove works great, but we speculate that some of it has to do with some of the same phenomena related to learning in other fields. So if you're doing something over and over, like you're saying two plus two is four, two plus two is four, you're just using your short term memory, you're not memorizing anything. But if you say two plus two is four, you go get a coffee, you come back and you try two plus two four. So there's that desirable difficulty that you have in there and you have to process that instead of just go through the groove that apparently helps this adaptation. So rest for at least 10 minutes, do sets of about the repetitions of half of what you're possibly able to do and you know, listen to your body. Typically train two, three days in a row and then take a day off. But listen to your body. Incidentally, this grease to groove is the topic of my next book. I have completed it, it's not published yet. If you look at, I can't pronounce the Hungarian professor's last name.
- [50:01]
Andrew Huberman
Csikszentmihalyi.
- [50:02]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that. So he's talking about that perfect challenge. Perfect practice lies in that channel between boredom and anxiety. So if you put yourself in that channel and if you keep lifting this moderately heavy weights with a moderate effort over and over and over, you're going to get strong. It's one of the many ways to get stronger.
- [50:22]
Andrew Huberman
Are you doing anything in the rest periods between these 10 minutes? So is it, let's say bench press, wait 10 minutes till you bench press again, but in the meantime you're doing Zercher squat five minutes after the first bench pressed.
- [50:35]
Pavel Tsatsouline
That's one of the way to do that. You can do up to three exercise, three exercises at the same time. So let's say like Zerter squat and the bench press and maybe a third thing, but I'd say those two are enough. And another option is you can do that, you can incorporate this into, if you do only one exercise, you can squeeze it into your lifestyle or your athletic practice. So for example, in, let's say you're teaching a track, track practice or martial arts class and every 10 minutes on the clock you just have the class do drop and do three hard, let's say three one arm push ups, okay? And then get back to the class. So there's no interference whatsoever. In fact, it's better than no interference. Back in the 60s, Soviets found out something called the strength after effect. So if you do strength work that's not exhausting in nature and that's not novel to you, it has a tonic effect just for anything that you can do with your brain or with your body, anything. So what they would even do, some coaches would do so called strength warmup. They would warm up as usual for a track class, let's say track practice, then they would do, let's say three sets of three or something like with 80% max, which is not much, and they start their practice. Then the coach noticed that the athletes are starting to droop a little. He'll repeat that. He might repeat that up to three times. So what you have is by having this short, very small dose, like a nanopractice of strength, you rejuvenate yourself and your productivity increases so much so whether you want to just do the strength exercise, several of them in that one hour period, or whether you want to combine that with writing a great American novel, that's, you know, that's your business.
- [52:26]
Andrew Huberman
I suppose if someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home, you could incorporate grease the groove into your entire day.
- [52:33]
Pavel Tsatsouline
That's ideal. Yes. And obviously it's difficult with some equipment, but what you could do, you could use the heavy duty grippers, you could do one arm push ups, you could, you could keep a kettlebell under your desk and do impress it at every opportunity. And again, the idea is really just practice. You just try to hit a perfect, perfect trap. And notice that if you have some issues, if you're a warm up dependent person for orthopedic issues, I'm talking about warm up very much in the body, not the mind. In this particular case, then it might not be appropriate for you. Although with 10 minute rest it might still be okay. But practicing a skill without the warm up, that means rehearsal is very powerful for improving that skill. People think they automatically equate performance with improvement with learning, but it's not so, not at all. When you are doing something that's just out of the blue, it's, you know, the west sniper would take a cold shot that's so much harder because you have to have produced that solution. Or maybe an example that's closer to most viewers, golf. You go to the driving range, you start hitting it and like, wow, you're amazing. You just get yourself fine tuned, you hit, you're perfect, then you go and you play the game and you cannot replicate that because suddenly different club, different topography, everything's different and you didn't have the luxury of that tuning yourself up right there. So it feels, it doesn't feel like you're stronger, but you are going to get much stronger.
- [54:14]
Andrew Huberman
I've been eager to share with you some recent findings that are not my own, but that I think you might be curious about. And then I think most people hopefully we'll be curious about as well. It's not greasing the groove specifically, but it provides a at least partial mechanistic understanding of how particular types of physical movement with this high motor neuron and attentional engagement can generate high levels of Alertness that can be devoted to, as you say, writing the great American novel, perhaps. There's a guy at the University of Pittsburgh named Peter Strick who for the first time started to map the connections between the adrenals and the brain. And he was able to do this using some really cool technology. The basic takeaway is the following. Adrenaline released from the adrenals, as some of the listeners may know, doesn't cross the blood brain barrier, but turns out it binds to receptors on the vagus, which then stimulates noradrenaline in the brain and provides this increase in alertness. So then the question is, how do you get your adrenals engaged? We can sit here and we can do a staring competition, which I'll lose for certain. But, you know, there are all sorts of psychological tools. We get, you know, caffeine, et cetera. There are all sorts of ways to get cold water. But it turns out what Peter found was that there are particular locations in the motor cortex that send basically a two synapse connection, disynaptic connection directly to the adrenals. And the areas of motor cortex that engage the adrenals, cause them to release adrenaline. But just by sheer movement of particular muscle groups are the core, as you were talking about before, like bracing the core causes the release of adrenaline, which then via the vagus, causes the brainstem area to release noradrenaline, wake up the whole brain, essentially increase learning and performance in anything. And as well, the stronger and stronger activation of the motor neurons, deliberate activation of the motor neurons seems to engage adrenaline release. Now, to me, this was a wonderful way of trying to persuade people that they have internal control over this thing that we call motivation, that movement itself can increase adrenaline, which can increase the tendency to want to move.
- [56:17]
Pavel Tsatsouline
As long as, again, you don't want to have too much adrenaline either.
- [56:20]
Andrew Huberman
Right, And I'd like to talk about that, But I think I and so many other people were kind of raised and conditioned, at least in this country, to think, oh, if I want to increase my level of motivation, I need to, like, I don't know, watch an inspiring video. That could be great, or I can drink caffeine or an energy drink, and certainly that will do it. But to me, the discovery that particular movements and particular muscles being engaged in activity itself changes the neurochemical milieu. I mean, of course, it had to be, right? It's a big duh. But I think that, anyway, I was excited to share with you. I didn't discover them.
- [56:56]
Pavel Tsatsouline
That is new to me.
- [56:57]
Andrew Huberman
So I read the Naked Warrior. I was closed when I read it. But it's a wonderful book because it talks about body weight only exercises and this concept of, for instance, like trying to crush one's fist on, you know, making a really strong fist on the other side and how that will increase your. Your gripping ability on the other side. This kind of thing.
- [57:17]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yes. As you know, with your background in neuroscience, obviously there's so many neurological phenomena, like if you can think of like muscle software that we have access to, that if we become conscious about accessing the. We can be so much stronger.
- [57:30]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. So when you talk about doing a set of three or four repetitions, or two to three repetitions at about 85% or 80% of one rep mast waiting 10 minutes, and then the intervening 10 minutes going and trying to learn something important or physical or cognitive. This makes perfect sense to me because of the relationship of adrenaline, but also the way that your entire nervous system has changed in the intervening period.
- [57:53]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And plus you have the contextual interference. So one of the Greece group is not something that I invented. It's something that I was able to codify and explain and possibly refine, but it's been around since the day of Ecclesiastes, and specifically in strength training, Paul Anderson. Paul Anderson, one of the greatest weightlifters of all time. He was a big favorite of the Soviet public. You know, very tough group to impress, but they called him the wonder of nature. He was so strong. And Paul Anderson would do a set of squats, then he would wander around, drink some milk, half an hour later, do a set of presses. Now go do this again. And so he reinvent. I should say reinvent. No, he invented, without knowing neurons from nylons, many of the training concepts that are just cutting edge today. And again, so this concept of contextual interference. Remember we talked earlier how if it's harder for you to produce a solution, if you're trying harder to remember two plus two is four or how to throw the ball, then you're going to learn more as opposed to if somebody just hands it, oh, two plus two is four. So Paul Anderson had both. The spacing time came like, so the groove has been forgotten in the sands of time. And the contextual interference, he did another exercise that erased whatever previous groove right there. And it's very fascinating how looking at some of these old timers and just how. How genius. Something.
- [59:24]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, the unconscious genius aspect of it is so cool. And of course, I don't want to be disparaging of common gym programs these days, but I do Feel like the way that most people train. Yeah, you'll do that? Yeah, the way that most people train in terms of thinking, okay, I'm gonna hit the gym, you know, three, four times a week, or I'm gonna train chest one day and chest and biceps. While that has some value, I feel like, for creating all around strength and hypertrophy, there's just such an incredible treasure trove of other things that you're sharing with us today that are just not discussed as much because people don't take the lens of the nervous system component. One thing that I love to ask about the nervous system in terms of training, adaptation, and recovery is that I was weaned somewhat under the thought patterns of Mike Mentzer. This was in the Dorian Yates era. And I knew Mike a little bit. I paid for a consultant with him over the phone. We never met in person, so that had my mother asking, you know, why is this grown man calling our home? And why are you wired? In the old days, you had to wire somebody money. So I do. But it was so worthwhile because Mike taught me that the goal of training was to induce an adaptation. Anything additional was not necessary, and in his case, he felt was counterproductive. Very infrequent training, et cetera. And it worked tremendously well to take me from like £150 to £210, which I had no need to do, but my body just reacted like crazy. But then Again, I was 16, 17, and 18 years old in that time. Probably could have done any number of different things and experienced similar results. Who knows? But the concept, of course, is that you train to induce an adaptation, then you rest, and then you allow the adaptation to serve the, you know, moving higher poundages in good form, this sort of thing. The problem, however, is that, and Mentzer highlighted this, is that training of any kind, running, lifting, et cetera, taxes both the nervous system as a whole and the muscles locally and the connective tissue. How should we think about training and recovery? So when you describe Grease the Groove, I could imagine if I had a home set up or I'm going to the gym, I could maybe do four or five rounds of this training. But at some point, it becomes counterproductive.
- [61:33]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Wow, A lot of great question.
- [61:35]
Andrew Huberman
I'm just trying to think about how to schedule this sort of thing, keeping in mind that the nervous system fatigues as a whole. And then there's also the issue of local muscle fatigue or even the propensity for injury if you just overdo it.
- [61:47]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Sure, yeah.
- [61:47]
Andrew Huberman
So we could just riff on this.
- [61:49]
Pavel Tsatsouline
If you don't mind, Andrew, I'll break it up because a lot of great questions right there. So one, as you mentioned, there are different ways of training, and again, we degrees, the groove load parameters, apart from the long rests, are very much based on Soviet weightlifting system. And I'd like to talk a little bit about that later. Another system that is completely and radically different, and it ties very much to Mike Menzer's training, for reasons that become obvious, is the classic American powerlifting system from the 80s. And when people argue about training methods, what they need to understand is there are many ways to get the job done. You know, Atkuvir, his research in Estonia found because there's so many different combinations of stimuli and the different, different adaptations that result, you can arrive to similar outcomes in a lot of different ways. So to say this is right and this is wrong, you cannot sometimes do that. I mean, I can say most of things are wrong, but I can also say there's multiple right ways of training and they can be radically different. And they're different because they rely on very different phenomena. So in this particular case, you're talking about recovery and frequency, which is again, a great way to address it. I'm going to talk about two systems that are completely different and yet have that same pedigree that they have brought so many gold medals. So one system is the Soviet weightlifting system is again where athletes would train several times a day. And Bulgarian system is a more extreme example of that, and every day. And the other extreme would be the American powerlifting system, exemplified by Hugh Cassidy, Marty Gallagher, Ed Cohen, Kirk Kowalski. So starting from the 70s through the 90s, those are really glorious day for US powerlifting. And in that system, they would pretty much do one or two heavy sets per lift once a week. So it's kind of a little bit like Mike Mentzer's work, kind of. But we'll address why. So how can that be and how can both systems work? So you address the recovery. There's a concept called heterochronicity, which hetero means different. Chronicity refers to time. So the different systems in the body recover different rates. And if you don't take that into account, then you're going to have some serious problems. So the Soviet system took. If you look at the Soviet system with frequent training, they looked at, okay, we want to do frequent practice, which is exactly what we do. We don't want to beat the muscles up so much. That takes them very long time to recover, you know, not too much eccentric stress. Not too much acidosis, avoiding, things like that. And they were able to adjust the loads in such a way. So let's say your weights are heavy, but not too heavy. The reps don't go too high, so you're able to recover pretty much overnight. And the benefit of that is it's been shown that if you fragment a given workload over more days or more sessions, you get better results. And it's your body is able, and your nervous system, endocrine system, your carcass, everything is able to handle much more if it's split into small doses. So let's use an example of a meal. Let's say if you were trying to an eating competition, how much you can eat in 24 hours. So it's not like those Coney island, you know how many hot dogs you can eat in one sitting? No, but you'd probably eat a lot more if you spread it throughout the day. And this is the same idea, just like that parable from Nassim Taleb about the king that got angry at his son and he says he's going to crush him with a big rock. And he realized, well, what did I do? I don't want to kill this kid, but the king's ward is king's ward, right? So he ordered his peons to break up the rock into pebbles and then just dump these pebbles on the kid. So that's the same idea. So fragmentation of the load always allows you to do more and do it safer. So something else is related to that in some training systems. Some training systems rely on adaptations, let's say for strength that goes in the muscle, that go beyond just the contractile proteins, just, you know, the part, you know, my part, that make that create force. So, for example, the Soviet system, they also tried to increase the storage of creatine phosphate, which is the kind of immediate fuel for muscle contractions. For this type of work, we're lifting heavy weights over and over. And so by training, sometimes easier, you're able to keep stimulating that creatine phosphate adaptation, but without still allowing muscles to recover. So this kind of a dance, and it's fairly complex. Then, on the other hand, the American system did something completely different. And the explanations for what happens in the muscle within this American system, we don't know for sure, but there's a hypothesis by Russian specialist Vadim Pratasinko that seems quite credible. So again, the system. Here's the system. You train hard, you do one hard set once a week or two hard sets. So the satellite cells that are immature cells in the muscle, they're sitting there waiting to jump in if you need to replenish the messed up ones. In order for the satellite cells to get their job done. They try to figure out, scientists try to figure out what sort of stimuli are, are required. And one, a strong case can be made that a very particular damage to the microstructure of the muscle can, can provoke that stimulus. So but that damage has to be very, very specific. If you beat up the muscle with a baseball bat, you're just going to get a whole lot of scar tissue. And you know, some satellite cells will just die and others will just become, becomes scar. But if the cross bridges in the muscle, the cross bridges is that part that does create force in the muscle. If they do tear in a very specific way, it seems to do the job. So the way the muscle contracts is, so there is, imagine that you're rowing a boat on the water. So water is one protein, it's called actin. And myosin is the oars that are moving in there. So the oar dips into the water hooks and pools. And that or relies on available energy in the muscle. So these ATP molecules of stored energy, they're floating around. And the head, myosin head needs that ATP in order to both to hook to produce force, but it also, it needs ATP to unhook as well. And it's in this in between stage, it's called a rigor. So whenever the muscle has produced force, but there is not enough energy for it to relax, so the muscle is stuck in rigor. So think of rigor mortis. So if you tear that body's muscle, you know it's going to tear. And supposedly this is going to happen only when you're able to, when the consumption of ATP is really high in the muscle. But the, but the supply is not. And so if you're, if you do that in the first, let's say 20, 20, 30 seconds before acidosis set in, that's what, that's what should happen. Because if you wait longer, when there's a lot of acid in the muscle, acid, it kills that reaction that, it kills that reaction that uses ATP. So you're not using as much anymore. Sure, the, the demand is down, the supply is down, but it's on demand, so it's not so good. So if you raise that fatigue point, so if you try to deplete that creatine phosphate, that kind of rocket fuel of the muscle within about 20, 30 seconds, then presumably some of these hooks Some of these oars are going to get stuck and when the muscle is lengthening and they're going to tear, and that's a very specific tear. It doesn't happen on the outside of the muscle. It happens just on the inside in there. Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but it's a pretty good theory that does explain Mike Mentzer's method and explains the American powerlifting method, interestingly enough, about Mike Mentzer. And again, to the listeners who are not aware of the method, that means train a muscle really hard, very infrequently, with very low volume. Professor Yudiver Kashansky, before he died, famous Soviet sports scientist, known in the west mostly as the father of what is called plyometric symptoms. The West. But he's also done many other things as well. He spoke very highly about Mensur. He thought Mensur was brilliant. Mensur was an innovator. But many people, some people get good results from it like you did, and a lot of people do not. And so pretty much what Pratasenka suggested that might happen is eventually you'll reach the limit of adaptation of how much you can deplete, how much you can deplete the creatine phosphate in that window. That's when you hit the wall. And this is where the American system comes in. This system is called cycling. The history of cycling is fascinating. The relationship, the interaction between the Soviet and American strength schools is absolutely fascinating. So just to go back for a minute, Soviet track athletes in the 50s were using the typical stupid high rep, high reps to burn. Then in the late 50s, some very sharp young specialist, Vitaly Chizinov, he made a case at a conference. What are we doing? Let's look at what he said. Let's look at Paul Anderson, DY Hepburn, Bruce Randall, these North American strength athletes, let's look what they're doing. They're lifting heavy stuff for sets of 3 to 5 reps. Let's knock this down. Since off Soviet track athletes started doing that right there. So this is how the Soviets, for example, learned from Americans. That's an example of how it went the other way. The classic periodization, as it's known, Matveyev periodization, in which you kind of start out with higher volume and less specific to lower volume, more intensity and so on. That periodization is not used by lifters in the Soviet Union. Lifters thought that's just completely not, it's just not usable. It's just inappropriate for their needs. Arkady Vorabyov, the profession And Olympic champion made very strong case why. But Americans who got some limited information about it, American powerlifters, not weightlifters, were able to develop their own training system based on that premise, something that the Soviets didn't do. And the way it worked is like this. You don't necessarily have very high volume, but you start, I'm going to give you a most classic example of this type of cycling. Again, this is again, Cassidy Gallagher, Colin Karwaski, four week blocks. Let's say there's like going to be three, four week blocks, maybe four. So you do lift once a week. On week four, you go for pr. So let's say this is a month of fives. So this is on your week four, you're going to do a PR set of five. You plan for it. Week three is somewhere around your old pr. Week two is lighter, Week one is lighter still. Okay. And then after that you may increase the weight, but still relative effort is going to drop and you're going to kind of repeat the process. So it does multiple things on the muscular level. So what Parthasanka explained, you pretty much decondition yourself temporarily and you progressively increase that creatine phosphate use. So initially when you're deconditioned, it doesn't take as much to get the stimulus. You don't have to push really hard in first week, you push harder in the second, and harder and harder. There's a concept, their concept in periodization, so in sports science of reactivity versus resistance. Reactivity means how responsive your body is to the stimulus and resistance, kind of like in the medical terms, you know how much it can, you know it, it's, it's not affected by it. So when you're starting light after layoff, your reactivity is high and your resistance is low. It doesn't take much. So boom, sudden you build this muscle and then you keep building up. And when you reach, when you reach a peak, then you just, then you just step back again. And on the side of the nervous system and endocrine system, much later, Soviet research, they said you can train hard. Maximum two weeks out of four, that's it. More than that you cannot handle.
- [75:08]
Andrew Huberman
So for every month you're training two weeks hard, the other ones you're cruising, you're not as hard.
- [75:15]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Sometimes easy, sometimes. There are different ways of programming it. The typical one that you hear about in the west is you're kind of build things up for three weeks and then down on four, it's one of the about 16 different, different possible arrangements doesn't have to be. There can be. Here's one brilliant way. Franco Colombo who passed unfortunately was not just a great bodybuilder, he was a great chiropractor and great strength athlete.
- [75:41]
Andrew Huberman
Super strong.
- [75:42]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Very strong and brilliant. So he told me about his deadlift cycle. Week one moderate. Week two heavy. Week three, moderate. Week four, very heavy. Again, this is a different way of arranging the same concept. And these American powerlifters were able to build a system that built the muscle probably exactly in this manner. What was happening at the same time? Oh yeah. And there's also another angle how that system possibly has worked. This is fascinating. Any type of exercise that you do makes your muscles more slow twitch. It's just the way it is. It's very, very bizarre.
- [76:25]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, even explosive.
- [76:26]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Even explosive.
- [76:27]
Andrew Huberman
Even just crush the bar and drive the deadlift up.
- [76:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Even that the more you do it. So Gold Spinks research back in the 80s that any cycle of stretching or contraction resets the heavy chain myosin, you know, the contractile proteins that makes it towards slower time. So any type of work, if you do biopsy on somebody who is a couch potato, you're going to find that person probably has a higher concentration of white fibers than you and I.
- [76:52]
Andrew Huberman
Wild. Very counterintuitive.
- [76:54]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Very counterintuitive. And so that's like a default setting for the fibers. However, if you take time off, something changes and it changes, it goes beyond the change. So this, this research came out of Sweden. I believe when they trained a group of subjects and strengths, they saw a predicted decrease in the ratio of type 2x fast H5 fibers. Then they took a couple months off and then they experienced, they called it MHC overshoot myosin heavy chain again like fast fiber overshoot. So they had something like 70 more percent fibers after that.
- [77:35]
Andrew Huberman
Wild. Nobody takes two, three months off these days.
- [77:39]
Pavel Tsatsouline
But they figured out, Verkhosansky figured out that is not needed for athletes because obviously you get deconditioned in other ways. Right. So remember we talked about heterochronicity. Different processes take place at different rates. So it's like you're constantly playing the whack the mole. So this is getting out of shape, but this is not recovered yet. It's a game. That's a game of training, programming. So in the American system, first of all the infrequent training, it reduced the stimulus for the conversion of the fibers towards a slower isoform, slower types. And the second, all the taper that they did later. So suddenly switching for a five suit like one triple one double for a few weeks. If you do that for just a few weeks, you do like a one triple one double, you're not going to lose much muscle mass because it really takes over a month. But there's enough time for the myosin to reconfigure itself to a faster type. So that's probably what happens. Interesting and neurologically I think what happens probably they exerted themselves very strongly once, once, twice a month. So it's again in, you know, neural drive probably with strength and disinhibition and other things like that. And the irony is the system has lost its popularity. Some records in the deadlift, like Dan Austin's record and possibly Naba's set back in the 90s and 80s. There's oh yeah, Lamar Gantt. Lamar Gant is, this is the strongest deadlifter pound per pound in history. So like 683 at buck 32 or something like that. And it was done back in the 80s so he trained that way. Dan Austin. In other lifts records have increased in part because of the equipment changes and some other reasons. But Ed Cohn dominated the platform for decades. So there are some great, great lifters who train this way. But then the system lost its popularity for reasons have nothing to do with its effectiveness. This it doesn't mean it's appropriate for everybody though because train the lift once a week for one or two sets. There's not much practice and that's a problem. So unless you're training under very high level coach or you're already coming in with great skills, it's really good. Second, if you need any kind of level of endurance or if you're playing other sport, you're going to be very sore from this type of training. So it's a great system for certain type of people.
- [80:02]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors. Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium all in the correct ratios but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking element dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes to make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes. I dissolve one packet of element in about 16-32oz of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and and therefore losing a lot of water. And electrolytes, they have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of Element. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. And now that we're in the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, Element has their Chocolate Medley flavors back in stock. I really like the chocolate flavors, especially the chocolate mint when it's heated up so you put it in hot water and that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate, especially when it's cold and dry outside when hydration is especially critical. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.comhuberman to claim a free Element Sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by Joovv. Joovv makes Medical Grade Red Light Therapy Devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light sources have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, even mitochondrial function, and improving vision itself. What sets Joov lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light light in combination to trigger the optimal seller adaptations. Personally, I use the Joovv whole Body panel about three to four times a week, and I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you'd like to try Joovv, you can go to Joovv spelled J-O-O-V-V.com Huberman Joovv is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off Joovv products. Again, that's Joovv spelled J O O-V-V.com Huberman to get up to $400 off based on what you just told us about Franco's training and the rest seems that shorter training cycles might be advantageous, even just conceptually and practically. Like, I've tended to break up my year into 12 to 16 week training cycles, doing that for a long time. And now that I'm 49, this is the year that I decided I was going to start modifying my training a bit because certain little things aren't working for me as well. You might laugh. I'm actually curious whether or not you'll laugh or approve. I switched at some point to using the belt squat. These belt squat platforms. I just feel like that you may.
- [83:22]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Want to explain that.
- [83:23]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, the belt squat is essentially you stand on a platform, so you're on. Unfortunately, you're on display for everybody there. But that's not why I do it. You step up onto a platform sometimes it's called a pitch shark. Rogue makes a belt squat. There are other ones, of course, have no relation to any of those companies. And you wear a big thick lifting belt, but it's kind of sagging in the front. And then you. As if you were going to attach a weight to it, but you attach yourself to. Usually it's a cable or a lever between your legs. Sounds scary, but that lever or cable can drop below the level of the platform you're standing on and you can load up quite a bit of weight on this. What I love about it is you can get very vertical if you want, or just a little bit of forward tilt because you can place your fingers on the handles, you can grip them if you like. The point being, there's a lot of degrees of freedom in terms of stance and I like that you're not loading the shoulders.
- [84:12]
Pavel Tsatsouline
True.
- [84:13]
Andrew Huberman
I, you know, I don't want to sound like a wuss, but I'll do it. You know, I moved from standard squats, back squats, to front squats, then to hack squats, and then now I've been playing around a lot with the belt squat and really enjoying it because you can go really deep, can blast out of the bottom position, you can load up lots of plates on there if you have the strength to do so without the feeling that you're just compressing your whole squat spine or worrying about dropping the weight. So I'm enjoying working with it. I love your thoughts on belt squats.
- [84:38]
Pavel Tsatsouline
True.
- [84:39]
Andrew Huberman
But in general I, I am hearing you and I'm thinking that moving away from this 12 to 16 week cycles is going to be advantageous because what I'm finding is that it's Hard to account for life events in that way and, and plan training and travel and all this. But four weeks is kind of a manageable thing this month. This is what I'm going to do. And of course the months work together. The body doesn't know the difference between February and March, as it were.
- [85:03]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, in California it doesn't.
- [85:04]
Andrew Huberman
It does, right? It does, right, exactly. The seasonal cycles are real elsewhere. But I'm thinking shorter training cycles might be a strong conceptual and practical framework. And yeah, I'd love your thoughts on both of those. The belt squat or legwork that's non spine compressing and shorter training cycles as a general theme that people might think of incorporating into their training.
- [85:27]
Pavel Tsatsouline
The belt squat and this leg work that's not spine compressing. I'm going to address healthy people like yourself. So if somebody has medical restrictions, you got to do belt squat because the doctor says so, that's what you got to do. As long as you're also addressing the rest of your posterior chain, as long as you're training your lower back, your upper back, obviously your neck, which obviously you're doing that and in some other manner, there's absolutely no problem with that. So let's say you're doing some shrug pulls or something, you got that taken care of. Or you're doing some deadlifts. And also for powerlifters, what powerlifters do, it's a tactic, is when you're training the same lift, especially if you train the same lift very frequently, there is always that heterochronicity. Something is not catching up quite as fast. So you're going deadlifting and your hands are beat up. Use straps, you know, or you come into the deadlifting and your back feels like, well, it's time to deadlift. My back is not quite ready. Well, you could go do a narrow sumo or something like that. So there are ways of modifying things this way so you're able to. If let's say you hit some hard deadlifts or hard squats and you need some additional leg work, sure, you don't need any extra stimulation for your upper back and mid back. However, if you are a person who has more of a minimalist who does fewer exercises, then you just can't afford that because then you're going to have to do some additional exercises, you're going to do something else. So may I suggest for listeners and viewers to do Zercher squats, get a fantastic exercise. It does not beat up your shoulders, it does not build up your elbows or your wrists. It may leave some bruises, you know, but it's okay. You can live with that. And does that answer for the bell squat?
- [87:17]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [87:17]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And by the way, machines in general, here's also very interesting observation about machines. Machines are very useful for advanced trainees and fairly useless for beginners.
- [87:30]
Andrew Huberman
No, I love that you said that. I barely touched machines early on in my training. I dare I say call it a career, but I've been doing it for more than 30 years, so I'll call it a. A stage. Yeah, it's a decent run.
- [87:43]
Pavel Tsatsouline
But if you imagine. But imagine the scenarios, what people do? What do people do? Oh, it's safer. Get in, climb into this machine right there. You're not developing any stabilizer. So you get out of this machine, you get crushed somewhere. But on the other hand, if you are more. If you're more advanced lifter. So like, you know, Marty Gallagher, one of the top powerlifting coaches in the world, he might recommend leg presses in a very specific deadlift stance to a lifter. And this is going to increase strength in your leg drive without beating up your back. But you're already doing your deadlifts. You can definitely do that. So advanced lifters may make a good use of machines and they don't need to be taught how to do that. They can figure it out. But beginners really should just use exclusively free weights. I'm not saying everybody should do squat, bench, deadlift, kettlebell, snatch and this and that. No, there's a large menu of exercise to choose from, but you got to choose just from that menu where you discover the weight. That's free, that's truly, truly free. Shall we move on to the cycle? Shorter cycle.
- [88:44]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, the shorter cycle.
- [88:46]
Pavel Tsatsouline
A lot of it depends on the type of programming that you do, so the type of progression that you use. So if I may, may I step to the side on that? So in strength training, you can look at the typical linear progression. We just progressively increase the weight. It only works for beginners, obviously. You look at the wave progression where you know you're going up for a while, then backing off and then going up again. And interestingly enough, in this classic American cycle, there's a wave there, even though the weights keep going up every week. But if you did a set of five with £500 on the fourth week of your fives, and then you went to 520 for triple, 520 for triple is a lot easier. So there is a deload built in there. Just people don't realize it. So it is a form of waveloading as well. Then there is also the step loading. Step loading is a very interesting way of going about it and I believe it's the preferred programming choice for do it yourself people who not necessarily aspire to records but want to train in a very simple manner. And step loading pretty much means where you start out, it's kind of like reverse. Think of George Costanza approach to progressive overload. Right? So it's like regressive overload. Do the opposite. Instead of starting light and going heavier, start fairly heavy and then stay with it and then stay with it and stay with that until it becomes fairly, fairly light and then increase. In that case you're staying this longer. So that's a good approach. For less experienced people there are limitations, advanced athletes run into limitations of this method. And finally there is a variable overload, which is what's used in the Soviet weightlifting system and later in Russian powerlifting. And there's no progression there at all. It is just based on pure aperoiodicity, irregularity. So it's like imagine muscle confusion, but the smart kind and nervous system confusion where lows whiplash like at least 20% every time in volume from session to session or week to week and exercise are changed and so on. So there's no progression whatsoever. So if you're using a fairly conventional linear or wave progression, the shortest cycle is generally a good idea, at least for older lifters. Like in using the American powerlifting experience, older lifters looking back at Ernie France, Ricky Crane, Ricky Crane especially, who passed recently, unfortunately. So they were observing how an older lifter can't afford to start as light because he ends up losing ground too much and he can't afford to go as heavy as well or not for long. So they pretty much switched to shorter cycles, something like eight week cycles even possibly six week cycles. So it's a legit. It's a legit approach. But there are many different ways. Obviously, because you're looking at the big picture, you kind of have to look at it from up close and from afar. But overall I'd say yes, for older and more experienced lifters it's a good idea.
- [92:05]
Andrew Huberman
Great. Most people I think who do resistance training these days would like to also have some degree of cardiovascular fitness. In fact, I think one of the great things that's happened in the last five to 10 years is that most everybody, men, women, we can talk about kids and kid training, but adult men and women are thinking about muscle, the importance of having muscle and being strong in particular as part of Their longevity and health. This is a great progression. That's so very different than when I was growing up where the only people, at least in American gyms that lifted were preseason football players, bodybuilders, and maybe a few other niche groups. But now things have really changed. Earlier we were talking about why the Soviet system and training for strength is. Has been the tradition and here why things are just so different in how we conceptualize resistance training. And I'll just go out on a limb and say what I believe and have thought for a long time, which is that what screwed up everything in terms of people's conceptualization about how to use resistance is bodybuilding that, you know, I mean, no knock against people that want to make bigger muscles.
- [93:17]
Pavel Tsatsouline
That was a screw up, number one.
- [93:18]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, that was. Yeah. It seems to be that the idea is, you know, you go to the gym multiple times per week, you get a pump. I mean, this notion of the pump, like it always feel, it feels aversive to me. Not the pump itself, but when people talk about it, it just feels a little inappropriate, like, let's get a pump. Like, it just feels weird when people say that in any event, but this whole notion of just flushing the muscle with blood and getting it to, sure, you get some window into your potential future self if you go home and eat a bunch of food and sleep, but somehow it's so unathletic in its approach. And I have friends who've done competitive bodybuilding and that sort of thing. Not too many, but. So I have respect for the sport at some level, but I feel like the way it's spilled over into quote, unquote, gym culture has done equal harm and good. And what I like so much about your work is that it's really about strength as a skill, strength as an asset for longevity. And I guess when I think about somebody who wants to be strong, somebody who wants to be healthy, I also have to ask, should people be training for strength and endurance like the two opposite ends of the spectrum? Because it seems to me that would be the answer.
- [94:28]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Great question.
- [94:29]
Andrew Huberman
As opposed to what most people do, which is, hey, I'm gonna go to the gym, maybe I'll push a sled and then I'll, I don't know, I'll do some kettlebell swings and then I'll also do some pull ups and then I'm gonna, you know, I'm like, take a picture of my tricep in the mirror. I mean, it just seems like while it's better than doing nothing, it's clearly not making America that much healthier. And I just think there's such a vast landscape of opportunity in training for strength and endurance. But they seem at such odds with one another for most people. So maybe we could just kind of throw up on the whiteboard here. This notion of training to get strong, strength as a skill, strength is something that's valuable for longevity. I think we touched on that a little bit earlier. And then endurance, the ability to carry two suitcases to the airplane without coughing up along at the end. Also the ability to take a hike with your partner or your kids, maybe actually have a backpack on your back and not have to stop every 50 paces just being a fit overall person. Which one? Forgive me for the duration of this question, but when one travels to Europe, I haven't spent too much time in Eastern Europe. But when you get over to, you know, Switzerland or Austria, you see people who are strong and they have endurance. I mean, I imagine a Sherpa is strong with endurance as well. Right.
- [95:41]
Pavel Tsatsouline
By the way, Sherpas are really messed up. Their mitochondria truly messed up. This is excessive hypoxia. It's very interesting. Their metabolism is quite severely anaerobic. It's very weird. Oh, weird. They're the markers of oxidative stress is really, really high. But, sorry, that's off topic.
- [95:56]
Andrew Huberman
No, no, we can touch on that because it's interesting. People who live at altitude and up.
- [96:00]
Pavel Tsatsouline
To a certain point, Denver is good. The Himalaya is not good.
- [96:03]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, well, yeah, I have Scandinavian relatives, and you go to Denmark or Sweden or Norway, and you just look at them. These people are so healthy. Their posture is great, they're strong, and they're not spending a lot of time in gyms. Sometimes they are. So what's going on in terms of strength and endurance and maybe how bodybuilding and this notion of building muscle has perhaps caused some issues that we need to help people reconceptualize.
- [96:32]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Once again, several great questions. Let's talk about bodybuilding. And then before getting to endurance, what you said, it's absolutely true. But I'd say there are different types of bodybuilding. If you look at bodybuilding historically, guys were strong. I've had the honor of knowing some golden age era bodybuilders like Franco Colombo and Dave Draper and Clarence Bass. And these guys were formidable. They were not just pretty boys. They were absolutely extremely strong. So I think something happened in the culture where bodybuilders stopped valuing strength. Some bodybuilders, there's still a number of guys out there who are following traditional methods and are strong. Also, interestingly enough, the bro split, you know, hit muscle once a week. It's not necessarily bad if you again, follow more of into this classic American powerlifting model. So instead of training three times a week, you train five, you know, in addition to your squat day, deadlift day, bench day, you can have shoulders day and, and arms day and whatever, but you go heavy. You know, look at Reg park, you know, with his sets of five. And if you focus, if you emphasize this medium reps. And again, Soviets eventually came to the conclusion that for strength, you should stick in the one to six repetition range. And you shouldn't do a lot of singles and doubles. Threes and fours should predominate, but fours, and especially fives and sixes, this is where you get both hypertrophy and strength. That's that beautiful combination. And fives have a great tradition, American powerlifting as well. If you train with fives, you're going to get muscle and you're going to get strength and you're not going to complicate things. So there are some bodybuilders out there who train in this particular manner, and they're fantastically strong. Just not many of them, unfortunately. But I also would like to add that there is another influence that messed things up. I would take the bros of the 90s with the big bench press and the chicken legs to these guys who stand on balls and juggle oranges and whatever the hell they're doing. I mean, the idea is. So there's the concept of neuroplasticity, which obviously you know so much more than I about, that's always thrown around. Oh, you need variety. And so they throw every circus trick at these poor clients. And by the way, I use the word clients purposefully, like at Strong first. At our School of Strength, we have students because hair salons of clients. But in that world, they're definitely clients. Well, today you're going to stand on one foot and then you're going to pull on this cable and then tomorrow you're going to kneel and you're going to do this kind of thing. While asymmetrical loading and symmetry are absolutely something that's needed under certain condition, you need to do it in a professional way. Like if you look at Grey Cook's work, Gray will tell you, just get yourself symmetrical and start lifting instead of resort to this unlimited. What colleague of mine, Mark Rifkin, called random acts of variety. So I'd say that's the other. There are way too Many choices. And when there are no constraints, when everything's available, you go to a store, everything's available. You don't know what to pick, and you can stick with that. So that's a very big problem, I would say. So I would say the less time people spend on the Internet, unless you're looking up research papers or doing something else valuable or fine, watching a good movie, that's all right. So unless you're looking up a research paper or watching a movie, forget about it. It or your podcast or my website, that's it. The rest of it is off limits. But strength and endurance. Endurance is a very broad term. And if we talk about. Let's talk a little bit about training for athletes for endurance, and let's talk maybe a little bit for the general population we're trying to do for health and again, for just going for a hike. So the endurance of being able to do triathlon or swim a very long distance, the adaptations are primarily taking place in the slow fibers. And you have some very specific adaptations to the capillaries and the mitochondria. So many things, but in a very specific way. And that's not going to help you. Let's say, if you're a fighter, it's happened over and over where a guy who's been marathoner, he takes up MMA and he starts getting gassed really rapidly, because while he has his slow fibers can keep going forever, but not at the intensity that's required for this particular sport. And also we're talking about there's endurance that's peripheral and central. So you're talking about, obviously your heart, you're talking about your lungs, you're talking about the plumbing, but then you're also talking about the extraction and use of the oxygen, which is huge. And it's totally different. It can be trained with the same methods, but adaptations are very different. So then when people realize that, oh, let's start smoking, these MMA guys and martial arts guys and BJJ guys, let's just make them puke. And that's going to improve the endurance, and it does improve the endurance, but a very high cost. So in the Soviet sports science, there's a term the cost of adaptation comes from Felix Mayo. So he was, well, a cardio pathologist originally, but later, again, his research, the research on stress is amazing. So there's the cost of adaptation, and it's the same thing is pretty much as buying a car or table. You can get the same table for a lower price where you can pay the top dollar. So you can increase your strength while at the same time blowing your back out, or you can increase your VO2 max while getting arrhythmia in the process, or you can do it in a healthy way. So one of the issues you have to look at, they're trying to lower the biological cost of the adaptation. So in strength training, we do that by very careful, not training hard too often. So again, the American system is two weeks out of four, the Soviet system, pretty much the same, although the planning. The planning is going to be different. First, if we look at the cardiovascular adaptations before, we're looking into the mitochondria and into the muscle, most of the work should be done below the threshold, pretty much. So what's the threshold? So for runners, let's say you're running and you're able to maintain a conversation, and when you start running too fast and you cannot maintain the conversation, you pass the threshold. It's like you're going faster and you're breathing harder linearly, and suddenly it goes like this, like a hockey stick. So at that point, your body's no longer able to process all that acid and things are starting to get hard. So there are certain implications. There are certain implications for your muscles, for sure. We'll discuss that in a few minutes. But for your heart, there are two things we're primarily trying to train. One, we're trying to train the stroke volume, so pretty much how much blood the heart can pump out with each contraction. And it's very simple thing to do. You get up to like, you know, 70 to 70 to 85% of your maximal heart rate. So the heart starts stretching, literally. So. So this blood is incoming and the heart starts stretching and it requires volume. Some Tour de France riders, they might throw the food in the back of the cycle and they ride all day because that's what they've got to do. And that requires that adaptation. For people who just do. For health, you don't need to do that much. You know, 30, 40 minutes, several times a week is enough. But for a high level, you have to stretch the heart. If you start redlining the heart rate, the heart starts twitching. So there's no time for it to, to fully, to fully relax and stretch. You're no longer really increasing your stroke volume. And what you're doing right now, you're strengthening your ejection fraction, which is like the strength of the heart, which is needed for athletes whose sport require red lighting. The heart rate, you know, if you're a fighter, if you are a 400 meter runner, you absolutely need to do that. But what they found, it went back to German research, going to decades later, and then the Soviet research. If you start redlining your heart rate before you have that volume that you put in and built up the stroke volume, you're just heading for pathology. So there are arrhythmias, there's all sorts of different things that, that the afibs, all sorts of things that can start, happen that are bad. And also your performance is not going to be very high because again, your stroke volume is not there. And even for athletes who do that, they should do it for a very short period of time. It's just too stressful and it's just not needed. Typically it's a peak, it's peaking phase for some weeks before leading up to the competition. So pretty much steady state, steady state exercise, like riding a cycle or jogging or hiking, when you're still able to talk, it's the best, most efficient and healthiest way to, to promote that quality. When you're increasing your heart stroke volume. If you decide to get a little more intense at some point, interval training is appropriate. But unfortunately it's completely and totally messed up and misunderstood. It's like a catch all term high intensity interval training. And Brent Rochelle, a professor out of San Diego, said, this is nonsense. This term is a nonsense. What does it even mean? Like what's high intensity? And also here's a question, what does low intensity interval training mean? Going back to taking a step to the side. But that discussion will help us when we discuss what happens in the muscle terminology. So there are different rest periods between sets. There is the ordinary rest period. So which means you pretty much recover your function. It's like you're just as strong or just as enduring as from the previous set. There is the Supramax rest period when you, if you rest extra, sometimes you get some extra performance out of it. And there is this stress rest period when the next set is going to be harder. Your performance may or may not be compromised, but it's going to be harder. So with ordinary stress, ordinary rest periods, that is called in track, it's called repeat training. You know, so you run 100 meters, then you rest for whatever, 10, 15 minutes, as long as you need longer possibly, then you repeat it again and your performance stayed this way. Interval training again is established. It just means that things are going to get worse from set to set. So that's the definition of interval training. The irony is the interval training was designed to increase the intensity of exercise while reducing the demands on the body. So if you look at the works of work of Fox and Edwards, their pioneers of internal training in the United States, they gave some great examples. So let's say you're running for 30 seconds and you're at this speed, and you're going to produce this much acid, and your heart rate is going to be this high. Well, if you run for 10 seconds with short periods in between at the same speed, you're going to produce a lot less acid, and your heart rate is not going to climb to the stratosphere. And that type of training is very, very useful. And interval training can be used for promoting any type of adaptation. You can use it for hypertrophy. So here's one training method I learned from my colleague Fabio Zonin. It was designed by professor massaroni in Italian, Mr. Universe and Professor. Okay, you take 80% of your one rep max, let's say presumably eight rep max. Set a five, rest for 30 seconds. Set a five, rest for thirty seconds. If you cannot do it anymore, you're done. And then you come back maybe 10 minutes later, do it again. That's an example of interval training again.
- [109:01]
Andrew Huberman
I see.
- [109:01]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And you can structure interval training for adaptations within the muscle of mitochondria, and you can also do that for your heart. So here's how you do it for the heart. Today, there are a lot of fancy popular protocols, but all you have to do is go back to what Germans did many decades ago. Here's the premise. Your vegetative system, your heart, your lungs, your plumbing, they have inertia. So, for example, imagine yourself as a kid. You run really, really hard. You run for 100 meters or something, or less, maybe, and everything's fine. And then you're talking to your body. Suddenly you start sucking with. So that's an example of this inertia. So if you get your heart rate up to about 85 to 90%, one rep max, and then you suddenly switch to jogging, you don't want to stop because that's just way too hard for your heart. Without getting that venous return from muscles working, what happens is the heart slows down, but there's that blood keeps on moving, and the blood literally stretches the walls of the heart.
- [110:09]
Andrew Huberman
I see. So sprint perhaps 100, 200, 300, 400 meters, and then jog back.
- [110:15]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Traditionally, it was not quite a sprint. The duration would be typical 60 to 90 second. The intensity is such that you get up to top off at 85, 90% of your heart rate max, something like that. And Then you jog until your heart rate goes to about 60, 70%. So that's roughly about the same, probably. And that to look things up, it's like German interval training that was done. It is based on very definite physiological events. Like, this is what the heart does, this is what we're trying to do with the heart. And instead of inventing some things that are simply trash the body for no reason whatsoever. And part of the problem also, Andrew, is it's very easy to get misled by quick gains. And it happens in strength world and in endurance world. Let's remember the years when you and I and every other male listener bench press their max. Once a week you're strong, next week you're stronger. Third week you're stronger. Like, you're doing the math. You're doing the math. Like, okay, well, I should be setting the national record by Christmas and maybe I'll be going to the world by summer. And then at six weeks, you're done. And for experienced athletes, happens sooner. Like after three weeks. The same thing with endurance. When you start doing glycolytic work, when you start redlining heart rate and increasing the aesthetic, your performance jumps so quickly, it's very contagious. It's like, oh, not contagious. Pardon me. It's very exciting. And you think that you're going to keep going forever, but you really, absolutely will not. So if you want to train for. If you want to train your heart, a good way of doing that is steady state work. If you decide to do some sort of intermittent work, there are several different ways. One is intermittent exercise. That's more of a repeat in nature, not interval, which is very bizarre to people. Let's say that you go moderately hard for 10 seconds, you go easy for 10 seconds, and you do this for 30 to 60 minutes. Imagine doing that.
- [112:29]
Andrew Huberman
That's good work.
- [112:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
It is good work. But you know what would be shocking to you? That you're not going to produce that much ass or you're gonna redline your heart rate better. Would be like, like 10 seconds of work, 20 seconds of rest. That would be fascinating research that Swedes did back in the 50s and 60s on that. It's amazing. If you keep the work periods short, you're able to not produce a lot of acid, but just go very, very hard. And you're gonna be able to train your heart and your lungs in this manner too. You can also do. And you also have peripheral adaptations in the muscles, mitochondria and so on. Vascularity. So some capillarization Happening too. But you know, it's also interesting, there's one particular type of. I hate the fact that it falls under the high intensity interval training umbrella because it's not. Because everything that sounds like hit, it's not good to me because it's just made up label. But there's one type of training that delivers great benefits to your cardiorespiratory system. And at the same time it also does that for, you know, for your mitochondria and even builds muscle at the same time in track. It is called glycolytic power repeats. And in the last 20 years there are several good papers that were done on that. Dybala burgoymaster, I think, pardon me if I'm mispronouncing their names, but pretty much you do a wingate like a 30 seconds of heart exercise followed by approximately 5 minutes of rest and you repeat it several times. Here's what's unique about this, this type of method. It gets your heart rate up to about that 85, 85, 90% or something. Then you're going to walk it off after that. So you are going to get adaptations for your heart. It's not the most effective way, but it's for healthy people. It's a healthy way and it's a very efficient way at the same time. We'll discuss later what happens in the mitochondrial level. But also what's interesting, you're also likely to get build some muscle as well. And typically there is the conflict which we're getting to this point about, like strength versus endurance. Typically there's a conflict of strength versus endurance. Because if you're looking in the mtor on one side, ampk on the other side, things seem to be like, okay, this is pulling one way, this is pulling the other way. But somehow this particular load, while promoting peripheral and central endurance, also endurance, at least in the fast and intermediate fibers, also does promote muscle growth. Interesting.
- [115:09]
Andrew Huberman
And what sort of exercise this is? Not sprints. This would be kettlebell swings, for instance.
- [115:13]
Pavel Tsatsouline
In the studies that were done, they used wingates, they use cycle. They cycled sprinting. If you are going uphill, you could.
- [115:21]
Andrew Huberman
Certainly do that because this 30 seconds is hard. Yes, you're pushing.
- [115:26]
Pavel Tsatsouline
You're pushing. Yeah. Going on a track, it's too easy to get something messed up. So going uphill, you can do that. We do that with kettlebells. We did this work in my first Kettlebell School over 20 years ago where we would do a set of. You take a heavy kettlebell, moderately heavy kettlebell, like you know, for, you know, for you or me to be like a 70 pounder and we would snatch it really hard for a set of 20, 25 reps and then we just jog till the heart rate comes down and then we take this leisurely powerlifting rest and we're going to do it again. And it's a fantastic way to promote various aspects of fitness. So you're going to get in cardiorespir endurance, you're going to have get peripheral adaptations and endurance in the muscle and you're also building muscle at the same time. The reasons for that, here's the theory again. All the conversations we have about this is what happens in the muscle. All these are theories. We know pretty much if we do X, we're going to get Z, whatever or Y some kind of result at this point, but we may not necessarily know for sure. So the following is another one of the theories, but it's another good credible one. So this is Professor Viktor Silianev. So according to him, the preconditions for muscle growth, in addition to the obvious, like food and things and hormones, so when you reach a certain level of acidosis, only a certain level of acidosis, not necessarily very high, that those hydrogen ions will make the membrane permeable to the hormones, they're going to enter and go into the nuclear less and start doing their job. So that's one of the part of the explanation. Then at the same time also the free creatine when creating phosphate, that hot fuel gets burnt off, that's also anabolic for one reason or another. So there are some explanations. Whether that's how it is or not, I don't know. But the fact is doing a hard 30, 40 second set followed by a very generous rest, we're talking about five, ten minutes and repeating it five times, possibly more. It works very, very well.
- [117:34]
Andrew Huberman
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- [119:05]
Pavel Tsatsouline
All right, well first of all, whenever your heart rate is high, the very first thing is to not to suddenly stop because you want to. There are valve one way valves in the veins that whenever you contract the muscles of the legs, they help to milk the blood back through to the heart. So basically they reduce the stress on the heart. So just walk it off first. The first step, if your heart rate was high, then the second thing is you want to do exercises. You want to do relaxation, myo relaxation, muscle relaxation exercise. What they are is if you watch boxers how they, you know, shake off their, shake off their shoulders and drop and drop their hands and do things like that. These exercises go back to the 30s. Soviets used them since the 30s and they used them with elite athletes, kids and grade schools and everybody. So these exercises serve several functions. One is if you are doing an exercise that is strength exercise in nature, some of the cross bridges are stuck pretty much. And so your muscle is thixotropic, it's like gel. So by moving your muscle in a passive manner, you get, you get it unstuck and so you restore circulation, obviously. And the other reason is again, control of muscular tension is very, very important. It's important to learn how to contract the muscle for strength. It's very important how to relax for speed, for endurance, just for happy life. If you look at the best sprinters, note how relaxed their faces are when they run, their jaws relax, how relaxed their necks are. So relaxation is something that's practiced just like tension. So regardless of what exercise that you just did, shaking off, we call this fast and loose drills. Shaking like passive, like turn your muscles too fat. So you want to do this for a little bit. Then after that it depends how long is your rest. So if you're taking and depends what exactly that you're doing. In some extreme examples, let's say that you're a sprinter. Remember we talked like doing sprint repeats with let's say 100 meters and in 15 minutes you think, wow, sounds like a great, great training session. Well, the problem is these guys do need these 15 minutes to get the acid out of the system and have some other functions to recover. But after a couple of minutes, the CNS excitability goes down. So what the Soviets figured out back in the 40s still is what you do then after you walked it off, after you shook it off, you here and there you insert some very kind of like enlightened easy hops or whatever using the same muscle groups. So these poor athletes really have a complicated rest protocol. There's really no rest for the wicked there. If you are a lifter who's taking very long rest periods in between, let's say you take those 10 minutes, then after your heart rate is down and after you show cough and after you walk till you can just sit down, you can do whatever you want. Do not sit a slouch, because obviously Stu McGill explained why that's not a good idea. And speaking of slouching, one reason that runners get their backs jacked up after running or some endurance event is again they go into their knees and they, you know, get into that collapsed posture and their discs are really pliable and warm after the run and then suddenly put them into flexion and they get messed up. So yeah, you also gotta like you point out to watch our posture, but you really gotta watch your posture during recovery because you slump between your sets of squats and then you know, you could blow something out right there.
- [122:43]
Andrew Huberman
Interesting. I used to think that I would this recurring sort of lower back hip thing that I finally feel is under control. And I used to think that it correlated with travel and something about maybe not sleeping as well and traveling perhaps. But what I've noticed is even if I just sit too much after training my legs hard, I end up with this back issue. So just moving to standing desk configuration after training legs irrespective of travel has really helped. And I think, I mean, nowadays there's all this excitement about walking. I don't know if you, you know, I don't know how much time you spend on social media. But like, walking is the new thing for 2024. Okay. You know, people discovered walking lower, you know, post meal blood glucose. I mean, all stuff. It was very healthy. It's intuitive, great thing to do. We'll see what happens in 2025 with the, with the new.
- [123:26]
Pavel Tsatsouline
What's the next thing?
- [123:27]
Andrew Huberman
And I'm a fan of walking, but in no small part because it just feels like it loosens up everything after training. And I like to train early in the day if possible. And I know it's a dramatic reduction in kind of aches and strains as.
- [123:41]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Opposed to also the other thing you can do. I remember when I watched your podcast with Stu McGill, you mentioned that, that the upward facing dog. Cobra. Cobra helps you. Right. Putting yourself in extension. So for people who, for whom that works, it's. You can just lie on the line, the floor in your elbows and just read a book. So, for example, add strong first courses when people do exercise. And then we teach them. So we have several authorized postures. So you either have to sit ramrod straight, you know, you can sit in a lotus or seizure or something like that, or you can, you know, half kneel, still upright, or you can lie on your stomach. So we do not allow this, this collapsed posture because this is a great, great way to get hurt. Plus, you know, you look like a slacker when you're slacker mentally, you're not going to be focused on whatever you're supposed to be doing. So I think that's, I think that's a good idea. And to bring us back to. Do you want to talk a little bit about the peripheral adaptations from endurance?
- [124:39]
Andrew Huberman
Please?
- [124:40]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Okay. And then maybe we can talk about like, what should people, what should people do who are not athletes? So a much bigger thing than the VO2 Max is the adaptations, the ability of your muscles to extract and use the oxygen. So this again, calls this revolution. Anti glycolytic revolution comes from also Yudeva Koshansky. Again, he's known as the father of plyometrics, but he's so much more than that. And back in 1980, he looked at the typical endurance training protocols and he says, okay, everything. Everybody's trying to push the athlete to the greatest degree of discomfort and make the athlete accustomed to that degree of discomfort. And he says that that's just wrong. Instead we need to figure out how to postpone the fatigue and how to fight the mechanisms that produce the fatigue. And it says glycolysis, anaerobic glycolysis is the primary cause of that. We could split a lot of hairs whether it's, you know, it's the glycolysis itself or it's the acid from coming from ATP breakdown or whether it's non organic phosphates or whatever. But whatever it is, it always happens when the acidosis is running high, when acid becomes high. So that doesn't really matter which. Exactly, exact factories. So he figured out you need to promote aerobic metabolism in the working muscle fibers. So he decided that endurance training for, for high level athletes and people who are not athletes, it will apply to you as well, has to be specific. That's exactly why, like that, that marathon runner who joined the M and A MMA class and then sucking wind, his endurance is totally not specific. Here's an example of specific endurances where you're using the same muscle fibers in your sport and in a mode that's consistent with that sport. So Verkhosansky would have people like skiers for example, do this very long push off on the ski and then glide, push off and glide. And yeah, Sulyanov, who came after him. So an example of that, you have this really powerful contraction of the muscles that are used in your sport and then there's that relaxation during which the muscle recovers is its myoglobin oxygen. That there's a small amount of oxygen in the muscle and it requires that creating phosphate fuel that is used for that short term. So pretty much instead of relying on that acid producing metabolism, glycolytic metabolism that you start using on one hand to use lifter's metabolism, you know, creatine, phosphate, that's what fuels, you know, a set of 3 reps. And on the other you're using this marathon runners aerobic metabolism. So you're like putting glucolysis in a vise. And a great example of that comes from Berkhosansky is not the only one. He came up with this idea. It's been reinvented by others. So in boxing, Leon Spinks, to the viewers who don't know who he is, Leon Spinks was a professional boxing world champion and he defeated Muhammad Ali amongst among others. So he's a great champion. And he hired Arthur Lydiard, who's a great running coach from New Zealand to work in his conditioning and Lydiard had him do work in the heavy bag for an hour. And a half to two hours non stop. And he says, no, of course you're not going all out, sometimes harder, but you're definitely not tapping the bag. You're not shadow boxing. So if you're putting your muscle fibers in a very specific metabolic window and do it over and over and over, they start adapting to it. Fast fibers start developing mitochondria, fast fibers start developing capillaries. Fast fibers don't lose their strength, but they start developing the plumbing and the ability to use the oxidative system to recover rapidly. But going back to again, this larger prioritization idea is when you start with a new stimulus, your body's highly reactive, but the resistance is low. You cannot take much of it. Then that teeter totter goes the other way. You're no longer. So you have to figure out how to restore that reactivity. And different training systems do it differently. So an example of the American powerlifting system, you basically go lighter, start over with a lightweight. So you decondition yourself purposefully, like two steps forward, one step back. Another example would be to use what the Soviets call specialized variety. And this is something that you could see in the Soviet weightlifting system with Medvedev and Alexei Medvedev, one of the scientists and coaches and also the Westside Barbell Powerlifting Club Club. So specialized variety as opposed to random variety. It's when you have the same lift and with just very slight modifications. So the motor program, the intention stays the same. But again, imagine that instead of deadlifting, deadlifting from the platform, you're deadlifting standing on a. Off a plate. So just slightly increase the range of motion, but you're still doing the same thing. Or imagine that you bring your grip in the bench press a couple of inches in. Or imagine that you use a block. This is a popular exercise in powerlifting. You put a, like, imagine putting a brick on your chest, something the size of a brick, lowering it to that, pausing and pressing back to work that very specific sticking point. So you're still benching. So what you're doing is you're resolving this conflict between accommodation and specificity. And like you, on one hand it's novel, but on the other hand it's really, it's like same but different. It's a very good tactic. It requires, it requires the knowledge of. Knowledge of the iron game. It's not some. Because if you go from the bench press to the military press or dips, you might see improvement, but. Or might not, because that's not specialized variety anymore. But if you look at like In Medvedev, Alexei Medvedev, when he coached the national team for these clean and jerk and snatch. For the two competitive lifts, they had 100 variations.
- [131:04]
Andrew Huberman
Wow.
- [131:05]
Pavel Tsatsouline
But all these variations were like, okay, so now we're snatching from hang, now we're snatching from blocks, now we're jerking from the rack. Do you see what I mean? They're all. This reminds me of. This reminds me of this humorous book about Scandinavians written by a Scandinavian, explaining how very different different Scandinavians are. And so this book has pictures of the same guy wearing different sweater.
- [131:29]
Andrew Huberman
Sounds about right.
- [131:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
So, yeah, that's Scandinavian.
- [131:31]
Andrew Huberman
Relatives will chuckle at that. I feel like one of the. Again, I'm not trying to point out the ills of the fitness culture, but I feel like if I were to put up on a wall the two or three things that have caused the most confusion and, and, you know, reduction in people's potential results from fitness would be seeking the pump as its own thing and seeking soreness as its own thing. And then confusing panting hard and sweating a lot with intensity. You know, I feel like those three things, you know, people think I had a great workout or my new trainer is, you know, I finished just completely depleted, you know, this. And then these are the same people that are complaining about an injury or they quit or they don't have the motivation because, you know, they're not taking whatever pre workout is required to generate that kind of quote unquote intensity. I'm not looking for agreement, but would you agree or disagree? I mean, you know, I agree. And then maybe by comparison, we could sort of throw up on the wall the things that we should be seeking when we train as opposed to these kind of, you know, before I answer.
- [132:33]
Pavel Tsatsouline
This question, since we're talking about the peripheral adaptations, you made a great point about seeking pump. I'm going to give you a great example how when not seeking pump is going to do so can I deliver great adaptation for you. So do you remember that idea of punching the bag for an hour, let's say, or two hours? That's how that promotes mitochondrial endurance. Developing the fast switch fibers. That can also be done with strength exercises as well for wrestlers and MMA fighters. So you can do the bench press. You can do bench press and develop endurance in your fast food twitch fibers. The nature of endurance is very, very peculiar. You know, in team sports there's a term repeat sprintability. So repeat sprintability means that, let's say that you sprint for 20 meters, rest for less than a minute, sprint for another 20, you know, just something like that. So sprint rest. Sprint rest, which is, which reflects the nature of team sport, football, soccer and so on. It's totally different from running 400 meters around the track in strength, endurance. It's the same thing, NFL combined, you know, that's, it's, it's a fine test, whatever. It's a nice bodybuilding exercise, good pump. But on the field you're not doing 30 reps, you're doing one rep and then a little bit later you're going to do another rep. So your conditioning for fast twitch fibers can be structured in the same manner. So there's Russian research, a researcher named Bovvikin, he put his several groups of athletes in different protocols. So one of them was doing the typical high intensity, whatever circuit training smoker, right? So you take 70% of your one rep max and you do this for 30 seconds and you go push hard and then you do the next one. And very typical. Then the other group, anti glycolytic group, these athletes would lift the same 70% one rep max for three reps. They do one exercise, second exercise, third exercise, rest for one minute, do it again and again and again. So to the listeners, 70 rep max. An average athlete can probably crank out about 12 reps with it. A fighter is probably going to crank out 20 some reps with that easily. So they only do three reps and so three reps and other exercise and other exercise, rest for one minute, do it over and over and over. And the end result was really fascinating. The outcome. There is one particular test discovered by the same researcher that correlated has the highest correlation competitive performance for MMA fighters. This test was R 0.888. It's very, very high, Very interesting thing what it is, it's the rate of heart rate recovery after an all out set with 70% 1 rep max deadline. This, it's hard set, it's brutal, Very, very brutal. Interestingly enough, the reps with 70% 1 rep max correlation was not so good. Even the deadlift strength was not so high. But is that recovery from that was, was very, very high. So the group that did this antiglycolytic work never did more than 3 reps. Completely blew the traditional training group out of the water. Then in addition to that they were able to bang out a lot more consecutive reps as well. They weren't even in training for that. Then after that they also saw competitive, better results in competition and so on and so forth. It's, it's a great way to train because you're able to so you take, imagine taking a weight that's that you can lift maybe 12 to 20 times and you lift it about three times, rest for a minute and do it again and again and again. This is very much like a blue collar workers day and you're not seeking pump whatsoever. But as a result you're going to develop that type of endurance, that repeat strength endurance that very much is applicable to most combat and team sports. And also for the real life, whenever you are moving furniture, you're not trying to look, I'm going to try to get a pump. Let's see, get this piano up there and get another one. Then we're going to rest for 20 minutes, then we're going to start over. No Swedish work on occupational strength. They found that old and crafty and wily workers like loggers and others, they were able to like they keep their efforts very brief and then they rest for a few seconds and do it over and over and over. So that intermittent nature of rest is very powerful.
- [137:11]
Andrew Huberman
It seems like this is a repeating theme. And by the way, thank you for spelling that out. So for people that perhaps want to try something like this, and I intend to for exercise three, three exercises, excuse me, done each at roughly 70% of your one repetition maximum. So what you could do for about 12 repetitions but you're only doing three repetitions. Rest a minute in between exercises, active.
- [137:32]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Again, just walk around, shake it off and do this for, do this about 15 times, possibly later.
- [137:38]
Andrew Huberman
15 rounds, up to 15 rounds. And so this could be Zercher squat, pull up dip, deadlift or something like that. Maybe going deadlift.
- [137:52]
Pavel Tsatsouline
You know you use really good examples. So this is, this is a protocol that I did for a couple of friends of mine for their high level BJJ competition. We did exactly that. They did zergers, they did pull ups on towels and you know, more, more specific and more grip. And they did the closed grip bench press. And the reason it's close, it doesn't put on quite as much mass. But it, you know, works at triceps really quite nicely. But yeah, but you can even do it with one exercise. Three reps, rest for a minute, three reps, rest for a minute and so on.
- [138:21]
Andrew Huberman
How many times per week is one repeating?
- [138:24]
Pavel Tsatsouline
You can repeat this three, four times a week easily. But it depends on what else you do. And it's twice a week is enough, even twice a week is enough. And it fits your strength training regimen. It doesn't take away from your strength day. So it pretty much you can treat that as your light day for your strength for the same lifts.
- [138:39]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, so. And this would. Is going to increase endurance, but is also going to increase strength somewhat.
- [138:47]
Pavel Tsatsouline
It's going to increase strength somewhere in Bovikin's experiments, it definitely did, at least on fighters, but realized fighters typically are not that strong. So up to a point, up to a point, it is going to increase your strength as well, and at the very least, is going to support your strength. And it's. It's a great way to just perfect your technique, perfect your skill. It's wonderful. It's very, very meditative. My colleague at strong first, Brad Jones, he even just wrote a book about it, iron cardio, because he took a protocol, strength aerobics protocol, like this Russian protocol developed by another one of my colleagues, Alex E. Senard, another one of our instructors. And he just used the whole system and people loving it because, sorry, I'm going to go back from the beginning to Alexey Senard. So he lives in France, and he was coaching some. He was coaching some law enforcement, some law enforcement personnel, and they were on a stakeout where they absolutely had no ability to train normally and they wanted to do something, something effective. So he said, okay, take this kettlebell and you keep it in your hotel room or wherever is your stakeout. Do one clean one press, one front squat, put the kettlebell down, shake it up. One clean one press one squat, put it down. And like a metronome in a very rhythmical manner. You're not trying to breathe hard. You're not trying to get a pump with singles. You won't. And you do this for. You do this for about, you know, 30 minutes or whatever amount of time that you do. And it does develop that repeat strength, endurance fantastically. Well, there is additional secondary effect of some cardio because you're breathing in between. Pretty much your heart is recovering and you're not getting sore. Because you talked earlier about people seeking pump and seeking soreness. One of the reasons soreness comes from is obviously a lot of eccentric contraction. That's very true. But what people don't realize that soreness also comes from too much acid. In the past, the coaches used to tell, oh, acid burns holes in your muscle. It doesn't. But what it does do is when the acid levels are high in the muscle, it stimulates production of free radicals, which pound the cellular membranes. Later, it also stimulates activity of lysosomes and phagocytes that just eat up the muscle. So if you do too much acidic work, you're Going to be sore as well. So seeking. That makes no sense whatsoever. Especially as we know, not even from scientific studies, but from athletic experience. Some people get sore all the time, see no progress in anything. Some people don't get sore, they keep getting stronger and everybody in between. So there is no correlation if you're looking for pump. On the other hand, if you're trying to build muscle one very while building strength, one very simple guideline would be achieve some pump with a heavyweight and low reps. So if you keep your reps to five and fewer, even three, but you achieve a little pump, that means you've performed a sufficient volume of work to stimulate the adaptation. What exactly happens in the muscle? I cannot tell you, but it absolutely does work for both strengths and both hypertrophy.
- [142:08]
Andrew Huberman
So many theories about what causes hypertrophy.
- [142:11]
Pavel Tsatsouline
At least you and I know that. We don't know. We're just speculating here.
- [142:16]
Andrew Huberman
I really appreciate that you always acknowledge that, that we're sort of. We're not totally in the dark about hypertrophy. I like this theory about the hydrogen creating a permeability of the cells. And you mentioned that then it gives the hormones access. Some folks might not.
- [142:33]
Pavel Tsatsouline
To the nucleus. Yeah.
- [142:34]
Andrew Huberman
And some people might not. You know, the steroid hormones like testosterone, estrogen and others, they combine to cell surface receptors, but they can also go into the nucleus of a cell itself and cause changes in that's expression, which is sort of. If you just think about puberty as the most salient example, right. There's all these latent potential in the cells of the body. But then once the testosterone and dihydrotestosterone and estrogen arrives in the body, depending on the. On the sex of the individual, then you activate hair growth, you activate breast growth, you activate muscle growth. Thickening of the vocal cord. Anyway, that's through gene changes in gene expression. In this configuration that you described before, you know of doing this three repetitions and repeating. You may be doing that three times.
- [143:15]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Up to three. You can even do one, as you mentioned. Yes, right.
- [143:18]
Andrew Huberman
Three times a week. Could I also train for strength simultaneously? Same days or other days?
- [143:24]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Other days.
- [143:25]
Andrew Huberman
Other days. So on the intervening days I could go in and do my real strength work.
- [143:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yes. And you look at your priority. If your strength is more important, do this type of a strength aerobic work. No more than twice a week. And you know, then you do strength like an additional three times or four times if that type of endurance is more important. Do real strength work once a week and then three, four Times of the other kind. This is also a very good idea in general for planning for training. Planning for planning. Training different qualities. Because trying to develop everything to a high level at the same time, it's impossible it simultaneously training in parallel. Everything only is good for young kids when they're developing because you know, you got to try everything. Nothing's at a high level later on. There are different models of how to structure addressing different qualities. So one example would be block training. So here's one really good example how strength and hypertrophy can be addressed at different periods. The experiment goes back to 1970s. It was done on Ivanov Kiselova. I forgot the third, third author experiment done on throwers. And they were doing squats and bench presses. And one group was doing 85 for five triples. You know, typical heavy type stuff. The other was three sets of 10 with 60%, which is fairly typical hypertrophy work. Jim Bros would say that's too light for six sets of ten. And I say, no, it's not, because you still have to throw the shot put the next day. If you do 10 sets of 10 reps to failure, you're going to be completely done. Your strength will be down by about 40% for the next few days. And so one group did this, the other group did this. They both made good gains. And the third group, but up to a point then they plateaued. The third group, they alternated two weeks of this, two weeks of that. And in the squad, interestingly, I have to say it didn't make that much difference. But in the bench press, there's a huge difference that alternating these two types stimuli. So that's an example of block training. How you can do that. But what you can also do is you could simply maintain a quality. So fortunately, it takes a lot less work to maintain anything that you reach than to get there. So typically training some quality once a week at a moderate effort is enough to maintain it. Like in strength example of strength. If once a week you lift 80% of your max with three sets of three reps, you can maintain your strength easily for months, easily. It just doesn't take much at all. And you don't want to stop your strength training ever totally because again, it has that it will improve everything that you do, even your endurance. But then you can switch the priorities in the same manner. And people can do that in their own way. Oh, okay, here's a great example. So I love Stu's biblical week. So where Stu McGill, he trains two days a week of strength, two days a week of mobility, two days a week of endurance, which is a very good and balanced, balanced model. But what you could do for a while is you switch to doing 1, 2, 3. So let's say one quality gets three days a week, one quality gets two, one quality gets one, and then you shift the priority. So this sort of a serial specialization is a very good tactics for experienced trainees.
- [146:54]
Andrew Huberman
Maybe switching it up once every month. Perhaps once a month is good, once.
- [146:59]
Pavel Tsatsouline
A month is good.
- [146:59]
Andrew Huberman
And maintaining that. Moderate, hard. What was it? Moderate, very hard. What was Franco's, what was the cycle? Forgive me forgetting.
- [147:10]
Pavel Tsatsouline
You can do that as well. Yeah, Franco had four weeks of deadlifts. Moderate, heavy. Moderate, very heavy. And again, we can define them a lot of different ways, but we definitely need to vary the effort, not just the intensity. Somehow in our training it can be done differently in different training systems. One very simple way is just to stop, stop your sets earlier, before long, before failure, and you know, later on in some weeks just get a little bit closer to that. So that's an example of that classic American cycling, powerlifting cycling. So when on your week four, you're going to do five reps with your five rep max, but on week one you're doing five reps with your perhaps 10 rep max. So that's, that's a very simple way of doing that, where you go easy and then you go harder and then you start over. But there are many, many different other ways of structuring it. But generally speaking, I'd like to warn people that training hard has to be done, but it's not something it has to be done in really small doses. Like, let's use singles as an example, heavy singles. Heavy singles are the special sauce of strength training. They cannot be used as the foundation of your training unless you are, except for some very few genetically gifted individuals. You know, we all know that Bulgarians have done that in weightlifting, but again, these guys were specially selected, specially assisted, and they were broken very quickly. Soviet champions stayed. There are some Soviets who won the Olympics at the age of 36, like Plug Felder and Alexeev for weightlifting. That's just an absolutely old man. And David Rigert said, I think, what, 63 world records. Because they were very careful about when to use this near maximal stimuli, they figured out this. And the system itself, the Soviet weightlifting system, was totally empirical, which is really fascinating. They just looked what works, what doesn't compare it and just kept trying. So they've experimented with everything and they simply have found that certain observations like, okay, Lighter lifters can do more heavy singles than heavier guys. Intermediates can do more than the advanced guys. It's going to vary from lift to lift, a lifter to lifter. No difference between guys who are on drugs and guys who are not. But you have to individualize it. And they found that if you do too many heavy singles, you're going to not progress rapidly or hurt yourself. You don't do enough, you don't progress as quickly. So it has to be. You have to find that sweet spot for yourself. And they also were very definite that the singles aren't maximal. So that's what competitions are for. So they would go to 90, maybe 90, two and a half percent once in a blue moon, 95. But you're not there to test yourself. There's even, like Russian powerlifters, what they do a couple of weeks before a meet, they have this work up to a weight that's kind of max. So the word for this, prikitka. And prikitka, it translates kind of like estimate. It's like an estimate. This is not. You're guessing, like, you see, this is where I'm at. That gives me an idea what's going to be my first attempt, what my opener is going to be. Instead of, oh, I'm going to test myself, I'm going to show them. Gym is not the place to show anything. That's what the platform's for. So you need to find, if you're interested and serious about strength, you need to find how often you can go heavy in the different lifts. Start with, you know, start with something maybe once a month, about 90%, and then try to see doing it more, doing it or doing it fewer times. But the meat and potatoes of the training has to be, again, these moderately heavy weights. Heavy enough, heavy enough to respect, not light enough, not to fear. And most of the work has to be done with that. So it's like those sets of three, four, maybe five reps with 80. 80% something. Something like that. And that's fairly universal across the training systems, because the American powerlifting system, you know, is organized, the cycling organized, totally different. But that's, again, there's going to be, you know, fives and threes and fours. That's going to be a big deal. Soviet system, different, but a lot of threes, a lot of fours, some fives, some variations. But why it is. So some of it possibly has to do with skill practice, because this goes to an example, it's a Western study of a discrete skill, a discrete skill to listeners that means something that happens once, kind of like a throw or a lift as opposed to continuous skill like running. And in an experiment they tested these athletes do this discrete skill for six sets of one, three sets of two or one set of six and two sets of three did much better. So supposedly it's like there's certain amount of repetitiveness like when you hit the perfect trap and then you're done. So again, three triples have that very special quality.
- [152:24]
Andrew Huberman
And presumably there's a drop off of ability to concentrate and really execute properly.
- [152:29]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Absolutely.
- [152:30]
Andrew Huberman
I mean one thing that keeps coming through here is that whether or not one's talking about high volume or low volume or endurance or strength. Quality, quality, quality.
- [152:40]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Oh, no doubt about it.
- [152:41]
Andrew Huberman
Everything else is potentially detrimental and frankly has added a lot of confusion to the fitness literature where people, I think, you know, they're doing, you know, five sets of five or do I do 10 sets of 10? And it, I, if I may, you know, this isn't my field of expertise but again, having been in and around it for a while, I feel like the message that keeps coming through that's going to deliver the results is every single repetition, high quality. The rest period, high quality, whatever that may be, walking around, shaking it off, the structuring of the program, high quality. I think people are far too haphazard and seeking the pump and soreness and some sweat so that they can have their post workout shake. Well, I'm not trying to be. And a selfie, and a selfie between every set and just kind of check the box. Even for people that aren't competitive athletes, I think there's just such a, an enormous range of things to be gleaned from taking one's fitness training seriously. Even the word fitness is kind of a strange word. Training seriously, right? I've never even called it a workout. I think I picked that up from Mensa. You train, you don't like I've never. Or you practice or you practice. I like that very much. I also like the distinction between students and clients. That's, that's a very. These are not just, these are not just labels. I think they really.
- [153:57]
Pavel Tsatsouline
No, they're really not.
- [153:58]
Andrew Huberman
Change our cognitive frame.
- [153:59]
Pavel Tsatsouline
In the Soviet system, when you're talking about your training session, oftentimes it was referred to as a lesson when various qualities were developed like strength, endurance and so on. Verkhosansky, for example, often mentioned that like education of qualities and at strong first are we talk about a practice, not a workout. And great line that was written 100 years ago by Earl Litterman in his Secrets of Strength. And back then, strength athletes understood the importance of not training on the nerve. So they understood you just train and then eventually you're going to go for a pr, but the rest of the time you don't kill yourself. And when he's describing kind of these early adherent of this high intensity whatever, and he's referring to him, he says he has literally worked himself out and he says that that's something that strength seeker cannot afford. So semantically, when you're trying to work yourself out, that's you're trying to exhaust yourself or are you trying to practice, to excel, to get better at something? And that applies to inequality, because endurance very much has a skill component just like strength, because the ability to reuse the elastic properties of the tissues, the ability to relax between the contractions, to restore the circulation, the ability to maintain the proper posture and so on and so forth, These are all skills. The breathing, breathing skill, huge, extremely important for strength, for endurance, for absolutely anything. And if you're going through this mindlessly, it's yes, yeah, nobody's going to get very far this way.
- [155:42]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, so while one could use resistance training in order to generate strength and endurance, you explained how to do that. There are a good number of people out there, including myself, that sometimes like to get outside for a run or to hike. As you mentioned earlier about the rucksack, I'm not such a fan of the rucksack because of being pitched forward, but I like this idea of carrying the kettlebell and switching sides. Now, nowadays they also have some weight vests that are a little bit more close to the body that distribute the weight. What are your thoughts about going into the gym in order to do the strength training and then generating the endurance work elsewhere? To be blunt, like, how would one combine lifting and running in a way that allows one to get stronger and develop endurance? Perhaps simultaneously.
- [156:29]
Pavel Tsatsouline
If we're talking about right now people who are just active, people who are not athletes, there are several things they need to keep in mind. One is the timing, relative timing of strength work and endurance work. If the strength exercises that you're doing are primarily neural adaptations which you're targeting, which means lower repetitions, heavier stuff, then it's important to be fresh when you're doing the exercise. It's not really doesn't matter as much what happens afterwards. So which means that you could do some heavy deadlifts, you know, having deadlifts, and then a few hours later you can go for a hike on the other hand, if your lifting is more hypertrophy oriented, it's less important. If you come in tired, it's okay even if you just hiked in the morning and then you went did your curls. But afterwards, for 36, 48 hours, it's ideally to restrict endurance exercise. So because you're really going to have a massive conflict right there. And it's not a good idea to do that if you're doing our preferred work of let's say sets of 5 reps. 5 reps. Again, they address both endurance and strength. Well, I guess you better keep a window on both ends right there. There's always a conflict, you know, Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions, there are only compromises. So you just have to decide which way you want to compromise. But that separation in time really does help. The other thing is spending different times when you focus on one thing versus the other. So the next two months you're going to spend on hitting your strength hard and you're just going to do two hikes a week just to, just for your health, just to maintain. And then summer rolls around and you put your lifting on the back burner. You left lift less, not necessarily lighter, just less. And you spend a lot more time outdoors and, and do these different things keeping in mind also the duration of the duration of training. So the longer your training session is of any kind, the more you are triggering adaptations that are, that are more in favor of endurance. So your cortisol level goes up and there are some other things that do happen that drive you towards endurance as opposed to strength. So even in your strength training, don't make the sessions too long.
- [158:52]
Andrew Huberman
What's too long?
- [158:54]
Pavel Tsatsouline
It's really hard to know at this point. In the Soviet weightlifting practice the top guys would spend two and two and a half hours. They would for them that work that seemed appropriate. But then again, don't forget at that point they're juicing. And in the pre steroid eras those times are shorter. And this is one of the difference in steroids, by the way, that's in your training when you use steroids or not. As I mentioned earlier, Soviets established the correlation with the volume of lifting and muscle mass. That's one thing. But they're also established correlation between volume of lifting at 80% or higher and strength. And the correlation is very strong, 0.84. However, if you're talking about the muscle mass with that lighter stuff, some lifters would just get great results and some lifters would just get more endurance. And they found that Guys who are juicing, they can keep doing higher volumes and skills still keep getting more muscular. But the guys who are not, who are clean, they're just not able to do that. So trial and error probably. Like Marty Gallagher says, fill an hour. I think that's a safe, I think that's a safe guideline. Fill an hour.
- [160:07]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I like the fill an hour. I don't think I've ever spent more than an hour of actual work in the gym. Maybe 75 minutes or so. I notice if I train longer than that, I pay a serious price in terms of post exercise fatigue later in the day. I'd actually like to talk about this concept. I looked it up before sitting down today. There's a little bit of literature starting to emerge, not as much as I would like, about post exercise cholinergic depletion. So much of our ability to hold our attention is dependent on epinephrine, norepinephrine and acetylcholine release in the brain and of course, muscular contractions. Acetylcholine being the dominant transmitter from nerve to muscle communication. But this idea that if we exercise too intensely or even if we just do cognitive work that's very intense for a period of time, that there's this post exercise cholinergic depletion and then we get this, what people typically call brain fog, although that's not a real medical term. So I think from the practical standpoint, a lot of people who would like to train more for strength, train more often for strength, do strength and endurance work. The challenge sometimes isn't just scheduling it, it's that we feel depleted and tired afterward. Have you observed this? And is there a way to use strength training or other forms of training to improve cognitive function? Because again, as you pointed out, only compromises, not solutions. But I do see a world in which one could use their physical training to give them, for lack of a better word, a boost into the day. So you're getting stronger, you're developing your health, and you're also able to then lean into your day with more focus and attention. That would be the ultimate, ultimate scenario.
- [161:52]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yeah, well, there's. Obviously we're looking at a zero sum game, so there's. You only have so much, you know, your resources are limited. One thing that will absolutely help is fragmentation. It's been proven that dividing up a given workload into smaller chunks allows you. Doesn't matter what it is. Whether it's endurance training or strength training or some cognitive work, you're able to, you're able to do more. And that's one thing that to consider. The other is obviously the feedback. You know, you have to listen to your body pretty much. Soviets stressed very much that you have to take the cybernetic approach. You have to have the feedback no matter what the training plan says. Marcus Zvarobiov says you have to listen to that feedback and freshness. In the Soviet system, strength training, and not just in weightlifting, freshness was paramount. It's even better. Let's talk about how track athletes in the Soviet Union train for strength. And that will be even more applicable to a lot of the listeners because they definitely didn't spend two and a half hours in the gym. So Vladimir Zyachkov, he was a head coach and he was one of the first to implement heavy lifting for the track right after the Soviets decided, hey, look at these Americans lifting heavy weights. Bruce Randall and Paul Anderson and Canadian Doug Hepburn. So these lifters, he has absolutely says always do low reps. So they would never do more than 3, 4 reps even with the lightest weight, even with the warmup weight. They spent a lot of time doing just singles and doubles. And it was absolutely essential that they stayed fresh. And part of it was just how they felt, part of it is the performance, how well they jumped and so on and how they felt after, after. So they found if you're really obsessive about it, you have that tonic effect that lasts at least until the next day. And the tonic effect is both for your strength, for your power, but also for your cognitive functions as well. But it's also very, very interesting that, here's an idea. Do a bench press before the next day before you're competing in the jump, or do a heavy squat the day before you're competing as a thrower. So it's again, it's very interesting how the opposite part of the body stimulating that was, was very, very helpful, very interesting phenomena. So they found if the strength work is familiar and non exhaustive, it absolutely facilitates whatever is that you do afterwards. And restricting this is where the difference, this is where track athletes were very different from a lot of other people. They tried to restrict, restrict their volume as much as possible of strength training in part because, well, they had to do other things and because they had to stay fresh. So if you look at the volume, if you look at general speaking, how many repetitions that you want to perform per exercise, per training session. And again, these are purely empirical numbers, they come from Soviet weightlifting, but they were also applied in training track. So the minimal volume is 10 to 20 repetitions total. So minimum and optimal is 20 to 30 maximal. It becomes 30 to 50 in that window. So when you're looking at 20 to 30 reps, maybe on the lower end right there, you're going to build strength. And if you also are going to not go to failure and rest sufficiently between sets, unless greasy, unless you're greasing the groove, you need to look at at least five minutes pretty much. And that's both for neural and biochemical reasons. But more is really better, unfortunately. Really a lot of it is just comes down to listening to your body and just using your judgment. I wish I had any better. I wish I had any bad answer here.
- [165:47]
Andrew Huberman
I think it's a terrific answer. I like to leave the gym with some gas in the tank because, well, I get paid to think and to speak, as it were, not to lift. But.
- [165:58]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And many great thinkers in the strength world, starting From Liederman back 100 years ago to Soviet weightlifting authorities like Radionov and Roman, and later on somebody like even Steve, just that was a very colorful individual, just brilliant, brilliant strength athlete. A farmer from Nebraska who just came up with some fantastic protocols. But he would say that you've got to finish stronger than when you started.
- [166:29]
Andrew Huberman
I love that.
- [166:29]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And that seam is very much permeates professional or high level strength training where this mentality of a workout or try to get smoked or pumped or throw up in the bucket, they would look at you as just insane. One of the reasons that also Soviets respond restricted the number of reps in the squat, because you do sets of 10 in the squat, you're going to definitely put on some mass, no question about it. But one of the reasons they restricted that very few people did sets of 10 except for heavy weights who had a hard time bulking. And even more is like, okay, that's too much cardiorespiratory stress. And even though Soviet weightlifters did some general physical training like cross country running or playing soccer, but they're not trying to get their cardio on the lifting platform. That has just made no sense whatsoever. So restricting the reps will go a very long way. Increasing the rest periods to at least five minutes would go a very long way. And restricting number of exercises because people don't realize that you're using different muscle groups, but still using the same brain, you're still using the same adrenals and all that stuff really adds up. So I would say during one practice, one training practice, maybe two, maybe three exercises max lifts, and nothing wrong with doing just One. And yeah, if you want to, you know, do your curls and whatever calves later, that's fine. But you can tack it on in the end or you can do it totally separate. Those things don't really zap you. You can just come in in a separate day and just do your. Enjoy your calf burn.
- [168:02]
Andrew Huberman
Love it. There seems to be an over reliance nowadays on pre workout stimulants. I'm a big consumer of caffeine in the form of yerba mate and coffee. I'm old school that way.
- [168:14]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Not that I like coffee.
- [168:16]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. You, you still drink coffee every day?
- [168:19]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yes, I do.
- [168:19]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [168:19]
Pavel Tsatsouline
But only twice. Got a moderation. Moderation.
- [168:22]
Andrew Huberman
Right. These days there's a lot of emphasis on just trying to get as, you know, absolutely wired and geared up for training. And I think that in part contributes to why people feel this post exercise fatigue. You know, they hit the gym hard after a pre workout and then they're doing their post workout shake and a bunch of carbohydrates to replenish their glycogen. And then of course, two hours later you want to take a nap. I mean, it's amazing anyone could study or do anything at that point. I think that's very different than the kind of training you're describing. I also just so I'd love your thoughts on stimulants generally and how they can support or hinder performance. And I'm also curious about just what's lost in that model in terms of learning how to cycle one's energy up and down. Several times today you've mentioned this thing of the ability to relax the muscles and relax the nervous system in between sets, maybe even in between reps, who knows? But usually between sets and certainly and.
- [169:26]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Sometimes between reps under a certain circumstances.
- [169:28]
Andrew Huberman
Interesting. Yeah, so, so maybe we talk about stimulants. Before we started today, we were talking about, you know, when stimulants can actually hinder performance, when they can help. And then maybe we talk about this cycling of, of tension and relaxation. Because I look at training physically as a, as a, as a venue for exploring nervous system function and control over nervous system generally that one can apply elsewhere. So that's the kind of theme I'll just roll, roll out onto the table.
- [169:52]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, first of all, I'll preface it by saying that stimulants and any kind of pharmacy is totally out of my wheelhouse. So what you're about, what I'm about to say is purely reflected knowledge. You know, with your neurobiology background, you can tell the listeners so Much more than I could possibly can. But top athletes, when they compete after a competition, talking about power strength sports like powerlifting or weightlifting, for the next two weeks they're, they're just gone, they're completely flat. Because there are two adaptations that take place in strength training, proper strength training. So on one hand it's much more economical function of the adrenal glands. On the other hand, it's much higher capacity as well. So these are the guys and gals who are able to crank it up really, really high when they want to, but they're also able to really keep it, keep, keep it down when they don't have to. And they do know that for the next two weeks after, after the competition or after some idiotic gym max, you know, that might take a week, they are, they're going to be flat, they're going to be completely gone. So you really have to spare your adrenaline. The lifters who take heavy lifts in, in the gym, they still typically they stay at the training max, not their competition max. So what's the training max? A training max, it's the heaviest weight that you can possibly lift without getting too excited about it. And back in the 50s Luchkin, he was one of the fathers of Soviet weightlifting, he came up with a great tactic how to find that weight. If your heart rate goes up before the set, that's too heavy. So that you gotta be like, you gotta monitor yourself. Unless you're in competition, of course that's, that's a different game. If I will defer to others about how much one should or could take stimulants before training, lifting, I'm talking what. But generally speaking, you got to do it moderation and especially you got to save it for the times when you really need it. Like in the American powerlifting system when you have during week three and four, that's a good time to do it. During the weeks one and two, when the weights are lighter, let your adrenals recover and you don't need to push yourself as hard anyway. So it's just one example how to go about this. If you have to drink some stupid energy drink to just get yourself up to training, there's something wrong in your life. Possibly it is something that's a lifestyle choices and you need to address it. If you always feel exhausted after training, you're missing out on life. I mean if you're doing a very, a desk job that does not require high cognitive ability, something that's really mechanical with pen and paper or computer, and you choose to Just destroy yourself on a daily basis with a lot of sets to failure or metcons or whatever it is. Well, it's your choice if you want to destroy your life like that. But again, if you look at your adrenal profile, if you look at your sympathetic dominance, if you look at your, how you're just feeling is going to be really awful. The other angle to this is as we talked earlier in learning and skill training, skill practices, learning, current performance is not indicative of learning. So just because you're able to lift five pounds more, because you got yourself all jacked up on some drink, doesn't mean you necessarily got stronger. So you just need to come in and put in your practice and walk away and come back and then when there's time and it's the day to go heavier, that's, that's when you do that. So don't want to discourage you from drinking coffee. In fact, if you drink a stimulant, coffee should be the only thing the rest of this stuff is. I don't know.
- [173:40]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, coffee, tea, coffee, tea.
- [173:42]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And then figure out again, figure out what is that moderate, moderate amount. Figure out how to use it when you truly need it as opposed to be relying on it all the time.
- [173:53]
Andrew Huberman
Would you mind, before we go to the next question, if I, if I just share with you a result that I just wanted to plant in your brain because I've been excited to tell you about this because it's new results from the field of neuroscience that I don't think anyone's discussed anywhere. But I think you might find interesting for your sake of discussion here, but.
- [174:09]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Also thank you for looking forward.
- [174:11]
Andrew Huberman
I didn't do this study. I wish I had. The study very briefly is interested in the neural basis of choking. Not choking someone out or not anything else related to choking, but when one feels that the stakes are really high and suddenly ability falls away, what is that? So what they did is they developed this game where essentially the potential payoff in this game while recording from neurons in the brain is either low, medium or very high. Or the occasional jackpot, like you could just win the whole thing and the payoff is very, very considerable. Then they looked at the amount of upper motor neuron recruitment. So essentially the areas of the brain that drive coordinated muscular behavior or action. And what they found is that it basically scales with the level of reward, so you get more neuronal engagement as the reward scales up. However, every time the jackpot was offered, it over engages too many motor neurons. And so this notion of like Choking when the stakes are.
- [175:14]
Pavel Tsatsouline
So you have irradiation that you cannot control.
- [175:16]
Andrew Huberman
Exactly. It's like spillover of like, it's like too much. We could call it too much excitement, but it's not adrenaline in this case, although that's probably associated with it. But you think, oh great, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to get an award. I'm going to get me bigger, even bigger. Okay, oh my goodness, this could change everything. And all of a sudden performance just tanks. And so it turns out it's, it's a brain. It's a brain thing at the level of over recruitment, which just speaks to this idea of being able to maintain arousal within a certain range is an essential skill to any performer. I just share that because it's a fun set of results. Since I was a little kid, if I learned something, I have to share it with somebody who I think might care. So if ever people wonder about why people choke, it is hyper arousal at the level of the brain, apparently not so much the body.
- [176:02]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, being able to control arousal, it's such a key skill for an athlete. And part of that, obviously it should be directed at sports psychologists. And there are some fantastic techniques. For example, Dr. Judd Byasoto, who is an author who published the book with strong first, Dr. Judd squatted 602 at body weight of 132. And that was back in the 80s. He was in his 40s after serious back injury surgery. And he was a sports psychologist. And he discusses these various skills. It's fascinating. His control of excitation inhibition was such that he would slip between attempts. A couple minutes before the attempt, his handler or coach would wake him up. He would wake up, he'd get himself into frenzy, he'd lift the weight, he'd go back to sleep nine times a day throughout the day. Now that's a mastery of excitation inhibition. You're on switch and off switch. So part of that is sports psychology. There are tools in sports psychology for that. Part of it is training is whatever you do in the gym, some of your habits and some of your practices. Like for example, okay, David Riggart is one of the greatest weightlifters of all time. Some people would say the greatest weightlifter of all times. And when he was discovered by Rudolf Pluckfelder, his coach, who was another Olympic champion, world champion, one of the things that the coach was impressed with is that Riggert would do his set and then after his set he would just go completely limp like a rag. And he was Very impressed with that later in Rigor's career, when he was a world champion already in the United States. So there's a, there's an American coach. Route writes how he saw him in Columbus, Ohio or Cleveland, Ohio, competing back in the 70s. He was lying and smoking a cigarette. And then he gets up, he snatches 60 kilos, like £135 or something once. Then he just picks up something else equally trivial. And then he goes and does goes his first attempts, and then ends up with a superior performance at a different time. Rigor bet a box of cognac that he would snatch 90% of his max, which was. His max was probably around 370 or something. So he was able to snatch 90% of that. No warm up whatsoever. And so this is this ability of that incredible control. So part of it is whatever you're born with, part of it is sports psychology techniques, but part of it is developing some habits. As soon as you're done with your lift, just power down. Incidentally, after training, a strength athlete ought to perform a cooldown. And Russians did some, did some numbers on power lifters and they found that the top power lifters, they spend time in cool down. And the guys who are not so good, they don't. Because not only it just allows you to bring your excitation down, get your parasympathetic, get you to start recovering. So you do some easy stretching, you do some meditating, you do some breathing exercises, whatever you do, but even after each set, so you put up that heavy deadlift or squat and you just immediately come down and then you walk around and you chill. So you just try to tune your switch. So much breathing exercises come in handy for that. There are breathing exercises to increase your excitation. There are breathing exercises that are able to very much put you in a state of inhibition, very deep inhibition even. Some of them are hypercapnic, some are hypoxic, which means, you know, you try to increase carbon dioxide or you're trying to decrease oxygen. There are some very sophisticated yet really quite simple techniques that, that can help you do that.
- [179:52]
Andrew Huberman
I love this concept of just learning to push on the accelerator, push on the brake, and to play with disinhibition. First person to come on this podcast, even among the neuroscientists I've spoken with, to talk about disinhibitions.
- [180:06]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Really.
- [180:06]
Andrew Huberman
Thank you for bringing that.
- [180:07]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, the history of that, that's a.
- [180:08]
Andrew Huberman
Beautiful concept and an important one for how we function.
- [180:10]
Pavel Tsatsouline
That's a, that absolutely is the original research Was done in the 60s. Ikai and Steinhaus, 1961 I believe. And then later on that was a, a big part of the training method of Dr. Fred Hatfield. Fred Hatfield is a legend in the iron game. He was one of the first to squat a thousand pounds in competition. And he was just a fantastic lifter and just brilliant scientist. So he tried to direct a lot of the training towards this inhibition. So he even developed special techniques that are largely forgotten ironically. But yes, disinhibition is huge. And it's also one of the things about disinhibition too. It's also very important to avoid failing because never failing a lift, that's part of disinhibition. So like we talked about Ed Cohn earlier, another one of the powerlifting grades. Ed Cohn competed over several decades, set over 70 world records in several wheat classes. Only missed a couple lifts in competition. Never missed a training lift whatsoever. Always calm, always composed, an amazing lifter, amazing guy. And what's very likely happened is that his inhibitory pathways just shriveled and got pruned and died. What people don't realize that, you know, greasing the groove, that's the term proper term, long term potentiation is like when you are getting better at like that transmission gets stronger. Like your nerves become superconductors, but there's also its evil twin long term depression. So pretty much what happens is now you're trying as hard, but your muscles are not jumping in response anymore. So one of the ways to get this long term depression is by failing. So whenever you're attempting certain things and if it doesn't happen, that's a way that pathway starts firing weaker and the inhibitory pathways start become stronger and it becomes even worse if you're emotional about it. So you said quite a few things about adrenaline, but adrenaline has, adrenaline does promote neuroplasticity, but not always in a good way. So if you look at the PTSD treatments, you will find that if a person re experiences that bad, whatever thing that happened and then it gets into the feedback loop, that positive feedback positive doesn't mean good positive, it just means it keeps increasing it. Because every time that there's a spike of adrenaline that reinforces the memory. So if you missed the attempt and you also got really upset about it and you remember it again, so you're making yourself weaker and weaker. Which reminds me of a very fascinating way that the ancients used to record some events before there was writing. So let's say there's a wedding between VIP families, they bring a kid, young kid, 7 year old let's say and make the kid watch the whole thing. And after, after the festivities, they throw the kid into the river, the kid crawls out of the river and it was, he doesn't know to, he doesn't expect it. And the kid climbs out of the river and he's going to remember that wedding for the rest of his life. He's going to hold that record.
- [183:24]
Andrew Huberman
Because of the adrenaline spike associated with the.
- [183:26]
Pavel Tsatsouline
So that really did increase in neuroplasticity. So the, that memory became really deeply ingrained. So yeah, part of disinhibition is not promoting inhibition, is just not failing. So Fred Hatfield had a beautiful line. Success begets success, failure begets failure. Train to success, not to fail.
- [183:45]
Andrew Huberman
Do you recommend actually avoiding training to muscular failure?
- [183:51]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Absolutely. There is really no reason for that. If you're doing that with single joint bodybuilding exercises like curls, it probably does not make, doesn't matter. And if you're doing it for bodybuilding, but I still don't see the point because every rep closer to failure that is going to increase exponentially recovery time. So you're not going to get quite as much. Yeah, you might get more muscle gain from that particular last rep, but your recovery is going to be increased so much. And also as you start training to failure, you also, you're converting more of your fibers to, towards slower, towards slower times. So on the other hand, if you don't train to failure, you don't. So there's an interesting Spanish study when they found that when athletes train to failure again, some of the myosin and type 2x fast fibers they converted to 2a so they, they became slower probably because now it's an endurance event. When you're training for as many reps as possible, it's really an endurance event. On the other hand, the athletes that trained with half the maximum possible repetitions, they did not experience that decline, which goes back several decades to when Arad Olympic champion scientist head coach, incredible, incredible person. He said there is a big difference between six sets of three and three sets of six because. And you think like this sounds like the most obvious thing to say, but the fact is you build just as much strength with six sets of three as three sets of six. You get a lot less tired, you get to practice for three extra sets and you can train sooner. So that's fundamental. So pushing to fail or also the other thing is about the control of your technique towards the last reps, there's no control left but imagine that you always have that perfect technique, so you grease that pathway, that becomes a reflex. In fact, early on, the Soviet sports scientists very much view strength adaptation as just the development of conditional reflex. Kind of like Pavlov with the dogs, drooling dogs. And then you go into the competition and you psych yourself up and you don't even know what's going on. You're not aware, but you only have one pathway. There's no plan B. You only remember how to do your deadlift in this particular manner. No any other way.
- [186:19]
Andrew Huberman
The neurons are trained to, to complete the execution of the movement.
- [186:23]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Exactly. And all in a very specific way, because there's no plan B when you start failure. So you start, okay, this is the stressful situation. So I, I revert to plan B. But for there's plan B for amateurs. Top athletes don't have plan B. Watch a top lifter fail an attempt, he or she is going to shake with that bar. Shake, shake, shake, shake. And finally it's going to come down. But it's not like the butt's going to shoot up or something ugly is going to happen. So going back to that point you made earlier about the quality of practice, quality is absolutely paramount. And it's. Strength training is a skill practice. Any athletic training is a skill practice. Maybe writing the elliptical is not a skill practice, but it's not a. It's just not a sport anyway. It's not anything. You know, even hiking is a practice. You're trying to stay tall, you're trying to breathe in a particular manner. It's all practice.
- [187:13]
Andrew Huberman
The crossovers between physical training and mental pursuits are astonishing to me. You know, as we're talking about this avoiding going to failure, I'm in the process of writing my first book. I know you've written several books, and I'm finding it to be very different than anything else I've ever done. And the experienced writers tell me that you should end on a sentence where you kind of know what the next sentence could be. Perhaps to see the unconscious mind for the next day, but you don't want to run right up until a wall and bang your head against that wall, metaphorically speaking, because it places a kind of frustration into your nervous system that you arrive to the page with the next day. I guess the opposite could be argued too, but. But it fits very well with, with what we're talking about here. I, because of the early Mike Menser training, or the influence, I should say, I've tended to train to failure purposefully and Used to do forced reps and drop sets and all that stuff. As the years have gone by, I've started only incorporating a few sets to failure and my volume has increased somewhat and I'm training heavier at lower repetitions. And my progress as I get toward my fifth decade just continues to. Just continues. And so I just decided, as you were saying last couple of sentences, that for the rest of the year, I'm going to not train to failure because I really want to experience what it's like to do that for a long period of time as opposed to just reducing the number of sets that I take to failure. I'm also, I'm very stringent about form and always have been. And I do want to ask, what are your thoughts on unless somebody's training for isometric or eccentric specific training full range of motion, not just for sake of building strength, but can using a full range of motion also improve flexibility without some dedicated flexibility training? And I'd like to use this as a segue to talk about flexibility training.
- [189:07]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yes, it can. So sarcomeres can grow in length as well. So the contractile part of the muscle, they can grow lengthwise as well. It's something that needs to be done carefully and cautiously, of course, and it's with. Not with heavy weights. Eventually it's possible for a person to perform, you know, flexibility feats with heavier weights if it's desirable, but initially at something go lighter. So, yes, absolutely, you can. And it's, it's one of the easiest way to promote flexibility. And flexibility also has very much a neural component as well. So part of it, obviously you're looking at what's happening in the joints. Of course, part you're looking at the length of the tissues too. But a lot of it is also the ability to reset the regulation of muscle length and tension. So it's like the ability to do a split, for example. It's part of it is. Yeah. Well, if you're provided your hip joints are built for that sort of thing, a lot of it is really in your mind because you're experiencing defensive inhibition. You're just afraid you're going to get torn in half. So which brings us to a very interesting parallel as we keep talking about quality and is also talked about that flow channel by Professor Csiksimahat. Exactly. Thank you. So between boredom and anxiety. So when you're trying to do a split, for example, so you see somebody trying to get into that stretch and that person goes, oh, sitting there and panicking and being in total pain and nothing Good is going to happen. You're pretty much just facilitating this pain pathways and you're just learning to hate this exercise. A smarter individual would get to the point, to the edge of pain and then stay there for a while until owning it until the spindles reset. You know, okay, accept the new range of motion. Add some contraction relaxation. Contraction relaxation. You know, isometric stretching, you know, progress, progress even further. So in any type of training, forcing the adaptation is just not going to work. Whether it's flexibility, whether it's strength, whether it's endurance, there's time for a very high level of effort, but there's never time for ripping yourself in half. Right. There's never time for hurting yourself on purpose. But yes. Do long range of motion work to increase range of motion for the upper body? I'm obviously very partial towards kettlebells, but one of the great many benefits of kettlebell training, you know, above the handle is the way it's designed. So you press it from here overhead. That offset center of gravity helps to pull your arm back. So you're just improving the shoulder flexion. You're improving thoracic extension. It's so much easier to place yourself in exactly good position and then just stay there. So it's very important to stay open to keep that, keep that useful posture and keep that good, good shoulder function. So. But yeah, with squats, you can definitely do that just very progressively. One warning about squats. If you're going for parallel squat like it is in powerlifting, it's parallel defined as the top of the knee is a little higher than the crease on the hip.
- [192:24]
Andrew Huberman
Not a right. People will argue about this in some comical ways from time to time. So when parallel is not right angle at the knee. Correct. It's parallel, the top of the top of the thigh. I realize you said it very clearly, but I'm just making sure because debates abound on the Internet. The top of the thigh should be parallel to the floor. Well, or deeper.
- [192:46]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yeah, yeah, but, but when you do go for that depth or somewhere in that ballpark, that's. You can go wide in the stance. You can progressively increase the width of the stance if you do for flexibility. There have been people who are doing squats like in almost like a horse stance style, squats and progressively developing great level of flexibility. It's possible to do that, but you are doing that. You're going wider but not necessarily deeper. So it's okay to go wider, but you still, you're still. Your femur should not be dipping too much. So if you're trying to go rock bottom and the wide stance, your hip architecture is not designed for that, right?
- [193:25]
Andrew Huberman
So like Tom Platts, right, famous for squatting, very, very deep.
- [193:29]
Pavel Tsatsouline
But he was there. But he used a narrow stance.
- [193:32]
Andrew Huberman
Got it. So glutes on calves practically. But he was a shorter guy, right.
- [193:36]
Pavel Tsatsouline
But he also, he was, but also he was also squatting in a pretty narrow stance. So in this particular case you're not experiencing with the hip, you know, with the hip limitation right there. So it's okay for you, but imagine if you try to go wider and then you try to go. It's just again, this is not, not a good idea.
- [193:51]
Andrew Huberman
You could end up on the floor, literally on the floor.
- [193:53]
Pavel Tsatsouline
If you want to develop, here's a great way to develop flexibility for this type of rock bottom, bottom squat. If you're not there yet initially, even without resistance, assume your normal squat stance. And I'm talking about a narrow stance, you know, shoulder width or somewhere there and approach the wall, face the wall, put your arms out and start squatting. And you will find the wall is going to tissue. So it is the feedback from the wall. If you start doing something funny with your spine, you're going to hit your head on the wall and fall back. So it provides terrific feedback. It is something that I learned originally from a Shikung practitioner and again, quite a number of skills that by system are picked up from martial arts. But we applied that strong first to use that for teaching people that upright squat and developing the mobility for deep squat. It's a foolproof. It's like Greg Cook would call this a self correcting exercise. And those are really the best when the coach can walk away and have a cigarette and the student is still going to be able to do it. Right.
- [195:00]
Andrew Huberman
I love your book Relax into Stretch. I think it's a really important concept, this idea that the nervous system and our mental state is preventing, inhibiting a good amount of our natural flexibility, that we can work with the mental state and progressive relaxation and contraction of muscles and related tissues.
- [195:20]
Pavel Tsatsouline
We absolutely can. And it's very much mind over the matter. I have a great success story. So one of one of my senior instructors, a strong first, Steve Friedis. So I met him a couple decades ago and he had a severe back injury. So he spent eight or nine months in bed in Percocet and he was not athletic. He had done some jogging or things like that in the past and he decided to get serious about getting strong. So he healed up until he was healthy. He started lifting kettlebells. Then after that he started powerlifting and he started doing proper stretching like this. So he is right now he's Steve in his late 60s. He holds a bunch of American masters records in the deadlift even though his back was totally messed up. Lifts without a belt, he is. You can break your fist on his abs. I like having people punch. Would you please punch Steve? Just don't hurt yourself. But he also worked up to suspend his side splits and you know, that's at that point he was probably in his 50s when he did that and maybe 60s possibly. And then he even competed in this crazy all around meets where there's one lift where you hang between two chairs and then you pick up a dumbbell from the ground. You can find the footage somewhere on the Internet. So here's the man who took, who did not take his injury lying down. So once he was cleared to train, he decided to approach his training with the attitude of a musician because he's a music professor. And in my experience that people who become very successful in strength musicians and martial artists are among the people who can succeed because they're used to practice for many hours, they're used to paying attention to small detail and they're used to doing whatever other people consider boring over and over. So again, here is this 60 some year old man with abs you can break your hands on, deadlift records and full splits. That's what a human mind is capable of.
- [197:23]
Andrew Huberman
I love this concept of a practice or of practice. Not of a practice, but instead of training, I always. Training is such a better word than working out and it probably is, but I think practice is such a better.
- [197:37]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Verb than training is also good, of course, but practice is, it puts you in the right frame of mind. You imagine the word workout like litterman, quote, he literally worked himself out.
- [197:50]
Andrew Huberman
As long as you're highlighting remarkable instances of people in the second half of their life, let's, let's say getting quite strong, developing impressive skills. Before we started recording today, you were relaying to us that your father has acquired some significant strength. Could you just share some of his abilities to inspire both the people in the second half of their life or so and to motivate, intimidate the younger ones and get them going because they really have no excuse.
- [198:24]
Pavel Tsatsouline
I'm very proud of my parents and they're both 87 years old and my father has always been an athlete. And then at the age of 71 I brought him to powerlifting meet and I see him in the warm up Area picking up, you know, 225 pounds with bad forms like, dad, what are you doing? He got interested. So fast forward a few years and by the time he was 75, he had several American records in several weight classes. And he deadlifted in the low four hundreds without a belt, body weight of 198. And in fact, when back at that point when Professor Stuart McGill, who is a very good friend of mine, he came to watch my dad, I think he pulled like 385 for triple before competition at Gold's J in Venice. And Stu examined his back and he said he had a, you know, muscularity in the back of a 40 year old. So I thought it was pretty, pretty, pretty cool. So he's not deadlifting right now because an old injury cut up to him. He fell off a tracked vehicle. You know, like imagine a tank without a gun, military tracked vehicle on ice in the winter and about 40 years ago. And there are some things that cut up to him. So he cannot deadlift right now. But he's still, twice a week he does over 50 pull ups in total. And you know, at least twice a week he does over 100 perfect body weight squats, like powerlifting style squats, you know, and he does that, he does push ups and things like that. So he just stays on top of that. And he's still maintaining very good strength, very good muscularity. So the approach to building muscles, muscle for him is it's that same volume with medium reps and medium effort. It always works because it builds strength, it builds muscle, it's very safe, it's, it's very enjoyable. And my mother, she, she used to be a professional ballerina and she got started training since she was 6. So she, because she had to train all day, she hates exercise, but she still does it because she must. And she came up with a great antiglycolytic training protocol for herself. So this is something she invented. I had nothing to do with it, but it just totally goes with Verkhoshansky's work. She climbs stairs at a high rise and she will climb stairs from one floor to the next. She'll walk the hallway, come back and then go to the next floor. So that's the same idea that Verkhosansky had. Intensify the intensity of contraction and then give a little time to not so in order to, for the acid not to pile up. So you keep that effort creating phosphate powered and aerobic powered. And, you know, so she does that for 17 floors or whatever a few times A week and plus other things. But yeah, I'm very fortunate, very proud of my parents. My father in law, Roger, here's a great example and a great Grease the Groove success story. So he is a retired firefighter and Marine and at the age of 64 and he always lifted, very unusual for his generation. He started when he was 15 and never stopped. But he couldn't quite do 20 pull ups when he was a marine. So at the age of 64 he got on the Greaser Groove protocol. So at that point his max was 10 reps. So I said, roger, every time you go by the pull up bar, hit, hit five and when they become really, really easy and then you can add a rep. Well, a few months later he finally he, when he worked up to nine daily reps he tested, he could do 20 pull ups. So at 64, he finally aced the US Marine Corps pull up PT test, something that he couldn't do as a young jarhead. And yeah, seeing these older folks who are not taking their age lying down and taking their training very seriously, it's just very admirable. And you know, you see much younger people start complaining. Some 30 year old comes, well, I'm aging, I'm getting older, what should I do? It's like, what's wrong with you, son? You know?
- [202:32]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I completely agree. These are inspiring stories, truly inspiring. And people of all ages should pay attention. It's not done in one leap. There's the progressive nature to it. And I think not training to failure just is resurfacing in my mind now as we have this discussion. You know, the idea isn't to, to grind, it's to just grease the groove, get in there and do it as a practice. Actually, I'm going to change my language around this. I realize that when I call it a practice as a, as a noun, it's not as effective as practice as a verb. I'm going to practice, okay? Not that, just for me. This is just my own internal thing. You know, my neuroses insists that I share this. But I do think that semantics are important, as you pointed out before, because it has a lot to do with how we feel about ourselves and what we think we're capable of. It starts with being inspired to try something, but also like, I didn't grow up in a particularly athletic family, you know, not, none of us are unathletic, but I didn't think I could be, you know, reasonably strong, have decent endurance and I wouldn't consider myself an athlete by any stretch, but you're being too modest. But my consistency I have confidence in. Like if I bite down into something, there's a good chance I'm gonna do it for the next 30 years.
- [203:49]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And consistency, my, my friend Jim Wright, who passed, he used to say consistency over intensity. And that, that's absolutely true. If you're doing, if you're doing things correctly with proper form, if you do it over and over, you will win over long term. Which also interesting. Kind of brings me to an interesting point. You made me think of the long term development, athletic development. Here's what I'd like to see in an idea perfect world. Nobody has tried that yet, but I imagine a strength athlete starting out using the Soviet system and later, by the way, the Russian powerlifting team uses exactly the same training methodology derived from that. Which means you're training many times a week, let's say squad, four or five days a week and you're doing a lot of reps with this moderate effort and you do this for years and you achieve high level. And then at some point you switch to this American powerlifting system because your skills are already fully honed and you're fully adapted to the type of stimulus that first system brings and you switch to this once a week cycling method. It'll be very interesting to see what, what would happen, how far one could go.
- [205:03]
Andrew Huberman
So folks in your 20s and 30s, get going on it now and we'll have a podcast in a couple of decades to check back. Send us a note or put in the comments. I'd love to talk about body weight training. I love, love, love the book Naked Warrior.
- [205:17]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you.
- [205:18]
Andrew Huberman
I got that book initially because in the early days of starting my laboratory I was traveling a ton and I didn't always have access to gyms and, and I wanted to try and grease the groove when I arrived in my room in the middle of the night in Germany or whatever. So I still have not succeeded in doing pistol squats on both legs. So one is I have some dominant and weakness, as it were, but I, without any natural strength ability to speak of, was able to learn one arm push ups, one arm pull ups. I'm not there now. I have to return to that level of upper body strength. But it's remarkable what one can do with bodyweight training. And you describe some really beautiful progressions in the book. I highly recommend this book folks. So maybe we could just take the push up as an example and a handstand push up as the extreme of that, right? What I love so much about that book Is, for instance, you talk about doing a push up against a wall is trivially easy for most people. Doing a handstand push up, free, freestanding, very difficult. But there's a series of progressions in between that maybe you could describe to us that once you realize that, oh, I can work through this over time and if I'm not in a rush to get through it, and I just do these a few times a week or more. Ah, a few times a day. A few times a week or more. I could do a handstand push up freestanding or a pistol squat or a one arm push up or a one arm pull up. It's not outside one's reach at all.
- [206:52]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Absolutely, yeah.
- [206:53]
Andrew Huberman
So could you fill in some of the gaps? So getting people to think about the kind of physics of this and the principles behind it, it's such a valuable system and one that is a lot of fun too.
- [207:03]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Before talking about this system, Andrew, may I speak about the relative benefits of different types of resistance, please? Okay, yeah. So the body weight resistance, I'm going to talk about body weight, kettlebells and barbells and obviously there are other things as well, but you know, it's going to take too long. So body weight training, the great advantage of body weight is its accessibility. So you can do a push up absolutely anywhere. So that is, that's a really huge selling point because for some people, somebody who travels all the time and somebody who is in places where gyms are not available. So that's, that's a great app. It. Some people just simply enjoy it greatly. That's just fine. The downside of body weight training is it's a lot harder to learn these skills than it is, let's say, to learn some, many kettlebell skills or even some barbell skills. So it seems very innocent and so easy. But the, it may take time to really get some of this. So that may take time to do it longer. It might take a longer time. The beautiful thing about the barbell is, well, first of all, the satisfaction lifting, really heavy stuff, some people find it extremely satisfying. If you don't, maybe it's not for you, but if you do, it's, it's incredible. Then the ability to adjust, adjust the weights in small increments. So you can prescribe 87.5%, one rep max and you can do that. That you cannot do that with body weight. In fact, with body weight, it's very hard to calibrate resistance. That's another one of the problems because you do need to have Some skills figure out the regressions and progressions, how to do that. And the other thing, the other great benefit of the barbell is some of the lifts, especially the three power lifts, allow you to make great gains in strength. And if you choose muscle mass with a very low volume, it's possible to do three sets of five once a week in the squat and get very strong. Try to do that with pistols, it's just not going to happen. So reasons for that we can speculate. We know some reasons, we don't know others, but it is what it is. The beauty of the kettlebell for strength specifically is it's very easy to teach the body language of strength with the kettlebell. You would think that with the body weight it should be easier because a lot of the skills that I teach in, in my book, the Naked Warrior, they are either gymnastics or martial arts based. So it's like, okay, here's the hollow position from gymnastics, or here's this little trick from hard style martial arts. So they both use body weight. Nevertheless, it takes a lot more processing to figure out how to do this right from scratch. Like especially contracting your abs properly. Especially if you don't have abs to start with. By the time you have them, that's good. But if you don't have them, it's hard. With a kettlebell, for example, you take, you start doing double front squats with a pair of kettlebells, it's going to be like zerchers. You're gonna, your abdominal wall is gonna light up. You suddenly learn exactly, oh, this is what it means to get tight. Or you stick your elbows inside the knees and do goblet squat. Oh, this is what the proper, proper squat feels like. And just very easy to, very easy to integrate, integrate all your body in one lift. And there is an, an apparent disadvantage of the kettlebell, which also can be an advantage. There is no, you can't program 87 and a half percent body weight. I mean, one rep max, because kettlebells jump in large, you know, like, for example, from 53 to 70 pounds, for example. That's a big jump. And I mean, these days some companies will manufacture kettlebells with small, like, you know, small jumps. What's the point? You're defeating some of the reasons for the being for this particular piece of equipment. And here's what they are. One is simplicity. You only can have a couple bills and do a lot of things. But the other is when you go, when you suddenly, let's say that you've been pressing a 53 pound kettlebell and you're doing a lot of sets and your goal is to press a 70 pound kettlebell and it's a big jump. So what you're going to do is first of all you're going to have to put in a very significant volume of work, that foundation of the pyramid. Many strength authors throughout history, Bill Starr and many others use that analogy of volume as being the foundation of the pyramid. You're going to have to press that 24 kilo many times properly before you're going to have a run at 70. You have to develop the confidence. The other thing is you're going to have to acquire the skill of tension, total body tension. Everything is linked up because when you go up a couple of pounds, it doesn't make a difference. You're doing the same thing. You're not noticing when you go up a lot. Everything has to be just so. So as you're doing going through your sets of five with the 53 pounder, you're also doing just cleans with the 70 pounder. You're starting to see what it feels like you're doing get ups with it. You're starting to see acquiring, see how that weight feels like. Again, we're talking about disinhibition here. You're planning on owing this weight. So you're forced to put in a very significant volume of work, which means, which is very healthy, will lead to a lot of really healthy adaptations and you will force to develop the skills to make that transition. And plus you're also having that desirable difficulty in skill, in learning. There is that concept by Robert Bjork about desirable difficulties for learning. If learning is very easy, something is presented, you don't learn much if you have to struggle. Like even if you're reading something and a font is ineligible, ironically you end up learning better. So this is an example of a desirable difficulty as you're progressing this way. So that is for strength. Obviously kettlebell have their benefits for endurance and for other things as well, but just for adjusting the resistance. Oftentimes it's just a matter of preference and a matter of accessibility. So I'm not going to say you pick this tool, you pick that tool, you pick the other tool. But if you decide to pick the body weight, my recommendation would be just be ready, patient for a long road because you have to patiently learn these little subtleties of micromanaging your body. Again. You watch the body language of gymnasts, you watch the Sanchin Kara in some styles of karate, and you'll see that amazing linking of the different parts of the body into the one chain, how the tension is used. So it's, it's very rewarding. But I would say that's probably the most attention demanding. Even though it seems so innocent and so simple and so safe, but it demands a lot of attention. But if you're, that's your speed and if you enjoy practice, true practice, that's, that's a great way to go.
- [214:09]
Andrew Huberman
I haven't explored kettlebell training so much. Whenever I've tried the standard kettlebell swing, just kind of, if there is such a thing. But you know, between the legs, two handed kettlebell swing, I tended to get some right side lower back pain, medial glute thing. And I'm sure I'm not doing it correctly and I wanted to learn kettlebells properly. You have an online kettlebell course?
- [214:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yes, we do have several resources. So we have the book Kettlebell simple and Sinister which is available on Amazon. We have an online course under the same name. We also obviously have workshops, live instructors that you can find locally at our website Strong First. But I can tell you that of course some people are not supposed to do swings, as is true for every exercise. For example, in McGill's work, say some people who have problem with shear, sometimes they might have issues. But a great, great number of people, majority people, can do swings very successfully. We have seen some really pretty broken people when they're cleared to do that and when they're coached properly. The big issue is you have to hip hinge, not lift the kettlebell with your back or with your arms. And for that we have very, very specific progressions. You cannot go move beyond this until you do this. Okay, here you are doing this particular hip hinge drill with no weight. Okay, good, you got that down. Now you're going to do a kettlebell deadlift, which is just a, you know, sumo D deadlift with a light kettlebell. Then you're going to progress with a very particular type of swing. So it's about patience, but the benefits are really worth it. So what are the benefits, let's say of the kettlebell swings as opposed to or snatches? Again, snatch is more of a less democratic exercise like the dips, parallel bar dips. Fantastic for those who can do that. But you know, if you can, that's too bad, but there are alternatives. So again, the snatch is great. If you cannot do snatch, you can do swinging. So the swing, it allows you to train power and power endurance in an extremely safe manner. Because if you try to develop power in a Lot of conventional ways you will find like, okay, you try doing Olympic lifts. It's very skill intensive trying to learn how to do that. And besides, for some athletes, not appropriate racking the bar and overstretching the wrist ligaments, like for example, for fighters, that's a kiss of death. That's a really bad idea, destabilizing the wrist in this manner. And for many athletes, other athletes too, you know, pitcher doesn't want to do that. Baseball pitcher, so high, you know, then you try to do things like sprinting. Sprinting requires a lot of coaching, proper coaching, much more than a kettlebell swing. And it's very, very easy to rip a hamstring or something like that. So it's this kettlebell swing allows you to train power and power endurance in a very safe manner. And what's also very unique about it, you don't have to use a lot of weight. What's unique about the kettlebell and the kettlebell swing. Another thing about the design, you can swing it back between your legs, but you don't have to let it passively swing between your legs. You can choose to accelerate it. This is called overspeed eccentric. So some years back, I, our colleague, one of our instructors, Brandon Hetzler, he put me and several other of our colleagues, instructors on the force plate and we started doing swings with overspeed eccentric, which means accelerating it downwards and upwards. So we were using just a 53 pound belt, so the most experienced guys, we were able to generate over 10 GS of acceleration. So basically we made that 50 pound bell weigh 500 pounds. But if to the listeners who know about how, how the tissues, how the passive tissues can handle the load when the loading is really rapid, it's amazing how these tissues can handle that very, very safely. So you can apply tremendous amount of load. Of course, you don't start with that. It's not how you start your swings. So. And you can develop power endurance. So you can do a whole lot of different, many different, different sets, many sets you've had. Megan, Kelly Vonnevo are certified instructors out of uk. You know, she said a Guinness World Record for a crazy number of swings done in an hour. And so she would just go, her training is she would go and do swings, she'll do a few reps, pick up, set it down, and she would do it for, let's say, 90 minutes. Then she would do it with a heavy kettlebell. And the adaptations are fantastic from that, in the kettlebell world, we refer to what the hell effect. So what's the what the hell effect. What the hell effect is when you're getting an adaptation that's not a beginner's gain, but it's an adaptation that's totally unexpected. There's some collateral benefit how suddenly you're able to do something. And the improvements in fat loss, improvements in resilience. So, for example, speaking of resilience, so some of the tactical teams that I worked with in the US here, when they added either swings or snatches to their training with the kettlebell, plus one legged kettlebell deadlifts as well, they stopped tearing their hamstrings. So you have this amazing way to do eccentric loading for the hamstring. But it's very safe and just really prepares you. One of my friends is still playing baseball in the 60s. He says thank you for the kettlebells. You know, he went through the course in one of the federal agencies 20 years ago, and he's still doing that. He's retired, but he's still, he's still doing that. So that's a great benefit. The amount of pure workload that you can do in this amount. That's why you can burn a lot of calories, you can develop cardio, whatever. But also, like, why would anybody want to do power training who's not a power athlete? Because for so many reasons right now, I don't need to speak about it at your other guests have, for the reasons of longevity, how important it is to have high levels of power. And the kettlebell swing is one of the ways, one of the ways to develop it. And interestingly enough, going back, like, you know, these accelerations. Nikolai Yakov live top Soviet biochemist, he was just talking about sprints during added SP sprints. When you're adding sprints just to a jog, you know, this kind of a fart like work. He was saying how important, how good it is for elderly and for teenagers, how good it is. So the kettlebell, even if you're not sprinting, if you don't know how to sprint, you're able to get so many of this youth promoting benefits. And again, you have one tool that can train all the qualities you can develop mobility. You know, the bent press. That's a tremendous exercise, the bent press, where the mobility of the T, SP spine, the mobility of the shoulder. So like you wore a watch and watch, for example, Dr. Pope Mosley, he is one of our instructors and he's also a doctor and biomed researcher. I mean, the gentleman is 70 years old and he's doing these beautiful bent presses Getting himself in the range of motion that young guys, you know on their phones can possibly get in into and is doing it in a healthy manner. So you can develop mobility, you can develop strength, you can develop endurance and resilience in all one, one package. So obviously I'm biased and I'm not saying it's the only way to go, but that's one relative benefit. One of the many relative benefits of kettlebells. But in the overall lifelong journey, like if you're looking at three things right now, your new strength. What should I start with? I would say start with the kettlebell. It's the best entry point. We find it so easy to start coaching people in powerlifting or transition to some body weight strength after training them with kettlebells. It's extremely easy because they've got that body weight language of strength down.
- [221:58]
Andrew Huberman
I'm going to have a few questions in the upcoming months about kettlebells. I'll try not to bother you too many times, but I'll be happy to use them. Thank you. I'll use the course as a guide, but I. I'm determined to derive some of these benefits of kettlebells because kettlebells have been around me for over a decade now and I just haven't quite taken to them. Not through some aversion, but I'm going to approach it correctly. I love the body weight work. The body weight work. I don't know, maybe it takes me back to PE class when I was in high school or something. When we do these fit tests, it's usually some pull ups, some push ups, a reach and a run or something like that, like, like a straight legged toe reach. Who knows if it's a meaningful metric. But in any case, something so satisfying about going from struggling with push ups to being able to do a one arm push up or something like that. And you describe it in how to make that progression in the book for people that.
- [222:56]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Let me just to interrupt you. And it's also cool that you're a bigger guy and you're doing that. This is what I love to see and we're seeing that as strong first. A lot we'll have to see bigger guys and gals getting into the body weight exercises because that's not typically their strength. We like to see skinny people getting into the barbell and just go against things like for example, seeing somebody like Dr. Mike Hartle, one of our master instructors. You know, he's a former American bench press record holder and coach for the Powerlifting Team usa. I mean, watching him do one arm push ups. You gotta love that stuff because normally big guys hate body weight work.
- [223:31]
Andrew Huberman
That's humbling.
- [223:32]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And little guys hate barbell. And we just get, and not just guys, women. We have these ladies, these skinny little ladies lifting amazing weights. That's just always awesome to see that.
- [223:44]
Andrew Huberman
It is awesome. And I love that strength training, resistance training is starting to really make a showing here in the US and the general public. I think it's one of the best things to happen in the last few years. And this discussion, your knowledge is going to put even more momentum behind.
- [223:59]
Pavel Tsatsouline
If I just made to guide people just briefly on a very high level. Great news, you have so many choices. Bad news, you have too many choices. So pick one program with an established track record and just stick with it and follow it for a long time. Do not try to over customize everything. Daniel Kahneman spoke how much algorithms outperform humans so often. I've seen this over and over how a properly designed strength program or endurance program that was generic design but with certain, you know, feedback loops in there. Okay, if this happens, you have to go back and make some changes, deliver much better results and customized programs very often. So find something that's simple, find something that does not have a lot of moving parts and, and just stick with this for a long time. If it's working, do not look for the, for the next thing, because the next thing, maybe it's as good, maybe not. But also do keep in mind that every time you change gears, you lose momentum. You're a neuroscientist. I don't know if you spoke to your audience about the law of neural Darwinism, but there's a competition between the synaptic sides. So you have the pathways. So you can only do so many things well. So a child can do everything but poorly. But as we get older, some of these pathways get proven, but others get reinforced. And unfortunately we can't excel at everything. So as this classic example with, and not just physically, mentally as well, cognitively as well, this classic example with taxi drivers, back in the days before GPS taxi cab drivers, they were supposed to pass an extremely challenging test how to navigate through the city that was not designed to, to be navigated through. And they found that certain part of their hippocampus was more developed than in others. And so this, you know, so they thought, well, maybe it's just pre selection, maybe whoever made it through the test were the guys with the more muscular hippocampus, you know, and then they monitored, then they monitored two Groups of students over several years and they said they start with the same size and in the group that passed their brains so to say got bigger in that part and the others, they didn't. Okay. But then at the same time in a different test of a different test of memory, the guys who passed the test, they were not so good. So they lost something in the process. It's just life. It's many things in life are zero sum game. You want to seek some balance up to a point. But there comes a point where you know you cannot do it all. We are limited in time, we're limited in our adaptive capacity.
- [226:51]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, amen to that. And I appreciate you highlighting the London cab drivers experiment. Your, your knowledge of neuroscience is truly impressive.
- [226:58]
Pavel Tsatsouline
You're way degenerate. Thank you.
- [227:00]
Andrew Huberman
No, it's true. No other guest on here has discussed long term depression which it's.
- [227:06]
Pavel Tsatsouline
My dad said Andrew knows something my dad really cool early on. That is good things happen at junctions of fields. If you always stay exactly just in your own narrow field and you're just, you know, just the same thing is repeated. But when you start going to somewhere else, a little bit outside, it's adjacent. Whether it's neuroscience, whether it's okay. How do they, you know, what are the martial arts skills? How do the martial artists do for striking or somewhere else? I think that's just really interesting to kind of step a little bit outside your comfort zone and sometimes you see patterns. That's what happens.
- [227:38]
Andrew Huberman
Your father's a smart, smart, smart man.
- [227:40]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you.
- [227:41]
Andrew Huberman
Kids and young people training. I don't know what the going word is now as to whether or not there's a, you know, too young to, to resistance train age. You know, some people say there isn't. When I was growing up it was thought that if you squatted heavy or you deadlifted heavy before you reached your natural limits of your height, that it could quote unquote stunt your growth. Like your comments on that. But based on what we were just talking about, it seems that if a young person is interested in developing a super skill in one area, one sport. Okay. But there's a real trade off to that and perhaps what we should do as kids is a little bit of soccer, a little bit of swimming, a little bit gymnastics, seems like a wonderful all around sport. Maybe a little archery, you know, try a bunch of things, some ballet, you know, try.
- [228:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
That's the time to do that. That's explores that neurodiversity and the things that you can possibly do and then find the things that you click with. And for the physical body. Early specialization destroys athletes. It is really terrible because early on kids absolutely need to do a wide variety of different activities and really pursue a fairly balanced development. You know, there may be a bias towards strength or bias towards endurance, but they really need to do it all. And specialist athletes break. They break. They really do. So that balance between general and specific, it's a tough balance.
- [229:06]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. And psychologically sometimes too. We had a guest on here who's become a psychologist, but she was a concert level violin player, then injured her finger and it was like the most devastating thing, you know, when we put all of our sort of identity into one thing. Sure, you get your Michael Jordans and you get your Tiger woods and seriously.
- [229:28]
Pavel Tsatsouline
There'S no right answer or wrong answer. So I remember Ivana Bajiev, who was head coach for the Bulgarian weightlifting team. He says if Paganini played whatever instruments, you know, in addition to his own instrument playing in 15 hours a day, he would not have become Paganini. And that's true. But I'm not saying that specialization is necessarily the right choice for everybody. Some, some people prefer to be decent in many things and it is healthy, but you still have to decide, you still have to make decisions. Very much. You're looking like at a budget. Do I want to buy a couch or do you want to go on a vacation to Italy? Or do I want to go on a much lamer vacation and buy a lamer couch and do both. And I'm not saying what's the right answer right there, but just people do have to understand there are, there are limitations. They can't successfully compete in two sports, for example. It's not going to happen, especially if it's a power sport and endurance sport and they can't study everything to a high level just as well. If you want to be polymath, that was fine in the 18th century. Right now it's a little bit tougher.
- [230:36]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Previous guests. You may know him, Josh Waitzkin of chess prodigy fame. He's gone on to do several things at world class level by severing from the previous endeavor completely. He hasn't picked up a chess piece since he was 16, which is remarkable pivoting to other things. But when one looks at the data on child prodigies, very few of them are like Josh. Most of them don't actually succeed in doing anything else at a very high level, except hopefully survive and thrive in their personal life. Who knows, after being ultra successful as a young child, probably because Their nervous system is so. They grease the groove so heavily for one endeavor, it's very hard to cross over. Josh is exceptional in that regard.
- [231:21]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, exceptions prove the rule, usually.
- [231:23]
Andrew Huberman
Exactly. Not to say too mechanical and specific, but I'd love to talk about abdominal or rather core work.
- [231:31]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Sure.
- [231:32]
Andrew Huberman
Another thing that I love in the Naked Warrior are the abdominal exercises. I must tell you, after years of doing some crunches here and there in different, you know, for whatever this class or that class or trying to. I never really cared about having my abs defined for its own sake. One should probably be able to at least contract their abs. Okay. It's the level of.
- [231:53]
Pavel Tsatsouline
We assess them by punching them.
- [231:55]
Andrew Huberman
Right, Exactly. But there's some wonderful exercises in there about learning to brace the entire body and some, dare I say, some rather unorthodox ways of assessing stability at the. The level of the core. I'm thinking about the plank, where somebody tries to either kick you over or push you over. This might sound violent. This is not where you start.
- [232:14]
Pavel Tsatsouline
It's kind and gentle, but I never.
- [232:16]
Andrew Huberman
Thought I could do, like, hanging pikes, for instance. And like now, pikes are standard part of my weekly routine. I love doing five sets of. Five of hanging pikes. And. And I will tell anyone that decides to go down this path that when I first tried to do a pike, I failed miserably. I tried an L. Sit. Failed miserably. Tried to the, you know, hanging from the bar and just getting into a chair position and could just barely hold that. The progressions are what matter, right? Slow progression and patience. Now, five sets of five pikes, trivial for me, but when I. I just want to emphasize that when I started, I was far, far away from that. And it's the progressions in the book that really helped me. And I've maintained that pike ability. So thank you for that. And I say not. Not to necessarily to highlight what I can do, but that. To highlight what I do believe most anybody can do. If you put the work.
- [233:08]
Pavel Tsatsouline
If they put a lot of attention in. So midsection training is one of the most misunderstood and messed up areas of physical culture. There's a thousand different exercises and people are going to have variety this many reps. That's not the point. The point really is tension and attention.
- [233:26]
Andrew Huberman
Tension.
- [233:27]
Pavel Tsatsouline
So those are the two things. And ideally, your best first step is really learning abdominal tension through something like a Zercher squat or double kettlebell front squat, where the load distribution is such that it forces reflexive stabilization. And you feel, oh, that's what tight abs feel like and getting somebody just weak in a plank, it's hopeless. There's a. Absolutely not going to help. It's not. There are ways of building up to it, yes, by rolling in the back and so on. So. But if you don't have that option or if you choose not to exercise it, you have to be extremely attentive to the details of what's going on within your abdomen. So you need to learn things like for example, you need to learn to contract the pelvic diaphragm, pull your butt up because you're trying to con, you know, trying to constrain the intra abdominal pressure. Then you need to learn how to direct attention to the different parts of your abdomen. Almost like a bodybuilder, but really not quite more like a gymnast. There is this argument about, in strength world about, you know, internal focus, external focus and queuing. And the agreement is in motor learning, well, external focus cueing is so much better than focusing on, you know, whatever happens within the individual muscle. It may be true in the beginning and it may be true outside of the strength game, but any top strength athlete that you will meet, they have their own internal cues how they do something. Later on, they may forget them. It just spires on, you know, but they know how to. This is how. This is how I engage the lat in the, in the bench press. George Halbert, bench press world record holder, famously said it took him many years to finally understand how the triceps is used in the bench press. Many years. So there's a lot of internal component and for the abs, very, very much so, you have to learn how to very much direct your attention there. To get high tension, you have to keep the reps low. Like you said, five sets of five perfect high reps are not necessary. You're not going to burn off fat by doing more reps, you're just going to irritate your back. That's all you're going to do, nothing else. So you treat your ab training very much like a strength strength vent. And if you do that, you're going to get those results. And finally, the final detail is you need to use that intra abdominal pressure as your friend. Because in lifting, like a deadlift or a squat or something, an intra abdominal pressure helps you. It supports you. When you're doing abdominal work, you work against that intra abdominal pressure. You just create that pressure and contract. Again. This is something called internal isometrics. So it's kind of interesting. It's just a combination of classic strength work with very Internalized, kind of almost like a martial arts approach to it. Then you need to learn also how to obviously use your abs and lifts and lifting. And once you do, and this is the beauty, you don't really have to train your abs anymore. So Franco Columbo, for example, great example, in addition to winning, you know, being super strong and winning Mr. Olympia, he won the best abs. He didn't train abs. He said, he told me, I hate ab training. He just would stay tight whenever he did his heavy lifts. And this is pretty much what happens when you reach a certain level of strength and a certain level of awareness, simply staying tight during your strength work and also employing power breathing, which is very important, you're going to be able to get as strong as you need in the abs and get your six pack or whatever, provided you don't need the Twinkies. So how do you pressurize the. In fact, may I show an abdominal exercise right now that is just sitting at this table that's also going to teach you how, teach your audience how to properly pressurize for lifting. So normally it's better than standing. So. And it's not for people with high blood pressure or heart concerns, you know, check with your doctor if that's the situation. So you take a normal breath in your abdomen and you pull up your butt. Pretty much like imagine you have to go to the restroom and you trying to, you can't quite, you know, it's far away. You're trying to stop yourself. And then you put your tongue between your teeth and you start, and you start hissing and you do this in this ratcheting kind of manner. So try to keep all the pressure out of your head, out of your neck, direct all the pressure, all this pressure is just really staying below. And so this type of hissing, you will notice that very rapidly you're going to contract everything around your waist. So everything around your waist is going to contract and you're going to strain your abdomen. You're also going to start learn how to properly, how to properly stabilize yourself under heavy weights. The difference between using this technique for lifting and for just training the abs, when you're training the abs, there's going to be some spinal flexion. Not a whole lot. You don't want to do a lot of that. There's going to be some spinal flexion. When you're doing that under a heavy barbell squat, you're maintaining your spine as neutral. It's like your body stays a cylinder. And you're going to hold your breath pretty Much. But the idea is the same. So it's like. So the Valsalva maneuver, one Russian coach called it. It's an exhalation that didn't happen. Okay. Because people don't know, hold their breath properly. They just. And then eyes are bulging out where there's no stability right here. So first of all, you got to inhale low. And how do you do that? If you watch top lifters, how they do that, they will do it through pursed lips. You can also do it through the nose, but you cannot do it through big, wide open mouth. So I'll show you why. So if you. You can. You folks can try it at home. So if you put your hand on your stomach and trying to do an abdominal breath doesn't go very well. Now, for contrast, pinch off one nostril, take an abdominal breath. Or you can do that through pursed lips. Try it again. So you see, more resistance, more resistance. And again, you're engaging the diaphragm instead of just your thorax right there. So you take that breath into your abdomen in, like through a small opening through your nose or through. Or through your pursed lips. You draw it in right there, and then, you know, down below, you pull it up. And then after that, it's that, that exhalation, that didn't happen. Do you see?
- [240:14]
Andrew Huberman
I see. So I. I'm familiar with sort of bracing my abs. What I've not done before is the resisting going to the bathroom thing that you mentioned, the pulling up of the butt. And then. And then. So you're creating compression from the bottom and from the top and also from all around.
- [240:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
That happens. Happens reflexively as well.
- [240:32]
Andrew Huberman
So that's the position to get in to before, say, like a hard azerture squat or something like that.
- [240:37]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Absolutely. And if you're doing that for an exercise that's long, long in duration, you know, if you don't want to be holding your breath too long, then we have an expression that comes from one of the chirotest styles, breathing behind the shield. So. So right now I can speak to you, but I'm still just as tight. And so you see what you're doing. So the way we test it at our. Where we teach it at our workshops is you lie on the ground, I tell you to tense up, then I'm going to stand on your stomach, I'm going to have you sing a song, and you're going to have to learn to properly maintain that pressure while still continuing to breathe. So you're able to stabilize your spine, but you're not going to pass out from maintaining that by holding your breath from for a period of time. And then finally what you got to learn to do is you got to learn to match the breath with the force. So synchronize, synchronize. When you're punching, when you're throwing, when you're lifting, you have to learn how to match that contraction. The timing of the abdominal contraction and the pressurization, sometimes exhalation, sometimes just pretending to with the effort, Effort. Once you learn how to match the breath with the force, it's like magic. And what people don't realize is not just purely mechanical. Mechanically, yes, of course it works. You know, Stu explained this so well about the stiffness of the structure. The analogy of the bicycle frame. It's the same thing. You're getting an expensive bicycle frame when you have strong abs as opposed to the cheap one that rattles and wiggles. But there's also something that it's never spoken about in the west. For some reason, the Soviets studied that decades ago. This is something they called the pneumo reflex. Pneumo is P N E U M O so air. So there are baroreceptors, receptors for sensors for pressure inside your abdominal cavity and thoracic cavity. So whenever these receptors are stimulated, what they do, they automatically increase the sensitivity of alpha motor neurons. So which really means to the audience is this. If you imagine your brain is the music player and imagine your muscle is a speaker, the amount of intra abdominal pressure is your volume control. So by increasing that pressure, increasing the strength, but by, by releasing that intra abdominal pressure, you relax the muscles. So that's why in stretching, as I mentioned before, you can be sitting in a half split and groaning. No, you need to release. So if you release that passive breath again, your muscles are going to relax. So controlling your breath is very much, as it's known in martial arts, it's very much synonymous with was controlling your body and your mind very often fantastic.
- [243:39]
Andrew Huberman
When one throws a punch. Is it true that exhaling is actually providing additional power?
- [243:48]
Pavel Tsatsouline
There's no question about it. It's been measured. It's been measured in fighters. It's also been measured in lifting as well. There was a study that was done in the west, even when screaming increases strength significantly, again, this is not just a psychological component. I mean, there may be some psychological component to that, but again, there's this very distinct increase of strength through that reflex. And it's very easy for the listeners to test that. Get a dynamometer, hand gripper and just test yourself on that and just see. Test it out with different breathing patterns and just see what happens. And whenever, you know this idiotic practice at some gyms, oh, you can't grunt right here. And it's just, well, I guess you can be strong here. And yeah, of course, if you're doing this on purpose, you're walking in with the bros and you're just trying to. Just to make noise to attract attention. That's wrong. But strength is a noisy endeavor. So there may be some hissing, there may be some grunting. It's just absolutely unavoidable. And if you're trying to be quiet and if you're trying to be a lady or a gentleman, well, maybe it's not for. It's for somewhere else, not for the gym.
- [245:05]
Andrew Huberman
So some potentially trivial questions, but I think they are not trivial. I hope they're not. In any case, where should we place our eyes when we're in exertion? Close our eyes and grind it out. Look at form in the mirror. I'm a big fan of gyms without mirrors because I have to concentrate on the form. Vision is a powerful tool and source of feedback, but also a source of a lot of things. There must be a rule about this or at least a set of guidelines for. Are we eyes closed and grimacing? Are we checking our bicep vein in the mirror? Just kidding. Don't do that, folks. During a lift, where should our eyes be? Is there any idea that looking up, it makes it easier to drive up out of the bottom of a squat? Has this been explained?
- [245:57]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, it has. There's several sides to that. Part of it is the spinal safety. So Stu will tell you that extending the neck is going to facilitate the entire posterior chain. And he'll also tell you that lifters with longer necks may be able to get their heads up and that might work better for them. For some other lifters, especially those with pronounced lordosis, where they're very arch, big arch in the back, that may arch them too much, that might be inappropriate. Or just kink their neck. It's all possible. And so a lot of coaches these days in lift like a deadlift, they try to. Including Andy Bolton. Andy Bolton, he's the legendary deadlifter. He's the one, the first lifter to lift over £1,000 in the deadlift. And Andy and I, we co authored the book the Deadlift Dynamite. So Andy's got the most beautiful deadlift, just the most incredible, beautiful deadlift. So Andy's. What Andy does is pretty Much what the standard recommendation for most people is these days, where you're maintaining a neutral neck and your eyes kind of go with that. So you get yourself in the position on the bottom of the deadlift, like where your head is the continuation of your body, like you're an insect or something. And then you look at the spot on the ground that's appropriate, and your eyes will come up. So that's a good general standard recommendation. For people with long necks looking straight ahead, it's a good recommendation. Some lifters succeed with crazy ideas. Lamar Ganta, again, pound per pound, the biggest deadlifter, he was in tremendous hyperextension. He was looking at the ceiling. Then, at a high level of competition, there are some other subtle ways, some things people try. So Constantino, Constantino from Latvia, he was another great deadlifter who passed. He would look down at the start. He would look absolutely down. He was pretty much. And if you look at. If you look at it from your perspective, when your neck is inflection, interestingly enough, that facilitates the knee extensors, which is really, really weird. Yeah. And that's when I put my chin.
- [248:14]
Andrew Huberman
Towards my chest, not all the way down, but.
- [248:16]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yeah, yeah. You will find that your quads are going to be stronger. Yeah. But it's not for everybody. For somebody else, that's a great way to mess up, mess up the back. So there are some. There's some subtleties, and there are also some people who really get fancy with the eyes, eye movement, you know, follow the bar, do these other things, like accounts from gymnastics. Good rule of thumb is if you look straight ahead, more often than not, you're going to be okay. But from that, there are a lot of fancy ways to do it. As for closing your eyes, closing your eyes is not recommended. It changes the coordination of the lift. But for advanced lifters, lifting blood blindfolded is a really good idea. So Robert Roman, one of the top Soviet specialists, he pioneered that. And you would have his lifters do some of the sets blindfolded. And it's really amazing at how much not relying on your vision, relying your kinesthetic sense, what that does, it's quite remarkable. And also, just to add one more thing, at a competition, at least in powerlifting, a lot of. I mean, the top guys, they don't see anything really. You know, they're just deep inside their rage. They're not. It's a total tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, everything. So it's whatever, their heads in their head in whatever remembered position, but don't ask them to look at you or see you. It's not going to happen.
- [249:34]
Andrew Huberman
They're someplace else.
- [249:35]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Yep.
- [249:37]
Andrew Huberman
Pavel, I must say this has been a spectacular voyage through.
- [249:42]
Pavel Tsatsouline
You're very kind, Andrew. It's been a real pleasure. Very, very stimulating conversation.
- [249:48]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, thank you. And I'm going to just embarrass you a little bit further by telling you more positive things about you because I noticed it makes you uncomfortable. It's perhaps the only thing that makes you uncomfortable. But in all seriousness, I don't think any. I can't sense any discomfort. I want to just thank you for a number of things that are reflective, I'm sure, of what other people are thinking. First of all, the level of rigor that you've approached. This whole thing of strength and fitness and flexibility and breathing and every one of these topics, too many to list off just now. It's remarkable. It's really fantastic.
- [250:27]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. I love my job, so that's easy.
- [250:29]
Andrew Huberman
This comes through and it's rare these days, but it's rare in any age to find people that are so dedicated to this level of rigor in a given area. And it's so appreciated.
- [250:44]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you coming for me. It means a lot.
- [250:45]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, we really, we need people like you. You're truly a scientist and a practitioner. You embody the principles that you discuss clearly, which is also important.
- [250:53]
Pavel Tsatsouline
If I could blush, I would right now.
- [250:56]
Andrew Huberman
Russians don't blush. No, no. Got it. A topic for another podcast. So the rigor and the quality of the information that you put forth in your books and on this podcast and elsewhere, your online courses, just absolutely spectacular. And I hope people noticed. You know, I couldn't help but notice as an. As an academic, but your attention to proper attribution for people that have done the work and accomplished the various feats from whom you've gleaned various aspects of this knowledge is not to be overlooked because that's something that's so important. So to go without saying, it's just, it's so. It's. It's remarkable and it's important to hide.
- [251:33]
Pavel Tsatsouline
It should go without saying, it, shouldn't it?
- [251:35]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, it should go without saying, but it doesn't, you know, these days it's more about who can glean the most attention as opposed to shed light on others and, and their work. And in doing so, as, as we've observed, there's absolutely nothing is lost and so much is gained. It's for everybody. So thank you. That that's a proper attribute. Thank you for is spectacular. And I really look forward to sharing the resources where people can learn more. But already today you've just provided such a wealth of knowledge for us and it's a real honor to sit here with you and to learn from you. I plan to listen to this podcast several times over and take detailed notes. We timestamp it all and I just hope that we'll have the opportunity at some point to sit down again and as well perhaps to get the opportunity to train together so I personally could learn from you. But in the meantime, on behalf of myself and everyone listening, watching, thank you ever so much, Pavel.
- [252:30]
Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you Andrew.
- [252:30]
Andrew Huberman
You're a real, real pleasure. You're a real gem.
- [252:32]
Pavel Tsatsouline
And thank you for spreading the, spreading the word of health and strength, strength and health.
- [252:38]
Andrew Huberman
Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Pavel Satsulin. I hope you found it to be as interesting and as actionable as I did. To learn more about Pavel's work, including his books, his online courses and other resources, please see the show Note Captions 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 click Follow for the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple. You can leave us up to a five star review. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics 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. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols 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. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Threads. 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 content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that'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 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 Pavel Satsulin. And last, last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.