Barbell Shrugged - Body of Knowledge  — Chapter 5  —  Biases Collide

Episode Date: May 11, 2018

In chapter 5, we dive headfirst into the strength vs cardiovascular training debate. Andy sets the stage by telling the story of Bob Hoffman’s showdown with Dr. Peter Karpovich over this divide in 1940. Following the aftermath, we address our own biases, contextualize the role of adaptation in human performance, and provide some general recommendations. Andy and Kenny dive into the two, formerly opposing, schools of thought in the fitness world: strength training vs. cardiovascular training. Andy covers the evolution of strength training starting in 1861 with the coining of the “healthlift” or deadlift, as we know it today, and then they both explore the timeline of how scientists, who were pro-cardio, experienced a mindset shift and slowly understood the importance of adopting multiple modalities. Enjoy! - Kenny and Andy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bok_1.5 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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: 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: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedp... TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged  

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, this is Doug Larson, co-host of the Barbell Shrug Podcast. Of course, this week only we are doing a 50% off sale for a nutrition course that I developed called Nutrition for Weightlifters. For years I competed in weightlifting at either 85 kilo, which is 187 pounds, or as high as 94 kilo, which is 207 pounds, while simultaneously competing in mixed martial arts as a welterweight at 170 pounds. That's a 37 pound swing and I was always going up and down. I got very good at manipulating my weight to hit my weight classes depending on which

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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

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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. I don't know where that came from. I wasn't listening. I was just thinking about that.

Did I make up a word? Emblemized? A little bit. Josh, is that a word? Emblemization? I know. Emblem is a noun. I don't know if you can make emblem.

For this show, because it's the body of knowledge. We get to make words. We are adding to the collective body of words. You know, as a smart man, I once said, words don't own me, I own them. That was Dan Cook, by the way. Was it really? Yeah. Oh, man.

One of his bits was like, yeah, I just made up a word. He's like, words don't own me, I own them. Something like that. It's a good bit. I thought that would burn a little bit extra deep for you. Yeah, yeah. I've worked with Dan a couple of times. Anyway.

We know. Yes, we do. Go back a couple chapters. So, assuming you have an interest in health, fitness, strength and conditioning, CrossFit, bodybuilding, or science, today's show is going to be epic. Why? Because Doc Galpin, we call him Andy around here, is going to school us on a rather historic intellectual duel that has fueled just about everything we are seeing, thinking, buying,

believing, and sometimes smelling today. That's right. If at any point you've wanted to get jacked, be super fit, ripped, lean, crushingly big, functionally strong, perform with a lift-only bias, you have a cardio-only habit, you're a HIIT enthusiast, or take a mushroom tea that makes your cognitive function dwarf Garry Kasparov and Stephen Hawking simultaneously, you're going to walk away from this chapter having a sense of why. Which to me is fantastic. Know your roots, as most grandpas have said. And today, we're all about understanding our history on the body of knowledge. The stage is set,

1940 Springfield College, the top strength coach of the time, Bob Hoffman versus Peter Karpovich, the top exercise physiologist of the time. Andy, what happened? The winner of the showdown, Kenny, single-handedly created what we now know as the fitness and supplement industry. So the stakes were high. There was ego on the line. There was reputation. And really, the arc of the entire industry and field as we know it was all coming down to a single moment

in fact it all came down to a backflip of course because that's how all intellectual duels end sometimes you pull out the cardboard sometimes you do backflips and if you break dancer hip-hop fans like kenny and i know what i'm talking about so i think i need to maybe back up a little bit yeah you gotta back up a little bit because somebody just did a backflip and then another person got served and then there was a hip hop reference. Right. So we had strength on one hand versus cardiovascular training.

Wow. That was in 1940. I feel like that conversation is still going on now. It is. And it's the wrong conversation. So we need to back up a little bit. Bob Hoffman was a major player in American health and fitness in the early 1930s and 1940s. He had bought in what was called Milo Barba Company, and he founded a magazine called Strength and Health.

Now, this was huge at the time. They were selling like 150,000 memberships a year. This is massive money, massive marketing around the globe, again, in the time before modern technology and modern prints and shipping and things like that. So he's wildly influential. He's the father of strength conditioning and powerlifting. And in fact, for the most part, he's one of the few people really in the country promoting strength training. There's all these classic stories of him going out of pocket, using his original oil company to fund all these lifters,

like basically a scholarship. He's paying their living wages. He's taking them around the world to compete. You also have to remember, but back in the 30s, we didn't have this differentiation or splitting between subtypes of lifting. In other words, power lifting, weightlifting, bodybuilding, these were all virtually the same thing. In fact, this is still in the area of Tommy Kono,

who won, I believe, Mr. America and Olympic gold in weightlifting in the same year. Right. Or close, right? Okay. So he's supporting this entire thing. In fact, there are stories of Hoffman being in his 60s and still being able to lift 250 pounds over his head with one hand wow supposedly he had a 50 some odd inch chest and he would put

chains around it and flex and just rip it and shed it to pieces and stuff so he's this really iconic character and so on one side of this battle, we've got this larger-than-life character, almost literally in Bob Hoffman. His opponent on this day is Dr. Karpovich. Now, Karpovich was a Russian immigrant to America, but he was a classic what we would call exercise physiologist. He was at Springfield College, and he was studying, for the most part, cardiovascular fitness. Now, in context for that, everyone in the world at that time, that's basically what you did if you were into, we didn't really have these terms like we have now, but if you were a scientist

in muscle and exercise and physiology, cardiovascular fitness was about the only thing you could get away with studying. If you tried to present a paper on muscular adaptations of strength training in 1930, you'd have been laughed out of the building so what we've got is like the thought leader in the intellectual elite versus sort of this strong man that's going around and developing a handful of people's bodies with out of his own pocket but then also out of his subscriptions and the somewhat large for the time followership that he had yeah huge numbers yeah and karpovich at the time was massively influential on the ymca which was basically the only place that people had in the world certainly in america to do any sort of physical fitness

karpovich was going around and he has this wonderful quote. He did an interview in February 1940 and the journalist asked him, you know, what's your most important scientific task? And he said, to fight these muscle builders. This is a scientific agenda. Karpovich wasn't just pro-cardiovascular training. He was also anti-strength training. Right. There was a strong culture at the time of most of the leading scientists in the world that strength training was detrimental. And in fact, it was extremely unhealthy.

And there's a very clear reason why that happened. So I need to actually take you back a few more decades. Right. Stick with me here, Kenny. Okay. So we're going to go back to 1861. There was a young Harvard-trained physician named Dr. George Winship.

Now, the stories go he was something like five feet tall, 100 pounds, was getting picked on in school, decided I don't want to get beat up, pushed around anymore, took actions into his own hands, started strength training. Turned into one of the strongest guys in the world,

which was, you have to understand how unbelievable and amazing and how unique this guys in the world, which was, you have to understand how unbelievable and amazing and how unique this was in the 1860s to be a physician and to be really, really, really strong. In fact, you can go back and look, but he developed a machine and he developed this exercise

where you pick a huge load up with your hands out in front of you. He called it the health lift, which is now what people call the deadlift. So that was really the original name for that movement. That's funny. The Russians used to call steroids health injections. Yeah, right. He actually had coined the term strength is health. So Hoffman's magazine, we talked about strength and health with actually an homage back to Winship's original saying of strength is health. What happened, though, was a few years later, in 1876, Winship dies at the age of 42 of a stroke.

That can't be good for the strength community. It crushed it because everyone was like, yeah, you might get stronger. You might be able to lift this horse, but it's bad for your heart. So, Karpovich and most of the other academics around the country were still promoting this idea that strength training was actually deleterious to your cardiovascular health. It was dangerous. They had also come up with ideas that it caused you to be muscle-bound. This is where that term came from, which is a way of saying if you build too much muscle, you'll lose flexibility.

Other things started coming up that it would actually hurt your cognitive function, right? You'd lose mental function and intelligence. You'd get injured. It'd be bad for the joints. And there was all this dogma coming up about the negativity

of strength training that some of it is actually still around today in some of the circles. And there's a reason for that. And then we've got this young guy who happened to be just like Winship, small, picked on a lot, started strength training, found a love for it and said, I want to go to school for it. At the time, physical education was the only version of kinesiology,

exercise science. It was all wrapped into one. So this youngster named Ferguson, Frazier Ferguson, in the 1930s says, okay, I fell in love with strength training. I've seen it change my body. It's improved my self-image, my confidence, all these things. I want to make a career out of strength training, physical education. So he goes to Springfield College. Because Springfield College had probably the strongest ties to the YMCA. And if you wanted a career in this field, that's where you had to work.

Via Karpovich, the cardio-biased exercise physiologist. Right. So Frazier gets to Springfield College, excited to start a career in physical education, and is immediately shocked because all of his professors, including folks like Karpovich and all the people around him, were continually only bashing on strength training. Frazier got so frustrated in class because here were these YMCA and physical education people that had PhDs that he looked up to. He went there to study under these folks and he felt continually ostracized.

And what really made him frustrated was not that they were saying this but that they were saying these things when he knew they themselves had actually never experienced it so you've got academics telling you about how hey you lift these weights it's bad for your heart but they don't do the thing and they've never tried yeah they never tried it and so one day frazier lost it. He snapped. He's in Springfield, Massachusetts. He reaches out to Bob Hoffman via snail mail and says,

look, here's what's going on. Can you come up here and show my professors? And to Frazier's shock, Hoffman says yes. It's going to go down April 4th, 1940. Everyone shows up. The auditorium is packed. Hoffman's in the back with all of his guys.

They're getting ready to put on a show. The audience is filtered in. Now this is, again, almost entirely Springfield students. They know Karpovich is there. So everyone's there to see the athletic performance and to see these bodybuilders on stage and these powerlifters. But really, everybody's there to see their their guy dr karpovich shut down these bodybuilders time out just a sec is this build as a show of strength via bob's people or is it set up as this opportunity for debate well I think the

technical build was the show as a show yeah okay it's supposed to be an exhibition an exhibition okay but everyone knows why they're really there yeah so the format is gonna be this show and then Hoffman opens it up for questions at the end and everybody knows that's when the real show is gonna start so Bob Jones comes out he does his handstand on his thumbs. The rest of his guys come out. He's got some power lifters. He's got some weight lifters.

Later on, people would talk about how just amazed they were about how some of these guys could throw 300 pounds over their heads so effortlessly. And all these amazing things. And the star of the show is a guy named John Grimmock. Now, again, if you're a nerd in this field, you probably know that name. He's one of the legendary bodybuilders of all time. He was a Mr. America that year. I can just picture it.

I have an image in my head of old 1930s, 1940s kind of physical things and the announcers like, oh, now coming to the stage, John Grimmock, see? Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. Incredible feats of strength. Right. So Grimmick comes out on stage, and he proceeds to go into his exact posing routine

that he won Mr. America with. And this is the epitome of the muscle-bound guy that Karpovich had been warning everybody about. This whole time, Karpovich is sitting there in silence. Grimmick finishes his pose down. Hoffman opens it up for a couple of questions. Some of the students ask him things. He finishes it, and Karpovich hasn't said a word. Quiet goes over the crowd, and then a

murmur starts picking up because everybody knows he can't keep his mouth shut for very long. Finally, very calmly and very sweetly karpovich stands up and he just says i have one question for you mr grimmick would you mind scratching your back and of course mr grimmick says but i don't have an itch whole crowd starts laughing grimmick then then scratches back and basically says well we're at the spot how about this spot i'm over here and he's reaching all around and he's touching about every inch of his back and karpovich is like oh shit this was his trump card he was going to show the whole world in front of all of his students in one question to prove his point. And now he's scrambling. Grimmick decides to make it even more uncomfortable, so he drops into a full splits.

Stands back up, straightens, locks his knees out, and almost puts his elbows on the ground. Oh, you also think that this lifting makes you lose your athleticism? Asks the crowd, what's the best athlete at Springfield College,

and how far can he broad jump? They told him, he said, fine, I'll jump that number right there. And if that wasn't enough, decides, let me top this off by doing a backflip. So Stans does the standing backflip, and because that's too easy, I'll do it while I'm holding 50-pound dumbbells in each hand. Now, the rest of the team, the other lefters are doing similar things, and they're just collectively smashing, crushing him. At this point, there's really no room for argument anymore. It's not an anomaly. Karpovich is stuck. And he's standing there, all of his students,

knowing there's media coverage here, this is going to hit the presses, I'm done for. And he's got this choice to make. Is he going to try to fight back, defend his honor, and hold his ego? Or is he going to give all that up,

admit basically his entire life's work is wrong, figure out what the hell he's going to do with his life from there moving forward, all so that he can actually help and protect the people he's claiming to be doing the science for in the first place? Is he going to do what's in the best interest of the people? So show finishes. He walks backstage, gets in front of all the lifters and says,

I was wrong, I'm sorry. Profound moment. And not easy. I mean, as a professor, as a coach, we've talked about this before. As a father? As a father, this is one of the most, to me, it's one of the most endemic things

that infuriates me about our industry as a whole. Like, that inability to take in new information because we have to be right about these things because our value systems are literally dependent on it but the downside is when you're the sherpa of people when you're taking care of people when you're when you are helping with science and health and fitness intended to help people advance like that is that is a significant egotistical adjustment and it's a responsibility that's bigger than you and it should be treated that way so these titans collide and create two new gigantic paths for the entire fitness and health

space all together i don't know much about astrophysics but i imagine if you had two paths for the entire fitness and health space altogether. I don't know much about astrophysics, but I imagine if you had two comets or maybe two asteroids smashed together, it wouldn't be that one would deflect off and the other one would keep its path. They would both be shifted. And this is exactly what happened here. Karpovich decided, not only do I have to acknowledge this, my entire career has been wrong. My trajectory needs to change. And so he did that. It was a little bit of a stumbling block because the World War started up. So he had to take a handful of years off. But when he came back and Springfield College opened

back up, he decided to change his career research line to studying or putting some actual evidence behind this concept. So he had seen it anecdotally with his eyes, but now he said, we got to get some research on this. So he lined up a series of studies. His very first study after this showdown, he wanted to tackle this idea of actually making people faster or slower. So he put together some people, looked at those that were strength training, those that weren't, and sure enough, those that strength trained, not only were they not slower, they were significantly faster than those who weren't strength training. So that was boom, one myth shot down immediately. His second study, because he's firing bullets, right? He's coming out the gate hot here. Boom, let's tackle the next thing. Are you going to get hurt? Is this bad for your joints, ligaments, things like that? Similar idea, a couple of groups, shoots down this idea. In fact,

these people who are strength training are not getting hurt their joints and ligaments are holding up just fine boom study number three let's get let's go big here now let's take it and he looked at 30,000 people put it together a big group of people and said okay are any of you people reporting any significant cardiovascular health concerns stroke but any of these things and any significant cardiovascular health concerns? Stroke, blood, any of these things. And he didn't find a single incident of cardiovascular problem in the people who are engaging in strength training.

So now he's really gotten people's attention, saying this is not everything we've been saying is systematically wrong. And when we put this under a bigger umbrella of a bunch of people, we're not seeing it. And now let me round out the picture with study number four, and let's look at cognitive function. And so I think he used the people at Springfield College, and he said, are the people who are lifting doing better, worse, or the same in terms of their GPA in school? And it turns out, surprising enough, people who are doing the lifting had a higher GPA.

Now, that's causation correlation, but it doesn't matter. What he speculated in his conclusion, though, was almost the same thing that Winship had talked about in the 1860s. The reason he felt like people were doing better in the classroom when they lifted is because the same attributes you had to have to go through that, in his terms, the grind of getting up every day or training when you don't want to train, all these things, pushing through the pain, the physical mountain you had to push, were the same things that you needed to push through the mental to study, to get the work done. And so he felt like the lessons you learned in the weight room were directly transferable to every other function of your life. Not something like you've ever heard before, right? You didn't talk about that all in chapter two.

It's great. It's great to learn this history and understand these significant influences absent of this history you know i mean we're just all operating in these independent bubbles but this these trajectories are massively important to all of us karpovich went on to be one of the strength science's most eminent and visible advocates he wrote a textbook um with a guy named jim murray called weight training and athletics which was one of the most if not the most adopted academic textbook in all of physical education and what really resonates with me about this is while it looked like he lost that giant battle he turned out to be the winner because he

not only saw his mistakes when presented with that new information, but he took action to fix it. Identify the problem, acknowledge it, but then do something about it. So that's what happened with Karpovich. But what happened with Hoffman? I remember you saying that he, in many ways, was the father of the modern fitness and health industry. Yeah. It really launched his company, York Barbell. They were selling probably the most exercise equipment, dumbbells, barbells, and anybody else in America for several decades.

He had also, at the same time, was one of the first people to make exercise supplements. Launched a bunch of those. You can look up the history of what's called the National Health Federation, which was an organization that he started. We're not going to get into that today, but if you look into that, you're going to see that it wasn't so clean. He had several lawsuits come his way, putting things in the supplements that made them work a little bit more effectively than others. And I'm imagining a little bit more effectively than others. And I'm imagining a little bit more experimental. Yeah, I'm not necessarily telling you what was in them,

which is why people, again, credit him saying, What's in this? Don't worry about it. Yeah. Boy, I feel great. Yeah. Great. So that's why they gave him the credit for really starting I can't stop training.

the supplement industry as well. Now, the reason I really like this story is because we've learned this great lesson about changing your mind when presented with new information, which changes the real theme of this volume. And to be honest, this is the second or third time we've recorded this show. And that's because we did it the first time, andosh and i were sitting back and it just wasn't really sitting right and we couldn't get our thumbs on what exactly wasn't wasn't right about it and it took us a while to realize although we knew this story we hadn't ourselves really learned the lesson yet and it's bigger than just change your mind when presented with new information. It really came down to highlighting the same mistake that Josh and I had personally made.

We thought this taught us, hey, strength training is not bad for you. That was the lesson here. That's not the lesson. It's not about whether or not strength training is better than cardiovascular training or the opposite. That's the wrong question. Karpovich had made a mistake because he thought one was better than the other, but Hoffman was making the exact same one too, just in the other direction. Josh and I for years were advocates of basically strength training only.

It's funny because both of our wives that are sitting here came at us with basically the opposite, primarily a cardiovascular dominant background and almost a fear of strength training. All under the giant umbrella of health. Yeah. And what's crazy is- And fitness. Karpovich and Hoffman were trying to do the same thing. They both were genuinely interested in improving people's life, health, quality of fitness, they just believed there were different ways to get there. They honestly, in their hearts, thought they were

doing what was best for most people, but they just differed on how to get there. So their intent was the same, but they were fighting over something that was the wrong battle in the first place. It's not a matter of this being better than that. Is overall strength important for mortality? Absolutely. And there have been dozens of studies showing that stronger people live longer. But at the same time, equal information has been shown on the other side. People that have a higher VO2 max, have a lower resting heart rate, they also live longer. It's not which one's better for you. The answer is clear. If we want to maximize our overall health and fitness in most people in the general population, we need some balance

of both attributes. That's the real lesson I learned after going through this chapter. There's an interesting thing about bias in human beings. Michael Blevins pointed this out. We're really good at lying to ourselves and we're really good at confirmation bias. So I believe something is true. I go find evidence that confirms that thing that I think is true. And with most people, they see evidence counter to the thing they believe and they just dismiss it. Um, which is where having really high-level principles matters. So I hear the Karpovich story, and that gives me evidence that Karpovich was really dedicated to the people that he was trying to do the studies for, that he was trying to do science in service of. And when he was presented with evidence that contradicted his beliefs about how to get people to better health,

that was okay fundamentally because it was getting closer to the truth rather than just simply furthering his agenda that was based on whatever bias or experience and circumstances that he had. You know, for me personally, I grew up doing strength training and playing football and doing track and things like that. And that had worked for me. So naturally, I believe this will work for everybody

because it worked for me because my experience was so shaped by strength training. And at the time when you're 22, that's probably enough to keep you fairly cardiovascularly fit. Heart rate was fairly low. I mean, relative, right? I mean, the worst part of track practice, time when you're 22 that's probably enough to keep you fairly cardiovascularly fit heart rate was fairly low i mean relative right i mean the worst part of track practice was so i i did shot and i threw the shot put in through the discus the worst part of track practice every day was

the two lap warm-up i hated that i did not know why i had to do that right uh but yeah i remember i i had a i had a conversation with my wife years ago when she was training for a half marathon. And I kept harping on her about, you got to do strength training. You got to do strength training. Like, this running stuff is not good for you. Like, look. Oh, and then she dinged up one of her knees. And I was like, oh, look, see, running is bad for you.

And it's been recently in the last, like, two years that I finally said I was wrong. Like, yeah, you should have been doing strength training, but the running wasn't bad, necessarily bad for you. You know, what to me is really interesting about this whole conversation is the overall history. And growing up in a fitness club, it was our business to fuse some of these principles. So what was at our business? We had a couple of swimming pools, a bunch of tennis courts, a weight room that included a universal machine and some cardiovascular machines, and then a general sort of group exercise area. The other interesting thing about my upbringing is that my grandfather was an abnormally strong man with tremendous sort of strength biases. And then my mom was, as I've mentioned in past chapters, an early adopter

of interval training, a huge advocate of it. And she was also very big on plyometric explosive style training. This is things that she was recommending to me in the 80s as I was starting to train for my black belt test, which was going to be a six hour test of physicality. And one of the things that I was doing is going for these long, long runs. I was going, you know, as a, as a 15 year old for, you know, 15, 16, 18 mile runs. And she's like, you know, what you really should be doing in addition to that is getting the weight room, lifting some weights and doing some plyometric training and doing some interval training as well.

So she knew that the training needed to be more diverse, because the demands of me as an athlete, as then a soccer player and martial artist. So she realized that endurance training wasn't, like strictly running long, wasn't gonna do much for like a sparring or some kind of spinning sidekick or doing several spins, you know, in the middle of a soccer game. We grew up in this business of people having to be healthy and feel and look fit. So there was an aesthetic quality to that.

Then there was a performance part of it inspired by her going, if you want a high level of athleticism some of this aesthetic stuff is it doesn't help with the functionality of being a good athlete right so she kind of understood that the hybridization of the business model right people want to look good they join health clubs to look and feel good and keep their health generally well at that time in the 80s there was a lot of nautilus equipment coming out and that was the big sort of thing arthur jones yeah but yeah machines that were keeping people's ranges of motion very limited we know exactly why that happened right now we do and we're going to tell you in a later chapter. Which I'm very excited for. The influence of all that, you know, led me down this unintentional hybridized path of like pseudo bodycocked idea that if I had the mentality and the ability to do things like an endurance person does, then I'm crazy.

And that defines my toughness and fitness because I could outrun somebody for a long time. And there seems to be, especially as the needle continues to move and these hybridizations of qualities that Hoffman and Karpovich battled over. Later, we're going to talk about Wieters influence and bodybuilding. Glassman's work with the kind of creation of CrossFit was a great utilization of a lot of these things from a functional aspect but again you know it supports like a measurable force output which is unto itself now a very specific thing in a sport unto itself so like it's been very interesting watching the evolution of all these things being in it as somebody who's a practitioner and also somebody who's been involved in the business of it. Yeah. I want to step back a little bit. With this conversation, reducing all this to first principles, the goal, the outcome, or the objective is improved health and longevity for the majority of people or the masses. Are you moving the needle for lots and lots of people with that goal in mind

stepping a level down of how to do that the common theme with all of these different modalities of exercise and fitness is this physiological adaptation so the goal of doing physical exercise or training for your health this is not to say if your goal is to go to the Olympics for a sport, if you're, if you're just a person who wants to live healthy and wants to live a long time and be healthy, the clear message is that you need to be constantly creating some sort of physiological adaptation, which when I was 15 and started doing Olympic weightlifting, there were, there were huge gains to be made from moving a barbell and squatting heavy because I hadn't specified anything yet.

Yes, right. So just doing intense training created a massive amount of adaptation in my young body. But now at almost 30, doing the same snatches and squats and clean and jerks that I did when I was 15 is not going to produce the same adaptation because they're like the neural mapping has been laid down. The, the patterns are there. The, the growth and the specification of the muscle fibers has been done. So while I will be fitter from doing snatch heavy snatches today than if I just sat on the couch, I'm not going to get the same marginal benefit as if i went and ran five miles which i've only literally done once in my

life like there is more ground to gain by me a very big strong explosive athlete doing things that are not in my wheelhouse let me just jump on that real quick. I think one of the biggest things that coaches and scientists make a mistake is that people don't back away from that question enough to look at it clearly. Andy talks a lot about what is the point of programming. We do as well. And the point is just what we're mentioning, and that is to create positive adaptation without breaking people. So that's something that the show is very much behind. But typically, that is something that

is often lost because of these biases that we've been talking about thematically within the show. People have an ax to groin, a point to prove, or a lot to lose if they are viewed as somebody who, if their insight isn't proven with their followers doing their thing, then they will lose value. So there's actual real economic value to be lost in this fitness science space if your thing isn't correct. And I think that that's where we unfortunately misguide, abuse, and maltreat our populations that follow us if we're not mindful of that very fragile question and equation. Yeah, creating the overload is easy. That's not the hard part.

The difficult part is how do you balance the overload? How do we make sure we give you overload enough to cause these adaptations in all of the areas that it needs to be done, the muscular system, cardiovascular, bone, endocrine, hormones, all this stuff, but we don't do it to where we blow you out. We can't crush you and hurt you. And I think one of the biggest things that is required is the depth of context, the depth of understanding both from the coach and the practitioner. And it's really hard. You know, keeping interest, keeping fun is like there's the human psyche is one part of it.

And then the other part of it is actually providing a program that keeps people moving forward. I think, you know, with our experience, we've crushed people before. I've mentioned that and I'm very public about that. I consider myself a very high level programmer. And I also know that I have made and will continue to make a lot of mistakes because there is no right in this. There's just trying to take as much of this information as we can and put people in the right position to positively adapt. The clear thing here is to get human beings to a state of a high level of health for a long time,

you have to overload the system without breaking it continuously. That's very simple in the words, but when you think about the execution of that, you have to be challenging an individual based on what their current ability is, knowing that the demands of life and the training itself are going to undulate. So you can't just go hard all the time. It is not sustainable because there's a pendulum effect. One of the big things that we do around here, there's this undulation of intensity where you're not just going hard all the time.

There are practice days, there's competition, there's mental toughness, and that's part of the long game. Like, how do you consistently do this thing over time? It's understanding that pendulum. But then within the specifics, how do you challenge the system consistently over time without breaking it? And if you're someone who's done nothing

for the last 10 years and you have no physicality, doing the smallest of things will challenge you physiologically. You can create adaptation by getting on a treadmill for 30 minutes. You can go to spin class and create a physiological adaptation. You can get hit the leg press machine once a week and create an adaptation. That's not going to continue to create the same change over time. So you have to be constantly fighting this battle that is, how do I challenge myself given where I am today with the long game in mind of, I want to do this for a long time. I'm working out so that 90 year old me doesn't fall down. How do I continue to do this in a way

that when I'm 90, I can challenge myself physically without breaking myself, which gives me something to be mindful of as I'm doing heavy snatches, turning 30. If I'm doing things that are purely in service of my ego, that maybe is not going to help my longevity in the long run. Yeah. If we're talking about sustainable long-term overload, you've got really two options. Number one is a micro overload. So you're making extremely small increases over a long period of time. And I'm not talking about, hey, put on five more pounds every week. Like that's going to last about four weeks. Right. And then you're crushed. It's got to be

an ounce every week for the next year or something like that. That's how you do it because it's a small insult. Your body can handle that and it won't break you. Or you have these larger increases in overload coupled immediately, though, with massive recovery. So this is a really tough challenge, a back-off day. Kenny, it's similar to how you set it up, right? 30, 20, 30% of your workouts during the month are very, very physically challenging, but the other 70% are practice improvement. They're a good workout, but you're not beating the door down because you can't go there very often, right?

Long-term sustainability is going to be a combination of different modes. And what we need to do is achieve this overload we've been talking about, but how do we do this over a long period of time? Variation. And that's why things like CrossFit took off very well because it did expose people to variation who at the time, 15 years ago, it was really tough to come up with these things on your own. We didn't really have a system for any of that stuff. P90X comes along, here's your system,

here's your constant variation. But the problem with those initially was they didn't manage the overload. They gave you tons of variation, but they smashed you with overload. So now we're finally in this place where we can say, yes, we have this health data. We know what predicts mortality, strength, and cardiovascular fitness, and your ability to go max heart rate and all these things. For the average person, to me this looks something like probably once a week

you should do something that is more akin to strength training. And by that, I mean heavy. And I'm not talking three pound dumbbells for circuits for sets of 30 and rounds. I'm something that is very, very heavy, whatever that means to you. One day a week should probably do something more akin to your traditional cardiovascular training. So 30, 45 minutes, an hour, whatever that is for you of sustained continuous work. Doesn't have to be running, doesn't have to be cycling. You could be pushing a sled, whatever you want. The tool, the mode is less important than what's the physiological overload. And then probably one day a week that

takes you up to a maximum heart rate. This could be a kettlebell circuit. It could be a combination. It could be intervals on the track. If you do those three pieces, something heavy, something endurance based, long-term endurance based, and something interval based, for the normal person, that's going to make you a very, very, very healthy person in the long term. And it is extremely, extremely sustainable if you use a lot of variation within that. Well, I think that's why CrossFit did so well and has done well over the last decade and a half. A, because of its novelty. B, because of the variation that you talked about.

C, in some of the original articles that Glassman and some of the authors who really pioneered CrossFit anchored some of the science of it and that, you know, there was exactly that prescription that you're talking about. In a one week, 10 day cycle, you're going to see some exposure to something that's in excess of 40, 45 minutes in excess of an hour, sort of a sustained heart rate. Then there's going to be absolutely some lifting heavy. And then there's going to be some very fast intervals and intensity. And you can decorate those three principal things in a lot of different ways. One of the problems with the need for novelty, at least as the the market went is that soon became the thing

unto itself yes and so people um searching for that endocrine blast that they would get that intensity yield that max intensity yields became the consumptive experience that wound up overexposing people, ironically, to a system generally that unto itself supports very broad fitness and health. And again, I think this conversation, we need to keep it on track because it can get quickly away from broad, inclusive health. And that's what we're trying to do is circle back to Hoffman, circle back to Karpovich and go, what were these pioneers trying to anchor their followers and the people that they were trying to touch? They were trying to anchor them in general health.

Here we are at this moment of physical culture where, wow, we know more than we ever have before. Yet even the thing that's recently most effective with its sort of simplicity in some ways is CrossFit. On the exposure of it, you get people beating themselves down because of over intensity, uh, too many times too often. And so that's, that's the hardest part. We're talking about programming, how not to throw people into walls. And that is, that is the dance that continues to, um, keep our feet shuffling, I suppose. From the, from a behavioral perspective, CrossFit was exactly what certain people needed when it came on the scene,

where they had done years of just strength training or years of just cardiovascular training. It provided that new exposure that created incredible physiological adaptation because it hit neglected areas for a lot of people. Conversely, on the other side of the spectrum, when you throw people who have all kinds of excitement and motivation and drive to change into a world of very, very high intensity, that can lead to negative outcomes where you tax the system too much and it creates harm or it creates damage that then leads to people shying away from fitness or exercise in general because it's now an existential threat and not a challenge that can be overcome to create adaptation.

Yeah. Kenny, you definitely have the most experience of all of us. How would a normal person figure out, like, when do I back off? When do I not? Have I gone to the well with this intensity too much? Any advice you could give yeah I mean there's the general one that an old coach taught me are you hungry horny and happy which is the basic uh three questions you need to ask about any person in any field over training um you know because if those three things are set then uh you're probably training just about right or your exposures are just about right.

One of the things that I see very chronically in our sort of high intensity populations is that horny and happy factor. People start to get pretty grumpy and that's when I start going, okay, look, we're pushing a little too much here. I think for the general population, it starts with awareness, understanding. I'm a huge advocate of coaching relationships. I refer to an interview that i'd done some years ago with joe douglas who was one of the founders of the santa monica track club and one of the things that he's he struck me as um well first of all he had 67 american records and 37 world records keys during his time as a track coach and you're gonna you're gonna

learn a lot from a guy like that but one of the things that he said to me is like i got to be able every day to look my athletes in the eyes and see the whites of their eyes and i'll know what to do with them at that point i witnessed him doing that i used to go out and watch him coach his practices and he would have people go harder based on what he was intuiting and feeling. And that was based on a huge, I mean, decades of experience, science, and success. Another coach that I refer to in addition to my mom was the 96 Olympic coach. She was somebody that was hybridizing all sorts of things in the 90s she was combining endurance training with weightlifting explosive lifting mixing energetic systems within runs but here was somebody who would also the moment that she knew that your

roommate was sick in college she just kind of like glance at you, same thing that Joe Douglas would do and send you home and go, but I feel great. She'd be like, go home. If she knew, this is a huge learn for me that influenced very much the sort of programming that we use here at the gym, which was if somebody was stressed in a relationship, so if you're going through a college heartbreak,

she would send somebody home. I mean, she understood the emotional stressors that influenced physiological responses. That always sat in the back of my head and influenced the way that I program and the way that I think about human beings. Because yes, we're always as scientists or in my case definitely pseudoscientists trying to seek the most positive adaptation generally that i can using very broad means but we're dealing with humans so they have to have a space within their training sessions to be just that humans knowing that other stressors are going to influence their

physiology. Kenny, I want to ask you a favor. That's one of the most annoying questions you get. You probably get a lot, but I want it anyways. Imagine there's a listener at home, maybe new into fitness or not into it at all and says, okay, you've convinced me I want to do this well-rounded. Can you just give them a very basic and general okay a week workout would do this then monday i would say do this wednesday do this and friday do this and if they want to be able yeah something basic yeah i would i would use the formula that you laid out first of all i would say get out in the sunshine and move around for an hour at least a week like get like literally get in whatever sunlight your situation provides even if it's clouded additionally if um if you don't have many

means if you're getting out on foot or and or on bike or even in a pool let's say most ideally in sunlight the other thing that you can do is find a hill a hill that takes you when you push yourself to get up it somewhere between 30 seconds and 60 seconds to get to the top okay and it doesn't have to be perfect you and i andy could go back and forth about what is the most favorable work rest adaptation and i could point you 50 different ways to why you would want to rest longer or shorter. But the bottom line is get to the bottom of the hill, sprint to the top of it as fast as you can. Let your heart rate come down a little bit. Go back up.

Do it again. Do that a handful of times, anywhere between four and six times, depending on the length of the hill. That will provide, again, assuming that you have very little means to do much of anything, massive, massive adaptation. And we can, you can corroborate that clinically. I can corroborate that from the field and having done that for decades. And then last, let's say you don't have much other than your current body weight. Now, you and I both favored and biased something heavy, but in the meantime, that could be a body weight and overloading the body. If you have a tree or a pull-up bar to pull yourself up and over and you have the capacity to pull, then do so. If you don't have that capacity to pull, then start with some sort of push-up

variation. Work it to a capacity every week, exceed whatever number you did in the prior week. You can break that into sets, one maximal set per week. However that needs to look for you, it does not have to be horribly sophisticated. And I think sometimes we get very, very opinionated about how that's going to look. But if you were to say, give me a gross outline of a prison, not so prison-y, but somebody who doesn't belong to a gym. So once you move past that introductory stage, so either you went through that for six weeks or six months or however long it took you, you're ready for the next evolution to go a little bit more forward. As I continually,

as we try to distill the lesson down from this story, I think that what we're clearly learning is we want to achieve this overload, but as we get past that introductory stage, I'm going to have to up the ante a little bit. Because now what was hard a month ago might not be hard again.

And so now I got to push forward. You established that in chapter one. I mean, the body responds profoundly, often 30, 50% within a year for some people. So depending on what you're doing and how you're exposing yourself, the body is going to adapt. And so is the mindset towards things. That's one of the beauties of being a coach is that you see people adapt, especially people that are new to things, that the rate of change is so significant. But as we identified in Josh's case, you know, he hit maximal loads lifting-wise in his early 20s.

Now it's more a matter of maintenance and developing other capacities. One thing to understand about how the body works, and I think it's worth mentioning, is that the owner of a med ball came up with these 10 general skills of fitness. And I think it is a very helpful way to understand how to train. And I'm just going to list the 10 of them. And, you know, people can be bored by it, but if you just listen for just a second, it can be very interesting. The first four are things that you can train and your exposure to them will yield a greater work capacity. And that's cardiorespiratory endurance, stamina, strength, and flexibility. So if you just work on

those things, those things are all going to get better. Then the last four things on that list are coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. Now those things take practice. You have to be exposed. By the way, those last four things that I mentioned are also interesting to the human brain. They require the human brain to be on. One of the mistakes that we make in the fitness industry is dummying everything down so that it's simply cardiorespiratory endurance, something stamina-based, something strength-based. We're just like a Mongo lift and then just go, okay, let's just do work on our flexibility. Now you can touch your toes a little bit better than you did yesterday. Yes, but there's something that is critical for your continued participation in that, and that is your brain's got to get turned on. So as you develop

work capacity in those first four areas, developing skill and working skills, coordination, challenging your fundamental abilities by becoming more coordinated, by working on your agility, by working on your balance will necessarily affect those first four. Now, assuming you can get the bookend of these 10 general skills right, the things in the middle that are very measurable speed and power and if you can get that equation right on both ends and you can continue to dazzle yourself with an ever-increasing ability to grow and change if If, however, you only bias the skill portion, the practice part of that,

yes, you might be a great ping pong player, but a damn weak one at that. Yeah, that's unhealthy. Physically healthy. But if you only stay under a barbell and you go out and play catch on Sunday and somebody says, ball, and you look and ball hits you in the face

because you haven't worked coordination for 42 years. Yeah. That's an embarrassment to your family. And you're you equal a poor father. So at some point, like if you're going to continually generate your self and your ability to grow, keeping in mind this overall 10 general skills, I think is a massively helpful thing. And again, it doesn't have to be that sophisticated other than playing catch or bouncing a ball off of a wall now and then, or just going out and trying something new here and there. The lesson I learned from the Karpovich story and the self-realization of the mistake that

Josh and I made earlier in our lives, and that we have all probably made, is two things. Number one, if we're talking about sustainable, improved quality of life over a long period of time, we have to have massive variety in our training. And number two, as we get more fit in all spaces of training, we're going to have to continually up the ante. Andy, this has been a fantastic episode. I know that you did a lot of research and preparation for it. And as always, we'd like to acknowledge anybody that we're learning from and getting information from. So yeah, first one, www.explorepa, like pennsylvaniahistory.com is where I got a lot of the information on the Hoffman story. So you can check that out from those folks.

Historians Jan and Terry Todd. If you don't know those names, they are phenomenal sport historians. I would encourage you to read everything they've written. But in particular, the two articles I read were the conversion of Dr. Karpovic and Jan Todd's Strength is Health. Those are available on PDFs free on the Internet. Just great, great, great stories. And then John Farr's article, The Golden Age of Weightlifting. And that's not the full title, but if you get that far, you'll get it.

So thank you to the Todds and Farr and the rest that contributed. That was just excellent information that I love. We had mentioned this earlier in this chapter, we prepared a lot for this and clearly Dr. Galpin guided us through understanding how the fitness industry has been affected by this Titanic battle that happened in the 1940s and all the subsequent conversations between the cardio bias, the strength bias, and everything in between since. Now, there is way more history to cover, which we will in a later chapter. But before we do that, we'll be segueing next week into a conversation that gets everybody

lit up with just as much dogma as the fitness world. What am I talking about? Nutrition, how we fuel ourselves. I'm very excited about next week's episode because we will be getting into it in a very deep way, ideally just as deep as this, and we hope you enjoy it. As always, please share this podcast with your friends. Give us a review on iTunes. Give your neighbor a kiss, a high five,

and if you're so lucky, a nice pat on the bum. For Dr. Andy Galpin, Josh Emery, I am Kenny Kane, and this is 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.