Barbell Shrugged - 136 - Common Training Myths Busted w/ Dr. Andy Galpin

Episode Date: August 6, 2014

This week on Barbell Shrugged we are busting training myths with our old college buddy Dr. Andy Galpin, Professor and Researcher at California State University, Fullerton.  This is Andy’s third appearance on the show. We first got together to chat about muscle physiology way back on episode 19. Most recently, he helped us break down the science of mixed martial arts with the one and only Bas Rutten on episode 91 (this is also the show where Mike get’s kicked in the balls by Bas, a classic moment indeed). Those were both awesome shows, but this latest discussion was probably our best so far. Maybe we have the combination of Glenlivet and the bright California sunshine to thank for that.  After a bit of catching up we got right into some training myths, starting with a common misconception in the fighting community. These athletes are a lot like Crossfitters, in that they are very driven. They train very hard, and they generally do everything they can to improve performance. Effort isn’t the problem. The real issue is that they don’t really plan for a rest properly, and they don’t understand fatigue and cumulative stress. For them, more is just better. There is one speed - Train as hard as possible no matter what, “or else you’re a pussy!”  Of course this isn’t true at all. Andy’s currently working closely with MMA athletes to educate, as well as help them to train more effectively and recover more quickly so that they can maximize fight performance and reduce their risk of injury.  A fairly simple scientific tool that Andy has utilized with these fighters is the force plate. In a highly objective way, Andy can point out the data when an athlete produces force at a less than optimal rate. In other words, he can show the athlete exactly when they are moving, “slower than a middle school girl.” Sure, many of these folks are really strong. They are tough, bulletproof with big lungs, but they are slow and it’s killing their performance. If you only did one thing in the gym, you would try and get faster. Speed kills, in just about every sport.  All lifters and competitive fitness athletes should take note of Andy’s advice for fixing this problem. “If you’re getting tired during your speed work, then you’re doing it wrong.” Cut the reps and start performing every repetition with the explicit goal of moving absolutely as fast as you can. In many cases this coaching point was good for a 20% improvement in force production, which amounts to a significantly more damaging strike. Write this little pearl down, friends. Before you do anything else, consider doing less, going faster, and training more often.  Sure, “More is better” and “tired is good” are common misconceptions amongst fighters, but the actual myth busting on this show didn’t really start until we began out chat about nutritional supplements. On the top of that list, as always, is Creatine. Despite huge volumes of research supporting its use, many people still have the wrong idea about it, which is frustrating. First thing’s first, you can think of creatine as if it were the fifth macronutrient right next to carbohydrate, fat, protein and alcohol. Having an abundance of this energy substrate in the muscle does significantly improve performance, there is no doubt about it. Creatine also manages to do that without any known side effects, including the classic fretting over water retention (Myth!). The simple truth is that you will be a more powerful athlete, for longer, if you take creatine. Also, this is currently one of the most heavily researched supplements for improving overall mental acuity and long term mental health. Just consider the work being done on Parkinson’s disease, which is extraordinary. If you aren’t taking it, you probably should be. Once you start, you probably should;t stop, as cycling on and off is completely unnecessary. Remember, it’s better to think of creatine as a nutrient, not a drug. Nutrients aren’t the sorts of things you cycle off of. Another classic training myth is the function of lactic acid in muscular fatigue. Andy brought us up to speed with the truth. As it turns out, this particular myth is rooted in a 120 year old hunting journal, where elevated lactate levels were observed in killed, bagged deer stags. The easy observation to make was that these increased levels had to be associated with fatigue. That sounds reasonable, but as Andy will tell you, it’s complete fiction. The truth is that lactate is possibly the single most-preferred fuel source in the human body. It also actively works to hydrate tissue and reduce acidity by capturing and shuttling hydrogen ions down the metabolic pipeline. That’s a very big deal.  No, lactic acid is not your problem. That much Andy is sure of. Now, when it comes to explaining what does actually cause fatigue? Science has some ideas, but the truth is that we still don’t know. I guess Andy still has some work to do to keep him busy around the laboratory.  One of the final, big myths we take on in this episode is all about muscle mass and endurance. You’ve no doubt heard those old time, unfounded concerns that athletes who strength train will only end up muscle bound and immobile. We know that this is silly and untrue. Some of the fittest, most mobile human being's alive train with really heavy barbells, just about all of the time, and they are huge! You just have to make room in your training regimen for some structured mobility work, the fix is that simple. Work at it and you’ll improve. Ignore it and you’ll get worse. Who knew? The same thing can be said of muscular endurance. Metabolism occurs in the muscle tissue, so having more of it can only improve one’s endurance potential. In that light, the classic fighting myth that being too muscled only makes you get tired more quickly…Yep, complete bullshit. That is, unless the athlete in question never works on their endurance. Remember, you get back what you put out.  For more from Dr. Galpin make sure to follow him on Instagram and Twitter. You can also check out his faculty page here if you want to learn more about Andy’s research and academic work. Andy, we’ve got to make this at least a once a year kind of thing, buddy. It was great to see you again. XOXO,  Chris

This week on Barbell Shrug, we interview Dr. Andy Galpin, PhD in bioenergetics, and we bust some physiology myths. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrug. For the video version, go to barbellshrug.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bletzer here with Doug Larson, Chris Moore, got CTV behind the camera. We are in sunny California. God, it's glorious out here. We're on Huntington Beach. We're here actually for a business event that we're putting on. If you were wondering why we just hang out in California.

If you want to know more about things we do with business events and stuff, if you're running a gym, you might want to run over to barbellbusiness.com. Sign up for that. We have a guest here today, Dr. Andy Galpin. Such a special guest. You might know him from such shows as Barbell Shrugged, episode whatever. He's on episode what? 19.

Episode 19. And episode 91 with Boss Rootin, which was probably my favorite episode. Boss Rootin was one of the funnest episodes we've ever done. I wish I would have been there to see you get kicked in the balls. But you weren't exactly featured on that show. The one that you were like, you are our sole guest, I missed. I was like super upset about it. That's why it was so good.

That actually made me upset. People were like, man, that was the best one you guys did. Yeah, I was like, I wasn't even there, you son of assholes. And then you missed the Boss Rutan one too. I know. This is the first time we've all been on together. First time. We've known each other for how long now?

Well, Doug and I... Don't count that shit. That's an OG relationship. Yeah, we met in college in Oregon in 2001. Probably. The 13th. And then you gentlemen. Hey, do you like chicks and beer, too?

All right. We're buddies now. No way, bro. That's actually a pretty awesome story about how Doug and I did meet. Here's the thing, real quick. We didn't bring Andy on just because he's a good friend of ours and he likes chicks and beer just like the rest of us. He's our brother

and we love him. He's a professor at Cal State Fullerton. You teach exercise science stuff, PhD in bioenergetics. You work with UFC fighters. You do a lot of research with those guys and teach them how to hashtag legit how to not suck or how to be better i mean none of those guys suck no but uh you definitely help tweak their performance and all that kind of stuff

so before you think oh this is just gonna be a bullshit show where it's gonna be just hang out with their buddy you're gonna get a lot of that because andy's super cool but when we bullshit we talk science but we're gonna talk about some really solid stuff here. So don't just tune out at this point. All right, now, how did Doug and Andy meet? You telling it? Up to you. You got the better perspective.

All right, so I'll give the maybe not get Doug divorced. No, no, no, no, no. No. Okay, so Doug and I went to school together, did our undergrad, and we both played football together. But when you're a freshman football player, you're meeting 150 guys in a few days. It's intense. I actually didn't even meet him halfway through the season or more maybe.

Dude, every year we're playing football, I only knew half the team. Yeah, right. At best. So I actually had a job when I was an undergrad. I had to clean the dorms. So I would vacuum the dorms and stuff like that. And I was in one of the halls vacuuming in one of the top floors. Oh yeah. I tell this whole story. And I look through the window. I think I told this at your wedding. Probably. Yeah, I think I did. So I looked through the window and I see in one of the other dorms a window open and I'm looking through the window

and I can clearly see two people shaking hands. But not with our hands. But not with your hands, exactly. And I was like, huh. And I stared a couple extra seconds. So I don't know, a week or so. 15, 16 minutes. Yeah, right.

Did you just stare? No one else was around. A week or something goes by, I'm not sure. And I was in that dorm cleaning that hall and the doors open. And then Doug's standing there and I was like, hey, I think we played football together, right? Who are you? I'm Doug. Hey, great. Wait a minute. Were you here last Wednesday? 3 o'clock? I recognize your bare chest. Yeah? Why? I was over there in that window.

Oh. I think that's how it started is I'm vacuuming and I said, hey, were you here? And he said, yeah. And he said, yeah. I'm Doug. I'm like, hey, I'm Andy. He goes, were you having sex in here on Wednesday at like noon? I was like, yeah. Shaking Annie. He goes, were you having sex in here on Wednesday at like noon? I was like, no, shaking, shaking hands.

He goes, I saw you. I go, Oh, no way. I'm Doug. Nice to meet you. Yeah.

As the years go by, the greatest bromance ever told. Yeah. And as the years go by, that story gets fussier and fussier. I can't remember some of those details. You just got to start filling it in with things that are more interesting. Basic idea.

And then, uh, yeah. And then I think a few weeks or months later, we moved in together. And that's so funny because then pretty much you came to Memphis and started your studies for your master's degree. Yeah, but we kind of came randomly. Yeah, they didn't come together to University of Memphis. No, no.

We just talked about having sex and then you talk about coming together. This is getting bad. So it worked out, yeah. No, I went and did my internship with the Colorado Rockies. And then you went and did your internship with Mark Verstegen. Yeah, in Arizona. In Arizona. And then I called you up after, because we ended up meeting Dr. Fry, one of the professors

from the University of Memphis when we were at an NCAA conference. And so we both kind of had an in, in a way. We had developed a relationship with Dr. Fry. So we had talked to him independently. And then after my internship was over, I called you up and i was like hey uh you going to graduate school and he goes yeah i'm going to memphis i said fuck me too i actually remember you i hadn't never you got to keep this in mind doug and i lived together we basically we played football together we basically took we're the same majors we almost had every class together so we literally spent

almost every minute for three years. Your Menzies cycles a line. We moved to Europe. You watch each other shaking hands. We moved to Europe together for months. Yeah,

all this is true, right? Yeah. You almost died in Ukraine or whatever. So when we graduated, it was sort of like, all right,

bro, have fun. Like, it was a nice sort of time off. So sometime, months go by without really even speaking

and I get a phone call i'm in like a middle of wyoming driving to memphis and i'm like oh doug hey what's up man and then that's when that whole thing down i was like fuck i'm in the middle of wyoming right now going to memphis you got to be kidding me yeah so and then they actually they put us in the same house together and we were actually like we requested to not live together because we're like if we do that we know how we are i'm gonna only meet you like you're gonna be the only friend and likewise so we need to branch out so i moved in and that's actually i moved in with cory lonas who was on a couple times with you guys yeah dr cory lonas yeah and then you moved in we knew a lot of smart people and then actually that that

allowed you the space to move in with doug yeah well kind of i mean it allowed me a laundry room to live in for a while before I got a real room. 200 bucks a month. You couldn't pass it up. 200 bucks a month, I had a closet. No laundry room closet. And then I left. Corey couldn't handle that bastard anymore.

Canadians can't handle it. No. And had to move in with Chris. Small doses. Yeah, so I started working, doing some shit. I can't remember now. Life's too good now. But I was doing some job, had a house, had extra room. I was like, fuck, who can I ask

who's my best buddy in the world to come in and live with me? So fucking Dr. Galpin moves in. You lived there for a couple years, right? I think a year. A year? Yeah, just one year. It was the fucking best time in the world. That house was so awesome because you've got to understand, at that time, I was cutting weight for weightlifting

national championships. And at the same time, Chris was actively gaining for powerlifting competitions. So picture you're in Memphis in summer with the hot ass, terrible weather. I am constantly freezing because I'm trying to lose all this weight. You're spitting in the cups and shit. Yeah. And I'm just like, you know, a hot cup of creatine tea is like my fucking Friday night, like Vice friday right

and i gotta watch this bastard every single night eat a whole bar of chocolate cooking and peanut butter and fire the whole thing down he's got 14 fans going on he's sweating like a pig he just discovered rock band so he's just all over it and i'm just sitting there shaking the funniest thing i remember that's the story man it makes you laugh right i just sitting there shaking just freezing I remember the story man it makes you laugh right I was sitting there eating I told some shit like because I was super heavy

and powerful I was like 365 pounds or something I go I looked over at him I was like yeah man you know it's funny

I don't really know why I'm so big I don't eat that much like why I'm saying I'm eating a fucking sweet potato pie out of the shell watching TV

I ate half that fucking pie right there in front of this guy. You know, I don't eat that much. I eat no fucking whole pie by myself. Oh, God.

And then the cheat meal, the best cheat meal was like a whole, a whole large cooking bar. Not like the shit you would buy for your personal consumption. The super dense ones.

No. Yeah. A big, huge, like three inch thick. So they make cakes. Dark, special dark chocolate Hershey's bar. Yeah, you make a cake out of it.

I'd go get that and break off the huge chunks like small little bricks and just dig them through a trench of fucking peanut butter not organic not natural

not any of that shit no just sugary Jif peanut butter and just slam like a whole bar of that down and I'm eating like a can of tuna fish

and four carrots and I'm just like I'm like man weightlifting's so boring come on man power lift it worked out though so now you're helping train UFC fighters and you're traveling and I'm like, man, weightlifting is so boring. Come on, man. Power lift. It worked out, though.

So now you're helping train UFC fighters and you're traveling around with them to their fights. You get to go to the UFC all the time, which is fucking awesome. Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah, we had a really good relationship. We've had a lot of those guys came up a few years ago to get some baseline testing done. And it just worked out really well.

Sort of the feedback I gave them and then the questions just sort of spurred from there on out from those guys and we just had a really good relationship a lot of the guys I work with down here Jake Ellenberger I've been working with him for a long time he's a great guy got in good with Ryan Parsons who manages a lot of these guys was one of Dan Henderson's original partners um that guy was all right yeah he's fantastic uh so he came and hung out a little bit when we were doing the boss episode yeah exactly yeah and that's actually how i how boss got me is um boss has a product he wanted to get some testing done on so ryan was like i got a guy that can do this stuff for you um so boss called

me so if you have an idea for a product dr and. Andy Galpin might be able to test it. For the right money. Yeah, and do the research necessary for you to slap a label on it that says this was researched at this school. And so now we've been working with, I had the blast. You guys, this is so awesome. We got to work with, I work with Pat Cummings. If you guys know Pat, he fought a few fights ago, fought Daniel Cormier,

who's probably the number two ranked guy in two divisions. And he fought him on nine days notice. This was pretty awesome. You can imagine now this guy's been trying to get into the UFC for a few years. No one will fight him because he's too good. But the UFC says you only have four fights, so you can't get in. So he's like, he's sort of stuck in limbo. And then he gets a call, basically nine days notice says you want to fight? You're fighting the co-main event, and you're going to fight a guy who's an Olympian, and he's number one in two divisions. And so that whole process was awesome.

We're working with him. We've been working with Dennis Bermudez. Both of those guys fight. Pat and Dennis fight this weekend, so we head up there for that. But it's been really good because a lot of those guys, like a lot of your CrossFitters, they train so hard and they want so bad to do everything right. And they want to succeed and the work

is there. It's not even close to the problem. But these guys had no perspective whatsoever on planning, on what's happening in the body. Nothing like that. It was just how much harder can I go for eight weeks.

Going by feel. All their training is based on the history of weight. It's not going by feel. More and more is better. Because feel is mental weakness, Mike. Oh, yeah. Mental weakness. If you're tired, you're not training hard enough.

That's a wrestling. That comes from the wrestling backgrounds. You've got to train no matter what. Train as hard as you can or else you're a pussy. If they train by feel, they'd probably be okay, actually. But they don't. They just go. And so from my perspective, where I came in was saying,

okay, here's actually, you know, it was basic rudimentary. If you go hard eight days in a row, we probably need to have at least a half-day recovery. Can I get you there? Let's start there. Yeah, and just planning out you've got eight weeks or you've got 12 weeks, how can we put these things together to get you the least chance of injury? Because injury is so high with these guys.

And how can we get you to perform at the right time? You guys know what it feels like to peak the day before or two days after. It's awful, right? It's the worst thing ever. You guys have all bombed. What about like a month before, two months before? I did my math for this on the back of a fucking napkin. I think I saw a video one time of Josh Koscheck going out to do some extra work after practice.

A guy who's very talented and works super, super hard. Fight for a world championship. Yeah, and someone came in. I think it was one of the strength coaches in the video and says, like, hey, man, you know, more isn't always better. And he looked at him like, dude, I've been doing this a long fucking time. Trust me, more is better. Well, what they forget, too, is like more is better when you're 17 and 18. It's not, but you can get away with it.

You can be fine. That's the right way to say it. You get away with it. You don't feel the pain. Exactly. And you're 25 even, which is young, but when you've been training really hard for 15 years, 25 gets old. Yeah.

30. We need a little bit more, and now you've got to balance. The best part is they show up. I'm 175 pounds. I've got to get to 145 in four weeks. And you've got to balance. The best part is they show up. You know, I'm 175 pounds. I've got to get to 145 in four weeks. And you've got to train more. Awesome. So that's when it gets really hard.

So it's been fun helping those guys a little bit along the way. And then getting to go to the fights is, of course, really, really fun. So the first part of that is just teaching them to maybe reduce their training volume a little bit, and then you're also helping them with recovery aspects. Yeah, so a lot of it, too, is nutrition. You guys know this. We eat hot dogs and fucking energy drinks.

Yeah, so you'd be surprised on what their nutritional plans are. Sometimes it's no plan. A lot of times it's really bad information. Yeah, they're just going off information they maybe heard from a guy or read out of a magazine. Yeah, I was actually, so for Jake's last fight, he trained a lot in Glendale at the same camp that Ronda Rousey trains with her coach. She's all right. And he's actually a really smart guy, Edmund.

You know, she's fantastic. Would you let her punch you in the face for $100? Actually, I've had her punch me really close to the face. Oh. Yeah. Where'd she punch you? I had a couple. Everywhere. I had to move my me really close to the face. Oh. Yeah. Where'd she punch you? I had a couple. Everywhere.

I had to move my head a lot away. But her coach was talking about how, yeah, she got on this crazy plan where she wasn't eating on Sundays and she was eating one meal a day and all these things. That's not a plan for athletes. Now, keep in mind, this guy is not an nutritionist and he's admitted, like, I know a lot about training boxing. I don't know shit about all these other things. But he he's like all i know is when she ate one meal a day she trained like shit she constantly got hurt she constantly got injured when she started eating

again she felt way better and we trained way better it's like the baseball pitcher who has a ritual for the game like sacrificing chickens to joe boone shit i didn't do it i threw slow that's what i'm saying yeah that's what i'm saying i sacrificed the chicken i threw a fucking hundred mile an hour fastball so i know a lot of the stuff with these guys, it's not like I'm giving them any revolutionarily super-secret, buy-my-six-week-diet plan. It's like, hey. Eat protein. Hey, do you think maybe if you packaged it that way, they might buy into it?

Well, that's what they do when they package it. Let's do that. You know what? Hey, don't worry, guys. In the Barbell Shrug shop, coming soon. You know who's impressive? Dr. Andy Gappin is going to write a book. We're going to come up with a very sensational name.

So don't forget to check it out. What people don't realize is they want to know what these high-level guys are doing. And it's the very basics. And when you can get them from there, just the basics, they just are so much better. Eat real food. Yeah. Sleep when your body says you're tired. Sit down.

Rest. Oh, yeah. Don't worry about shit during the day. It helps if you have a job body says you're tired. Sit down. Rest. Oh, yeah. Don't worry about shit during the day. It helps if you have a job that allows you to fight for a living. You don't have to fucking throw boxes at UPS's distribution center all day. You know who impressed me? Johnny Bones Jones, his Instagram feed.

That dude has some omelets that are so amazing looking. Maybe it's no, the guy understands that food's important. He has a chef to cook him real meal foods. Maybe it starts with that. Oh, yeah. If you're getting paid, I think if you're getting paid more than six figures a year to be an athlete, getting a chef at that point is probably going to make you get to where you can make a million dollars a year. Think of it financially.

How much longer can your cure last if you feed your body the way you probably should? If you eat food every day and you get five more years of fighting out of it, that's probably worth the cost of that fucking chef. I can tell you probably the thing that got me on board with these guys the most. They were actually, some of these guys were decent. Ryan Parsons is pretty good. Pat was pretty good. They're solid nutrition.

The first thing I actually explained to them was speed work. Yeah. And they were blown away. They were like, oh. And I was like, if you're getting tired, you're doing it wrong. Right. And they were, they're really good because they're open to feedback. And they were like, oh, we've been doing this for 30 years, and we never thought about that.

Right. And we bring these guys to the lab. They're tremendous athletes all around. That's awesome. They're very, very slow. They just go, hey, I've been doing this for 30 years. Fuck off. Well, that's why I work with these guys is because they are like that.

Yeah. I don't have the time. I don't need to work with you guys. This is stuff I do on the side. I don't need that. And when I explained that stuff to him and I showed them the stuff in the lab and I showed them the test results and they're like, wow, we are slower than middle school girls. We're strong as beasts and we just don't fatigue

and our lungs are huge and whatnot. And they started implementing that and we just saw huge 20% gains in performance of tests you can't fake, force plate stuff. You can't fake that. There's more force into the plate or there wasn't. And they're like, wow, we're doing less. We're going faster. We feel better. We're training more often and we're getting better. I'm like, and I'm not, it's not any revolutionary secret.

It's science. It's the shit we teach you. Turns out that, you know, you measure shit and you figure shit out. You should use the data at hand to train. I mean, I've been pulled in the same thing, you know, studied, you know, the right way to do things. And then I stumble across something that's, that's supposed pulled into the same thing. I've studied the right way to do things, and then I stumble across something that's supposed to be different, and then I get sucked into it for a little bit,

and then I go, whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe I should apply these principles that apply to every human being. And the planet and the earth and everything. Things like periodization or something like that, and there you go. Well, it's the shit that you write about in your blog and stuff. Like, it's really pretty simple. Yeah. It's not, we're not that much faster and bigger and stronger than we were thousands of years ago, really.

Yeah, people want to talk about, you know, undulating miles of periodization. I go, how much, how many hours of sleep did you get last night? Four. Fucking go to bed. Yeah, well, why are we talking about that? Here's your fucking first lesson of being strong. Go to bed. Oh, so before the show started started we were all bullshitting

out here in the backyard it was like two hours of pregame and we just started talking about different things and we were like oh man we should just turn this into a myth busting episode and so I don't know I'll kick it off with

one of the ones this really isn't myth buster but people go I don't take creatine because I don't want. I'll kick it off with one of the ones. This really isn't Myth Buster, but people go, I don't take creatine because I don't want to gain weight. Right after this break. Okay. We're going to take a break real quick, and then we're going to bust some myths. This is Andrea Ager, and you're listening to Barbell Shrug. For the video version, go to barbellshrug.com.

Barbell Shrug is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrug.com. Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to Barbellshrug.com and sign up for the newsletter. I'm raising children here. I won't fuck with this microphone all afternoon. Herding cats. Herding cats. Raising children.

Don't touch it, Chris. Don't touch it. Don't touch the fucking microphone. I'm going to fall off again. Don't touch it. Talk with your mother. Don't touch it. All right.

And we're back. All right. One thing I meant to mention is, so we were talking to one of our guys that are on the team. He said that a lot of people are on our website and people are messaging him. We got like a little chat box on the website about some stuff. And he said that people aren't even aware of the stuff we have in our shop. So just so you know, we actually do have some educational courses and stuff in our shop. So just so you know, we actually do have some educational courses and stuff in our shop. So if you go to barbellshirt.com, click that link, you can check that out. So I didn't know,

you know, we always tell people to go to the newsletter so that we can email you about that stuff, you know, as long as well as the podcast and events we have going on. But if you don't do the whole newsletter thing and go for the shop. 10X your wiener in 12 weeks. Tell them about that product. That's definitely in there. I was going to jump in and comment about how I actually use a lot of your guys' products in my class. But I'm more interested in hearing about this product. Well, Andy. Natasha's around here somewhere.

Yeah, your girlfriend's around here somewhere. Your girlfriend or should I say the person who's referring to you as the guy who needs to fucking get off his ass and propose already. Yeah, right. I think we should go back to you using our courses in your class. Yeah. Copyright infringement, motherfucker. I've actually been using it. I don't remember licensing that out to you.

Talk to this man. Oh, there's like, oh. I used the. Gave it away too easy. In my upper level, senior graduate level program design class, I used the TechWad videos. So along with learning how to program designs designs one of the things about program designs uh designing programs is exercise choice right and so the assignment is they have to watch one of the videos and they have to compare and contrast two similar type movements so take a front squat so compare and contrast a front squat

with the camber bar front squat when's it better to use give me a situation when it's better to use camber bar give me a situation it's better to use? Give me a situation when it's better to use cambered bar. Give me a situation when it's better to use this. And so they have to learn, well, this is better. That's one thing they never teach you in fucking straight to get into some classes. Well, actually,

that's exactly what your feelings do. Why would you want to do something? That's the question. You have to be able to answer the question. Why are you doing what you're doing? Well, I read it in Muscle Fitness or I saw it in that fucking blog or so-and-so does it

and that guy's a great athlete. Or Klokov did it. Klokov did it. I didn't learn any of that stuff in actual class. Me neither. In college or in graduate school. None of that. That's what we do in our classes.

If your answer is, well, because you're supposed to, then fuck you, that's the wrong answer. Well, that's what fucking irritated me about, I'm sure you guys saw the recent, I think Ripito wrote that episode about how basically colleges are fucking worthless now, and my response was, you haven't been to mine. You haven't been to my class yet,

because I'm doing a lot of that shit. It all depends on who the professor is. He's talking majorities. You know, but you know that once you reach tenure, all your classes go to shit. No, I'm just kidding. Now all the tenured professors are out there like, I'm just kidding. We use the maximum ability in one of them,

teaching different screening tools and stuff. We use that. I make Chris come in and talk at the end of my program design. I spend a semester learning about... I drink a bottle of scotch and come on and teach a class. Yeah, they spend a semester learning about designing programs and then Chris comes on at the end and tells them none of that shit matters. It's great. It's fun.

So yeah, right before we went on our break, we were starting to talk about busting different myths and you really want to talk about creatine. Oh, yeah, because I was talking about taking creatine for mental acuity, but also the big myth regarding creatine is people are like, I don't take it because I'm not trying to put on weight right now.

I'm like, supposed to cycle on and off, bro? How do you supposed to cycle off, bro? Easiest way to think about it is there are four macronutrients. Carbohydrate, fat, protein, alcohol, right? Yeah, which we're drinking. The easiest way to think about creatine is it is a fifth macronutrients, carbohydrate, fat, protein, alcohol, right? Yeah, which we're drinking. The easiest way to think about creatine is it is a fifth macronutrient.

Okay, it's not right, but it makes you think of it that way. So I always ask students, do you cycle on and off protein? Do you cycle on and off fat? Then you don't need to cycle on and off creatine. Having more substrate around is a good thing. Yeah, carbohydrate causes you to store excess water. If creatine, okay, let's talk biochemistry. Let's have an argument over it maybe.

In the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Carbohydrate does the same thing, arguably more. So whether or not you're taking, it's such a bad understanding of what the purpose of creatine is. So the whole game of water. What is the purpose of creatine? I don't know what it is. Yeah.

So it's really effective for about everything. In fact, there is more work going on in creatine in Parkinson's patients, in cognitive function, in neurological disorders, than there are in strength, power, muscle building. People have stopped asking that question since we were asking that question 15 years ago. Yeah, I mean, I asked it in eighth grade when I was taking creatine for the first time. Yeah, it's that well-known we've just stopped asking questions. And the clinical significance of creatine supplementation is just, it's extraordinary.

It's really, really promising stuff. So it does wonders for mental acuity and for people who might have brain and neurological issues. What about for strength? I actually put creatine in the health portion of my classes for that reason. Not the performance? No, because we know the performance questions. That was answered fucking 15, 20 years ago. And we wrote a review on that in 2000.

We do, but everyone doesn't. Just state the obvious for a second and tell us what creatine is for. It's very, very, very effective. It's very effective. It's dirt fucking cheap. It's almost free. We are going to get this out of him. So what does creatine do for performance athletes?

So the easiest way to think about it is the way that you make energy in your muscle. You make this molecule called ATP. Think of it this way. Whenever you break a bond, it gives off energy, right? Like a relationship bond? Yeah, any bond. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Yeah. It gives off energy, right? Yeah, it does. So there's this molecule called ATP. Most people have an idea what that is. It breaks apart, gives you energy. Creatine is very effective at re-synthesizing ATP

so you can re-break it and get more energy. It happens to be the easiest chemistry way to get it. It allows you to fuck more shit up. Yeah, so it allows you

to make energy really, really, really fast. So for strength and power movements, it allows you to do a few more reps or a little bit faster or more frequently.

If you do it every session, you do it month to month and year to year, all of a sudden you've done ten times more work. If you do it every session, you do it month to month and year to year, all of a sudden you've done 10 times more work. It'll make you maximally strong and maximally fast for a few extra seconds. If you can go at maximum 100% full speed or maximum 100% full strength for a full six seconds, maybe it'll stretch it out to seven or eight seconds. Or think of an example if you're going to do a lot of really heavy sets.

So you're going to do five or ten sets of one or two. Maybe it gets you another set, which is adding to cumulative work. Yeah, I tell people it's not what you do in any one time. If today you're just X percent better, it's one little fucking sliver better because you took creatine. Over the course of five years, you're fucking obese. So the majority of the research, again, years ago, showed for strength and power development, it's very effective.

Right. So as an example of what you just said, if you're doing a 95% snatch every minute on the minute, maybe normally you could do three or four sets before you start missing number five, missing number six. Well, maybe if you take creatine, you can hit number five and hit number six, and then you miss seven, eight, nine. Exactly. So recovering in between repeated bouts of heavy or fast movements, it'll let you go for a little longer.

So snatch ladders, clean ladders for CrossFitters, that's a fucking awesome supplement. Yeah, and it's actually what people don't appreciate about creatine is it's actually what they call an intracellular buffer. So it's actually going to, think of it this way, it's going to block the accumulation of acid. So it's actually very effective for endurance. We're going to go down that route too?

We can get there. Do it, do it, do it. Go, go, go, go, go. We got to finish all the creatine benefits first, Doug. This is the biggest myth bust of all. Yeah. Hold on, Doug. Hold on, hold on. It's like a dual can get there. Do it, do it, do it. Go, go, go, go, go. Oh yeah. Finish all the creatine benefits first Doug. This is the biggest myth bust of all. Yeah. Hold on Doug, hold on, hold on. It's like a dual one right there. We can run down the muscle and the lactate one. Okay. We all do that. Do it, do it, go. So what do you want to do? Muscle or lactate first? Well finish creatine, finish creatine. Well, so okay. So here's the creatine. A lot of people assume that acid is

causing fatigue and it's just not. It's just, it's not how it happens, but it's not helpful. So actually creatine works as a very good buffer for acid. So it's very good for a short anaerobic, two, three minute, a minute, 30 seconds is hard. So if you're doing Fran, creatine is going to help your Fran. Yeah. And so that's the probably unappreciated aspect of it. Yeah. Especially the clinical stuff we also talked about. So it helps with power output and it helps with mental acuity. So if you're a cross-fitting rocket scientist, is there any

downfall to taking creatine? It's really really cheap. It's really effective and no real side effects at all. So what's the negative side effects of creatine? So the slide in my class that shows up says, here are all the negative side effects. You ready? Next slide.

That's it. And yet, there are journalists that have written negative side effects, right? I saw one in a newspaper two months ago. Journalists, not scientists. So journalists, yeah, exactly. So here's the deal. And people always say, I read this in the paper. I read this.

Entire football team gets compartment syndrome, or it makes you blow. By the way, we're untrained. It's 115 degrees outside, and we did way too much. That had nothing to do with it. It was the creatine, you son of a bitch. Well, Andy, we've got to get our guys tough. Or the entire football team is juicing, and that's way more likely to cause. Well, they're all hungover. It's not the creatine.

Yeah. It's not the creatine. Andy, let's answer this question. The practical thing for the audience, like, okay, I should get powerful. I should extend my maximum power, I should get powerful, I should extend my maximum power, what should I do, coach? How much does that take?

When? What's your expert opinion on dosage? So the basic idea is somewhere in the neighborhood of.03 grams per kilogram. It usually rounds out being about 3 grams to 5 grams for a 170-pound person, something in the neighborhood. I would never suggest calculating it, just 3, grams to 5 grams for a 170-pound person, something in the neighborhood. I would never suggest calculating it. Just 3, 4, 5 grams.

What about 100 grams? Is that better, Coach? Yeah, take a scoop. So most creatine bottles have a 5-gram scoop. Yeah. And if you take too much, what can happen? What dangers lurk in our creatine bottles? Well, what do you mean by too much?

I mean, if you were supposed to take three grams and you take five, what's the worst thing that could happen? They've actually done up to tenfold. It's not that big a deal. I mean, if you go obnoxious. Probably shit your pants, I imagine. I mean, and you may not have heard this, but there's a speculation that creatine does cause a little bit of myostatin inhibition.

Oh, geez. Don't even get me started. Just real quick, but there's a theory that if you were to take up to 60 grams a day throughout the day, like spaced out, that it would...

Let me tell you where that theory is not coming from. It's not coming from people that are measuring myostat, and I can tell you that. Nobody that does that work is saying that.

No, that's... No. Oh, man. I can't wait. I can't wait for the comments. All right, so let's go down the buffering track.

Yeah. So tell us about lactic acid and what's correct about that and what's not correct about that. So almost nothing is correct about lactic acid. That is common. So what's the theory, first of all? Tell us all about the bullshit first. Let me go back to 1880 or so Germany. 1880?

Let me tell you kids a story. I want to tell you guys how lactate. I'm so glad it's going this far back. So this is what happens when you drink scotch and you're a real science nerd. You look these stuff up and you end up buying paperbacks on Amazon for $3 that went out of publish 100 years ago. Anyways, the original work on lactate came from deer stags. So-

Sounds hot. Yeah. They hunted. What they realized is when we kill a stag and it's been hunted, there's a lot more lactate in the muscle. It's been sprinting for its life. Therefore, lactate must be causing fatigue. And that's what we're talking about. 120 years later, we still have that same idea,

even though 60 years of science has showed us quite the opposite. In fact, lactate is probably the single most preferred fuel source in your body. If I IVD'd you right now, put glucose or sugar in one of your arms and put lactate in the other, your body would pick lactate as a fuel. Not only does it not cause fatigue, it's incredibly powerful form of sugar. That's essentially what it is. It's one step away from sugar and your body much prefers that. There's a guy just down the road actually. So how do we produce lactate? Can you put all that in a pill form? I'll take it. Yeah. Inject it in my arm. So I'll make this real simple for you.

Sugar is six carbons. When you go through this process called glycolysis or splitting sugar, it gets broke into two separate three-carbon molecules. We call those pyruvate. Pyruvic acid. Remember this stuff? Now, yeah. I remember when I was younger taking pyruvate for this reason,

but then is that effective? No. Okay. Go. Close. So now we're at two three-carbon molecules. We want to metabolize or break those bonds. I remember when I was younger taking pyruvate for this reason, but then is that effective? No. Okay, go. Close. So now we're at two, three carbon molecules. We want to metabolize or break those bonds like I talked about earlier to get energy. Well, if I don't have enough oxygen to send these three carbon molecules down the road through metabolism, there's actually hydrogen floating around.

And so I bind a hydrogen to that three carbon molecule. That is lactate. It's pyruvate with a hydrogen to that three carbon molecule. That is lactate. It's pyruvate with a hydrogen on it. That's all it is. So in fact, what lactate is, it's a pyruvate that is held because if you're not familiar, hydrogen is acid. That's what pH, potential hydrogen, right? So lactate actually is pyruvate that is holding on to acid. It's stopping you from becoming acidic. So the more lactate you have, the more you are stopping yourself from becoming acidic. That's the point.

It's capturing it. Yeah. And so the easy way to think about it is, and I ask my students, okay, so if you could think of one thing in the world, you had all this H plus floating around. What do you think of that binds really well? And you don't have to know chemistry to know this answer. What binds really well to hydrogen? Oxygen. Oxygen and makes? Water. Water. Fantastic. So now I've got pyruvate with a hydrogen attached to it. And I want to get back to pyruvate because pyruvate's sugar. I think of it that way. What am I going to do? I'm going to take a big, huge, deep breath and bring in? Oxygen.

Right. Right. Fantastic. I'll bind that oxygen to that hydrogen. I make water and then I send my pyruvate through as a metabolism. So lactate actually is a fuel. It gets sent to your heart, actually gets sent to other muscle, gets sent to the liver. It's a fuel and it's blocking you from becoming acidic.

It's tremendously important. Why the mistake? Is there a correlation between fatigue and lactate? Of course. I always laugh because some asshole killed a deer and came up with this whole thing that we all just buy as undisputable fucking train in truth. Well, you know how I learned this lesson?

Actually, fun story. During my doctorate, we had to take our comprehensive exams and one of the guys on my list was a guy named Per Tesh who's one of these original researchers right did bodybuilding fiber typing years ago and his question was you have eight hours tell me about lactate

and I was like okay filled like 30 minutes and I was done and I got a huge lecture form about all this stuff and go back and find this go back and find this you don't understand lactate you're gonna have a doctorate in bioenergetics you don't understand this single most misunderstood ion or enzyme. Boom, lesson learned. Go back and read.

So instead of calling it lactic acidosis or whatever, a lot of people call it metabolic acidosis because it's more technically correct. So when people discuss doing lactate intervals or something like that, that uses that term, what's the correct way to talk about all that? How do you use it when you're talking to athletes well here's here's the easy way to think about it in the end it doesn't matter call it whatever you want as long as you're communicating what you want your athlete to do it doesn't really matter if you have the right terminology so you can call it lactate it's the same thing putting yourself in a state of

really high lactate well that's actually happening it's just not the cause of fatigue so call it lactate uh that's why i always laugh when people call it Metcon. That's the CrossFit term. I always want to respond, can you explain to me a type of conditioning that's not metabolic? It's all metabolic conditioning. Just might be a different

metabolic pathway. Yeah. But they're usually referring to It sounds fucking cool and that's why we like it. It's not even a different pathway. It's the same one. You don't have to have evidence

for everything. Not everything has to be in your fucking scientific ivory tower. We like the word Metcon, dude. We like the fucking word Metcon, okay? And wad. We like to blow our wad, okay? Is that so bad? Is that fucking bad with you? I don't jazz

people back. It doesn't matter. As long as you're communicating with your athlete, it doesn't matter. So what's causing the fatigue? So that's a great question. We have no idea. No idea. There's some ideas. That's a sign of somebody who's telling you the truth. When you ask them a question, they go, I don't know. Well, we certainly know this.

Enzymes, those are the things that make energy. They don't work when they're in really acidic environments. A great example, you guys make guac, right? Of course, there's some right over there. Oh, God, guac. You take your avocado, you cut it in half, open it up, right? And what's the main macronutrient in avocados? Fat. Delicious fucking delicious fat. Yeah. What happens when you put oxygen around fat? You take your avocado, you cut it in half, open it up, right? And what's the main macronutrient in avocados?

Fat. Fat. Delicious fucking delicious fat. Yeah. What happens when you put oxygen around fat? Oxidation. Same thing happens in here. The tabbing on the avocado.

It's literally the same process. It's being oxidized. It's radical oxidant. It's oxidative stress. That's all the same word. Okay? So what do you do to make your guacamole not turn brown? Pour delicious lime juice all over that shit, homie.

And what's lime juice? Citric acid. Citric acid. Enzymes don't work in acid. So if I put your muscle in acid, it doesn't metabolize your fat. If I put your guacamole in acid, it doesn't metabolize that fat either. It's literally the same thing. So how do we metabolize fat?

What's the most effective way to metabolize fat? So I shouldn't inject lemon juice. You shouldn't inject lemon juice. I actually get asked that question a lot. What if I drink lemon juice all day? I'm like, it doesn't. What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you, kid? I don't care.

Oh, you're a weirdo, man. Just eat it. It doesn't matter. So what's causing fatigue is the question. Acidosis does not help. I was going to say, Dr. Andy said never eat citrus fruit. There are other things with the way that the muscle works. So remember that ATP molecule I told you?

There's a thing that suggests that maybe that phosphate, so it gets broken into ATP, which is trisphosphate, into diphosphate, and one more phosphate. There's an idea that that one additional phosphate or inorganic phosphate causes fatigue. There's a bunch of ideas, but the real answer is we really, really don't know what's exactly happening. There's an idea that it's actually central. So the neurological system

is shutting you down before muscle actually wants to shut down. Protection. Yeah. Would that be, you know, what people call CNS fatigue? Oh my God. Don't get me. That's a worse one than lactate. We're going. Oh my God. Another myth. Let's do it. Go right into it. I was throwing it at you. Go for it. Yeah. No, there is no question that the neurological system can sort of get overwhelmed and shut down. Wait. What is CNS fatigue?

Explain that briefly. What do people think it is? So the basic idea is- Before we bust it, we got to say what it is. Yeah. Is that the central nervous system can be trained independently. What's the central nervous system? So that would be basically your brain.

What is your brain? The spinal cord and your brainstem. Your nerves run into your muscles and tell them what to do. It gets frustrating sometimes when people come to me and go, oh, I was experiencing too much CNS fatigue. It's because they read that shit on the blog. I'm like, I saw what you did for training. You didn't suffer from CNS fatigue.

If you were nature, you'd be fucking dead in two seconds and we'd be through with you. Evolution would take you out with that talk. There's no question that the spine and the brain will sort of fatigue in that fashion. But muscles getting a whole lot of fatigue there too. The basic idea that irritates me is people think you can train your spinal cord or your

brain to fatigue, but your muscles completely fine. And that those things can be trained independently. That there's a central, it's not my muscle, it's my central nervous system. Wow. Take intro physiology class. There is no central nervous system training that trains muscle differently than it trains central nervous system. You got fatigued, you got fatigued. Fantastic. There, it's no, there's no difference there. It's, it's, uh, again, it's one of those things I just go, roll my eyes when coaches say it.

As long as you're communicating the right message, I don't care if you understand the physiology, if you're programming right. It does make me wonder sometimes whether coaches are using that terminology to explain to athletes knowing that it's not the exact right thing. Well, they probably don't, but who cares? It sounds sexy, and I guess as long as they get it, no harm, no foul. No, I mean, you get the idea of like, and I won't mention a name here,

but a friend of ours I remember one day was like, it was an off day, and he was like, oh, I'm just going to do a bunch of really heavy deadlifts. Just train the central nervous system so my muscle's fine tomorrow. And I was like, whoa. Repeat that? You're going to do heavy deadlifts so you don't train your muscles? No, no, no, no, no. That is not how it works.

Have you deadlifted before? Yeah. Yeah, that is not how it works. I usually get really sore. Yeah, that's not there. And then the other one was the muscle. Yeah, we don't know why people get tired. Is it because we're too fucking jacked, Andy?

Well, this happens a lot with MMA fighters and boxers. And they actually believed it at one time with baseball players. It sounds like a muscle-bound argument. It's about that asinine. All you got to do is go back to the 70s and 80s, and baseball players want to lift weights, and the coaches are like, no that's, you know. It sounds like a muscle-bound argument. It's out of that asinine. All you got to do is go back to, like, the 70s and 80s, and baseball players want to lift weights, and the coaches are like, no, no, no, you'll get too muscle-bound, but Barry Bonds fucking nails home runs. Why are steroids important?

Why would you even do it to hit dingers? Why would you want it? It's the fatigue thing that Doug and I were talking about earlier, that the idea that if you get too much muscle well you're going to get tired faster and like that's such a again a very bad understanding of how physiology works on any level the idea that having too much muscle is is bad uh what'd you say earlier really watch the crossfit games yeah those dudes are buff as shit and they have amazing work capacity and they're mobile yeah shooting holes in all those arguments like i feel like people watch mma and they they see like this one dude who happens to be buff

and he happens also to be out of shape, and then they say because he has muscle he's out of shape. One fucking guy bench presses too much before a fight. He ruins it for everybody. I'll give you a great example, Jake Ellenberger, one of the guys I work closest with. His biggest professional issue is he gets a little bit tired. He's had some fatigue issues, and he's really gets a little bit tired. He's had some fatigue issues.

And he's really, really, really muscular. He's unbelievably powerful. And so it's like, man, all this muscle, all this muscle, all this muscle. Like, man, you just don't get it. We were talking earlier. I'll give you three arguments on this. Number one, just look at the athletes. Look at a George St. Pierre.

Look at a Sean Shirk. Arguably two of the fittest guys. Sean Shirk is like the jackest dude. They're so unbelievably jacked, but they never get tired because they train that way, because they're genetically different that way. Bob Sapp gets tired because he's huge because he's just huge. He doesn't fucking work out. And he doesn't train.

He's not conditioning. Yeah, he doesn't train. You can be strong as shit and muscular, but also do your conditioning, man. The problem is these guys are big and they fatigue quickly because all their training goes towards getting big and none of it has to do with endurance. That's the fucking problem are big and they fatigue quickly because all their training goes towards getting big and none of it has to do with endurance. That's the fucking problem.

That's the problem. Training is imbalanced. Think of it this way. Without making math too crazy, take an athlete who's six feet five and they're 100, say they're 200 pounds.

Asia Bartow. He's heavier than them. Six, five, 200. Say they have 150 pounds of muscle on their body just to make numbers easy. Now, if I take somebody instead of making him six foot five, make them five foot eight, put the same numbers on them, they both still have one hundred and fifty pounds of muscle.

But why is it we look at the five foot five guy and you're too muscle bound, you're going to get tired. He's got the same amount of muscle as that guy. He's just distributed differently. He's just trying to take down. Yeah. Like it doesn't make any sense. In addition, the last comment I'll make on that is, any idea where at in your body metabolism or the way that you produce energy, do you know where that physically happens at? I'm going to guess the muscles. It's in muscle, yeah.

So if you want to produce energy, you need muscle mass. Plus, it still does that force stuff. Well, you get the argument. Well, look at the endurance athletes. You never see a super buff endurance athlete. Because they train like shit. They also run a bajillion hours a week and they don't eat and they don't train and they're genetically really, really

good at that. None of them are strength training for hours on end every week. They do it, you know, they touch it a little bit. And you have a nature-nurture issue there where the really high-level ones are really good at that because they've been built to have a certain mass-to-tendon stiffness ratio. You know, they're able to have a certain mass to tendon stiffness ratio.

You know, they're able to produce a whole lot of force with very little energy to get there. So it's just a really silly argument. Well, how does that work? That's something we don't talk about very much on the show at all. Yeah, so. We do talk about stiffness, just not tendon stiffness. I'm so stiff right now.

This is one of the issues we work with the UFC guys on a lot. We don't talk about snap to give you a Mark Verstegen. Yeah, yeah, right. Pop, bang, yeah, whatever he does. The issue is there's a lot of ways to produce. So in my lab, we study muscle at the single cell level. So we pull one muscle fiber. We take a biopsy.

In fact, I've taken a biopsy of Mike. Your first muscle biopsy. How was his touch? Was his touch gentle? Well, his tissue resembled something of an older woman. Something like that. He had to take two out because he didn't get the first one in. I was like, no, Andy, you got to push more this way.

No, I remember the needles like halfway in. And I'm like, I think I'm there. And he's like, you're not in. You're not in. And I'm like, every. I can't tell you. Because I can feel how it's supposed to. I knew how it was supposed to feel.

How many years have I been waiting for you to tell me that I'm in You know it because it's that weird pressure Not a pain but like Oh god what is that And I remember for some reason I'm looking at his face And not looking at his leg that I'm jamming this gigantic needle As you go You're not in You're in

Snap in get the fuck out We study muscle You're not in, you're not in. You're in, you're in. All right. Snap, snap, snap in. Get the fuck out. We study muscle at one cell at a time. You petted them after. Is it okay? You want to try again? So we published all this research on what happens on one cell at a time, and then people make these extrapolations to whole muscle performance.

And we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's a lot more muscle than one cell. There's the connective tissue. There's the connective tissue around the entire muscle. There's the tendon and ligament. And one of the things that we do with the MMA guys is we try to test and tease out their muscle force versus their tendon and elastic response

because they're different. So somebody can be really, really strong but poor elastic. I'll give you an easy example of how we do that. So I'll make them do a vertical jump from a static squat position. So I'm going to take the tendon and elastic component out of it. No counter movement. Start from a half squat straight up. And then they get to do a counter movement. They get a dip and drive. And then I make them do the same thing off of a box. In fact, I got this from old... This is my research. Yeah, old stuff from Bud Charniga.

Yeah. His old translator stuff on their numbers, on the old Russians, what the numbers should be. And we use that, and so you jump off of a box, and now we're looking at how you land and go back up. So now it's really elastically driven. And we want to look at, and shocking enough, a lot of these guys produced a tremendous amount of force,

jumped really, really high from a static position. But when I had them give a counter movement, they didn't jump any higher, which you should jump way higher. And so my mini reaction is we've got to work on more reactive, explosive stuff. That's my weakness, too. I can sit down at the bottom like on a low box and jump and then not really jump that much better. That's why it's one of the things that will make me perform better

is just doing more of the reversing. And how funny it is my whole life so I was a competitive weightlifter and my always sort of joke was me is if I couldn't front squat something I would just clean it and then try to front squat it because I could clean almost as much I tell people that

sometimes I'm like I actually know a guy that can clean more than he can front squat and they're like power clean or clean I was like clean yeah it took this, dumb draft years to figure out. Like when I was working with these guys actually, and I went, maybe I should do some more pause squatting because I am very bad at producing force. I rely entirely on my elastic response.

It's like box squatting is good too. Exactly. And so now I started doing that stuff and wow, the gap got much, much better. But that's how we use sort of the idea that there's a lot of things producing force that are outside. Your mommy, all the research, like that's the last time I did research. But it's how you can use research and science to actually help performance a little bit. So some of these, we had them doing a little bit more.

And we're just talking not like a 24-inch box jump, you know, like off of a 4-inch or 6-inch thing, landing and going. And in their sport, it's sort of like, okay, imagine a guy's pressing you in the cage. You've got to back up a few steps and then lunge back at him. You can't do that right now because you get sort of stuck in the hole. You've got no elastic. We did that, and now their life's a week. Speed is really important. When I did my thesis, one thing I did, I borrowed Louis Simmons weight releasers.

I went up there and trained for a week. I said, hey, dude, I'm doing my thesis. You mind if I take your equipment out of here and just never come back? That's the kind

of guy, that's why anybody who talks shit about Lou, I go, look, okay,

you can have your ideas, but the guy is so kind. You just let me take his shit and go back to Memphis.

We did jump squats. You lowered a certain percentage of your max. These weight releasers would hit the ground

and the weight pops off the barbell. You just fucking jump. We had this awesome thing. I wrote a little thing and I got money from the weight pops off the barbell and you just fucking jump. We had this awesome thing. I wrote a little thing and I got money from the NSA wearing a t-shirt.

God bless those guys. What the fuck are they doing now? They gave me a couple grand. I bought a- Getting sued. What was that thing? No shit, right? What was that thing we bought?

Oh, I've been in some fun meetings with the NSA. What was that thing we bought? It's a barbell suspended in an apparatus where if you let go of the barbell, the circuit opens. It catches the bar. The thing catches the bar so you can jump with weight and land with your body weight. It's really cool. What we found is it didn't matter how much weight you added to the bar.

We thought, well, these things, people use this shit. What's going on? You lower the weight, it kicks off, and you jump. But really, that didn't matter. What mattered was the speed at which you lower. You get down quicker to stretch things. And that's the part that irritates me whenever I work with my students that are coaches and other coaches.

They're like, well, you know, we just did this, actually. I had John Cronin from New Zealand up in our lab. I almost went to work with him, man. Yeah, and he had visited Cal and he went to Stanford and all these other places. Then he came down to us and he was like, you guys are the first people that actually are actually using any semblance of science. Because he went up there and he was like, the coaches were like, well, you know, we're coaches. We're not researchers. We don't read that shit.

Bullshit. And he was like, and I was like, well, this is how we're doing it. We're trying to, you know, and it's tough, and you can't be bold for sure, but you can't just pass off the researchers, wow, this is, they don't know what the fuck. All the researchers, boy, they've never lifted before. They don't know. Like, yes, yes, we have.

We're trying to do shit. Like I was barking about, hey, get out there with your lactate and your goddamn central nervous system fatigue. That's what they go do. It'd be helpful if you learn the evidence. It'd be very good for you if you learned something. I mean, you've got to let the evidence build up over time, too. Absolutely.

The other mistake, because the other side of the coin is people find one study, and you're looking at that one cell or something, and they extrapolate it out to the entire human body, so on and so forth. So there's got to be that happy medium. No. It's good to look at the research. You know, if there's been 60 studies done on this thing and all in agreement and, you know, it's been peer reviewed and all that, then that's good.

But, you know, but on the flip side, you know, people take single studies, take it way too far. So there's got to be, you've got to be smart about how you read, you know. It's the edifice. It's the edifice. You've got to wait for a wall to be built of information before you can really know it's it's the edifice it's the edifice you got to wait for a wall to be built of information before you can really make and you take yeah exactly you take one thing you get okay maybe there's something here but you wait until there's really and but then you still

have to be very very very careful about taking a basic single cell or whatever oxidative stress and applying it to the human condition there's a big big big jump there well also if you're not a researcher, but you are very experienced and you understand research, then you don't necessarily have to read the part of the research where they're interpreting the data. Not that you can't read it, but you don't necessarily have to read it. You can read the methods and the results and look at the data, and then with your own experience and intelligence, you can interpret the data however you see fit. You say, oh, I understand why that happened like that. Oh, that makes sense about

what I've been doing, what I've seen in the world. Read the methods because if you only have a little bit, don't read the abstract conclusion. You have to look at the actual data. You don't just read the abstract. You don't just look at what the researcher wrote as the conclusion. You have to do it yourself if you really want to know what's going on. That conclusion might

have some bias. I published a paper three or four years ago called Guiding Coaches Through Science. It was for coaches and the idea was that. You're like Carl Sagan. Can we get that link? We need to have that link off of our blog. We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes on the website.

My first piece of advice, what to do with the introduction? Throw it away. Don't read it. It's not information. Methods. It's what you do so you can start talking about what matters. You got to do this awkward rambling. You're trying to sell. You pick 10 random articles. You reference them. You throw something together that works. You're trying to. Well, for us, it's grant money. We're trying to convince people to fund our work. So it's not for you guys to read. Don't it's. Don't read the intro. If you are brand

new and you don't know shit about that paper, then you can read the intro because it'll fill you in. But again, if you're experienced and you already have a lot of intel about that area, then you can probably skip it. But be careful because the intro is guided. I'm trying to convince you why you should read my paper. I'm not giving you like the full unabashed, here's all the stuff, here's the pro... I'm giving you

like a very... It's not unbiased. It's a sales pitch. It's a sales pitch. It's selective referencing. Read the methods and there are certain parts you just throw out, don't read. Read these few results. Here's how to get to them. And then the discussion, just like you said, throw it out too. Because this is speculation.

I think it maybe happened because of this. I think it happened because of that. Maybe this happened. Hell, I don't know. Who knows? So don't read that shit. Exactly what you said. Read the results.

You make your decision. Boom, out. Yeah. By page two, you're just a cuss. You're like, what else can I say about this shit? You get through research, and you don't take, like you said, you don't take that one paper and be like, okay, that's it. I'm now going to take X. Yeah. By page two, you're just a cuss. You're like, what else can I say about this shit? You get through research, and you don't take, like you said, you don't take that one paper and be like, okay, that's it. I'm now going to take X.

Right. Whoa. Come on, athletes. Let's jump off the cliff. That actually happens the most with supplements. Oh, God. You know, they're like, there's one study, and then they want to take, I mean, that's what I do.

You took that lizard shit after that. Yeah, and it works, but you know. Deer antler piss. Yeah, yeah. Hey, bro, I mean, and it works, but you know. Deer antler piss and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, bro, I read the study. Should I be taking deer antler? Yeah, one or two studies doesn't really do it. We're talking about creatine earlier.

There's been fucking hundreds, seven hundreds of thousands. Creatine and caffeine. Creatine and caffeine. Caffeine, yeah. Go to examine.com and go, oh, shit. The numbers are in the tens of thousands on that. Tens of thousands. Yeah, so there's a preponderance of that.

We know what the fuck we're talking about when it comes to caffeine. That's why I kind of roll my eyes when you said it. I'm like, do we really want to take time talking about this shit? Yeah, because people are listening to journalists, and that's the problem. Yeah, it's not for us. It's for whoever happens to be listening. Yeah, it's... Get off it.

Oh, it's probably time to wrap this show up. I think we could probably go on for hours. Well, we will. Off camera. We'll do blood soap and barbed wire tonight. We'll get more alcohol going. We're going to switch over to tequila if that's going to happen. I'll make Corvette Summers tonight, man.

We'll have a good fucking time. I love Corvette Summers. Oh, that's my signature cocktail. Alright, guys. Make sure to go to Barbell... Wait. You know what? I'm going to be a gentleman here. What do you want to plug, Andy? Andy, what do know what? I'm going to be a gentleman here. What do you want to plug, Andy? Andy, what do you want? Well, I don't have an Instagram because I haven't been educated.

Maybe I'll make one now. He got berated when he showed up for not having one. You have a show on Fox? Yeah. Actually, by the time this airs, it'll be gone. But you guys can probably watch it. We filmed an episode of Countdown to the Octagon. So the preview for like the UFCfc events that they do yeah we

filmed that at my lab with some of the guys portion of it which aired on fox yesterday which was awesome i got bombarded by the university the pr media people they're blowing up because they love you the fox people told me we'll count the viewership in the millions pay me motherfucker yeah we're gonna send you dozens no he didn't wear if you guys caught that, I've been working with Kevin James for a while, the actor. Oh, really? And the last day, we filmed his last movie in Vegas. So I've been back and forth in Vegas for the last few months. And I happened to be wearing my Barbell Shrug shirt.

And we took a last day photo. Can you get Kevin on our podcast? Yeah. He's awesome, man. He's tremendous. He's in Toronto with Adam Sandler in the next movie. But we can work it out. Get Adam Sandler. So, Adam, but we can work it out.

Get Adam Sandler. So, Adam, how does training help you do whatever the fuck it is you do on camera? You call this shit movies. How does it help? Kevin's crazy. You guys could get – because Kevin could have been a national or higher than national level weightlifter. Really? He's in his 50s.

He overhead pressed – what was it? 280 for 20. What? What? On a machine. Kevin James. On a machine. On a for 20. What? On a machine. Kevin James. On a machine. But it's the hammer strength, independent.

Still, that's not weak. I was like, Kevin James is one of the strongest men in the fucking world? Kokov can't press. That'd be his number. He did the independent leg press, 380 for 32 or something. I just said stop. He's unbelievable. He played football.

And he's in his 50s. He wrestled a little bit. He's unbelievable. Didn't see that one coming. Mick Foley, he went to school with him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, so you got the Fox Sports. Yeah, so you got that stuff on there. The Octagon.

What's the show called again? This is a key podcast. It was called Road to the Oct was called Road to the Octagon. Road to the Octagon. All right, where can people find you on Twitter? It's at DR, Andy Galpin. So Dr. Andy Galpin, just DR. And after we force you to do Instagram, what's your name going to be?

Hopefully the same thing. Probably keep it something like that. I don't know. You guys will have to tell me what to do. It's tough if you don't have the same matching thing because Twitter doesn't like Instagram because they didn't let them buy them. I don't even have a phone that I can do that stuff on.

So anyways, we're going to get you an Instagram account after this. Hopefully it'll be the same thing. Maybe we'll link it on the show notes.

Actually, one last thing. I have had multiple people now contact me from the first couple episodes that watch this and are now going to be coming to school with us

or that are doing projects with us. We have some people come in and visit the lab, bring their kids and stuff. You're welcome. That had 15-year-old kids interested in stuff. So I'm happy to do that stuff, too.

So if you guys are interested in maybe pursuing education, we do real applied, cool science, but real applied stuff. There's not a lot of places in the United States where you can go and get a legit fucking sports science degree. This should be on your list. East Tennessee State. We offer a degree in strength and conditioning. We have a master's degree in strength and conditioning.

Like you said, I never in my life took a class in strength and conditioning. We have a bunch. Like, we teach graduate-level, undergraduate-level classes in strength and conditioning. So if that's what you're interested in. Yeah, we get hit up a lot from people going, hey, should I even go to school? Where should I go?

You know, all this kind of stuff. And a lot of times I'm like, you know what? It all depends on where you go to school, where should I go, you know, all this kind of stuff. And a lot of times I'm like, you know what, it all depends on where you go to school. Sometimes school's not the right answer. Sometimes it is. And if you know you're going to do something like exercise science, kinesiology, this is one of those schools where you're going to be able to get a good education there. The schools with, and this probably goes with like every degree program there is. They're vastly different from school to school when it comes to kinesiology, exercise science.

But we do know that at Cal State, it's good. Cal State Fullerton. There's 26 Cal States. Sorry. Yeah, don't just go pick a random college without visiting it. When we were doing our PhDs and we were traveling around to different universities, checking out the programs, some of them, you just were like, fuck, there's no way I'm going to that school.

And don't go to school. Don't choose the university based on geography. Look at the programs, please. Can you record that and play that in my class? Oh, man. Every one of my students. Oh, I want to go to school. I'm not leaving Orange County, though.

Yeah. Great. I went to Memphis. Like, why did you ever leave and go to Memphis from Seattle because we you met because all of us were there at the same time

read the list of people who were hanging out doing research in Memphis during those years speaking of which everyone that left that program and were hanging out

at that time were all doing really cool things in strength and conditioning guess who I saw last week who'd you see the panda bear himself you saw Lauren Shue

Lauren Shue what was Lauren doing he was in Vegas we were hanging out had some cigars I haven't seen Dr Lauren Shue. Oh, really? He was in Vegas. We hung out, had some cigars and scotch. I haven't seen Dr. Shue. Let me guess what he's doing in Vegas. No, it's a convention. We'll put Lauren on the show.

We do need Lauren on the show. That dude is fantastic. He's very opinionated, which is awesome. We should just talk about kettlebells. I remember he used to get in such epic. He's the smartest guy I think I've ever met. This guy is just, he's like a Garhammer type. He could have been a PhD in physics.

For some reason, he dug, lifted weights and wailed. He wanted to master it. Well, he came like a Garhammer type. He could have been a PhD in physics. For some reason, he dug lifting weights and weightlifting. He wanted a master. Well, he came out here and got his PhD from George Salem at USC. Yeah, he's a master

of biomechanics. This guy's brilliant as fuck. But we used to sew, because I'm like the brash, fat, wide stance, squatting pilater. He's the by-the-book, physics-based,

weightlifter. And we used to just hang out all the time. We'd sit in the lab, drink Diet Code Red, Mountain Dew, like fucking buy the case. Every day, you had to bring in.

Buy the book. They're not nutritionists, physiologists, biomechanists. We would go through a case of Diet Code Red every fucking day while we were sitting there

slicing muscle tissue. Every day, man. You have to, to keep you guys in the fitness lab. Yeah. Crushing it. In the locker room.

And Dr. Schilling was no better. He drank that shit too. Don't let him fool you. And then I tried to get him to go down the tab route because at the time I had a mean addiction to tab. Dr. Schilling had 35 and changed everything. Yeah. I never heard a tab tell you.

You brought me to that. Tab. If you want to have a problem, you start drinking tab. You're going to be fucking hooked. Keep this perspective in mind. So when we got there, it was, you were diehard powerlifting. Lauren Chew was his opinionated everything. We're over

here. And so it was just mutual hatred amongst everybody. These fucking powerlifters are so stupid. They don't know anything. And we all train in the same weightlifting room. They're cheating. And then he's over there. Yeah, well, we're putting a thousand pounds on our back. Eat shit. And then all of a sudden, Mike was like, hey, I want to get into this CrossFit stuff.

We're like, what the fuck? You, and everybody hated you. Everyone teamed up against me. They were like, that CrossFit thing is stupid. I was like, it's fun. Don't worry about it. There's a lot of mutual love-hatred going on there, mostly hatred. Things have come a long ways this year.

Can you fucking believe how popular Olympic weightlifting has gotten in this country? It's amazing. Yeah, yeah. There's over 350 athletes at the American open new like world record i think for for weightlifting meets and then we host the nationals this year was we just broke it again with like 500 athletes we hosted the largest ever local meet uh last spring here at in my weightlifting club we had 182 registered lifters or something over three days just and don't pretend that wasn't because of crossfit it was no you can, I don't. You can talk all the shit you want about CrossFit.

No, I'm not talking to you. There's a lot of people out there. If that's all they ever did that was good, it means I will never talk shit about them ever. I mean, they reinvented weightlifting for us. You know, without getting too far, pushing this podcast along too far, I get asked a lot about that.

What do you think about CrossFit? You know, without going too far, I say that to the USA people, USAW people, I say the same thing. Like, we're not even, we've doubled in a few years. Yeah. You have a lot of people exercising a lot. They're trying really hard and they're changing a lot of their lifestyle.

I've been on ESPN, probably 12 different episodes of different interviews about CrossFit. You know, pros and cons, hurting people, all that garbage. And I sound like this huge CrossFit proponent. And, in fact, I was on a radio show, and a guy called in one time and said, we'd like to know what Dr. Galpin's affiliation with CrossFit officially is. And I said, none. I've actually literally never done it. I've never done CrossFit, never competed, never won.

Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's a lie because you did fight gone bad once. Oh, yeah, that's right. With Nizal. You crushed it. We have pictures together. He was wait, wait, wait, wait. That's a lie because you did fight gone bad once. Oh, yeah, that's right, with Nazal. You crushed it. We have pictures together. He was like, oh, I don't do any conditioning, just weightlifting. He came in and just fucking. Well, my response to that question on live was, yeah, I've done a lot of push-ups.

I've done a lot of burpees in my life. I've pressed barbells, thrown medicine balls. I guess I've never done CrossFit, done it my whole life. I don't know. What the? Or maybe you did CrossFit your whole life and you didn't know it. Right. And the basic argument is CrossFit's the name of a company, not an exercise program.

But to come back to sort of the original point, it's done a lot. People are, this culture has moved forward. There's a lot of goofy shit that happens. A lot of it, the socks. That's always, man. That's always. Exactly. Humans do goofy shit. That's what we do. And so for the most part, if you weigh all the things and bad things, it's trying to

do a lot of good things. Maybe to get the tops, nice guy, maybe not nice guy. It doesn't matter. The movement is in generally pretty positive. And that's the only way it can respond. And a lot of people seem to enjoy it. They're liking it. How can you say what people like that's not harmful to others?

Soccer moms are snatching barbells. Yeah, and the thing that we have to- It's to very libertarian view of you yeah careful we're in california you know you have to understand that and i use your guys in fact i use your guys's gym on espn as the exact example that every gym is run independently so if you went to crossfit south bay which i don't is that one maybe probably i should say that yeah just say crossfit fit strong prepared faction mike bledsoe i don't know cross Is that one maybe? Probably. CrossFit, FitStrong, Prepared, Faction, Mike Bledsoe. I don't know. CrossFit, Jango's and you had a really bad experience and maybe they're

really underqualified people. I totally believe it. That could absolutely happen. Go to the one four miles down the street and it might be the best gym in the world. And it might be also terrible. Go to the next one, go to the next one and if you don't like it, don't do it. But you can't tell this company that. You could say that about any personal personal training studio it could be really shitty and then block away

really good well my exact example was are there some really ever been a 24 hour well i won't say any other normal gym just keep naming names there are some really really unqualified people trust me they're my students i'm trying my best so unqualified so unqualified. I do a great time. It's the best school in the world for exercise science. My students are highly underqualified. And then I also have some really, really fantastic personal trainers. Some really tremendous ones. So why would we think that the CrossFit ones are any better or worse?

But I get asked that. There's people getting hurt in yoga studios because they're doing stupid shit. No one's like fucking get rid of yoga. There's good and bad doctors, good and getting hurt in yoga studios because they're doing stupid shit. No one's like fucking get rid of yoga. There's good and bad doctors, good and bad chiropractors. Welcome to humanity. Dentists, like whatever. When I hear horror stories about CrossFit did this, I'm like, oh, I believe it. I believe it entirely. And then when I hear tremendous stories about how many of your guys' people that are in there,

whoever, non-athletes will say they've had tremendous success, they've been there since day one or early on. And I don't. I'm like, yeah, that probably happened too. Just like any other. You go to one auto shop, it's terrible. You go to the next one, it's fantastic. Four more, terrible.

How you can not think through that? I don't know. True that, homie. True that. Science. All right. Make sure you go to barbellshrug.com. Sign up for the newsletter.

Check out the shop. Everybody's got a bonus 35 minutes, by the way. That's what you said. We to barbellshrug.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Check out the shop. Everybody's got a bonus 35 minutes, by the way. After we say, well, we're wrapping it up. And no one else. Yeah. I'm really going to shut this down. Because we've got to go to the beach. The girls are waiting.

And they're going to be pissed because they can't look at us. All right. Thanks for coming out. Yeah, thanks, dude. And with some passion. I like it. Yeah. Peace.