GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimize Your Training Program for Fitness & Longevity
03:06:07 Share

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 am a professor of neurobiology and optometry gy at stanford school of medicine, today's epsom march, the fourth in the six episode series on fitness, exercise and performance in today's episode is all about optimal fitness programme, that is, how to design a fitness exercise program that can achieve the goals that you want for fitness and for sports performance. Doctor and the open great to be back.

In previous episodes, you taught us about the various adaptations that occur at the level of cells, at the level, indeed, at the level of the entire body, that underlying things like improvements and strength and speed, hyperdrive phy A K muscle growth in the various forms of endurance. And you laid out beautifully the various protocols that one can do in order to achieve each and every one of those adaptations. Today, I i'd love for you to teach us how we can combine different protocols to achieve multiple adaptations in parallel.

For instance, how to improve endurance and string, how to achieve some level of hydrophone, perhaps directed hyperdrive py specific muscle groups while also maintaining endurances and perhaps improving speed, for instance. And if you would, i'd love you to tell us how we can combine different protocols and vary those across the week, across the month, across the year so that we can make regular progress. And perhaps even you could give us a window into the ways to make the fastest progress possible.

I would love to do that. We've invested a lot of time in the previous episodes covering background and concepts and detail about the physiologies. You understood why you're making the choices you're making and why other choices are less effective in this discussion.

I would actually like to jump maybe more directly to the answer and kind of get right into the protocol. So and may be a little bit less background if you're interested in that stuff. I I suppose you have to go backwards a little bit and watched some of those previous episodes, but I would love to jump in to just some samples are some case studies, if you will, and and kind of walk through different protocols.

I know that over the course of my eleven years as a college professor and um being in the the public based a little bit, probably the most numerous style of question I have gotten is exactly that. So I know the rub range for this, so I know the style of training for that adaptation, but how do I put them together? And I would just like to spend our time today going through those things.

And the reason I want to do IT is this, some people listening at home surely just love exercise. They're already bought in and they're gonna train no matter what, and they're interested in just actually being more effective. And so the way that you structure and put your plan together will in large part determine getting more progress for for less effort or actually being able to put the same amount effort in getting results faster.

There's also some folk probably listening who are like, okay, I exercise. I do, I can. I bought IT in to the benefits and you've talked so elaborately over the the hundred plus episodes you've done about the various benefits of exercise. But you don't like ABS, you're kind of doing this because you know it's important but just not there.

So for those folks, it's sort of like, okay, how can we actually make the same more effective so we can make sure you had the things you're absolutely have to get for the short and long term benefits, right, to make sure that you're looking the way you want to look, you're performing physically the way you want to perform, and then you can do that across your lifespan. So how can we give you awesome structure to wear again? You don't have to turn into an absolute lover of physical fitness, and IT doesn't have to take over your life, but you can still get more results for your same time restrictions, whether that be you have two days a week or five days week, or only certain access to equipment or experience, whatever the case may be. And how can we help those folks as well put together a protocol that will get them closer their goals with less restrictions?

fantastic. And hoping that along the way, you'll also point us to how often to take the fitness assessment for each of the adaptations that you refer to in a previous episode. We will also link to the fitness assess segment the shown of captions for this episode, because that fitness assessment for different adaptations, I think, is a really powerful way for people to touch.

And cy, you know how much long insurance do they have? How how much anoroc c capacity do they have? How much strength do they really have? And then perhaps you'd also be willing to throw in a couple of additional ways that we can assess our level of fitness and progress in this arc of a fitness program across the year. amazing.

Uh, I can't wait to do that. I think IT is also important before we jump in to acknowledge a lot of folks maybe thinking themselves, I don't really necessarily need a plan. Why do I have to do that? I don't have a certain goal going after.

I'm not running a race anytime soon. I'm not a competitive athlete, just I go to germany, I work out and that's great. Well, I would like to try to convince you that regardless of where you're at, having a plan will achieve those things we just talked about, which is more success and a shorter time frame.

There's actually a significant amount of research to support this. Those individuals who go on a specific training plan compared to those who done out, we will receive Better results are independent of the effective ess of the program, right? So we've talked in previous episodes about tons of different styles and strategies and literate IT really doesn't matter which one you pick.

The fact you heavy plan is always more effective than not having a plan. And so again, even if you're not planning on competing with something, if you want a shortage matter time you're in the gym, get more results from IT. I would strongly encourage to put something together. The two largest reasons why people don't get results with their fitness train protocol is, number one, at hearings and then number two, some sort of progressive overload.

Both of those two things are chAllenging to accomplish without a plan, right? So the reason people don't go to the gym, one of them, and one of the reasons why IT takes them so long as because they don't walking with a very specific plan is sort of like going to the grocery store and figuring out what you're going to buy versus knowing exactly what you're going to get in your shopping. Let's scribing those things in getting out.

You'll notice your time and the grocery y story is half the link. You're more productive and you didn't waste money on extra thanks. okay.

So that alone will drive a hearings because you're not going to think yourself all that ninety minute work out I do is actually really just sixty. And so now the next time you go to train your like man, have ninety minutes. You realize that only sixty or forty or thirty or twenty, whatever needs to be, so that alone would get you there.

The second part of that, which is overload, it's very difficult to understand. And remember, well, the last time I did that races, I used, I think, five pounds, and then I think I did like twill. Well, if you don't have some sort of system of tracking, and this can be as simple as a nobo, just writing down what you did before and doing a little bit more than next time, that is going to almost guarantee you success. So having some structure and this structure can be fairly blue. We going to talk about a bunch of different examples um is something I strongly encourage everyone to utilize for their exercise.

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 and the galpin teaching and research roles at costa for ton IT is, however, a part of our desire effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is momentous. Momentous, make supplements of the absolute highest quality. The huberman lab podcast is proud to be partnering with momentous for several important reasons.

First of all, as I mentioned, their supplements are of extremely high quality. Second of all, their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations. If you're going to develop a supplementation protocol, are going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations.

With single ingredient formulations, you can devise the most logical and effective and cost effective supplementation regiment for your goals. In addition, momentous supplement ship internationally. This is what is important because we realize that many of the huberman lab podcast listeners resigned outside the united states.

If you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned on the human lab podcast, in particular supplement for hormonal health, for sleep optimization, for focus, as well as a number of other things, including exercise recovery, you can go to live momentous built O U S. So that live momentous dot come slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us.

Eight sleep, eight sleep. Make smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I've been using an eight sleep mattress cover for about the last eight months, and IT has completely transformed my sleeping, sleeping about the same amount, but i'm sleeping far deeper.

And i'm now getting the proper ratios of so called a rapid I movement or rem sleep and slow wave sleep and waking up feeling far more recovered mentally and physically. The underlying mechanism for all that is very straight forward. I've talked many times before on this podcast and elsewhere about the critical relationship between sleep and body temperature. That is, in order to fall asleep at night, your body needs to drop by about one to three degrees in terms of core body temperature, and waking up involves a one to three degree increase in core body temperature.

With eight matches covers, you can adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment to be one temperature at the start of the night, a different temperature of the middle the night, and a different temperature as you approach morning, each of which can place you into the optimal stages of sleep and have you waking up feeling more refreshed than ever. If you like to try aid sleep, you can go to eight sleep dog com slash huberman and check out their pod. Recover and save one hundred and fifty dollars at check out.

Eight currently ships in the U. S. A, canada, united kingdom, select countries in the E. U and australia, again, that eight leave the comm slash huberman to save one hundred and fifty dollars at check out. So what sorts of things should people be thinking about? When developing an overall fitness program a few minutes ago.

we were talking about how two of the major reasons people don't get as much other training programs as they would like is because of, one, a lack of a hearings, and two, a lack of progressive overload. So the solution to that is constructing a plan that lives within your realistic limitations. So I would like to walk you through a my ten step approach to how I design training programs.

Now before I do that, I think this is fair and important for the audience to understand that this is simply my approach. I've been doing this a long time. I I played a college football and I wrote my own training programs back then.

I have and and still working with professional at least. And P, G, A, tour and nf fell the MBA majority baseball as well as a ton of general population folks. So this is a combination of the evidence space that we've been talking about in terms of best practices for strength additionally as well as just my years of experience.

So there are many, many ways one could do this. I'm not even suggesting this is the best. This is simply how I do IT. This is exactly how I handle IT when a new individual comes to me and how I teach my students. So step number one is assessing properly and identifying a training goal. Now that's actually sort of funny because we hear that a lot, but a lot of people actually never take that step, not to colony, but in the room out.

What's happening here is this morning and the doctor alpha I, we're training together and he was providing amazing tips on forum and set reactions in the sort of thing. And he said, so what's your training goal for the next twelve months? And I pause, and I turned into a very long pause.

which is an easy, nice way of saying he didn't have an answer.

I didn't have an answer. Of course, I don't just want to maintain what i've developed in terms of strength and ha trivial endurance, but I don't have a clear goal. So i'm hoping that by the end of today's discussion, I will be on track to a clear set of goals to amaze.

I'm not going to borrow you all here, but really I can't stress enough how important that step really, truly easy getting results. The analogy we use here is if you left your house and you are attempting to get to the grocery store um and you just started driving and if you draw every possible road, you would eventually get to a grocery store. And so yes, that can work.

A Better approach is saying, here's where I am. There's where I wanna go. What is the optimal out there? And that's really what you're doing with goal.

So IT is a boring step. IT is not interesting to here. I don't have any real hacks or tricks for you um but IT is step number one on purpose. We have to know exactly where we are going. You can do this in two ways.

One number one is to just pick something arbitrary, decided i'm going to run a five k or i've done that before and I want to improve IT by ten seconds. I want to lose ten pounds. You can just pick one.

That's great. Another way is to run through that fitness testing protocol we described, uh, a few episodes before. And if you do that, you can see which of these areas and maybe you have the largest lagging in.

And what is the most severe performance anchor is how we referred to IT and then choose that as your primary go. So either option, some people come end of training programs with a very clear gold mine. They want to add more muscle or whatever, whatever. Kay, greg, if you're like, I know I just kind of work out then run the fitness testing protocol, you'll see what score is the lowest in and then you maybe make that a priority for the next to say, three months.

So the first step is to identify a specific or set of specific .

training goals. A really nice tool for helping you set a goal is a system called smart. Right now, there's a little bit debate on what those acronis actually stand for, but we'll get close to know, right? So smart is often specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

So starting off with a specific in general, the more specific your goal is, the higher likelihood you will have a succeeding in that am are being measurable means that needs to be something that you can actually put a metric on. So this can be objective or objective, but generally I like to have at least one objective measure. So remembering objective is something that is not based on feeling IT is not up to this could be something simple, like your body weight IT could be how much you can range press, what's your one mile time.

And whatever is most important, he would actually doesn't have to be a fitness related goal. For example, if you're using fitness as a way to enhance your sleep, the main metric you may be interested in is mount of hours sleep. Slept IT could be something like efficiency, or whatever is most interested could be worked productive.

IT doesn't really matter. So he doesn't have to actually be the the fitness school. But what is the motivation of why you're doing IT so that specific meerly um attainable or or actionable as is often described as something that is within your capability.

So attainable a bad example of attainable is something like my goal is to win more games that may not be up to you, the team, the other team you're playing, you could influence IT the schedule, a sectoral. So trainable les should be something that is within your control, realistic, uh, or relevant to you is something that is again st something realistic that you can achieve. You wouldn't want to make a goal, that is, you want to double your body mass that this is not going to happen.

So think about the constraints. How old are you? What's your training experience? How much time you really have to invest in this? And then pick something that is realistic and an honesty. My little to us here is take that in minus ten percent because typically when people put together training programs, their goal tends to be quite lofty and they get some small percent of of the way and realized they're never going to get there.

And then back off, we actually this sort of reminds me of a, uh, plastic deception study that we didn't and might have one time where we took people and we had them do this, uh, maximum front race basic. You held a dumble out in front of you. I feel as long as you possible, we could.

And the goal here was actually a deception study. They were tricking them. And so we said, okay, we wanted to get Normal of value to see how long people can hold this front race.

And I think we use something like five percent of their body weight. And so they came in, they did at one time, and we time them. They didn't IT to see the clock.

They left. And then we said, we're got to come back in repeat IT, right? We've got to do a couple of tries here to get a Normal value case.

This is off whatever. Well, the participants were split up in the four groups. So group one actually was told that their time was fifteen percent lower than that they actually got.

Group two was five percent lower, group three was five percent higher, and group four was fifteen percent higher. So the second time they came into do IT our graduate, soon corton coal made a mistake and left the timer in front of them. So the first time, again, they did the exercise.

They are just holding, and they don't know, have any idea along the hole. In the second time, they had a giant ipad set like just a little bit off center or they can clearly see IT. So they watched the time and go by.

And of course, what happened was those folks say, who did one minute the very first time when I tested, they came back in to do the second time, and they've holding IT. And we told them they actually got forty five seconds when the reality they had done a minute. So they're holding IT and holding IT, and they think they needed forty five seconds.

By the time they get to like second forty, forty one and forty two, they get past forty five. They almost all quit like forty seven, forty eight seconds because they wanted to beat their previous score. But then where I cool, I beat IT.

And then they quit early, so they'd actually not yet to failure, but they were just happy enough to beat what they thought theyve done. And then they quit. The other group on the inverse side again said, they got a minute.

We told them they got a minute. Fifteen seconds. They got to, like, forty five seconds, fifty seconds, and started realizing, whole man, I have thirty more seconds to go.

And they quit fairly because the care was way too far. They realized, i'm never gonna get there. So i'm just going to stop. now. Can you guess which group did the best on the post .

test once they were just within about five percent of totally?

So they want to improve. And so again, say, they got a minute the first time we told them they ve got a minute five. Or sorry, they ve got a minute five the first time we told them they only got a minute, they actually exceeded that greatly because they wanted the P.

R. So um making sure that, that goal is properly a line IT needs to be a little bit scary, a little bit analysis where you're going to have to work for this. If it's too easy, you'll quit. You won't feel like a chAllenge if it's too hard though, your query as well. So you want to make sure that reasonable bounds of like should I trained today or like me, I just go to if I i'm not going to hit I, I, I got ta get after IT but not like, oh my god, like this is no chance here you going we're going to walk away early.

It's a fantastic study. I have to say it's very simple. I think IT illustrates a number of important psychological principles about goal setting, motivation, self perception, but also the dopamine in system um you know the the development system is this universal reward system that meaning IT doesn't only work for food or only work for fitness goals or only work for academic goals or relationship goals.

IT is the universal substrate for all of that. And I actually think they're some real gems of information and the study design that you described. So just cue that for maybe a potential collaboration between our laboratories because I think it's very important.

But he does cue up another question like a relevant to fitness particular, which is what are your thoughts on intermediate goals? So let's say my goal is to drop two percentage, two percent of body fat from where I am now, a year from now, roll into the next year from now, about two percent lower on body fat. But maintained my little body mass, or maybe even the increase IT.

How should I assess progress? You know, because the dopamine system loves a goal. He loves anticipation of a goal.

But IT responds best to, we re up, if you will, our dopamine, anytime we get a signal that we are on the right track to that goal, and that signal could be okay. I did to work out. I just trust these workers are going to give me the result I want.

But of course, we know that when people get a glimmer of the idea or some objective feedback that they're on the right path, that dopamine system really fires and provides motivation for continuing toward the ultimate goal. And um as we've talked about in the strange speed and hydro hie episode resistance training itself has this built into IT because of the infusion of blood into the muscles. You actually get A A little window into what you might get in terms of an adaptation simply by way of the so called pump, wherein dance type work generally doesn't have that you don't see yourself get Better, drop back and then adopting actually get Better.

But that's actually what you see with wait training. So given all of that, contrary of the dopamine system, what sorts of intermediate goals should I set for myself, or should somebody set for themselves? And I realized that would probably depend on the ultimate goal. But would you say check in um on progress once every week, every month, three months?

I I can I don't know if you can tell the look on my face. I love this this question in this topic. I spend so much time on on on my senior graduate level program design course.

I've been fortunate to work with a few atis where we've had multiple years. And if you can really take the timely step back and go, it's not about optimization ing for the next six weeks. And in this case, it's not the next fight.

IT is the championship of fight that we need to get to in three years or IT is olympics, which are a quad program, right? You're really optimizing for that four years. If you can have that foresight and really think about that and then work backwards, you can see some pretty tremendous things.

The sort of saying that is like we end, we tend to over estimate, but we can get done a week and underestimate what can happen in a year that can be extraordinary ly powerful. However, you have to have those metrics s called out ahead of time because you will lose motivation in that short term because you won't see that result immediately. But if you remember, i'm on a path to four percent or two percent or whatever you need to be.

Therefore, I only need to be this far right now. I need to be that far. And then that far it's actually quite clear.

And so what we would actually do in the scene ario not to go like so off track here, because, like, I can really go on this stuff is, let us say he was the year recommendation. You gona actually need to go to the last part of smart, which is timely. So part of set in the school is making sure you understand the timeout omai responsible.

And it's actually quite great here because not to go inception on us were like list within a list. And rob kills us over here. But number one of this program is, same thing was assessing your goal.

Number two is identifying your defender. What I mean by that is what is stopping you from hitting that goal so you want to lose two percent body fat in the next year? Okay, great.

What's gonna stop us once we can achieve that will go into more that into a second. Then you just start walking that two percent backwards, so you might have to go something like this. Look, every time I start working out really hard, I always get hurt. interesting. Okay, great.

So maybe instead of jumping really hard into a high intensity enable training program, knowing we're likely to hurt something or get burnt out or quit or whatever that the defenders is for you, maybe we invest something right now, which is maybe improving your flexibility and working on movement technique, whatever going to stop you from getting her, or maybe we progress slower so we don't get there. That will allow us to do the work necessary to hit that goal twelve months from now, not two weeks from now, not two months from now. Maybe that's not the case.

Maybe like, no, look, hey, I move. Well, I feel like him in like decent shape. I've got enough muscle mouse on me.

We've talked in previous episodes while having insufficient muslim masses, sometimes detrimental for fat loss. So you check out that blocks. I don't get her very often right.

I got equipment around. No problem. I ve got the time in my schedule, and I have enough muscle.

great. Well, now we maybe just split up and say, look, we ve got twelve months. We ve got two percent.

It's as simple as doing a half a percent per quarter of the year. And now all we're looking at as that number, right? I don't have to necessarily get all these things done.

Um I can go quarter half percent, half percent, hf percent, five percent. You're gonna get there. The other scenario that I laid out a second ago, IT maybe needs look like something like this quarter.

One is going to be zero percent like all yeah, that's right. You may not lose a pound for the next three months. We don't care.

That's not the goal of these three month. I know that's the goal this year. That's our major microcrack le goal or going to get there, but they get there most effectively.

We need to invest in working more with your car racer, whatever the thing is, right. That will allow us to then go half a percent quarter too when we can really start training. But we're going to rap into IT.

Quarter three. We're going to go another half a percent. And now we're half fully.

There are quarter four. We've invested so much, you're ready to go. We're going to go hard. We're going to get that last one percent at last quarter, and we're going to get there and you won't be hurt.

So that makes me very clear. And I can also vision how the precise structure of these intermediate goals would vary depending on what sort of an adaptation when is pursuing. And I do remember from our previous episode, des, that fat loss itself is not adaptation, is a by product of other adaptation.

So I just want to make sure that you know that I was paying attention. It's committed to memory. Absolutely some goals such as that, lots very quantifiable and yet they might not be lenie, right? It's hard to know. know. The assumption is if you and just you know x fewer calories and no required per day, then you'll lose x amount of weight, some percent from body fat.

I think that cues up the idea that we need to build some flexibility into our are thinking about these intermediate goals in order to just make sure that dove mean system is in tethered to exact numbers, you know because after all, uh, reduction two percent body fat, for instance, is really desire to achieve a different sort of overall body composition of recomposition. Um I don't know, by the way, that that's my exact goal. I I think one of my my goal is to be able to run a mile faster.

And I sort of haunted by this experience of wanting to run across country in college and trying to walk on. We went to division one school. But the threshold for being um considered for the team was you had to run a sub ten minute two mile which turns out to be very, very fast.

That's really hard and I did not do that. I didn't even come close. But and I don't think that I could reasonable do that now give I am not interested in committing to the kind of training required.

This across isn't meaningful enough for me um fairness state but lowering once mile time to run a mile by I know ten percent seems like a reasonable goal um across six months here great so in the case of a goal like that, um clearly there are special training programs but this raises the issue of what if I have other goals as well um and at what point do people having multiple goals start to set up collisions between goals? How do we know whether or not something as reasonable, not just in on its own, but because of the other things that one has structured into their program. So being able to reduce a mile time by ten percent in six months, okay, maybe that's doable. Maybe it's not, you can tell me, but also being able to you know double them out that they can do for a new single repetition like extension for that matter ah at the same time, that seems that seem like capital goals.

right? So a couple of things. Number one, the more specific and precise you can be with a single goal, the faster you will get there generally. So in theory, if you had one thing you wanted to achieve, the best way to go Better is to focus on that, give IT the most priority. That doesn't mean you can do anything else along the way you can, but you would want to focus on that.

The more additional goals you bring in, the more distraction you're creating for that primary goal, depending on what those goals are, you can actually do them at the same time, some other combinations are less effective. Think about like this, we went through those nine adaptations, and we went through them in a specific order on purpose. The closer those adaptations are together in that list, the more compatible they are to training each other, the further way they become more chAllenging.

So just to give a few examples, if you wanted to improve your speed and power, you could basically train those simultaneity. They would not an error with each other at all. In fact, since power is speed, time, force, that would be complimentary if he just walked on the line and they're a strength, hey, same thing if you get faster, that's gonna aid in strength because force is mass times celerity.

So if you improve acceleration, your contributing distance. Same thing with power. So speed, power and strength are generally very complimentary. You can absolutely train all three of those goals at the same time and have no issues getting in this hypocrisy.

Now we've got a little bit of distinction if you're going to train strength and hypocrisy, as we talked about in that episode at the base, those are gonna be complimentary. You add on some muscle, you're gonna stronger. You start training for strength. That's probably going to help you out on some muscle mass.

As you get to the end of that spectrum, the overlap between the two starts to go away so that if you truly wanted to maxim strength above everything else, if you continue to train for hypertension ia as well, that's going to take too many resources out of your recovery bin. You won't be able to do that. The universe would also be the same, right?

If you're training to max, my strength wouldn't be able to put them up value on to get sufficient hyperdrive. Y so if you wanted, then combine speed with hypocrisy. You're going farther away from each other, which means it's going to be more and more distraction.

So the hyper fee train would cause a tonic fatigue. You wouldn't be able to go at max speed for your speech or power strank. So you going to be compromising those results.

Now speed training won't compromise your appetite training because it's non fatiguing, right? And so boom, here we have a little bit of an an interference, in fact, one way, but probably not the other. Let's move down the spectrum one more time and get in the endurance.

We won't go through all of these things, but you you're getting idea here. Oh, a little bit of high intensity interls. Okay, cool.

Now would that compromise my speed, power or strength? Probably because there's a little bit of residual fatigue. If the volume is low enough, then you'd be fine.

All you're worried about there is not necessarily like some sort of Stellar mechanism. It's just simple fatigue IT. Is amount of energy expendable versus is that compromising my recovery to come back?

What would those first three or four, those speed, power, strength interfere with your ability to elevate your anoroc capacity? Probably not, and almost surely. In fact, if you look at any of the literature on and dance training, you will see that speed, power and strength almost always improve.

Endurance, right? And dance training, add on top of strength, can be detrimental, can have a neutral effect, but generally doesn't help one get stronger by adding additional conditioning. Unless you're so unfit, you can't get through the volume needed in the strength training, right? One more example here.

So we don't drag this out too far in the case of something like I want to lose fat, well, hey, we don't have to worry about difference. Doesn't really matter if you're fatigue for your hyper fee session, not a big deal. We're just trying to get some work done.

If you're hyperdrive recession fatigue from me, your conditioning is cool because you you got the work done so you don't have to worry about IT so much. Um so really kind of depends on the actual goal. And what you want to pay attention to do is actually what are the chances of overlap which means like the the adaptations you get physiologically that cross over from one to the other.

And then what are the ones that are actually going to start inferring? In fact, I have in my, in my class, I have this giant matrix start of interference effect, going from adaptations through a whole once of systems, everything from by channeling P, H to linhay drainage to bond tal density especially. You can walk through these whole things and say which ones actually have a positive effect, which ones have a massive positive effect, and in which ones actually have a little bit of the references. Perhaps if you guys, we're nice enough, we could throw that in the a newsletter or something PDF or something, I think they'll .

be immensely valuable. I think some of that more extensive information went laid out in great form like that, useful. So we should do well. Now we've said IT. So I didn't .

say I said perhaps .

think it's a great idea um it's a terrific idea. The idea that items closer on to each other on the list of those nine different adaptations are going to be easier to achieve in parallel, then items further apart makes perfect sense. In what I heard was that there is A A few caveat that might see minor, but the but actually quite important, such as anything that is relatively low intensity and doesn't impede recovery, can probably be included as a parallel goal. So some speed work in conjunction with some londres ation cardio work and said even though we're talking about number two on that list and number nine on that list.

in that case, the long gration endurance, even if it's low intensity, may actually interfere with the speed if the volume gets so high. If you're talking about I went on a thirty minute for most people that that it's totally fine. But we're really talking about here is when the miles start piling up and the the time really starts getting there in combination with some of things, the factors we talked about early, which is exercise choice.

So more events c landing based textron izzy is running, for example, is more likely interfere then cycling because you're not landing swiming is low impact. So if you're going to do those things, you can heads your bets little bit by choosing and exercise choice that is less than impactful again, if you literally, because there is often times confusing, here was like, oh, don't do ten minutes on the thread meal before you lift, you're going to go I like time out. A warm cup is fine.

We're really talking about probably more than thirty plus minutes at higher than sixty percent are rate like a random number. Something like that depends on the person eta, but IT has to be a decent chunk. Um again, you can actually fix that by then this consuming galleries.

You can also fix by making sure everything else in the hidden invisible stressor bucket is improved. So that is like one of our tricks will go get into when we get in the recovery. If you don't uncertainly me to to reduce your training, if you just ramp up your recovery.

I like to see a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a vital mineral probiotic and adapted and drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking ethos that Greens daily since two thousand and twelve.

So i'm delighted that the response or of this podcast, and I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once or twice a day is that IT helps me, me all of my foundation. Tional nutritional needs, that is, IT covers my vitamins, my minerals and the probiotics are especially important to me. Athletic Greens also contains adaptations which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work or just general life.

If you like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman in to clam a special offer. They gave you five free travel packs, and y'll gave you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 Again, if you'd like to try athletic Greens, go to athletic Greens dock com slash huberman to claim a special offer.

I'm going to take the liberty of assuming that most people falling to one of other three bins in terms of their goals. Again, most people, certainly they are going to people that lie outside these bins. I think if you pulled one hundred people or one hundred thousand or a million people as to what their major goals were in working out, they'd say, as you so nicely listed out before, esthetic changes functionality and longevity.

But that one in three really kind of sit higher than most people would like to, perhaps even admit they want to look good, which usually means they want to lose some fat, gain some muscle. In specific places, I realize there are folks out there who want to gain a lot of muscle, just muscle everywhere. But I think most people would like to have a little more shape here, or a little more muscle there, to either baLance out there or two centuries, certain parts of their physique.

And they would probably like to shave off some subcutaneous fat, although there are those exceptionally people out there um and they exist too. I think that would be gain muscle in specific places, lose fat and do IT in a way that also provide some booth to their health span and longevity. I would say that that might even be fifty percent of people out there.

Again, i'm taking the liberty of estimating. Another thing I would venture is interested in getting stronger and putting on a more muscle. Certainly, there are a number of people that are interested in doing that, and that could even be more muscle all over or more most with some actuation to certain areas where they happen to be weaker or less, less developed as IT work.

And then the third bin be people that really enjoy cardiovascular work. Oh, I should say the second bin probably care about their longevity also, but it's not really most. And like, yeah, you know, I feel great now and I will live to i'll live to be whatever, but I only want to do IT if I get that much muscle right. We know these kinds of folks, and I run a full .

in my class every year. When I asked, like, what you guys all lift, of course. Like, I make them put your hand up. Like, you guys room in my class, you, you to put your hand up, let you lift twice.

And I asking, like, why do you train? And like health is long term health is like honor list and they all like, i'm like any of you this selected health are liars. Like you're twenty to twenty five, you are not exercising for health. You are exercising because you, anna, look a certain way, organs stronger once you get passed that undergraduate age, though, the actual desire to live longer and Better actually becomes pretty real.

Yeah, I think that there are people who want to feel Better. They know that excise and the results for exercise can make them feel Better. Yeah, that second been tense.

Be more focus on the aesthetic change IT seems we are being strong. And then the third category think our people um I know a lot of folks like this who really enjoy what are Normally considered in dance type activities. And here I just want to highlight again what you so beautifully illustrated in in previous episodes that you can gain a lot of endurance even using weight or machines.

That just depends on how you use them, right? It's not about the exercise about how you perform them. And etta and you again, beautifully provided all those details as to how to create endurance, regard the some of equipment standards at a but that third category seems to be people who enjoy running, cycling, swimming, hiking, dancing um activities that they can do for long periods of time that often will involve some sort of um skill that is based on improving motor patterns.

So maybe not so much stride, but i'm certainly for people that are really loved tennis yeah people that love a sport like goal, right? They want to be able to not just walk, you know, they want to walk eighteen holes. They want, they want to have a great golf swing at.

I'm not a golf player to forgive me. My Normal nature is golf. Golfer, golf got that.

You don't play golf, you would go golf player.

I played manager golf a few times. That's about IT. Although stanford does have a beautiful golf course, I told I should learn, have gov.

I play. If you want, you come up, i'll play.

I'll say how I get me on course, my lab. So category one, I think, is a significant infraction of people. yeah. So as we lay out these different um ways to assess call and as we approach the structure of a of a program, as you'll tell us, if we could perhaps touch back to those every once in a while, I again, i'm taking the liberty of assuming that we we will net about eighty and ninety percent of people out there.

Again, those category people who want to lose some that maybe built a muscle specific as on their body and really want to be healthy, they want to feel great, and they want to have a long health spin k and lifespan. And I live a long time feeling great. Second category, people want to build more muscle and strength. Sure, they don't want to damage their health, but that's not their main focus on their main focuses on building muscle and strength.

And then the third category of people who really want to do more insurance type work feel great and strong doing IT, but not because they can um you know Carry heavy weights while they're doing IT, but rather they can feel vital and they can push harder for longer and maybe even translate that to some of the more recreational type activities or sports like tennis and things that are more long duration playing soccer, maybe even soft bowler things that yes. So those three catered maybe could call ban A B and c for sake of today's discussion. I think um if you're willing to embrace yeah but I think that will be informative toward our listeners in a way that um simply not assuming what people's uh different goals are um might not be able to accomplish.

Said differently, hopefully by doing that um people will derive a lot more from the description of the program that you're going to give us. So of IT. Now I am certain that I want to let you return to your list of the five things that people need to consider when establishing a exercise program.

Yeah, greatness do that. I also do one. Acknowledge that point you've brought up to exercise doesn't mean just lifting weights.

That's my background. That's what I spent my time on. So I started to fault to examples in that category. But IT doesn't have to be that you've articulated plenty of other ways where you can get amazing forms of exercise that that I have nothing to do with lifting weight. So for those folks in in what was been .

c or three and a is, again, must lose fat, be healthy now and forever. And b is get stronger, gain muscle, don't damage your health, but not really focus on health in the immediate term. And then bin sea is want to play or do in dance type activities and quoting what feel strong doing IT. So have more vigor to be able to do that longer and maybe with more attention to scale at sea. And of course, also want to improve their health.

What you've effectively done as you've given us three different avatars with three different goals, right? So the next step, p for each person or group is going to be to identify their defenders. But before we get that, we've got to close the loop on this smart thing.

So in each case, they have either chosen that goal based on their personal preference or perhaps they they are our fitness testing protocol and and realized they need to gain strength. So whether the reason they chose to be in buckets b or a or c was because of our protocol or this personal province IT really doesn't matter. They still want to go through this process of laying out their goals and making sure that again, they're specific, right?

So um let's go through bin sea, which is a great one. So you want to have more energy. You want to feel stronger when you're doing your kite boarding.

You want to feel stronger when you finish your round of tennis, round of golf, game of tennis? Okay, great. That's a different strength.

absolutely. Say, I hear. I know you're signal. amazing. So golds, be specific to that, right? So IT would be hard to make a goal like, I want to feel Better at the end of my round.

Boy, what? That depends on too many other factors. A Better goal would be something like this. I want to be able to run this two mile loop that I do around my neighborhood, and I want to do IT and have a lower heart rate at the end.

Or I want to be able to get my heart rate back, my heart recovery back faster. Amazing that that will probably alive with you feeling, quote, got stronger with that, right? So I did the same course, and neither I can do IT at the same speed, and it's not nearly as hard or I can go faster whichever ver one IT doesn't matter but that would be an example of a specifical.

The other buckets you laid out kind of already have specifically like I want to get stronger. Well, that's going to be the goal. The other one is going to be um you know I want to lose some fat okay that's kind of the goal is sort of implicit in that it's the other people were read like I don't want to care about that. I just want to be able to serve the great waves and I not feel exhausted afterwards.

Are right cool with you still should pick a metric that is not that activity, maybe because IT won't be within your control depending on the waves in the temperature and all the stuff that you can use as a proxy to say, if I were to do something that represented me feeling probably Better when I serve, what would that be? And it's not perfect, but I would be still as specific as you could get. You still want to make sure it's measurable.

Again, this example might be something like you're going to go to the pool and time, how long IT takes you to swim eight meters or something, right? It's attainable. And then you'll a goal that's realistic and timely.

I'm going to improve by five percent in the next two months. Okay, cool. That probably falls in the room.

And then you're making the assumption if you did that, you'll probably feel Better when you go out to do your primary activity, which is say serve um the reality that is every time we work and actually actually that's what we do at least don't come to us to lift weights. They don't come to us to get stronger. They come to us because they want to play Better and they want in the field more.

What we're trying to convince them of is if you do this thing in the gym, then that should translate in du being Better at your sport, recovering faster, being less injured, but is still as a proxy. And so that's all you're doing with these other non specific goals, especially when their performance spaces. And we didn't package IT that way, but that's really what you talked about for band.

See there, IT is a performance based school. I want to be able to perform when i'm in the field and my brain that's a sport and your brain is when you're at yoga class. It's the same thing like, uh, we've said this earlier in our series that if you have a body, you're an athlete.

I want to prepare your body such that they can do exactly what you wanted to do. You then get to have the choice of what you ask you to do. You call IT a sport, you call IT your saturday hydas your family, I don't really care, is the same thing.

You get control of your body, performing the way wanted to perform. And that's what this whole thing is about. great.

So now that we've covered, I think as much as we need to regarding assessing and choosing a goal, I want to get back this idea of identifying your defender. So you really need to think carefully about what is stopping you from hitting those goals. And so you're forecasting a little bit.

You're also going back into your own personal history, right? Do you have history of nee pain? Do you have a history of working too much? Uh, do you have a history of a lot of travel? Do you have a history of getting sick a lot? What are these things that are happening? They are going to stop you from hitting your goal. Um a couple of examples i've already laid out. So we don't need to go too much longer here.

But in the case of somebody who is in maybe a band aid right, which is want to lose some fat, maybe gain a little bit of muscle, okay, what's stopping you from the strength in conditioning side is IT the fact that you can't train consistent enough? Is that the fact that when you go to train, you don't know what to do? Is that a when you go train, you train and ask off and you're getting results? okay? great.

All of three of these different scenarios are going to result in different programs because they have different reasons you're fAiling. And that is really critical. Instead of just going, I want to fat loss program and picking one up off the internet, IT may not actually be addressing the point of failure for you.

So the sooner you can choose your programs based on why you're fAiling, the sooner you'll start getting results. You have to run a little bit of a critical nounce there. And IT can be um know something scientific and I could be a measurement and also could just be youth thinking about you've try this in the past and why didn't IT work? I wasn't that interesting.

Okay, tell me more about why I was an interesting ah I just i'm not really in the machines and that's all I had. Okay, great. Or I I loved that.

I loved the gym. I was that, and I was getting results, but he was so far away. Okay, interesting.

Why did you stop before? Why did you work? Or if I did work in the past? amazing. Let's go back to something similar.

But has your life changed at all? Is raining different about now than when IT worked three years ago? Yes, no. If not, maybe we run to write back. If IT is okay, we're going to pursue to predict those things and you want to work.

Um effect of what i'm saying is without this entire tense step process is going to be you want to make sure that there are the non negotiable les that are in your life, that you know we're going to be ahead of your fitness program and you want to work with those things, not against them, right? Life will win when IT comes to your children, when IT comes to your job. Life is going to win.

You're gonna have to give up something. It's gonna take some hard work. But we want to fight the right battles for most people, right, even for our professional athletes.

We get this all the times, just like they have nothing else to do but train right and that whole hold on now. They're getting traded. They have agents to deal with.

They may not have a contract. They have families to be. I think life will get in the way, I promise.

And so you want to fight the battles that you can win, not ones that you're going to lose. And so that's really what this game is about. So if the battle is, hey, my job is super hectic, okay, great. We're going to come up with the difference strategy that's more flexible. Maybe i'm still going to hold you to the fire.

I'm not going to be easier on you, but we're just not going to try to set up a situation where you have to do this work out monday, wednesday, day and saturday because you know your job is on the road and you're provide all the the income for your family. And okay, whatever the thing is right um that's what we really want identify. So when I say identify your defenders, you need to run a little bit of a critical analysis on this and a little bit of a tool I use for this h is a modification of another system I told from Candy cane, which is we call a system.

So you can imagine everything in life goes into one of four buckets. All right, now, bucket one, i'm just gna call business. And this is anything to do with your job income, sort of all those things.

Bucket, too, is relationships. So this could be family or love, like, like anything that we will call relationship, social connection, purpose. But anything with bucket three is your fitness, and bucket four is your recovery.

So one of the first steps we take is we walk through this and we say, alright, you have ten points total and you get to distribute these ten points across the four areas. So not ten each, you get ten total. And so we walk doing, we say, right now, where are you giving your points and and we could do this right now for you, if you like.

Or I could make up A A scenario. Do I do IT sure. great. So Andrew, uh, right now in the last month, um if you had ten points total on those four categories, um where where would you be distributing most points? Which category and how many .

points that be business, my work.

business work, jobs sort of all things and how many.

which doesn't, I should say, ever quite feel like work. Running laboratory and doing the podcast doesn't ever really feel like work in the traditional sense. But it's career.

It's hard to work. It's IT involves relationships. But IT certainly doesn't enhance my fitness except of my vocal cords and in recovery. So so with those notes there, I would say four or four to five.

you pick five, five, five. That's the most common number five business.

Five, great. Once again, i'm typical, which makes me happy one of few ways which I ve been accused of being Normal vie for business. no.

What's the next highest and what's that score?

Um um I do invest in relationships, I would say. Does have to be around. Can I be have a whole. Two.

two, all right, we're seven and ten years. So would you say IT is fair that you spent roughly two and a half percent of year is not necessarily time. It's energy, time, focus, sort of all these things, two and a half times as much on your business as you do in your relationships.

IT varies depending on what's going on. Um that feels a little sewed in the direction of business. So I might want to adjust to a four three ratio. I want to hold to five, two business relationships. And then just for the sake of example, and because you know this is doesn't seem like IT exceedingly precise measure, IT can have some slot.

of course. Okay, where would you put fitness and recovery?

I definitely put energy into fitness, so i'm going to give that also or two.

Which leads one for recovery. great. That what you just lay out is again the most qui essential split.

You could in fact, you run this game on everyone they are onna come up with basically the same answer unless they don't work out or or whatever, right? okay. So a couple of rules here. Recovery must be at minimum half of your fitness allocation. In your case, to the one you're fine.

I think you say has to be half, he has to be five out of ten point in case doesn't leave much anything else.

I would like IT you to be minimum twenty percent of the total, which means to at ten now. And when I say recovery, I don't simply mean muscle. I mean, you need personal time, you need meditation, you need enjoy sleep, you need to go to a concert and get out and see people.

And so like whatever the things that that give you energy back, right? Some folks that's personal time. Some folks that social time.

whenever I mean to see you, right, yeah, I should get a lot of energy for my work. And so now that's why some of these numbers are a little bit you can always the kind of cloak that the underlying dynamic.

So here's what we do from this game. We look at that and we say if that our split of five, three, two, one.

five, two, two, one, one, i'd love to be able, but three in relationships just because, but then I need eleven out of, right?

So here's the fun game we play. You're currently at this and you don't get the ad to eleven. You have to stay at ten there.

Your ten is different than in my ten, maybe, right? But ten is ten. There are just whatever the maximum you can actually do, it's you. So if we went back to our training goal, whatever that goal was for you, and we went back to our defenders, we would look at this score now and say, is three at a ten minus three, right?

This is two. So it's five, two, two.

One is two at a tense sufficient to hit that training goal in that time frame you described. And let's say you said, I want to hit a new P. R. In my mile six months from .

now yeah first sip icy, say and also because is largely you i'm going to put myself in in what I refer to has been a earlier right my wife, a percentage is is okay. It's it's in the rain that I would like, but I would like to bring down a little bit, gain a little bit muscle here and there, keep keeper, gain some endurance. And certainly, certainly my immediate and long term healthy are extremely important to me. great.

Some of the question, and they may answer maybe yes, that this is the optimal split for you. If IT is not, then we have to make a choice. We either alter the goal or the timely to make IT realistic or we alter our quadrant.

And then if you're going to alter our quarter, the next step is critical and import. We need a list of very specific life actions that we're going to take that allows that is what to happen. So if you said, for example, I want to put three in the relationships, great.

What specific life actions are you going to take to pull one from fitness? You can't pull me from recovery or one from business and and we don't have to actually answer. This is too personal. Um I know you don't like making these things about you .

because right that's the other reason to do IT. And um IT is that a diablo trick to make IT to insist these be whole entries because I would have done you know like a four point five for business and a two point five for relationships but obviously write the rules on this.

not me. So you would just walk that at this, okay? And in less could be something like um I promise to not work after seven pm um thursday through sunday whatever the thing is I promise i'm i'm gonna make sure that I don't start work before A A M or but whatever right no more trips just make those things specific and measurable, not just like i'm going to work.

That's never going to what is the very specific life action you're going to take? Those going to be alarm that goes off tuesday night at four five P M. And no matter what we a barber shrugged. We used every little shirt that was like d three eighty, which is like drop everything in train, what IT means at three pm the afternoon, no matter what's happening.

We dropped everything in trained because that was like when you start a business IT and you're going a things is run away from me, right? And this sort like, man, it's not my company, but those got like we are a string dishing company and we're not training so we had to just make this hard rule. And just like a little thing that came up and he was easy to say, drop everything and training.

three o clock, three go. I like this, a drop, D, A, E, everything, A N and blank, like you could be. Drop everything and correct, you know, pick your favorite to the relevant ABS. I really miss reading for pleasure. I would put that under recovery .

and potential and oin breathe .

you are saying breathe I was saying read that yeah because for me reading is actually is both recovery and relationship um because often times in in my relationships insist not insisted and I didn't this a uh we've had a format of reading the same book in parallel, all great yeah not surely side by side, but the same book in parallel and discussing IT, it's a wonderful practice. Or listening to the same audio book IT works well.

You can do job everything and play. You just going to go do something. You going to play video games, you're gonna play through kid.

You're going to do where play with your dog like you some IT doesn't have to actually be play, but play to you can signify personal time right? IT doesn't really matter. Um so yeah that I really .

like to drop everything and blank got that you probably not have more than one, two or three of those overall .

pretty much like one is the one, two maybe Grace, where you want to go.

So the idea is them to redistribute the numbers on this list, but throw a very concrete action. And I like this, drop everything and blank, because IT speaks to the non negotiable aspect of IT habit.

You is life will get pushed.

right? It's not a fine time to right, right? It's not in next year.

I'm going to correct. I love that yeah yeah when you make when you when you put those things those things you might as well just don't inform you this is not going to .

happen yeah you're talking to somebody who loves rules um because when they are non negotiable rules they provide this incredible organizing force for the brain yeah it's really a neuroscience thing in my mind totally.

And actually we did an episode on happiness where you find that once people make a decision, if they eliminate the possibility of other decisions, like literally the hatches close, that is IT about the rate of subjective happiness, immediate launching happiness over time. Go weigh up. yes.

And so i'm convinced that the nervous system doesn't like to keep the valves on these dopamine circuits open. Actually think that diminishes from the reward component, and they're actually some date on this. Anyway, I don't want to take us off track.

But the last part is what we do then is we take that quadrant and we take that list and then you're going to a print IT physically and you're going na put IT in two places. This could actually be on your phone. You can screen share to be the background, your phones.

Every time you click on your phone, you immediately see that quarter. Like it's a very clear reminder of like what are my priorities today, right to a simple little picture. Um I also like to put IT in your place of failure.

So for a lot of people that is like on their laptop or write about their work station, right, like the thing that's going to lose and beat your fitness, is your job typically right? Or it's on your TV, it's on your netflix control. No, sorry, in netflix, no fans.

But you don't mean like it's whatever the thing is you fail for. Um I played too many vio against great there I work very much. Okay, great.

And you put IT there and you put IT also the last community that has to also be in the hands of somebody who can hold you accountable, right? Wife, training partner, business partner, whatever. Is this like key Andrew, like, you promise you are going to do x yourself.

Why are you still here? You committed this. You're gonna get out of here. Someone who will like you, like, not know is drop everything and read. It's eight clock you're supposed be reading.

You got to go um you can check back in on that, check back in every week, check back in IT doesn't matter every month and then you can adjust. It's fine. You can always change the system, but that has to now change.

You've got to print the new one and now it's a whole new promise you've made years. So, so you've gotta be able to hold yourself accountable with those things. It's got to be flexible enough to where it's realistic IT can be.

I'm not going to work after six o'clock every day. Maybe it's just three days a week, maybe it's on saturdays. I promise to work for the first two hours, so I don't work that every night.

Whatever or the universe i'm not can work. So you get IT. You could come up with a million examples here. So that's the system we used to make sure that we have now appropriate identified where we're going. We have found a road map to that, and now we know exactly how we're going to stay on track. I have to take this opportunity to add one more thing to our drop everything list and you give the example of deer which is may be drop everything and read or drop everything and relax or uh another example um I have to add a deal which is drop everything and this is for you, lex love.

Actually, one of the advantages of having a dog or having children is that the drop everything and love is often enforced by the faces of of of those that you love. They just show up in whatever space have to .

best if you work from home.

I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge a sponsor inside tracker. Inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood DNA to help you Better understand your body and help you reach your health goals.

I ve long been a believer in getting regular blood word done for the simple reason that many of the factories, the impact your immediate and long term health and well being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. One issue with a lot of blood test and D, D, N, A test out there, however, is that you get information. About various levels of lipids and hormones, metaphoric factors.

That said, a but you don't know what to do with that information. Inside tracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy. They have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are, of course, but then also what sorts of behavior do and dots, what sort of nutritional changes, what sort of of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you? If you'd like to try inside tracker, you can visit inside tracker outcomes lash huberman to get twenty percent off any of inside track kers plans. Again, that's inside tracker dotcoms slash huberman to get twenty percent off.

Let's move on to the next one. Show me number three. Here is going to be what I call calendar or sort of time frame.

So it's going back a little bit and saying you've decided on this school and you have to identify the defenders. Now we need to come up with a realistic time frame for how long is going to take to accomplish that goal. And when you do that, you need to look at your life schedule.

And what I mean by that is do you have important deadlines coming up? Do you have holiday you have of a trip? Do you travel? Do your children have something coming up? Um you need to take all that information and I literally lay out a calendar and I write all those dates in a physical calendar first. And the reason i'm suggesting this is you want to work your training backwards around that.

As we've been discussing, life will win if you try to plan a training program that is five days week, ninety minutes today and all the sun, you look two weeks from now, you realized you ve got a grant deadline, and then you've gotta take two days to go to host. It's just foolish. You're going to fail, and then you're gonna quit and you're going to be like, man, again, my training program failed.

So you need to figure out what are the non negotiable les are in that business quadrant and just not be foolish, all right. So let's imagine you're gonna a plot out, say, a twelve week training face and you want to you've decided on this go and then you look and and you realized in the middle of this twelve weeks span, week five is really hectic and chaotic. Or you realized that this is a quarter in which something important is, do maybe we want want to either adjust the goal?

Or what we really do in this step is going on to actually step number four, which is choose the number of days per week you can exercise and the length in terms of amount of time you can truly afford to train. I would rather you underestimate that, then over estimate IT. So you again, you look at the counter or you put all these non negotiable les, the deadline you cannot move in the counter.

And then you say, look, based on this, realistically, I can conservatives train three days week for sixty minutes total, and that includes the time I walk into the gm, my warm up, my downed regulation, breathing at the end, and then be getting back either in the shower and back, because really now it's may be nine minutes by the time traveled, your transition, you pick back up on work, you showered U A sector that time just runs away from me. And also, and he was a two and half hour thing, even know, is a forty five minute workout. So you really need to fix that thing out.

If you're a few weeks ending, you realized you actually a little more time. I thought you can know extraarid more. You do another thing you can add you don't want to do is set up a program that is requiring you to do certain extroidinary on one days or certain styles of training on another, and then you constantly miss one.

Those days I I thought I could do four days a week, but one day a week, sometimes getting pulled out. This is gonna ep. You off schedules going to make you feel like a failure and you going to run into problems with you're training.

So schedule three, if you are sure you can get three and if there's an active day, we can always do other fun stuff, right? So that's really step three and four, figure out your life events over the course of this time. How many days a week can you train and how long in terms of minutes per workout notice, we haven't selected a single exercise yet.

We haven't worried about how heavy areas, all those modifiable variables, you don't need to pick those later. First, where we going. Second, how are we going to get there, which is the quadrant and identifying of defenders.

And the third is, what are the restrictions I need to place on myself in terms of program designed based on how often and how long I can work out that is going to allow you to go back to some of the previous eos. And o man, you gave us all kinds of ideas. How do I know you want to choose? This is your answer.

You're going to choose space upon the limitations of time and frequency. So if you vote said, we're just imagine we're in bucket a or bucket c doesn't matter and you go look the most I can afford with where I met with what's going on in my life in three days week. Well, we automatically know we're onna have to start training, choosing a training style that's limited to three days week.

Don't worry about the four or five days. So those are on the table. And now so we've place restrictions that kind of goes back to that concept of I think it's one of your podcast gets joko right is like a structure gives us actually some freedom.

So by creating some restrictions, here were a little more free to go. I only actually have to choose between rather than sitting down to go. And there's all twenty hours into this exercise, podcasting and there's so many options are going to pick what you create. A little bit restriction and now is easier to go. Only option is there be and there we go.

So that's number four.

That's three and four at that point. Once were good there. Now what you want to do is go to a step number five, which is actually select your exercises or your movements. This could be as simple as selecting like, uh you know a cattle bell swing or running or swiming IT could be your entire exercise mode. What you want to do with exercise selection here is make sure that you're balancing those exercises across the whole week, not even necessarily every workout.

So if you have four days a week, five days a week, you want to look at the exercise election and say, okay, I need to have somewhat of a reasonable baLance between movement patterns, our muscle groups or front and back. I decide, however, you're thinking of IT just across that week. So again, say, one of three day program and we're in either of the buckets, any the buckets really and we say, okay, great.

Maybe it's not ideal if all I select is cycling every day. That's not a lot of baLance. I don't notice there's no upper body work there.

There's no torso al work, there's no other positions. So maybe i'm going to really focus on cycling. So I will do only cycling two days week, but that third day, I need to pick something for the other movement areas.

And that's going to make sure you stay in a reasonable baLance ah if you have an exercise you like, great. If you have exercise you have access to, again, maybe the gym is a giant pain in the ads. And so you could say, look, it's too far away.

The closest one is forty five minutes, then. Bx, so maybe i'm in, restrict myself to only cattle bell and bans and running, because I can do those in my house. awesome. We've actually creates some freedom because we give ourselves some restriction. And now we just have to figure out how i'm going to give some movement pattern s somewhat baLance across mine three days.

So really when IT comes to exercise choice, IT is selecting the patterns that you know how to execute, giving yourself against some what of a baLance between the muscles in the joins and the movement patterns, making sure that you are specifically targeting any muscle group or movement that you want. So making sure you you want to improve muscle size in your groups. You Better make sure some other exercises, if you're doing at least one day a week, you're feel eating your actual goods so you can check that box.

IT doesn't have to be every exercise. You probably shouldn't IT doesn't know how to be every single day, but make sure to checked off somewhere on that list. And the last one is, is there a strategy which you can progress IT? So if you're like, i'm gonna body with exercises, okay, great.

Well, how are you gna progress those in the case? Like body way is it's really hard to add load. Maybe you can put a weight vest on or something, but then maybe you don't have that. That's an actual thing or economy go so far.

So what's my progression strategy going to be? Well, on this case, maybe you just increase the complexity by going from two legs like say, a body with to a single squad or you just incase repetitions or you increase time we're going to hold with my point is your progression strategy. You will be based upon the restrictions that you placed, based on availability and and things like that.

The last thing I was recommend here in terms of exercise progression to make sure that you can continue to do these things while lowing your risk of entry, both in the short term and long term, is to progress your exercise complexity in this this fashion. So make sure, number one, you can do the exercise properly with the system. So let's imagine a scenario where we're going to try to squat.

So give yourself, put your hands on a bench or something like that. Now can you execute that s perfectly with assistance? So you're holding on to something? Okay, great.

If you can't, then don't progress. Pass that. Don't go now. Do a borrow back squad if you can't do correctly when you had assistance, but less so most people can do that. Okay, great.

Now you can move on to the next step, which is, can you do IT well without assistance? So this should be body way only. check.

cool. We're good there. Okay, now you go, head moved on. Can you do IT well with an added incentive c load?

So in this particular case, if I if we're learning to squad, we can do well when I hold on to something that's great. Okay, now I can do IT. Well, this is my body way.

Now, if I put a little bit weight on whether it's t or do, can I lower go all way down and stay in perfect position? If you can do that, great. You're allowed to go the next step, which is, can you hold the isom metrically.

So can you go all the way down and then hold that bottom? Musician, what you don't want to do is start adding load or speed or fatigue. If you're going on to the bottom position of the movement and you are out of control, we really wanna void this.

So I want you to show me you can go down and you can lower the weight under control. You can hold IT in that position under control. If we're clear there now, we can add the concentrate portion, right?

You can now go head. You can lower IT. You can hold that position of most danger. And now you can move up at whatever speed we want. We are all good there.

Once you can show me those things, you can add the last two steps, which are now speed, if you choose to. And the last one, which is fatigue, right? I would really discourage people from doing exercises to fatigue, especially with a moderate or high load.

Unless you can promise me you can do these first six steps, if you can. You can basically go hog wild with your training. And your chances of injury are are very low against acute injury as well as long term in jy, which is just sort of like my joints ache and all that. My shoulder hurts and you know things like that um that's really what i'm looking for. And once you're clear there, you can train pretty.

I really like this because recently I was showing somebody how to use a in the case was a hack squat machine. I know that they were a very timid of getting a into a deep squad position, and they cited a previous nee injury, which has long since healed. But even with proper footplate emin and everything you just tell, they were getting ginger about IT as they they approach that bottom position.

But over time, with pauses at the bottom, they become very comfortable and now actually are going well below ninety degrees angle between you know, few and and lower like. So IT was clear that IT wasn't something range emotion limited or IT was just IT was a mental thing, but a logical one for them. Now after what you just said, I think a Better strategy of that I could have used would have been to have them get into that position, just no wait at all, maybe nothing on the slide and then slowly working up from there as opposed to um doing what we did in our case, which was to just convince them that they were much stronger than they they thought they were. We eventually got there, but i've realizing that there was far too much mental anguish involved in that process.

Yes, this whole progression, by the way, this can all happen in one session. If you can check the boxes, like in that example, you may even find a jump there. You may have just going to hate, you're fine here.

Get get through IT OK. This whole progression might take two years. Mean, this really depends on your background if you actually have injury history and your comfort, your confidence in all this thing. So you don't need to worry about rushing through that progression. You don't you need to get all over the end if you don't want, especially with speed, things like that. But again, I can happen IT doesn't have to be like, well, just a month of this month, like, but no, if they feel great, you can go through one of seven and five minutes. Then you get to .

go number six.

Number six now is just order. So you know how many days per week are going to work out? You know how long you're going to take.

You've selected all the exercises you need to get done. You've baLance that across the week. Now you need to put them in order.

And the easy answer here is generally do what's most important first in the workout. There is some minor interference, in fact, to some other things there. But read the reality, IT is if you do the priority first, you're probably going to be okay.

So whether this priority is a muscle group. So in the example, you want to make sure your glue good trend, maybe do IT first. If you're trying to maximize your back squad, you may not want to do a bunch of glue exercise activity first, but that's not the priority we picked.

We picked a different one, which is pocket A B, N C. Okay, great. By doing at first, you told me the priority was to make sure I do something for my glue.

And then I would also like to get my back quite a lot of IT stronger or whatever. Kay, fine, the same thing could be done for your enduring train. You could do your enduring training before you're lifting.

If you understand that, that means you might be compromising your lifting quality of the workout a little bit, but you might be fine with that if you say the enduring work is more part right now. amazing. You don't know the answer to that though, if you have gone through steps one through four, and that's why those things are critical.

So that makes what we call chaos management, which is things happen in the moment. I don't know what to do. What should I choose? That decision becomes really clear because you can always go back. The beginning of my priority was this then, therefore, that's my choice today.

So I provides a very simple set of instructions for when the workout gets cut short, when your workout has to be a hotel in any number of things that pop up in real life, whether again you're an athlete or non athlete, either way, life will getting away at some point. So you need to have rules and a system that says, when this happens, I go right back to this and that's my choice done. And moving on.

No decision to make here. It's already been determined a week ago. Five weeks go more often rolling.

So the order again is pretty simple. Just put the one that is most important first. Now I know you like to do legs on monday.

That's great. I actually love that too. I I do the same thing generally because to me, that's almost always the most important thing.

If I miss a bye work out, i'm probably fine. But I really don't like missing the big movement pattern. So I make sure that those happened on a day that tend to be more stable. For me, monday's are generally pretty stable. Things get chaotic as the week moves along for me.

Others might be the opposite, right? Others might want to go, hey, i'm actually going to keep monday as my flexible day or off day because i'd like to get a lot of my work done, get that clear so I can now, oh for sure, like work around you. Some people love to train on saturdays because they're most free.

Some people hate IT sure. You tell me what is the biggest priority and when you the most fresh, monday, tuesday, IT doesn't matter. Depends on your work schedule. Maybe you work, the weekend ends, I don't know, right?

You decide what day of the week are you generally the most consistent the most consistent schedule and the most consistent energy and do the thing that is most important on that day IT doesn't matter monday, tuesday, day one, day three. Um we are sort of talking about this earlier, but you actually don't even have to do a week schedule. Our brains, i'd like to go year, month, week, but a lot of folks will even just run this thing in terms of like the seven or ninety schedule.

In fact, we ran a nine day train schedule m for one of my major lik baseball players. And he's eight or so years in his career and he's hitting all time pr in velocity. He is very, very good.

And he was a nine day training cycle, ran that for the entire season. So IT doesn't have to be a seven days sport, but IT tends to work a lot of people because most people have a fairly consistent schedule across the seven days. So picked the thing is most important, do at first and due IT on the day, the week that has most consistent for you from schedule and energy.

I really like what you're describing. I should just say that one of the reasons I put legs on monday is because I tend to get enough sleep on the weekends. I generally get enough sleep during middle the week, but often times things will come up.

I can be pretty sure, however, that i've cutting caught up on my sleep on the weekend. This notion of catching up on sleep is a little dicky enticed, but tend to be pretty rested by monday morning. And actually, my week begins on sunday, and sunday's are when I get my long form cardio. So those two are really non negotiable.

And the reason that long form cardio is on sunday is that they can take many different forms that can take a hike with a way diverse IT can take a the form of a job, IT can be done with other people, IT can be family time, IT can be time with friends and so on. And that's pretty hard to do during middle of the week or pretty hard to ensure, at least for me. I also find that by book ending the week with some non negotiable days of training on sunday, monday, then if the week gets busy tuesday, wednesday, or even sometimes thursday with traveling things like that, one can sort of catch up toward the weekend.

It's not ideal. I mean, ideally it's sped out, but really this isn't about what I do. This is really just to underscore the principal you described, which is I have a very clear sense now over, you know, three decades or so of training and three decades or so of being involved in academic and science and work of when I tend to be most arrested, when I tend to have some flexibility in my schedule and also when i'm trying to combine fitness with some of my your social engagement, which is actually quite fun.

I one thing I noticed that um the four boxes that you mentioned me for work relationships, fitness and recovery, some of them do have some cross over hike with family or friends is both relationship and fitness and so on. But I love the principle. And because anything that can add consistency, as you pointed that out, is going to greatly increase the probability of reaching one schools, that sort of an obvious one. But in an earlier episode, you also said something that I wrote down and is really still bringing in my mind, especially now, which is that consistency always beats intensity.

Yeah absolutely. We used to do a thing um when I was training and fell players for the combine many years ago, where saturdays were supposed to be the day they came in and we did the most regeneration. So this is when they get body work done and we do hot, cold contrast and sort of all these things. And our attendance was like one percent.

Nobody showed up.

Nobody showed up. Wo seems. Remember .

course.

but remember, you're eighteen years old. You're likely to be getting millions of dollars into you in the next few weeks or months.

And he's not referred to me, by the way. I'm actually quite bit older than eighty and i'm not getting him to billions of dollars each week.

right? So I would think that but those folks like they recover super fast. You have never really had that. And also like pretty night, kind of enticing. And so nothing was there.

And the strategy that was, what if we instead of having a important hard training day on saturday, we transition and IT is only things I want to do. So we would be based identified what are the things in training you love the most, unless to those saturdays. And that turns out for those spokes.

No surprise here. IT was what we call the gun show. So they would come into the gym and we would literally do nothing.

But by sus and try sups, they'd just get a pump. And then the deal was though you come in and little, you would come in as we would pick three guys. So you you knew you pick your favor by some exercise.

You pick your favorite one. You pick your favorite one you threw over there. You pick your favorite. Ice is a ice of Price. And we just want a big circuit.

This is like, how many rips? I don't know, I don't care how many that I didn't care. This is like pumper away. Like, I don't even care, right? We show small muscle groups not really in fear that much.

We're trying them for the nfl combine, which is like it's not a it's legs performance basically, right? So like if they smashed the vice up and try on a saturday, it's not an influence what we did on on monday. So recovery wasn't issue once we finished the gun show, though.

Now you have to go to your region stuff. So if you can need cargo, you need physical therapy, whatever you're going to do. So we would get them in the building with the low hanging through, and then we would actually get them do their work.

You can do the same thing, and I honestly do the same thing I tend to do either um if I want to doing up lower split, i'm gonna do that stuff either friday night or saturday because it's very difficult for me to do a hard, long workout friday night, right, or even friday morning for that matter. Same thing. Saturday I wake up and it's I was like his family mode as kid things.

I wanted do something, man, but I can usually can convince myself to be like or I just go there, go twenty minutes and get you, everybody stuff down. I can, I can walk myself into that mentally. It's harder to walk yourself.

In the year five, six of five dealt. His sort is like, wow. I can get that to me right now. My high intensity innovations, the max of I don't have that right now. So all either go for my long steady stay stuff, which is like i'm i'm going on the bike and ride down on the beach or coming back now is along the I can get myself to go for a bike ride like so I picked the thing that I am likely to do on the days where i'm probably gonna my weakness coronal, not physically, but motivation wise for a long time. I try to like IT just got stuck in away where my harder stuff's friday nights.

And i'm just like why I doing this, I was having like a fifty percent success rate, just like we are having like a no percent successful with the end of your guys on saturday. So you have to be a little bit tough. You have to grind sometimes you have to you know get some motivation go after, but you also have to be like what this is just stupid planning, right?

Like why put yourself in a position where you're just fAiling over and over and over when I could not move IT and go look, those sessions are going to be things that are easier. They don't require as much gusta to get up and get them done. I get those things done ninety percent of the time because the worst case I can be like are we're going to go to a family then give me twenty minutes.

I'm just going to run of their smash upper body and you don't need, and I need twenty years warm up like I can just kind of jump into those things. If I had you, if I feel great, then I can still go do something else. I could do more I do a longer session, but you're sort of immune to any situation. So um I would book in those as I guess is what i'm saying. What's the day you're gonna the best day and what's the day you generally have the worst and and put the programs around those situations?

I'd love the idea of identifying the friction points, the high friction in low friction days, friction, meaning anything that impede from training consistently or well. And there are so many factories that ratched into that sleep. Other social engagements work friday night.

I also want IT tough uh, to do any kind of training. I do a cardiff asked lar or training. I do interval type training um on friday typically but there's a lot of cumulative fatigue stress that happens across the week and usually for a long time.

I cash more than a decade now, have been told myself that saturday is the day that I tried to reduce my court as all as much as possible for the week, and then sunday is the day they enjoy that low result state. And that is actually what opened up into the long, slow run. I like SHE like to think of myself as a bit of a meal during those runs.

Actually have a shirt that has a slave on IT that I wear to remind myself to go slowly on those runs. Not that I ever run that fast, but the whole mind set around IT is to be a bit of a of a new just kind of moving through IT. And the fatiguing tor is more one of um you know at first is a little bit of board them, but then i've noticed there's a whole different set of mental scapes that open up under different training types.

And this is maybe something get into little bit in a future episode discussion. You when you train really intensely for short periods of time, one way your mind goes into a particular state when you do long duration training, you're thinking and and indeed, even the way IT affleck sleep patterns is also very different. I think one of the great future for neuroscience and exercise science in collaboration is to identify how different patterns of physical relate to different patterns of thinking, and vice versa. Anyway, something maybe they just uh erec k for a future conversation, but there's clearly a relationship there .

yeah well when we certainly know of a pretty clear relationship between um even what we will classify zone five extra isse and deep sleep so a zone five .

became being uh you're breathing a lot of your mouth because you have to do in order to bring in enough oxygen to offset the acidity created by the the exactly yeah .

this is the high heart rate so so I mean, if you're going to look out and hit a number um looking for something like thirty plus minutes a week being in uh the top ten percent of your heart.

right that impacts deep sleep is .

going to be positively impact deeper sleep as long is done very far away from deep sleep. So you don't want to do that at night. So in in the in terms of time um so if you hit those numbers earlier in the day, um often times sevil enhance seep sleep.

I was looking at some papers recently on the number that that um kind of emerged from those papers was that unless its low intensity exercise, trying to exercise about six hours or more away from your sleeping would be ideal. Now that said, for those of you that have to hit the jr, go for a run in the evening and then are trying to fall, see four to six hours later, I wouldn't want that statement to impede your regular, your regular exercising yeah this .

is this an easy trick that just finished with down regulation breathing. So that's sort of one of our things that if you because that is a realistic situation, right.

finish at five or even six and then by time you're you're training or running or what everyone to call IT, it's seven, thirty eight, your home at nine, you're eating and then even like you can get two hours before bed, pretty soon you run into a number of different collision points. They make you wonder whether not you're doing everything wrong or if it's really worth training at all. I would argue it's Better to train them, not to train, provided that you can still get to sleep one hundred .

percent so you have to walk a little bit of a game. We run in this issue with the N, B, A players, right? You're playing games at six o'clock and I start majorite baseball is seven or five, seven, ten pitch rate.

And also, by the way, we're changing time zones every five days, right? U, F, C, fighters and uh such was usually training twice a day. There is no option training or I I mean, we are training twice a day always.

So we have to come up with strategies for that. There's other like none at the scenarios, of course. Where is like there is no other option.

You're cool. So what we do is a couple of things. Number one, that further way you can make IT from sleep, the Better, if possible.

We do need to train though, around the same time you're going to be playing. But that has to happen. So the harder and longer we go in the training session, the harder and longer we go in our downregulates post exercise. And that is, in my estimation, the number one lover you can pull that can help. Right now, if you really does start crushing sleep, you're gonna to make a critical decision.

There in general, is not a good reason to not exercise, but maybe you restricted to only a couple days week, you go all the way up in intensity and the rest of days, maybe seventy percent explains this kind of a working zone. awesome. Um maybe it's a longer down regulation.

Maybe these other strategies you can do, but yeah you want to be careful of uh, and we've had this situation a number of times where I sort of dislike sleep, complain, sleep complain, sleep complaints. We run full sleep studies on them in their house. We do the whole thing with absolute rest.

We come in, we do the whole thing. I tracking biomarkers, the whole thing. And it's like, oh, you just need to stop doing intervals at A P. M.

right? Then I would add to that another incentive for being able to train with or without caffeine. Is that very clear that even if you can fall asleep after ingesting caffeine in the proceeding hours, that caffeine consumed in the. Gosh, he even, you know, twelve, but really know eight to ten hours, four hours prior to bedtime really disrupt the architecture of sleep. So if you critically rely on caffeine in order to train, whatever your training might be, and you know that sleep is important for recovery, well then it's pretty obviously I am going with this yeah so having that flexibility is vitally important yeah.

you've probably also cover this, but you can actually measure that directly. So by eye tracking patterns, you can actually identify the effects that caffeine has on sleep, independent of a sleep time or not.

right? There are never positive effects, correct? That said, I am a purpose of caffeine early in the day. And caffeine does have A A lot of, and I know a degeneration of as long you not getting anxiety. It's property mance, both mental, physical, of course, if you do not need caffeine, if you're one of these mutants that do not need caffeine order to go about your daily living, uh, with focus and intensity and biomedical, start taking cafe .

and not huge fan. I am scientifically hundred percent of more personally IT does I don't do well on IT.

but you seem to ride up a little bit more what we will call sympathetic tone, you know of shifted towards more. I tend to be a naturally a bit more like my bulldog hostel was a bit more on the mellow, sleepy side. And caffeine just puts me right at that alert but calm place.

And I can get away drinking. I didn't say ridiculous, but fair amount of caffeine and remain there. But I do restrict IT until the time.

Right up about two P M. At the latest is when I trying to drink coffee. Number seven.

great. So number seven and eight or pretty simple, this is now choose the intensity and the volume. So we've discussed those at length in the previous episodes, and we probably don't have the time to go back over all those details.

So remember the adaptation you're training for and pick the property red range, total monocles as well as the intensity to then get the corresponding adaptation. All you have to do is select those things in terms of progression through a week. Uh, the rule of them, we say, for intensity is something around three percent problem, right? For volume IT will depend on what you're doing a little bit.

But any time you cross more than ten percent per week, you're going to start running into problems. So I like five percent Better IT doesn't need to be the lowest three. You can jump up much more than that. Five to seven percent is Better.

So if you are doing uh say running because because the number is make IT easy and you're doing ten miles per week total, if you were to go up to eleven miles the next week, you great you're write around ten percent. But what you wouldn't want to do is they are running ten miles this week. And I did maybe for monday through wednesday through friday.

So for three and three or ten, then you wouldn't want to add a mile every day. So monday instead of doing four, I did five. Wednesday instead of doing three, I did four.

Fridays are doing three days for you, which you actually did you, from ten, thirteen, which is a much higher percent jump than the ten percent prescribed. So the same thing would be true for lifting weights. The same thing is actually true for calories and trying to add them as well. So the body tends to not handle those things as well, jumping more than ten percent a week.

So keeping with this idea of increasing progressive overload being ten percent more over some period of time, and I correct in assuming that I want to identify one may be two meaningful variables and progressing that or those variables. So progressive .

overload can come in the form of any of the modifiable variables. So you could increase the complexity of the movement, you could increase the intensity or the load. You could increase the volume by either more sets, more reps or more total exercises in a day.

What about time under attention.

you can also manipulate how the the temple of each trapt tion, you can also manipulate how many times per day you train, so you can manipulate frequency. You can also manipulate rest nervous, so you can progressively load any of these things, increase intensity, uh, run a little bit faster, complete the same amount of work slightly faster, um put five percent more on the bar bell ler, the lower the handler ever going to do.

That's a simple way if you want to think about volume. In the case of endurance, work is simple, biology, time, whatever. In the case of lifting, all you have to do is take the amount repetitions you're doing, preset, multiply by the sets, add that a lot.

So if you're doing three at to ten, that's thirty repetitions. If you did three exercises, you just did ninety repetitions. Put that number down for monday.

Put that number down for wednesday. Put that number down for friday, add that total up. So say that ninety ninety nine, you look at a mine total, a number of repetitions.

This week is two hundred and seventy ty, if I want to go up five percent, then I need to go up another fifteen. Also, total repetitions. great. That's all we have to do, that the increase. You may keep the load exactly the same, keep the exercises same time, nothing else.

But you want to add fifteen more total reps for your week, and you may choose to do that by adding one more repetition percent close in up. So last week, I did three to ten. This week i'm going to three set of eleven.

IT can be as simple as that. Again, I can be complex. I walked you through IT can be any the modifiable variables. But the progression I just laid out is fairly simple, and it's honestly the one I recommend for most people just because you will avoid confusion and I will avoid people taking massive leaves and volume.

So the typical strategy I would recommend here is increasing load or intensity or a little bit of accommodation slowly for about six or so weeks and then taking what we generally call A D load. So back down, maybe seventy percent, whatever that number is you've been doing. So you did three sets of ten, and you work yourself all way up to three sets of fifteen back that down.

And maybe we'll do two, six, eight for the week, and they will come back the following week and go back and do the highest we've done. Now also, we're going to do four sets of twelve or something like that. So if you get these little deals ads every depending on what you're doing for eight weeks or so, you should be in a spot where you can continually progressed for a very long time without they're burning out or overloading and over stressing and enduring pattern. So the simple way, pick intensity or volume and just go up slightly every week for a short span of time, generally around six weeks, and then you come back and and change your strategy.

if you like, because you mention sets and repetitions here. Just wanted to remind folks that in the episode that we did on strength and hyperdrive phy, and that also included speed, there was a description of a terrific program for strength, which is the three by five program, or three, two, five program, as it's called, which is to select three to five exercises performed for three to five repetitions, three to five times per week, with three to five minutes rest in between those exercises .

for three to five sets.

And if I recall correctly, the protocol for generating hyperdrive phy muscle growth is to perform a minimum of ten and probably more like fifteen to twenty sets poor muscle group per week, and that can be done in a single session per muscle per week.

So one could train, for instance, quarter steps one day per week as long as you're getting that volume of sets per week or can be divided up across two or three different sessions for that individual muscle group. Of course, people are going to target all the major muscle groups, and hopefully some of the minor muscle groups as well. And as I recall, the number of repetitions that can generate hyper chopine is quite broad, anywhere from six repetitions all the way up to thirty repetitions. But by the end of the set, IT should be too failure or close to failure with good form.

Is that correct? We would say close to failure, uh, is probably most appropriate. You can actually reach failure maybe on a few of the sets, maybe the end and probably best to choose that with the exercises that are uh safer, not that any exercises particularly unsafe if you do not properly, but you may not want to go to true failure on every set for the more complex, larger um risk or exercises so um had pretty close to failure. You are not all .

the way and I realized, I forgot to mention rest intervals between sets IT follows that if a large range of repetitions are performed, that a large range of rest intervals are allowed, meaning that there could be rest intervals between sets of as lowest st thirty seconds between sets or as high of two or three minutes, depending on the loads that one is using, and that, of course, you will scale with the number repetitions.

excEllent. In fact, that sort of leaves me into a step number nine of designing own training program, which is, you've decided our goal. We've worked our calendar out.

We have figured out how many days per week and how long we're going to work out in those sessions. We then went selected our exercises. We baLance ed them across the movement patterns in the muscle groups that we need.

So we're not causing excessive stress on the same exact joint or muscle group over time. We then ordered our exercises based on priority, right? Because of that, we have identified our goal.

We went back and we selected the volume, which is the repetitions per set, the totally monotone and the load process that matched the goal that we wanted to get on the adaptation. Now all we have to do is fill in the rest nerval, which reflect back again the goal. So generally higher rest nervous, which means time that you rest between your sets.

Hire somewhere between two to five minutes for things like speed, power and strength, perhaps a little bit lower, although as you mentioned, that could also stay high for project y. And then for enduring, you follow the rest interface that reflects the type of enterance training that you'd like to get that's walked us through one through nine, were almost done. We've put together a pretty nice sort of protocol.

IT should be well rounded. IT should be effective. We've also talked about how to progressed IT for me to week, keeping IT within again, four to six weeks, maybe up to eight, before we then take a back off.

The very last thing we have to do to make sure this training program is customize to you your goal and your situation, which is then going to enhance your likelihood of a hearings and consistency as well as increased the likelihood effectiveness. As we just have to do a little bit of what we call chaos manager, which just take a quick moment to think through this program looks great. But if I had to nippit, where are the possible chances of failure? And you just want to sort of think about where or where would I predict things would go wrong.

And if you anything pops out, you try to come up with this solution at the beginning and this could be a number of things. Um so maybe you've picked an exercise and you realized, man, I really actually don't like that exercise or maybe look at the schedule now that is late on front of you. You look at your work schedule on your leg uh, maybe that's a bit of grave.

I don't know could be any of number of things, but IT is a useful exercise to just think through everything realistically. I typically just like it's sea og, I teach my graduates students before we hit the MIT, we're going to sleep. So is there is ready.

We're going to take twelve hours going to wake up the next a look at IT again. And o, are we sure we're good here? Yeah, make adjustments if you need. If not, if you feel confident, then hit, send across your fingers.

yeah. We referred to submit. The man is script. It's interesting you say that I have a statement that I always make to people my lab day hit submit, and now I say that you realized you're going to wake up tomorrow morning, there is going to be an email in your inbox that something was formatted in correctly and you're going to spend tomorrow reformat in and submitting again. So i've also learned that that every project is actually two .

project I did not die of me yes.

have done this enough times. You have ve done this you know many dozens of times. And then there's also another um true or ism of science, which is that you know there is the project, there is a science of question and then the paper is yet another project. And I actually think this is analogy that Carries over to other other domains of life.

I think that any time we take on something that we want to write a book or we want to get a degree, or we want to fitness program, I think it's worth thinking about those decisions as actually two taking on two major things because one is the planning and organization around that thing, and the others, the actual performance of the thing. And so I say that because hear what you just described this, you know, ten steps to consider in designing a program, think some people who are real list makers and love the precision and the theron's. And i'm one of these people thinking, this is great.

I'd just want to check off each one of these things on the list and figure out the ideal program for me for given period of time. I said, and the other folks might be thinking, well, that's a lot. That's just a lot to do.

But what I know with certainty is that performing those sorts of this, just call them what they are, those tasks of figuring out what's what, where the defenders are at, at a without question, makes everything goes so much more smoothly once you are into the actual performs, the action of doing the exercise program, or the book or the podcast, whatever is that you happen to do. So i'm grateful that you are brought up, uh, both the things that act as can do this for getting good worked on and this notion of defenders and and bottle next. Because if we don't consider those, I would argue that is a very low probability that anyone will succeed. But when one does consider those, even just a few of them, I think the probability of success goes who weigh up immediately.

That's actually a very good point. Uh, that is a lot of work for a lot of people. And I know when I am consuming information IT is helpful to hear structure and systems and design is also helpful to hear actual reality example.

So maybe the next thing we can do here is I can just walk you through an entire set up in a program um considering folk sider ing bucket A B N C and maybe i'll save uh a little bit the explanation and will eliminate maybe the background and i'll just walk you through what this could look like all right. So I created a program which should run about a year. And the idea here is that this could be an ever Green system, so one could check off all the boxes that we've talked about.

So in general, we want to have three primary goals with exercise. So we want to look a certain way, whatever that means to you, we want to be able to perform a certain way well that that's for life goals like hiking and energy or sports goals or whenever. And then we want to be able to do that across our lifespan. okay.

So a program that gives you all the goals we talked about and a program that covers that health, combine that we referred to way back in some of our earlier discussions, which as a little bit of a recap, is what are the physical fitness parameters that we know are critical to maintaining both lifespan and wells span? And as a bit of a reminder, those are things like your grip strength, your leg strength, your total amount of muscle mass, you're actual speed and power so that you can catch yourself from a fall, your view to max and your physical fitness. So I want a program that is a little bit of all that as similar actually, and we're kind of crossing barriers between our three buckets.

So I need to be able to control my fat. I need to be able to have enough muscle, that muscle needs to have enough function, and I need to be able to maintain range motion so that I don't lose flexibility and get heard. And then I need to have a good vial to max as well as to be able to sustain energy over time.

So that was the goal of my progress. Now a couple of other things that we haven't chatted about, which are very important. You have mentioned, I think, on a previous podcast about the importance of sea light. This is something you've covered at one point.

I joke that i'll be going into the grave and they'll be shoveling there on to me, and i'll be telling people. But i'll tell you again now, which is to get five to thirty minutes of sunlight viewing as early in the day as possible, ideally from sunlight as it's called sunlight, or from bright lights of another kind if you cannot get sunlight, and also get that in the evening, and then avoid bright lights between the hours of ten P M. And four years, unless you do shift work, in which case, check out our episode shift work.

amazing. So we've got a little bit of jx position where people like I need to work out and do all the training, but then i'm also supposed to be outside. Okay, how do I blend those two things in my training program? cool.

So I checked that box as well. I built that in. The last thing here is we've talked about structured exercise. And just in this episode, we've really opened up into non structure exercise, hiking, sports, things like that. Well, one thing that is incredibly clear, and my colleague and friend, Tommy woods at the university, washed and published a fantastic paper very recently on the importance of proprioception in maintaining and staving off late onset dementia and apart kines.

Maybe just remind people propria tion .

yeah absolutely. So there are structured exercise and that's very important. But then there's also things like baLance and ordination and proper reception, meaning you're adJusting to stimulate coming in from the outside world.

So this stimulate be sound, could be light, could be smell, or in the physical case, the body IT is where you are at in space. So i'm feeling like i'm falling to left, therefore forging to correct and move back to the right. So you don't get this with doing things like a hat school on a machine.

You get this typically from being outside. So now you're smelling and seeing things and you're also not landing with your foot and exact same position on an even platform. We get this from things like sport.

Now i'm not only exercising, but i'm reacting to the outside world. The balls going over here, my oppone is going over there. So it's a very important, in my opinion, to have at least one session per week of exercise in which you are doing something that chAllenges proper reception, right?

So how do I fold all of these best practices into one drain program? That's not two hundred hours a week, seven days a week. That's what i've laid out to you make sense to cool.

Let me walk you through IT and then maybe will come back in the each individual category and you can ask questions about them. So the way that I think is best is to have a goal and have that goal be around eight to ten weeks long, like we've been talking about. So what I gave you is let's start off with corner number one of the year.

So perhaps january through march or so, that doesn't have to be this on. But as an example, you decide your goal is going to be to put some muscle mass on. So we gonna prioritize adding muscle.

okay? Now within that, you're gonna poking up adding some muscle, but we're also going to be sleeping more. We know we need extra recovery in this session and we need to go up in calories.

Now this happens to organic for a couple of reasons, but in that protocol, maybe we're going to do seven days or seven sessions a week of physical activity. Doesn't mean seven days, but maybe those sessions are something like, I will do one indoor sport. Uh, this could be baseball, could be any number of things, right? So I got my sport checked off in his indoors.

Why I am january to march. The weather is probably not great for most of the world, so i'm not gonna as much outside activity. I'm going to do weights maybe three or four times a week and then maybe two days a week.

I go for a long walk. okay. Again, we will come back and explain you why I made all these individual choices.

So you know, run that for the first quarter at the end of this quarter. And I take a delos week. Now this could be fully off.

Maybe this is when you scheduled vacation. Maybe this is backing off. Maybe you just keep your walks in and you spend the extra time on your family or work or whatever else need to do.

So we've booked up a little bit. We spent two thousand weeks adding some mass. Now we're going to transition into corner two, which is where we start to actually get lean.

This is actually a pretty standard. Body building template, which is you put on some mass first and then you get lean after that. So now we're going to get lean from April to june.

We're going to bring calories down a little bit. And now we're actually going to play in a hyclak c state somewhat the days time to get longer. So we're going to have more time to spend in the sun.

So we're gona shift a little bit from an indoor sport activity. Like the example I lies that early. I was two maybe stand up pala boarding or some other thing where you're actually getting your sport done, you're reacting use and property reception. But now you're getting that sun and there is well, because you have a greater opportunity act, you do so. And the weather probably is onna.

CoOperate with you more often than a wooden say february you then maybe gna pick a fitness or exercise class um you know any number of of routines where you're with multiple people and then two days week in addition to that, you're gona maybe live some lights, all right. So now we've out of some muscle. Now we've got lean and all this said were actually looking pretty good for the summer time.

Um interesting right corner three july to september will transition and will try IT into great car of vasco shape so will transition more into some high intensity and all type of stuff more frequently. Um we're going to maybe stay up in galleries now we spend a little bit of time hyper, then we went hyper. And now now we're going to go back to maintenance and and keep along.

We're going to continue to choose some outdoor sports. But maybe you change IT up, maybe you keep the same one. Maybe maybe now we switched out the golf, for now we pick a pick a ball, we play baseball and now we just do IT outside any number of things you can do, right? Um so may be we do a couple change IT up. You do that twice a week.

You're spending more time in the sun now um you look outside, you're seeing this great weather and you're not cooked up in a gym, but you're getting your physical fitness sin that's also going to be eating in your high intensity, your interval, your conditioning because you're doing more stuff like that rather than lifting energies. And then maybe you're actually going to do some track workouts. Maybe we'll do this on a bike or will do some hills friends outside any number of things and then we'll do that maybe twice a week and then we will still lift twice.

So we can not jump. The last quarter then is going to be october to december and we're onna transition there and do more pure cardiff askar fitness. Okay, because we're doing that, we're going to be working harder.

And remember, cardiff asked lar, training is generally expelling much more calories than lifting. So we're going to actually go up in calories. We're to return to that. And that works out kindle because I don't know if you know or not, but people tend to eat a little more calories from the months of, say, november through .

december yeah holidays and at least in northern hemisphere colder temperatures.

So maybe even we play with two workouts today here, we're trying to get really in shape or try to improve, improve our conditioning in our endings in multiple areas. We're going to actually transition back into an indoor sport. So maybe we're gonna do some kid boxing or G G U class or something like that.

We're going to maybe hit the cardio machine once or twice. Now we're hoping on the stair master aversa climate more, maybe getting result bike goes something like that, maybe hit some machines and do our lifting there. Maybe we have spent the rest the earlier part of the year on barbells and dumbbells with transition as some machines.

And then we still try to get outside and walk twice a week, okay? And week decreases are outside activity, but it's not necessarily a structure programs. You we got a fifteen minutes.

The weather is breaking a little bit. So let's walk, get outside and get to walk, alright. So that's the overall structure of everything. I would like to actually go back to the beginning now and kind of walk through each other things in detail and explain why I chose certain things. I've kind of given some him already, but I think it'd helpful that to walk back to the beginning and start there.

great. I love the overall structure. I have just a couple of questions. The idea of training, mostly for her hypocrisy, january through march make sense, followed by period from April through june, focusing primarily on fat loss, and then from july to september, speed and nerval type work, and in october to december.

you put to emphasize .

endurance type training. I thought for a moment that when we got to october, december, you were going to emphasize strength. And i'm wondering whether or not there's any incentive for training for strength, october decembers. So that when one arrives at the hypertrophy training, january through march, that much stronger. The idea being then there's more muscle to hold on to as one then tries to lose fat from April to june and then july through september, is the speed work or is july through september the speeds slashed? Power phase of the program.

the july through september would be more like your higher heart rate, learning to get all way up maximum exertion and then recovering.

October to december is long form and directs IT to long form.

right? So it's closer to that. A robot capacity stuff IT is closer to longer duration ation. And moving through that spectrum, you are a stood and pointing out that I didn't have your strength really in there.

You certainly could fold in in but quite, quite literally a useful uh, three months walking up in janine march that's gna bring some strike along the way so you should be fine there but you absolutely could alter any of these variables um if you wanted emphasize something more than the one so say you actually felt like you and the fitness testing and you identify actually you're in dance is pretty good but you're struggling maybe with a little bit strange and maybe a little bit of Laura muslim s, you could substitute ter three or quarter four and say one of those quarters will be strength and then i'll do all of my conditioning in another quarter. And what you've really done is the program is still fairly simple. You've just alter the priorities a little bit and therefore, you've altered the adaptation across the year.

And why this is really pant this temple let is meant to be something you can just run back year after year after year, and you make a subtle change like that. And now over the course of five, ten, twenty years, you're going to be in a fantastic spot at the end so you can make easy adjustments along the way as priorities pop pop, as goals pop up. But you're going to be in a position where everything is.

There's nothing that's going to be lagging behind. You'd ve been in a good spot. Most civil bases are covered to be pretty and have a good amount mother, and to be in great shape.

Two other questions won. Just a quick question. For sake of generating proper except of feedback during the entrance phase, is trail running a good, a good option? absolutely. Thinking back to the day's running cross country, is october, december your trail running totally training from dance?

okay? The ground is not super solid, which is even Better in this case, right? You're making more choices, trying enough fall on your face?

absolutely. And then you mentioned walking up, and I just wanted to highlight that there are some folks, myself included, while i'd like to add a little bit of muscle here there, i'm not interested in over reading to the point where I lay down a lot of body fat stores along with them. I think there there a lot of people out there are not necessarily interested in going go bulking up. I also my understanding of the the literature and tell me i'm wrong is that, well, there does need to be some sort of color surplus above what is required to maintain body way in order to build muscle that many people who try and quote a bulk up basically just end up expanding the size of their their cheeks and face along with their limbs and or so i'm not trying to poke on at them, but the idea of deliberately over eating at the point where a lot of body fat stores come along, I would imagine that would just make the April through june phase that much harder. And i'm not sure it's ever been studied directly, but I can imagine it's all that excuse me me all that healthy to bring along a lot of atopic st tissue um in once pursuit of of hypotheses yet you're .

absolutely correct. Uh we have not gotten into the nutritional details there but yeah thank you. Good clarification.

Point a couple of things. You're not going to be doing this very long. It's twelve weeks.

We're not going to be six.

Number two, just since we're here to clarify, the literature is ongoing in this area and there is actually uh, handful of studies that I I know coming soon. But in general, when I say hyperchloric here i'm referred to an increasing chloric intake above baseline by something like ten to fifteen percent. So if you Normally eat twenty five hundred calories throughout the day, you might add another two hundred and fifty four hundred.

I'm not doubling calories. I don't want you to be stuffing your face, hating food, feeling off all day and then putting on half of your way is fat and half your way is as muscle IT is just technically hyper clerk because you're eating more, which is an absolute requirement for most people to add muscle, right? Some folks who have a higher centage of body that and a low level of fitness training can actually get away with just being either ISO glor technically or even a little blow and still adding some muscle, others in some fat.

But for most folks, that's going to be chAllenging. So you're gonna want to be in a hyperchloric state. Another reason I put IT in here is because remembered people tend to make these extra calorie choices during this part of the year anyways. And so you're sort of playing in the life is why I chose that right is like, hey, you can't restrict calories all the time. It's really, really hard.

So maybe if we can put a color restriction during the faces of the year, that's a lot of IT easier and give you the freedom to have a little bit calories during the face the year when you're probably going to want to do that anyways, just make sure you're doing a style of training that supports that. So you're gonna trying to add muscle when you know you're going to be adding more calories, we're going to be trying to really push th Epace o n o ur c onditioning w hen w e k now w e're g oing t o b e e ating m ore c alories a nyways. And so that is actually, in fact, exactly why I shows those goals.

For those times of the year is because we're now playing into life a little bit more. But we against certainly do not want to be eating h two and access or were IT um causing some of the problems you manage. We just need to be eating a little bit more.

The last point here is the next face, April of june. We know we're going hyper clerk. So it's always kind of nice to go yet. We're going to go on a little bit of calorie deficit here, but it's really just these few months.

And it's okay because I ve spent the last six months where I wasn't restricting that much and then one actually where I got to eat little bit more and now cool, not hard for me to convince somebody that to go. We're going to bring the calories down right now are in a month and two months and and this can be this twelve or sixteen weeks or what are not being in there. So those who were some of the rational, uh, that I was thinking of what I decided to do that.

But thank you. That's a very important point in terms of hypothecated. It's not the dirty book. It's is not the excess of that a lot of folks will do.

And and uh just a final point for folks in the southern hemisphere, australians and south americans, we actually have a larger listenership in the southern missy. Of course, I just accordingly, even though the holiday months are still in november, december there, of course holidays or you're have got many of the major holidays are around november, december, but IT summer down there, just adjust accordingly. There's nothing holy about trying to achieve certain adaptations at certain times of year. It's more about trying to eliminate bottle next defenders, as you mentioned, and it's really about the sequence.

So if we go back to that first court, we going to try to add some mass for the reasons I just described, right? Um it's also tends to be pretty motivating. You will start the year off. You're going to want to train and get to excited because of your new year's resolution and you're gonna sty results immediately.

We've talked about this in some of the previous episodes, the nice part about hybridity training as you see your muscles growing right now, where the enduring stuff tends to have a little more of a delayed gratification. So i'm going to give you a win early, kay. Now we're also gonna sleep ing more because we know and maybe we'll get in this in the future episode, that sleep is absolutely critical to recovery and critical to grow muscles.

So you're gna emphasize sleep more during this part of the year also because the sun is very low, it's harder to sleep for a lot of folks longer when the sun is out for longer, especially you don't have a perfect black outcry. And so you're just like trying to play with restrictions. Life gives you and optimize your scenario.

So the sons probably not out very often and especially depending on where you live, if you're anywhere like I grew up in the pacific northwest, it's going to be dark and grain gloomy most the day. So it's not hard to convince you to go to sleep a little bit more often. So we'll do that.

That's also again, why I chose an indoors sport that activity you can not shout from the foot um being in the gym when it's cold and crap outside is is not thought hard to convince yourself to do so you're going to be lifting your weights, say four times a week and then again getting some outside time in the form of a walk so that you can do at middle of work if you have to or catching twenty minutes here there whatever needs to be um the chances of you missing that walk are little and you'll still get some outside time you can you've talked about the importance of getting sunlight and even if IT is overcast, so you can still nail all those boxes and be in a pretty gest spot up into that quarter. okay. So moving on the quarter to then April to june.

A lot of people want to look good during the summer months. You're more likely to be outside. You're more likely to have your shirt off because it's all because your application are going to beach. So let's play into that a little bit.

Let's let people look a little bit Better if that's what they determined to be looking Better during the months when they're more likely to have that you are also more likely to have things like weddings, uh, over the summer time, people don't get married often in the winner. And so people want to look good these events. So let's play into what a lot of people already want, and let's help you get leaner.

Not a lot of holidays that involve eating during that phase. So you're not gonna like you're missing out on a tone life outside of maybe of a few smaller holidays in that face. The days are getting longer and so we're going to choose to get in the sun more often.

We can start getting a ten Better. We can start getting ready for summer. And so that is why we exchanged our indoor sport for outdoor sport, surfing, hiking, a cycling outside, whatever the thing is you want to do.

There's tons of a kite boarding like the skate boarding. There you go you know skating a little bit ah whatever IT needs to be. So we'll do that once a week or so.

And then I actually threw in a fitness class here. And there's a couple of reasons. One now is sort of nice to take the pressure programing off.

It's also nice to if you're been lifting by yourself to get in there and lift to somebody else. It's also nice to now have some social interaction. Uh, the game of vacation, the group, the scoring self that happens in witness classes is very, very powerful.

IT tends to be somewhat fleeting, so IT won't last for a long time for some people, others that does. And so if you pepper this thing in and you know you're going to join this activity class even if it's not great and the program design isn't perfect, it's fine for ten weeks. In fact, you may may really, really enjoy IT.

And also again, gives you IT gives you something new to think about music is on you're adding your house. If you've lifting in your house, you're a different part of the gem, the schedules little tighter, so you can just go work out whatever one you got a sort of show up when the class is going and you probably find that you just love IT. You also get some social interaction, right, which is something that's also very important that we haven't really discuss yet if you're up playing basketball e by yourself or what not.

So this is just another thing i'm trying to fold in that still allows you to check out multiple boxes of things that are healthy for you. You've had episodes on the importance of social connection and action. We talked about that in the quad breakdown of making sure you have relationship time and things like that.

So throwing in a fitness class and just doing honest something quite different, uh is is pretty fun. But then still keeping two days a week, we're doing a traditional strength training thing so you have some quality control there. Lastly, you can also then make sure you're hitting any specific movements or muscle groups that are very important to so you don't get to control that in your fitness class.

But now you can least do the gym and make sure you hit them also group that, that you have an interest in IT. So now we're we're feeling pretty good, are rolling in the summer. We're pretty lean.

We're getting out the sun a lot. We're bringing calories down to live IT, and we probably are feeling pretty happy. Were also not burn out. We've got a lot of fun things, uh, and we've checked a lot of the boxes off for for long development. We had a combination of specificity but actually selection, but we also folded in just a little bit of variation.

So we don't have to worry about overuse injury of doing the same machines, the same left month and months and months after month and slowly wearing down something if our technique isn't perfect. okay. So when I am, we're going to go into a quarter three, which is the summer months basically up here at least delight to september with transition is been a while since we done some condition, right?

So we may have lost a little cardy respiratory fitness. We may have you know not feeling greatly more maybe energy throughout the day after starting lake down. So we're going to get in shape.

We're going to push our heart rate high and we're going to bring the the calories back up the summer time um or to july other holidays like this where eating is involved. Maybe you're going to sporting events and and things like that. Our sport choices is often going to be uh outdoors.

But in fact what you'll notice is is i've wrapped the sport choice after twice a week and in fact I will encourage you to do two different types of exercise. And one of the primary reasons for that is to spend more time outside, a chAllenge we often see with people exercises gone, man, it's so nice outside. I can go sit the gene for forty five minutes, right? I don't have that much free time.

And then he remains over here telling me I need to get direct sunlight more. And like, how might to fit the scent? Do exercise outside.

Enjoy IT if you live down here like us, he takes sunshine for granted. But a lot of people I know, it's like it's only nice for tune. Hf, months of the year, get outside.

So let's push more of our fitness training to outdoor activities. Um these sports can be intense or not, right? IT could be, uh, go out and swim heart in the ocean.

You going to do open ocean swimming instead of swimming the pool indoors or whatever the case may be. So we're going to gave ourselves more of a priority of being outside looking. We've look pretty good or little ten, and we're enjoying all the benefits of training outside and the lack of structure.

Still, we have structure, but not so specific like the machines and the and the weight to give us. Maybe even now we're doing some crack workouts. So now we can do something like sprint the straight away, lock the corners and we don't have to can do our conditioning on the same stare, master air machines or or wherever we're on.

So we're going to enjoy himself like that. We're going to be athletic, were going to run. We're ongoing to move.

We haven't talked about that yet, right? Everything is really been about sort of structured exercise. Well, now we're going to do some spring work.

We're going to get out see that, which is really important human quality that I think is important to not like this actually ability to spend. So we'll do that and then we will still make sure we lift twice a week. For the same reason, I talked about the previous phase.

So we make sure we have some quality control there. We maintain some of the muscle that we built in the quarter before we don't lose too much strength. There is very good literature to suggest strength maintenance can be done in as little as five sets per week for a very long time, really up to eight plus weeks if you do a little bit.

So you you're touching and enough where you're not going to get really, really weak. But we what you wouldn't want to do is go twelve over sixteen weeks where you've lifted no weight and maybe you got a great shape, but you're going to feel very weak k after that. So maybe that number come out of one time a week if you really wanted IT to, but one to two days a week, we are lifting the big exercises, the muscle groups and movements of interest, and you're good to go.

Then lastly, we rule in our final quarter, which is october to december, and we're gonna really get in great shape. That son is starting to come down. We're rolling into the holidays where there is getting worse.

We may have other outdoor activities we want to do, like in my case, are going on a hunching three. You have some travel conferences, whatever the case may be. And so we're going to choose an indoor sport, and I love combat sport.

So at the example I you earlier was like get to or you know maybe you just transition your baseball inside or your pick ball comes inside or whatever happens to be and you're still going to have that twice a week. Then maybe instead of the track work out outside, you do that same work out indoors now back on some sort of machine or something like that. Our weights are actually now down to once a week because we're really pushing th Epace o n c ardiff a scp.

We're doing once a week to maintain IT to not lose and get too far behind. But we're really want to drink, bring up our view IMAX. We want to bring up our fiction ency, uh, our cardiac output and everything like that.

And we're still going to now walk twice a week so we get something outside. And I talked about why, again, it's nice to have that flexibility not having to train outside because now you got warm up and do all those things. We just get out, get to walk in.

He stood at the outdoor experience. So we run the entire thing and then you should start back the next year, ideally again at the end of every quarter. You take a week off.

Well, that is a true full week off, which I am fully supportive. I mean friends only talking about four of weeks a year, that's absolutely fine um or couldn't be a slight the loaded week if you wanted to be. So we shouldn't run into too many issues of overuse.

We have a lot of variety. We get a lot of movement patterns in because we're mixing in sport with machines and dumbbell. We're mixing in social interaction, were mixing in the sun.

We're mixing and enjoyment. We're mixing in fat loss strengths hypothesi some cardio askin durance. Were mixing in calories in high. We're mixing a little bit of calories low. And we're trying to hit as many these notes as possible.

If you also wanted to cut each one of these a little bit short and repeat your fitness testing at the end of every quarter, you could I would probably recommend doing that at least once a year, perhaps doing IT, maybe the third week of december. So so you run that testing that you're last week of training, then you get to go on your vacation break. You come back the beginning the year, you will got new goals, new targets, and you go if you want to repeat twice, you do the same sort of thing at the end june.

It's fine. I know these out s quarters, which is generally to a week with one back off week, but if you wanted to make IT nine weeks in a testing week and then a back off for ten weeks, IT is fine. Is is closing up.

So the last little thing I want to say is let's assume you're doing the twelve weeks and you're gonna have a back off week at the end of the twelve weeks. I would actually still then recommend having at least one back off week half with you. So he would look like this five weeks hard where you're progressing, sing you going up, up, up, up, up every week, or either increasing volume tense, you like we talked about few minutes ago.

Then week six, delos, go down a seventy percent for me in a tensity. Come back, go hard for five more weeks. And now week twelve is your true off week for you. Again, take gold thing off. If you do that, you now have four weeks year or you're totally off.

You have four weeks a year where you're really backing down and you just have five week segments all year around where you're just going to push your heart for five weeks, you're going to break, going to reset, you going to transition a little bit. Now as I started this conversation off with that, there are many ways you could structure your training program throughout the year and hit those prime ages we talked about of looking fantastic, feeling amazing and being able to do that your entire life. All I can tell you though, is I know this model works because we've done this a lot with our clients in our rapid health optimization program.

And this spends everything from twenty five year old folks who are competing in the boston marathon to a lot of individuals who never exercise before, who maybe have done a little bit exercise. In fact, it's quite literally all three, the buckets you laid out. We've had clients in all of those areas, both men and women, Young and old, and we've had a tremendous amount of success transforming our lives using a very similar model to what I just light up.

I find that overall structure to be immensely informative, and i'll tell you why in the context of a number of examples with myself, although that's the least important of them, Frankly, but examples of family members of mind and friends of mine who undertaken exercise training programs, but that haven't varied the program so much.

And here again, I the person who really loves to swim, they're a low barrier of entry to the pool or to the ocean they have in the water. I am not one such, but I like being in the water, but I don't motivate to drive to the pool, want a bike to the pool or to get into the ocean. Often once I do IT, I enjoy IT, but for me it's running and lifting weight, and has been for a very long time.

I have a family member, close member, who doesn't really like critical exercise, but loves dances and dancing, going out. Dancing, yes, but dances classes amaze particular, really enjoys that loves to be distracted from the fact that she's doing exercise and just really enjoys IT actually is a very good danser despite the fact that she's related to me and on and on. There are many examples, I think, of folks that fall into the different bins that we talked about earlier, but that also attend to default towards a given structure of training one way and doing that throughout the year.

I can tell you right now that i'm personally going to modify my schedule according to this four quarters per year. IT actually works because I ve mostly been on the quarter system and academics for a long time. I was that a university had a semester system once, but this quarter system is actually the one that we follow academically.

So that's one reason why it's A A natural fit for me. I confess that I typically don't vary up the proportions of endurance to resistance training. I tend to keep those about three and three across the week, three resistance training sessions, three let's call them cardio sessions, but each one designed to achieve a different adaptation.

And i've now um all through those even further based on your the recommendations in this episode and previous episodes. But what I have not done is to really think about the load and to really stick to the structure that I set out to accomplish across the year. On the topic of d load.

For me, the d load has been when I get overwhelmed with work or i've gotten sick. I don't tend to get sick that often, but every once, and i'll get knocked back with a cold or a flu once every three or four years, I seem to really get hambard with a fever inducing something rather. And then i'm bedroom for a couple days and then i'm back at IT and I tend to come back rather slowly.

And that tends to be my week off. But i'm beginning to wonder whether or not part of the reason I hit those streets of you being overwhelmed by sickness or by stress is that I have not done A D load period. So one of the the things that i'm going to immediately implement is a period the load according to the the program that you described.

And i'm also going to start matching my specific goals for each quarter with time of year. I don't think i've done that, and it's not because I live in california. And by the way, folks, there are temperature variations and amount of light across the day variations in california.

Well, although they are not as dramatic as they would be either than the pretty right, of course, someone listeners are the equation. So they have the opposite of in any event, i'm i'm definitely going to do that. I'm going to started incorporating regular delude periods and I am going to be very dedicated, very disciplining about sticking to a program for three months devoted mainly to a hypertrophy. Then a three months program devoted to that lost a program to um you know a robic output and then one devoted to endurance, although I I must is very attempting for me to do a very specific straight dedicated portion because I I don't tend to be particularly strong k but i'm not particularly strong. So I might I might consult with us to how I could very endurance and strength in any event.

I love the idea of a microstructure and I love the idea of d loads in anticipation of being able to go further the long run in terms of results, i'm hoping this next year because we're just on on the cup of a new year, will be the first year in which I don't find myself getting some bugger virus or whatever IT happens to be from time to time and having to back off on training for that reason. And that promises a question, and it's something that I want to get into in more detail with you when you describe recovery coming episode. But couple of quick questions.

Maybe there are some short or shortish answers you could provide if i'm not feeling well, like I really had a poor nights sleep, maybe just two to four hours of sleep for whatever reason. Trainer don't train. That's the first question.

Second question is, if i'm starting to feel a little bit of a throat ticket and I mean that phase of denial like I don't get sick, i'm not getting sick, I would i'd be Better off bundled ling up some hot liquids, getting into bed, sleeping a little bit more, etta, and protecting myself against that? Or would I be Better off training? And if i've and then the third question is if i've always served to a bug, but it's not a severe bug, I don't have elevated body temperature, so no fever.

I'm not hacking up but not not productive call for anything like that, but i'm still just kind of not well head codiss you know sort of thing comes to mind and its not seasonal allergies train or don't train, leaving aside the point of whether or not know you in a position IT get anyone else sick because obviously that's a bad idea OK so lack asleep, I would say a thirty to forty percent of one's typical sleep the previous night train or no train, starting to feel like one might be getting ill. Um and then the third category is um coming back from from Young sec OK. Thanks, and sorry for the extended question, but I want to make sure there was enough detail there. exciting. These are three comments in area.

We are going to cover that in the recovery conversation that's next uh in detail. And I will give you very specific guidelines, and we will have a plenty of time to go to that. The quick answer is IT comes back to what phase of training are in no to walk through each scenario if IT is a chrome night of sleep and I am in a phase of train in which we are trying to cause adaptation.

I have a lot of space in my schedule, and i'm really using this time to make progress because I know coming up soon, my schedule change and my time to train will go down. I'm still training. I might use a bunch of tricks that we have for feeling Better instantaneously.

We call these little hacks. These are acute hacks. These are not chronic cache. I'm going to push the base if IT is really close to a delos week, say it's wednesday, and I started my dealer next week or this is not one bad night of sleep. This has been four about nicer sleep at last five days. This has been six kind of chrome nize over the course of last nine. And you're starting to see larger pattern, and that's a different answer.

So the question we're going to ask ourself is, is this acute or is this a tendency or actually a chronic thing? If it's a cute and we're close, we're gonna train through IT, if it's acute and we this is not a face training or we're trying to really push, then maybe we we back off a little bit. If it's the opposite though, we need to probably make some changes and give ourself some recovery.

This may include anything from a moderate training session. Maybe i'm onna, go in the sona and sit through that and do some breathing drills in some mobility stuff. Oh great, great.

Maybe i'm gonna go to the gym and and ride the bike at fifty percent art, right? Something restored of like that is a little energy IT doesn't beat you down. That's probably where we're learning.

Um if you're feeling sick and you think it's it's coming, i'm probably going to do option to as well, which is some sort of restoration training. Again, this tends to be moderate. Could be weights, could be any of the stuff.

Maybe you're going to go out for your swim, but we're not going to push past probably about seventy percent we can absolutely induce and you al suppression with excessive training and so you may want to a walk out of that. Um the last case, which was I think uh phase number three, you said there which is are like I got a pretty nearly cold right now. Am I going to train most of the time for most people? I'm just going to say to shut IT down, get out of there, right?

Um if you're not going to be able to get productivity done there, you may be Better off either going and slept, catching up on work, doing other stuff so that the next time you go to train you don't feel behind and we can give a good solar effort for. So I know other people who will train right through IT. Um I tend not to be totally Frank.

I if i'm feeling kind of junky, i'm i'm really not onna train. I may actually probably uh do some hot hot water emerging so back jaki things like that. I I actually like those Better than I like .

sona if one is ill or you just like them .

Better than one generally .

both actually oh my first person ever ever met or come on this podcasts say you like bazin jcc I more than saw .

yesterday um I may even do size probably not a tunnel because you can you get to be careful there that's a big dresser. And if you're already over the line, you may be adding passer or I may, I may go sleep. I'm i'm feeling very, very, very sleepy.

And sometimes, depending on what kind of a bug you get, that can happen. H, I will just sleep and I might be the best choice you have. If that means you kick the cold half a day earlier than that, then you just won in the aggregate. So um that those are probably it's a little bit inside of the algorithm that i'm running with those things.

Those are highly informative answers. Thank you. And I look forward to our discussion about recovery so that we can go into even more depth on how to recover.

The last thing I do want to say here is kind of going back to our quarter system. The examples I gave with the poking up, losing fat and getting in the Better fitness and cardio, ascribe the end. Those were these samples.

Friends, please don't take that literally. If you want to emphasize strength more, put in some more strength. If you want to emphasize a different one of our nine adaptations, great do that too. If if you're somebody who is has a lot of body fat to lose, then maybe put that for two consecutive sessions or every other, you can modify them.

Um we've talked about nine very specific training updates as well as then fat loss I only gave you for, which is just meant to be a sample that you can roll in or out but use those prior to adjust that system according to what is important for you. Now five years and in forty five years down the line for whatever that may be. So you are absolutely free to modify the order.

You're absolutely free to modify the primary outcome and then adjust the specifics within each quarter based upon what is needed to do to optimize that outcome. Uh, I think maybe one more tool we can offer people is maybe giving the individual week a little bit structure. So the system laid out was sort of like months by mountain. Maybe we can layout, say, a three day week workout programme and a four day a week program that was still hit some of the same well rounded adaptations that probably covers maybe not individualized per bucket that we've talked about A B and c, but it's gonna cover seventy five eighty percent of what we need to occur in all three buckets and then you can use that last twenty five percent uh for your individual goal or specialization. So um maybe we can jump in in .

that next great let's here IT.

The first one I want to give you is just a basic three days split um that again same idea is a well rounded to exercise program. I actually wrote this all in an article ah that is on X P T S websites. So perhaps we can link directly that I will just jump you string to the answer.

You can read more about why and details in that article if you'd like. But ah this is day one, day two, day three. You can do these days where you split them up actually having twenty four hours between or you could do this back to back IT doesn't necessarily matter in this particular case.

Say, day one, you start off and do a little bit of speed and power and then you may finish that was a little bit of hydro y. Now, if you want to to gain more speed and power, you just do more of IT. If you want to maybe just do a little bit to touch IT and you really want to gain some muscle, you would do more vantis there.

So the temple let can stay the same. And you would just increase the amount of either adaptations, the speed and power stuff or the hyper tree based on how hide is in your priority list. Those are combined together because, as we talked about earlier, they don't necessarily to interfere with each other.

You would do the speed and power stuff first because IT wouldn't hamper hypertext. e. If you did the hypertrophy than that work out, he would probably compromise your speed power. In that case, you would actually not be getting out page. So day one, you do that, and that could be eight one even to work out total, or at two and a half hour up to you.

Then you would come back, maybe the next day or two days later, whatever you d like to do in your second day of exercise, you would start off with A A pure strength, uh, protocol. And you would finish that with what i'm calling is to higher heart rate. So this could be something like our antrobus, a capacity stuff IT could be the a robot capacity, something where you're getting up to close to high heart rate.

That could be those twenty second birth that could be in ninety second birth, five minute. My repeat, anything you like you could just sort of plugged and play this in. You're getting to a spot now where you've had a little bit speed, a little bit strange, little bit hypocrisy, and you've touched the high heart rate.

So you checked off most the boxes already into sessions. Our last session then would be more than a steady state. Longoria and dance. And so uh three day we explain like that is gonna be a pretty nice set up for the average person.

So this could be a monday, wednesday, friday, tuesday, thursday, saturday. What's happening on the .

intervening days? Totally off, if you want to, to be. So I set this up as the best I can give you any three days.

Okay, great. If you have more, we could certainly improve IT. But this was my worst case scenario. I've got other things in my life the most I can do for exercises three days week.

And given that it's three days, very how approximately how long are each of these workouts going to last?

I would do whole body exercises for almost all that. I would do your full body parts. And I think you could certainly finish that in forty five minutes of work time, a little bit of time to warm up.

Some downed regulation at the end, you could be in and out of that gym. And certainly under sixty minutes, the real ladies, you could probably be out of there under fifty minutes. The total working time can be thirty, thirty five once you get going.

So as three days uh, as you pointed out, probably more work for week is going to be Better in terms of um maxim ing goals, of esthetic goals and performance enhancing goals and a lunch levity goals. So I mean, the numbers that i've heard that is that we should all try to get somewhere between one hundred and fifteen and probably more like one hundred and eighty to two hundred minutes of zone to cardio per week minimum. But as I recall, you consider zone to cardio so low intensity that just walking around and is qualified as really zone one's to cardio yeah not to .

take us too far off track, but if I was actually useful to differentiate what I consider to be exercise and physical activity, so physical activity is out for a walk. IT is using a walking trade mill. And while you're at work, IT is a you know parking father in the parking lot and taking more steps.

These are all important. And what's clear, you are not going to reach likely optimal health by only exercising hard and sitting around the other twenty three and half hours today. So it's very, very important whether you want to do that in the form of zone one or zone two and hit thirty minutes a day, uh, various organza will say things like that.

You need to have thirty minutes a day of moderate low intensity exercise. I don't really care you. You can combine like that if you want um what you don't want to do is just physical activity all my which is almost always going to be like zone one, the maybe zone too. You also don't want to go the other inspections um which is again, like I left hard three days a week and then what to do the rest of time nothing that's not an ultimate either. And so I guess the system I I walked you through here or the example rather I walked you through his um you would need to maybe suppliant that with being physically active if you work ah say you're nurse and you're on your feet, you're moving up and down.

You you're probably actually covering a decent amount of your physical activity because you might be at fifty thousand steps a day if you were sitting in front of your computer and you do this same three days split, you would probably need to go ready to make sure your adding a bunch more steps. And so you might need to add several hours of walking to hit that hundred and fifty hundred and eighty minutes a week of physical activity because the program I laid out is, you know, if you're doing really forty five ministry is a week, maybe sixty minutes at best you hit one eighty germany, sixty minutes times three hundred eight week. So you might actually needed then throw and maybe some more specific walks so you could do that a number of ways could be, again, actual structure exercise IT could be simply i'm going to do attended walk three times today. IT could be the exercise snacks that we talked about in a previous epsom. So there's lots of ways to engage in more physical activity, but to me, those are different often times and structured exercise.

I think many people will appreciate that you put out there for us a three day week protocol because many people simply don't have more time to exercise. They're putting emphasis on these other bins in the quarter. And and Frankly, those other bins are very important as well.

So wonderful that people can check off some critical boxes for aesthetics and performance. And longest with three days of work or workout per week. I should say.

what are some other schedules that people .

can follow if they're willing to dedicate a bit more time toward their fitness?

sure. If you wanted to do another sample of maybe a 4 day week。 And again, to clarify this, this is not really happy.

You said that this is this, a four day a week of structured exercise. This would not account your the activity moving around, which everybody should be. absolutely.

Maybe this is something like they one, you're gone to do a strength training session and will stay in the five to ten or so repetition range. A little bit strength, a little bit of hypocrisy. You've checked off a couple of boxes, probably whole body, so you get all the body parts covered or close.

We're looking at generally multi joint exercises could be accommodation of barbilles, freeway, igh, ts, bds machines. Anything like that would be sort of day one, you could come back the very next day or you could wait twenty four hours, but the second day of your exercise would be maybe your longterm. And this is actually sort of somebody how you set up.

It's you do a little bit the inverse. What you're kind of saying is i'm probably going to be a little bit sore from day one, and I don't have any free body parts that aren't sore. So instead of trying to do another left or something, i'm just gonna a put in some restored of longer duration of same exact principles for alteration we just talked about.

Could be a swim, could be any number of things, could be your sport IT, could be your out and to go ride the bike and go for a jog in the sun, what whatever you'd like to do um if you're feeling Better, maybe that's little harder, longer. If you're feeling pretty beat up from the day before, maybe that's a little bit shorter and solar, you can modify IT, then maybe you take the next day off and that's open. Your third day of exercise is now instead of being at five to ten repetition range for your lift, you do something like eleven to thirty raps range.

Also, this could be exchanged for something more like body weight, more musk lear enduring cyp osp s so this is a great day. Maybe as yoga, maybe IT is, uh, a gymnastics thing you're working on or any of many other styles of train that are not lifting weights, but they're not just walking in hiking. So that could be a dies or evaluate anything like this.

We're going to get some mosquito to burn in there, but probably not any additional weight outside the body weight. Or if IT is, it's fairly minimal. You know five, ten sort of fifteen pounds.

Something like that would be nice, could also be done a circuit so we could hit our high, high rate. And if IT hit the moscow enterance in their group activity class, might be nice here, even maybe something like a spin class or a dance class, all these things could be great. And then maybe you even finish that with ten minutes of some light weights to hit the body part you say, didn't get.

So maybe to the dance glass. And then you finishing, you do ten minutes of upper body sets of thirty to make sure you get on an ice pump there, because your legs probably got some work during the dance glass, which our everybody didn't see. BaLance the system out a little bit.

So all body parts got a little bit of moscow and dance, your heart rate got really high, came back down, and you sort of cheat both of those boxes. Now is important to remember the hypocrisy episode. Doing sets of, say, fifteen plus repetitions per set is as effective as doing sets of five to ten or twelve th for project gaining muscle.

It's not effective though, foreign games. So you wouldn't want to do this only because you really be doing nothing to improve your muscle strength and you want to make sure that, that box is tick at least a little bit. Then again, you could take the day off after this, or you could roll ride in your fourth exercise day, which would be your last exercise session of the week, and you would do something more like medium intensity.

So this is a little bit higher intensity than our second day. And this could be something like, you know, shadow boxing or eating a heavy bag. IT could be a little bit of higher intensity intervals, but not all the up.

So maybe this is you're gonna do a uh, one minute on, one minute off on the bike, but you're only going to go to like eighty five ninety percent heart rate. And then instead of going off during that one minute, you drop IT down to fifty percent. So you would actually look like thirty minutes of straightness, but you would have a little bit roling intensity as opposed to staying really nice and record restorable.

It's going to be some work there and you would finish IT with something like five to six minutes total of max heart rate stuff, which lines up perfectly with that number you actually I created in our in our enduring episode of hitting six minutes total per week maximum heart rate or close. So you could wrap that all of kind of into one session. You could do those in the inverse order.

Third, warm up a few minutes, whether you wanted to thirty second birth or a minute birth or straight five minutes. This is A A protocol. I like to use a ton on the bike.

He is simply a good warm up, ten minutes solid, warm up, recover. And then i'm going to go five minutes and cover as much justices I can in five minutes. Brutal IT is running le, and it's amazing. And you like you get a lot done in five minutes, ten minutes on the back of that is a very gradual bring back to earth there.

I actually in that case, I don't need to do down regulation breathing because i've ten i've spent ten minutes actually coming way back down and the last two minutes or so of that is very deliberate, five second in hill of the nose, five second and sale of the nose when i'm barely just moving and even have been in a pretty good spot. So that again, time wise could easily be done in thirty minutes and you be rounded off there. So the nice part about this four day weeks play as well as the three day explain is IT does give you a little bit of flexibility.

And so what I mean is maybe monday, your plan is to do the day one left and then any number of things popped up in life, you shipped back to tuesday rather than saying like monday is leg day and also something happened. You miss like that. It's just you're doing these things in order and you would like to get off for done in a seventy span.

But if IT doesn't happen fine the next day you get to workout, you just go right back into the next work out and IT doesn't matter what day they land on exactly um for the three day routine. That works very nice because the assumption there as you really only have time for three workouts a week. And so that sort of implicit is there's probably some chaos happening in the schedule a little bit.

And you don't you don't really have the ability to lock in three days, but week a doesn't not the case. You can go. But we're trying to listen to the pain points that people have with exercise and see if we can give them some solutions for those.

Several things about this program are attractive to me. One of them you just mentioned, which is that by not rigidly attaching individual workout, just two specific days of the week, in theory, could say, okay, was I didn't get them much sleep last night. I don't feel I know that they'll say what what is feel, but I don't feel recovered or like i'm going to get that much out of the workout tomorrow.

So i'm or today so i'm just going to push IT forward today and the ability of slide workouts forward or back by a day think is incredibly valuable um if for the consistency sake, I also really like this idea of some of the long duration work coming a day after hitting the strength and a bit of hypertrophy work. So this would be the the day two one thing that i've experienced over and over is that if i'm very sore and a given muscle group, especially my legs doing some low intensity cardio, um when the night it's a jog or on the bike um IT typically for me it's a jog or even even skipping ropes and then walking skipped rope walking does seem to dissipate the series. I'm sure there's a mechanism of mechanism for everything, Frankly, but I like that arrangement. And then I also like this idea of making sure that there is a workout for muscular endurance because I feel like unless i've been stuck without a good gym or i've decided to specifically train body way exercise, which I did a few years ago, I got really excited about some of people. Sut solan great is a big um .

the naked .

warrior um which doesn't involve training naked, although I suppose you could if you want IT IT was really about no weight um and involved building up to pistol squad and one on push ups and things of that sort um even doing pull ups on doors and i've discovered that some door frames are much stronger than others in hotels I just accidentally I caused him the image there. But in any case, muscle and dance I think is a really interesting one that I planned to incorporate into my schedule but that is um I think is one that often overlooked unless people really have an aversion to weight and into machines.

You're right now IT shouldn't because it's pretty low hing and fruit, you don't need a lot of equipment for IT. Typically IT doesn't hurt that bad. You don't often get that sort out of IT and you're gona feel a nice wonderful pump afterwards. So it's a great model. And as we discussed many times now, IT is quite effective at hypocrisy.

Yeah I also I don't know if they fit specifically with moscow dance, but if you look at the the physics, for example, in rock climbers, I mean, they have to me, of course, they have usually the experienced climbers have um pretty remarkable um body composition. They tend to be in and lie and flexible all those things um that many people spie to. But the other thing is their development always looks succeedin ly baLanced.

You don't really tend to see climbers. They're like overdeveloped in the torso and underdeveloped in the arms or overdeveloped in the arms despite all the climbing and underdeveloped in timely in the other little of limit. That's true for women and men.

It's not A A sport that I participated. But um IT seems like what they're doing is essentially muscular and dance standing. yes. Yeah so there there's really something there to be valued. Um um so that's a four day a week schedule with but off days or rest days inserted um as needed and then just continuing for those that are a bit more committed to their fitness and want to do a five or six days week program, would you recommend just um collapsing some of the off days, paying more attention to recovery and and cycling through more quickly?

absolutely. You could combine that and just run that either one of those programs. So you could run that three day week program back to back to get that down six .

days ah so day one speed power hypo chapa. Day two strength work with eleven hard rate in the roof capacity and day three endurance and then just and then just cycle through again.

Yes, you take day four off of the week and then you go back again. So we would be having the six days of exercise one day off, and you beginning everyone of those adaptations in multiple times a week. That is almost exactly how I would set up a six day week program.

great. I love the the elegance in the simplicity of that in the throw ness of IT because IT checks off so many, if not all, of the nine major adaptations to exercise that we've been talking about these episodes.

And I suppose the one thing that I want to highlight and impose this also as a question is that early in our discussions in a previous episode, you mention that so much of what people think of and apply as IT relates to resistance training is borrowed from body building and hyper trip y training specifically, which typically involves getting close to failure. Failure sometimes even involving rest, pause, where you hit failure than way down for you. Section and read these high techniques, you know, accenting the negative, so called the syntax. It's said a in hearing about these protocols of three day a week or four day a week, six day a week, it's very clear to me that if one is not careful to omit that kind of thinking and suddenly is taking their strength work and speed work to failure or is pushing too hard on muscular and dance to the point, we are just grinding out that very last push up on every set that the amount of sourness and the amount of recovery that results from these are workouts might start to cause progress issues.

So one thing that's in the back of my mind is, as you've describe these programs, is that even though some of them are very brief or involve a minimum of time commitment, in particular three day week, but also the four day week schedule, that there is A A discipline involved in making sure that you stick to the work out that you're supposed to do that day and not um go ham as they say and just throw in a couple extra sets of a by set goals and try set pushes because you wanted do that. You thought you could maybe you could get away with that, but you have to come back pretty quickly and do some serious um meaning devoted speed and power work and or strength work. And if you haven't been disciplined about not doing certain forms of exercise, I can see how the whole thing could kind of crash quickly.

And one could think of this is just too much work or it's it's not for me. yes. So this I suppose now where the question comes, which is um what what are some of the key points that people need to keep in mind when they embrace a program? How originally do they need to stay attached to know today's in during state i'm just doing in dant today's strength day, i'm just doing strength work. I'm not onna take things to absolute failure beyond failure.

I am absolutely happy with anyone modifying any example programs however they would like to. My only recommendation for the question you just post would be set your program and then if you're going to make a change, fine, but that is a change to your program. In other words, don't just make decisions every single day and make changes.

If you're doing that, you miles will not have a program. And as we described earlier, there is clear evidence that having a program is Better than not regardless of the effectives of the program. And so my general comment to that is, okay, fine, a day or two images modifications, no problem or in the situation now what is like your basically changing the work out every day, you go, then we just need to read, write a new program.

We need to assess what that because we need to have some structure, look, reality, if IT is I change the programing, i'm going to do the day of often because of any numbers situations I just don't feel like IT I will estimated today. Um we talk a little bit and previous episode about auto regulation, which is a style of of purification and program design, which you're adJusting based on high actually feeling that day, but with some specific structures so you're going to take some measurements that day. And just so other regulation is a very, very effective.

You just need to make sure that that otto was died. And in the words, is that because your body actually needed something different? Or is that because you're now just getting little bit lazy now, you just not feeling like IT today? So there's a little bit of an impossible line to draw there, both scenario, a real gray area.

A lot is real in the moment. And so you just need to be a little bit aware of having some reality check, listening to your body but then also being like, k, no, i'm talking to you. I'm telling you this is a plan.

We're going to do this in staying within IT. IT is going to be chAllenging to progressive the overload and therefore get a high likelihood ccea training program. If you're just making decisions and changed the program right before you work out, you're probably not you're probably going for most people, you're probably going to choose less or off more so than you choose more.

Um now having said that, there are more than a few clients that have come through our programs where they use more. always. They have said they add an exercise, they add another workout and that can be OK.

But we're going to attract various markers on them. And if we see these things consistently going down, we're going to identify whether they are, which phase of this overtraining thing will talk about next there actually in some faces, i'm okay. Some of them are not.

And we're seeing certain things happen physiologically. We're gona make a conversation. Were also then going to really think carefully about why are you making this choice? Do you feel like the training is enough? Okay, great. Let's modify IT.

Then are you not making progress? Or are there some other reasons why you're doing this? Obviously, about a psychologist with therapies, but there are clearly situations in which folks and those themselves with far too much exercise for reasons that are not because it's productive to their training our goals.

And if such case are, we would probably bring in somebody that specializes in those areas to clear that out and and just make sure it's like we're not doing this for anxiety issues or energy things like if it's I just something the programs enough. Okay, great. Let's go back. Let's look at our metrics to valuate our test and go there. But if there's other reasons and um we may bring somebody to have that conversation.

Usually when i've seen people dba from programmes is because they tend to revert to something that they have done for a long time. I just feels really comfortable to them. And IT worked yeah and I was giving them decent results.

So they're skeptical to try something else or there is a fina type of kind of hap hazardous sometimes, especially, we will get really cafe any before, work out and just want to throw something. And then there's a third category, and this is one that I ve had to contend with a lot in my life, which is that I really enjoy training with other people when I have the opportunity. Yeah and certain day rules around where you're supposed to do something and not do other things. And people say, hey, do you want to go for a long ocean swim or you want to train and you end up doing some, can he can in this ones for you, some ridiculous, you know, twenty wall ball cross that I work out and i'm not actually mated for that sort of thing.

And then IT does tend to throw things off, not because no one intended uh canny because there's no there's nothing wrong with a sets of all walls of that part of your conditioning yeah but if it's not appropriate for where you are in your schedule, IT really can disrupt what trying to do yeah and even as as a non competitive athlete like myself, the years but since i've competed in any athletic program, but the as a non competitive athlete, I think there's a beauty to and really strong incentive to being disciplined about the program that one follows. As a mentor and professor that I worked with years ago used to say, I come in to his office, all these ideas and the things I want to do, and he'd say, let's constrain this walk. And then, you know, the question you always want to arrive at in a discussion with your students says, you know is what's the experiment exactly and then you going to do that specific experiment I think I view will work out the same way that there are multiple with adaptations, goals um and things that people are trying to achieve.

Really knowing why you're there each time and really sticking to that even if that means not training with other people or I would say, well, you can train with me, but i'm not going to train with so. So that's one way to do IT. But really sticking to a schedule is really what allows the progress to emerge.

But that doesn't necessarily mean anti social. You can invite people along. In this case, i'm telling people to be the host, not the guest.

I have a little bit of rule here. Maybe, maybe I should have to answer to your question this way. I actually like doing things totally different occasionally. So i'll do what i'm traveling. I tend to do hotel workout. So what I mean that is I will go down to the workout room and I will do a set of ten to fifteen ribs of every single machine in the exact order in which they are laid out. Wo just for the sake of fun, like, just for the sake of like.

like the terror r card version of work out. So whatever comes up, I want to make sense of IT.

and you just move. And those are typically things of, like, I just want to move a little bit for the lag other sort of purposes, right? Um that's often like I wasn't going to get to work out today and so i'm going to do something to feel great.

I don't travel that much though, so it's not really throwing my my things of um I also I don't get a lot of free time. And so if I am traveling and i'm seeing someone I haven't seen in many years or for the first time we got to train together this week for the first time, i'm not going to burn an opportunity. My rule is this so i'm not going to do something that's gonna me more than three days so i'm absolutely y um to get out there and maybe tomorrow morning or tonight we go to some fun that's off my schedule.

I'm i'm in a hundred percent. I'm just going to done regulate a little bit. I'm not going to maybe do as much as you, as hard as you or whatever.

I do more I should. But if IT caused me tomorrow up, IT was worthy exchange. I don't have a world record i'm setting anytime soon. I don't have. I got many years.

I am happy to give up a couple of days of exercise to be little sore that I need to be for the exchange of a lifetime memory. And this stuff is so important to me. This stuff, lan, is like true lifetime memories, or I can look back, many of my phone memories are on my life, are our training sessions with friends.

Whatever IT is like doing to just do as somebody is a world champion, we just like to told whatever the thing is really like. That was really, really cool. Absolutely worth missing today.

If it's going to be more than three days. So we're like i'm going to be so rect. I can't work out for five or six days, then i'm probably like, alright, that's that's kind of answer unless it's like an opportunity like I absolutely can't ass up.

No, so that that's kind of think about IT. That doesn't happen too often with me though, maybe once month. And so my okay final last a day really IT.

Is this probably one like once a quarter, but that happened so I don't really care. So you do want to baLance joy and life. You don't want to be so rigid about your training program that that ruins and robs experience.

Physical activity should be fun. Your fitness in your training should be something that makes your life Better, not some task you have to get done so that seventy five years from now you've hit some metric of, who knows. So I just .

alone in your room with .

your training logs.

No, no, you there in all serious since I think you point to the reasons of life and and you can draw these boxes like work relationships of witness recovery, but the boundary between those boxes are blurry because, and I should say I love training with you, I greatly enjoyed training with you this morning, not just because I was receiving so many useful tips. In fact, thank you.

As first time I P R in a number of things today, thanks to your input in the moment, that's irreplacable kind of gift. But most is the gift beginning to train with a colleague and friend so um I want to underscore highlight and put an emotion mart behind what you just said. Thank you once again and again for giving us so much interesting, clear, actionable and at times somewhat counter intuitive information in order to build out an exceptional training program to meet any of and in some cases, all of the nine major adaptations that exercise can create toward esthetic, performance related and health span, life span.

Okay, on gefty goals, this really a treasure of information there. And I look forward to our next discussion about how to best recover from exercise, both within the exercise belt and between exercise bouts and in the more microscopic structure of a week, a month, a year. I can't wait.

I can't wait either. I love that topic and i've got a lot to cover, so it'll be fun.

If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribed to the podcast on spotify and apple.

And on most spotify and apple, you can leave us up to a five star review if you have questions for us or comments or suggestions about topics you like us to cover or guess you would like me to include on the human podcasts. Please put those in the comments section on youtube. We do read all the comments.

Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and during today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. I'd also like to inform you about the huberman lab podcast free news letter.

It's called the neural network newsletter, and each month the neural network newsletter sent out and IT contains summaries of podcast episodes, specific protocols discussed on the human in now podcast, all in fairly concise format and all completely zero cost. We can sign up for the news network news letter by going to huberman lab dot com, go to the menu and click on news' letter. You provide us your email.

We do not share with anybody. As I mentioned before, it's completely zero cost by going to hub human lab dot com. You can also go into the menu tab and go to newsletter and see some example newsletters from months past.

Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercises and performance with dr. Andy galen. And as always.

thank you for your interesting science.