← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Why You're Not Losing Fat & Building Muscle (Avoid These Mistakes) | Dr. Andy Galpin PT 1
01:32:18
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A
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B
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Yes.
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B
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C
What's up guys? Prepare to be blown away as we welcome the powerhouse of physical performance and optimization, Dr. Andy Galpin. Sky is not just smart. He is a walking encyclopedia of body transformation. He's rubbed shoulders with the titans of the athletic world and is the go to problem solver for the trickiest of issues. And trust me, I'm speaking from personal experience here. He is a guy that I have trusted to help me find a solution to my most stubborn injury yet. And when it comes to the human body, muscle building and fat loss, Andy really is in a league of his own. Our chat was an absolute brain fest. I felt like I had raced my way through a Master's degree in physiology by the end of it. Why? Because Andy is a master of connecting the dots between scholarly knowledge and real world application. So if you're raring to bust fitness myths wide open and supercharge your workout game, stick around for part one of this two part phenomenal conversation. And don't forget to follow us on Amazon Music for more electrifying episodes and the captivating continuation of our deep dive in part two with Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. The vast majority of people that go to the gym, they're in there working out all the time. They never see any substantive gains. Why not? What are people doing wrong?
- [02:20]
A
Well, I'd say in general there are a few concepts that you need to hit and then there are infinite methods. So the way to frame this entire idea is regardless of your goal, gaining strength, losing fat, all those things you listed, there are always these fundamental Concepts. If you hit those, you're going to see your goal. If you don't, it doesn't matter what method you're using, you're probably going to either not hit a goal or you'll hit it very shortly and then come back down and you'll have this yo, yo patterning. So all you really have to do is ensure at the most fundamental level those concepts are hit. And then we can talk days and days and days about all the intricacies of the different methods, because they are different, especially as we get to the level of nuance. But for most people at this level, it is that big stuff. So what does that look like? The number one thing is what we call progressive overload, such that you need to be asking a change in your physiology. And remember, probably the biggest advantage we have in biology is the fact that we are optimized for adaptation. And I want to reiterate that point. What that means is your entire physiology is based around a single goal of adapting to stimuli. It's the best trait we have. Why that matters here is if you're asking it to do something, it is going to respond. And so you need to be very careful with what you're asking it to do. If you are putting a stress on it, it's going to change. But if you're not stressing it, it's going to revert back to homeostasis. This is that baseline. So ask it to change and then be diligent about what you're asking it to do. In this context, we call that progressive overload. So you're going to continue to ask it to do a little bit more and more and more so that it will continue to adapt. It doesn't have to be harder or longer or, or more sore or more fatigue. It just needs to be overloaded. And there's a bunch of ways we can reach overload. That can be more weight, it can be more repetitions, it could be longer, it could be more complexity, it could be more novelty. There's a ton of ways in which we can ask our body to learn a new task. But that is the one that jumps out to me is the first fundamental issue is folks will go to their fitness routine and they'll sort of perform the same thing every time. And that's great. And you're gonna get changes up to that level, but once that is a new homeostasic balance, you're not gonna proceed any further. So progressive overload is the number one tactic there.
- [04:44]
C
Okay. And so I've heard you Talk a lot about consistency. That certainly is a problem that a lot of people have. They are not, they're just not going enough. They're maybe they go work out once a week, it's super intense. But when I think about the problem of consistency, should I be thinking about it in terms of that even if you go in and do the same thing, you're going to make some mild gains, but it plateaus quickly? Because I think most people are thinking about it in terms of do I need to be in the gym six days a week, do I need to be in the gym five days a week, or can it be less than that? What is the amount? That is the baseline if we want to add muscle.
- [05:20]
A
So this is a great question because what you're actually asking is a methods question. And I say that to reiterate that actually, not that it doesn't matter, but this is a second level question. So that gives you options. If within your schedule or your preferences, you want to work out twice a week, that could work. If you want to do six days a week, that could work as well. You have the ability to do either one or anywhere in between and still reach most people's fitness goals. And so what it really comes down to is the question beforehand, which is, what is that goal? If you're trying to say optimize strength and you are fairly highly trained, then you probably are going to have to work out more than once a week. But if you're saying, hey, look, I want to simply maximize my fat loss, that could be done plausibly, in once a week. Could be done, wouldn't be optimized, but it could be done. And so the other question is, again, are we looking for optimal or effective? Those are not the same questions. So we have a lot of room to grow in general for most people. If you're doing some sort of what we call structured exercise, a couple of days a week at a minimum, and then the other days you have some sort of baseline physical activity, then you're probably okay. This could be something like a step count. So are you hitting your 10,000 steps a day plus then two days a week of structured exercise? Okay, that is probably enough for most people to get by. If that's all you're looking for, great. If you're saying, I'm not interested in just getting by, well, now we're having a different conversation. So again, ultimately it really comes back to what is the actual goal? And to determine what these steps are and the methods we need to execute that goal. But to go back to our first point, it's still progressive overload. I'm still moving and I'm still training. The other thing we need to discuss here is the difference between physical activity and, again, structured exercise. Those are not to be treated as the same thing for most people. Easy example. Let's say you went to the gym really hard, 20 minutes exhausted at the end of your workout, and you did that three times a week. And then the rest of the week, you engaged in a thousand steps and sat the rest of the day. You could look at the science here. You could also look at intuition. They're both going to lead you to the same spot, which is to say this is not an optimal health strategy. You might feel great in those workouts, but you're not in a great spot. The polar opposite would be, oh, I don't really work out because I walk a lot and I move great. Also, strong science to show that that's not optimal for health either. And so the balance that you're going to play here between my physical activity and my movement, my taking the stairs, my gardening, my standing desk, like all those general things versus your more structured exercise, it's a balance game, but it depends on the specific goal you're going after. We could go through different goals if you'd like, and I could give you more tangible examples, but that's before we do that.
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C
I definitely. We will get into, especially muscle gain and fat loss. But first, I really want to nail down why most people don't make the kind of progress that they want. So we've got the progressive overload, we've got consistency. You're going to need to do both. My question is, though, why don't people do that? So taking them one at a time. Well, one. Is there something more than consistency and progressive overload?
- [08:32]
A
Yeah, there's a handful of other concepts, but the other big one that I think you're actually. You're getting to, if I'm reading the right direction here, is they don't necessarily have a specific plan. And so what the evidence will show you scientifically is having an actual plan, regardless of how great that plan is, is more effective than not having a plan.
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C
When you say plan. So I'll use my own journey as a mile marker. So my plan was look like Hugh Jackman in Wolverine.
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A
Amazing.
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C
Or in X Men when it came out. So is that. Are we calling that a plan? That was certainly a goal.
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A
That's a goal.
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C
But I had no idea how to get there. So I just bought Arnold Schwarzenegger's book of bodybuilding and started going after it. Progressive overload. I understood. So I was. I was really trying to push myself. I was trying to add more weight constantly.
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A
Yeah.
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C
But this brings me to the big avenue I want to go down. Are the things like why? Why are people lazy? How do they get injured? That kind of stuff, which I think plays into it. But I have a core thesis that I want to run by you that I think is a big part of this. So you started by saying that humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. My words. But that was your concept, which I agree with very much. But what I don't understand is why we have such a use it or lose it stance at a biological level. So the thing I don't understand, you're fighting against constantly. If I let off the gas even a little bit, I slide backwards. So you get this A. It's very hard to move forward. You have to put yourself in what I'll call an adapt or die state. I remember lifting. If I wanted to increase size and strength, I had to go in there like I was trying to kill myself. Like, it's not like, oh, just do
- [10:10]
A
a little bit extra.
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C
It's like two hours in the gym to the point where I remember one time I put pressure on my hand like I was leaning on something and. And my arm just collapsed because I had been doing tricep work. And it was like, when I was working out like that, I made gains. When I stopped working out like that, I wasn't making gains. And so there is something that I don't understand about why the body is so hesitant to put on. To increase VO2 max and maintain it. To put on muscle and maintain it. Like all these gains, lactic threshold and maintain it. Like all these things that we can do, they just end up sliding backwards. So it would be easy to say, okay, people don't understand progressive overload. Fair. It would be easy to say people are lazy. Fair. It would be easy to say that people hate working out. I certainly do. But my question becomes, why does working out suck? And I think it's meaning it is physically unpleasant. At least if you're wired like me. It is not fun. There's nothing about it. I've seen you joke about people vomiting. Like, it. It is a horrib experience for me from top to bottom. Now my body is telling me, stop doing this. That's the part I don't understand. Why is my body screaming, stop doing this. And then why does it slide back so fast? If I Actually do stop doing it.
- [11:33]
A
There's so many fun things there. I was trying not to smile, interrupt the entire time. There's. This is a topic I find endlessly fascinating. Right. The biological drive of what we do. I have a lot of things to react to on that, and I'll try to stay organized with my response because that is very fun. Number one, I need to push back hard on you. On. It is absolutely not required to train that hard to make progress. I would actually love to go back to your training records and to see what you were doing. But I would. I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that the training program you were doing or what you were asking your body to do outside of that was massively off. And so this could mean that your training program was terrible. Uh, technically, right. What you were doing, probably, or your other factors that go into your physiological adaptation. So the way that we characterize this is, remember, adaptation happens as a result of stress. Okay? And people think stress, they think bad. That's not the case. Right. It's pro stress, negative stress. There's scientific terms for these. But that. Just think about it, though. Good stress, bad stress. Right? So what actually happens is people use an analogy of like a stress bucket. So you have a certain size of a bucket, say this coffee cup right here, and there's some water in it right now. And the water is full at 60%. Okay? Now, once that thing overfills, then it starts spilling out, okay? So you have a couple of options. You can either increase the size of your cup, or you can reduce the amount of water in the cup. In this case, the water is the total stress load. This is called allostatic load or allostasis. That's a fancy science word for stress load. So if I want to be in a position where I can put a little bit more water in that cup, again, two options. Make the cup larger, or take the amount of water in there and reduce it. But remember, in order for me to adapt, I have to add water. That's the signal. That's the stress. So just not adding water means backwards adaptation. Right. So what most people don't realize is that water is actually full of two types of stressors. These are what we call hidden stressors and visible stressors. The visible ones are the ones that you see or feel or react to. You know you didn't sleep last night. You know you didn't work out yesterday. You know you drank alcohol. You know you did things like this. But then there's a whole cascade of what we call hidden stressors. So these hormones are not symptomatic. These are micronutrient deficiencies. These could be parasites, these could be inefficiencies in sleep or recovery. Tons of things going on that are outside of your perception. So one of the things that we do is to make sure that that hidden stressor is as low as possible. And so I've lowered that water line. Why do we care?
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C
Because it's going to stop me from pushing myself.
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A
No, great question. I'll come back. The more water I can put in your cup, the more adaptation I get.
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C
Got it.
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A
So the more stress I can put on you. But if your cup is already 90% pre full and I can only put in that last 10% and then you start overflowing. Overflowing would be injury, breakdown, fatigue, things like that.
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C
So this is why it's important to understand the two types of stress. I may be filling a cup of dumb stress and not useful stress.
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A
Yeah, exactly. And that dumb stress and useful stress could be again, something you're aware of or unaware of. And so by simply reducing the amount of unwanted stressors, I've increased your ability to put more stress in the system, which increases your ability stress to adapt. Right. It's targeted stress. It's saying, for example, you're having a stressor in your physiology because of a poor nutritional intake. If I can remove that, then I can add that same amount of stressor in by more exercise. I can do it and I can target where the stress is coming in, which means I can target the adaptation. What we're looking at here is saying, all right, let's make sure that that stress cup, that bucket is minimized with non targeted stress. So we can maximize our targeted stress. So we can maximize our targeted adaptation. So I would say again that either your training program is not great, which means the stress you're putting in wasn't great.
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C
Because you're saying your fundamental assumption is that I should not have to work that hard to make those gains.
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A
Yeah, no, like that I would, technically that's an assumption. But I, I would say just because of our years of experience, all the science, I would not believe any other truth is that that training program was not great or something else that was going on in your internal physiology, your hidden stressors or your visible stressors was causing your cup to be pre full too high to where everything was just blowing over and there was no ability left for adaptation. So one of the actual markers we test for is adaptability. We can measure this Through a bunch of labs and stuff, I would imagine your adaptability was extremely low. And so you had to push hard, hard, hard, hard, hard to get any moderate amount of change. And so this is kind of the equivalent of working extremely inefficiently. We would have came back and said, we're going to get you more progress by simply removing these other things and you're going to do the same work, in fact, less work and you'll make a lot more gains.
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C
Give me some of the standard bad, invisible stress that build up in people's lives that they're unaware of.
- [16:43]
A
Yeah, the ones that I mentioned earlier, very common to see either inflammatory markers, hormone profiles, micronutrients that tend to be off. There can be other things that are more difficult to ascertain, like heavy metals, things pollutants in the air. There could be things in your sleep environment that are volatile organics that are coming out of your mattress, like formaldehyde or out of your wall, like lead.
- [17:08]
C
Heard you talk about that before. So let's break down commonality of these stressors. Like is, is it like you're just walking straight to people's bedrooms, testing the formaldehyde leaking out of it and going, all right, we gotta switch out your mattress? Or is that like, meh, it's mostly people's diet and you're just eating a diet. And that's the reality.
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A
Okay, so I'll back up what, what our system is, is it's comprehensive. So we build stuff for these high performance individuals, whether they're athletes or non athletes. And our approach is basically if, if we wanted to take money out of the equation and figure out the answer for everyone, let's do an unbelievable amount of diagnostics so that we could come back and say you have a very specific and simple solution plan. And what we're looking for is what we call performance anchors. So these are anchors that are holding someone's physiology back. The last time we had a conversation, we talked a lot about not wanting to overuse technologies in fitness. And that's still true. And so we believe in the power of your own internal physiology, which means I want to let your physiology do what it wants to do. With all the great technology we have right now, we still don't necessarily understand why physiology runs the way it runs. So that all being said, then we are looking for the things that are constraining your physiology. If I can remove those three to five performance anchors or constraints and then let your physiology do what it wants to do, then I'm in a Much better spot. And you're going to be in a much better spot. So I'm on the hunt for what those three to five things are. Maybe seven, maybe two for each individual person.
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C
Do you approach them in the same order? Meaning you just expect some are common?
- [18:44]
A
Not at all, no. Yeah. And so this is answering your question directly. There's been plenty of people that will run these full evaluations on. You're talking, you know, well over 500 biomarkers. The environmental analysis. We're doing sleep tracking at the highest level. You're running full clinical grade sleep analysis. This is a sleep study done in your own bedroom every night, things like that. Right. You're not going to a sleep lab. We're doing all kinds of other tracking and we're gonna figure out. And this has happened plenty of times. Yo, you just need a psychologist. Yo, you just need to eat a reasonable diet that your performance anchor is all nutrition based. Sometimes it's the opposite. They're doing all the visible stressors, great sunlight and stress and community and connection and purpose and good diet and exercise and all those things are great. But then something is happening internally that they just never would have spotted. This could be an inflammatory marker. This could be any brain chemistry, things like any number of neurotransmitters, something like that. And so that person might be on a different protocol. Another person might be something like you need to find purpose in life, that you need to find an activity or volunteer or you need and you need to do this more style of training. Right. So any combination we're really trying to find again, what are those like three or four or five things that are going to make the most impact and then we can just get out of the way and let physiology do it. So my brain, when you were saying that earlier is look, of all the I've, I've dealt with professional athletes and probably 15 pro sports and this is at the highest level. So you're talking NFL MVPs and Cy Youngs and all stars and all pros and Olympic gold medalists and world champions in the UFC in boxing and all these things. We've dealt with hundreds of people in our executive programs. I've never seen anybody that has to train that hard to get progress. So I just don't believe that that is. I believe that was true in your actual experience, but I would say something was not great with the program or something else in your physiology was constrained to a level that your adaptability was just smolderingly small. And so we would need to Figure out what that was at the time. Could have been job stress, could have been CO2 tolerance, could have been connection to your own physiology. Like there's all kinds of areas that this could be in and we've seen them all and. Or it could have been, you know, something else going on. So we would have gone in, found those things and said, we're having you do A, B and C. Could be very simple, could be not. And then here's your new training program. And I'd be willing to bet a lot that your training would have resulted in much more effectiveness. For sure.
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C
Okay. I don't want to litigate sort of in theory, and I certainly don't want to argue for my limitations, but I do want to. I'm going to pose some questions and you tell me where I'm crazy. Yeah. Is there such a thing as a hard gainer?
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A
Absolutely.
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C
For people that haven't heard that phrase, somebody that has just a hard time putting on muscle.
- [21:39]
A
Yeah, there's actually, we've spent a lot of time in this. There's a nice review paper on this, a handful. There's been a couple of now that have come out on looking at simply the physiological factors specifically in muscle. And there's a whole host, probably over a dozen now of the cellular processes that go into muscle actually adapting, that have been looked at. And none of those are really jumping out. In fact, I literally read a paper this morning looking at muscle fiber type. This would be fast twitch or slow twitch. And that didn't seem to predict hard gainers versus fast gainers either. Ribosomes are probably the most leading candidate, but satellite cells have been looked at, gene expression, signaling, protein. And so there is clearly, it's clearly happening and there's no question there are hard gainers. But we still haven't figured out, in my opinion, really any strong evidence suggests what's happening inside the muscle cell, despite a lot of research and a lot of papers on this topic, which again gives me more ammo to come back and say, I don't know if it's muscle, it's something else potentially that's leading to it. There's no question that some folks will have an exaggerated response. So central dogma is basically this. If your muscle adapts, you have to have some signal coming in extra slow. This could be the cell wall of the muscle fiber stretching. This could be a hormone that's activating a receptor on a cell wall, say t, say an androgen receptor. Could be testosterone. Like any number of things, IGF1 stuff like this. So it can be mechanical, stretching, exercise, stuff like that, or hormonal. But that signal has to be then transducer cross through the cell into the nucleus which holds the DNA inside the cell. That has to then activate what's called gene expression that tells your muscle to express the genes that code the proteins that make your muscle fiber. So three step process signaling is one, gene expression two and then protein synthesis actually is the third process. There's clear evidence that if we were to take all of us in this room, do the exact same workout and then biopsy us, some of us would have an exaggerated either signaling response or maybe not, but it'd be an exaggerated gene expression response or maybe not, or maybe even just a more effective and faster protein synthesis process. So in all three of those individual layers there are differences between folks, but they don't seem to predict at this point which one is going to be the hard gainer or not. And so what I tend to come back to now, having taken so many people through our comprehensive process, is there's probably some other hidden stressor in those individuals. There has been some stuff on older individuals in, in studies where they try to look at this and what they find is they give them more volume and they tend to respond. They get the same gains as the other people once they've had more volume.
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C
Other papers feeds into my sort of underlying hypothesis, which is that I did need to work that hard. Or are you saying that hey, yes, add more volume, but if you're going to the point of not being able to support your own weight, that you've gone too far.
- [24:47]
A
I wouldn't say that. Like I'm a, I'm a strength training junkie. Like I love that part of it. But when I say volume, I'm specifically referring to not necessarily how heavy or how hard you were going, but maybe you needed an extra day, maybe your workouts were too long on one day and you need to do it more frequently. Maybe the recipe for you was a total amount of sets that you were hitting or repetitions you're hitting per week. It's also possible that you were exceeding that. And so what you were actually doing was you were compromising your recovery capacity that was reducing performance in the next workout. And so by the end of say the month you were actually getting a total tonnage less than you would have had you been saved a little more gas in some of the workouts and put it to the next one. So it could be a combination of things that were expressing it. I did want to acknowledge though that it is still absolutely fundamentally true. Some people are simply going to respond better. There's, there's, there's clearly a spectrum of hyper responders to low responders. So I'm not saying that that is false. What I am saying though is you could have made a lot more progress had things been dialed in. No question. Could we have put you in a position where you're the fastest muscle grower ever? No, like probably not going to happen. But we could have improved your status quo for sure.
- [26:02]
C
And I, I'll make that the default assumption. And I don't. For the viewer's sake. I don't want this to be about me, what I did or didn't do. But I just want to better understand like what the sor bracketing functions are so hard gaining is a real thing but probably don't have to worry about that is what I'm picking up from you. This might be a bad stress issue. It's a volume potential issue addressing those things.
- [26:25]
A
Yeah, actually can I give you two just real quick action points on that one? If you do feel like you're a hard gainer, number one is make sure everything else is truly dialed. So get the lifestyle stuff that's within your control as high functioning as possible. Before you start blaming the workouts or your own physiology. Make sure you're doing your due diligence and the things we talked about earlier.
- [26:44]
C
Can I run through what I think you'll say? Please to sort of remove all those basic things. Make sure you're getting plenty of sleep, make sure you're getting sun exposure, make sure that your diet is. I'll call clean. Maybe we'll get into that later. But you're basically eating whole food whenever possible. I'm sure you're going to say protein intake is going to be pretty important. If you don't have the building blocks for the muscle, you're not going to be be able to build them. You mentioned purpose earlier, which I love hearing. I think that would be very important so that psychologically you have meaning and purpose in your life. You have loving relationships. What am I missing? That's probably pretty close to the 8020 rule.
- [27:27]
A
Yep, you covered most of it. You could throw in a couple of other things like social connection. Maybe you folded that into purpose, maybe didn't.
- [27:35]
C
But loving relationships.
- [27:36]
A
Yep, that's, it's great there. Maybe hydration.
- [27:40]
C
Yeah, we're going to get into hydration. I won't derail us now, but. Okay, great. Understood.
- [27:45]
A
But you've hit most of Them.
- [27:46]
C
So, so one thing then. Assuming that we have those basic things taken care of, I, I have maybe a misconception. You will blow my mind right now. If you tell me that this is just a protocol problem, I will love you forever. But I have a belief that adding muscle is brutally difficult and that if you're not in the gym working really hard, really consistently, meaning you have a high volume of lifting and a high volume of days that you have lifted. So if somebody came to me and said, hey, I'm trying to add muscle, what should I do? Uh, I obviously look at their diet first and then I would say you need to be working out probably six days a week. Is there anything in that assumption set that you think is broken in terms of the difficulty of adding muscle mass?
- [28:44]
A
Yeah, I say you're again exaggerating the need for training that part.
- [28:50]
C
Let's pick a physique. So here's more base assumptions that Tom has. When I watch a Hollywood star get jacked like Hugh Jackman in a call it six month period that they almost certainly did steroids.
- [29:06]
A
Reasonable assumption in that community. That's pretty reasonable. Now I'm fortunate to know many of the individuals that actually are the ones behind those folks. And I'm gonna maybe not say names though. I'm actually. He may appreciate it, but very good friends with the gentleman responsible behind Henry Cavill and his stuff for Superman and things like that. Sorry, Michael Blevins. That's his name. I'm sorry, Mike, if you don't want me to say your name or not,
- [29:38]
C
you can always bleep it out if you want to ask him.
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A
Yeah, but he's, he's, he, he's. He spoke about this at length and juices him up. No, in that case, I don't know if Henry does or not. It doesn't matter. My point is though, he's gone through a number of those things and I know a lot of these things. Many of those individuals are, are on anabolic agents, which, fine, who cares? Right?
- [29:57]
C
I don't have a beef with it. I just want to better understand how hard muscle is to gain.
- [30:01]
A
Some of those folks are not. I can tell you though, we've worked with plenty of individuals that to our knowledge are not on that. And I've seen countless people add to their physique without needing any things like that. So it's, it's it. The challenge, Mike would say would be if you want to use that as an excuse, great. There. That excuse is right there. If you want to use the excuse that all those folks have all the money and the time and to train and to eat and the chefs and all like that, and that's the excuse you need to have in yourself to not go through your own body transformation, then great. Use that excuse, because plenty do. All true. Why does it matter to you, though? Do you want to make the journey or do you not? If you want to make the journey and you don't want to go on the anabolic agents, no problem. We've done that personally countless times and across the world it's been done millions and millions of times. Can you get to the level based on your starting point, to finish looking like Arnold? No. But can you again, you go through your own transformation? Absolutely. Can you improve your physique? Sure. Can you look like Henry Cavill? I don't know. Without drugs? I don't know. Did he use it? I don't know. I don't even really care for the most part. So the question should be framed back on you. Is this something you're willing to go through now? Do you need to get dialed in a little bit? Sure. Do you need to work two and a half hours a day in the gym, six days a week? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Again, we have extensive evidence for that. Are some individuals going to have to work harder than others? Probably. Are you going to have to make other changes in your life? Potentially. But if you don't want to necessarily go all the way to Hugh Jackman level, but you just wanted to make some improvements that are noticeable in your physique, that can absolutely be done at a much more reasonable time frame. To also be clear, it won't be easy either. Right. We're not going to just add a bunch of stuff at 45 years old by, you know, just eating a couple of protein shakes a day and lifting a little bit harder. Yeah. It's not going to happen. Right. And so there's a truth here. In between.
- [32:03]
C
Let me ask you how. Assume I'm 27.
- [32:07]
A
Yeah.
- [32:08]
C
How many pounds of muscle without anabolics can I add to my lean muscle mass? Can I add to my physique in a year?
- [32:18]
A
I would say in a year, at 27 years old, £10 would be very conservative of lean muscle mass.
- [32:27]
C
Okay.
- [32:28]
A
Yeah, that can certainly be done. That's going to be a standard deviation. Right. Some folks a little higher, a little less. But I would think the average person, 10 pounds would be very reasonable. You can certainly do that in much shorter timeframe. But given life and all those things, trying to factor in A practical answer, that'd be a. Now that also scales. If you're coming in at 145 pounds to start or 215 pounds to start, that number scales. It's harder to put on muscle when you're, you know, 40% the size. Yeah. Well, when you're already big in terms of just physical size. So for somebody who's £215 to put on £10, that's not a high percentage of their total body mass, so that wouldn't be that hard. Somebody who's 150 pounds easier for the big guy, Definitely.
- [33:07]
C
Gotcha.
- [33:08]
A
Definitely. Because absolute size matters a ton. For someone £145 to put on £10 of pure muscle, that's a big percentage of your body weight. So that would be a much slower process, but you could be done.
- [33:19]
B
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- [34:16]
C
Interesting. So we have a guy here at Impact Theory that has really been trying to put on muscle and he's very solid. Like if you touch his shoulders, they feel firm. But he just, he's like, if I don't concentrate all of my energy on eating all the food that I'm supposed to eat for a day, he was like, over a weekend, I'll lose five pounds. And I'm just like, that is so weird to me as somebody that if I look at a photo of a dessert, I'm going to gain weight. I just find putting on especially fat is so easy. This kid shovels food into his face non stop and just can't. Can't add.
- [34:57]
A
Yeah, you know, I've been answering those questions for 15 year career now. Again, I don't know. I will always acknowledge the uniqueness of physiology. There's always weird things that happen. My guess is. I'm going to call it a guess. I'll be more arrogant than that. You're just not doing it right.
- [35:14]
C
The lifting or the eating?
- [35:16]
A
Both. And my other thing would be, not to harp on this, but something else in your physiology is constrained, and that is the answer. Once that thing is constrained, then you just take off like a rocket ship. No question. So a lot of folks do things that make them feel like they're smashing food all day, but the food choices are incorrect or they're actually at just totally unnecessary volumes or something else is happening.
- [35:40]
C
Unnecessary volume of food.
- [35:42]
A
Yeah.
- [35:42]
C
So, okay, interesting. Now he is. I don't want to derail us on diet just yet, but he's eating the standard 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass that he. I don't know if he's doing it for where he is or where he wants to be. Does that matter?
- [35:57]
A
It's sort of pedantic at this point. Could be, could not. Like, probably pretty close.
- [36:01]
C
Meaning you're just not sure what the thing is that's constraining.
- [36:04]
A
I mean, it is close enough. Probably is a rough one. Whether it's, you know, you're talking, you're splitting hairs of 10 or 15 grams, maybe 20 grams of protein a day, it's close enough.
- [36:11]
C
Okay, so if I'm trying to add, or he's trying to add, is 10 pounds of muscle over the next year, is he going to be able to do that with the three days a week or does he need to?
- [36:20]
A
Yeah, you could. You could for sure.
- [36:22]
C
Is there any advantage to more days or is it just volume in the days that you work out?
- [36:27]
A
So the. The most strong predictor of muscle hypertrophy. And again, we're not talking fat loss or strength or endurance or any of the other goals, but for hypertrophy, total volume is. Is the answer. And so whether you want to get that done across three days or six days a week, there may be a small advantage to breaking it up. Actually, more recent research has gone back and forth in this point of frequency. Right. So if you equate for volume and you just. The only variable is three days a week or five days a week or six days a week. You could find evidence on both sides of that equation. Probably practically, it's easier to do it six days a week because the volume needed on three days a week is then double on each individual day. So it's just hard to get that all in. But that being Said, again, I don't want. I really don't want people at home listening, thinking, well, I don't have six days a week to lift weights, and I'm not going to do it for an hour and a half. So there's just no way I'm going to try to add muscle. And I, like, I really need to dispel. That is absolutely. Because it's not true. It's absolutely not true.
- [37:26]
C
Because they can spread it out. Because a minute ago you said, hey, it's a question of whether you want to go on this journey and whether you're willing to put in the work or not. Which I think remains the fundamental question. But now I feel like you're backing off that. So help me understand.
- [37:43]
A
Okay, so here's what I'll say. There's a difference between trying to improve your physique and trying to maximize and do the most possible ever for the fastest and largest gains. And so I guess I'm differentiating there. If you want to go to optimize, then that's great. Um, technically it's probably easier for you to execute that volume over more days per week, but it doesn't have to be if three fits your schedule fine. Also, if you're like, look, I'm 80, 20 in this thing, I don't need to get the most amount of muscle gain possible in six weeks. I just want to gain 80% of it. Can I back it down to three days a week and do an hour? Can I do four days a week in 45 minutes? The answer is yes, you can absolutely gain lean muscle a noticeable amount in three to four workouts a week if you give yourself three or four months or some reasonable time. To me. So that, that's maybe the differentiation I'm drawing. That's. That's absolutely possible. What I don't want people to do is think that that is binary. If I can't do six days a week, 90 minutes each session, then I might as well do nothing. And that. That is, like very much not true. Again, we have people that do this very routinely. And if you look at the research that has looked at variety of volume, so total amount of volume per week, you want to count the amount of sets that you do. The number you're going to look There is about 20 to 25 sets per muscle group per week.
- [39:06]
C
So if you're thinking 20 to 25 sets per muscle group, okay, now that
- [39:11]
A
seems to be about optimal. Having said that, the groups that did 10 still grew muscle. And so that's why I'm saying, like, you can still. Now, if you take the example of 10, let's say you did three sets of biceps three days a week, that's 10. I mean, you're at nine right there. So like 10 sets a week is not a insane volume. If you did three sets of 10 of two different bicep exercises on one day, that's six total sets. Do that twice a week. Now you're already at 12, so you're already getting there and you're going to grow muscle. It's just not at the same rate maybe that those folks that I did 20 or 25 sets. And so it's a question of again, are you trying to maximize or are you just happy with some statistically significant, scientifically measurable progress in muscle mass, which is still very important. And so it's to give people options and to not scare them away of saying, if you can't go to all the way to the end, that doesn't mean go nowhere. You can still go somewhere and have effect. That's also kind of what I was referring to when I was saying, if you're not willing to do the work and you don't even want to go to the first couple steps, well, then don't expect anything. But don't think that just because you can't have a full team, a chef at your house, anabolics and all these things, then that's an excuse to do nothing. If you want to do nothing, do nothing. But you can still make a lot of transformations under whatever constraints that you really have.
- [40:35]
C
I would like to take a moment to do a PSA for anybody out there considering lifting and adding muscle mass and getting lean, I think both are going to matter. There is something fascinating psychologically at work for the human animal as you both sexes, but from a guy's perspective, I will just tell you, when you transform your physique, when you get stronger, when you add muscle, there are going to be few things in your life, if anything, that will make you feel better about yourself. I don't know why it is, but it is, it is unreal. Now, I'm not at as big as I used to be and we will get into injuries in a minute because hopefully live here, you're going to be able to help me overcome some that I've struggled with for a long time. But there was a period when I was younger, I could bend over and pick up almost £400. It was amazing. I loved it the most I've told this story. My poor listeners A million times. But I was at a pool party with my wife. A woman climbed up out of the pool and asked my wife if she could pet my abs. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Petty, yes, for sure. But it was amazing. And so it's worth it. And I want people to hear that before I say what I'm about to say. It's really worth it. It will do something deeply to you psychologically, to get strong, to have a physique that you're proud of, what you have to do to your own mind to be consistent, to show up every day, to progressively overload, to get your diet right, to do all those things, to care enough over an extended period of time. The rewards are tremendous. And even though I absolutely despise working out, the results are so unbelievable psychologically and physically. But psychologically, the results are so incredible and they apply to so many areas of your life. Look at Schwarzenegger. He's been able to apply it to all these different areas of his life. Same for me. Some of my biggest breakthroughs in business were born of the discipline I developed in maintaining a physique. All right, hopefully everybody heard me say that. And now I'm going to say, when somebody comes to me and says that they want to add muscle, I'm just like, you're never going to do it. They're never going to do it. And it's interesting because I don't know as much as you, I take a totally different approach to why they're going to fail. To me, people do not want things badly enough. Because they don't want it badly enough, they will not suffer. And while you are making it sound easier than my experience leads me to believe, you're the expert, I want to completely acquiesce to that. And I cannot wait to learn more about how to do this more easily. It's difficult. It takes a lot of time. Nobody will stick with it. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of humans will give up long before they make gains. And PS because of this reversion to the mean that you're going to slide back. If you take two weeks off, you're going to notice. And so if you take two months off, forget it. Three months, and it feels like you never worked out in your life. It's bananas how fast you will go backwards because of all that. Dear listeners, the vast majority of humanity will never do this. Do you agree with that?
- [43:44]
A
I would agree with much of that.
- [43:45]
C
Okay, what's the part you don't agree with?
- [43:47]
A
I still Think the charge is worth the effort?
- [43:50]
C
Yes, I started with that. Yeah, I started with that.
- [43:52]
A
Andy, totally agree. There are many other benefits of strength training that are going to pay off dividends the rest of your life.
- [44:02]
C
Yes, I get that. But what I want to get into is what breaks people. So we've covered. They've got these hidden stressors. Cool, we're going to address those. What I'm talking about. And so stressors and their approach probably isn't right, but now talk to me about the, the mind game of this all. Like where do, what factor do you think that plays? Because you work with elite athletes, man, they've already walked over some sort of threshold where they're like, I'm committed, I'm going to do this. But do you encounter the sort of average person and where they trip themselves up?
- [44:36]
A
Yeah. So our entire rapid health and performance companies, all non athletes for the most part. So we've been through this plenty of times, gone through this transformation. The folks in here range everything. But you've got people running billion dollar companies in there that no time is my point. Right. You've got mothers of three kids and running companies and startups. And so these folks do not have the time. They're not committed, they're not 25 year old and they're not even on anabolics for the most part. Some are, but some are. And so we face this challenge plenty of times. A couple of processes that we go through. Step number one actually is we can actually come back and talk about kind of biology. We, we started this earlier and be happy to come back to that. That's a fun conversation. But our process looks a lot like this. Number one, are you choosing the right goal? And this is really not us trying to play psychologist or therapist, but is really making sure based on your physiology this is where we think you need to go. So let's say the example is muscle growth and they come in and they say we want to, I want to add muscle, I want to add 15 pounds of muscle. Okay. The first question we would ask is why? Right. If is it just a personal goal? Well, great, that's fine. Is there something else going on that you think you need to add 15 pounds of muscle? And when we run this complete analysis, and this is top of mind because this has happened with one of our clients and we looked at it and his aerobic capacity, his metabolic efficiency was very, very low. And there's actually good research recently showing that going through about of six weeks of pure aerobic exercise prior to hypertrophy cardio, straight up cardio. You're talking cycling. Just steady state cycling, not intervals, not anything like that. Six weeks of lower, moderate intensity cycling prior to going through hypertrophy training resulted in more muscle growth by the end of the study than those folks who did not do that aerobic part before.
- [46:25]
C
Hmm. Do they have to keep doing the aerobic part?
- [46:27]
A
Nope. So six weeks, some sort of primer. It's primer, and it's most likely an improvement in aerobic capacity, which makes the workout less painful. Recovery. It's all recovery from the training. Right. So now you have the mechanisms that allow you to actually enhance your recovery, which allows adaptation to occur. If you dig too deep down that hole of fatigue, all you can do is come back to baseline. But if your recovery is higher, then we can actually get the results that we're earning. And so in this individual, it was a similar story where we were like, you need to go through some basic aerobic fitness first before you start launching into hypertrophy, because, number one, you won't even get through the training. You'll be so fatigued, you'll be so sore, you'll have all these problems. And so we need to set this foundation of aerobic fitness prior to getting into that. So that would be one of the things that I would say is, is what are we looking at here and what's truly why you want to get there. And if you want to get there, let me guide the ship on how we get there. Just trust the process. If you were willing to wait six months, we will get you farther by the end of the six, six months than you would have had you gone on your own. It's going to look like we're going off course here, but this is what we need to do to get you there. So that would be reaction number one, right, Is to say, why do you want to get there in the first place? Is it just a personal goal or do you think it's something else going on? And so the process then says, okay, we've decided we want to get 10 pounds of muscle in the next six months. That's the goal. And we went through the whole process and we're all in agreement. That's the goal. Okay, great. Second step is then, all right, let's look at what we call your quadrant. So your quadrant is take everything in life, and we're going to put it into four unique buckets. Okay. Now, I got this from my colleague, Kenny Kane. So I always like to make sure I give him credit. He created This I did not. But bucket one is what we just call business, okay? This is whatever work, finance, things like that. The other one is what we call relationships. This could be family, friends, social time, going out, concerts, parties, whatever thing it is for relationships that you do. Social connection, volunteering, whatever. Bucket number three, your physical training. Again, this could be walking, hiking, gardening, exercising, lifting, kickboxing, I don't really care. The fourth one is recovery. And recovery is everything from mental recovery, emotional recovery, physical recovery, et cetera, et cetera. And there's huge crossover. Something that lands in a recovery bucket for me might not be recovery for you, et cetera. So it's just, it's personal, right? In those four buckets, you get 10 total points. And you can allocate those 10 points total, not per category, total, however you'd like. And so we run through this assessment and we say, okay, you're putting five in your business right? Now. You're putting three into your kids. Okay, great, you're. Now we have two points left. You're going to go one training and then two into training and no, one recovery not going to work. Right? And what, what we're trying to do is run them through a very high level analysis of allostatic load. All stressors are stressors, right? We have to account all these things, business stress, all this stuff matters into the system. And so we look at that and we say, where are you at now? And we come to an agreement, and then we say, where do we need to be to allow that actual goal to happen six months down the road? We need to make adjustments, all right? And so we're going to take a point off of business. We're going to take a point off of maybe relationships. Maybe we're not hanging out with friends as much, maybe whatever it is, right? And recovery has to be at least half of training, right? So if you're gonna put three into training, you can't put one into recovery. It's not gonna work, right? You're not gonna have enough recovery to actually get the adaptations, right? You're just going to be stress, stress, stress. No adaptation or no recovery, no adaptation. So we build that thing out, we come to an agreement, and then that, that agreement goes on a postcard, literally, physically, if possible. And that goes to three unique people. Person one is you to you. And that thing goes, it is a contract between you and yourself of where we actually need to be to allow that adaptation to occur. That's the goal we set. We agreed on that. You made that goal. We're Going to do the work, we're not going to do the work. Here's how we get there. This is how we opt to allocate that. And I encourage them to put that in the place of vulnerability or weakness. So if they're addicted to work, then that goes on their laptop or that goes in their computer screen. If it is addicted to Netflix, it goes in their tv, it goes in some place when, when they start violating that rule. They see also goes to person number two, which is the person most likely to ask you to violate that rule. This is your friend who always wants you to go out. This is your boss. This is your. Someone else is asking to work late. This is the person who's going to push you against it. And that person knows this is Tom's new deal. Like this is not non negotiable anymore. Three, the person most likely to be hurt besides you by the violation. So this could be again your kid. This could be someone else who says, dad, like you committed to X amount of time with me. And you're not following. You, you, you did that meeting, you did that other thing you weren't supposed to, whatever it comes down to, right? And that's an accountability system of person who's going to violate you, you're going to violate yourself or the person who's going to be most hurt by this. And then the last step is, okay, great, we know where we're going, we know how to get there. Now all we have to do now is set very specific boundaries which are extremely specific. And there are things that we call what life actions do you need to take to ensure those things actually happen. And so just to give a random example, say we have agreed to take one point off of business. Amazing. What are we going to take to ensure that it's not just like, oh yeah, I'm going to try to work a little bit less. That's never going to work, right? It is. Okay, I'm going to commit to never working on Saturdays or I'm going to commit to never working before 9am or after 6pm or something. Right, whatever makes sense for you and your scenario. Same thing with recovery. I'm going to commit to doing X amount of recovery minutes per week period. I'm going to commit to this much dollar investment. Whatever, whatever it takes for that thing. Once you have all those, you're still going to have some failure, no question. But you have very specific guidelines. And then when you do fail, it's very clear what happened and why. And so that's the process we take our folks through and we don't have 100% success rate, but I'd like to think it's pretty high. Well, I know it's pretty high and I'd like to think it's higher than most folks. So this is kind of the soft part of coaching, right? Not the X's and O's, but this is a reality of what we take our folks through. And I think that would be what I would recommend to the scenario you set up is going through a process like that. So it's very clear on where we're going. And when we started the conversation, one of the major concepts I said is people not having a plan. I was really talking about like actually knowing what to do in the gym. But this is also part of your plan so that you ensure when you get to the gym you're in there in the right frame. You're not rushing to get out of there in 15 minutes because you got to go to work or you're not rushing there. So knowing exactly what to do so you're not making your workout up as you go based on what machines are just open that minute. But then making sure you have the space. Like this is the commitment I'm going to spend or not. Right. I'm only going to commit to 45 minutes in here. I can't drag this out to an hour and a half. So I have to get off my phone immediately. I have to get right to my warm up. It doesn't matter if my playlist isn't right because I have to be out of here in 45 minutes because I committed to this other thing I had to get to. So there's no time to drag this on. So that means I have to have a very specific training plan which means I need to either have a professional helping me ahead of time or some other thing. But tomorrow's success is based on today's preparation, right? So having that plan in place, just simply having that plan will take your execution so much higher than not having something written down. So having that done ahead of time is what's needed.
- [54:27]
C
That's a great process. I like that a lot. I'm going to point a lot of people to that clip. So now talk to me about the final piece in this. People just don't make gains movement here. So homeostasis and the reversion to the mean take me into the biology of it. I understand muscle is calorically. Yeah. Expensive. Perfect. So that I get where the body doesn't want to keep More muscle than it absolutely needs. But like VO2 Max, I don't understand why that would ever. Especially if it is Peter. ATI is right, and it's the number one predictor of longevity. Why on earth would we revert to less? Why would we revert to a worse resting heart rate? Why would our heart rate variability drop like all these things are. Are good? So why do we revert to a mean that is suboptimal?
- [55:25]
A
Well, what I'd say is I'm gonna poke a little fun at Peter here. I consider Peter a friend, so I can do this. Depending on what study you look at, you'll actually find that leg strength is a stronger predictor than VO2 max.
- [55:35]
C
Interesting.
- [55:36]
A
Yeah, I'm really just teasing him. They're. They're both incredibly important. Obviously, I'm a strength training guy, so I'm gonna give most of the credit. A little bias, just a touch. Right. I'm biased towards lifting and physiology, if you haven't picked that up. So interesting. Well, I think the biggest issue is you're personifying the approach. You're good in batting. Physiology. There is no good and bad in physiology.
- [55:58]
C
Ooh, Ooh. Andy, you sure about that?
- [56:02]
A
Very sure.
- [56:03]
C
Okay, give me your North Star.
- [56:04]
A
There is this point, the North Star is adaptation. That's the thing. It doesn't know good or bad. Chemistry doesn't know good or bad. There are no toxins. There are things. That's just what they are, right? So we don't have bad inflammation. We don't have good inflammation. They have inflammation. We don't have toxins. We have chemicals. This is not how the world works. So, number one, you're fundamentally approaching this as good and bad when that's not actually what happens. Because why would physiology do it if it is bad? And the answer is it wouldn't step back. It's playing a game. Over here, you have immediate gratification. Over here, you have delayed. We call this optimization. We call this adaptation. You're pushing one end of the spectrum with every single thing you do. The better day you have today may make it worse later. Immediate gratification, delayed gratification. This is what your physiology is doing every single second, every interaction, every thought, every insult, every injury is all pushing further on one side of the spectrum. And so when you're asking, like, why is it doing this? Why is it doing this? If you're not pushing for delayed gratification, you're pushing for immediate gratification, which is rest recovery. So it's saying if you don't need this VO2 max up here because it is expensive. Then we're going to conserve energy now because we don't know when the next slot of energy is coming and so it backs down. Think about it. I'll give you another way. You're probably familiar with the autonomic nervous system. Parasympathetic versus sympathetic. This is rest and digest versus fight or flight. Now, which one is better? Obviously it's not right. It is a situation of you want to be able to maximize both. If you said right now, like, why is my body fighting me? I have so much such low energy like my body is. And you would have all these negative words and I would say it's not. No, no, no. It's doing exactly what it needs to do. It's going there on purpose. You just haven't figured out why it's going there. You have the car pointed down the wrong street. Don't blame the car for driving down the street. Blame you for not pointing it in the right direction. It's not going to drive there and be a, you know, this bad car. The car is just driving where it's being told to be driven. So if you don't tell it anything, it's going to revert back to. We don't know if we're going to live 10 or 20 or 50 years. So we're maximizing for this current moment. That's what's happening. Until you convince it to maximize down the road, it's going to maximize for right now. So why is it going to reduce muscle mass? Muscle is expensive. There are also resources in that muscle that it can be used for something else. Think about it this way. What do you think the body will choose to give an advantage to? Muscle or organ?
- [59:00]
C
Organ, definitely.
- [59:02]
A
You're going to die tomorrow or today. If your organ is going to failure, you are not doing anything with your health. If your muscles get weaker right now, you have years to work on poor muscle and so it's always going to revert towards, number one, your brain. All things default. We're going to keep your brain alive. Second thing, keep your heart beating. Third thing, keep your organs alive. Fourth thing, organ systems, right? Skeletal muscle, nervous system, etc. Etc. Those will be preserved last. And so you have to understand the choice you're making right now. You need to be convincing your body do this adaptation that is expensive and it is costly. It is using resources and is using energy. Now we're specifically talking about ATP and then resources like, like amino acids. Now you think about this in the context of building muscle. But amino acids are also needed to build red blood cells, to beat immune cells, to build any other tissue in your body. And so it's not that it's holding onto them or preserving them so you can get more jacked, but it is saying, we're going to conserve these so that we can rebuild your liver. There's damage happening there.
- [60:08]
C
Right.
- [60:08]
A
The liver just notoriously gets kind of the crack kicked out of it all the time. Right. Especially by some people, more so than others. But things like the kidney are not as resilient. You don't want a lot of adaptation. You don't have a lot of adaptation happening there. And so that's what's actually fundamentally happening. You're pushing it there. If you make choices that maximize current optimization, that maximize immediate gratification, think about those two as the same thing. Optimization and immediate gratification. Okay, it's, it's different, slightly different, but they're representing the same idea. Right now what's happening is you're going to feel better in the current moment. So this could represent yourself something like, I feel less stressed right now. I'm more relaxed, I'm more downregulated, more parasympathetic, I'm more recovered, I'm not sore, I have a lot of energy because I'm super chill. That's great. But if you continue to be in that super chill moment, you actually start regressing back down to inefficient because your body's like, yo, we don't have to be this inefficient. Let's take a. I'll give cardiac output, a very specific example. So cardiac output is calculated by the amount of times your heart beats. So bump, bump, bump, multiplied by how much blood is coming out of the heart per pump. That's your cardiac output. Right. So when you get very exercise trained and you get really fit, your resting heart rate goes down. Okay, why is that? Well, because you can actually have a stronger contraction per contraction, so you get more blood out per squeeze, so you don't have to squeeze as often. So the aerobic demands of you sitting here are the same whether you are fit or unfit. Aerobic demands are identical. You're not using any more or less energy, basically. So your body says, I can get that same amount of blood pumped in less pumps, so don't pump as often. So resting heart rate comes down. But if you lose that strength in the contractions because you weren't training it, then it has to bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. Bump more frequently to keep cardiac output the same. And so as you go into recovery mode, you feel better, but you're automatically not putting stress on the heart to be strong. So it starts regressing back to being weaker. So your resting heart rate has to then come back up. If you are in a state of overtraining, whether we're talking about non functional overreaching or actual true overtraining, this is how you recover. This is how you peak for performance. This is how we get people that have these end of the periodization tapers and peaking on the right day or the right year or the right month, like in the case of the Olympics, making sure they are being perfect for that world championship fight and they feel the best they've ever felt on that day, not a week earlier, a week later in that exact moment. So we can time physiology to be correct. The other end of the spectrum, if you're always choosing delayed gratification, you're never going to be feeling as good as you can in the current moment. And so if we look about, think about this from the same perspective, going all the way to the end and saying training, train, training train, train, train, train, train, train as hard as I can, more adaptation, more adaptation, more adaptation doesn't give you the recovery capacity to actually see the changes. And so then the system breaks. Last example, and I'll pause here. Think about this from the perspective of happiness, such that if you choose delayed gratification all the time, you tend to not be present. You don't celebrate wins and you don't, you're not happy in the moment. Right. Something great happens, your company or success, and you just want to move to the next thing because you're choosing delayed gratification. Those folks don't tend to do very well. Well, right. If you're.
- [63:54]
C
They don't do well in what, in
- [63:56]
A
terms of they're not maximizing longevity, they're going to struggle because they're never present.
- [64:02]
C
A delayed gratification person, definitely.
- [64:04]
A
So you're always choosing delayed gratification. And so what I mean is like the current win just moves to the next thing. Just moves to the next thing. You don't, you never celebrate, you're never in the moment, you're never right here because you're just thinking about the next thing already. Right. It's not a win right now.
- [64:21]
C
I'm not tracking how that would add up to.
- [64:24]
A
Let me, let me back this one. The opposite is those that choose immediate gratification all the time, so all they do is sort of celebrate in their current president right now and they're not paying any attention to the next step down the road. Those folks are going to struggle because nothing is planned out in the head. There is no drive, there is no forward progress. Right. They're very, very present, but there is no leaning forward. So what you clearly need to have is both of these things. They are not good or bad. They are just two different things. Right? Depending on how you want your life to go, you may hedge a little bit more towards being more present. You may hedge a little bit more towards Great, that was awesome. Mini celebration. Now we got to get back to work into the next thing. I'm not judging either side here. People have been wildly successful and happy in both approaches or somewhere in between. But it's a fundamentally different approach to how you're going to handle the problem of immediate versus delayed gratification. Right. I would think most would argue you don't want to be fully on the end of the spectrum of either one of these things, right? There has to be some worry and planning for the future, but then there also has to be some enjoyment of the current moment. An ideal scenario, you're able to flicker back and forth between both, right? Some present and then some forward stuff and then potentially even some password leaning stuff there. But that's the psychological equivalent of the same thing your physiological body is doing when it's saying, yo, do I need to maximize today or am I banking for the future? But if you continue to bank and you don't allow recovery processes, there's going to be a problem that occurs. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [66:33]
C
Okay, so man, really interesting idea that what we are optimized for is adaptation. My gut reaction to that is that the adapt the we are the dominant apex predator because of our ability to adapt. There's no doubt about that. I'm a huge believer in humans as the ultimate adaptation machine. That seems though to me like a path and not the North Star. So when I think about what is evolution optimizing for, it's optimizing for you surviving long enough to have kids that have kids. Adaptation is the way in which the human animal achieves that. I see you have a reaction to that.
- [67:20]
A
Yeah. All right. The North Star thing is so fun because let's take the stress. Now, I would argue the entire existence of the human race has had one fundamental goal outside of reproduction, which is clearly the. The absolute number one. Right. And this is really how do we get to reproduction? And that is stress. And we spent our entire existence trying to mitigate stress. So initially it was thermal stress, so let's create housing. And then it was stress of attack, so let's create communities. And then it was stress of food, so let's create more sustainable and agriculture and farming and better hunting and all things like that. Right. And then earlier in this century, in the previous one, it was let's create more safety nets. So this is cities and governments and economies and things like that. So that less people have as less extremes, less likely. Right. So we've been charging deadhead at this path of minimizing stress. And we take this one step further. And I know you know exactly where I'm going here, this was probably not a great idea. It probably was for the first hundreds of thousands of years we were around. But it's very clear whether you look at the astronauts that are coming back from space or you look at any of the films or literature or just the thoughts that are going through people's head, it's just like, oops, maybe minimizing stress was not the right actual North Star. When we come back and we put ourselves in a position where we actually have eliminated stress in the context that we understand stress to be, we get really unhealthy very, very quickly. You've talked about it multiple times now. What happens when you take training stress away just for even a few weeks? We come crumbling back to baseline. Right. That's how important stress is in our life. If you take an astronaut, put them up in space for a minimum of like seven days, and they come back, you see massive physiological changes. I think the numbers are something like 30 days of bed rest is equivalent to 30 years of aging and skeletal muscle. This is how big a deal stress is. People sort of joke about Mars getting there, but that's a human problem. That's a physiology problem more than it is a rocket problem. Obviously, I'm a physiologist, I'm quite biased. But how do we get people alive in a situation up there? This is where we're spending, you know, billions of dollars trying to figure out that's how critical stress is we've had to re engineer, put exercise back in our lives. We've had to now figure out, oh my gosh, we can't be isolated. That's not good for human mental health. We're engineering all these things that are stressed back into our life. Right. Maybe we should actually go out of our way and spend tens of thousands of dollars to get hot again, to get cold again, to get hungry again. Like we have to do all these things because we realize again, for most of our life, our species existence, that stuff was good. We absolutely needed to keep people away from those things. But now once we kind of got there, it's like, oops, we need to figure out how much that stress needs to come back into our system. And so figuring out what is the right amount of stress that's on the biological system to make it actually live as long as possible, as healthy as possible is an unanswered question at this point. And I was sort of smirking so much when you were talking about that earlier because I don't think we have any idea what the North Star really should be. We thought it was stress reduction, but I think that that's pretty clearly misguided. Is it optimizing stress in and out? I guess, but that doesn't feel right, doesn't feel profound. I don't know if we've learned anything there besides the fact we realize if we don't have any stress in our life, this is a problem. And I think the reason I defaulted for Adaptability being the acronym Start Litter is because if we drill down on stress, why do we even care to have it to begin with? Going back to first principles, why is stress even necessary? And I think it's because our body functions best when it is pushed to adapt. And so I actually think right now the best process I have come up with is that the optimal state is adaptation.
- [71:34]
C
Andy, this is very interesting. So I have a maybe slightly different take on that. So there is, I think it was Lisa Feldman Barrett that said this to me and it was really eye opening. She was like, Tom, you're asking me the classic is it nature or nurture? And she said, the reality is we have a nature that requires nurture.
- [71:53]
A
Definitely.
- [71:53]
C
And I was like, oh, that is so true. When you were talking about stress, I don't know that stress is the. I don't think that we have optimized to remove stress. I think that's a result of two different factors. One, I think that we have a nature that requires stress. And the reason we Have a nature that, quote, unquote, requires stress is because there is stress in the system. For an animal, nature is completely indifferent. It does not care if you survive. But if you put a gene, apparently under the rules of evolution, it will adapt or it will develop a survival instinct, because the ones that have their survival instinct are going to be the ones that survive. Like, people are even saying that this may happen to AI which is sort of one of my fundamental pushbacks about AI. I won't derail this conversation for that, but that, to me, makes a lot of sense. So if a gene's response to being in an environment where it is the survival of the fittest, then it will develop a survival survival instinct. And to survive in an environment that is replete with stress, you're going to. An organism that has a survival instinct will develop the ability to adapt to that. And that's why, as the. The greatest adaptation machine that nature has ever created, we have gone farther than any other animal, and we have a level of control that they do not. The other part of the equation is that nature only has pleasure and pain. And so to get whatever behavior it wants, those are the only two levers that it has to pull. And so this was really the thing driving my initial question of why does working out suck? Like, if I should be doing it, why isn't it fun? But. So if nature only has pleasure and pain in order to get me to survive, then the question becomes, what did it leverage to make sure that, ooh, I want to do this thing that's going to keep me going? And as far as I can tell, that thing is progress. So what you're saying is us optimizing for stress, I would say, is the pleasure principle at work, where nature had to make something pleasurable so that we would move towards. So it gave us this freakish desire for progress in our lives. Now, the reason that I think that this ends up playing out weirdly, where it looks like, ooh, we're now without stress, and that was a huge mistake, is because if you have this incredibly strong desire for progress, you will make problems to fight against in order to feel like you're progressing. And so that devolves into madness. This is one of my earliest, like, insights about people. When I first got into business, this random thought popped into my head, which is, some people need to be chased by a lion. Because I was just like, dude, what are people are getting up in arms about some bullshit. I'm like, why are you even worrying about that? And then I realized, whoa, it's because they have the cycles to worry about it. The food is there, they're not struggling with temperature, like there is no lion around the corner that's about to eat them. And so all of that desire for progress to they're optimized to overcome stresses simply because it's been in the environment. Now they start there's like a almost sort of weird derangement of like I'm going to find a thing to freak out about because things get too good. And then you get into collapses of civilizations and how they it is rarely when they are galvanized against an external enemy stroke stressor to your point that they collapse, it's when they don't have something from the outside galvanizing them internally. They're all in total disarray. And when times have been good for too long and they've gotten weak, then the enemy comes and they're no longer prepared for it and boom, they collapse. And at least the Roman Empire, which is the one thing I've started looking into, the collapse was distressingly slow. It was. Anyway, this is going to really derail this conversation, but that to me is a really fascinating take on why people end up failing. Because that's where this started. Why does the body default to backwards sliding? And you're saying from an evolutionary standpoint it would make sense that they would want to go back to that. Okay, so that's a really interesting sort of how it plays out and at the psychological level.
- [76:13]
A
Can I jump in here? Actually, I think there's a nice tie in the reason current people probably, I'll say that maybe this way, one of the reasons people are failing in this scenario you outlined, there's just not enough incentives.
- [76:27]
C
To what?
- [76:29]
A
To succeed. Why do they really care about adding muscle if they don't really, really care? There's no lion chasing them to do so. Eh, doesn't matter enough to them, right? If this is a personal goal for just looking a certain way so that you'll get somebody to pet your abs. If the person is wired mentally the right way, that might be enough. We certainly have plenty of crazy ass people on our program. It's like, okay, great, if they're not, then that's going to be exactly the scenario you laid out. A few weeks, few months, don't care enough. Why? Because their family doesn't depend on it. Their survival is not depending on it. Nothing matters. Right? If you fail in your physical fitness journey right now, how many folks out there are really going, God, if I don't do this I'm screwed versus how many people are saying, if I don't do this, yeah, medicine will probably catch up. There'll be gene therapy, someone else will take care of this eventually. So I know I need to work out, but I'm not gonna die. It's not really gonna like someone else is gonna. So I think actually when you're saying, like, there's no lion chasing them, that's probably in big part what it is, right? These are, again, we had to add in exercise as a fake stressor. This is a very recent thing, right? There's a whole. The history of exercise, structured exercise is really fascinating to me. And there's a whole arc you could take it through, but I'll kind of jump through some of the ends. And one of them where you see this catastrophic rise and specifically strength training is post Pumping Iron, right? It's Pumping Iron, it's Conan. And then all of a sudden, Terminator. And then it's just a rocket slide, right? The whole thing launches off. And I think what happens, and it's my position that people looked at this, and prior to those things, exercise was something you did either for sport, great, small segment of the world playing sport, or you did it because you liked it, it was pleasurable. The reward, all those things. Small percentage of people, right? More people probably more like you. Right? I do it because I know I'm supposed to, but I don't really particularly enjoy it. That's the bulk. Okay, well, now you've inserted a new thing, which is, yo, I can make you a superhero. Wait, what? Oh, no, literally, look, picture prior to that, there is Adam West's Batman. That's what a superhero looked like, right? And then we saw that thing and it's like, yo, how did that happen? It's like, oh, protein shakes and lifting. Well, even if I can't get all the way there, that's pretty fucking rad. Like, I want to. I can literally become a superhero. So if you think about that consciously or subconsciously, that grain is planted, going, yo, you could literally become a superhero. Like, some percentage of the world is like, whoa, that's incredible. I can take that and I can grab that. And that is my new lion. That's the chasing thing. Because it's like, yo, I'm going to be a superhero. And this is all the things that are there and whatever mentally is going on for that desire. I don't know, who cares? Healthy or not healthy? Irrelevant, right? But you've got a big push going on there, and that's all great. Where we're at now though is like we've still left a giant bucket of people. We're just like, I don't care about being a superhero. I don't care about kicking a ball better or fighting somebody better. Like I'm not doing any of those things. And I don't like working out. It doesn't feel good. Okay, great. Where's the net to catch those people? Well, the net should. Well, initially was scare tactic. It is. If you don't do this, you're going to die earlier. Quality of life, et cetera, et cetera. And if I think we have enough evidence to suggest that doesn't work very well, whether it was scaring through food, whether it was scaring through death. Like people just are not motivated by not dying. It's the wildest thing, right? They're just not motivated by not dying particularly. Probably because they've already bred or past their bread breeding window. So maybe that instinct is just gone. I don't know. But even folks prior to that like just don't seem to care so much. And so it's trying to figure out like what is the thing. And I don't think we've ever. Well, actually I think it's pretty clear that anything we've tried so epically failed. Whether this is information, guidelines, whether this is monetary, it's just nothing really works for people. So I don't know what it would take to figure out that button to push on people, but we haven't got it there. And it would be again, my current thought would simply be the fact that there's just not enough on the back and there's no payout for these folks. There's no instinct to go, if I don't do this, I'm going to lose my job or I'm going to have some other suffering. And so the suffering of I'm comfortable now, I have income, housing, friends, engagement, social media. Like I have all these other rewards. Exercise only represents something that I don't feel good right now. And secondly, something that is going to potentially help me maybe years and years from now. But someone else will probably come fix that anyways. Would probably be why most folks don't have a lot of desire to exercise. I think those are all wrong, but that would be my guess.
- [81:32]
C
Okay, there's something I want to wrap up. Is, is VO2 max expensive? You said that the body will will back off of the things that are expensive.
- [81:42]
A
Yeah.
- [81:43]
C
Is VO2 max expensive?
- [81:45]
A
Depends on how you want to look at it. So in general, VO2 Max has a couple of components. There's a central component and a peripheral component, central being that first thing, cardiac output. So it is. It has. The heart has to squeeze with a certain amount of strength, and then it has to pump a certain amount of blood per pumps. Okay, well, the second half of that equation is what's called a VO2 difference. A stands for arterial and V stands for venous side. So it's the part of your vessels that go into tissue, and then the part that leaves tissue and goes back to the heart to get reoxygenated. So it's the arterial versus the venous O2 and the difference in sides. What that means is, let's just give it a number. If 20 molecules of oxygen came into the tissue, just call it 20. And then it went into the muscle. We'll just call muscle for now. Comes back out, goes back to the heart, instead of 20 being in there because muscle took some. There's five left. So the difference between 20 and five would be 15. Okay. The higher that number, the better. The higher the VO2 max. Right, because you're multiplying it. Cardiac output multiplied by a VO2 difference. So if I come in with 20 and I leave with 10, that difference is 10. Good number. But if I come in a 20 and leave with 5, that difference is 15. That's a bigger number. If I come in at 20, I leave a 0. That number. A VO2 difference is 20. That's an even bigger number. So the bigger that number, the higher your VO2 max. Meaning you took more of the available oxygen, extracted it out into the muscle, and didn't have any just circulating back in the tissue, which is. You're more efficient at doing that. So how do you improve AO2 difference? Well, a couple of ways. Number one is you increase the amount of capillaries, right? So you put more capillaries. Because what happens is these vessels go into tissue, and then the way they actually get into tissue again in this example call it muscle, is they diffuse through capillaries. And the more these capillaries, the more that it slows the blood flow down. Because now picture a river. You have a giant river coming in, and all of a sudden it's moving at this rapid rate and it disperses into 50 little tributaries by hitting that, because the surface area and pressure changes now it just slows way down. The blood then moving through that muscle slower allows muscle to grab the oxygen out of it. Just based on physics, right? Moving fast through an area or slow burning area, we can grab more things out of it, circulates back out and then has to be recycled. Right. So increasing the amount of capillaries you have in that particular space is, is. Is the primary adaptation there. Secondarily, you have to have mitochondria, because the mitochondria are the part in the muscle cells that are going to actually be able to use the oxygen to power recovery or any other process. All of aerobic metabolism happens in mitochondria. There is no other way in all of biology, certainly in humans. Right. So we have a demand for extra capillaries, we have a demand for strength of contraction of our heart, and we have a demand for mitochondria. Those things have require maintenance. Right. I have to keep up the capillaries, they get damaged and recover, repair. Mitochondria have themselves the demand for energy to stay alive. We have to repair them, we have to build them, we have to increase them. And then the strength of the contraction, we have to produce the energy for that and we have to produce the recovery capacities for that. So all of that is. Is quite costly. Now, having said that, your instincts are actually quite good here. So I'll ask you a question and see if you can get it there. If we take muscle mass, muscle strength and VO2 max and you stopped training all of them, which one goes away the most, the fastest, and which one is the most stable? In other words, holds on for the longest amount of time. Strength, size, aerobic capacity.
- [85:40]
C
I'm gonna guess. Oh, God, I don't know. So this is just a guess. I'm gonna guess.
- [85:45]
A
Your instincts are good here. So take a second and think about it.
- [85:48]
C
Cause your instincts are the bad news is all I have is a gut instinct. So you lose fitness really fast, meaning VO2 max. So my guess is that one goes first. Okay, then I'm going to guess that I would. I would say that. God, strength and size, that's my gut instinct. But you do lose size pretty fast. I don't know. That's my rough gut instinct.
- [86:11]
A
So you said VST max first and then choose strength or strength, then size. Okay, great. You perfectly screwed that all up.
- [86:17]
C
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
- [86:19]
A
So this is what's interesting.
- [86:21]
C
So you lose size first, then strength, then VO2 max will hang on the longest.
- [86:26]
A
Strength is probably going to go first.
- [86:28]
C
Yes. So that was my mid, so I didn't get it completely wrong then.
- [86:32]
A
Okay, then you're going to potentially lose
- [86:34]
C
the muscle size and VO2 max hangs on the longest.
- [86:36]
A
It's extremely stable.
- [86:38]
C
Interesting.
- [86:38]
A
Really Very stable.
- [86:40]
C
Whoa.
- [86:40]
A
Yep.
- [86:41]
C
I'm shocked by that.
- [86:42]
A
Yep. So, in fact, if you see this, if you look at things like a maintenance dose, if you reach a certain level of muscle size, a single dose of training per week is enough to maintain that current level of size for a very long time.
- [86:56]
C
Really? Wow.
- [86:57]
A
And that's actually pretty clear until you're at the extremes, like you're, you know, very high level bodybuilder or something like that. But for the majority of people, a single dose a week will maintain size. So if you can do that initial work, get, Add some muscle size and you can do something to keep it around, one session a week is enough. We actually know more and more about the mechanisms of that. The other benefit is the second time you go to grow that muscle, it will come much faster than the first time. This is the cellular side of what was called muscle memory. And so again, we know a lot about the mechanisms behind that with what's going on with satellite cells and some things there. But the first time is hard and it's long, but once you get there, it doesn't take much to hold on. And two, if you ever have to slide that slide and come back, it will come back much faster the second time. When you compare that to strength, strength is thought of well as a skill, which means just like, if you, if you take a professional golfer, we work a lot with PGA golfers. They'll. They'll be on the PGA Tour for seven or eight years. They'll have won tournaments and majors and stuff. And they take two weeks off and they come back and they feel like they don't know how to get golf ball. That's how fast their skill slides to down, right? And they'll be like, oh, I'm just so terrible. Yet they're still top 10 in the world, but they're not one in the world because that's how much they've regressed by taking a few days off, right?
- [88:24]
C
Jesus.
- [88:24]
A
We have one golfer that I've worked with for a while, very high profile guy, and last year he's, you know, he told the media, hey, like, I'm just gonna take a bunch of time off. And everyone's like, oh, my gosh, like, what's going on with him? Like, in his mind, that was like eight days. So he took like, anyone's like, think he's gonna be out for like months or a year or whatever. And he was like, he played the next tournament. Like, what the hell? He's like, yeah, I took like eight days. Like, I Was ton of. So just like that's how fast skill comes out.
- [88:49]
C
Now will skill come back quickly?
- [88:50]
A
Absolutely. Okay, it will come back. But it's very sensitive to what you do like within the day almost. Right. Our major league baseball players will say the same thing. Right.
- [89:00]
C
Do you know what's hap. Is that a neurological.
- [89:03]
A
It's exactly right, yeah. So it's a very, very tight switch. You also have to remember they're trying to execute motor control with unbelievably small margins of error. And so it's not that they forget, it's just that they don't have that fine tuned precision that's unrealistic to most of us ever. Point is skill slides quickly and strength is a skill. So your timing the neurological sequence, muscle firing, activation patterns, the position you're in, that stuff requires a lot of skill. Not as much skill as a golf swing or a baseball, anything like that, hitting a baseball, but more skill than just being big. More skill than running.
- [89:44]
C
I've never heard anybody call strength a skill. That's a total reframe for me.
- [89:47]
A
It is absolutely a skill.
- [89:49]
C
Is this. I've heard you talk about intent, intent a lot with gaining muscle. And I wrote a note saying, does he mean like you're literally folk? Arnold used to say I think of my biceps becoming a mountain. Is that what you're talking about?
- [90:03]
A
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. So there's a couple of ways. One of them is called the muscle mind connection and there's again science behind this as well. But literally thinking of the muscle. It's funny you mentioned that but like Arnold nailed it a hundred percent. Thinking of the muscle, watching it grow in your mind. There's been studies looking at whether or not you watch the muscle in the mirror while you're training or not. Right. So you've seen people that are like lifting and looking at their bicep in the mirror and that's quite effective.
- [90:30]
C
It helps.
- [90:30]
A
Absolutely.
- [90:31]
C
Interesting. I didn't not expect that.
- [90:33]
A
Yeah. Now it's not going to work for skill based movements. So it's not going to help your deadlifts. Right. It's not going to help your, your snatch or your clean and jerk. It's not going to help you perform any better. In fact it's, I would argue as a skill coach that's going to make things worse. Right. But from a muscle growth perspective, that connection between your mind and the actual muscle is very important and is a great way to add percentage increase of your results by doing Nothing different size or both. Mostly size. So the mind muscle connection is clearly important in strength, but what we're talking about here is muscle size and development. So this is when we would say intent matters. And now that was actually good research on intent for speed and strength as well, such that what we're saying here is it doesn't actually matter how much you lifted or how, what speed you achieved, but the intent to go as fast as possible will lead to greater adaptations than lack of intent. So intent matters across all of these things. No question about it. But in this, this part of the conversation, we're talking more about thinking about the muscle you want to grow, watching it, paying attention to it, and having a strong mind connection will enhance your results for muscle growth as well.
- [91:52]
C
Very, very interesting. Okay, so long and short. Going back to VO2 max, it is expensive. So there are reasons why the body is going to back off all of that. It's really interesting.
- [92:06]
A
Now let me run that out though. Sorry, I never finished.
- [92:08]
C
No, please.
- [92:08]
A
So this is why if we work all the way up to VO2 max though, it is expensive, but it is not nearly as expensive as holding on to and exaggerated muscle mass, or as nearly as expensive as the neurological motor control. Very difficult to keep those patterns alive and that feel alive. Very difficult to keep muscle a particular size relative to simply maintaining capillary density, mitochondria density. There's just not as much. And so if you look at, in fact we've done this, we did a project with a cross country team years ago and they need a three week taper and for this project they got down to 50%. Total of weekly miles were dropped by 50%. This is a lot if you're a competitive runner, right? College level cross country runners. And we biopsied them before and after we did VO2 maxes. We did actual, this is in seasons, this is an NCAA season. And what we saw is Despite a 30% reduction in training, there was no change whatsoever in VO2 max, no drop. There was no change in any of the molecular and cellular enzymes responsible for aerobic capacity. So any of the citrate synthase or any of those things that are important for metabolism, despite the fact you had a huge reduction in training volume, those things did for almost a month now. They went nowhere. Race performance went way up. So they all had more improved performance. And at the muscle level, the fast twitch muscle fibers increased their size and strength by almost about 10% over the course of the taper. So to reframe that, all they did to increase their fast twitch size and strength was to train 50% less. Now that's probably because that they were like a little bit pre fatigued in the prior in the three week one. But the point is nothing changed and their aerobic capacity at all. And if anything things got a little bit better. Now taper for a competitive runner is not the same. That's just like an average workout for the average person that's they intentionally do too much volume on purpose to have this kind of super compensation. But the point remains the same aerobic capacity will hold on for a very long time if you just give it a minimal dose. So it is what we would call one of the most stable physiological parameters. So it is expensive but not nearly as expensive as the other ones. Which is why we say you really do need to invest in the strength training and the hypertrophy training because those are harder to maintain and just do something if you absolutely have to to maintain your VO2 max and that'll hold on pretty tight.