GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness
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Welcome to the huberman lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neutral logy and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today's episode march, the first in a series with dr.

Andy galpin. dr. r. Andy galpin is a professor of kane's ology at caster university, fulton, and one of the foremost world experts on the science and application of methods to increase strength, speed, endurance, hyperdrive, phy and various other aspects of fitness, exercise and sports performance across the six episode series.

Doctor andy gabin pulls from his expertise working with everything from professional athletes to recreational exercises, and teaches us the mechanisms, logic and specific protocols for how to achieve any of the number of different exercise adaptations that I mentioned a moment ago, ranging from string to endure, hypocrisy and everything in between. We get really far into details, but at all times, paying attention to the microscopic issues, that is, how to create a program for endurance or strength, or hypertrophy or speed, or one that combines all of those. We also talk about supplementation and nutrition and how to maximized recovery for each of the different types of exercise adaptations to taneytown episode dr.

Ta glen teaches us how to assess our level of fitness and more generally, how to think about fitness so that we can best achieve our fitness, exercise and performance goals. Doctor, professor andy gAllen, super excited to have you here. You're such an immense treasures of of information on physical training and optimizing for specific goals and outcomes with physical exercise.

I'm curious, however, so many people have different levels of fitness. Some people are professional athletes, of course, but most people are not. Many people exercise regularly.

Some people are trying to do that more. Some people are doing too much of that. They're over training. They are not recovering enough. If we were to take a step back and each and every one of us ask, how fit are we with the word fit, of course, being a very brought in compassing word campus endurance, certainly he does strength, the ability to run fast, even if for short distances. IT might even include hyperdrive phy or directed hypertrophy trying to baLance one's musculature to offset a symmetry recovered from injuries.

That said, a, how should I, or anyone else for that matter, think about their level of fitness? Know I know my resting heart rate, but what do I do in terms of really assessing whether or not i'm as fit as I could be and should be, both for sake of health and performance? And here i'm asking you the question, not as an athlete, but as somebody who's been pretty consistent as an exerciser. But if we were to throw our arms around this question of how do we assess our fitness, what would be sort of the different levels of assessment that we should think about .

and do when IT comes to exercise, people generally have two major goals in mind. Goal number one is achieving some sort of appearance, right? This is I want to be big or I want to not be too big, or I want to be lean something right? IT doesn't matter what that goal is, but there is an esthetic component to almost everybody.

They want to look a certain way or not look a certain way. The other one is functionality. So I want to be able to perform a certain way.

Now again, that definition differs per persons. So I want to be Better at strength. I want to be Better at mobility. I want to be able to um have energy throughout whatever is. So there is some sort of appeal to study and there are some sort of appeal to functionality.

So within both those categories, we want to be in a position where we can understand where do I need to go with my exercise training so that I can be as fit and as healthy and achieve these goals that I want now, as well as we in a position where I can maintain them for a long period of time. So this blends both immediate goals. So so you're just interested in squatting a lot of wait, so you're interested in running five k time the best you want IT doesn't matter.

IT blends that with the ability, the desire to have a long wellness span to be fit throughout life, to achieve all those things as long as possible. So that then the question kind of comes back to saying, well, how do I know which area I need to focus on the most and why am I not achieving these goals? Or how can I get there more effectively? And if we look at the big picture, we have to understand that there are several major components, the physical fitness, that are going to be required in all of these categories.

And to achieve that, there are a handful of components that have to happen to bid, able to hit those schools. Now they're infinite methods. So the same we actually use here a lot is the methods are many, but the concepts are for you. So what i'd love to do today is, over the course of our discussion is hit exactly what those concepts are and then cover a whole bunch of different methods. And we can do that for hours, but will cover a number of them for various schools.

So one of the reasons I went into neuroscience and not into exercise science is because of this thing neuroplasticity, the neutral systems ability to adapt. But the more time I spend with you and the more I learned from you, I realized that many, if not all, of the organ systems of our body have this incredible ability to adapt.

And when we're talking about physical exercise, there are incredible adaptations that, of course, involved the nervous system, but also involved muscle and connective tissue and so many other cell types and tissues. That said, when we talk about fitness, what are the major types of adaptations that underlie the thing that we call fitness? And later, I know we're going to get into how different forms of exercise can trigger different types of adaptations, but what are the major adaptations that one can create in their body using exercise?

There are many reasons why once to exercise, and we could perhaps cover that later in our chats, but the physiological adaptations can be bucket, really, in a nine areas. So the very first one is what I call skill or technique. So just learning to move Better, more efficiently with a specific position and timing and sequence or whatever that is, this could be running more effectively.

This could be practical skill like shooting A A ball or an implement swing, a golf club. Anything like that, I call that skill development. The second one is speed.

This is simply moving at a higher velocity or would the Better rate of acceleration and that's very similar to the next one was just power, and power is speed, multiply by force. Um the next one then of course on top that is force or strength that those really syn nony mous terms, right? How effectively can you move something?

Now this is often confused strength rather as muscular and turns. So what I mean that is strength truly is a marker of how what's the maximum thing you can move, or is the maximum lt of force you can produce one time is not how many repetitions in a row you can do. That's actually another one of our patience called muscular and dies.

alright. So that is typically under the order of, like say, five to twenty five, maybe fifty repetitions. Think of a classic.

How many pushups can you do in a role when I set ups can you do in a minute? Like things like that are muscular endurance moscow and dance tends to be localized. So this is specific to just say you're try steps in and your delt oids.

It's not a overall cardiovascular indices marker earning like that. So that's strength. Number four. Number five is most like portrait y and this is the first time now we're talking about uh and appearance rather than a functional outcome.

So you know moving Better, moving faster or moving heaven ier or a indicators of how well you can move. This is the first one that's just simply how big is your muscle that's mostly put to your muscle size after that is most going on gerns. So this is how many repetitions you can typically do of a movement.

So think of how many push ups in a row you can do, a, how many setups in minute you can do, things that are typically in like five to fifty repetition sort of range. And IT is often, or IT is almost always local muscle. So what I mean by that is IT is I push up tested is really how many reps that you try steps and pax and and delton's can do.

IT is not a cardio asked lar endurance. IT is not a global physiological. It's specific to typically one or a few muscle groups at a time.

This is why you have to do multiple test for sort of every group there after that. Now we moved into number seven, which is what I call aneroid capacity. This is more synonymous with maximum heart rate.

And now actually looking at rather than a single movement or muscle group, IT is a total physical ological uh limitation so IT is uh the maximum lt of work you can do and say thirty to forty five seconds, maybe even up to one hundred and twenty seconds of all out work. Um think of your classic interval type of stuff here. So how much work can you do at a maximum rate where you're going to enter tremendous amounts of global fatigue? The next pass that is maximum robot capacity.

And this is publicly something like in the eight to fifteen minute range where you're going to reach probably both a maxim part rate as well as a true view to max, which will talk a lot more about what that is later. So that is, is a different from the previous one where you can't reach this in a matter of seconds. IT simply takes multiple minutes to get to a position to where your view of two max is actually going to be sufficiently chAllenged, are an indicator.

And then the last one, number nine, is what I call long duration. And this is just your ability to sustain sub maximum work for a long period time with no breaks, no reduction whatsoever. This is often called steady state training or a lot of people just think of this when I think of and go cardio, but your ability to continue move without any breaks or change or drop, uh, is the last and final adaptation.

And for long distance, steady state, i'm guessing that exceeds fifteen minutes because the previous one was eight to fifteen minutes or so. What sort of rent time ranges are we talking about in terms of this long duration? Well, that's actually wonderful.

You going to be anything past fifteen months. So really, if you look at a kind of a minimum number, there is generally twenty minutes of what we're looking for, but a more typical will be twenty to sixty minutes. But anything passed that would still be limited by your longterm insurance, serious need to sustain work over time.

okay. So are given that there are nine different major adaptations that can be induced with exercise of specific types, is there any one global test or assessment that people can take or do that allows them to determine what level of ability of fitness they have in each and every one of these nine different category?

There are probably dozens or more tests that you can do for each one of those nine categories. And what I would actually like to do is walk you through my favorite, tes for each and giving you both the scientific gold standards. So if you have the ability on the other resources, what should you go do? As well as some that are our equipment free, that are cost free, things that anyone can do across the world. In addition to that, I want to walk you through what those numbers should be. How do you identify if you really pour in something or you're great and then if you aren't as good, maybe in a category you wanted get Better about IT exactly what to do in terms of protocols for how achieve up results in each of those steps.

So I know in your list of the nine different adaptations to exercise that you did not mention fat loss or health promoting benefits, which are two reasons that a lot of people percies. Was there specific reason that you did not mention those?

Absolutely, is because those things are actually not specific training styles. They are by products of these nine. So what I mean by that is if you understand how fat low occur s which we can turn talk about, you'll realize some of these nine protocols are effective for fat loss and some are not, uh, general health.

This is the same thing. When we understand what that actually means to be healthy from a physical gc perspective, then the rationale for what to train for is going to determine itself. So what I mean is, looking at things like, in order to be healthy, you have to have sufficient strength, you have to have cardiovascular itns, you have to have sufficient muscle.

And as such, a therefore, training for one's health is determined by those restrictions. So for you, Andrew, you may need to do more strength training to be healthy for me, because i'm stronger, ready, way stronger than you. I may not need to do as string training.

So our court on called health based protocols are based on our current status or limitations in physical finish among these nine areas. So what I would like to do today is to cover a brief history of extropy science. And the reason is it's going to explain a lot about why people are not getting the goals in their exercise programs that they want as well as give you very specific direction about what to do. Instead.

I can't wait to hear all the things that i'm doing incorrectly and to have you helped me remedy that. Before we begin, i'd like emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is also separate from doctor governance teaching research erles a coste foton.

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If you like to try aid sleep, you can go to eight sleep dot com slash huberman in and check out there pod three cover and save one hundred and fifty dollars at check out is currently ships in the USA, canada, united kingdom, select countries in the eu and australia again, that asleep dotcoms slash huberman to save one hundred and fifty dollars at cheko before we get into how the history of exercise science informs the mistakes that we are all making and how to remedy those mistakes, i'm curious as to whether or not you have any favorite one or two studies that point to a sort of naturally occurring example of how people can become very fit in one area and not another. You are familiar with seeing in duran's athletes that apparently have terrific insurance, but at least to my eye, don't look like they are particularly strong. Most of familiar was seeing individuals that are very, very strong to go on social media, but that don't look like they can walk up a light of stairs, much less run a mile. Do you have any examples of studies in or outside the laboratory that point to that in a concrete way?

There's a lot to have to discuss here, but all answer really clear if you look across the literature. And this is actually back to as early as the mid one thousand nine hundred and fifties. In fact, that actually goes back to previous to that, to the harvard fatigue b.

Nineteen twenty seven to nine hundred and forty seven area people actually were advocating at that point a combination of strength training and adults in the nineteen way back then in fact actually goes prior that delay one hundred and eighty. There is scientist evidence back then. Um IT became more well developed in the middle thousand nine hundred and fifties and sixties.

In fact there was um the initial stages of what's called all the exercises medicine movement, which is the movement now, but the initial stages of that actually route back the one thousand nine hundred and fifties. And I could actually go in that whole discussion in the story of how that came about, but that's the health is wealth montreal that came from the one thousand nine hundred and fifties um from the scientific unity that all those those data points are going to suggest. You need a combination of some sort of broad strength training and broad and dance.

Now if you have a specific five months from now, you want to compete in a race or hit a certain physic think that's fine to focus on one area of training. Certainly you're an athlete that's different. But if you want to maximize health and and overall functionality throughout time and needs to be accommodation and really, really highlights, I can actually talk about a couple of studies that i've done.

Um one of them we actually did in socom, sweden. So I did this at the Carolyn's institute, which you probably are aware of. It's actually one of the founding places of all of exchange generally started there.

IT was called something different back then. But um really our entire field came out of stock home and the carlin constitute and we work with the whole bunch across country skies that were in their eighties and nineties. And so they were competitive skies in one nine hundred and forty ties and fifties, and they had been skin competitive ly for that entire duration.

So you're talking fifty to sixty consecutive years of competing. Um so there are eighty to ninety year olds living alone and healthy, and we compared them to a group of individuals uh here in amErica who are the same age, but we're not exercising. And what we wanted to do is to see and going to look at what are these lifelong endurance individuals, what they look like when we brought them in the lab, which is, by the way, amazing to do a youtube access on a ninety two year old um especially in the language that they don't speak.

And you're you can imagine you're doing this in the hospital, right and you're running people through. This is a cycling test. And so for A A view to max, as you have a mask on your face, you hooked up to a metal, all the cards, so we can collect all the gas that are coming at your mouth and you're chanting these people on.

And basically every minute the workload gets harder, harder, harder until you can. complete. And we're doing this in a cardiology center and the cardiologists are usually waiting for the heart rate to get like slightly eleven, and they stop them because there you know eighty five, eighty six years old. And only we not stopping them, but we are screaming in their years is like go.

go.

go and we to england in english, right? And then the translate, but IT doesn't take a lot of translation when screaming at your face, like go, go, go. So we ran them through a whole bunch view to maxus, and we did the same thing for those folks back um here in america.

And what was um incredibly clear from that study was the view to max. Um you can think about these numbers. This is what's called relative.

So in the relative terms are a middle ads per cillo gram per minute. And so a standard number is about eighteen, as we call the line of independence. So if your view to max is below eighteen, middle test parki o gramp per minute is very hard you to live by yourself.

So your fitness is so low, you probably are going to need to have somebody living with you or you'll need to be in some sort of assistant of living home. So if you are in like beauty max of twenty or twenty one or twenty two, you're not below that line of independence, but you're on the rush hold. And so what we found was our folks here in america, the group average was right around that number.

So they were living at home by definition. We picked them to be people living by themselves in their atis, not a living, but they don't have any band with. So if they got a cold or they had anything pop up where they lost little bit of fitness, they were going to drop below that line and would probably have to go to some sort of this of living situation. Um the folks in stock com, the the cross country skies, the group average was most closer to like thirty five to thirty eight middle ads per legram committed. Now that number is about the view to max you would find for a Normal college mail. And so these folks that were literally eighty or ninety um if the you know the joke I felt sabor truth tiger ran in the room or or whatever and chased IT down and we all had to run at the sea who didn't get eating alive that the college of men would probably i've gotten eaten before the the ninety year olds in one case we had a ninety two year old individual. And I think his vioxx x for thirty eight, which was an estimation world record, the highest biotin x for somebody over the age and ninety.

asked what what is the typical resting heart rate for somebody very fit like these older swedish cost country scars? Somebody has a um this let's say their number is thirty five millions per kilogram in this vio to max test. But since most of us don't have access to that kind of equipment but that we can measure our pulse rate, what was a typical resting heart rate.

resting pulse sub? Ty, yeah. I mean, typically that's a good number to go off and for anybody regardless of age. Um any time I see somebody above that, i'm going to start asking questions. Certainly above you'll seen the literature people will say sixty to eighty is Normal, and I don't agree with that at all. If you're up, if you're resting heart seventy five years from minute, there's either something going on or you're not fit.

How much ross country scheme were they doing on average in the previous let's say if we take the previous twenty years since they're been long time across country skies, divide that by twenty years yeah on average age of these people cross country in five hours a day.

two hours a day, an hour a day. Yeah that's actually good question. I don't remember it's been many years um but they were not doing in every single day and the volume would not shocked at you IT was the consistency over fifty years that got them there.

Now obviously these people were again world champions and olympic dali's in one thousand fifties and fifties. So they were, you lead, they just continued consistently over time. But IT wasn't a shocking amount of physical fitness.

They also didn't go either way to train hard. They were busy shopping, what, they were busy doing number of other things. And then they just happen to do some of these races and ski a long way.

But IT wasn't a crazy amount to where you're like. That's great, but I could never hit that number. IT was something much more reasonable.

So is they take a way to be consistent about getting cardiovascular exercise and we can define d what consistent means in terms of days per week a little bit later. I I know we well yes, what are some other examples I love these examples of um from the real world.

So here here's the downside. So I only told you about the auto max, what I didn't tell you about is that like strength and functionality, and that part was no more superior than IT was their counterparts who were not exercises. So what that showed really, really clearly, and many other studies have been done since then, that look at the classical we call live long and dance exercises.

You will see in general their view two max, a cardiff Oscar function, they're resting heart rate, their blood pressure IT will be markedly healthier than folks who don't exercise. IT is extraordinary ly clear. That type of exercise is very important for crawling disease management, no doubt, about IT.

However, IT is not sufficient for overall global health because IT does almost nothing for leg strength for any other marker of health, which we can talk about. What are the things that are actually going to predict mortality, morning ability the most? So that was A A big a big smashing indication.

That's okay. This is great. However, you're leaving things on the table for your overall health. No one could argue they're eighty and that they're doing pretty well, but they weren't doing as well in these areas.

And so a study we did later, actually, as a follow up, I was looking at models like us. S so this is actually an interesting, being a scientist. This is a classic example of one of my graduate students who had been in my lab for probably three, four years.

And SHE was in our single fiver physiology lab and he is you imagine she's isolating individual muscle fibers from an athlete one by one with the twisters. And he's going to do several thousand individual cells, right? So he's you're down there for hours and and things happened out there. You can to lose your mind and and who is kind of going on one day with one of my colleagues and just talking and he's like, oh yeah, my uncle is really, really fit and something other and then oh yeah, he's a twin and like us monoliths she's like.

yeah for I don't know monogue are identical twin yeah.

what's is interesting? So you basically have one of setting up here. This is the perfect exercise.

Scientific experiment models like this. Identical twins mean they have the exact same DNA. So an egg was fertilized, split. And then two humans grew out that with the exact same DNA.

And so now we can start answer to the question of all, yeah, okay, what about maybe these cross country skies? Maybe they were just genetic freak. Maybe IT didn't matter.

Is like some people have will generate always a component to IT. But how much? Well, now we have a scenario lining upwards.

Like whitman, you have models like us to us. So we have a replica of a human being, exact same DNA. The only differences that we were seeing their physiology now would be due to lie elle circumstances.

interesting. So models like us went on, uh, a dad and uncle, right? Uhh, great.

Do they exercise? So one of them does. He's a lifelong and turn exacerbates runner, cyclist, swimmer, iron man, all these things.

What about the other one? nope. He doesn't exercise at all. And at that point, like I wanted to kill my graduate student because unlike you've been in my lab for three years or more probably, and you've never told me that in your household is the perfect scientific experiment for exercise you could ever create.

And like he is that have, look on her face when my calling and I was staring out. This is like, oh, my god. So unlike call them right now, they are coming in the lab.

L fly them in from chicago. Adults are what we have to do like we're getting him in. And so I wanted to actually going back to the model that was first developed by the harvard fatigue.

One thing is interesting about that community is they started off with the concept you're trying to exam in human performance through holic lens. And so IT was the antithesis of looking at either organ by organ. So we're going to only look at the cardiovascular system, are only going to look at skeletal muscle.

And then we're going we're looking at this entire picture. And so that model we wanted to Carry through when these twins and I said, all right, I want to bring them in the lab, but i'm not just going to look at one system. I want to do everything.

So we took store samples, we took blood. We did vertical jump test. We did maximum strange test, did uh mr rise of muscle mass.

We did um uh real to max test. We did efficiencies. So we we did the net testing.

We did niu test with the psychological battery. We want to look at everything to figure out of these things. What diver between the twins.

And so the second key question there is by how much so can I improve my view? Two, max, sure, everyone knows that. How much can IT change by five percent, eighty percent? Like where's the number? And so putting some quantification on this was very important.

And so again, we had another example of a classic endurance only training paradise compared to a non. So this is a person who is that thing, is a truck driver by voting, which is, and I actually drove for a potato chip company, which was even funnier. The entrance actually, IT actually was great, because, like any endurance people, he had a, he had physical books of all of his training college for the last thirty five years.

And we could, we went through them. We calculate the total amount of miles he ran, his averages, his heart race time. We had this unbelievable thing, like what races he was, any of the documentation he was, this totally nuts, right? Like something that endurance people are like shaking.

They'd right now on, oh, I got that and .

I was so pretty. I yeah, super right. So is great.

Because now we can validate is closest one could to actually how much you ran and and things like that. So they had about a thirty five year discord. They both exercise up through high school by eighteen.

They stopped doing that by the time. Like right? There in their mid d fifty. So about thirty five years, a difference. And when we ran them through the testing, if you look at the the the measures that were similar to the sweet and study IT was almost identical.

The view the exercising twin was significantly Better at things like a lipid panel resting heart right blood pressure, views to max. Any of those markers, as predicted, were much, much Better. What was very interesting though, was the things that were in the middle.

First of all, their total mantle muscle mass was almost identical, like to the gram within the margin of era of a dex is scan could possible ever be the non exercise, although was a little bit fatter. So the difference in actual body weight was explained almost entirely by body fat or non tissue, really same sort of. So okay.

Like no one surprise there that the exerciser was a little bit leaner even though I didn't change volume of muscle us at all when we looked at some of the more functional test and we looked at things like muscle quality. So this is a metric you can give from an ultra sound. You can kind of think about this as how much fat is inside the tissue, which is sometimes an advantage for render in ethics to have a little bit more than what are called inter moscot coorious because it's a fuel direckly in the tissue.

But in general, the exercise are the the muscle quality was not in favor of the exerciser. Um if you looked at the performance testing and if you looked at strength IT favoured than the non exerciser. So now again, we have the same finding we saw on our sweden study, but in identical twins. And so that really, really highlighted the fact that if you want to move forward of optio health, simply picking one cyclo is not going to .

get you there one time, meaning just running, just cycling, right? Does this mean that the twin that did not exercise could jump ire or win an armor sling competition? Not that that's a vital thing to be able to do, but just in terms of measuring strain, you know it's a ice metric strain. Um was the non exercising to in stronger at least as stronger as they're exercising?

Yes, ticula grip strength yep. And any measures like the vertical jump, like extension power and a number of things they often favor the non exerciser, which you're still a little bit of chicken and nag. You don't know if necessarily the enduring training reduced that other twins strength or IT doesn't even really matter.

pursue. I think the highlight of IT is can you change some of these metrics of the ultimates? Yeah not even close. These things are very responsive regardless of your genetic your genetics will give you a starting place very clearly.

Um even the non exerciser was a pretty healthy guy so they want to go buy, made fifty, doesn't exercise, doesn't really paid gentle died at all and he was in a pretty shape. However, if you want to actually move progress and move for uh, high functionality, you have to do something besides just run, right, just distance run. Now I could say the same thing for strengthening that alone.

I don't want to make this thing I am saying under and exercises IT worked in both case and beat these studies. Those folks were a much Better off in metrics s that are incredibly important to mortality. How long you're going to live? View two maxim.

Um it's just not going to get there and turn the strike. We took a look at muscle fiber, the theology as well, which is very interesting. So what I mean is there's generally two types of muscle fibers, fast switch and slow twitch.

And one of things that is a hallmark of aging is a reselected tive reduction in fast touch fibers. And that's because it's difficult to activate them unless you're doing high force activities. Um you're going to activate slow twitch fibers doing almost any activity of daily living.

And so they stay around switch fibers unless you're doing something of by force or going not be used and they're not going to be capital around. And that's a problem because when you look at things like the need for like strength through reading, the ability to catch yourself from a fall, these things are incredibly important. If you don't have faster red fibers, you don't have the speed to get your foot down in front of you on time, and you don't have the e centric strength to stop the fall from happening.

And so if you look at crossing the aging literature, that they're very clear about the importance of maintaining strength and and faster ge fibers over time. So we know that this is an important distinction here overall. And people will often talk about, okay, how much of that is genetic determent? Can I change my fiber type? And the answer there is, is resoundingly yes. And can I change IT with exercise? And the answers, absolutely you can.

And then the next question is, how much? So now again, we're going to see him order Mandatory de in general without going too far down an area maybe because for later um each one of your muscles in your body has a different percentage of fast which in switch, for example, your cafe um if you look at your solid, which is kind of a smaller one that goes in the back, that's generally mostly slow twitch, typically eighty percent of those switch um the gas rock which is the other one right next to so you're to point your toe next, your face in that part that kind of flux is out in the middle pop soul that's your gas struck that is almost the a inverse so it's generally eighty percent fast to which maybe twenty percent so to which um generally anything anti postal or postal rather anti gravity uh spinal rectors things that are meant to keep you up or moving all day are going to be slow twitch ch and things like your hamstrings which are for explosion or can be fast witch. Well, we buy up through the quad in these individuals and in that muscle it's generally about fifty fifty faster with slow wich as is a really broad number.

Well, one of the things that we found was in the non exerciser IT was almost textbook. What you would predict IT was about fifty percent or so slow twitch, a little bit percentage fast switch, and about twenty percent of of these called hybrid fibers, which are a hallmark of an activity. Alright, great in the exercises.

Or IT was about ninety five percent sludge. And so it's extremely clear, again, I don't know if maybe their set point was limit hartarto that the non exerciser know devolve down to his place, or they the one, but IT doesn't matter. I mean, you going from forty percent so to one case to ninety five percent so, judge, in another case, IT shows you that the limits of psychological adaptation are done near boundless, given enough exposure. And in this case, thirty five years of extremely consistent training and his muscle of methods, gy was completely different than his identical twin of the exact same DNA.

Those are two beautiful examples of people doing endurance work for a number of years. And what that gives them in terms of benefits and functionality, has the opposite experiment been done or observed where somebody just weight lifted or just sprinted for a number of years? Uh, I don't know that there is a identical twin uh.

control that's a third too much .

shar right trip lets. okay. So triplets out there, if you're exercising in different ways or people who have triplets, maybe you assign one kid to be a runner, one kid to be a wait lifter and the other one to be set into you. Please don't do experiments like that. But the expected, as I understand that, would be that the person that springs or that does heavy, squat, explosive work would then have more faster muscle fibers in their quad and they're non exercising in counterpart would have fewer that, that would make sense. But what happens if you assess the the endurance level in somebody who is just done string training or just sprinted?

Yeah so we don't have those data specifically. There's were actually just starting to have studies come out on life long string trains. And there's actually a very good reason for this um which is a whole sorry, we can get into. But the the quick answer is we don't have a lot of people who have been lifting weights for thirty years plus years. We have a whole swath of people have been doing in different training for that.

One is that because fewer people have been wait training or wait trainers, all dead.

you got to go back to the one thousand hundred and fifty three and nine hundred fifty four. Yet two major things happen that change the entire course of exercise physiology and exercise science and really exercises as we know IT. It's important to understand the history of I feel a lot of the questions I get are based on false assumptions of what exercise can and can do.

As an example, we questions like momentum. Should I use momentum or or that's cheating, right? Or IT doesn't work.

Uh IT compromises my results. It's actually totally untrue. There are excEllent reasons when you should use momentum when you left.

There are reasons when you should not. IT is sometimes very beneficial to go fast with the exercise repetition, sometimes very slow, and control is Better. Any question I get, in fact, i'm very infamous for always responding with IT depends.

The reason I say that depends is IT depends on the goal when you're training for speed or power, muscle and dance. The answer to some of these very common question differs. What people feel to realize is they think they're asking the right question because they don't understand this history was being planted in your brains.

So consciously is driving that question and is not necessary the right one. So if we walk through that a little bit, you'll see what that field has LED you, why you think certain things matter when they actually don't? Or maybe your assumptions aren't correct? And then exactly what to do about them.

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So in one hundred and fifty, three hundred and fifty four you had Roger banister breaking the four minute mile so soup four and file and then you also had thread man hilary and his shape and norgay, uh, summer everest in the same basically to your span. That exact same year after that was the formation of what's called the american college of sports medicine. Now that is still around today.

IT is the permanent group for this exercises medicine. So if you're interested in things like exercise for obesity prevention, for cancer treatment, for for things like that is not really sports medicine. It's more for icic exercise.

That's the place to go. American called this worse medicine. So we have this launching of both a ton of people wanting to start doing in different excruciation and start swimming and cycling and running.

And then you have a launch of people coming off of the back of the harbor, fatigue b. So the fatigue b actually shut down in one thousand nine and forty seven. So you have these people interested in physical fitness, but nowhere to go.

Well, all those people left the art of tig labs, started their own labs and their places. So you have launched the careers of people like they've costal and and john losy and some of these very famous exercise physiologist, nestor 表 laboratories。 And we start for the first time ever, studying the science of exercise.

So years go by, and these people happen in one thousand hundred and sixty and twenty seven, what we call the runners bomb. So people start that if, in fact, if you look at the numbers of people who are doing marathon's, IT explodes through these two decades spans, right? Because it's like them, we could do these enduring feeds.

Notice both those feeds are in dance, right? Running short term as well as going over there. No one has thought anything about strengthen.

And here is why the late eighteen and eighties there was a very famous uh, physician and a George windship, but his name, who was a big proponent of strain training, well, he died in, like in the age of fifties, something of a heart attack. And that terrified people are strengthening for seventy years because they're like, wow, wa, that stuff, i'll kill you. Because he was a doctor, he was trying. He was running around the country doing these exhibitions in proportion IT.

And then he died like atkins, hundred percent dying. All the some people say he died of a heart attack. Other people said he fell through the ice and the cold water that's debated, but the fact that are a heavy proponent of a given nutrition plan dies suddenly. Yep, not good for business.

So now the little storm is brewing one nine hundred and forties. And i'm going back a little bit, but bear with me for a second. There's a guy named um Peter corporation and he is uh scientists out of spring film like the decorated physical education pe like that's a legended place springle college and he is anti strength train for a lot of the same reasons and his entire career talked about note to this he's going to launched these ideas that strengthening will make you the flexibility IT will be bad for kids and like all these things that we know now are clearly not true. He's proponent these things and there is a show that happened um in his sprinkler college and guy name bob york.

And if you be work marbles that's still around the day is going around the country and putting on these exhibitions they come to spring field and is sort of like A A new aged um like social me thing works like the students know is about to happen because corporate shows up to this event and everyone knows he hates streng training and everyone is like waiting for you to end just to see what he's going to say. So this whole exhibition goes on. These people are doing now you got to member back in the time, like body building with lifting power, lifting, strong, strong man.

It's like all the same thing. There's no different tian and IT finishes and corporate stands up and that the crown goes silent and he just asks one question and he just points on other guys. He says, scratch your back and now he's just a summing and waiting for the guy to be like and not be able to put his hand behind his set.

And I think he pointed to john gema, who's like a famous body builder, and he reach back and scratched tues back. No problem. And then they proceeded to grab two umbels.

I think there are fifty pound dumbbells and do a backflip, standing, backlit with both. And they chant, they start doing the soots on stage, and they start going, performing all kinds of physical function test. And and carp, which is stunned, his, I call the shit, has nothing to say.

He leaves there in his whole life has changed. All these things he was claiming were shown in his face to be false. He does a one eighty on his career.

He starts running study after study on strength training, and starts finding immediately there are no detriments to strength in in terms of, like, global health, right? Of course, you can do IT wrong and things like that. In fact, here comes a whole bunch of benefits.

So through the thousand nine hundred and fifties, while these things going on with the enduring spokes, no one still strength training because there's no there's no record to see, there's no american college sports medicine, there's no societies, there's no science, we're not sure as safe. And meanwhile, carp, which is is hammering study after study after study showing you it's safe, it's safe, safe. But he hasn't picked up yet.

And then everything changed in one thousand nine hundred and seventy seven. Thank you. All sports ago, he came out with the trifle. He hit you with pumping iron, which I know, you know, that movie, right? Resting movie.

for those not interested in body building. A very interesting movie, because IT really gives a window into not just him, but the way in which way training started to show up as a regular practice. And when I was growing up, the only people way train, where people preparing for football, body builders who basic didn't exist in the town where I grew up.

And the only people who did yoga were like, you is doing bicarb. But now you drive through any major american city or european city. And there is the yoga studios, their games freeway igh.

ts. Arnold, short taker, is largely responsible, I think, for for initiating that that shift. Yes.

he he think about he hit us with pumping conan and in the terminator almost in back to back, like very close within years. So you've got this whole cascade to seventy of people running, cycling and swimming. Now scientists starting to come out that is not dangerous, and maybe actually the benefit.

And then, boom, not only is IT not bad for you, you can make you into a real world superhero. I think about the psychology of a child growing up watching somebody like conan. Think about what batman looked like in the one thousand nine hundred and fifteen and sexy, right? And then bone, I can look like that.

Now not everyone wants to look like on, but you see, like, you see the power that can lend, and people know what to ever seen or thought. You can make your body transform like that. You can, baby, be born like that. But no chance. That's within the grass of all of you.

When I was a kid growing up, one of my favorite book was again and spoke a world's record. Yes, I still have images in my mind of the the coldest animal, you know, the longest life span, you know. And there was a picture in there of annual shorts. And agger, and know what his record was, is said, perfectly developed. Man, yes, yeah, which is, as you point out, that isn't the physical that .

most people's priority.

but IT really, I did inspire this this shift. The other thing about resistance training that I think has a certain a lure for some people, men and women, is that it's one of the few forms of exercise that because of the enhanced blood flow to the muscle that occurring during the training, the so called pump, yes, IT gives you a transient, but someone real window into what your results will be. You run in your gasping for air.

Don't get this. You aren't experiencing what it's like to be faster than you are that day. But when you wait, train, you get an esthetic picture into how your functionality anaesthetic will change.

IT disappears a few hours later or as the the so called pumps subsides but its a very interesting form of exercise in that way it's almost as if you go to learn a language and during the process of learning for brief moments you're actually flew ent and then I get to taken away. So IT puts the dopamine e and carrot out in front of you. This is just me, zing, as to why wait training might taken off the way that .

is yeah that means like if you got paid every hour on the hour when you're working and at the of the day, like they take the money back, but you still like as the time clock is going on in your day, you're looking up and you're just seeing you're watching your bank account grow in your life like you can see.

Why is so addicting to those? So to finish the story here, what's going back to actual question answered, this is happening the late seventies, early eighties. And so now, joe weather, all these gyms, they are exploding because people want to look like that. Or if they have, they realized they have a chance to change how they are physically.

Look that i'd never been a reality before.

You meant that point yet for a large number of reasons, cultural acceptance. Zeta, even with endurance stuff, you could get fitter and run fast, and that's Better. But jellon wasn't going to change how you looked unless you were losing fat. Now you can change how you look, which is so incredibly addicting factors of a very famous quote.

I think it's actually javier who said, show me one man who wants to be strong and also you tend to want to look strong, right? It's like that's very, very powerful, right? There's there's a whole like there's tons of the history I can go into, which is export of explaining to.

But now you're you're immediately and you have what I call my generation, so you have my generation who fall love a strengthening the eighteen in the thousand nine hundred eighties and nineties. But there is really no scientific field for IT. It's not really come about yet.

The science of endurance and exercise, physical gy is now homing along in a massive rate because these people came up in the seventies and eighties and five, ten, fifteen years in their career. They're producing they're they're generating graduate students. They're starting their own labs and exercise physio.

Gy, still that this day is eighty percent and dance steady state stuff almost explosively. But now my generation, you'd love, you love sports, you love lifting you of all these things. And now we see happen is the chicago ables.

Michael Jordan starts picking up string training oh that's that's on TV. He's on sports center and mid one thousand nine hundred and ninety lifting weight and we go back actually to the next thousand and seventies. And i'm i'm not sure if you're a football fan, but any football fan will recognize the nebraska a corn husk ers in one thousand nine hundred and seven, eighty and eighty change shelf pulse play.

Well, the reason is because they started train training and they started doing out with a guy named boy, I believe, who is the founder of the N. S. C.

A. So the national strength condition association is formed in late one thousand nine hundred seventies as well. So just like asm was developed the year after those two events happened, thousand, nine hundred and seventy eight, the year after all comes out.

Bone nsc is form. And now you have a scientific organization dedicated to strength and conditioning. You've got nfl strengthening and coaches that are starting to come on board.

You have got scientists that are starting coming to lapse. And strength additionally becomes the scientific field. Well, everything swings now from an exercise perspective into body building.

And so almost all of the things, in fact, we were sort of talking before I could run a whole bunch of tricks on you, and I could ask you a whole bunch of questions about things you think are absolute standards or guaranteeing about training. I'm supposed to do this. I'm never supposed to do that.

For instance. For instance, is IT okay to training a muscle group on back to back days? Most people at home thinking, no, you're not supposed to train the month and needs to recover and that's total nonsense, right?

Um other things like body parts split training, right training one muscle group per day. Um other things like cardio uh in dance training influencing will IT ruin my gains from my left. All of these things are on at a base of assumptions that come from body building. Now that's a fantastic world.

But because everything started in the thousand nine hundred and seventies as body buildings in terms of basically strength training, was that weight lifting and power lifting were not at all around, right? They were, but nobody cared again, shows me someone who wants to be strong or so you tend to want to look strong. The physics thing is dominated, and we're not getting out of that yet.

We're not, although out of we're starting to them because here's why people start to realize this body building thing is fantastic. I can change my physic. I'm getting Better but damn, these workout take an out half two hours and i'm going to spend that whole time on one or two body parts which means i'm going to half to lift six days a week and i'm after that consistently right analysis boom. Two hours on my on my elbow flexors and my elbow started to hurt .

and yet my understanding is that IT doesn't really require two hours a day training in order to get benefits even and just for hypocrisy totally but .

but a lot of the time you're onna have to get some amount of time and because you're spending so much isolation. So we've gone away from training, movement, running as a movement, cycling as a movement, training my bye PS is a muscle are but muscle group, training my hamstring ings or a muscle group that is not a human movement.

So we've done a one eighty in terms of select, and the exercises from movement base prescription to now muscle group based training. So when you you're ice citing muscle groups, that means I hold chunk of your body is really not doing much throughout the day. So what happens if you're doing, say, legs on monday and you miss monday is on a flight now your legs have to wait a whole another week, right?

That's the social APP. So this just become problematic. People start getting beat up.

People start realizing actually feel that great. I'm not superfit. I'm sweating, just walking up the stairs.

I'm out of breath. why? Because all that training, you've done nothing for your party of oslo fit this. You've done nothing to improve my heart rate, oxygen, ation, blood flow. And so that paratime swing way too hard into the exercising, specially lifting weight is single joint, often machine, often slow, often high volume isolation.

So, and that left a giant opening of people going, wait a minute, what if you could get in the gym? I could promise you the same or Better result in under thirty minutes. And in fact, you will also feel Better.

You'll lose more weight. And that opened up group exercise classes, cattle bell stuff, cross the type post of circuit training. Because you can come in, you won't get so beat up because of volumes lower.

The time is much lower. You get multiple additions the same time. great. The problem with that though fast for ten years, is that started bearing people because you've now d emphasized movement quality and you've over emphasize scores, right? So this is a classic example.

If you go and you watch pumping iron, you'll see or anybody over, you'll see if they're doing a buy self crew. They don't even really pay attention to the rege. They don't really pay tension to load.

They are looking at their muscle. They're trying to figure out how do I get that thing to fire. They're freezing their flexing, they are posing at the end of every set.

They're going to figure out, am I getting in up pump IT is exclusive. Vely founded on exercise quality, the rep brains, the numbers almost relevant when you go to the other model. Exercise technique IT doesn't matter, just get the most amount weight up.

or the amount reps, or the .

fastest time.

and settle a high. enjoy. Definitely felt like I was working hard. I I observed a lot of people in very close proxim ity doing olympic lifts and doing keeps. That's where you kick your legs for, say, you know, sort of like walking in tipping type pull ups. No, I I enjoyed IT um IT wasn't for me for the long term, but he did seem that there was a lot of ballistic movement in close proximity to other people. So the hazards to me seem more about that than the actual movements.

Well, again, the point of setting up here is that was actually a really brilliant solution for a lot of the problems. The classic body building high perch fee introduced. So I got away from my isolation movements and got people doing big movements, which are more effective, generally Better, got people doing things fast and explosive that's more athletic.

That is more important for longevity is solves a lot of the problems. Joint health wasn't getting crashed. The issue they went with is they just pushed ed th Epace o n s core r ather t han q uality.

They push th Epace o n h ow m any p eople c an b e i n h ere a t t he s ame t ime. So now you're doing higher risk movements, higher intensity, higher and what they told, not that they don't care about technique, but it's not the thing that they're most concerned about. It's getting the number of the thing done.

They saw the time issue though. You can get tremendous results in three days week under forty five minutes each session. Sea burn. People out, though, wait too much time, intensity way too often. And the other problems, safety concerns, all kinds of orthopedic sues.

all there are stop. Can I interpret for a moment and just ask a question as we go through this arc of the history of why endless training predominated or strength training or body building type training or cross fit type training? Because I think this is fascine.

I know we're about to arrive at where we are today and what the future looks like for for people and what they should focus on and do. At what point, if any, do you think resistance training started to become adopted by women? There was no equivalent of arnal shorts and ago there was Linda hamilton in the terminator.

Yeah there are some impressive physics certainly on female actresses and um athletes, the William sisters, you know, very impressive muscular turn physic. Of course there turns playing things for itself. Has that happened yet? Mean what I mean is um do you think cant work with both men and women? Yeah do you think that most women understand that weight training um done properly is going to be extremely beneficial for them, maybe even especially for them in terms of offsetting bone density loss and things of that sort um or we still waiting for the state the popular a stimulus for getting you know eighty percent of yg women thinking I want to lift .

yeah um hard for any answer because i'm not like i'm not a woman right now. I have a daughter, she's four so we'll see. Um what I can say is is i've probably worked with I don't know how many professional authors in total a lot i've worked with them, probably fourteen professional sports have worked with sigh, Young winners M V P like the whole all all the credentials right I bet thirty five, forty percent.

The artists i've worked with our female. So i've worked with olympic d delist. I've worked with a Browns medals, and in multiple sports have worked with the most decorated power lift of all time.

So in a number of these areas, fighters, world chain, all these things for me I feel like that verses are you happen um in my students. If you look at my classroom, I don't know what the numbers are, but there is no small number of females in excise science and exercise YSL logy. If you look at our laboratories, that's one thing you will see there are very few female exercise scientists.

There are very few a female strange initiation and coaches. But that number is is is coming down to a astronomical rate. You have people that are being hired in every sport.

Um you pick the n fell. You pick magic baseball every every few months were hearing first female hired for the first, hard for that. Um the yankee is Rachel. Rachel book is a fantastic.

Um you know yes yeah. Rs, been to my lab. She's terrific.

Yeah, yeah, yeah that's she's fantastic. C, and she's hired as I think she's a hitting coach. Now she's going to be a jm, right? This is her goal. She's determined. Um so that's already happening.

And my students that are coming through our program are getting placed in these rules that haven't gotten through yet a lot in terms of being an actual scientist um but they're getting there um more scientists the NBA bring hired females in terms like big da collectors for science and tech will cover you um and another discussion but I think this happening, whether not the the cultural social product I can speak to that and the equation what I can speak to the is um one of things I think is is most fun coming forward scientifically is you know a number of years ago, nih came back came through with their Mandate. So think it's no longer acceptable to exclude women from scientific. Sure, because we just did that for decades.

Well, what happened I just to fill this in because I think it's worth noting is that for many years, studies, even on routes, yes, we're mainly Carried out on male rodents because the. Assumption, and the assumption turned out to be wrong, but the assumption was that the physiology of female rodents, because they don't have a mentor cycle, is not twenty eight days, that an extra cycle, its four days different type cycle that that would somehow disrupt the data IT turns out that's entirely wrong.

Now it's actually required when you sit on a grand study panel, which of the people who value a grants you they ask that they literally say, did they meet the criteria for sexes of biological variable here, not about biological sex. And um if you don't say yes, that's a strong hit against the grant. And if you say yes, then IT checks off that box.

So it's not required that both male and female roads and humans be studied and the given study, unless the study is specifically told, understanding that only exist in one h one or the other populations such as many as for instance yeah mental cycle andropause for instance. But um no, this is extremely important. I'm excited to hear that.

Um so where is going to go? That is actually so that was step one, which call you got include them where we haven't gotten to yet, but i've seen more, more grand applications come through for this is just the funding helsing, which is it's one thing to in to let women be in the same studies. That's great.

It's another thing though to start performing high performance research specifically for female questions that has not happened yet. That's just like a funding issue, right? We haven't gotten money.

People aren't aren't supporting that. We don't get a lot of financial support for sport science, but we can track on the money yet of something me going. I want to do a study in female.

I said answers female athlete questions. This won't help men. These are questions specific to the female. That's the next step, right? That's what we gotta get you.

So we can say maybe we should do things differently um around training a recovery or or we shouldn't or doesn't matter there. There's some there's a handful of not lower quality but like some studies um I don't love them yet. There just needs to be a tonto work.

Birth controls are very good example the the information for women at female athletes, or even just like hard exercises, you don't have to be competitive. That thing around, what is birth control doing? What types? How should I manage that? What conversation should have be having with my doctor? Almost nothing like women have nothing to go on for high performance of.

So what if i'm trying to compete in event or or run a race? How like all these types of questions should be answered? Um Normative value, Normal tive of data performance testing, like it's just not there on the female. So that's an area I I think like if somebody really wanted to make a change that the science is want to do IT, I know I I talked to so many in our field that would really love to explore IT um because it's getting there. The the said the coaching side is getting there. There are scene that they're hiring these people i'm seen in my students um know my following is not all meant like it's a very large percentage females and all I do is post about exercise science and like this is all .

I do so well this podcast is very we know very clearly the audience is fifty percent women, fifty percent men that's um which is great.

So just to jump back in our history discussion and to finish that point where we're at now and where I think we're going to go, I should go. So we walk through the body building kind of running everything, and people walking into a gym any time they lift weights there, making all the choices, basing the assumption that maximizing muscle size is the goal. And clearly, that's not the case or other adaptations you may be after.

So we talked about how that had problems, and we talked about how some of these all the forms of exercises fill those gaps and then what problems those things introduced. Well, I think we're actually at this point with that pension is kind of slowly shifting into the middle. What I mean, but that is, if you want to maximize muscle strength, we looked towards the power lifting community.

If you want a maxie muscle power, or to look the way of the community, if you want to look for muscular and turns, well, rowing, this, maybe we look into across pic communities and some of these obscure course races or functionality thing. So what we can do now is generate protocols that get us the exact dictations we want, and not once we don't want, because we can look back at each of these different styles of training and pick and choose optimal protocols or combinations for them. So somebody simply wants to get healthy.

Like we talked about when we listed the nine adaptations, and I mentioned, health wasn't one of them. That's because what's determines your health versus s. What determines my optimal health defers. So if I need more hypocrisy, I can look towards body building concepts.

What if I have enough? Or maybe for personal reasons, I decide I have too much, or I don't want to add any more than I can say, hey, how can I get stronger without getting bigger and born? My look to our political concepts, how can I get more powerful? How can I get faster? But I don't know, again, want to lose fat? Okay, great.

Or if I want physical changes. So we have all these different areas we can pick and choose from, uh, that have expertise in specific adaptations and develop ourselves perfect protocols. Based on that information.

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Can you walk us through .

the nine different adaptations that you mentioned earlier and give us away to assess our level of ability or our level of adaptation in each of those nine are the very first one .

we want to talk about is, is movement skill now set aside sport specific? So i'm not going to give you an assessment for optimal golf technique. swing.

Is this really about human movements so that you stay injury for and and you can continue to train for as long as possible? So what are the minimum requirements? Now if you can have access to a highly qualified physical therapies or movement specialist, that's the best out right, go to them, have them, uh, identify all of your movement patterns, overhead, pressing, squad, running, all these things that your gold stand, if you want to do IT yourself, though, here is a very simple four step solution.

So the way that I teaches is I go joint by joint. And so I I think this just as the major ones, your shoulder, your elbow, um your low back, hip, nee and ankle. Okay, now what you can do is do a representative movement for you.

So if you bench a lot, use the bench. If you do pull ups, s use to pull up. If you squad do that, I would recommend doing an upper body press an upper body pull, a lower body press lower body pull.

An example would be a push shop, a pull up for a bent roll, a squat and then a dead lift. That would be a very, very well rounded approach. What you're going to do is do that movement and and I would record IT for yourself and in record a front of view and a side view, probably do three, the ten repetitions per angle.

Okay, slow and controlled. You don't need any body weight. What you want to do is move and you want to look for four key things at every joint.

All right? So I can imagine of doing a squad. I'm going to do the squad.

I'm going to focus on just my ankle, and i'm a look for these four things at the ankle, and then i'm going to go back and watch my knee and look for the same four things. The ky, to the hip. Eeta, alright.

So what are these four things? Number one is, you want to look for symmetry. So symmetry is front to back, left to right, and your right limit your left look right.

And so what we want to look for, or if they aren't moving perfectly, that's fine. But you want to see is one moving further ahead and the other one is one a turning to the side. One's not.

Is one fidgeting and watching around differently. So you want to look to check, to see and make sure that they're stable. That's one. Number two, you will look for stability. So key indicators here are things like if you if you can't control A A squad, a control squad where your knees no start shaking like that would be an instability issue.

So can you do the movement slow? Can you posit the bottom? Maybe three seconds, maybe five seconds or ten? You should have complete control of that movement at all of these joints.

Um are your hip sliding to one side when you stand up? Is one elbow closer to your body when you're benching and the other one's more flared out? These are the things i'm talking about, right? I'm not worried about what angle they should be or not.

You're simply looking for a symmetries or instabilities, right? So again, as you're pushing up this one elbow, start flipping and twitching and going all over the place. The third one is what I call awareness. So uh, there are a lot of movement technique issues that are simply people don't know, and so you'll watch them squad. I do this on my classes of the time.

I'll have a hundred kids out there are and you see some horrible squad technique and when you just tell them, hey, did you realize your heros are supposed to be on the ground all times in your squad like all OK? And they can correct that is not actually a movement flaw. IT was just simply awareness.

I didn't know and then I actually didn't realize that was happening, that position. So we want all of our joints to be going through a general for range of motion, which is number four. So the angles during like a squad your knee should will be able to go as far over your toes possible while maintaining good position, your feet flat on the floor, your you know three points of contact, your whole flat and you're not compromising another joint.

So that's all you're going to look for those four things simec stability, awareness and arrange of motion through each joint, through each moment IT sounds um difficult and time to me is really not right. You can generally kind of clearly things in one or two repetitions in a couple of seconds and what you're really going to look for, there's lots of scoring schemes, you know, test physical therapies to sort you. I just look for absolutely terrible.

I can't do IT at all minor flaw or pretty close to good that that's really all i'm looking for. Some ice ring ism is zero one three zero is like you're not going to do the sexercise because you're at a very high acute risk. You might get hurt on rep one tomorrow.

Number one, a score of one is like there's a minor flaw here. We can probably do IT, but we need to be cautious of load and volume. The the other one is maybe it's perfect, maybe it's not, but go ahead and sort of do IT on a reasonable protocol, you'll be fine. So that's generally uh, what you would need to do is a cost free method of identifying good movement technique with then any other things that that you would do.

What about speed?

I actually don't think this is one most people should test. If you are high performance, something we can run a forty or dash or we can do some different things with a velocity trances are on a barr bill if you're weight lifter or something. For most people, pure speed is really maximum velocity or acceleration or kind of the two ways we break IT down. It's not just doing not that necessarily .

to test what about number three, power, which believe before you told me was speed, time, force. So the reason why I don't .

worry too much about speed is because you can infer a lot of IT from a power test. And a power test easier to do as well as easier to train for for most people. So the the costly version here is a simple, broad job.

So this is stand uh, with Normal position, jump out as far in front of you, use a possible we can, and measure the distance between where you started and the back of your heel were at lands. A super basic number to look for. There is your height.

So you should be, build a broad jump, how tall you are. If you're five 55， five, you should did five, five, six of five eeta. It's not perfect.

Um that's gonna rattle IT down a little bit, about fifteen percent for females. They just simply don't have the power in general that manhattan. So you going to want to bring that down a little bit, but that is a very crude number.

If you were to look at like a high performance nfl player, if there's six, we told the maybe jumping like nine, ten to eleven feet, if you can jump your body height. Um we're not looking for optimization in this particular test what you are looking for, red flags. If you can jump your body height, you're going to be just fine.

That's incredibly straight forward. And yet I have one question, yeah i'm assuming that I can squat down as low as I need to. Before I jump, I can swing my arms from back to front as harder with as much momentum as I can muster. And when I land, you said i'm going to take the measure from where the back, my heels, you wants to .

measure the distance you actually covered. So to clarify, there's no running approach here. There's no steps into IT you to stand at a Stellar. You can swing bounds as much as you would like to do. You're onna project our life.

So you going to measure the distance from the tip here to, so basically stand behind the line and then the further point back where you land. So basically the worst possible score, not the best possible, because your feet won't land. Symmetrically ones probably going to be a little bit further. And now technically, if you fall backwards in your hand, touches the ground, we mark that number. But in this case, just use the furthest point back of your back heel and go from there.

I'll be training IT tomorrow morning.

Now if you have access to a little bit more technology or you just really want to know a Better number, a classic vertical jump is is a good starting place. So you can actually do this in a simple cost free way. You can just measure to your hands, put them together to the both of your middle fingers are touching, overlap them and put them directly over your head, kay.

And then you can we reach up as high as you can get, and you mark that on the wall. My brother and I used to do this all the time. We would take a highlighter, the yellow ones, and color as much as we kind of our fingertips, touch the wall so that the highlighter was staying the wall.

If you could actually go back to my house and for my childhood, you'll see these markers all over our our house. I'm sure your parents were through by the care. Think that he didn't care. He is like whatever you guys do, everyone. So you want to measure that.

And then of course, you're going to a jump with those two hands and touch as size you can up, and you're going to match the distance between your standing reach and the actual height you jump there. Now the reason you're doing IT too handed, by the way, is because if you do one handed, you can actually reach pretty high by offsetting your shoulders. And I are getting in the differences of who has more solder mobility, who has the ability to kind of get up there, a two foot stand or two handed standard approach.

Is there same thing? No running approach here. Um you can dip, you can drive, you can do all those things, you can swing your arms, but you're going to be a two handed touch is a general way to do that.

You want to look for a number of something like twenty four inches or higher uh if if you're past the age of fifty, the number can come down a little bit to closer at twenty. And again, for females, it's going to be reached down about fifteen percent. Everybody want to go if you're a middle aged female and you're jump ing twenty inches, you're a pretty spot um you're going to be looking really nice there.

So now if you can do that on a force plate, that's even Better. So these are very, uh, basically scales that will go out to multiple digits, sometimes five, nine dig passes zero. And you understand these things, you need exact same test.

And these are very interesting because i'll tell you not only how high you jump, but i'll tell you how much for super in the ground. They can also tell you how long I took you. This called your rate of forced development as well as impulse and speed to bunch of other stuff which are are important to help you understand where on the power spectrum you need to be.

So you would do that in addition to using some sort of velocity transducer on a barbell. So a very classic thing to do would be um let's say you're going to do a squad and you're going to put this device on the barbell and and that's going to measure the speed to which the barbell moves and you going to do that forty percent of your one repetition acts fifty percent, sixty percent seventy eighty nine, up to hundred. And that allows you to create was called a force for occurred.

And you can start to see at what point when you start loading things heavy, you start slowing down too much. And they'll tell you what part of the force velocity curve that you want to train to optimize your power, why that's important. A lot of people will do things like what i'm trained for power, how heavy should I lift? Well, the general answer, people say, is thirty percent of your one or max.

But that's actually not true to what's most open for power development, which will discuss more much later is depending on where you're flaw in the force, follow city curve. So if you have access to technology like that, that can give you a lot more inside information. If not, do the broad jump p test or the highlighter on your fingertips and jump .

out of the water test at andy opens.

Hey, just, you know, come along is already the walls already mess up, just go come up to wasn't will.

What about strength? right?

So strength is really important. You need to measure this in in multiple areas and will start off with grip strength. okay?

So you can do this in two ways. You can buy a hand gripped diameter. Now, these are anywhere between twenty two, one hundred dollars, anywhere.

This is actually used to be like when I was in school, like hundreds of dollars. And now you can literally buy them on any website for twenty five box. So my house recommendation is technically that's not costly.

I know your whole thing about the cost free protocols, but twenty five bucks on call on that basically cost free. Um you can bring that in a testa and this is a little device where you're going to squeak and you're going to do and I would do your right hand and your left time. You want to look for a cemeteries there, but you want to look for something like typically those are they're going to give you a value in kilograms.

And you want to look for something like a minimum score here of forty kilograms. Ideally, europe past sixty would be a really good spot bean. You want to make sure that there's no less than ten percent variation between your left and right hand. You're non dominant hand actually shouldn't be that much weaker and this test so what you'll actually see lot of times is the non dominant can be often times stronger um because the dominant and is more for movement precision and writing things like that.

So you want them to be close if you are a meal and you are under forty kilograms on a handgrip t in a momeby like we're going need to trying that if you're female is not that much slower, but about thirty five kilograms is the cut off point. If you're a above fifty five, we can edit your training, but i'm not worried about leaving and add your training if you're female, if it's about fifty, that's my sort of got off where we want to go. So that's a fairly cheap one.

Uh, another one that you can actually do is just a dead hang so you can hold onto any bar, ideally one that is thin enough to where you can wrap your whole hand around IT. So you don't want to be using A A giant fat grip. Um you're going have a false reading here.

So something like going to the german jumping on any pull up bar or Apollo g and you want to hang and this is a simple time test. So in general, we we should be able to hang for a minimum of thirty seconds as what what we're looking for thirty to kind of fifty seconds is my like good but we could probably get Better here if you're cruising at both sixty seconds. I'm generally pretty happy um this is actually a good example of one female stand to be Better uh griping.

And women is tends to be strong and they can hang for quite a long time. So those those standards are not really changed that much for women. Now if you are exceptional, large, this thing doesn't scale perfectly.

Now if you're two hundred and forty pounds and even if you're lean, is just hard that to hang and hold two hundred and forty pounds. Conversely, if you're one hundred and forty five pounds, even if you're unhealthy, you're onna build a hang for a long time. This is not that much wait to Carry. So just rough numbers have to start off with.

So that's grip strength. What about strength elsewhere in the body?

The primary ones um you can do an upper body string test if you would like, although it's not technical, something we do very often. Happy to do one of max bench pressure, something like that. That's great. The more one i'm generally more interested in is a leg extension test. And the reason I like this is a book squad is Better.

A barrow background is, look, that's my like, that's my jam, that's my life, right? Is this very technically demanding and is chAllenging? You need spotters, you need comfort um a locals into this for so for the average person, a leg extension this this is fairly standardized.

You're going to worry about technique and people can just get into IT and go. And so you want to look for there is is A A couple of standards you want to hit again, a very simple answer here is body weight. Can you do a leg extension with your body way?

how? One repetition, one repetition. Um I can answer that right now. Yeah yeah no you can. No, I can hack squat, reasonable manner weight. But um I was on the leg extension this morning and night is a notley machine and I certainly could not like you extension my body way.

Let me clear AR. Were you doing a single league? E no, so by later you can like a center.

your body way. No, but I certainly can hamstring curl .

my body weight. okay. So we maybe have some um efficiencies in our cause that we need to go after, but that that's a pretty good number you want to be at. If you go up in age past eight forty every decade, that can come down about ten percent and you're still be in a pretty good slot.

So if you're fifty years old and you're one hundred and seventy pounds, if you can do one sixty in a pretty good sort and then you get this again, take IT down about ten percent every decade after forty. But prior to forty, there is really no change in strength. Um but certainly somebody there forties to fifties should be able to leg extension, their body weight noted.

I look forward to our discussion a bit later talking about how to build strength.

Yeah any these strengths, they don't have to be done to a technical true on that max, you can use what are called repetition, uh, conversion equation. So put on a load that you think is kind of close to your maximum and just do IT first many reps as you can. As long as it's under five rapes total, you can then actually go online and enter that in the any number of calculators anywhere.

And I will tell you, okay, you did three repetitions at two in our pounds. Your one rep max is probably two hundred fifteen whatever. So there's estime equation.

So if you don't want to spend the time or you truly comfortable like absolutely going to true winter max, just get to A A number that's fairly close and do as managers you can and then go online again. One root max estimator equations are everywhere. Um if you get past five repetitions or so, the accuracy of those equations starts to going down.

So don't put on something a god at twelve reps of IT and then try to figure out you're going to max little good clothes. You start moving past that. You're just getting worse and worse and worse accuracy. So I want to make sure whether you doing the leg extension test or a front squat test, you don't technically have to do IT an episode wonder max um if neither those an option. Another one I like a lot here is simply a front squad or a gob squad.

Hold so you going to hold a wait in front of your chest, whether canobia as is great here, dumb lls is fine here, and you want to hold about a half of your body weight, go all the way to the bottom position and try to hold that for about forty five seconds. So it's a pretty good indicator of, number one, your position. It's hard to be in a bad position for that long at that load as well as core strength and load backs stability.

So it's a very different cator um then say the like extension test, but it's it's a really nice one. So IT doesn't require many moving parts. It's more difficult than the leg extension, but it's it's quite a bit more functional and it's going to give you insight into a lot more areas than just the quarterback PS forty five .

seconds down at the bottom of the squad. P and then returning to a standing position.

And if you can't do the return, I actually i'm not that worried, but as long as you're going to hold that good position without a technical breakdown in that forty five seconds are really good spot. Um as an intro, I want a third of your body way for thirty seconds.

trafic. I plan to attempt all of those string tests very soon. What about hyperdrive phy? sure. Actually, before we get into that.

I want to jump back really quickly. It's important to add a couple of caveats to the strength string stuff. So there's two that I want to do.

Number one, these are assuming you are technically profession, so I don't want you to do any exercise to exhAusting or to maximum strength if you're not, come with your technique. So adjust this accordingly. If you're not comfortable with the front scot, do the leg extension.

If you're not uncomfortable that do something different. So we never want to utilize maximum testing if it's going to come with a consequence of serious security. So that's the most important flag. The second one is your warm or protocol will have a huge effect on your actual results.

And so whenever you do this test, especially if you're going to do a test, then I test again down the line, you want to make sure that that warm up protocol is standardized. Now again, the nsc and I I can give you resources, has specific guides for exactly what to do for your warm up protocol prior to wonder a max testing. So we can go there and you can look that stuff up. We can add that to show .

out to or something yeah I think when we get into a deeper discussion about strengths and hypothesis and resistance training in general, if we are touching into the the best warm up protocol, I know I have mine and i'm certain it's gonna sub optimal based everything based on every conversation we have ever had where I learned all the things on doing increase. But I do make changes on the basis of what you tell.

Is that correctly? So much as that is like sub up table .

that's a very kind way of time is incorrect. Thank you. What about hypothesis? Phy.

so the thing you want to pay attention to here is you have the aesthetic, uh, portion of hergert that's entirely up to you. There is no rational you can decide what you feel like looks good or doesn't look good. That's irrevelant.

There is a sufficient amount you need to have where below that is detrimental to your health regardless of your outcomes. And so the best way to do this is a couple of ways. Um any sort of body composition test you can do this.

So whether this is um a scan ah, they are like a dexia scan, which is a gold standard or other ways of biological biology trc impedance or otherwise. So there's a ton of different test you can get that are pretty close, kay. So what you want to pay attention when you get like a dex, a scan is a number called F, F, M I.

And so that sends for fat free mass index. So you can look at, again, any number of online calculators. These are all standard.

So doesn't actually matter what you pull them up. You don't have to worry about look IT up and whether not it's right or not or something. And so that's going to actually tell you if you have sufficient muscle math.

And so a number you want to look for in general, something like if you a man or f FM, I should be something like twenty, or hire if you are woman, you want to look for something like eighteen. So that that was the targets. If you get past like twenty four, twenty five for a man, that's a lot of muscle mass, assuming you're reasonably clean.

Now if you F A M I is like twenty four twenty five, but your body fat is like forty percent, you're actually just a very, very large individual. You're not like you're not in a Grace spot. So when we say these sorted numbers is the assumption that you're probably sub thirty percent body fat um for a man and sub thirty five for a woman.

So those the numbers um there are online calculators. All you really need to know is your total body weight, your body fat percentage, and then you're height. You can enter those three numbers and then theyll tell you your F, F, M, I score and correct for adjusted value.

And most those who actually tell you the grading rubric. And then so good, average bad assets a but those the numbers we look at, if you are as a man sub seventeen, as a woman sub fifteen now or an area of a pretty severe physiological detriment for insufficient muscle. And some of our later to something will talk about why that matters.

So that's not sub seventeen percent body fat. That is specifically the f FM. I.

That's a correct yet. What about .

muscular endurance? Is this where you going to tell me I need to do wall sits?

So this is really nice. You can do any number of test here, a standard plank. IT is a good test mate of of moscow.

n. So can you hold a front plank for sixty seconds? Can you hold a side plank for forty five seconds? Pretty easy if you're able to do a push shop.

So if you can't, that sort of tells you long, it's actually interesting if you can do a single push shop p that's not the most concerned issue. That's actually I A strength issue because that's a one max problem. Um so we want to be able to do for again for a general male, we should have no problem doing twenty five plus consecutive push PS.

I apologize for interrupting you, but as long as we were talking about pushup, you just mention form are we talking chest touching the ground, a elbows breaking right angles? What is a proper push up according to your laboratory.

unless you have a very specific reason to limit range motion? I want all my testing done through full joint range motion. This is different for the person, so it's individualized to them.

But in general, for a push shop, this would be a full complete lock out of the elbows on the top and a full just touch or close to IT at the ground. You can do IT different IT doesn't really matter, but just keep a standard from your protest, your post test if you're trying to mark progress OK. But for us, that's we have a very specific reason. We're going for a range motion for all .

of these things. So twenty five push for a .

male a mall is a standard and even something like ten is a number were looking for again as a minimum categories uh, for an upper body muscle and .

not to get two down in the weeds. But um I have observed other people course never myself not i'm kidding other people pausing um maybe at repetition fifteen catching their breath and then continuing or you continue like a piston so no problem. I just up down, up down and trying to hit at least ten, but ideally twenty five.

I learned this lesson in one of our studies probably nine years ago, but we didn't clarify that. And so we actually had an individual. He wasn't there.

He wasn't being the various. He just figured out, if I do a couple, take a quick break into a couple. He like quite drop poled his post test result from his pretest result because he figured out that little hack there. So you want to standardize IT. It's not that I am against have some sort of strong belief is just trying to keep protect standards and which means any break failed test.

So ten to twenty five for shops, minimum for males.

What about for females? If IT sub ten for a man? That's again, you're like very severe red flag problem.

We really, really like to see a number above twenty five. Okay, that's where were anchored. Anything teen, twenty ten and twenty five is like, yeah, but not severe.

That means they have work to do. We have work to do. And for females.

for a female, you going to scale that sort of back. So a female, the answer could be as little as zero, right? So you're going to see that.

Can you do a full position? If there in that position, we're generally not going to do a moster durance test from the knees. We really know the answer is year year p will actually default another test what i'll talk about in a second year.

So for those those folks, anything that's gna scale down a little bit. So basically you looking at fifteen is that marker like twenty five was for a man where I want to see a about fifteen. And if I do, we're good. Anything between five to fifteen is a number of like okay um if your sub five like we we generally have some problems. And if that is different between one and zero, then like now zeros is is a problem, so we should able to do that.

So if a female cannot do ten for posh shops, yep.

ten for push PS is hard for a female, depending on size OK.

Let's a female can do five shops. You said, rather than go to a needs down version, what would you do to assess their muscular interns? And would you then also encourage them to work on their strength?

Well, absolutely. So again, if if they can't do, they can do anything less than three. Um you be a spring.

In fact, if you want to look at most going just in general. So this is a bit of a off topic, but I proms to keep IT short, not come right. Back when I was a doctoral student, I had two lab mates.

One of them was a runner, female and harder and twenty pounds, something like that, small. That one was a male, and he was basically like a straight bro, like he lives weights thousand. Doing other sort of training is like a very classic not training programme, but kind of train.

And they were sort of venturing back and fourth for a while. And basically he was saying, you so unfit you can't run at all. And he's saying you're so weak you can do a pull up.

And so they chAllenge each other or competition. I said at the end of the year, the girl is going to do twenty six pullium SE and the guy had to run a marathon, so twenty six miles. So that was the thing.

And then there are some sort of consequence for whoever sort of failed till the guy quickly tried to figure how they help. I can run twenty six miles when I have not run a mile in like many, many, many years. So he just start running three miles, four miles, whatever.

SHE, of course, they both of were a mely to me right then. He was like, how the hell I can do a polyp? And I was like, great.

And I gave a very specific max motrin protocol, and he was like, war, I want to go to the assisted puller machine and work on doing, like sets up to twenty five, because i've got to get my moskin durance up. And I tried to explain her, your muscle and dance is irrelevant. If you can't do one, it's never going to matter.

SHE did the musical dance protocol, the entire thing didn't listen to me. The end of the year came SHE still produced exactly zero polyps. So point is, if you look at moscow and durance, where is IT h strength and where is IT actually moscow and durn?

The general sort of number that you're looking for is under like eighty percent, right? That's going to tell you. Is this an mostly dance problem or is an aba string .

problem under percent of a one repetition matter?

yep. So what I mean by that is this, in fact, this actually isn't your question. The other way to us as mask and dance is take the exact strength test you did from the the top five minutes ago. what? what? What do you do? Load that to seventy five percent, and then do that for as many repetitions as you can.

And that is a tremendous, almost good earth. So if you able able to do two hundred pounds in your lake extension tests, but seventy five percent of that, and that as many reputation, can you want to look for more than eight repetitions if you are below eight repetitions, then we having a moscow and dance problem. And if IT is, if IT is higher than that, if you ve got fifteen or twenty, then we know we have probably some problems in your peak track or the test itself. So that is a good eight, twelve sort of number is where you want to be looking at for there.

What about in a robot capacity?

This one more chAllenging either have to go to laboratory and do something like a win gate test. So this is a thirty second maximum um test where you're going to see how much work can you possibly do um in that thirty seconds if you don't have allowed us to laboratory. You can do this on any any protocol you want.

If this could be sprinting, this can be on uh like an area bike. This could be on a rower, anything like that, anything where you can exert maximum fort and you don't have to worry about technical problems. So I generally don't like to do things like a cattle bells swing or something like that.

There's just too many other variables you need to be able to go as hard as you possibly can knowing you're going to get to a place of tremendous fatigue. Now in the lab, we often use what called a bosco's protocol, and you're going to stand in a force plate and you going to do as many vertical jumps, as fast as you can, as high you can, for sixty seconds, and you're absolutely destroyed by, like second forty five. So we either use that when gay protocol, or that bosc le, if you want them again, take any other, other places, thirty seconds or so up to, forty five seconds up to me if you want IT doesn't really matter.

And you just mark down the distance you cover. That's oil. We don't really have standards these things because it's going to be different.

How far you can travelling the recently on a red mill IT is is gonna so different than sprinting in the field or on the assault biker, whatever? So um what you really want to worry about there is can you complete IT? And then how awful do you feel afterwards?

So what what you really want to think about here is not those protocols, but this you want to think about. Can you get close to you predicted maximum how rate? So the the number we throw out is two hundred and twenty minus your age.

So if you're fifty years old, two twenty minus fifty, you should be able to get to a maximum heart rate around one seventy beds per minute. Now that number is extremely general. If you don't get there, that doesn't have any indication of your fitness.

If you get higher, that doesn't mean you're any more fit. It's just a rough number. So here's what i'm what I want you to do. In this case, your heart rate recovery is the Better metric.

So I want you to get up to a maximum for rate and then test your heart rate recovery and what you should be looking for. There is about a half a beat recovery per second. So you're going to get up to a place where you reach like absolute terrible exhaustion, right? Maximum fatigue, test your heart rate and then count, right?

Have a time we're going within sixty seconds. You should have again, at half a beat per second. You should have a hard day recovery of thirty bees permanent within the next, uh, the next minute.

So two minute recovery SHE began, half thousand sixty beats. Those are rough and numbers to go back on. Your three minute recovery is again, have of that again.

So that is the closest way. If your hearty recovery is worse than that, then we know we have a problem and you're on a rope capacity. Or your kind of basket.

basket I love IT. What about number eight, maximum heart rate? Because what you just describe sounds a lot like max, more heart, right?

So this is a much so the gold center here is to actually go into a laboratory and get this thing done so we can actually run a view to maxus where you put a mask, gon collect on your gases and run you to there. And there is a very specific protocol for uh, completion of a true maximum test. And any any scientists will know that if you don't have access to that, even do a couple of test.

One of them is called a twelve minute Cooper test. So, so this is simply time. You going to run for twelve minutes as far as you can, and you going to record the distance you covered again. You can go online, any, uh, any number of of calculators enter that distant and and that will tell you your proximal estimated automatic.

So that's a twelve minute sprint. Twelve minutes print maximum distance.

You can cover twenty minutes.

keeping a steady the .

the goal is to get maximum distance covered, twelve minutes. So that's anywhere between a mile to two plus miles, depending on how that you are. But you just do that, Cooper, to a minute test.

Got IT I told you right. So if you remember, a robot capacity is eight to twelve, thirteen minutes, where you're going to see a real true test of that way to max. You simply can't get that um in under a few minutes. So IT is is a if you want, you can do a little gentle version of that.

Um so there are a number of sub maximum tests there, in fact, that there is a one mile walk test can do so again, all you're going to do is in this case, you have to have some sort of either a stop watch or ideally A A monitor. And all you have to do is this is a rock board, one mile, some maximum text, you're gna walk a mile, record the time, record your heart rate at the end, enter those in, and those will give you A G an estimates. Every beauty max.

So that's the the like. Oh my gosh, I can't run for twelve minutes as hard as I post. We can or and I want to do IT or we have a lot of these um in our executive programme.

It's like my knee hurts too bad. I've got back pain when I run and whatever can I okay and you do to walk us, and it's pretty accurate if you do IT correctly. So technically, all you have to actually do is measure your heart rate on your, you know, account, sixty seconds.

But this is easier to what everyone's life is and stuff. Now, just where heart is monitor plugged in those numbers um and again, those are all standard calculations. So anywhere you find those um you're not to worry about the source so you just enter your stuff and they are going to be running of the same equation.

I like the idea of the twelve minute run. I'm going to give you a shot.

We did for years we did a one mile version of this, and this is a lot more science on the Cooper to and couper tests. So we did that. IT is pretty good and IT is not even motly close to fun.

That sounds like fun for other reasons. Yeah, yeah. Well, IT fun in the sense that IT reveals a lot, a powerful post.

Super, there is no hiding. You can hide with the legging test. IT doesn't hurt that pad, but you can not feel anything but the twelve minute run as far as you can test.

So these are really actually psychiatric diagnostic test. They are of so number nine, londres ation steady state exercise. I think of this as A K endurance. But as you mentioned before, there are other forms of enduring so long duration, steady state exercise. Yes.

you really want to think about this as not a standard number. This is you should maintain consistent work output for over twenty plus minutes. okay. And this one, I want you to just pick something that he was in your lifestyle.

Is there a loop around your house that you can do? Is there are some protocol you like to use before and you're simply going to test your ability? Can you maintain work without stopping? That's all that needs to be.

Now idei personally like to throw a little twist here, which is, can you do this with nasal breathing only? That's when I feel really good. If you can go thirty straight minutes without needing to take a break.

Walking doesn't really cut IT unless you're very, very unfit. Which case, if walking thirty minutes without a break is a chAllenge? Okay, like there.

But if you can, I want you moving at a non walking pace. I don't care what the zones is, two, three, four, five, I don't care. Showing me you can maintain minimum of twenty minutes of work with no breaks, no animals is no downtime. And I get ideally bring through your nose online.

I love this list, but IT worries me a bit, not because any one of these tests is necessarily that overwhelming, but because i'm unclear about how to arrange performance of these different tests. For instance, do I separate them? So i'm doing one test like long duration output on one day, and i'm doing strength on another day. Those seem pretty obvious to me.

But other ones that one can combine on different days, how much time you won give oneself in between these tests? How often should one do an assessment, just as we don't want in the early evaluation way, changes by getting on the scale three times a day, maybe once a day, at the same time each day is more practical. How often should we be assessing our fitness for each and every one of these?

Well, the way that I would say this is you want to pick the one that is the worst and do that more frequent. So if, for example, you do the upper body strength test and you are fantastic, if you can venture us double your body, I don't need to test your bench very often for the average person on the power after, like maybe once a year, maybe not even that. We just don't need together.

However, if we then test your your view to max and in your twelve minutes, you cover a total of a half a mile, then like we might want to test that every month, right? And so we're going to let our priorities emphasize which one we're going to do more often. I would recommend doing this full battery once a year.

Full battle mean the entire list on one day.

the entire, not on one day, but within a week. So you can take a week. Now you could do this technically all in two days, uh, three days.

Split here is probably best. So if you were to to say, hey, this is like testing week. I actually love this for beginning of the year, our whenever is you sort of change your training.

But I think once a year, just like once a year, you should probably go to a physician and get for a blood work um a full no hard scan and and everything like that. Um and then if maybe you had a heart issue, they would come back and to test you or free. What are the cases, right? You should probably run through this and you're gone to be thinking in the abbot, I don't wanna give up on my exercise, your twin that week.

Well, I promise you, you're not going to finish this week and think I didn't do very much work this week. It's gonna great. And then you gona have a very nice parameter of exactly where you need to change in and priorities your training for the next quarter or half year or where we wanted up.

If you want to actually do this every six months, that's really we end up actually doing this quite a thing like more like every six months as a general um test. That's a really good way to do. But if if minimum of if you are arguing with me, give me once a year, they want to do this.

So which order to do them in the non fatigue test you can do whenever so, this is the the body composition scan, the F, F, the body fat composition, all the stuff can be done. However, I generally like to do that though, as you're very first activity. The reason is we know that acute exercise can heavily influence things like body composition measures because of information.

Water store to section. So it's easier to just get that off of a forty hour rest. You want to make sure you don't do any hard exercise the day before a body composition says and probably forty hours before that. So you start yourself offer that your movement test can be the same thing. Um you don't want to try to do a assessment of how where you're squad.

If you're incredibly sore from your your brutal quantity, so tend to do those things when you're the most fresh, then what you want to do is any skill or maximum strength or power goes at the very beginning of the day. Any fatigue thing happens at the end. And so you could easily do this.

All right? I'm going to do my power test, my broadband. great. You're not going to be fatigue at all of that.

And on the same day, since i'm already pretty warmed up now in a role right into my leg, strange test. And since i'm really warmed up, i'm going to do my leg, mostar jorn says, right there. So this is a very common strategy we use.

We do our one right back, like extension, five minutes, seven minutes, whenever we need to do come back loads to seventy five. There is many websites you can you could roll right into than your upper body tester, your griped string tester. Anything else that you want to do there? Is there a little bit of influence? Yeah but really for most people, it's not that bad what we inflows.

I mean, if you do a leg strength test coming back under the upper body strength test afterwards, it's not that big a deal. Give yourself fifteen, give ourself twenty minutes, give you twenty time, so you can knock out your string testing in my skirt on testing all on one day that could be you can do your performance um your skill diagnosis c your power jump test your strength and your most conference and all that stuff is knocked out. You're gonna have to come back on a separate day and do your aneroid c test.

This is thirty seconds maximum. And things like that you could do if you wanted do that after your longing test. Your longterm test is, again, as it's going to function as like A A big warm map.

Or you could love those things, or you could do them on separate days. You're gonna have to do your real tum access on its own day for the most part, unless you wanted to do again your movement or your body composition sort of before those things. Um so you really have the ability to kind of mixed match.

Ideally this most realistically probably takes three days if you want to separate them in a four or five. The more separation you do, the Better data you're going to get. This is a question of like how how pathetic are you really trying to get here? And are you willing to lose five percent to then, say, the whole day, then you can do sort of these things in multiple stacks. So that's that's how long we break up.

So what i'm hearing is Better to do IT than to not do IT most people and be rational. Don't um don't try and do your string output late in the day when you're fatigue. You if you're going to combine some of the steady state endurance and maxim heart rate find understand there might be a slight deficit there but test IT the same way each time and what you're really looking for is .

improvement yeah and you can also do the heart rate recovery under any mode so you could do the heart recovery um after review to access so so you finish that thing uh and then just again, the same test for up to three months.

These are fantastic tools. I'm almost tempted to say that i'm willing to post my numbers, but that actually violates the a core principal that I think we're getting out here, which is that it's highly unlikely that anybody is going to be phenomenal across the board.

I mean, certainly, there will be individuals that are but based on everything we talked about earlier, specificity of training and um how extensively somebody he's been training a certain way will without question, upside them, if you will. Yeah toward being Better in some of these assessments and less quit in others. And that's just simply the way that these .

adaptations work. yes. And it's not you don't need to be optimal in all these areas to be coron code optimal health from this perspective.

You just want to make sure, again, there's no severe performance sectors is what we call them, right? We want to want any these severe constraints s because you're going to get limited by that thing. And so you want to do is move that up to just sufficient or concerning, right, and get away from that.

If you do that, that things not going to catch, you can be able to continue to pursue pursue optimization in the one thing that you have a specific passion for, which is generally what moves people right? You you train um so you feel Better. You train because you know there are all these benefits to IT and in use, this audience probably could list hundreds of them, but you also trained because you're generally like to get Better at something a lot of us that have something.

And so you want to make sure that you're not going to hab. I know you're good at endless, but you really should train anymore. We don't want that message. Not at all. I want you to love your training. We just want to make sure that you're not loving that so much, that you're not taking some blinders off and missing another area which would actually um again, you pull that performance taker this whole ship sales faster with less effort and less friction.

What I love about this is also that as you've described IT, it's not just for athletes or people that are super indo fitness, is also for people that just want to be healthy and want aesthetic changes. And that's why they are exercising, which I think accounts for a early large percentage of people out there. So and I think what you describe is an incredibly well structured, incredibly clear and incredibly actionable.

So I want to thank you for that. I'm serious about my willingness to do this and at least share those numbers with you. And I think for most people that are seeking what you listed off before aesthetic changes, functionality and longevity, it's clear that all nine of these are going to be important in summer garden. another.

So before we close out, I want to go back and finish off, uh, the metrics for view to maxes. I don't actually think I gave you numbers on that. So in general, for men, a minimum number, we want to look at here, thirty five little leaders, parki o gram per minute.

And for women, that be about thirty. So we we can actually push, uh, a lot higher on those things. In a reality, I want to see men of the fifty.

if I could just interpret for a second, when you say forty millions per kilogram, millions of what specifically?

yes. So what actually those metrix mean is ah the first one little leaders is oxygen. So amount of oxygen kilograms is body weight. So it's how much oxo can you bring in per kilogram, a body way per minute.

So as a volume of oxygen per your size in a time duration, in fact the way that you calculated, uh, is you multiply your cardiac output by what's called your A V O two difference. Your cardio outplay is your heart rate times your stroke volume. So how much a blood you're pumping out per pump is your stroke volume? How many times you're pumping are your being?

You multiply that by your area. Two difference A V O two differences is artery minus spain difference. So the out of auction in your arteries, minus the amount of auction in your rain, which is going to tell you how much you took up in your capital, aries, in your muscles. So you take those two factors multiple together.

and there's reveal two max. You know, as you are describing that, I imagine you get into an fmr machine and seeing that equation lighting up in your brain. Clearly, it's committed to memory very well. Thank you for that clear description.

yes. So to finish those numbers um I really truly want to see some a man above fifty. Um and i'm not even rely stoked until I get about fifty five.

In fact, it's sort of funny. Dave costal, whose lab I did my P H. D, and he was retired by the time. But he he's again with these legends, figures and exercise psychology started in the seventies.

He would always say there is no human excuse to be below sixty, which I always always like, damn, that's really actually pretty hard to get to. Was he oh, he still actually setting world records like in these last couple of years and is like all the masters record for swimming and cycling this up. So he was a super, super fit guy um so he was always above success. Is probably like fifty something now, even though you know eighty .

whatever eight years old yeah when the V O two max of fifty he .

probably really not fifty. He's probably he's probably going to member that earlier and that we talked about. I had a ninety two year old by the year two maxus thirty.

They is probable to break that record when he gets there. I'm sure. I'm sure I, in fact, I gave into you. He has that number in his brain. I have been talked him in fifteen years, but I guarantee that numbers in his brain and he's probably training for IT.

I love IT and I love IT because IT proves that exercise pays off o it's one of the few things in life where there is a direct relationship ah between work and .

outcome yeah as as Henry roan described in his wonderful essay, you're from here with that oh my got so you're punk rock guy you .

know Henry and I mean I certainly know who .

he is and know his he has work an incredible one page uh paper sort of something to do with the iron uh any basically describes that is like this is the one thing where it's truth like IT is the most true of thing you'll ever do which is a love for that.

It's almost like a principle of .

nature on a percent. Yeah so with with the women, I really want to see the women if I want to see men about fifty five, I really anna see them about fifty um as the target and if like you're there are some pretty good so you can do the math on then the middle ground of what's like okay, but we need to work on IT.

In fact, if you look across a literature at different athletes, you're onna see like the the really high level and dance folks um you know they may pass seventy or eighty in fact um there was talk a few years ago a guy breaking one hundred alias like an eighty and ninety nine but I actually don't think he was ever fully confirmed repeated but certainly you'll see plenty of people like ninety five um in those extremes if you look at other sports like football or basketball, they're probably going to be in the fifty five, sixty five sort rain. So if you as an average person or fifty five um that's a really good mark to be and if you get even close to that, you're a good bottom. I'm sorry if I let you down, dave.

Now we just love how you describing average version and look at me with just a little bit of sympathy like like if you if you reached the standard of average, Andrew, listen, you're giving me prompts all over the place to try and improve my metrics, whatever they happen to be.

And I think that's one of the great values of getting objective numbers, even if they have to be measured by some of these back at the envelope techniques that you, because we always teach people in the laboratory, right, that a tool can be um not extremely precise, but as long as it's reliable, there is still value there. Me, of course, you'd love to have the most precise and most reliable tool. But if you can't, then at least go for a reliable, tall and measure for consistency yet .

for the real world, reliability, peaceful energy and as much as we can for a lot of things we're talking about, especially for using IT as a metric of that, I get Better as long as that tools, reliable body composition. Does all these things have inherent error in them? Some of them are smaller, some of them are larger.

But as you mentioned, having standardization within the testing protocol um is going to low you to measure progress. And let's got to tell you, so we're at um now that we sort of covered all of these areas of adaptation and we walk to the history and we walk through a bunch of the explanations for why people are maybe not getting the results that they want to get through their training. The way I would like to go with the rest of our conversations would be to just go through each of those adaptations step by step and make sure I cover very specific protocols for if you have run through this testing and identified area of weakness.

So maybe you've sort of been lifting a lot because you you like lifting and you maybe realized that your cardy aster fitness or your heart or your cover is not where I really should be or the opposite, like we've talked about. Maybe you're doing a lot of that type of work. And your strength doesn't there, your removal quality is not there.

So you have identified a problem. How do I specifically solve IT? What are the evidence based um and uh most effective protocols that I could put myself in for each one of these categories. And I think that would give people a lot of take home value, but it's going to take us some time to cover. So it's gonna to come across over multiple conversations to you and I .

looking forward to each and all of those conversations, and I want to add just one more metric to our discussion today, which is really just my way of saying thank you. Because if there were a metric for amount of useful information, percentage spoke, you would be at the upper level of that metric. You have this amazing ability to provide so much knowledge in a clear and conscience, and today listed out format that is both interesting, grounded in science and actionable. So on behalf of everyone listening, and certainly for myself as well, just want to say thank you.

Well, appreciate the compliments, and i'm looking forward to the next conversation jumping right into speed, strength and I berta training and what the evidence based best practices for protocols in those areas.

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