Barbell Shrugged - [Muscle Plasticity] How to Build More Muscle, Faster w/ Dr. Christopher Fry, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #751

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Christopher Fry is an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Athletic Training and Clinical Nutrition and the Co-Director for the Center for Muscle Biology at the University of Kentucky. Chris completed a B.S. in Biology at Baylor University (2006), Ph.D. in biomedical sciences at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB, 2011) and postdoctoral training in muscle physiology at the University of Kentucky (2014). Chris’s research focuses on elucidating the mechanisms that regulate skeletal muscle plasticity to establish interventions to maintain strength and function during conditions of muscle wasting. Over the course of his career, he has created a focused research program that bridges targeted mechanistic approaches to clinical translation. Chris's work spans the translational spectrum, from targeted genetic strategies in pre-clinical models to randomized controlled trials. He has competed as an amateur bodybuilder and enjoys working out, traveling, cooking and spending time with his wife and son. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Dr. Christopher Fry on X Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Christopher Fry is coming into the show. He is going to teach us. We're going to take the deep dive into all things muscle plasticity. For many people, you may have heard of like brain plasticity and how your brain is always able to mold to whatever new is going on or adapt to whatever stimulus is coming into it. Sometimes we think about it on the physiological side of things as well, but today we're going to be digging into specifically muscle plasticity. Essentially essentially how do you grow more muscle faster while you're in the gym what do you need on the recovery side the nutrition side and then what are the mechanics that are in play that actually allow you to speed up the process of building muscle as

always friends make sure you get over to rapidehealthreport.com that is where dan garner and dr andy galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you're going to access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Lars, and Coach Travis Mash, Dr. Christopher Fry. Welcome to the show, man. This is fantastic. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about how we get more out of lifting weights. How do we build more muscle? You said an awesome, awesome word that I'd love to, but the plasticity of muscle. Yeah. We're going to have to dig into that for sure. I'd love if you could just kind of break down what that means and really like how the layman can

go to the gym and understand that concept. No, that's fantastic. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Thanks you all for having me on the show today. You know, I say we're real interested in this concept, like you said, muscle plasticity. Muscle is a very adaptable organ. You know, you start lifting weights, you can build muscle mass, build strength, you put a cast on a limb, that muscle atrophies really fast. So that kind of inherent adaptability is what really drives a lot of our research. We want to understand on the most basic level, what are the kind of like molecular cues that give muscle that kind of plastic ability to allow it to respond. We want to exploit those to then make muscles as best as we can, bigger, faster, stronger. One thing I've always wondered, do muscle tissues have memories?

Like if I didn't lift weights for a month, no, not muscle memory in that sense, on like the gross side, like, you know, you, what made me originally think of that as you talk about, you put it in a cast and it goes away. It just stops. It atrophies to a point where you're, um, everybody's probably seen a friend with a broken arm and they take the cast off and it's just like pale, chalky, white, tiny little arm all of a sudden. Um, but it grows back pretty quick. It's like, it remembers where it's supposed to be. Um, and, and I always think about that when I see like a like a DEXA scan or something. It's like how much of the like physical tissue versus the water that is in that tissue are we actually

losing when it does atrophy versus when we are going to the gym and working out and getting our pump and it grows? Like what is the difference between the actual tissue that is there in that atrophied muscle versus the, I just did lots of bicep curls, super pump? Yeah, no, that's a great question. And so thinking about like what, what muscle memory might represent is muscles. It's a really unique cell type. You know, you've got a lot of like nuclei in a given cell. You think back to like high school biology, one cell, one nucleus. Muscle is the product of a lot of cells fusing together. So you get these really long fibers or cells that have a lot of different nuclei in them. Each one has a unique job kind of governing different parts of that muscle fiber.

There's a good bit of literature showing that when you undergo a period of disuse, you know, during casting or inactivity, or just I decide to take some time away from the gym, you know, we might maintain that nuclear number. And in that maintenance, that could serve as a form of memory per se, that you retain that ability to then increase productivity in that fiber to kind of restore it to its prior levels, to its prior glory, so to speak, when you start training again or when the cast comes off. And understanding the basis of what that memory might be is a pretty active area of research, and there's a lot of different kind of ideologies on what constitutes that memory.

But to your point, I feel there's plenty of anecdotal evidence, as well as research that shows, you know, even if you are faced with a period of inactivity, forced or by choice, like, there are ways to kind of bounce back and your ability to condition your muscles kind of going into that period of disuse, you know, it offers a critical ability to kind of mitigate that loss and better enhance recovery. Yeah, To the point you were saying, I feel like there's also like, when you say like muscle memory, the like neurological component of lifting weights, where if like 300 pounds is 80% of your squat, something like that, you're likely going to just because of the neurological piece, but the actual size of the tissue is more what I was kind of getting at there of how do we get back to from the

atrophied state? It seems like it grows significantly quicker to get to that full muscle size again. I agree completely. I think there's a good bit of literature to back that up. Yeah. Outside of like, you know, the neuromuscular control, firing rates, recruitment patterns, all that, you know, you get down to just the basis of muscle itself. It's, it's an expensive tissue to maintain. Like it takes a lot of energy, a lot of food to kind of maintain that mass. And if we're not actively using the muscle, you know, it does the

body have a need, so, so to speak to keep it. And so that's when we see this loss of tissue or the protein elements of muscle, those kind of little contractile machines that give muscle its ability, they get kind of shifted down as far as priority goes, but they can bounce back quickly. And it's thought that your ability to kind of sense when that response comes back on, you can turn on those various factories or nuclei in your muscle to then re-synthesize those proteins to hopefully bounce back quicker. Yeah. Another question I've been, I've been thinking a lot about lately, one, because I just aged another year, I passed that birthday milestone. So you like think about things. Um, but one of those things that, uh, I think about a lot, um, this would be my like 28th year of training. So

kind of a long time. Um, but when I think about like where, like the amount of muscle that I have on my body and, and, and a lot of this kind of goes into like, how do we help people that are 40 years old, but may not have like a full 20 plus years of lifting weights under their belt. And I feel like there was a time we'll call it 1716 to 26, maybe even expanding that from like 15 to 32 years old, where just all of the muscle building just gets done. And I feel like for the last, you know, maybe eight or nine years, it's been in like a, how do I just keep all of this as long as possible? Are you able to see in different populations, like how much muscle can you grow? If I want to say the numbers, like 40 total pounds of lean muscle mass is kind of like the very high end. I would say of that 40 pounds, I put on 38 of that pounds from the age of 16 years old to 32.

But if I had found weightlifting at 32, I don't think that there's a chance I would have gotten to that, to even close of that number of total lean muscle mass. Is that kind of like train, is that logical process or like in my brain? Is that correct? I mean, we sound eerily similar. I just hit the big 4-0 this year and I feel the exact same. I think I probably started like, you know,

putting actual mind to my training around 16, 17. And then yeah, till about 32, 33. That's when I feel I was at my peak muscle building ability. After that, it's been more just like, let's keep it with God and not suffer too much loss. I think it's because your brain fully forms and you go, well, this is, this is not that safe anymore. Yeah. You don't bounce back from the injury. When they do prop up, I can't just shake it off in a couple of days. Yeah, it's a great point. And so that's, I think it's tough to kind of parse out. But, you know, you've been doing this for a long time, you've got an inherent ability to kind of like, maximize effort every time in the gym. who is maybe just starting at 35 or 40 and they're truly like exercise naive they've never been there all that like initial motor learning those like early abilities they may not experience the same level of adaptation that like we did it may be like age 20 but they will still have a very

exaggerated response because it's such a novel like shock to the system so to speak yeah i'm curious i was gonna say how does muscle change as you age? Like, do you lose that multi-nucleation? Do you lose nuclei? Do you lose sarcomeres? Like, is it just contractile tissue? Like, what are the common changes if you're not training versus if you are training? Yeah, that's a great question. So, I guess that's the key distinction. It's how active are you? Like, if you get to a point where you're approaching middle age and you just decide, you know, I've had enough and it's time to just kind of kick back, you know, you're, you're going to lose a lot of, I think mainly the contractile tissue. You will start to like remodel some of that neuromuscular

control too. Again, we're not going to have as much of an ability to kind of maintain those fast, powerful muscle fibers. You're kind of type two, two A, 2Xs. And so a lot of times they can undergo periods of denervation and re-innervation with like a slow motor neuron. And so like you can see some patterning shift as far as fiber type 2 goes with the aging process. But I think the key is any kind of activity you can maintain to keep using that muscle, you dramatically, you know, lessen the changes that occur. There's other issues related to kind of muscle quality that kind of they crop up as we go over you, you're, I don't say replacing per se, but you get like an encroachment, like a little bit of fattier tissue, you know, breaks in there kind of

disrupting muscle fascicles that like very patterned organization that really enables full function to occur you break it up you go from like a sirloin to a ribeye oh man ribeye just doesn't taste good but it doesn't perform as well as you want it to can you remodel that let's say like you know like how do i get a filet mignon now fingers crossed over here now i'm scared so like shark family I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts,

we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. Then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total

testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. I just spent three years going back to school, and by the end of it, there was probably a period of at least six months of no activity to the point I was the weakest of my entire life. And I'd always been able to – He's still in academics. He knows, man. He's with you. I was able to always – I could stop for a long time i could always like for

example front squat 400 pounds and then a year ago today literally a year ago from right now i got not only could i not squat it i got spit out like a cannonball and ryan grimsley one of my athletes saw it and he looked at me he says i'm gonna pretend i didn't see that and he look i was so embarrassed it was like it was a low it was a low anyway now i'm back to squatting 462 i'm jumping better like it feels like it's coming back but let me tell you this it's coming back slow i am climbing like every inch for the first time I'm fighting for it. It feels like I'm not the same human, but I'm 51 years old. So like, okay. Anyway, the question is, am I screwed? Is it just not going to come back?

No, no. But you're at an elite level. I mean, if you're moving that kind of weight, like you've achieved, you know, top levels of performance that we each have, you know, ingrained in us. So it's like, it's incredibly hard to get to that mountain and to stay there like you have to remain dedicated to kind of keep driving that sort of regimen yeah and that you drop off like those peak values like you said you know about 1rm 300 on bench that's going to come down a bit now in theory you'll be able to climb back up but i think anytime you're getting to like peak levels of performance it's a really daunting to kind of maintain that level.

It's so daunting. Like, no, remember though, let me like the best front squat of my life is over 600. So it's like, it's nowhere near, but dang, oh man, it's like, like the thought, I used to think that I could front squat 500 pounds for the rest of my life. It was like so easy. And like now it seems like, seems like um anders trying to run his six minute mile it seems like like maybe anders trying to run a five minute mile it seems so far away it does dude it does like all of a sudden 38 pounds you came on today you didn't

know you're gonna have to be a psychologist. It's okay, Travis. Just let them know it's okay. It's okay. I had the same conversation with my wife. It's the saddest thought, but I feel like I look at 1RM, maybe everything's in the rear view mirror now. It doesn't change how I'm seeing, but I'll never maybe feel that again, putting up the kind of monster number where i can write it down in my little notebook and it's be proud of it yeah yeah and so then i feel i do have to kind of you know alter my my like attack to to you know get motivated and what does that look like i'm not chasing this number as much now i gotta chase something else for like you know the back nine of the career and it's it's yeah it's a

it's a find new games to play exactly man like i mean very very similar to my last question and kind of riding off what travis is talking about here like i still train i've trained very consistently my entire life and have more or less never taken any real significant time off aside from you know very specific you know i got injured and then i had to take time off for just certain movement patterns but i always still trained you know in every other way that i could but i'm 40 years old now and i i still lift weights four or five six days a week depending on the week and i still lift relatively heavy but my training volume is lower it's different than it used to be for sure, but I'm only like 5% smaller than I used to be.

I still lift weights, but I'm like 25% less strong. And so like at the muscle level, like what are the, what are the changes there? If the muscles roughly the same size and I still train regularly, even if the training is a little different, like what are the changes that at the, at the, maybe even down to the cellular level, as far as muscle goes, that would influence the lack of strength, even if the like to the cellular level as far as muscle goes that would influence the lack of strength even if the size is relatively similar yeah it's it's a great question i've wondered the same thing too i'll get a dexa and like you know lean tissue will be approximately the same throughout the years but i noticed as well you know the raw numbers in the gym do tend

to come down you know and it's tough like pars, you know, how that lean mass is being assessed. Is it, you know, what it's actually grabbing? I look to like, I've got the same rough grams, kgs of lean tissue in my legs, I see decrements in that fiber size. So it's like, where is that, you know, tissue that sort of the discrepancy in your assessment modality, where is that difference coming in and where is it leading to those sorts of performance deficits? But at least I can speak to, you know, some of what we've seen as well as like you are seeing drops off and like, you know, the contractile units or those kind of myofibrillar proteins in your muscle cell that may lead to that drop in strength, whereas you're

preserving per se other aspects of the size of the tissue. So it's harder to judge, you know, from a performance standpoint, how useful that is so that you can do what you want to do and hit the numbers you want to in the gym. Yeah. Can you actually dig into what some of those numbers look like over time on muscle fibers? I'd love, I would assume, I'll just assume I'm like you, because that's probably what my body is doing at the same time. Yeah. And so when we've tried to study nights, it's difficult to look at, you know, the same individual who's willing to subject themselves to getting poked and prodded every so often kind of throughout the lifespan. But when you look at, you know, the groups that have done this kind of look at elite athletes, like the biggest change you see is force will remain the same in isolated muscle fibers from their biopsies. When you start looking at like the contractile velocity or power, those tend to fall off. And these are like isolated muscles in a dish. So

you're not actually, you know, looking at nerve stimulation, their firing rates, this is like the ability of myofilaments to slide past one each other, like in an isolated condition. So where exactly some of those changes are occurring you know you're getting kind of really into the weeds but it is with like is it some of you know how quickly myosin can cleave atp to enable those myofilaments to slide past one another where the drop-off in velocity and power start to occur that's a pretty active area of research to understand like from a performance standpoint people who are engaging throughout their lifespan, you still do see some drop-offs on like an individual cell basis, understanding where that comes from.

I'd love to, there's, there's a piece of me that feels like, um, like the, the neuromuscular side of things, I'm more efficient, so I should be able to move more weight just because of the neurological side of it without needing as many fast twitch muscle fibers. Is that a way to think about this? If the muscle fibers are changing, but my neuromuscular efficiency is increasing just because of time under tension and the length of time that I've been doing a squat, wouldn't I be able to stay at least somewhat as strong as I, as I once was? Yes. Like I feel, and once you put in, you know, I don't know what the number is, the magic number, but the requisite number of years to kind of establish like optimal,

you know, motor recruitment patterning. Yeah. You know, one of the things we see is that, you know, it's not even just that that nervous control of your muscle. Like you've optimized the ability to recruit to perform a task, but you're still seeing drop offs in that kind of peak load lifted. And I do think you're getting down to like alterations on like a molecular basis where basically you're acting in myosin or not interacting and sliding past one another to the rapidity with which you were used to as you know we were younger like you're seeing conformational alterations and come like very very basic biophysical properties of how those muscle fibers contract to then produce force so like you're doing like the rate coding frequency diminishes, not even like rate coding, because that's me like, you know, you're able to preserve kind of that firing rate, so to speak,

this is actually like, you know, once you're, you're, you know, acetylcholine hits that receptor, and you start to depolarize, it's your ability to kind of release calcium quickly into the muscle fiber itself, you then get basically it binds out actin myosin slide past one another. I think the kinetics of some of those properties within the fiber start to change, even in like an elite athlete, someone who's kind of maintain a training program throughout the duration of their life. Oh, wow. So is that like a deeper level? Is that like an enzyme issue? It could. So one of the things you do see is yeah there are a lot of enzymes involved in that process both you know pumps so to speak kind

of shuttling calcium around our muscle cells like we keep it fairly compartmentalized release it when a cue happens but then there's also enzymes regarding like myosin itself and its ability to kind of shift and then myosias and ATPase. Exactly, exactly. But again, like, you know, we're obviously fighting to be at as elite level as we can, you know, within the context of the broader population too. Anything you do is, you know, amazing to kind of maintain functional ability.

I think, you know, not wanting to create barriers like, oh, you know, I'm getting older maintain functional ability. I think, you know, not wanting to create barriers like, oh, you know, I'm getting older, I'm going to, these are inevitable things. I want to always, you know, encourage that any kind of activity you can do, you know, reaps benefit to your overall health and longevity, but obviously trying to maximize, you know, performance potential and kind of keep that at a high level for as long as we age. I think that's what drives a lot of us. It drives, you know, some of the things I enjoy studying, but then trying to think too, from a broader standpoint, you know, always just trying to encourage literally any activity people can do is better than nothing. That makes sense. What Doug was talking about

earlier about how he's still jacked, but maybe not necessarily as strong. Cause you think about that's what I said. That's awesome. that was everything i could not to make a joke right there i just you set that one up so well but like when he when he talks about how deep it is like it's like the myosin atpas was so deep like it could be the same exact size but if that enzyme doesn't act as quickly you know that which is everything we could you know if andy were here he would tell you like that's what makes things type 2x is like really it's that very quality right there so correct yeah a question kind of out of left field here have there have there been any attempts or do you think it's possible at kind of a pharmaceutical level to develop something that

that causes a conversion between fiber types in either direction really oh travis like huh no it's a good question get rid of all my type ones the biggest thing i'm thinking of is an ability to actually maybe increase like type one frequency if you're able to kind of stimulate like energy sensing centers within our muscle fibers, like thinking, you know, one of the key factors is this AMP kinase, it like senses energy reserve, and it can help then stimulate like mitochondrial activity if you don't have enough energy in terms of perform tasks. But if anything, that would then seek to

kind of drive, you know, an increased abundance of type one fibers, preferentially maintaining type two, you know, there may be and I would never shut the door on, you know, potential molecules or druggable targets being identified to kind of do that. I you know, there's there's nothing right now that comes close to just like, you know, time under tension, loading that muscle. I think, you know, that's not what we all want to hear we're already doing that but i think that's still the best we've got right now well andy referenced i know once in one of his things about hypertrophy like like steroids you know there was a there was a research paper you know he used to talk about hyperplasia you know or hypertrophy and you know anyone doesn't know hyperplasia means you know new

muscle cells and so um if there was a study done with people taking large amounts of steroids and lifting incredibly heavy loads there was there was hyperplasia and there was a type two preference to that hyperplasia so like i, I would assume taking steroids, you know, look at Ben Johnson or look at, you know, anybody. Yeah. And to go further too, we've done some work looking at like anti-myostatin inhibitors. Now we're kind of exploiting that from like injury recovery standpoint, but obviously like you think about myostatin, you know, for those who aren't familiar, it's kind of like a molecular break to muscle growth. This is a way our body like seeks to kind of limit muscle growth by turning on the expression of this factor. I would say just cautiously, any steroid person listening,

a myostatin inhibitor is what also inhibits cancer. So like chill. Right now somebody's getting online. Myostatin inhibitor. To your point, like, you know, a lot of what we've done and learned as far as like myostatin goes has been done preclinically where you're giving this to, you know, little furry critters and they have a much higher frequency and often their muscles of type two fibers. They'll even have another extra fast one, a 2B. And those are the types of fibers that see the greatest effect to the blockade of myostatin. So they undergo the kind of greatest growth, or when you see hyperplasia, you have an elevated abundance

of those exceptionally fast type 2B fibers. So, you know, again, not advocating for anybody to go out and start taking these sorts of things, but there really are, you know, the semblances of an ability to try and preserve maybe some of that type two functionality in a clinical setting too you guys ever seen a picture of like the kangaroo is like you know it doesn't have my stand it's absolutely jacked or like a bully bully whip it it's like a racing dog and they look like cartoon characters yeah it's awesome and the bulls that are on it they're just like yeah incredible blue all right now some young boy is listening to this and is going to be like, I'm getting some of that stuff right now.

And then you'll get cancer and die, but whatever. Good job. Oh, I had to look it up. The kangaroo is Jack. I love that. He's doing like the front double bicep too. He's just like, wow. Yeah, kangaroo with pecs is legit.

That thing would hurt you, man. Dr. Fry, what, what is kind of the, the, the latest state of the research as far as muscle hypertrophy, like where, where's the field going right now? Kind of what's on the horizon that you're excited about that, that seems to have some legs, but like it's not fully flushed out, but everybody's working on it. Yeah. And one of the things that we were excited about, so again, this is kind of coming from looking at people who haven't been training before, you know, trying to encourage participation

and reaping benefit from exercise is we did a longitudinal training study. So we took older adults, this is kind of like 65 plus, put them through like a 12-week progressive resistance training program. And we found that the individuals who had like the highest level of muscle capillary, so this is kind of like the micro vessel that supplies, you know, oxygen, nutrients, blood to your muscles, the people who had a greater density to their capillary bed accrued the most muscle mass during training and also achieve the greatest improvement in muscle strength. This has been kind of validated by a few groups throughout the world. And so it's thought that if you are initiating, like just starting to, you know, undergo resistance

training, that perhaps like, you know, maybe some aerobic preconditioning to kind of artificially seek to improve that vascular bed increase, you know, capillary density, you may then set yourself up to achieve greater adaptation to a subsequent resistance training routine. So, you know, people who are already trained likely have, you know, good adaptation, a fairly dense capillary bed to begin with, but thinking along the lines of a person who might just be starting out thinking about, you know, beginning to lift weights, this may be a way to try and maximize your benefit as you start to then build in the resistance training component. Mash, I'm living right now everything he just said. And if we had put out a podcast like 15 years ago, and you just said, aerobic

conditioning will help you build muscle, The world would have shut down on whatever bodybuilding.com forum that existed. Yeah. You could have just, the whole thing, we would have just been kicked off the internet. There would have been no way we could have continued on. There's so much like,

you know, with regard to concurrent training, man, it's still such like a hot button topic. People have visceral, you know, real response to it. I bring it up for the

last uh i'm i'm uh i i say that and and and say that i'm i'm living that over the past nine months like i've just gone on like a massive it's probably been almost 12 months now maybe even longer where i've just been like really focused on building a cardiovascular system in a very healthy way like um i've done it many times in the past where I wouldn't say it was the most, like the healthiest where I'm just burning myself out on a daily basis, but lots of VO two max training, like running hard miles, lots of sprinting, um, quarter miles, like time trial things where I'm like, um, I feel like I'm, I'm like, I feel like I'm cardiovascularly in the best shape of my life in a healthy way. What has also happened is I've done some things in the gym while being mostly focused on conditioning that I've never done.

And my body feels very strong compared to some of the other just like pure call it like burnout things that i've done where it's like i'm just gonna run myself into the ground for 12 minutes and see what happens but there's no um it's not a structured plan by any means and it's been very strange because i'm hitting numbers that like my 22 year old self were not like i would have never thought that that was possible um and there has been like a very weird piece where I've thought, like, is this really all playing together and like actually helping just because of the increased blood flow. So my recovery is faster. Um, it's, it's a, it's just, it seems like the new stimulus that has nothing to do with strength training and is mostly purely cardiovascular focused has actually impacted my strength in a very positive way, which I still don't fully understand why.

Have you guys ever read the book The Hybrid Athlete by Alex Vieta? He's all about, and that dude, he squats and deadlifts over 700 pounds but then he does those 100 mile like ultra marathon things and like anyway that book really sums it up pretty good about how you know you can do it all together as long as you're strategic and putting i will say this there is such a thing specificity so if you're trying to be uh you know a sub 10 100 meter dash you might want to consider what you're doing because you know but like for the most part if you're just trying to get jacked yes i think they go not only they go well together one probably helps the other i agree i think from like a concept of overall resilience you can you know extract benefit from some targeted training

i agree it depends what your end goal is. Like, what are you chasing elite performance at any one level? Obviously like specialization there is the way to go. But I think for just those of us looking to, you know, get into the gym, do we want to do feel good about it? Like, I think there can be a lot of benefit from this, this kind of like, you know, delving into a little bit of aerobic training, it could be like more high intensity type work too, but just building that overall capacity to do work and other aspects of your training, I think you'll likely reap benefit. But I do think too, that there are other, you know, there's good work showing that like, again, kind of coming back to this concept of just like a singular facet, but like the capillary bed, this is how you're delivering amino acids,

glucose, so your ability to then utilize all all the diet dietary factors we're taking in meal ingestion and then exploiting that to the best ability in your muscles i think like there there's you know clear physiologic basis where that could help with adaptation to then loading into more like resistive type activity yeah carbon dioxide oxygen exchange all those things are going to improve man yeah so yeah one of the uh biggest things that i've actually thought on the nutrition side is that my body's just being able to transport the nutrients much more efficiently to the places it needs to go because the blood flow is just so much more efficient both like i feel you get benefit from like what i like to think the kind

of two standpoints when I when I think of like your your capillary bed, you know, you've got like structure there, more capillaries, a greater ability to deliver nutrients to that tissue to muscle. But then to by engaging in some like targeted aerobic training, you increase like insulin sensitivity, and insulin is a really potent vasodilator. So your ability to then kind of shunt all those nutrients into that capillary bed to kind of perfuse the muscle capillary bed to then further enable delivery. So you get kind of like functional and then structural like delivery to that muscle after a workout. Do you feel like that, uh, there's, there's specific, um, modalities of say conditioning, uh, like, is it, do you feel like that there's specific modalities of, say, conditioning?

Like, is it, do you feel like more muscular or the ability to grow muscle is going to be favored more by high intensity, short sprints, VO2 max training, or like long zone two, or is it really kind of like just build the big system and it works? I think building, you know, having an overall goal to build the system is always good. But, you know, personally, to me, I like having that resistive component. If I can get on like a cycloargometer, kind of push a higher intensity, I feel like then I'm working the muscle in addition to trying to build capacity. So, but again, that to me is like, I'm trying to maximize more so like the resistive component of any sort of like aerobic training I'm doing.

But yeah, I think anything people can do in that regard is going to confer benefit. But finding something that has that kind of intensity or some sort of a loading component, I feel is then only going to synergize with the kind of training you're doing in the gym underweight. Yeah. How much pushback do you get when you start talking about conditioning and muscle building? Oh, man, you know, like I said, if this was 15 years ago, it just would have been, it would have been a rough conversation to break into. No, I completely agree with me. 15 years ago, I'd have been like,

I know. I think there still is the concept of pushback too, but it's the audience you want to appeal. We're in the business of trying to improve functional lifespan as we get older. Overwhelming majority of older adults don't engage in sufficient or exercise at all. And so we're coming at it from a different perspective. I think that like if we can show added benefit with certain training programs and someone who is naive to exercise, that's obviously going to confer perhaps a greater public benefit to overall health span versus like working with more elite level athletes who have very different kind of performance related goals. So, you know,

I think from like a public health standpoint, the message has been pretty well accepted, but you get into more like elite performance circles. I think there's still this, you know, bit of pushback because obviously the, you know, emphasis there is specialization to achieve whatever your end goal is. Yeah. I'd love to dig into kind of, you know, when we're going to failure every set every rep it has to be the heaviest thing you've ever done that we did you know decades earlier yeah and i think we kind of like have been you know beating around the bush anecdotally like you know how does your training changed with age and And at least, you know, again, that there's been a bit of research in this field to again, if you're looking at someone who has,

you know, gone past that sort of middle age barrier, and trying to see what kind of intensity then resulted in the best adaptation. And so they kind of did like a different scheme where you had like, if we have three training sessions a week, like, think about high intensity, all three sessions, they did a breakdown where it was like low intensity, high intensity, low intensity, and then a high, low, high type scheme. And adaptation in terms of like, muscle mass improvement, or strength improvement was better in the high, low, high because at least it was theorized that that allowed for better recovery in some of those like, you know, heavier, more intense cycles. But that was very, I feel, you know, prescribed a lot of

times, like when I approach training, I'm trying to maybe not take every exercise to complete failure, but then kind of mixing it up within the same bout. Whereas this was more like every, you know, every exercise is going to, so it was, I guess you can try and parse it out however best to you, but it did show that by bringing in a little bit more low intensity training to kind of intersperse from the failure work, you did have a greater, you know, recovery benefit to that. Sure. How long were these studies too? That was a 16 week study and it even had like a roll in period too, to try and really kind of like negate any sort of like neuromuscular training

component. Cause like the kind of like recruitment patterning that occurs, you know, the first few weeks is you kind of have a new stimulus. And so they had that run in and then kind of started like what I call the hypertrophy phase of that study. And so they did take, you know, a lot of steps to try and control for that and then found that kind of that, that additional rest, you know, did confer some benefit. Well, yeah. I mean, I feel like, you know, just the whole monotony and strain of things, like, you know, you can't keep anything, no matter what, can't keep anything like just killing the person. I mean, I guess the Bulgarians would no matter what, can't keep anything like just killing the person.

I mean, I guess the Bulgarians would say you could, but like they were also aided with drugs. But like I feel like the more you can wave it, the better you're going to be, you know, just from the whole like novel thing, you know. Exactly. And I think, too, you know, your ability to kind of self-monitor you know i i'll be honest like i i don't take as you know prescribed a session like going into it understanding where i'm gonna go but if i sense like you know i've been dragging for several workouts in a row maybe i'll throw in like a deload week or something like that but i kind of do it on a as needed basis i could be i think a little bit more forward thinking to map that out. And maybe that's what it takes.

But yeah, I think being able to recognize those signs when maybe backing off of it would encourage then a bounce back. I think, you know, I think there's more and more literature that would say that you're probably right instead of like, because, you know, I've come from more of the black periodization and where it's going to be prescribed. And like, it's built in like uh if you're yeah yeah it's built in but like i think maybe you might be right as far as like doing it when it's needed or like you know maybe monitoring for fatigue like with you know using vbt and like when the person comes in you could tell that there's this big drop, then deload, but like deloading for no reason might be not a good idea. So.

Yeah. And it's tough. Like it's, it's all these cues that you then have to pay attention to in the gym, like in between sets, what's my heart rate like, you know, what kind of respiratory rate am I at? I'm using those as like loose proxies as those numbers start to climb, you know, maybe I need to, to kind of back off a bit, but it's like, yeah, it becomes then a lot to think about to kind of conceptualize. So I don't know, I, I kind of waffle maybe going back to just taking more of a, you know, a programmatic approach and kind of building in versus like, I wish I had like a clear answer there. No, I know. No, I hear it. But I definitely agree. Like, you know, doing it more when needed versus like, especially for most adults, you know, they've been so sedentary, but they probably don't need a deload for a long time.

Like, you know, you've had your deload for the last 10 years, you know. Exactly. You're deloading, man. Yeah, exactly. I think if you're coming at it from that standpoint, you know, relatively, you know, untrained, I think, yeah, you'll be able to attack hard for a while you know once you have basic movement patterns and whatnot in place but yeah for someone who's been going at it for two three plus decades i think yeah it's a different story what i did i got a fighter ufc guy and so i've gone more to like your the way you just prescribed like deloads and so what he does is he monitors it you know every day

we do like a concentric only vertical leap and we monitor the velocity of that velocity and height and then we have parameters set in and so like if certain things happen then he does x and so it's just built so like you know like if for example if he's like you know seven percent slower than normal we have that between five and ten percent then we drop everything we drop intensity and load twenty percent right away and so anyway yeah that's that's i mean you have a very like performance centric like read out there it's like that reaction speed things that are clearly have you know this this translate to that performance aspect right upper like i feel at least myself when i

don't necessarily have that readout to know you know what am i yeah totally i want to feel good in the gym move some weight around and you know be happy with with performance yeah i'm hoping that companies get more and more affordable so like every i feel like adults might need vbt more than the darn professional athletes so we don't hurt ourselves because we're trying to we're trying to perform for life not just some silly sport but yeah no no this sport's silly my god it's my whole life but yeah no but it's one of the things like vbt standpoint it's garnered a lot of interest i work really closely again from more the injury recovery side with a lot of physical therapists and they're all about you know just kind of bringing back kind of broaching with

that you know kind of training paradigm so i agree that it's gaining a lot more but yeah that it's a cost prohibitive i'll agree sure yeah i'm curious i'm curious from like a mobility flexibility standpoint if you go from barely barely being able to touch your toes you train yourself over time and now you can do the splits as an example uh is that is that mostly just non-muscular soft tissue change is that is that ligaments tendons fascia joint capsule etc or is there changes at the muscular level i i personally think you're getting a lot of like musculotendinous ligament type adaptation maybe some fascial adjustments there too you know with like if you are dedicated to stretching, you can start to see like serial sarcomere addition. So you can change like the physical fascicle properties of your

muscles as well. I think the greater degree of laxity gain is through, you know, tendons, things like that nature. But I do think you can see adaptation to the muscle as well. You know, if you are really driven, like you say, going from not, not touching your toes to doing a full split, you will see adaptation to the muscle itself. You think that's more likely to like add sarcomeres in series. If you're, if you're doing loaded stretching, if I'm doing, if I'm doing RDLs with locked knee RDLs with a flat back with 225 pounds and I'm doing, you know, sets of 30 and I'm getting that deep stretch at the bottom,'d be brutally sore in this example of course and maybe that maybe that contributes to it actually but you know do you think that would actually contribute to

sarcomeres in serious versus passive tension type stretching as best I can like you know we're kind of extrapolating out like if we you know well-controlled studies with like biopsies and patients or humans who have done exactly what you said are hard to come by. So we're like stuck kind of extrapolating for more like preclinical. But if we take an animal, place muscle in a stretch position and load it either via like e-stem or some sort of mechanical properties, you do get sarcomere addition there. So I would argue that it's likely to occur in the model you propose as well. I feel we probably have a lacking of direct physical evidence there, but I feel fairly confident in

that, you know, adaptation. Because that all leads to the question of if you add Sarcomeres and Sirius, is that mobility or that flexibility change improvement more likely to stick for the long term if that's the case? I would think so. I mean, I personally see benefit to that. You know, I think that would tend to confer advantage, you know, from that point forward. I think that, again, adding this kind of like, you know, greater malleability to tendons per se could also be a conferred advantage. But I think with anything else to the degree of reaping that benefit would necessitate kind of maintaining some training modality, I think like a complete reversion back to, you know, not stretching

at all or being inactive, you're likely going to then walk backwards a fair bit. But I think with, you know, certain degree of activity level maintained, yes, that will be a benefit that kind of, you know, sticks with you. Yeah. Tell me more about the study you just mentioned a second ago. I missed those details. How do you how do you study this in the lab? So what we can do, you know, we can cast immobilize like a mouse or a rat so we can place certain muscles in like either a flexed or a shortened position, or we can lengthen them too. And then if you are stimulating those muscles, so we can take it where an animal is like anesthetized and directly stimulate the motor nerve firing those muscles. So if you think about like your calf muscle per se, you know, we can then kind of like dorsiflex where we basically bring your, your heel,

you kind of like flex your foot, so to speak, to stretch the calf muscle, gastroc, soleus, things like that. By then stimulating those muscles in that stretch position, you can then see sarcomere addition occur there. So it's a very kind of controlled environment. You know, it's tough to get those little furry critters to kind of do what you want from like a mechanical loading standpoint. So there's not like a direct benefit, like I'm getting under a bar and moving X weight, that sort of thing. But in terms of like, we can assess their force output when we stimulate the nerve to see like, you know, in terms of like functionality, so to speak, to make similar inferences to what like a human would undergo with the kind of, I think, you know, example you provided.

So that's kind of like the genesis of contract, relax, relax, like PNF type stretching. You put your muscle in a length of position, then you contract in that length of position, then you push beyond that for subsequent reps. Exactly. Yeah, that would be like the Golgi tendon organ, like starting. It's more of a neuromuscular adaptation, isn't it? I think you'll see direct adaptation to the muscle itself but i do think you know with any of this you know you'll see some motor recruitment patterning change as well but i do think that the muscle

itself will adapt you'll add sarcomeres things of that nature but i think also you'll probably induce like hypertrophy as well so you'll some, some different kinds of adaptation. How can people start to kind of understand the, the overall like health of their muscle tissues? Are there, are there tests, are there biomarkers when they get their blood drawn? Like is there a way that you can, without having to come see you and do the full biopsy to, to see the quality of muscle tissue? One of the things we're trying to do is moving towards a more non-invasive like assessment toolbox, so to speak. And so, you know, still would necessitate access to like MRI or something,

but we've tried to do in patients like a one-to-one comparison. I will get a biopsy from your muscle and we'll take a picture using an MRI at that exact same spot. And then we try and validate the signal the MR image gives us to what's actually looking like in the muscle in terms of like gross indices, like quality, how much fats in your muscle, how much scar tissue you might have. In addition to kind of more like muscle intrinsic properties, like the size of your muscle fibers, things like that. And we've come a long way to kind of building these imaging suites so that you can estimate, I'll say like gross indices of muscle quality, as well as size in a non-invasive manner. But, you know, again, there's still some barrier there. Time on an MRI gets expensive and things like that. But we're working to try and make them

more accessible to where it could be something you would go get this assessment done, have some imaging done. We get an understanding of what your muscle looks like to then try and better prescribe like certain training regimens or certain like rehabilitative exercises per se if that was needed to then reap benefit given your sort of muscle phenotype and we're talking about speed and power on a on a previous show and travis was mentioning like as you get older you lose elasticity like how how does that happen again kind of at the cellular level like what changes are taking place to lose elasticity and potentially even increase the likelihood of injury and tearing muscles or ripping, you know, having like a muscle strain as you get older?

Exactly. So the biggest thing that we see the change happening is like you're losing elasticity at the expense of like a stiffening. And a lot of times what we see is an increase in what I'll term like enzymatic cross-linking. You have various like proteins found outside of the muscle fiber. So think about like the sheath of connective tissue that surrounds each one of your fibers that provides like the kind of structure to our muscles. So a lot of that's collagen based and those collagen molecules can become cross-linked. That's kind of like a quintessential sign of aging. It doesn't just happen, you know, within your muscles. It happens in the heart and the liver and the lungs. A lot of our tissues

become stiffer with age due to like an elevated accumulation of these cross-links. And when those cross-links can preferentially occur at the sites of like your musculotendinous junction, that then can predispose you to like strains, tears, things like that, go to them, like, pick up something heavy, and you're not used to that load. And the tissue doesn't have that inherent elasticity to kind of respond appropriately. So that's actually one of the more, you know, recent areas we've started looking at in the muscle is this concept of like, cross linking in the muscle and how it limits the ability to build muscle as we age. And so the work we're doing there is all kind of preclinical, but looking at some novel like

drug targets and then using some genetic strategies in preclinical animals to try and mitigate that to then see, can this enhance adaptation, you know, in our muscles as we're older, when then they're challenged with like a loading period. Is there anything we can do to prevent that? Like asking for a friend about nutritional, uh, like rest recovery. And then of course, training. I think mobility is a big thing too. So like, you know, you know, I actively stretching, trying to work through some of that. You know, that's a problem is like you start getting strains, like, you know, MTJ strains are one of the, I think, most challenging things to bounce back from.

And then you are so much more highly predisposed to have another one. So it's the biggest thing I'd say from like an actionable standpoint is mobility issues, you know, being able to stretch, maintain mobility throughout joints. As far as like a nutrition or like some sort of pharmacologic, we hope, you know, that's in the future. What we're doing right now is to try and identify, you know, druggable targets that would facilitate that in an older adult. But we're still, you know, kind of a few years back from that kind of working out the kink, so to speak, in some animal models to see what works well and then what also would be safe. Because

it's like one of those things you talked about myostat and having some detrimental effects here. You know, you want to maintain tension in certain parts of the body, like the aorta. You've got these blood vessels that need to, you know, with increases in pressure. So that cross linking is good. So your aorta doesn't explode. So it's like you'd have to then kind of like titrate where those things are delivered to optimize like muscle, but not at the expense of like your heart. So it's a tough

balance to strike. A few minutes ago, you mentioned scar tissue, like, how do you build up scar tissue? Like, and to what degree, you hear people say all the time, like you get a massage or ART or grass or whatever, like you're breaking up scar tissue, like to what degree is that actually true versus that's just like, it kind of just sounds intuitive that that would be the case. You know, I think you can like break up some of that on a very kind of like subcutaneous basis, like maybe relieving some accumulated connective tissue surrounding like the fascia that kind of like the sheet covering our muscles. We're interested in kind of diving deeper. So, you know, after an injury, you see a lot of like, you know, nasty inflammatory, we'll call cytokines, molecules come

up, some of those stimulate the production of collagen. And so then you get kind of these like, what I call like fibrotic swabs in your muscle, where you have this like accumulation of connective tissue, it disrupts the architecture of muscle muscles, like very, you know, very geometrically, like, pleasing to look at, but then you get these like disruptions in that kind of architecture, the muscle doesn't function as properly. And I think a lot of it's born on times of either disuse, or more importantly, like after injury, it's kind of like a reactive mechanism. If you strained a muscle, you had a load the muscle couldn't accommodate in a way to better transmit force and load across the muscle,

the muscle thinks it needs to increase the abundance of that connective tissue, like the collagen, to then better able like control strain across the tissue. And that's sort of like reactive, you know, pathology is actually probably not beneficial to the muscle, but that's sort of like reactive, you know, pathology is actually probably not beneficial to the muscle, but it's sort of like the default setting, so to speak. I'd like to think, you know, that some of those mechanotherapy and whatnot do work. Now, a lot of it hasn't been done in humans per se, but when you look preclinically and they really titrate out, so it's kind of funny, think you've got like a rabbit or a rat that's under anesthesia and it's kind of like a very titrated rolling pin across their muscles after a period of disuse or whatnot. You can see that that sort of mechanotherapy or

massage therapy does tend to facilitate remodeling of that scar tissue so that you could see a release of that. I think the same principle likely applies to humans, but then it's like finding, you know, the, the requisite tension, so to speak with which to deliver that, you know, active release or the manual therapy to do that. So finding someone who is basically going to, you know, he's going to put you through some, some pain to kind of break up that tissue. I guess we're getting low on time, but I do have a question. Since this is your thing, I'm always curious from someone who works with muscle all the time. When it comes to the mechanisms, we've all heard mechanical tension.

There's two others. Starco. My old. Sarco. Hold on. Mechanical tension. And there's two others. Muscle damage. And then there's one more.

Getting a pump. The mechanistic striper. Yeah, but now I've heard that mechanical tension is really the one. It's hard to tease that out between the others. I know, it's all the same thing. They often don't exist, you know, but like someone who's been training, you know, has got a couple of decades under their belt, like their ability to induce like that damage, that kind of eccentric loading, they'll still better withstand that than someone who's novice doing like some eccentric exercises they're going to be in a world of hurt and they'll see damage to a far greater degree on a cellular

basis so i agree completely doug that it's really hard to kind of like segregate each one of those into their individual like tubes so to speak but i think like yeah just mechanical loading that sort of tension is metabolic stress that's the the thing. It's also likely then going to hopefully preserve longevity to keep doing it. You're less likely to sustain injury, so to speak. I think like, you know, pump like BFRT, I mean, that stuff is great. Personally, like I feel if you can engage in heavy training, that's, that's the way to go. I feel if you've got a contra indication, like you just had surgery on a joint and you can't lift weights, you're challenging like, you know, a new knee or a new ligament or something like that. Maybe then, you know,

wearing a cuff, restricting blood flow, lifting heavier loads, that could be kind of like a workaround to keep the muscle condition. But I think in any instance where you're able to engage with heavy training, that that's the key. key yeah especially when it comes to tendons all the other properties yeah fantastic i just wanted to hear you're like just lift heavy travis he goes got it sometimes i like going downstairs the front squat yeah sometimes i like to work on muscle damage just to remember when it's good i mean then you challenge your stem cells you know you get your little satellite cells doing their job make sure they're firing on all cylinders so i think those those kind of like you know every now and then dipping your toe into that water is

good i like to do it too just to make sure that sort of like injury recovery response is still firing on all cylinders i mine is because friday i went it haven't been this sore in a decade. Yes, man. I am still sore. Like, yes, I went a little too far. Sometimes the coach needs a coach. I might be at that point. Dr. Fry, where can people find you?

I'm at the University of Kentucky. I'm on Twitter at Chris Fry PhD. Feel free to drop me a line there. We're pretty active as a lab on Twitter at Chris Fry PhD feel free to drop me a line there we're pretty active as a lab on Twitter but yeah if you go to my faculty webpage on the University of Kentucky website you can see some of our recent work if you ever want to get engaged and learning more about our research being a participant

if you're in and around Lexington happy to have you reach out Coach Bash we brought up the VVT guys gymwear.com There's a flex unit you can get for under $500 I recommend it to Anyone up $40 and above

Just to make sure you don't do anything stupid That's why I use it Use code MASH5 5% off Yeah, that's awesome Doug Larson You bet, Monis Graham, Douglas C. Larson.

Yo, Dr. Fry. This was, this was awesome, man. Anytime I'm talking muscle physiology, it's a,

it's very engaging and enjoyable. I appreciate you coming on the show. This was great. Oh, thank you all for the opportunity. Had a blast chatting with you today. There you go. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner,

and we are barbell shrug to barbell underscore shrug to make sure you get over to rapid health report.com. That's where Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. You can access that free report at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we will see you guys next week.