Barbell Shrugged - Body of Knowledge  —  Chapter 1  —  Deep Adaptations

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

In chapter 1, Kenny and Andy dive deep into the science and applications of physiological adaptation. Research has shown that people can significantly change the composition of their muscle fibers and the magnitude of such changes can be shockingly high. Human beings can alter their physiology with exercise and nutrition far more than previously believed. Enjoy! - Kenny and Andy ----------------------------------------------- Please support our partners! Thrive Market is a proud supporter of us here at Barbell Shrugged.  We very much appreciate all they do with us and we’d love for you to support them in return!  Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of FREE Organic Groceries + Free Shipping and a 30 day trial, click the link below: https://thrivemarket.com/body How it works:  Users will get $20 off their first 3 orders of $49 or more + free shipping.  No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so why not give Thrive Market a try! ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.ShruggedCollective.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/shruggedcollective

Mike Bledsoe here, CEO of the Shrug Collective. If you haven't already noticed, we've got a lot of new cool stuff going on. You hit shrugcollective.com, you'll see some great content that you won't be catching if you're only listening to the podcast. Hit the website and see the new look and feel. This week, we get to introduce you to two new shows. Today, we bring you Body of Knowledge. This show has been created by a couple of guys you already know, Dr. Andy Galpin and Kenny Kane. They've had their own project and I love that we get to share it

with you here. As we're expanding and improving the shows, we have partnered with amazing companies that we believe in. We talk and hang out with the people who run these businesses and know why they do what they do. Not all products are created equal, even if it looks like it on the surface. We've done the research and have been in the industry long enough to see what really works and what will make the biggest difference for you long term. With that being said, one of my favorite companies, Thrive Market, has a special offer for you. You get $60 of free organic groceries plus free shipping and a 30-day trial. Go to thrivemarket.com slash body. This is how it works.

Users will get $20 off their first three orders of $49 or more, plus free shipping. No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so hit up Thrive Market today. Thrivemarket.com slash body. Enjoy the show. Can we start again? Yeah. Where's the future of this understanding going?

Don't know. Why? Anyways. We are not a singular thing. We are built to change. At the most advanced levels of everything, it comes down to fundamental basics. These are general health practices

that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness. Scream if you like candy. that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness. Scream if you like candy. I don't know where that came from. I wasn't listening. I was just thinking about that. Good people, I'm Kenny Kane alongside Andy Galpin,

and this is The Body of Knowledge with awesome stories at the intersection of science and fitness. Today on the show, we address a big question. Is your physiology something you can build or are you born with it? Now, recently, boy, the needles kind of move. People do know that you can build a lot of your physiology, but to what degree? And today, man, we're going to be getting into that with old ninja Dr. Pants next to me, Dr. Galpin. Now, to anchor this whole conversation is this philosophical idea that Thomas Kuhn in the 60s wrote a book about.

Now, it might be one of the most boring books ever constructed, yet the ideas in it massively influential. So if there's a listener or several out there that can read the entire book, I want to guarantee that we're going to give illegally the fire hydrant that rests outside of this gym that we're currently recording and a free puppy. So you're going to get a puppy and a fire hydrant for getting through that book. The title of the book is The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Now, in that book, Thomas Kuhn coined the phrase that has been totally overplayed, the paradigm shift.

Are you saying our show is not going to cause a paradigm shift? Because I think we're going to cause a shift. We might cause a paradigm shift. I don't think we're going to cause a shift. Now, what he said- Are you saying our show's not going to cause a paradigm shift? Because I think we're going to cause a shift. We might cause a paradigm shift. I don't think we're going to cause a shift. And it will be the most played thing ever because we have followed something that lost flavor in vernacular 15 years ago. Nonetheless, in the 60s when he created this,

it was brand new language. And what he's talked about is he said, look, the way to think about science is not so much as these deep scientific spikes and then that changes the world irrevocably. Rather, it's the way in which you view things and challenge things. So that's why he said it's a series of paradigm shifts that evolve and move the whole thing forward. And when, he mentioned in the book, these paradigm shifts occur, there is typically a tremendous amount of kickback and resistance. So we can all sort of understand, empathize, and relate to, hey, you've got an idea. And people around you go, that's scary, that's new, that's freaky, whatever. Certainly, I've seen it a lot as a coach.

I see a ton of closed-mindedness and people holding to their ideas. I do it personally myself. As a scientist off-air, you and I have talked about this, that it's endemic in the scientific community for people to hold on to their ideas as if they are absolute truths. Fundamentally, what we want this show to be about is the evolution of ideas, knowing full well that what we think is going to constantly evolve with some degree of plasticity. Plasticity, one of the interesting things that we're going to talk about. Why? Because muscle,

as we know it, turns out to be pretty darn plastic in its ability to evolve. To what degree? We're going to dive into that a ton. But let me just start this episode with our producer, who is a 230-pound beefcake named Josh Ambry, who has got a football-playing background and an Olympic-lifting background. So the guy can propel mid know mid 300 and something pounds overhead really without thinking about it and recently he came to the gym and i noticed a massive evolution in his oxidative capacities in other words his ability to perform exercise without fatiguing for a long

time dramatically improved and case point, he had a test workout that he failed to complete that had a 35 minute cap. So this means he had to get it done in less than 35 minutes or no matter, even if he wasn't done, no matter where he was in the workout, you stopped him after 35 minutes. Right. And after three months of training, he finished that workout in 28 minutes. So that's 20% or more. That's 20% or more in three months. So, you know, again, a lot of people really do recognize that there is this ability to gain fitness in different areas, but I understand that principally, but I would love your help in understanding that more specifically. Well, so let me ask you then how much strength

did he lose during that time? So it took him three months and he got better. How far did that down his squat go? That is a great question. Josh, what did you? Absolutely none. My strength didn't improve, but it stayed the same. My front squat was identical.

So what's interesting about that, because we're actually hearing that a lot right now, you've got hundreds of cases, thousands cases coaches around the world people from different from different areas are are saying wait a minute we used to think you either got strong or you got shit and there's no middle ground in fact we used to think there's an interference effect and there probably is to some degree but we've got to tease out exactly what's going on there uh if you're interested in this topic i would point you to a really nice article wrote by a good friend of mine, Dr. Jimmy Bagley, on this concept of concurrent training. But what it really does is it outlines we've got more plasticity or adaptability in this example in our muscle than we ever thought. To really understand that, we've got to go all the

way back to the beginning of our understandings of how muscle contraction works. A Greek physiologist named Erisistratus came up with this concept. Wait, what was his name? Erisistratus. I'm so glad that you can say that. Isn't that your son's name? Erisistratus. It took me a lot of time with Wikipedia or with the Google pronunciation function to try to

finally learn how to say that name. When you're giving lectures at Cal State Fullerton, do you have to refer to him by name? Yeah, I do. It just goes right over my student size. They don't care. Most of them don't care about any of this stuff. When they do, remember the name, you know what you give them? A fire hydrant. Or a fake mustache. Or a fake mustache.

A glue-on mustache, specifically. A glue-on mustache, right. So, Erisistratus came up with this idea that he called Spiritus Animalis, which is, talk about another fun book to read. Good luck, right? But what he really did was... It's all Greek to me. Yeah, literally.

He was trying to figure out how muscle contraction happens. So why is it when I flex my bicep, the muscle literally gets larger vertically, right? And so he came up with this working theorem that connected the cardiovascular, neuromuscular, and muscular system. And what he basically thought was there was this pneuma or breath or this spirit, right, that's in all animals and so when you wanted to contract your bicep you would send this wave of air from your brain through what ended up being your nervous system to the muscle the then this error like pneumatics right is where there were pneumatics comes from air fills that space is why the muscle gets larger this concept of muscle contraction via spirit as anomalous persisted for several thousand years.

Until, if I have it somewhat correct, this thing called the microscope comes along and there's this crazy advancement in the technology of the microscope. It's exactly right. In 1712, a gentleman by the name of Antoni von Leeuwenhoek. Von Leeuwenhoek! He came back and he used this massive advancement in technology that allowed him to actually look a lot closer at the individual muscle fibers. And actually, he was looking at whale and cod.

And he was able to look under this new microscope that he had made significant improvements in. And he started to realize that there's not air filling muscles. There's these actual individual muscle fibers. And so theile force or the the function of your bicep is really dictated by how all these thousands or millions of individual muscle fibers perform so that single fiber function determines whole muscle function so somewhere around 150 years later, I remember you telling me that this whole thing started to advance because some guy was able to look at muscle fibers and go, they look a lot different. Yeah, that's right. A guy by the name of Ron V.A., who we'll come back to later in later

episodes. He's the guy where we get to turn the nodes of Ranvier, which are the spaces between your myelin sheath, which is your insulation on your nerves. Also a great song that never got released by Adele. Yeah, probably, probably. It's her next hit. Yeah. So Ranvier quickly realized that some of these muscle fibers

were meant to do things like be on all day, but to produce a low amount of force, right? These are muscles like the back of your leg or your low back muscles to keep you vertical, the anti-gravity muscles. But some of them are meant to produce a tremendous amount of force, but they fatigue quickly, right? And these fibers are around to help you do things like rip a fire hydrant off the front of Kenny's wall to give away to people, right?

So we've got this independent function and this led to a whole new area of study so is that where this thing that you know between actin and myosin starts to kick in our understanding of that yeah that's exactly right so once we had this steam built from ranvier the next big advancement we had came in 1954 when a pair of scientists named Huxley and Huxley, which, by the way, isn't it crazy? They had this massive discovery together. Their both last names are Huxley, and they're not related. I'm going to qualify that as rare. Yeah, right? Nonetheless, what they outlined in their series of papers in 1954 was this relationship explaining the exact mechanics of a single muscle fiber contraction.

So it's something you could look up perhaps on your own, this idea of actin and myosin. So myosin being a very big molecule that reaches up and it grabs the actin, which are smaller molecules around it. It pulls them together. And so the muscle fibers start stacking vertically on each other, which gives you that size. And so what it really does is explain in more accurate terms or improve knowledge all the way back to the NUMA idea. They said, you know what, you weren't entirely off. We do have a signal coming from the brain and it's going through some area. It's weaving its way to the exact muscle. And there's a respiratory process involved absolutely energetic process absolutely but now the mechanics of it are improved and

what's probably really interesting perhaps we'll come back to this in another episode or another season is this whole concept of sliding filament theory while we know it is far improved over the pneuma and the spirit of salamalus uh we still realize there's some problems there so that's not as airtight as we had thought so let's get to the heart of this whole thing i mean you're setting a great foundation right now for us to understand sort of the history of muscle muscle fibers but help me understand Andy, like the plasticity of muscles. I mean, can, why is it that Josh can improve so dramatically and not lose strength or explosivity yet cart around that giant carcass that he's got? It's a beautiful carcass, but it's a giant one. It's a giant carcass, giant tattooed carcass. So once we realize that we understand how muscle fibers are contracting

and we understand some fibers are built to do different things, the next obvious question then was, okay, how much of these fiber types are determined by my genetics and how much of these things change or do they change? And people will just dig their heels in on this until they die absolutely and then they're generally the people that don't do the research they're not the actual people doing these studies because we've known actually for a very very long time the answer and in fact

it's it's not even arguable anymore but somehow people that don't read actual things want to make this argument right So here's what we basically know is, unlike in animals, humans are very unique in the fact that none of our muscles are homogenous with this fiber type, which is a fancy way of saying if we take a... Kenny, pick your favorite muscle. Glutes. The glutes, of course you'd pick the...

Love the glutes. Because yours are so delicious. I've got glowing orbs. I'm 163 pounds, and I would say that 45 are in my glutes. Fantastic. So if we take your glutes. Gizmus strumpf. Right.

We know the main function of the glute is actually to be a little bit of both in terms of it is necessary to be on at a low level for a large portion of the day. That stabilizes your hip, keeps your pelvis and your low back in neutral position. But it's also meant to generate a lot of force production, right? This is the massive external rotator of your femur, and it propels you forward, causes tremendous hip extension. It's important. And so if we look at its fiber type, it's probably a little bit of a mix.

It probably has some of these slow, and it probably has some of these fast fibers in it, right? Now, if you compared your glute and my glute though, it's entirely possible. In fact, it'd be almost guaranteed that that percentage of fast versus slow in your glutes is going to differ on mine, right? And so not only do we have different fiber types within a muscle group, but then we also have massive person to person variability in our composition. If we go back to Josh too, his composition might be different. So we're all three probably further down the anaerobic strength-power spectrum than the average person.

But if we compare that to, say, your wife, who is an Olympic-level distance runner, well, mid-distance runner, right? Mid-distance, yeah. She's probably a little bit further down the endurance spectrum. And if we compare that to an Olympic marathoner or even a normal person who just likes to do continuous steady state exercise, who had no problem beating Josh's ass in that first 30 minute workout, right? They may be further down the slow twitch end of the spectrum. So we've got this massive variability between person and between muscle. Once we realize that, and we started studying this even more, we actually started to understand it's not even that clean.

What I mean by that is just like when we had this massive advancement in technology in the microscope, we had this massive improvement in knowledge, the same thing happened with our fiber types about 30 years ago. We had a massive improvement in our laboratory's technical skills, and we started to realize not only are there fast and slow fibers, but there are some even further down the spectrum which are now what we call ultra-fast. There's not only fast, slow, and super-fast.

There are some fibers that exist in between each of those categories. So these are individual muscle cells. This is one cell in the body that is some portion fast and some portion slow at the same time. There's one cell in the body that is some portion fast and some portion slow at the same time. There's two things. One, there's the sort of conversation that everybody knows. The guy or the gal that says, I'm more of a fast twitch.

Right. Or like, I'm a slow twitch. I don't do that fast stuff. So people have their opinions about sort of – and that might just fit their personalities, let alone what they're exposed to. Then there's the other scientific thing that I'd like to hear more on, which is, as I understand it, the mitochondrial density is the huge distinguishing factor in the fiber types. And that's critical to sort of understand because the application of the sort of volume of mitochondria in the slower twitch fibers is much more dense versus the faster twitch but the faster twitch get energy from different resources so understanding that i think helps me understand

the sort of physiology of that but can you break that down better than i could for yeah listeners well you're exactly right in your first point a lot of that is determined by the exposure that that person gives themselves so if i'm a fast twitch guy, it generally means I like it better because I have more success there. So I spend more damn time doing it. Right. But what happens? That's so human, right? What happens if I expose myself to the other end of the spectrum? There is an unprecedented level of plasticity within this, right? Now to your second point, the mitochondria, which are these independent organelle that are different from you in fact they actually have their own their own individual dna by the way which is crazy and fun fact that's inherited entirely by your mother well my mom was a world

class athlete so well wow i wasn't i don't know what happened thanks dad might have been might have been mindset right uh so yeah there are more mitochondria in these slow twitch ones, of course. But there still is, your fast twitch have the ability to add more. And we do see this from time to time, although it's not the norm. It's not impossible for us to see a fast twitch fiber that has more, let's say, mitochondria than a slow twitch. That's funny because I was fixed in that thinking just based on certifications that I had done and studying that I had done at one point. No, absolutely not. We don't see any of that.

In fact, the more we study these things with the better technology, we start to realize our knowledge is rudimentary. And when we gain better perspective, we start to realize, well, the only reason we saw X or Y or Z is because that's the only way we could look at it. Now, once we look at it from a better perspective, we're seeing holes. Yeah, I just got off on the third floor. You're looking at it from the 45th. Exactly. And so these hybrid fibers, which I alluded to a second ago, is another great example of that.

And so, you know, just a handful of years ago, actually more like a couple of decades ago, we thought there's only fast or slow. And now we realize there's fast and slow, and there's a single cell that can be partially fast or partially slow. It could be 90% fast, 10% slow. And so what it really lets us know is, yeah, we can arbitrarily call Josh a fast switch guy. But more importantly, he's just a guy on a spectrum. There's a continuum of fiber types and he is just at a certain place on that continuum and that continuum moves based on a bunch of different things. When I see Josh move sometimes I think to myself sometimes he runs slow sometimes he runs quick he's sweeter and

thicker than a Chico stick. I don't know where that came from I wasn't listening I was just thinking about that. Anyway, take me back to the 45th floor. Yeah, right. When we look at some of the original research in these areas, we do realize that, yeah, okay, endurance athletes tend to have more of these slow twitch fibers and high power strength athletes do have more of these fast twitch fibers. And people kind of stopped carrying them,

but that's because we couldn't even see these hybrids. It turns out people who are untrained or sedentary have a lot of these hybrid fibers. And now as soon as you start to train, they go away. So is that some sort of epigenetic thing? You're turning on some DNA and also just utilizing specific muscle fiber types based on the exposure yes the nature of it's an exposure issue exactly now we don't know the details here because we're

again we're fresh in this field but one way i could speculate and i and i by the way i request full permission to totally change my answer in five or ten years when we figure this out but right now my speculation is this if we took josh and we sat him on the couch for the next six months, a lot of his fibers, whether they're fast or slow, would convert into being hybrids. Now, after those six months where, let's see, 30 or 40 percent of his muscle fibers are in this hybrid state, we have him start lifting heavy with you. Well, now a lot of those half-fast, half-slow fibers are going to convert into a fast fiber because now there's a level of specificity of movement needed. If we had exposed him to the other end of the spectrum, they would have

probably shifted to slow twitch. It doesn't appear to really matter what you do activity-wise to cause these hybrid fibers to specify. But the key thing is you have to do something. You can worry about the fine tuning and detailing later, but if you're on the couch right now, if you haven't trained in the last six weeks, six months, six years, just get moving. They will start to move and you will notice this immediately in form and function. And this is why when we take somebody who's untrained and it doesn't matter what workout you put them on after six months, they're going to be bigger, faster, stronger, more powerful, in better shape, oxidation, and you name it, they're going to be

better at everything, right? Now, if you're looking at somebody who's highly trained, they probably have very, very low numbers of these hybrids, 10% or less, right? Very low, because they're very, very specified, which is one of the reasons probably why it's harder for them to make gains. Well, time out. Highly trained for what? Like, are you talking about a sport specific or fitness specific? Either way. Either way.

Yeah. If you're very, very trained, if you're engaged in a lot of physical training, those fibers are going to specify. And when you get to the end of that and there's no more room to go, then your progress slows down. Right. Right. That didn't really answer our question, though though because people will always come back and say

okay well what if Josh say who doesn't have a lot of these hybrids maybe he chose to do lifting he chose to play football because he was already born with a lot of these fast twitch. So enter our next conversation which is to look at really is there

is it able or are you able to change your fiber type with training in a normal, healthy circumstance? And to what degree? Well, again, I would point you to a paper by my good friend, Dr. Jimmy Bagley, who outlined all this stuff, and he took all the studies that have been done on fiber type change, put it into one figure for you, And it shows a pretty clear change, whether you're talking about lifting weights for six months,

whether you're talking about doing a little bit of lifting and some cardio, whether you're talking about doing the opposite. So this is 60, 90 days of bed rest, right? Sitting broken leg or just laying in bed. We see fiber types change in all directions and in as little as like 14 days. So it happens very, very quick. In fact, a really cool paper just recently came out where they took old and young people and they had them do 14 days of disuse.

And what they found was the fast and slow fibers changed. Just two weeks. In just two weeks, right? And then when they actually followed them through 28 days of active recovery, the fibers changed again. They went back to their normal resting level. We know we have this level of plasticity. We know it happens very quick.

And in fact, it can even change with things like your nutrition and your diet. So a really cool study also came out very recently. They looked at, they didn't look at humans. They looked at primates, which are very, very similar in terms of our muscle fiber and function. And what they did is they put them either on a long-term high-fat, high-sugar diet, or they got the same thing with a little bit of a phytochemical called resveratrol. And what they saw was, again, a significant change in fiber composition based on that high-fat, high-sugar diet, and the resveratrol was able to block it. Interesting.

I think we can stop the conversation about whether or not muscle fibers change. The question really now is like, what doesn't change them? Really, what people want to know, though, is again, can we put a number on it? Right? How much do you change? Well, if we're talking about less than a year, right? So in other words, we take a biopsy. Kenny, you come down to my lab tomorrow. I stick a needle in there. I suck some of that fine-looking tissue out of you. Right?

Put it in my lab. Glute meat. Yeah. Yummy. Lots of glute meat in the lab. We're probably looking, and if we put you in a training program over a year, we could probably see upwards of a 10%, 15%, 20% change in your fiber type, which is a big, big could probably see upwards of a 10, 15, 20% change in your fiber type, which

is a big, big, big number. That's substantial because I'm 112 years old. Right. Well, actually, interestingly, we have done studies upwards of 80 years old or more and still we don't lose any of these abilities to change fiber types with age. The rate of change slows down, but we still can see fiber type changing in 70, 80 year olds. We don't lose this ability. We just lose movement, right? We stop moving. So if you are very, very,

very untrained, Kenny, we might see 10, 20% movement in a year. Now, if you're very trained, you might see maybe closer to five, six, seven, 8%, depending on the exact details here, but 10, 20, 30% is not completely unreasonable. It's physiologically possible. Somewhere between greater than a year. It's such crazy percentages. It gets even higher. It's crazy.

We've seen up to 70%. And what, like? Now, these are extreme cases when you do something like have a spinal cord injury and the nerve is cut for like five, six, seven, ten years. Okay.

But what that shows us is there is unlimited plasticity, right? It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of exposure. And in those particular cases, the exposure was literally nothing. So we see these huge changes. Can you guess which direction the fiber type shifted in those particular cases? For the people with neuropathies or spinal injuries? Like if we cut off your

nerve for your leg? Well, I would imagine that it would go more type 1 or slower twitch. Yeah, it goes the other way. Really? They become almost entirely not only fast twitch, they become almost entirely ultra fast twitch. Why? Don't know. That's very counterintuitive

to me. Extremely. It's probably because they're shifting towards that ultra-fast fiber type because it's more metabolically conservative. Saves energy. Right. We think that those fibers are then on their way out. It's their exit strategy. So they're about to die.

Now I'm getting way out of my lane, but can I just throw this out there? There's the mitochondrial density with capillary density, and if somebody's not moving, both of those are going to start to reduce. Totally. I got one right. Hey.

I got one right. Yeah. I want myself a mustache. Can we get him his fire extinguisher? So we think that maybe that's an exit strategy, so the fibers are about to die. They're saying, you haven't used this in a long time, but we're going to hang out here, and we're going to that's the next strategy. So the fibers are about to die. They're saying, you haven't used this in a long time, but we're going to hang out here,

and we're going to cancel all capillaries. We're going to cancel all mitochondria. We're going to save energy production. But we will be here in case we do have to rip that fire hydrant off one time. Now, you're only good for one, but we're here. I mean, that's a complete guess. We don't know. Then the hard part is we can't study these ultra-fast fibers

because we can never find them because we almost never see them in normal humans. So where's the future of this sort of understanding going? Ron V.A. and all those folks helped us identify that the cell type determined function. Fast twitch, slow twitch, this tells me how it's going to contract but the next level beyond cell is called the molecule and so the molecular and the genetic environment determines the actual plasticity so cell type determines function but molecule determines adaptability and so we have this in a couple of different directions. Imagine you've got one muscle fiber, one muscle cell. It's got a nucleus inside of it, right?

The nucleus is what holds all of your DNA. That's the things you inherit from your mom and thank you, dad, right? So you've got those things, and that's fixed. You can't change that. But how those genes are expressed, which is called epigenetics, that is determined in huge portion by your lifestyle, your sleep, your diet, nutrition, your training in this context. So these different molecules within the cells tell your nucleus, we've been stretched, we've

been damaged, we've been over-caffeinated, we've been under-sugared, we've been hyper-proteined, whatever happens to happen. So now what our lab and many other labs are looking at is, what are these molecules? Why are they operating this way? One quick example, we've done a recent study where we looked at two different bouts of heavy lifting, something like 15 sets of three repetitions versus three sets of 15 repetition. I mean, you and every other coach knows, okay, one of those is going to help me grow a lot of muscle. And one of those, I'll grow a little muscle, but really I'll get stronger power for like not even close. Right. And so my my question was if we know that's the actual outcome there has to be a molecular explanation for that and so we were able to identify yes there is a different let's take

two steps back yes for the vantage of the listener so basically you just described a way to build muscle, which is some volume is going to help with that. And then to develop some raw strength, a little bit less volume is going to help with that. Yep, agreed. So we just wanted to then come back and say these are really interesting practitioner coaching questions. There's got to be some cellular or at point, molecular and genetic explanation for it. And so, yeah, we saw quite a different response at that level. That doesn't tell us what to do, but that is helping us explain why you're seeing what you're seeing on the floor a lot of times.

So that's really the future. That's where everyone's going with these things. We're trying to identify this now. The problem still remains, were they built with those molecules? Did they have more of those molecules around so they were more sensitive to it? That's probably what explains your classic responder and non-responder. Rise at you and your workout buddy, you do the exact same workout, but he gains 20 pounds of muscle and you gain two.

Well, he's probably got more of these molecules floating around or the ones he have are more sensitive, so he just responds really, really well. And so we're starting to actually be able to get these answers and in fact we have found a bunch of these individual molecules that we can pinpoint and go you got more of this one around okay you're going to respond really really well you have less of it around you're going to have to work harder it's going to take more time or you might need more volume or you might need less volume is that more in the field of epigenetics i mean people who are looking at this on cellular and molecular levels well epigenetics is looking at the gene expression

gene expression but which ones are getting opened up or closed off based on exposures yep and so that's the gene level you can also look at the molecule level because the molecule is what tells the gene what's whether or not it's been overloaded anyways. But where this is eventually going to go is helping us truly identify individualized training programs. Eventually, we're going to be able to answer questions like why you can need more of a back-off than I do, or why you need more volume, or why you can handle these things, or you know what?

You, Josh, don't have enough of these mechanisms to program for enzymes that produce mitochondria or that work well with mitochondria. So you actually need more of this type of training because you've got an inherent limitation. That's probably what's doing it. And so not only do we have an answer to the question of whether or not these cell types change, they change massively. They change in response to a bunch of different things and now we know exactly what's causing it and we see it happening within seconds so dr galpin this this fires me up for a lot of reasons one as a gym owner one of the things that i'm fundamentally trying to anchor is the improvement of people's quality of life. You know, I understand the core principles of adaptation

and use those the best that we can in our group classes. Now, it's way easier to program for somebody one-on-one where you're just solely focused on somebody and what their specific needs and desires are. That's like, we don't even necessarily need to know to the degree that you're describing to see massive improvements in people when we're just working with them one-on-one. Having said that, the nature of gym communities, for example, work fundamentally as a tribe. So there's this individualized thing that's happening within a tribe. And that, that's where personally, I would love to see,

you know, the evolution of this space go where there's enough communal connection, but then we have such a deep understanding of everybody genetically, um, you know, to put them in the best position when they're coming to a group experience that, you know, workouts are getting kicked out that are going to help them respond best in the trajectory that we're trying to get them to go if that makes sense yeah absolutely it's not the scientists leading the cart here and it's not the practitioners either this is why we work together so with this integrated science as it starts to come to us we can sort of ensure as gym owners, coaches, trainers, that we're giving our people great stuff to improve their overall health, knowing that part

of that health equation is the camaraderie and that depth of human connection that is requisite for people living well. So while the muscle stuff is important there's more than just that there is and that's fundamentally like what what i'm after as a gym owner is like really dialing down and and anchoring into that because i've seen some situations where like the communal tribal experience is just wonderfully dynamic and profound and it keeps people coming back. But unfortunately, there's misapplication of, to me, very basic principles.

So in other words, you unintentionally injure large volumes of people just by malpractice or not really knowing or doing the work to know. And so to me, the ultimate is where they're integrated really, really well well where people are seeing uh you know their their bell curves continue to go up across their fitness but then their their connection and their basic joy and coming to the space is something that is you know just as sustainable as their physical practice all this segues really nicely into the next episode where we're going to be talking about context.

In other words, that pliable mindset that allows you to have a variety of physical practices and to be able to do those things with longevity. Good people. I'm Kenny Kane alongside Andy Galpin. And this has been the body of knowledge, the body of knowledge, the body of knowledge. Looks like you enjoyed the show. Make sure to go over to iTunes, go over to Shrug Collective, give us a five-star review, positive comment only, and make sure to go over to

thrivemarket.com slash body to order your groceries this week.