Barbell Shrugged - Real Science, Bro. The Latest Strength Research w/ Dr. Andy Galpin - EP 197

Episode Date: September 30, 2015

Catching up on the latest in strength research w/ Dr. Andy Galpin

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we visit the Human Performance Labs at Cal State Fullerton to discuss the latest sports signs with our longtime friend, Dr. Andy Galpin. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. 3, 2, 1, shaka brah. Welcome everybody to a very, very smart looking episode of the Barbell Shrug Podcast. I'm Chris Moore here. Doug Larson across the lab table from me in his very dirty lab coat. Dr. Doug Larson.

CTP behind camera number one and on mic for this episode. Charlotte, hello dear, behind camera number two. And for like the 800th time on this show, Barbell shrugged OG, if there ever was one, Dr. Andy Galpin. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Andy Galpin. Yeah, you got an actual PhD in scientific credentials and whatnot. Andy, can you, before we get going, tell us where the hell we're at. Why are we wearing these fancy outfits and goggles on our head?

What's going on, man? So you are standing in my biochemistry and molecular exercise physiology lab. Many big words. How long did it take you to learn how to say that? You know, it was like four years of grad school. My entire PhD thesis was on that lab name. Oh, man. What would make you look the smartest?

Yeah. So what are you doing here? So my lab is a part of the Center for Sport Performance. So our entire goal and mission is to figure out performance. So if it's not giving us an answer about actual exercise and human performance, we're not interested. Center for Sport Performance, not the Center for Sick Old Animals or Cells or anything like that. It's about sport performance. So anyways, let's make ourselves look really cool and smart. Yeah. I mean, here's our general idea.

We want to use physiology. We want to use chemistry. We want to use science to figure out performance. We're not interested in doing the opposite. In fact, most labs like this in the world are going to be doing the opposite. So they're going to be using exercise to study chemistry or exercise to study physiology.

We want to know about performance. So I want to know what performance. So I want to know what makes you bigger, faster, stronger, and I want to figure it out from the inside. And that's really what we're doing. So we're a muscle-centered research facility. So we take biopsies. We're looking at performance things just from a perspective from inside the cell. Yeah. Do you want to break into like really what the basic scientific approach you're applying here and how you're testing ideas and new hypotheses

and how you're putting the data into place to help people out? Yeah, so we really have a gamut of laboratories in our entire center. So we've got the human performance lab. This is where we're going to measure force production, strength, vertical jump. So we're doing all the really

performance-based things in there. The next sort of lab over is a little bit of science with a little bit of performance. So this is our exercise phys lab. We're going to be doing exercise performance type of stuff, but we're going to be adding in maybe blood work, collecting ventilation gases, things like that. So a little bit more science-y. A little more fancy. Yeah, but still you're going to do a VO2 max test or you're going to cycle to exhaustion on an aerodyne or something. Yeah.

Over here is sort of the other end of the spectrum where we're doing all of our chemical analysis over here. We've got like a million-dollar laser microscope a couple of floors below us. We're looking at muscle at the most detailed level possible. And, again, the big picture here is trying to use all three of our laboratories and our general approach to science is let's do whatever we need to do to figure out performance. That's really where we're trying to go with everything. Sorry, I've got to interrupt you. Okay. CTP's laughing his ass off.

What, man? What do you see? Are you sweating? His glasses are fogged up. Ladies and gentlemen, for scientific effect, do you see that I'm wearing the lab coat and stupid goggles on my head that make me look like I'm going to look through some kind of microscope or maybe some mucus or body friend might spread? You're fine.

I'm a fat guy in a lab coat that doesn't really fit all that much. Look, I'm bailing on those glasses. Go on, Dr. Andy Galpin. Making important decisions to shape humanity for the better. This guy's making fun of my sweatiness. Sorry. Down in Dr. Lee Brown's lab where the

force plate was and all the machines were, like the performance-oriented laboratory you were talking about, you guys had probably literally hundreds of different studies that you guys have done just over the last couple of years which number one that's a phenomenal amount of research studies to do in just a couple of years that's ridiculous uh but number two like do you have a couple of research studies from the last couple of years that you've published that have been um like shocking or like everyone thinks that the outcome would be one way but you know we actually showed that the results are totally

opposite or anything anything like that that is like mind-blowing, myth-busting, that type of thing? Yeah. Boy, that's everything we do. Oh, yeah? Okay. We're basically the myth-busters here. Just kidding. Just kidding.

Sometimes we support what we think. A very quick example of that, this is a Lee Brown study a handful of years ago. He's interested in over- speed training or additional fast training. Which is? So if you want to get fast, right, you want to improve your running speed or your jumping. Well, we do. Right? The best thing you can do is run fast.

Right? Well, that's sort of the common idea. Practice it. Or you say, okay, I want to get better at running fast, so I'm going to run with a little bit of resistance. All right? I'm going to run with a little bit of resistance. So your classic running with a bungee behind you or dragging a sled, squat jumps with a little bit of weight on your back, a little bit of resistance. And we've known actually there's quite a bit of research on that that suggests that's going to help. That does make you fast and jump.

Well, he's interested in the other end of the spectrum, which is I want you to practice being faster than you already are. So a couple of examples he did in that lab. Number one is a classic baseball bat. So if you've ever played baseball or you've watched a baseball game. If you got drunk in the park and you watch guys play sports, you also observe this. Right. You're going to see people, before they go up to bat, they're going to put a donut on their bat,

which is adding extra weight. It's just like doing. Not a real donut. No. It's a weighted piece of metal you slide on the bat to make it heavier, right? Make it heavier, right? All the time, everybody. The idea being, you get used to swinging the heavy thing, and you take that donut off, and now you're ready to hit a big donut, because now the bat's going to feel so much lighter.

Right. So we know that is fairly effective. In fact, well, the donut isn't, but that type of training, so resistance training for speed and power would be effective. Well, he kind of came back and said, what if I, instead of swinging something heavy before I swing my bat, what if I swing something lighter than my bat? It's kind of counterintuitive at first. Yeah, so he had them swing wiffle ball bats, which are very, very light, a few ounces.

It looks less manly than swinging a big bat with the donuts on it, admittedly. So what he found actually is that their baseball bat velocity, their swing speed, was faster when they swung the wiffle ball bat first. Wow, yeah. Right? So we've done the vertical jump version of that. Yeah, so tell them what you had in your lab that allows people to jump higher faster. On top of our force plate is a big harness that goes overhead.

It comes down, and you can attach this harness. You pull the string. It lifts you up in the air a little bit it's kind of like jumping on a trampoline almost and so when you jump you can jump way up in the air because you have like 30 percent lost body mass all right so it's over speed training it's jumping higher than you can normally jump all the training studies and even all the acute studies he's done on that have almost all shown that's actually more effective than resistance jumping so squat jumping or something like that so the i don't know if it's a fallacy or a bias or or just it's just your your personal feelings when you swing something heavy

like the baseball bat and then you swing the regular bat it feels lighter but that doesn't mean it's moving faster that's like that's like a an implication almost it's like well it feels lighter so it must be moving faster. Exactly, and it's not. But when you actually study it and you measure the speed, that's not actually the case. Correct. Are you suggesting that how I feel, Doug, may not be true? My feelings might lie to me. How you feel is true because it does feel lighter, but the implication from that feeling is that it moves faster, which isn't necessarily the case.

Right. So like another example that maybe you guys have tested this, maybe not, but if a boxer is getting ready for a boxing match, like instead of putting on heavier gloves and doing a lot of shadow boxing full speed, thinking like having the heavy gloves is going to make him, it might add some effect. There's some other effect. It's helping more than likely,

but maybe speed by punching with the heavier gloves, maybe he should just do bare knuckle and do very fast shadow boxing bare knuckle, and then that will improve his punching with the heavier gloves, maybe he should just do bare knuckle. Right. And do very fast shadow boxing bare knuckle, and then that'll improve his speed instead of heavier gloves. 100%. So just to really clarify, we're not saying the resistance stuff doesn't work. What we're saying is this also works, and in a lot of cases, it's more effective. Right.

Easy to do. You could probably do this a lot and get better quick. Yeah, exactly. Right. The other thing that I think people, they hear something like this, and then it becomes the ultimate you should never do that. Right. When you may,

maybe you were only testing, not maybe, you were only testing one thing. Right. You're saying swinging the bat with the donut on it doesn't make you swing it faster. That's all we're saying.

Yes. When that thing has no effect on anything else, there's a million other variables you could measure. In the boxing example, maybe having heavier gloves like gives you better uh stamina sure you know because you're you're used to doing five or ten or twelve or thirty or whatever how many rounds you want to do with those heavy gloves it gives you better stamina better muscular endurance

better cardiovascular or whatever but it doesn't make you punch faster as an example but right you're just talking about the one very specific thing a lot of people get. Yeah, and we're going to actually bring up some points in this later for some of the actual studies that we've done recently. And I'll highlight that point even more. But that's one of the major problems with the current or the past approach to science. And what we're trying to fix now in our sort of new approach, a new model of science, is to be very clear about those issues.

So here's exactly what it means. Here's what it does not mean. So the old adage in the sort of science is that sometimes not a difference or no findings are equally or more important than findings. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Right. So things like that and being very clear about the implications of your study and what the

implications are not is another important point. That's a really interesting thing, though. Those things, finding something, not finding something, or disproving something, but probably just those first two, finding something versus not finding something, if you find something, everyone wants to publish it. If you don't find something, it seems like people are like, well, that's not very interesting anymore,

when it can be just as important. That's a real problem in science, particularly when you get to the supplement game. Oh, supplement game. If you look and do, pick a cherry extract. What are the supplement game. Oh, supplement game. So if you look and do pick a cherry extract. What are the benefits of cherry extract, Andy? Should I take it? How many grams?

Should I cycle on and off the cherry extract? So you can maybe go out and find five papers that show some positive benefit to cherry extract. Now that doesn't mean you don't see the 100 studies that were done that were not published that showed it didn't work. And so if I were to give you the entire breadth, if I said we did 105 studies, 100 showed it didn't work, five showed it did, you'd probably be like- Change your outcome.

But if all you see is the five that showed it did work, you're like, wow, every study shows it work. All right. And I'm not saying that about cherry. I just made those numbers up for cherry. I don't know what the numbers are, but that's a very important point of not published is a real problem, and that is a current dogma in science of if you have no difference or if you find nothing statistically, you're very likely to get rejected from publication. It's a real problem. I feel like people don't understand even what science is.

They think of science and they think of all the stuff that's around us right now. They of like chemistry stuff neil degrasse tyson on hdtv sciencey same shit that's crazy right but they don't really know what science is like in my mind when i think of science like i think it's just a process of figuring out what what works and what doesn't work it's it's just a process in my mind like like how do you describe describe it? Science is simply logic. So, in fact, I'll go all the way to the beginning to help paint this picture. Of time? Yes. Wow. Jeez.

Comprehensive, Dr. Andy. We're going to go back to Aristotle. So one of my favorite of all time. I gave a keynote lecture a few years ago at NSA National Conference. The National Strength and Conditioning Association. Yeah. And the talk was on, supposed to be on muscle physiology, and I talked about Aristotle the entire time.

And the basic idea was, Aristotle is essentially given the credit for developing what we now know as logic. The scientific process is simply logic. So you develop an idea, you question, don't know an answer to something, you do some kind of test,

you interpret your result, you retest, and then you adjust your thesis, your hypothesis, right? Well, the problem with that now, in fact, this has happened in the last couple of decades. That last critical step of retest is eliminated. We can't do it anymore. You're saying things are piling up, lots of results and evidence coming on the internet at all times. There's a lot of results piling up, lots of results and evidence coming on the internet at all times. There's a lot of results piling up and not a filtering through to see what the best of these are? No, not necessarily.

What I really mean is whenever we come out with a publication, it's not vetted entirely. So, for example, if I did one study on five people and I found a result, 40 years ago, you'd have to repeat that in a different group of people, a different group of people, a different group of people. You'd have to do it. Confirm your results. Confirm your results. And then when you publish it, you have a really good idea that what you found is indeed happening. Well, now it's gone so far in the other direction. The most common reason your paper gets rejected from publication is because it's not new enough. It's not novel enough. Someone already did that study. Yeah, I want to confirm it.

I want to do it in a different group with a different rest interval or with a different supplement. I can't do that, not new enough. And so what happens is the importance of every is getting a little watered down by the fact that they're looking maybe for getting more people just to pick it up and read it and be engaged like it was a magazine versus a trusted source of knowledge featuring some studies that are duplication to make sure we know where people are being pressured into that. The pressure on our end as scientists is you need to publish. I mean, you saw, you mentioned we got all these publications, right?

Yeah, it's publish or perish, right? Publish or perish, right? And so for me to go back and collect more data, why would I do that if I'm not being forced to by the peer review process? If someone will take me with 15 people, I'm not going to go collect 30. Why?

I get one publication and it's double the work. Right, no incentive for you to do that. It's more work and no extra payoff. Right, no extra payoff. And in fact, it's not even not extra payoff. It's worse because then when I go up for review at the end of the year, they're going to be like, you only did this many papers. You should have done more. And so we're not only de-incentivized, we're punished for doing less work even if it's a higher quality.

All right, who do we blame? The man. Right? The man in the system. Yeah. So the problem is what that means for a practitioner is when you see a research study or you hear about a paper, you have to think a lot harder about the implications of it. It doesn't mean what it used to mean. And so science is really changing before our eyes.

Chaos in the brickyard, Andy. It's chaos in the brickyard. Oh, God. I mean, people are probably hearing that and they're like, is he saying that science is total bullshit? Like all these studies don't mean anything? Like what are you saying what i'm really saying is you have to be very careful about the detail of the paper so if it's not very directed towards what you're interested in you don't disregard it but you don't make it as you said earlier it's not meant the end

all be all all right so we found one study to support your idea. Therefore that's proved. We can't prove anything in science. I mean, that's the old adage of science is there's no such thing as prove or disprove. Those words don't exist in science. Being in a laboratory reminds me that this is a place where ideas and creative insights, things you observe in a gym, hunches you get can be tested. And then the outcomes of this, the more outcomes we get that we can trust and that are veritable and good, we're getting a better, like a sharpening image of reality. Yeah. So the way that I like to actually think about it is science is logic, right?

And logic was never intended to be the end result. Logic is where you start. So here's what we think happens most of the time in most people. Now, you need to use your own personal experience. You need to use experience from other elite sources or experienced folks, and then you modify, tweak, maybe even disregard what you started with. But we need to start with science.

That's where your initial thing is because this is what's most likely to work for most people most of the time. And then you will, without a doubt, find some people who it works fantastic for, it doesn't work at all for, and you use your experience, your creativity, and you use other experience of people good in the field, and you modify from there.

So it's just a starting place. Right. I've done two or three presentations talking about supplementation, and one of the things that I always start with is I show these two different graphs where the first one is like a scatter plot of all these people that say they that's just made up made up graphs that i just did for the purpose of explaining the concept but uh there's graph where it shows uh there's 20 people here's the results of their study say they they took creatine they took one group took it consistently for uh six

weeks another group didn't didn't uh they took a placebo or whatever and then the creatine group if you look at it maybe some people they put 30 pounds on the back squat and some people put 20 and some people didn't do anything. They didn't gain at all. Some people actually, they lost, you know, they're five pounds weaker on the back squat at the end of six weeks. And if you average it out, right. You know, if you average it out, then each person gains five pounds. But to your point, like the average doesn't really matter. Like for you as an individual, you need to look at that graph and say, you know, does it work for some people? Should I try it or not? If it doesn't work for everybody, well, okay. That's one thing,

but if it works really well for some people, kind of good for some other people and doesn't work at all for other people, well, maybe, maybe it's worth a shot barring no side effects and whatnot. You want to go ahead, Andy, we talked about post activationactivation potentiation. You want to go ahead and talk about breathing because that was one of the key outcomes. That was the power of individual results, right? For the breathing study? For the respiratory warm-ups, yeah. So Doug's point is 100% right.

The way that science works is you publish based on average. So I collected 20 people, all right, and the average result was 10% better, worse, and different, but you're going to have people way up, way low. And so you run statistical analysis, right? And that's supposed to determine whether or not that one person up here down there is, was fluke or was it luck? What are the odds? What she observed is a real thing. Right. And so for decades, that's how science has worked. P.005.

That's all you care about, right? What does that mean? Especially if you were taking stats in college, you go, you remember that fucking number. Yeah, that's all. You don't need to know what it means. The point is, we have this magical, in fact, I'd rather you don't, because that's how arbitrary it is. It's this weird number we've sort of settled on. Everyone just paused the video and said, what is P.005?

And we're back. Arbitrary number, right? It's this weird number we've sort of settled on. Everyone just paused the video and said, what is P.0? Right? And we're back. Arbitrary number, right? Well, what you do then, you take your average and you say, okay, that was higher or lower than our arbitrary number. Therefore, it worked or it didn't work. But if you peel back the layers and look at, well, for a third of the people that had this huge input and a third didn't and a third was there, you can't do that in science. You're going to get trashed for it. You're going to get buried.

Yeah. But as I said before we started the show, when you're coaching, you don't coach an average of 20. Not to me. You coach one person. So if your one person is way down or way up, that's really, really important to you. So you have to take that into consideration. So the respiratory warm-up is a classic example of that where we just completed a study using a little device called an O2 trainer, Boss Rutten's device, right, where you essentially looked at doing this respiratory warm-up before a maximal effort cycling bit. So this horrible, horrible cycling exercise. And we put people that do it four times. So they're breathing through something that's restricting their airflow, so they have to suck in harder.

And then by doing that, sucking in and breathing out, sucking and breathing out against resistance, then you put them on an Airdyne or just some type of a cycle to go through some type of workout, and then you're testing what in that case? So you're not using the mouthpiece during the exercise. It's just a way to warm up your breathing muscles. So just like you would warm up your curls at a light weight before you did heavy ones, like anyone listening to this does curls.

Be careful. Curls is a very controversial training topic in this community. So same thing. You want to warm up the respiratory muscles, and then you have a little bit of a break, and then you cycle to exhaustion. So how far can you go before you're done, before you stop? So every single person had to do it with no respiratory warmup, either a really hard respiratory warmup, a kind of hard one, or a kind of easy one.

At the end, the average result was that the respiratory warmup did absolutely nothing. Ah, throw that study out, doctor. Right. That shit ain't getting you tender. Throw shit out. Right? When we looked at the individual data, we saw something like, I can't remember the numbers, but 10 of the 11 people saw a 20% or higher bump in performance in one of the three warmups.

And so this is huge, right? It's a huge effect. Huge effect. And so what I need to do right? It's a huge effect. Huge effect. And so, what I need to do is have you run through each one, figure out which one you respond best to, and most likely, 10 out of 11 chance, you're going to have a huge response to one of the three. What was the highest percentage of benefit you observed?

Probably like 38. So, a 38% increase in your ability to cycle to the death point. Like you cycled 38 percent longer correct correct that's huge that's an enormous number yeah and we're talking uh is it trained or untrained or just college students or no they were um they were people who were trained in high intensity interval training of different varieties so some of them were runners some of them were cyclists some of them were mma5 some of the wrestlers or what do you mean they were all people who worked out in a crossfit gym or a crossFit-esque gym, something like that.

They did CrossFit-style programming, intervals a lot, circuits, some strength, something like that. And so the cycling test took about five minutes or so. So it's brutal. It's not an hour-long cycle to exhaustion. It's a five-minute one. And so instead of going five minutes, they now went six and a half or something enormous like that. Huge, huge bumps. Now, what's also interesting is some of them saw huge decrements.

So let's say five minutes was normal. One of the warm-up trials, they went seven minutes, and one of the warm-up trials, they went three. And so finding what worked for them was really important, but also finding, hey, this might crush you too. Yeah, it's like playing with fire. So it seems like some people are getting potentiated in the breathing musculature and some people are probably getting fatigued. Well, that's exactly what's happening. So the warmup protocols that were too difficult for some of them fatigued their respiratory

muscles. So they gassed really quick when they started the exercise bout. And so this is just a very quick example of what you mentioned earlier where if I would have just looked at the group average, I would have been like, been like oh no this doesn't work move on respiratory warm-up not important it's all bolt right but even though it worked for everybody basically almost everyone saw some benefit somewhere now i'm probably going to get hammered for it and it might not get published but that's the type of stuff we're trying to do because we think that that's important and you are seeing a change in culture and science. There are other people looking at other means

outside of simply, well, is it significant or not? There are other approaches that people are getting more sophisticated with. And I think that the people who are doing this type of research that are real practitioners are moving more towards a model of what I just described of,

let's really dive, because maybe the individual responses are more important than we appreciate and we can't just throw these things into a group average maybe we're doing a disservice and we're missing a lot of things yeah i mean the classic example is if you're an olympic sprinter and losing the gold medal is 0.01 seconds and you can get a one percent bump right that means setting a world record right versus losing right like versus losing. No one knows who you are versus national hero.

Based on taking one thing that someone says doesn't work. The opposite is true, actually, too, where we see all the time, you'll see maybe a 10% or 12% bump in something that's actually not practically significant. It's statistically important. Sure, 10%, but in terms of

application, it won't actually matter to your performance. So we see both ends of that spectrum. So it's really important we continue to have skilled coaches, practitioners, people who have done it get into science because we now understand these performance issues where if you have folks that are just doing the science that haven't really done it before, we lose a lot of that. They don't appreciate this aspect of science. More and more people are getting into this field. This being offered at a university is probably only how many decades old? Like 20 years old, 30 years? Well, it depends on how far you want to go back.

Do we want to talk about that? Tell us the history. You want to talk about the evolution of our field? I'll start it with Aristotle. Or should we do it after? I'll say we need to take a break. As we get back, we have some delicious things to get into, like some newfangled ways scientifically to maybe optimize our gains

or get a better result from our training. Take a quick break. That's coming up. We're out to break, folks. Cheers. Stay tuned. This is Tim Ferriss, and you are listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com.

Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged.com and sign up for the newsletter. Welcome back to this very science-y episode of the show, everybody. We have a few more really cool things to share science story-wise but before we do that dr andy galpin you're going to tell us how this field of sports science and kinesiology is kind of rapidly under experiencing some big change yeah tell us more about that man i think it's really important that people not scientists understand what's actually happening in the field especially young people in this field young coaches uh even if i don't even be young by age but new in the field um there's things happening right in front of their eyes that I don't think they're necessarily aware of.

So if we sort of track the history of the entire field of strength and conditioning, we'll call it, it really started in Stockholm, Sweden at GIH, which is essentially the first fundamental starting of the study of movement. It literally started with gymnastics it evolved so we're now we're talking uh late 1800s around the early turn of the century it evolves kind of a big jump into the harvard fatigue lab all right which is in the early 1930s or so where they started studying fatigue and human performance and they weren't doing it so that they make it they could make sports better because sports weren't really necessarily popular then. They were doing it really for things like industry. Labor force.

Labor force, right? Why are people getting so tired? How can we help them recover better? And so we're trying to understand fatigue. So it's a building block stage first. The characteristics of human movement and then what makes people tired. Very logical steps so far. That's a really interesting question in and of itself.

Like why do we get tired? Yeah. Like why does that happen? it's a really interesting question in and of itself like why do we get tired yeah like why does that happen that's a very interesting question we still have no idea yeah a bit of a rabbit hole too right yeah right um it was also for the war effort so soldiers i mean we're still if you look at world war one we're still fighting with hundreds of thousands of people in a battlefield for the most part so conditions influence the way of thinking right environmental physiology kicks in what happens like a tired thirsty hot this type of stuff so you sort of move on from there and then you have uh the conversion of dr karpovic karpovich however you want to say which is the development of um bob hoffman york barbell oh yeah where we have okay you shouldn't do all this heavy stuff it's bad for your joints it It makes you unflexible, inflexible.

What's the word there? Un-im. I don't know. One of them. Immobile? Makes you stiff. Unsupple. Unsupple.

And then you start demonstrating, wow, you can actually be really strong, really big, and be more athletic. Wow, this is actually good. And so what happens is you've got this conversion from lifting. Fatiguing exercise is no longer not bad for you. Maybe it's actually okay. That realization was how long ago? In the 1950s-ish. I mean, Bob Hoffman, York Barbell, these are the ones really pushing forward where you

had these, it turns out to be, researchers and scientists who were saying, yeah, this is bad for you. You shouldn't. It was almost taboo to lift weights because that would slow you down. It was highly taboo. It would muscle bind you and make you very unathletic, prone to injury. Yeah, and you have these. As they thought smoking was good.

And certainly some percentage of the world still believes that stuff. It's still persisting with people from that generation. Especially that it slows you down or something. Right. We're just scared they're going to lose their girlfriends. That's what's happening. I know it is. And so you have with these people are developing these barbell exercises and big complex movements,

we start realizing, oh, my gosh, they can do standing back flips with 30-pound dumbbells in their hands. Their performance is better. Who can't? I mean, come on. Get all the chicks. So you have this next transition, right, where it's, okay, maybe this stuff's not too bad for you. The next big switch is what I like to call the Arnold Schwarzenegger effect. Pumping iron comes out.

Bodybuilding starts being good. Popularization wave of this stuff. Fitness and aesthetics is really the biggest transition where not only is it okay for you to lift, but now actually maybe you can look better. You can feel better about yourself. You can have the body you always wanted. That's still... Come everywhere all the time. Right wanted that's still come everywhere all

the time right it's kind of what i call the arnold was the bro the bro area right it's the evolution of bro science where it's like let's take this highly scientific approach to weight training and weight lifting and exercising so that we can get as huge as possible as fast as possible right and so it's a really it's the first time we've really started developing science for the purpose of aesthetic, for the purpose of I want to look better, work out better, I want more results. Prior to then, it was about these other classic physiology issues. We're cruising along good, and that age is still alive right now. If you look at media, magazines, it's women.

Here's how to get bigger butts butts smaller stomachs bigger tits wait no the guy yeah there's an exercise for that teach me guys right guys it's the same fucking bodybuilding routine and reprinted every magazine from now to any time four sets of 10 everything you see here and not not very progressive right and so what's actually happening right now is you're in the middle of the next big transition right and that big transition is is sort of multifaceted and then or i should say bifaceted in fact where it's it's shifting in the direction of we're now starting to realize the major health implications not only is it not bad for you like we used to think okay you can get looking good but oh gosh, here are the health implications of muscle.

Here are the health implications of interval training. Here are the cardiovascular benefits of high-intensity exercise. Wow. And it has completely transformed what's happening at the medical level, at the healthcare level, because we're realizing, man, maybe we should have been doing all this really hard training all along. Yeah, we talked a little bit about the last show, been doing all this really hard training all along. Yeah. We talked a little bit about the last show, like healthier muscle being the foundation of healthier everything.

Better insulin function, better communication between muscles and organs. Basically, everything that can function better, it will function better if the muscle's strong and healthy. Yeah. One of the healthiest things you can do for yourself is to have a lot of muscle mass and have very little fat. Right. Like, there's very few people that have a lot of muscle mass and very low body fat percentage

that are not healthy. And you're not talking about like freak, crazy. No, no, no. People who achieve it via natural means, training, healthy lifestyle, not like massive amounts of steroids to make the muscle appear. No. I just want to make sure that was clear for the audience. We're not talking about a 21-year-old guy going from 10% body fat to 9% body fat. We're talking about just being in a reasonable health for your age and your development area.

If your body fat percentage is in the teens for guys, maybe high teens, low 20s for ladies, that's pretty lean for both genders. And then if you have a decent amount of muscle mass where you look normal, you look athletic, you look like between a college soccer player and a college football player, that type of athletic build. I'm not talking about being a normal bodybuilder and being just ripped ripped to shreds where like you're all your pain just sticking out or anything like that but you know people that have a good amount of muscle mass and a very low body fat percentage they tend to be very very healthy right people

that are super overweight all of a sudden they're not healthy like all kinds of diseases that come with the disease of being overweight right right exactly and so uh with that, you've got a decent level of physical performance. My prediction, and I've been telling my students this, the end outcome of a degree in our field is going to be completely different in a decade. I'm predicting right now you're going to be hiring them. Word. You're going to be getting medical. Insurance is going to start covering these types of things. It's going to happen. It's going to happen very, very soon. The entire industry will be different 10 years from now. The profession will be completely different in a decade now. There's just no way to disregard the treatment weight, the sheer effect that a cheap, you can do this anywhere, you can have few weights, get stronger, and really decimate these huge trends towards disease and metabolic syndrome and cancers and everything else.

Yeah. And so to establish that pedigree of importance. Right. So you'reation of the research in the field is growing leaps and bounds where you have labs like mine where it's fairly unique. You don't have people that have the practical background that I have that have a lab like this. I have my students in here. You can see them up the wall. We've got more than 15 or so students who have been in here. They're running chemistry and molecular biology experiments, and they never had a chemistry class. Oh, yeah.

They're strength coaches. They're working. So they'll leave an elite training center. There's one in Anaheim a lot of them work at here, STARS. It's great. They're training NBA players, NFL players. They walk over here, run some chemistry experiments, go back to class, then go back to work and train a football player.

Unfortunately, it seems a little bit taboo because people go, well, these kids have certain prerequisites and this kind of other. But then again, you're ruining this sort of crossroads effect where all the magic in any area of studies with ideas and personalities and people with different backgrounds are going to mix as they're working on a topic.

Yeah. Like you said earlier, we're not a bunch of, I don't have a 4.0 GPA. I barely passed one chemistry class in my life and I run a biochemistry laboratory. All my students are the same way. So it's not a, you're not like, well, my gosh, science, like you said earlier, it's not like, uh, I'm just a strength coach trying to figure out strength answers. It's more like on the job training. It's like you're learning the pieces you need to know

and you can do those things. You didn't have to take 10 chemistry classes and learn total generic chemistry that you're never going to use. You just came in and you learned the pieces that are important and you fucking disregard all the pieces that you're never, ever, ever going to use. I mean, don't get me wrong. I love it when I get students who have had molecular biology class and genetics class. It's super helpful. Yeah.

Because I don't have to spend as much time training them about things that kill them in this lab, which is good. They have some basic skill. Don't drink the formaldehyde. Yeah. I've got to write this down on the board. Yeah. That doesn't go on your face.

Yeah. The bottle of ATP I have, don't eat it. Yeah. It's not a good thing to eat. Please don't drink that. Right. So it's really a big transition where you're going to see a lot more research that is this combination of strength and molecular.

In fact, the only way you're going to answer the questions we're interested in is to start doing that type of research and we're pretty unique in the fact that we're doing that we're getting some really awesome practical answers by studying this level of physiology yeah speaking of the practical answers andy one of the other scientific topics we're going to bring up is heart rate what you're learning yeah so with some of your evidence well what the just as a quick example of what we're going to bring up is heart rate and what you're learning recently with some of your evidence. As a quick example of what we talked about a little bit earlier in terms of how you use science,

I was telling Doug that a couple of nights ago, Natasha and I did some intervals on the Airdyne. So 10 minutes, we did 10. It's a couple's date. It's a romantic evening. What do they say? Exercise together? Of course. Train together, stay together. Makes everything hot.

I'm a right champ. I just get yelled at the whole time. It's awful. We're not good training partners. But we did one minute intervals on the Airdyne as hard as you can. Ten rounds. One minute on, one minute off. Brutal.

Brutal, right? And I never wore a heart rate monitor, but I wore one to sort of show a point. Me, I had an average heart rate of 195 beats per minute for the 10 trials. Got up to like 208. Now, if you know what heart rate numbers mean, I just broke like, apparently I'm 12 years old. Right? So if you don't know what that joke means, how you calculate your max heart rate is supposed to be 220 minus your age. Right? So technically- I test you on an exercise physiology class on your exam. Write that formula down.

Right. Yeah, that's your number, right? Well, what it's clearly showing is I'm not particularly fit. I'm not super mentally tough, and I just passed... That's not how heart rate works. Heart rate work is...

Some of the best conditioning endurance athletes have ever been around have a max heart rate of like 175. I'm certainly not more fit than they are. But the point I'm getting at is that number, that equation, which is so well documented in science, most high schoolers know that number, it didn't work for me. That doesn't fit my physiology.

My max heart rate's more like 212. I've been to 212 dozens of times more. So some folks might be at 170. So 220 is your starting point. But you can deviate massively from that number. And that's just a very basic example of the fact that the interpersonal and intrapersonal differences are huge in science. It's like looking in an anatomy book and you're like, wow, the human brain weighs 10 pounds. What does that mean?

It's like saying the human foot is 8 inches long. It's like it's like well maybe for somebody but someone else's foot is twice that long like it doesn't really mean anything so the heart rate thing for you 220 minus your age like it should be you know 188 or whatever whatever it's supposed to be but there's a standard deviation both ways like for some people it might be way less than that some people might be way more than that so right to your point from earlier, it's not about the average. It's about the individual. And it's everything, not just in science,

but everything in the whole fucking world right now is leaning towards becoming more and more and more individualized. And science is chasing that motif, if you will. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. The heart rate factor, a very convenient thing to keep in mind if you're a student in school getting very, very frustrated over the rote repetitive memorization of shit. And you're thinking that that's where your future lies and be able to spit back out facts. Versus just taking the time to understand what is the real core of why heart rate going

up and down matters so much. And there's an important point actually sort of buried in that, in that I'm certainly not telling you to not pay attention to these normal numbers. Cause if you do, you're a fool. You need to know 220 minus rage that you should start there. If you don't know that you're,

you're going to miss the ball a lot. You're better off starting with the average and then figuring out if you're deviating. If you don't know that, if you disregard this, if you're like, well, if none of that's true for everyone,

I'm just not going to learn any of it the hell with it all. I'm just going to figure it out as I go. That is a terrible approach. You're going to make years of that's true for everyone i'm just not gonna learn any of it the hell with it all i'm just gonna figure it out as i go that is a terrible approach you're gonna make years of mistakes until you figure all these things out absolutely do pay attention to these things but you just interpret them with a little bit of a instead of being like oh that's the fact that's the answer there we go it's okay that's pretty good let me start there um yeah especially now we're in the laboratory science school i think you have to learn the basic rules of where you're playing and what you're doing. That's why school might not be perfect, but you learn how things have been done and you see the landscape.

And once you get that level of information, then you can decide, right, this looks weird. Let me pull a pressure on that and test that. Is that true for everybody? You can't break the myth if you don't know the myth. Yeah, learn the rules and break the rules. Put that on a T-shirt. Hashtag. So heart rate, and we also talked a little bit about gaining muscle mass, hypertrophy.

What's new on the scene with getting hashtag gains? Is that a 3D printed muscle in your pocket? I don't know. She's just happy to see me. People watching are going, what in the shit is in Dr. Andy's pocket? He's going to tell you. Not quite yet, though. Not quite yet.

Oh, you're teasing me. What is the purple thing so what i wanted to bring up here is the fact that as i mentioned earlier we do have a a nice number of scientists out there trying to do the type of stuff where you know the comment i hear all the time is like wow these scientists they just they don't understand application yes we do some of us and we're like no one why doesn't anyone ever do this type of work? Well, we are. You're just not reading it. This work is happening. It's an awareness thing, right?

This practical. So the example I want to bring up, I've been fortunate to collaborate with a guy. He's Facebook famous in the world of fitness, Brad Schoenfeld, out of New York. He's the hypertrophy guy, like world's guru on hypertrophy. He's a great guy. He focuses on studies. He sounds huge. He's a great guy. He focuses on studies. He sounds huge. He's tiny, actually.

Oh. But he focuses only, he keeps a very focused research agenda. It is hypertrophy, and that's it, basically, right? So we've been fortunate to collaborate with him a little bit, where he's doing a bunch of different training studies looking at hypertrophy. So he'll do an eight- or ten-week training study. Two groups. One group will get one minute rest between their sets and one will get two minutes sure one will get three minutes one and he's just doing all these things where for example we're

classically taught um if i want to hypertrophy if i want to get gains all right i should probably do somewhere between like eight to twelve reps per set all right that's your classic textbook number five to eight sets of that right four to five eighty percent maybe even a little heavier I should probably do somewhere between like 8 to 12 reps per set. That's your classic textbook number. Five to eight sets of that. Right. Four to five. Like 80%, maybe even a little heavier, maybe a little lighter. Maybe a little lighter, right?

Well, Brad challenges all that. And he says, okay, that's actually never really been established scientifically. It's just funny to sound because we've been teaching this for decades. Right. This is what people do and it just keeps persisting. It's not like it doesn't work, but we're saying, is it the best way? Yeah, so Brad is challenging that. So he just did a couple of different studies where he finished,

and he looked at rep range. And he showed impressive gains in hypertrophy in that 8 to 12 rep range, but he also showed it all the way out to like 25 to 30 reps. Ah, so that's what people would assume is, no, you just get endurance effects from doing too many reps anything over 10 you won't get stronger where here's the misinterpretation of it you're not he's not saying 8 to 12 is the same as 25

what he's simply saying is they both do work now the 8 to 12 group or so was stronger at the end than the 25 to 30 so a misinterpretation of science is ah they both work the same right no they both work the same right no they both work the same

for hypertrophy but one of them also added these massive gains in strength right hypertrophy means bigger muscles bigger muscle right getting bigger muscles so

what he will say is his interpretative data is different than how people interpret his own which is always how it works right yeah like every time someone interprets my research

I'm like no like that is not what I said it's like when you hear a song you say oh here's what that meant by writing the lyrics. And the guy who writes the song goes, no, man, nothing like that. You're still listening to the same fucking song. Right? And so what he says is you should spend the bulk of your training training in that optimal 8 to 12 range.

But then you need to also include out to 25 and include down to 5. And so he's just showing support for working across the spectrum. He's done the same thing for rest intervals. So if I do a set of 10, do I wait a minute, two minutes? Same thing. Most of your benefit comes with what we teach as a textbook, but you need to train over the spectrum. We've done the same thing in terms of I love the question of I want to get powerful. How heavy should I lift?

If I lift really heavy, it's too slow right yeah if i left really light there's not enough mass for it to be powerful and so the number of coaches will throw it as like okay 30 it's a little bit of mass right but it's fast enough to go fast true well the the the collective data suggests well that's good but you got to train the whole spectrum you need to do some real heavy stuff you need to do some real heavy stuff. You need to do some real light stuff. Optimal power is achieved across the entire spectrum. So it's just evidence like that where there is this practical research happening.

I know there's another guy in Florida who's doing a lot of these same type of things in elite bodybuilders. We're trying to answer, how is it different from young, old resistance training? Now what's it look like at the top end of the spectrum? So this is happening. There are some of us out there. And if I could say one thing to anyone listening, we need more people like that. We need more people who really understand practical because Brad actually started for like 15 years he was a personal trainer. He got his PhD like 20 years after he graduated college.

It's really refreshing to hear stories like that. People assume like, oh, I did some personal trainer. He got his PhD like 20 years after he graduated college. It's really refreshing to hear stories like that. People assume like, oh, I did some personal training. I can't go back and pursue an interest like going to school, learning some science, learning how my muscles actually work and now that I know the application side. Right. Most of us are not scientists that learned application. Most of us are

appliers, applicators. Human applicators. Practitioners. Practitioners. That learned research because we wanted answers. So that is growing in science. We need more, but it's getting there. The philosophy of attacking physiology from the perspective of the elite is a pretty new phenomenon, and there's only a few of us doing it.

Yeah, most of the science-y research and or developments from a lab like this went towards more like the medical system where people are sick and they're trying to get better there's there's more of a you know there's more pain like quite literally like emotional physical and otherwise uh in that situation which tends to make people very very motivated to get out of that pain so kind of most of the efforts went towards the medical world first but now people are really starting to take all those same practices and apply it towards people pain. So kind of most of the efforts went towards the medical world first, but now people are really starting to take all those same practices and apply it towards people that are their kind of baseline normal

and they want to be as healthy as possible versus being sick, trying to get back to normal. Yeah. I mean, the general philosophy of our lab is if we want to figure out how muscle or the body is supposed to function, instead of looking at a normal population,

which generally in research, normal population means 18 to 25-year-old male who's recreationally active, whatever that means. What we now realize is- You mean you're a college kid because that's the only pool you have to pull from? Right. That's what the lab is? Right.

That's the easiest subject to get. What? Condoms. Condoms. Condoms. Absolutely. Recreation. Recreational user. Gotcha. what condoms condoms condoms absolutely recreation recreational user gotcha um and what we're now sort of my philosophy is that's actually to me closer to the end not the the spectrum of normal that's closer to the spectrum of sick we shouldn't be taking people

who are basically physically active and can be considering that the gold standard. We should be taking the other approach, which is let's find out, let's look at the elite athletes in the world. Let's figure out what they look like because that's where we're supposed to be. We're not trying to just get you back to not sick. We want you to be performing in terms of life performance, health performance at the level of these elite athletes. So our contention is if we figure out what we're supposed to look like, then we can start getting closer to there. But if we don't know what we're supposed to look like, we don't know what we're going after. I do like the idea of making the

standards more stringent. Like anytime you raise someone's expectations, they always gravitate towards those expectations. Anytime you lower the expectations, people just, they kind of regress to those expectations. If the recommended amount of exercise from the surgeon general, whoever recommends it, is three days a week for 20 minutes at a time, and they're like, you know, go for a walk around the block, then that becomes the standard. Everyone thinks they're doing a good job if they do anywhere even close to that. I think we'd have a much better time, or not a much better time, but a much better outcome, rather, if we said that the standards were five days a week for an hour or something like that. And I could attack that argument from a million different directions and make a case for either side, definitely. But in general, I think having higher expectations is a good thing, especially if, again, we're talking on the individual level. Right.

Now, we'll sort of tease it back to, I think, the last episode I was on. I think I mentioned the fact that VO2 max is one of our more significant predictors of how long you're going to live, your VO2 max. So a classic example of what you just mentioned is – What is VO2 max for everybody who didn't watch it? So that's sort of – it's the maximum amount of oxygen you can consume, but it's essentially how your maximal fitness. So maximum heart rate, it's very similar to that. So your maximal cardiovascular function, sort of think of it like that.

So the way we normally say it is, okay, what's an average VO2 max score for a college male? And we would usually throw out a number like, well, maybe the mid to high 30s, maybe 40s, right? That's actually really low. So we say, no, to be healthy as a 25-year-old, you should be, everyone, in fact, the guy I used to work with, Dave Kostel, one of the classic exercise physiologists,

always told us if you're under 60, you're not trained. So 60 was him, was don't talk to me if you're under 60. But yet we say, oh, don't worry about it. Oh, you scored a 41? No, you're good. You're normal. That's actually pretty good. And so that bar is very, very good.

Yeah, normal's not good. Yeah, I'm pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing all right. A VO2 max of 40 for a... I was about to say what my score was until you were like, if you're under 60, you're untrained. I was like...

You got a VO2. Oh, wait, maybe I shouldn't say it. I've only done it once, like a true VO2 max test. That was when we were playing college football together like 10 years ago. Oh, really? And I think I got a 57. Oh, I'm sure you're much higher. I'm not.

But once I started fighting MMA, I bet you my score went up because I was in way better shape fighting MMA. I thought Doug was fit. Now I've got a – this one number tells me otherwise. Everything I've learned to date is a lie. I got a 58. For a football player, that's a pretty normal number. Yeah. I think 58 and a half a couple of years ago on a bike.

Did he beat you by a half? Whatever he said plus half. That's what I got. I actually think if I remember correctly, you beat me by one. I don't know. Or I beat you by one. That's probably the case. You're certainly farther down the conditioning spectrum than myself.

Yeah, absolutely. Without a doubt. Yeah, so we're learning a lot by studying um this practical stuff especially there are people doing this type of work we're learning every day and it's changing the way that we're training they're changing the prescription um a lot from what we thought because we're doing all this really cool stuff because we have the scientific knowledge and we're not being scared away and we're demystifying science. Speaking of demystification of knowledge, you want to tell people what the hell this

thing is in your pocket? I will on episode two of the series. Just kidding. Yeah, sure. So I told you we want to run the spectrum in our lab. So human performance, a little bit of physiology, all the way down to the nuts and bolts. So what we do is actually the muscle biopsy.

So we go in with a needle. We take a chunk of people's tissue, and we pull it out. You take a chunk of someone's muscle from their leg, and you rip it out of their body. Exactly. Yes. That's what happens. That's exactly what happens.

In the name of science. In the name of science. In the name of science. People volunteer for it. Yeah. They get paid like a half tier of money credits or something. Yeah.

You got 50 bucks one time. Here's a free six pack of chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A. Sometimes we have a bunch of variety of protein bars we give them afterwards.

Quest bars, I'm all down. No, that's too pricey for a bunch of past biopsies. We got the kind that got the sugar alcohol, give you the walk and fart. Is that okay if you're trouble? Maybe if we did AIDS or diabetes research, we could have the funding to buy Quest bars, but we're lower

than that. You're holding it in your hands. Also, use descriptors for the audio only audience. Right. Yes, if you're listening to audio, by the way, you're totally missing out right now, just like the last five episodes. And he's holding a pink shaft. Yeah, a pink shaft sort of with dots. So, what we do is pink shaft, basically. Yeah, a pink shaft sort of with dots. So what we do is, oh boy. We actually do all of our analysis at the single fiber level.

So that's one muscle cell at a time. Muscle fibers, skeletal muscle fibers in humans are extremely unique. In fact, I would encourage, I won't go into the detail now, but go back and look at the write-ups that myself and my colleague, Jimmy Bag bagley did uh for the daily okay it's on your website link to it um we talk a lot about the stuff we're doing here the new science of muscle memory right so we'll talk more about um you can read more about it there but what we're doing is we'll go through uh this piece of tissue so we rip it out of the leg and we go through a tweezer, and we pull out one fiber at a time. And we do all of our analysis on those fibers.

So a classic thing we would look at is we would take a biopsy of Chris's leg, and we would count how many of those fibers are fast twitch and how many of them are slow twitch, basic type of stuff like that. Well, we're starting to get more detail because we started getting athletes, and for us that was particularly MMA fighters, where we'd put them in our human performance lab and they'd blow the doors down in terms of their power and their strength and then we would bring them into our conditioning stuff and they're blowing the doors down on that and right in our classic that's another thing to challenge because

you typically you wouldn't expect both things to exist at the same time happening mma and also in crossfit's happening where people are very strong and very fit simultaneously and sort of breaking rules. Right. And we're like, oh my gosh, textbook, you're not supposed to be able to do that. And so my question, I'm a muscle guy. Why? And so I started thinking like, why in the hell is it happening? So we take the biopsies of these really high level MMA and UFC fighters and we started

looking at it at the single fiber level. So what we're doing is we're actually looking at how big the fiber is. And in human skeletal muscle, it's unlike anything else where normally most fibers in biology have one nucleus. The nucleus is what holds your DNA. It's what tells your cell to grow. The main center of the cell. Right. Well, human skeletal muscle has thousands of these nuclei in the fiber. Well, we started counting them. So we actually use a laser microscope. We make a 3D movie of individual muscle fibers. Which is super cool.

We stain it for the actin and the myosin, which is what makes it contract. These are basically components that comprise a muscle cell, make it ratchet and contract and shorten and lengthen. Right. And then we actually started staining it for those myonuclei, so those nuclei. So then what we did is we were literally leaving the laser microscope lab, which is below us, and I had this file on a flash drive, and I'm literally walking back to my office. And Jimmy said, hey, I just saw a sign that the library apparently has a 3D printer.

Oh, snap. So we literally walk into the 3D printer, and I ask the guy, what kind of files do you use? And he tells me, and I'm like, really? It's the same file we have. I pull out my flash drive. I'm like, can you print this? And he pops in his thing, and he's like, yeah, come back in an hour.

Man, I'm going to show off in front of all my colleagues when they see this fucking thing. So what you're looking at is the results. So this is a single muscle fiber. In fact, this is actually my brother. This is a fiber I biopsied my brother, took one of his fibers, I imaged it, and then I printed it in plaster. That's cool. Kind of looks like a giant

nerd rope. Yeah. Those things are delicious. Thanks for the scientific comment, CTP. You said you're going to give us some extra video, right? Yeah. We'll show the real thing edited in. Yeah, you can see the 3D movie. You can actually just

check it out on my website too. I don't have the link. Just Google it. You'll find it. It's on your membership site. Nine to nine per month. Look at it. Yeah.

You'll find Dr. Andy's. You have to be 18 or older. You might find his porn video from 20 years ago. You might find science. Who knows what you'll find when you Google Dr. Andy Galpin. So some of the interesting

things about this is if you see the black sort of dots. Yes. If you're listening to audio, pause. There are black dots. Right. For the audio. Many, many.

These are the nuclei. And so what we're actually able to do is count how many nuclei you have. Now, Chris, as the astute former scientist and strength coach you are. I was a former scientist. If you have a bunch of nuclei, what's that matter? I would think that there's a lot more communication and handling of information than otherwise would be going on. Absolutely.

So in terms of training, if I have more nuclei, I can do things like recover better. Because I have more control center, I can do different types of training and get better responses because I have more regulation. And more coordinated effort to do these things that need to get done. Exactly. Things are more efficient. Recovery happens faster. All this stuff.

And so I wasn't really surprised when we started to find these MMA fighters that simply started having more of these mononuclear. The thing Casey does? Your brother? Yeah, yeah. Well. Nothing. He's working on it. His brother's working on it.

Right? So it actually gets hyper-detailed past this. Doug and I were talking about some of the stuff earlier, but even the shape of the nuclei, you can see some of them are circular like that. Sure, yeah. Nice circle. Some are long, some are squiggly. That all means something, right?

The shape of them. We talked about the location. So this image doesn't show it, but you got to realize that some of these nuclei are on the outside and the movie will show this well. Some of them are in the middle. What we know now is when the nuclei start going to the middle, the fiber is about to die. I don't know why that's happening, but we know that that's a relationship. Young, old, strength train, non-strength train, this is all different. So the actions are different in them.

So what we're trying to do is figure out, again, what makes these elite-level athletes different. And we're starting to see it at this single-fiber, single-cell level. So the more nuclear becoming present, you're observing that. And then also I think what's interesting is when these athletes have a period of detraining, they go away. Are you observing any kind of effect when they are going away? They're not training. They're getting a change, and they come back to training. What happens because of all these nuclei?

Let me bring out my model again. Okay. Now, yeah, it's a classic idea of muscle memory. So if I were to do a gain phase, right, if I joined a six-month muscle challenge, right? You should because this jacket is very loose on you. Wow. Yeah, come on. Wow, you're hitting my lap.

I'm in your lap. I'm calling you gainsless. Right? Just joking, Andy. So if you were to do a bunch of training, this fiber would get thicker, okay? It gets bigger. Well, that's a problem,

because each one of these nuclei can only control so much. Are you guys worried about the thickness of my doll here? Production crew, come on. Come on. Keep it together. Charlotte's giggling behind you. It looks bad. I love it when Charlotte giggles behind me.

Anyways, so each one of these nuclei can only control a certain amount of area. Analogy, if you were to start a company and you're expanding across the globe, you'd eventually have to open up new offices everywhere to control everything. Get a bunch of new managers. Right. Well, you do that and that's what happens. And so your fiber gets bigger, thicker,

the diameter goes out, and so you end up having satellite cells come in. Those get developed into new nuclei. Cool. You stop training. The fiber shrinks, goes back to the normal science. Well, the old theory would be that the nuclei then die. Because that would be like a waste of resource.

Right. What we're now thinking is that they actually stay alive for quite some time so that when you start training again, those are already in place so it's easier for you to come back to that space. So back to your business analogy. So if your company grew and expanded across the globe, you open more offices, more offices, more offices, you hire more managers, more managers, more managers,

and then you downsize, you start laying off employees, but what you didn't do is you didn't sell all your buildings and you didn't fire your managers. You still have that core team. That way, if business picks back up, you have all that infrastructure in place and you can grow big again very quickly. 100%. You get rid of the interns, you get rid of the low-hanging ones and then

you downsize a little bit but you keep the important players and you can bring the other ones back to bring it back it's a super important point to make is if you get hurt you get something happen in your life where you're making good progress now progress stops because of circumstances to your life that aren't allowing you to train aren't allowing you to cover what you want if you have to take a break or if you take a break on purpose after a few competitions, you need some rest, you can come back way quicker and better than you think. You won't like magically just lose all this progress. The infrastructure is there to help you come back fast and probably better than before if you have a reasonable training program.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. We have another study actually launching here really soon that I'm really excited about where some folks, if you know much about this, you might be thinking, ah, well, how much of that is actually pre-genetically determined versus how much of it did you get when you trained? Sure. So we were lucky. We're very fortunate. We have a set of identical monosligus twins, so exact same DNA. Is it the Olsen twins? No.

That'd be cool, though, right? It would be cool, bro. Right. So identical twins, same DNA. Is it the Olsen twins? No. That'd be cool though, right? It would be cool, bro. Right. So identical twins, same DNA. One of them has about 30 years of marathons, Ironmans, endurance events. The other one has never exercised. Oh man. So we literally-

Like the dream scenario. Literally have the best design study you can imagine. Exact same starting DNA, 30 years of consistent training. We're going to bring him in. We're putting him through a whole physiological gamut of testing, biopsies, all this stuff included. We're going to figure out, essentially, we know that basically everything is trainable. The question is how much? So, right, if you're naturally born, say, for example, your genetics would give you a higher VO2 max than Chris. Right? Well, we think currently VO2 max, you got about

a 20 or so percent ability to change. But we're going to find out exactly. Is it 20? Is it 15? Is it 80? If the trained twin has got a double VO2 max, trainability is a lot higher than we think. If those are the results, they'll get you published

on the front cover of fucking Nature magazine. You know why it won't? Because we've got a subject size of one. But, as we've learned on this show, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's very insightful to have meaningful evidence from a very small experiment size. I'm very fortunate working here because I'm not,

I don't have a lot of that pressure. We talked about it earlier in terms of publication, so I'm really fortunate. Lee Brown, the director of the lab, is also, our director of his lab he's not my boss but uh we care about doing awesome shit if that means more publications cool fine if it doesn't i don't care i want an awesome answer i like mma i like fighting i like this stuff i want that answer if it means i get published cool if it means i don't i don't care i want to know the answer what advice would you give to the aspiring science students and aspiring coaches and athletes out there? And if they want to learn a little bit more about science-y stuff, where would you even

start? Okay. So I'm actually going to go a little bit big picture here. Go big picture. And I'm going to force you to go back to episode 189, the one you did with Alex Macklin recently. Knowing versus learning? Learning versus knowing. Knowing versus learning. Okay, so here's what I'm going to do. Be a learner, but don't be a knower. When you hear these things happen,

for example, someone has an idea and they tell you this training program is great, or this supplement is great, or you should do this this or foam roll, or you shouldn't do this. I really encourage young coaches to step back. And instead of being like, no, bro, I saw a paper show that didn't work. What you need to say is, wow, I wonder why they're doing that that way. I wonder how it's working. So in fact, ever since that, um, that meeting we had where we had this talk, um, I've had an entire new approach where I where every time something happens in my life,

the first thing I try to do is, okay, I immediately want to criticize something. I play a game where try to figure out as fast as you can a reason why that person did that. So whether it's training stuff or whether it's something like, you know, I went down to the kitchen this morning and my brother brother had didn't do his dishes didn't clean his pan my gut reaction was like you mother like every day you inconvenience me so much right and so i instead of doing that i go okay and this is a conscious act i go all right try to envision some reasons why he may have done that turns out he did that because my bedroom doesn't have a door. It's in the loft, and the kitchen's kind of below.

So for him to clean it, he just got to bang things around. This is 345 in the morning. So he didn't clean the dishes so that he wouldn't wake me up. Convenient. Had I yelled at him, I would have felt like a giant asshole. Right. Right? And so the same thing happens with training, all this stuff.

So when someone says, I'm doing this approach, or I'm doing this movement, I like to do this variation. Instead of being like, no, dude, I saw on technique wad, you're an idiot. Don't do it that way. Try to go, I want to think of three different reasons why he might be doing it that way. The same thing when young coaches read science, right? This thing worked. This thing didn't work. Well, okay, maybe it worked, but try to think of another scenario when it may not work. So this may have worked for hypertrophy. I wonder what happened

to strength? What happened to speed? What happened to recovery? What happened at this level? Getting lost in the conclusion of science can be traumatic. It can be a terrible approach. So my young coach, my advice to them, when you're in class, when you're listening to audio or podcasts, whatever you're doing, when you're in the gym, try to have that approach and really don't think about, is this working, yes or no, and just think about, I wonder why. Give me three reasons right now why someone might want to do that. Now, you can still disagree, but you've gained so much more perspective, and you won't sound stupid when you say something to somebody who's a scientist like, oh, this has been shown to not work.

And I'm like, really? Because I could play that game all day. Yeah, that's an amazing mindset to cultivate. And what about people who want to get in touch with Andy, learn more about what you're up to, come visit you, track you on social media? Where can they find you? Yeah, email chris at barboshrug.com. Oh, no! I'm just kidding.

The social media stuff, at drandygalpin, so like doctor, but not spelled out. You can do there. Check out our lab. You'll have to just Google my name and Google our lab. It'll pop up.

Put a link in the show notes to how you can get a hold of Dr. Andy at Cal State Fullerton. On our Instagram page, every time we finish a study, it gets down there. Every time I find an interesting finish a study, it gets down there. Every time I find an interesting study, I throw it up on there. I will link as much as I can.

I know the links don't work very well on Instagram. People always ask me to put my bio. I'm not putting all the links in my bio. Just Google the damn title. It comes up. So things like that. And hopefully in the very near future, we are going to be, after many, many meetings and a whole lot of work, we are finally going to be getting Barbell University off the ground one of these days.

We firmly believe that education for the science of exercise physiology and how that applies to real training is not as good as it should be. We can't find anyone that's doing it as well as we think it needs to be done. So we're taking that into our own hands and we're going to be opening that um probably not by the end of this year might do some pilot courses or something like that but uh we're flying in a choice member of the team from australia to live here in san diego who will be helping me and andy run that yeah um that new university so uh look out for barbarauniversity.com.com barbara university in fact there's already some already some stuff up there. There'll be more coming.

We could talk a lot about that, but it's really a couple of things I want to emphasize on Barbell University. It is a completely different change in content. So it is content-driven in terms of you're not going to get the same information in your four-year college degree that you're going to get in Barbell University, and it will not be delivered in the same information in your four-year college degree that you're going to get at Marble University, and it will not be delivered in the same fashion you've ever seen it delivered. So delivery and content will be

completely different. I couldn't be more excited about that project. It's going to be awesome. We're going to push the evolution of what we know forward, right? Well, it's sort of silly, but it's sort of actually like getting up with the times. Finally catching up with what you should be getting in a college degree.

Update the mechanism by which you can learn and get involved. Be a part of it. Actually, on that note, if someone wants to be involved with Barbell University, definitely reach out to us. We're looking for people that potentially might want to teach courses someday down the line or that just think that's a fucking cool idea and you just want to be involved. Just connect with us.

More likely connect with Andy. Where should they reach out to you? Andy at barbellshrugged.com. Perfect. Yeah, that's the best email. I was hoping you were going to give your current university address. You can do that too, but that inbox tends to get very thick very fast. You can check it through there.

People are asking about midterms and my question about my grade, all this stuff. Now, I believe my track record is 100% in barbell Shrug fan emails being returned. I have returned every single email I've got, which has been a lot. Some of them are very ridiculous, like, I'm currently an engineer, but I want to change fields. What should I do?

Just tell me. I've got my pen and pad ready, man. Be awesome. But you answer me. I don't know. Yeah, I always answer. You're Be awesome. I don't know. I always answer. Sounds like you know a lot about engineering.

Like I said, if you have those questions, email CTP at Barb. Well, we're here to help. I'll wrap it up there. Ladies and gentlemen, a very fun, sciencey show. For more information, go to barbellshock.com. Sign up for the newsletter. We'll keep you up to date on all cool things like Barbell University and future shows

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we'll see you next time man cheers everybody