Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #6 Diet,Training and Goals with Dr. Andy Galpin

Episode Date: November 6, 2017

Dr Andy Galpin Author of "Unplugged" Evolve from Technology to Upgrade Your Fitness, Performance, & Consciousness sits down to discuss the importance of setting goals, and some of today's best diet and training practices.         Connect with Andy on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook       Check out his website and The Body of Knowledge Podcast       Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on Twitter and on Instagram            Get 10% off at Onnit by going to Onnit.com/Podcast                      Onnit Twitter         Onnit Instagram  

Thank you guys for tuning in to the On It Podcast. This week's guest is Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Andy Galpin is a buddy of mine I met at XPT in Malibu with Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reese, and Brian McKenzie. He's a phenomenal guy, knows a ton of stuff on muscle as that's what he does. He's a researcher and a scientist. He's a professor at Cal State Fullerton, and he just released his new book, Unplugged, co-authored by Brian McKenzie and Phil White. There's a wealth of knowledge in there. I hope you guys enjoy this podcast as much as I did. Thank you very much for joining us. We got our man, Dr. Andy Galpin, here with us today. We have a shorter format show, so I'm going to try to grind through as much awesome bullet points for people and takeaways

as possible to dive deeper. I mentioned this too when I had Rob Wolf on. You had an excellent, excellent podcast with Joe Rogan. He's got the three-hour show. He can dive a little deeper there. It makes more sense if you want full background and all that. But what's your background? What do you do for a living? So I am the director for the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton.

And I'm the founder and director of what's called the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Lab. And that's a fancy way to say I'm a scientist, I'm a teacher, and I conduct and disseminate research in the areas of human performance. So specifically muscle, but that's what I do. Hell yeah. Yeah. So tell us about the background, though,

like growing up before you got into that. Because you have some some training lifting weights a little bit yeah a little bit i grew up in a really small country town in southwest washington called rochester washington so shout out to all 11 of you that are still in rochester um but you know i played i'm a country kid so i played everything sport-wise growing up and i got into lifting weights probably 13 14 I thought I was I thought it was badass getting in at 15 I think you're so behind the game yeah might have been there I was fortunate I had a culture um of lifting weights my high school football coach

the program my dad was also very into physical fitness but, it extends beyond that. What it really was, was that whole community, my family, the coaching staff, just the people in that area, the country people there, it just was not an excuse to lose or be behind because you didn't want to work hard to prepare. And I think that's what really resonated with me. It wasn't about lifting weights. It was just about the fact that you did everything to prepare. And if you can't pay the rent, if you lose, it doesn't matter sport-wise. If something doesn't come through, that's your fault. You didn't work hard enough. That's what I think was like, oh, here's the lesson here. Lifting weights happened to be the medium. Sport was the outlet for me i was i mean like you not as good as you but i was

very good at sport early and so i stuck in that medium but the real lesson there was like if you work for something here there's reward yeah i think uh that's really what coach house gave me at asu yeah it was i mean he was my strength coach and i got a lot stronger with him like everything he taught me worked but the thing that he taught me that stuck with me through my mma career and beyond was you can push yourself self further than you think you can yeah and i'm going to help you do that yeah and so he changed my belief in what was possible yeah and that fucking transcended all sport yeah exactly and not only that for me it was also uh you have a diligence it is your responsibility to prepare whether that's now for

science whether that's for the classroom whether that's for a talk at a lecture i probably spend more time preparing for the lectures and the talks at conferences that i give you know digits wise more than my colleagues because i still have that responsibility of saying like if you're underprepared and you give a 90% effort, you owe that audience 10%. That's not acceptable. You need to work extra hard to make sure that you put on a fantastic performance

because these people may be scraping the bottom of the barrel to get that 300 bucks to see you. And then you show up and you give a 90% effort. Like, that is all the difference and that is huge value to that person. That is their time they can't get back. And you may have put them out of serious financial gain to be there. And that's what you showed up for them.

Just unacceptable. So all those lessons carried me through. I played college football. Again, not a Division I level. I set the bench at Division I level. So I don't know that I could say how much I played. Fair enough. Defensive lineman?

What did you play? Yeah. I just assumed. D-tackle, D-end. Oh, yeah. D-end makes sense. Neither makes sense. I was too slow for D-end and too small for D-tackle.

Yep. Okay. But it was fun. It was fun. Less responsibility inside. When I graduated college from my undergrad, when I went to graduate school, I started competing in Olympic weightlifting. I really enjoyed that. When I sort of had my fill at that, I started competing a little bit in combat sports, jiu-jitsu and things like that,

and training really hard. So I've done a decent amount of sport, and I still really enjoy working with combat sport athletes.'ve done the nfl thing i've done the major league baseball thing but really that's that's the sport i gravitate to for you know the stuff we were talking about yesterday is it's not the finances are definitely far worse i mean you're not getting you're not getting rich training guys that are making 10 and 10 yeah no no it turns out that's weird 10 of 500 bucks is not very much money. Yeah, it doesn't stretch too far. No. So I think that's kind of put it all together.

And I always get asked this question next, which is, how did you get into science? And the response is the same. I was a pretty good athlete, but not good enough. I was good enough to be incentivized to say, if you do work hard, all of a sudden now, you're all conference, as opposed to just starting and being really good. Or now you get to go to play college football.

But I wasn't so good to where, eh, it doesn't matter how I train. It doesn't matter what I do because I'm going to be an All-American anyways. So for me, it was a perfect level of incentive to early on just learn how do you optimize training. I don't have time. One missed workout could be the difference, right? Or at least that was the perception. So I just spent a tremendous amount of time as a kid reading fitness magazine articles and Arnold's encyclopedia.

Oh, yeah. Just like anything I could get my hands on. Modern encyclopedia of bodybuilding. And so I knew when I went to school and I was on my recruiting visits, it was like, what do you want to do? And I remember saying, like, I just want to learn about muscle and performance. And everyone was like, oh, you want to be an athletic trainer i'm like i'm not

fucking taping ankles for a living that is not what i'm interested in doing no that's on i'm much love to all you athletic trainers out there i love you all uh your job is you're better people than i am but i was like no one really there wasn't a field really back then uh so i had to suffer through um a bunch of stuff that wasn't super interested in health-wise to really get myself in a position to study muscle and performance the way that I do now. So that's kind of how I got here. That's badass. So talk a bit about what you do in the lab, because you're doing some very fascinating

stuff that's looking at things in detail that not a lot of other people can say they do actually the what we do now is directly people i guess they have this false assumption of of man you landed a really great job no i built it i've engineered this whole career from scratch i started off with my degrees and when i finished my undergraduate degree which is in exercise science you know the standard thing, nothing miraculous there. And I went to work for Mark Verstegen, you know, down in athletes performance. And I spent time during those and I realized I don't want to be a full-time strength conditioning coach for just a variety of reasons. And I definitely don't want to work with professional athletes full-time. I'm sure that's fantastic for some people.

Did not work well for me and my personality uh didn't land right so i tried to look at the field and i'm like well a lot of people know a lot more house like all these guys know a lot more about strength conditioning and i could work 40 years and i'm probably not going to know as much as they are and i don't have all the things that they have to have for success so i'm gonna if i play that game i'm going to lose and i looked at the science aspect of it and people had mds and PhDs and teams and they were studying disease and cancer. And I thought, I don't actually have the intelligence by those metrics to get through that system either. And if I have to write and compete with

NIH grants and all these things, I'm going to lose that game too. I want to play a game that no one else was playing. Like that's my position. And so I looked at the two fields, and I thought, well, no one's actually doing performance research, and no one's doing muscle physiology at this single-cell, molecular, cellular level, and looking at it, translating it back to performance. And so I went and got my master's and my PhD in human bioenergetics, and spent four years studying muscle physiology of old people and aging and things like that, not because I cared per se about those topics, because I knew I had that sport performance and strength conditioning

background, athletic background. And if I understood the actual mechanics, the chemistry, which I was terrified to take, by the way, like I was terrified. I have a PhD in bioenergetics and I had not taken a chemistry class until I was in my PhD. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I was so terrified to take biochemistry. And I got lucky and skated through all of it, right? But I was like, because I don't have the intelligence for that, but I knew I could outwork it and I could just outpassion it. So I did that. And then when I walked out, I had this unique niche, which was, oh my gosh, nobody does performance at the cellular and molecular level like you do. Well, yeah, because that's what I built. Like I went after that.

So when I went out and marketed my job, I came in with this plan. And I walked into every interview and said, this is my plan, this is my vision, this is where I want to go, which is not how university jobs work, by the way. Like it's usually the opposite. We have this very specific direction we want to go.

Can you fill it? Yes or no? We picked a candidate who fills it. I did a little bit the opposite. I said, this is what i want to do this is why and i told them explained to them why this was different and how this is going to be unique and unfortunate cal state fullerton was like this is this is amazing this is what we want and and like i get a lot of of crap from my colleagues and stuff because of doing things like this all right which is like how do you make time for all this blah, blah, blah? I'm like, again, I built this job.

I built it for this and I told them these things like this. I'm going to build social media outreach. I'm going to do all this stuff and I'm going to promote all these things.

And they're like, oh my gosh, I'm not going to try to play the NIH game. I'm going to lose. Do you want me to play a game that you and I both are going to lose?

No. Let me try a new game that no one else has tried. And I've just been fortunate to have tremendous success from that. So our lab to finally i guess answer your question um we were one of the few places in the country in the world where they can do muscle biopsies i just actually had mark bell and chris bell a couple days ago they're out i biopsied mark oh no shit yeah which is gonna be

really privacy chris you had an excellent podcast uh two-part podcast on mark bell's power cast yeah that's a huge recommendation i love i love and i like all the the dick jokes and the shenanigans that mark cannot stay away from so it is uh excellent entertainment if you're into that sort of thing i guess but uh yeah yeah for sure so they came out what did you see i try to talk like a scientist, but like... They weren't having that. Yeah, yeah. Now let's get some fucking locker room talk going. Man, I'm a 34-year-old dude, too, that played college football.

Man, that side of me is still right there. So we haven't done any analysis on Mark's tissue yet. Oh, okay, okay. But that's the type of stuff we do. And then we look at it for everything like fiber type and muscle size, myonuclei. The myonuclei are the part of the cell that controls whether it grows, shrinks, dives, repairs, duplicates, splits, things like that.

But the twist is we look at those things, again, in relation to training. So why is it these athletes have more of this or less? These two different training styles, what's the actual physiological response at the cellular muscle level to these different things? And we try to explain the mechanisms behind that and try to find, you know, is this signaling protein

activated more or less or why what's happening? Again, not in response to pharmaceutical treatment or cancer treatment, but in response to two different types of strength training protocols, for example. So that's really what we spend most of our time doing. And that could be something as simple as like bodybuilder sets and reps, four by 10 versus traditional five by five or eight by two, power lifting. Exactly. A lot of people have looked at those practical outcomes and me as a coach and as a practitioner,

I could tell you the difference between doing four sets of 10 or 10 sets of four. You'd have a functional difference, you'd have a performance difference and that's actually well established, both research wise, practitioner wise. But what's not established is okay well what's the actual physiology physiological difference or is there is it not muscular is it central nervous system like everyone always gives credit to turns out it's not right and but we're never going to know that unless we start actually taking muscle

samples and we can use that science that that deep level of physiological science, to actually support what's happening at the practical and explaining or understanding those adaptations. And that's really what we spend the bulk of our time doing. That's awesome. So obviously you work with fighters because it's something you're passionate about. You've taken a dive in there, and then we had a long conversation about the perils of fighting, so I won't bore people with that. um what are some of the things that you've found that have helped from an athletic standpoint because fighting is one of the most unique unique things on earth from a mental standpoint a physical and emotional physiologically but physiological as well right you have a high end power output needing to be explosive You still have a huge endurance component.

You have to be able to recharge in between rounds, breath work and things like that, which I want to dive into you with. We'll definitely get into that, but what are some of the huge takeaways that you've seen? That doesn't even count the weight cut. Dehydration, rehydration, all that. I get asked this question all the time about signs and symptoms over training.

For an MMA fighter, day one of camp, here are the signs and symptoms. training like for an mma fighter day one of camp here are the signs and symptoms fatigue irritability not wanting to train soreness can't recover hard time sleeping like those are all the signs and symptoms of being calorically restricted to low appetite like you can do all these things during this massive weight because so it's like you gotta throw all that out the window that's not going to help you um but one of the things i've i guess the initial thing i found when i first got into this sport is just a simple lack of planning and not understanding. And I think this actually really extends to people, the general public, more so than athletes, because the vast majority of

people work out, and that's great. But if you're trying to just work out for the rest of your life, you probably need to start building in cycles of, okay, for this four weeks or the six weeks or eight weeks or six months, whatever, the time domain doesn't matter. You need to have at least a rough idea of a plan, which is I'm going to work on adding muscle to six weeks, or I'm going to add on really improving my cardiovascular endurance. I'm going to work on improving this, something like that. And then you need to change those things. But you can't change that stuff. Changing without a plan is called randomization. We want variation. But variation is planned, right? Or at least, I mean, I'm not saying like every rep or set or even close, but just a rough outcome goal. This is what I'm looking

to do. Get faster, improve this, something like that. And with the MMA fighters, it was a real struggle with them because they all work. I've still not met, well, that's a lie. I've not met many high-level MMA fighters who don't work extremely hard. So what's the difference then? Well, some of them have a plan with what they're doing, and most of them don't.

It's just like, I'm going to show up at the gym and I'll work. Well, that's great. When you're 22 and you've got an eight-week camp, that might work. But when you're 32, that's not going to work anymore. And you're going to be broken, you're going to show up at the gym and I'll work. Well, that's great. When you're 22 and you've got an eight-week camp, that might work. But when you're 32, that's not going to work anymore. And you're going to be broken, you're going to be continuing pulling out of fights, and you're going to be a train wreck when you're 33, or whatever the number is. So having a very specific plan about not only ranging intensity,

but movements or what's the outcome goal today, was the number one prescription I gave them. And I think it, again, extends very well to the general public as well. Very cool. prescription i gave them and i think it again extends very well to the general public as as well very cool so when the fighter is in kitten this is just the the former fighter in me wanting to pick your brain on this because i i see i listen to what you're saying and i'm like yep i fucked that up you know like yeah like there was clearly some some mistakes made in hindsight but um uh how would that shift for a power athlete getting ready for competition or who still has an endurance component you know like you could obviously training outside of camp varies wildly from training inside of camp what then becomes

the focus yeah so specific to the science that you've seen like through muscle biopsies like yeah this is where we get the most bang for our buck. So I think that there's not one answer, but there are some tenets that can be really, really helpful, which is it depends on what you look like coming into camp. So let's just say you had six weeks to prepare. Okay, fine. Well, what you do during that six weeks, what you emphasize is actually a product of what happened

the previous six weeks or six months. And you make your decision based on that. And I'll give you a couple of examples so it's a little more tangible. If you look at my friend Joel Jameson, all right, so he's up, he's Demetrius Johnson's strength and conditioning coach. He really, really encourages during fight camp, they really don't do much strength and conditioning. It's really about fight specific, right? Your training on the mat. But that's because he develops aerobic capacity. He develops strength. He develops power outside of camp. But that's because he develops aerobic capacity. He develops strength. He develops power outside of camp. But that's because he has an athlete like DJ, who is a real

professional and trains like a professional. He'll bust his ass year round. He knows how to listen to his body. Exactly. He listens to his coaches too. And Joel has a plan for him. And so he'll develop maximal strength or whatever he needs to add muscle mass or cut fat, whatever he's needing. That way, when he gets into camp, he can just get ready for the fight. A lot of people have a problem trying to get their body ready, trying to get in shape, trying to lose weight, oh, and also try to get better at skill. Well, you can't do both. It's very, very, very difficult. You could take the exact opposite approach, which is, okay, I'll get better as a fighter for the whole six months, and then the last six weeks, I'll actually just improve my strength, speed. Okay, fine. I know some coaches that do that thing, too. I don't think it matters, the fact that they both have a very specific plan.

The difference between development and optimization. Are you developing? Well, you can't try to develop during these condensed times. You need to be developing the other six months of the year, which is what a football, which is what house would do, right? We have an off-season, a piece. This is standard. Any strength and conditioning coach out there is going, oh, yeah, okay, that's an off-season mesocycle, then an in-season mesocycle.

Like, duh. Like, yeah, sure, but it just never comes. Let me just keep you together in football season. Yes. You're not going to get hurt. That's my fucking main goal. Exactly. I'm not going to add 100 pounds to your squat.

Right. And so are we trying pounds to your squat. Right. And so are we trying to double your squat strength four weeks out from a fight? Well, then we're probably off the mark. We should have worked on that later, right? If you are excellent at Muay Thai and you're fighting a guy who's a phenomenal jiu-jitsu player and you're trying to learn jiu-jitsu in the four weeks before the fight, good luck. Good luck. jiu-jitsu player and you're trying to learn jiu-jitsu in the four weeks before the fight good good luck like good luck like you need to be drilling a few very specific combinations or strategies or transitions he likes to hear his two dominant positions or her two dominance we want to go here here here here you have two or three options let's get rock solid out those and

extremely fast now you actually have a chance then we'll fix your jiu-jitsu game later but we can't really do those things you don't go from a blue belt to a brown belt in camp. That happens post-camp. So the big mistake would be focusing on one of those things. So however you want to approach it, separating out your conditioning, your power, that's actually dictated by what the outcome goal for that real

camp is, what the outcome goal for each week, and actually in each individual day. And you should, as the strength conditioning coach or the whole team, the athlete, come together and say, okay, today's goal Monday is leg power. Okay, then my boxing coach knows, hey, we want to hit some missed today,

but we're not going to fry him no matter how good he looks. We got to keep this in the tank because we're going to develop power today. But tomorrow is a conditioning day and it's a red day. And so it doesn't really matter what drills we do, whatever the focus is. Conditioning, and I'll be more specific. Again, this analogy is for fighting, but it really works for everything else. If you're understanding the concept here, which is say, say you're going to go to boxing practice. Well, oftentimes sport coaches don't

really have an outcome goal in mind. They just have like, we've got to work on your hands. Okay, that's a good start. What's that mean? We're working on hand speed? We're working on combinations? We're working on a specific tactic to this? What are we working on? Okay, we're going to work on hand speed. Okay, great. Well, then I can walk out of the room because you already know, probably as a boxing coach, how to develop hand speed. But you have now identified that this is not a conditioning day. This is not a skill day. I'm not going to ask you to remember a certain combo to use in a fight at the same day we're trying to work conditioning, whatever it happens to be. But just getting them to that level to go,

okay, I'm not telling what to do. You tell me what you want to get out of it today so I can work around you. Okay, great. That act makes them go through the act of going, oh, okay, today's goal is conditioning. So now you can do fun stuff, different stuff. The details don't necessarily matter as much

because they just know, hey, my goal today is to get Kyle tired. Great, he did it. Or my goal is actually not to get him tired today. He needs to really get better at this combo he's struggling with or this defense to this combo because his opponent throws it a lot. If I try to do that on a day when I'm trying to also get him extremely tired, oh, and then I'm asking him to try to work on his hand speed, oh, and then remember your foot.

Now, now you've actually had a practice where you've burned a lot of calories. You've taken some of your volume, but you didn't really get the goal done. Yeah. And you end up working really hard for eight weeks and you don't get much better. Yeah.

And to extrapolate the, for everybody that's like, well, fuck man, this guy spent a lot of time on fighting just cause he, yeah. You know, has some,

uh, some question marks about his own career. How, how, how we extrapolate that to, fuck man this guy spent a lot of time on fighting just because he yeah you know has some uh some question marks about his own career how how we extrapolate that to the old g-pop general population like these concepts still apply right yeah so we have like it makes sense to have a goal for a period of time and then to let that goal change for variety but one thing that i loved that you were talking with with mark bell about was the fact that just because you have a focus for six weeks or eight weeks it doesn't mean that you put all your eggs in one basket no no no so obviously you're you know you're talking power lifting and

things like that to a power lifter yeah and then you bring up the fact that it's a good idea to still hit even one day a week a good good cardio session, right? Yeah, we can actually go into the data here. My colleague Jimmy Bagley at San Francisco State has a really nice paper out. I think it's open access, so you don't have to pay to read it, in sports medicine. And it's something like the interference effect of concurrent training. So scientifically, the word concurrent means you're doing a little bit of strength and a little bit of endurance or aerobic work at the same time. And where this came about is the notion that, well, if you do aerobic exercise, it actually compromises your strength.

I've read that a million times. Right. And I could tell you the whole history of how that all got started if you want, but I'll cut it short for now. But we could go into it. It's a really interesting. I want you to dive. I know where you're heading with that. I want you to dive into that.

But let's get this one piece down and then we'll circle back yeah and this is a great misinterpretation of science and so the idea is okay any amount of endurance exercise is going to automatically compromise any strength or muscle development and while that's true to an extreme if you're running 100 miles a week and you're also trying to gain 10 pounds of muscle on your leg that's this just not going to happen. But does that mean you can't jog 400 meters for a warm-up? No, that's not what that means at all. Does that mean you can't

even jog half an hour one day a week? That's probably not enough interference. In fact, Jimmy's data collectively is very clear showing that that actually does not cause an interference effect at all. In fact, there's probably some benefit there. Probably a lot of's probably some benefit there. There's probably a lot of benefit.

Probably a lot. So clearly this is a sliding scale. Where you at home land on that scale is totally dependent upon things like how fit are you. So if you are extremely fit, and you have really good conditioning, well, you can probably actually handle a decent amount of conditioning, and that's not going to interfere with your strength. But if you're very, very

unfit or you're just new to training or you only work out once or twice a week, well, now that added aerobic exercise is going to compromise recovery a little bit. But whatever that means to you, it is a sliding scale. So instead of giving a prescription and saying, well, okay, like a 30-minute jog is or isn't going, I would think of it more like this. Let's actually just use like an RPE scale. So how difficult did it feel to you? So if you are going through and you're mixing in some... Perceived exertion? Yes, sir.

Would that be it for the GPOP? Yes, yes, sir. In general, the research suggests the more you can physically separate out the training sessions, the better. So if you're going to do 30 minutes of weights and then 30 minutes of cardio, okay, well, maybe that's not great. Maybe, maybe not. The science is actually changing a little bit on that. But if you can separate it by three or four hours, so you do your weights in the morning and then cardio at night,

that actually looks like the interference goes way down. You even separate it more, you lift weights on Monday and you do your cardio on Tuesday. It looks like there's almost no interference there. The only issue is if the volume of the cardio gets so much, it compromises the next day's lift, then you start to have an interference effect. So you at home, just use your own thing. How much can you do where you still feel good the next day and you can still train equally hard

if it's not taking away and you physically feel there and you're eating enough calories, caloric surplus of 10 to 15 percent. You don't need to go tripling your calories. It's 10 to 15 percent. So if you're eating 2,000 calories a day and you move to 2,300 or something, that's enough to add lean muscle mass. You won't add a lot of fat that way. And if you're still eating enough calories doing that, you're probably going to be fine and you can do your conditioning and you can do your strength work and your hypertrophy work uh if you're not you're feeling like a little bit sluggish the next day you're still sore well then maybe back the conditioning down yeah you don't need to do a 10k you could do like a one mile nose breathing slow run sure just especially with what's on the

table right so all these things come down to. If the goal for the six weeks is strength or for muscle mass, then know that the cardio is just the, it's not the meat and potatoes. It's the side dish, right? Double extra A for you. That's exactly what I meant earlier. All those things I was talking about,

they extend to all other areas too, training. Like, well, what is the goal? Is the goal to really maximize strength in the next six weeks? Well, if that's the case, then we probably want to really minimize the conditioning for that six weeks. Well, if that's the case, then we probably want to really minimize the conditioning for that six-week block. But that only works probably if you were fit to start.

So if you are unfit and you don't have the conditioning to get through your strength workout, that's going to compromise your ability to get strong. So in that case, adding a little bit of conditioning will actually improve your ability to get strong. And this is actually one thing I talked about with Mark. And he said, yeah, man, actually, I regret my powerlifting career.

If I would have done more conditioning, I feel like I could have gotten stronger. I didn't have the conditioning to get through enough workouts to get strong enough. If the goal, though, is I want to get a little bit fitter and a little bit stronger, well, then fine. Adding more conditioning is fine because you're not trying to maximize strength. Yeah, you can have balance. And if that means that you pushed a little hard on cardio day and you're not quite as strong or you're a little bit tighter and you need to drop to 50% of your weight on the strength training day,

that's okay. Yeah, because you have established that goal a priori, right? Before you started, you understood you're willing to give up a little bit of strength, add a little more conditioning, and then you're actually in a good spot. But you can't have those conversations unless you set those goals out to begin with.

What am I really trying to do? And if you're trying to, in six weeks, I want to lose 35 pounds. I want to double my back squat strength. I want to take two minutes off my mile run. Oh, and then I want to improve my hamstring flexibility.

Oh, and then I want to run my bit. Like, okay, well, not come on. Like, now how do you expect me to get all the things all at once?

Yeah. Like, well, shocking, you know, everything got a little bit better. I keep getting sick. I'm run down all the things all at once. Yeah, like, well, shocking. You know, everything got a little bit better. I keep getting sick. I'm run down all the time.

Weird. Yeah. I always, I tell people one of the words of encouragement is, have an acceptable range of success and failure. And so if you said, all right, I want to do this eight-week workout. I'm going to get really focused for summer, whatever it's going to be. And I want to lose weight. Okay, well, what's your acceptable range?

What would you consider success? What would you consider failure? It doesn't even matter what the numbers are. But if you put that out in front of yourself, and you can go, okay, that way if you say, look, I need to lose 35 pounds, it's probably unrealistic to lose 35 pounds in six weeks. Okay, what would be an acceptable range of failure?

All right, so I think if I lost five or less pounds, I'd consider that a failure. Okay, what would be an acceptable range of failure? All right, so I think if I lost five or less pounds, I'd consider that a failure. Okay, what would be success if I lost anything more than seven? Okay, great. Well, now when you show up and you lost six after six weeks, you go, oh, that was a win. Had, though, you started and I said, hey, my program, you're going to lose six weeks and six pounds in six weeks,

you'd be like, well, that sucks. It's the same fucking thing. Like you you actually the numbers are the exact same but the fact that you didn't establish expectations properly you never had that conversation with yourself and you never put it down on paper now all of a sudden a win actually looks like a loss and so whatever those numbers are have an acceptable range of success and failure so you can go yeah well i i really wanted to lose 30, but I told myself if I lost seven, I'd be happy with myself. And I lost seven, so I'm good here. I think that's helpful for the general population is just to establish those whys. What am I doing it for? What's the purpose? And then it makes a match. The other thing with the concurrent training stuff is it honestly depends on your physiology.

Some of us handle conditioning very, very well. Joints, muscles, everything lines up great. Like we end up being fine. Some of us don't, right? It also depends on things like your mechanics and your technique. So for example, can you add in cardio? Well, maybe if you don't run a lot

and you don't run well, adding a bunch of jogging may actually bang up the knees. All of a sudden, my back hurts. Yeah, your heels strike and you're in too much shoes. Well, now all of a sudden, of course, that compromised your gains because you actually added a bunch of eccentric trauma. But if you maybe run all the time, you grew up running, you spent 10 years running, that's probably such a limited stress on you because you're very efficient in those positions. It's not going to have nearly the interference effect.

So it's all relative um it's really kind of a sliding scale so if you understand that implement as you see fit yeah and if you're a shitty runner there's that's why they have airdynes and assault bikes and concept whatever else right whatever yoga or whatever there's many tools yeah do whatever you want yeah so let's let's do circle back because i really love this i want you to talk about kind of where these things split off in the strength game and uh like the history of strength oh yeah we know if you're if you're in your 30s you might remember some of these names if you're a younger millennial crowd uh these might be first for you but this fascinated the hell out of me the first time i heard you talk about this and your your podcast is the oh the body of knowledge body of knowledge

and that's on the first episode is that right uh i don't think so i think this one was uh biases collide i think is the name of that one um and i think it's actually we'll get the number sorry josh six something like that three nine six somewhere in there uh yeah the that podcast is a little bit different it's not a running thing it's only nine episodes total and it's just sort of history yeah exactly season two should be out uh next year early next year nice soon we got some really cool uh the the theme for season one was change and the theme for season two is actually sherpa. So once you've identified a change, like how do I identify the people that help you get that change to get up the mountain, get down the mountain, and also tell you sort of, Hey,

today's not a good day to climb. That's not the right mountain for you yet. So we're really excited about that. Anyways. So with this idea of change, I told, we told the story of change from a lot of different perspectives. And one of the ones we talked about was the history of this whole field and how the supplement industry was started. And this is the story you're alluding to, right?

Mm-hmm. So I'll trace you sort of all the way back. I'll give you the condensed version of it. I'll make you go to the whole episode to listen to the whole hour version. Yeah, that's what I want. I want the cliff notes. That way people got to go tune in. Yeah.

For sure. It was really interesting so uh in the 1800s uh we were still sort of figuring out this human physiology in this exercise thing and then some pretty interesting events happened that almost single-handedly led to concepts like hey strength training actually is bad for your heart uh strength training reduces mobility, makes you tight, you lose flexibility, all these things that you and I, Kyle, like grew up hearing. And it'd been phased out a little bit by then, but not entirely. And if you're, if you're Kyle or Isaiah, you're older, like, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're

younger, you're like, well, maybe you haven't heard these things, but a single, almost a singular event happened that caused this. And for about 30, 50, 60 years, this idea sort of reigned true. And scientifically, the benefits of aerobic exercise was just coming on board. People realize how this is good for you. And most of the scientists, if not all of them, were still in the boat of saying, hey, strength training is actually, not only is it not good for you, it's actually deleterious to your health. And there was this guy named Peter Karpovich who was at Springfield College and he was one of the most pronounced, prolific, worldwide known physiologists, scientists, and he was

a starch advocate of strength training is bad for you. And a young student wanting to get into physical education enrolled in Springfield College and was super excited to learn under the legendary Peter Karpovich. And was really upset because his first class, Karpovich is going on and on and on about strength training, and the student asks, well, have you ever lifted? No, no, no, that stuff's bad for you. He's like, well, yeah, but there's this guy named Bob Hoffman down the street in New York,

and he's doing some awesome stuff. He's got this magazine that's coming out, and he's got all these athletes. Hoffman is the guy that started York Barbell, the famous company. He had an amazing magazine for a long time called Strength and Health, which was an homage to some previous stuff you'll have to hear about in the episode. And Karpovich was like well whatever he sort of dismissed it and the student was really broken hearted because he's like i thought that a college professor is supposed to be the one who you're open-minded you really

understand things you are the expert uh you think of the prestige that you give to even now i'm called as a professor right and some people give me on unexpected and undeserved prestige for that well it was worse back then right if you were, nowadays you guys have the internet and you can go fact find and search out and it's college professors are no longer the sole key to holding all information. But back then, before the internet, they were. This is the reason you

paid exorbitant prices to go to college because somebody had information that only way you got it was to pay and attend their classes. So the student was brokenhearted and he basically said well what if i bring this guy up here and he reached out to hoffman hoffman agreed and so they put on this big show on campus and hoffman comes up and he brought in a bunch of his lifters and these people were this is still in the 1950s so this is when bodybuilding powerlifting weightlifting all this was really the same thing. There wasn't a split differentiation between weightlifting and powerlifting.

And the people put on this big demonstration. And you could see that the show was on stage, but the real show was in the audience because Karpovich was in the audience. And this is the 1950s version of sitting back on an internet fight on facebook and not actively participating with just watching the people bitch you know back and forth hitting the like button and being like oh shit get the popcorn like this is going down right and so people were really there to see what what karpovich is going to do with with hoffman and his guys and so they go on and do the whole show and they finish and there's a q a and's finished, and Karpovich finally stands up. He says, I just have one question for you. He said, will you scratch your back?

And the guy on stage was a world champion at the time, weightlifter and bodybuilder. And he's like, you know, jokingly said, eh said it doesn't itch hey guys i'm joking but he goes well apart and he starts reaching around this part over here over here where you want me stretched and he starts effectively answering his question right he's shutting him down right there and carpet was just like oh he fully anticipated this guy wouldn't be able to like reach his arm up he'd be so immobile because he was a bodybuilder and then he started asking other things and every time you'd ask these guys they would just knock it out and then they started once they could sort of tell they were they were going they just started going after

him uh they dropped into full splits one guy grabbed two 50 pound dumbbells and did a standing backflip with them started doing everything and carp was just like oh, oh shit. What can you say? My entire scientific career, all of his scientific publications, all of his teaching was against a method he had actually never tried. He'd never been around anybody actually doing it. And now he was confronted with pretty clear, undeniable evidence that this is actually not what's going on. He's like, shit. So he had a real dilemma there.

His internal bias against strength training had been smashed and with evidence like that what could he do he could either double down or he could go yeah i was wrong so of course being a scientist he went backstage and said yeah man i was wrong i apologize and he changed his entire career at that point and started basically actually studying strength training and started to notice, oh man, actually it doesn't make you inflexible. Actually doesn't make you bad for your health. It actually is really important for your health. And that almost single handedly changed the whole trajectory of the field because now strength training was acceptable.

And then he actually went down the road and had a confrontation with one of his former students named Joe Weider, the Weider brothers. And Weider was like, hey, we've got to change the game here because people aren't really about performance, people are about aesthetics. And Hoffman was a performance guy. If it doesn't improve functionality, if you can't do a standing backflip,

if you can't do splits, if you can't move around, this stuff is useless. And Wieter said, you know, for every guy that, show me one guy who wants to be strong and I'll show you 10 who want to look strong. And they had this philosophical breakdown.

Well, there was a big fight and there was propaganda and magazines going back and forth. And Wieter's main protege was a guy named Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold took off, Pumping Iron came in, and people were like, holy crap, not only is this now not bad for me, but I can actually use this stuff to legitimately be a human superhero.

I mean, this is before the internet. This is before, like, there's no memes here. You could legitimately make yourself look like that. The aesthetics, the supplement lines, all launched off of that. And so because of that, from 1970-ish to really the mid-2000s, aesthetics and bodybuilding reigned supreme in fitness. Weta went on to start Muscle & Fitness. Right?

So Strength & Health died out. That's my publication. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But if you just look at the word strength and health, that died. Muscle and fitness took off, right? Which is now it's all about muscle as opposed to functional outcomes. It's not about health and it's not about performance anymore. Now it's all about looking and the aesthetics of it. So because of that, everything, all the concepts that you and I grew up on,

never do this, always do this, right? This is another way to do it. So because of that, everything, all the concepts that you and I grew up on, never do this, always do this, right? This is not a way to do it. A lot of those are actually true, but only under that umbrella of if you're trying to optimize aesthetics. And that's okay when you're trying to do that. But the rest of the time when you're trying to do other things, those are actually not only not true, they're probably bad recommendations. Yeah, like 10 sets of preacher curls isn't going to help you throw a baseball or throw a punch better. Right, or I mean, the other examples of, like you listening at home, true or false? It's good or bad. I can't do true or false and then say good or bad.

Sorry, bad teacher moment. But true or false, it's bad to work out at the same muscle group twice in a row, two days in a row. Well, I know your gut instinct right now. Your gut instinct is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't want to work a muscle out twice in a row. Did you, when you were in MMA, get to have every other day work out twice a month? No, we didn't pick like today is jab day and tomorrow is right leg kick day and tomorrow is left cheek day. How about when you're a college football player? Did you get to pick which day is in season? No. No. Today is swim move day. Tomorrow is spin move day. No. And tomorrow's left cheek day. How about when you're a college football player? Did you get to pick which day is it in season? No. No. Today's swim move day. Tomorrow's spin

move day. Today is leg day. Yeah. Because I'm running. I'm sprinting. I'm pushing every single day. Like you train like an athlete, right? So the idea of should I train a muscle two days in a row? I'm not saying it's false. I'm saying let's look at the question. What am I trying to do? Trying to maximize muscle growth in the quadricep. Well, then maybe it's pretty good to not train at two days in a row. So you allow recovery, optimal growth. But if you're trying to do any number

of X other adaptations, well, then that truth or that law is completely out the window. It's no longer true under those circumstances. The problem was we were so confused for so many decades because we were always looking at it subconsciously through the lens of this is what you do to maximize aesthetics.

And people, which again, it's fine. It's just that people didn't realize that that was the scope they were looking at. And so some people look back and this is what opened up for other functional fitness movements because people looked and they're like, well, God, this bodybuilding stuff is actually not,

I don't feel better. I'm not actually getting any this i'm not improving performance i'm not making better athletes i'm not feeling better my energy whatever other issues so therefore all this must be wrong yeah well and just to jump in real quick like you're going to do an episode with zach evanesh coming up right yeah and that was a it was a really fascinating reading his book just to understand like how many of us that grew up in the 80s and witnessed all this and read every muscle mag and loved arnold watching him on tv you know and you're like all right this is how i got to do the training split you know and then you actually go to perform in some type of athletic competition and all your shit doesn't work like wait a minute i haven't done push pull squat hinge

rotational bilateral i haven't made my body work in a in a movement pattern that is what we actually is usable you know in in sport not only that but did you ever do any of those i'll just say muscle uh arnold's bodybuilding did you ever do yeah i did i did all that do you know what it feels like to try to get through one of those workouts? You're fucking crushed. It's brutal. Because you're not physically ready to do that workout. Like, you should not be doing what Arnold did. Unless you have Arnold's genetics and unless you have the training and background that he had.

You should probably do at best what Arnold did when he was in his first year of training. Well, and that's another thing people miss, too. Like, when you read the modern-day encyclopedia of bodybuilding uh beginner and intermediate both use a lot of compound exercises yeah there's a lot of squat deadlift bench pull you know pull-ups right and that's like that's for 90 of people that are trying to get yeah bigger stronger faster yeah yeah right that has carryover that's gpp like that's shit that's going to apply that's actually going to help you when you start nitpicking and saying today's tricep and left calf day yeah yeah yeah you're missing something there right well that's fine if you look like dorian yates and you're fine tuning at that point yeah i uh i'm giving a talk

in uh well this weekend uh at nsca's personal trainer conference right and it's uh my talk is on exercise choice so this is when you're deciding what exercise to do today. How do I optimize that system? And I actually break it up into outcome goals. So we'll just, we won't do all of them, we'll just do a couple of them. So say you're trying to maximize strength. Do you pick your exercises by the muscles you want to use or the movement pattern? Well, in that goal, most of us would say the movement pattern is more important because you're trying to develop strength in a movement pattern. You don't necessarily even care what happens at the muscle level, assuming you're synchronizing right or using the proper muscles. You're not using your low back when you're trying to use your glutes and, you know, things like that. But it's generally

you're trying to develop strength in a movement. When you're trying to actually develop hypertrophy in an actual muscle, well, then you choose by muscle group, right? Not by movement, making sure you're targeted. But What about things like physical therapy, rehab, or prehab? I think those are also good times to choose by the actual muscle group. And you can identify, like, here's a good example. We'll use the shoulder, okay? There is, you've got biceps muscles, so biceps too. You've got two main bicep muscles. And most people realize the bicep crosses the elbow joint, which is a way of saying when I flex my bicep, it moves the elbow joint, moves my hand closer to my shoulder. Got it. But people don't realize the biceps crosses the shoulder joint. So it also contributes to lifting your arm straight in front of you. Now, muscles don't work when they are slack over one joint.

So what that means is one of my bicep muscles starts in the middle of my arm. It starts there, and then it inserts past my elbow. So when I contract it there, it's always on stretch. But the other one actually crosses both shoulder and elbow joint. So here's what that means. Imagine a preacher curl, okay, where your elbows are out in front of you, right? You know, laying on the table and you're doing a curl. Well, that one muscle that starts on your arm and connects the other part of your arm is spine. It doesn't care. But the actually one that crosses the shoulder joint is shortened. So it doesn't actually contract. So it's not that a preacher curl is good or bad for

you. It's that it's very specific to one of the bicep muscles. Contrast is to imagine laying on an incline bench, you know, laying backwards where the arm hangs behind you and doing a bicep curl that way. Now, since the shoulder is stretched because your arm's going away behind you, now that bicep muscle is actually contributing to the force production, and now it's being put on, since it's being put on stretch, and now it contracts. So imagine I'm in a physical therapy situation, and for some reason you've identified, hey man, I got this shoulder pain, I don't really know what's going on, it's kind of irritating the hell out of me, but I need to get some elbow flexion work in. Oh, I actually know that I can

go to a preacher curl, because now the part of the bicep that crosses the shoulder joint is not actually going to be contributing so much, so it probably won't irritate the shoulder. That's just one example. You can do the same. I could do the same thing for every joint, by the way. We could walk through. If you understand which ones cross, seated calf raises are a great example. All right, so the gastroc crosses the knee joint and the ankle joint. So when you do a seated calf raise, the gastroc is not really doing much. It's almost entirely soleus. So these are really a seated calf raise, the gastroc is not really doing much. It's almost entirely soleus. So these are really good examples of saying,

okay, this is a good time to identify when to choose exercises by the muscle group versus the movement. And we could go through, what about fat loss? What about all these other things? Fat loss is, for the record, it's probably not something where you start selecting by the muscle group, right?

This is more like select by movement. And we we don't have to have like well i do it this way like what's right do i do i lift by yeah no so much there's we attach fucking you could say it's the tribe thing yeah you could say it's for whatever reason but so much of what we consider our identity this is what i do it's worked for me so this is the only way to identity of this is what I do. It's worked for me. So this is the only way to eat or this is the only way to lift. This is the only way to do cardio or this is the best way, right? Like, so what is the best way to get stronger? What is the best way to gain more muscle?

It doesn't matter. Like those things are not helpful for most people. If we can give them situations and circumstances and awareness and scaffolding of selection of choice and understanding of processes, then we can go, oh, okay, well, what's your goal? What are you trying to work for? Okay, well, in that case, here are the two or three rules, right? Oh, you have a different goal. Okay, well, now we've moved on. But the fact that we have to have one system, there has to be one answer. I mean, I know why, but I don't know why we continually search for that. Why is it so important there is one way to do that?

I think we have enough variability in human species and we have enough variability in success. That answer is clear that one way doesn't exist and it never, ever will. Why we continue to search for that, again, I do understand it, but it's not helpful. I think we can relieve that stress and going like, there is no magic. Okay, we're good here? All right right now let's just talk about what's

gonna help you right now do a b and c we're done here yeah and just try just do it right like mark bell when i was on his on his show he was talking about how many times people will ask him what's the best way to lift weights do i lift like a bodybuilder do i lift like a powerlifter do i do crossfit and he's like if you've never listed lifted weights before anything as long as you're not going to hurt yourself technique wise and you have somebody that are watching you making sure you're doing it properly you're going to get a benefit from no matter what you do oh yeah just like a kid right you can teach a kid anything and he's going to pick it up quickly and there'll be response there you're going to get stronger you're going to gain muscle you're going to lose fat

you're going to get all the things that you're shooting for just by starting to do it. I had another friend, Adam Konopka. I think he was at a male clinic at the time. And he did a really interesting study in Matt Harbor. And we looked at, I think they were 70-year-old, 60 or 70-year-old women. And he put them through 12 weeks of cycling training. And they showed equal, if not greater, hypertrophy in the quadriceps from only doing, I think, two or maybe three days a week of 30 minutes steady state cycling. Massive improvements in quadricep size. And they used that and actually interpreted it differently than they did. They were like, wow, this shows that hypertrophy is not specific to hypertrophy training and resistance exercise.

But my interpretation was, they're so untrained anything was enough yeah like anything was enough improvement from walking for 20 minutes exactly exactly like yeah okay i get that great now let's move that to progress the next thing and let's prevent it to progress the next thing because like why we're so i feel like we get upset sometimes when people succeed like why are we so mad? It worked. Great. Why bitch and complain and try to knock them off the pedestal when we should be celebrating the fact that, hey, man, congratulations. You got a lot better.

Your legs are stronger. You're more fit. You feel better. Great. Ready to progress? Ready to go to the next level? Fantastic. Awesome.

Instead of shitting on, well, that's not true. That doesn't help anything. That doesn't help them understand. It doesn't help them. If you look at the data on fat loss, it's clear adherence is the number one factor in which diet is going to be more effective. What you will actually stick to,

what you will actually execute. So my prescription for fat loss, diet or exercise, why? Well, number one, you have to find what they are going to actually stick to. Then you can make modifications. My friend Marie Spano, who's a nutritionist for the Atlanta Hawks and a bunch of this stuff, she gave a wonderful presentation years ago. So I'll give her due credit. She's probably not the first one to think about it, but she's the first one to express it this way.

So it's important I give her that credit. Well, she says, like, sometimes you'll have an athlete come in and they are over here, far left with their diet. She's not a fan of, say, ketogenic diet for athletes. Okay, great. Maybe they want to do keto. And she wants them to be on the far end of the spectrum over here. She's like, if I try to walk them from, if they walk into my office talking about the benefits of keto and they bring a study with them and they're really excited about it or they tell me to listen to this podcast or whatever, and immediate conversation is friction with them and explaining to them all the science behind it you know what's going to happen they're going to walk in my office they're going to do it anyways this this didn't help what i can do though is take them and say okay

you're over here i think you'd be better over here can i nudge you a little bit can we walk you what concessions will you make okay great and then she's like it might take me a year to finally get them to the thing i think is actually best for them but i have to realize these are people we have real people concerns when we try to give advice to somebody so we have to be able to help them get to where we want but we can't expect them to jump completely off the ship especially when they're really excited about something this guy walked in or these people walk in and they're really excited to make a nutritional change for the positive. Don't kill that energy. Don't kill it. Don't kill the motivation by shitting on everything they want to do. Can we make some modifications? Yes,

but let's express good leadership. Let's use that motivation and maybe slowly start to gear it over time, show them success, and eventually they'll start figuring out, oh boy, this part's not going great, this part's not going great, and then they'll come to you and go, all right, I want to make this. Okay, now you can walk them to your system, but don't ruin that energy. Try to keep it as long as you can. Yeah, and then try things too. You know, like they got, when I interviewed Dr. Michael Russo, he was like, look, compared to the standard American diet, the sad diet, all diets work. Vegan, vegetarian, raw vegan, paleo, low carb, keto, Atkins, whatever you want to do. They all work

better if you stick to them. And there's some differences there. It turns out people who have autoimmune or some type of gut issues do better on paleo, low carb, low FODMAP, things like that. So there are specifics, but at the same time, it's just like weight training. Something you talked about with Mark was, do you want to eat one food the rest of your life? do you want to do you want to lift a certain way the rest of your life like that doesn't make sense so as we rotate through these things you can continue to see benefit i felt great doing a ketogenic diet for the better part of two years yeah and i use that for certain goals like running an ultra marathon things like that for cognitive function i felt better but now doing carb backloading intermittent fasting and

different things like i still feel amazing yeah so like are carbs bad no what's the goal right i saw some negatives from the ketogenic diet in terms of my response on the jiu jitsu mat in terms of when i was dropping below six reps on deadlift or anything like that like yeah man i'm i'm missing something here for sure. You know, and there's a right way and a wrong way to do anything. It's not like, Hey,

carbs are cool. So I'm going to eat fucking donuts now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But that's an excuse. You're being disingenuous.

Yeah. You know that when you, when you start saying things like that, that that's not really the interpretation. Yeah. I don't understand also why we have to be, uh, who was saying this the other day?

Uh, was it you or somebody else else was like i think it was your friend nate last night i don't care anyways doesn't matter uh like the you know you used to be able to if you were on the internet and you talked about things like politics or you talked about religion like you would start a fight for sure right now you can add nutrition to that like you make a post about nutrition fight like it's going to be a fight for sure yeah like why? Why are we so literally religious and cult about nutrition?

Why can't it be like, hey, you know, I'm going to do intermittent fasting for six weeks. Oh, that was great. I loved it. I did this too. Well, okay.

Yeah. I also love jujitsu for six weeks. Now I'm going to actually maybe do more kickback. Like no one will say anything about that. Hey, great, man. Awesome job. I love them both.

Well, I can have the same love for different eating styles, different eating habits. Why is it not this one? And the body's needs fluctuate too. Absolutely. Depending upon goals, depending upon age, all that stuff. That all plays a factor. It's in flux, right?

It's never... Why we have to be married to systems like that makes no sense. It doesn't make teleological sense. It doesn't make scientific sense. It doesn't make evolutionary sense. It doesn't make behavioral sense. It doesn't even teleological sense. It doesn't make scientific sense. It doesn't make evolutionary sense. It doesn't make behavioral sense. It doesn't even make logical sense. So why do we have to stick to that?

Like on no level does it pass my scrutiny. So let's kind of switch gears here. And you have an excellent book, Unplugged, that you wrote with Brian McKenzie. And so, you know, kind of piggybacking off of where all this weight training started, where all the fitness industry blew up, supplement industry, and then big box gyms and everything and the madness of Gold's Venice. And now you've got giant 24-hour fitness mega centers and all these different places.

And that includes the fitness tracking market, like how we are obsessed with electronics and we're glued to the data that we see on our iPhones your book really is is the message is phenomenal because it's how do we get back to nature how do we and this tackles so many concepts that stretch across fitness you know like how do we get the most out of life how do we improve our quality of life right the book is called unplugged evolveged Evolve from Technology to Upgrade Your Fitness, Performance, and Consciousness. And really, Brian, Phil White, the other author, and myself came at it from different angles.

So I'm mostly a scientist, so I'll dabble with some athletes. But I don't have 120 athletes coming through my door weekly, like a true coach would or something. But Brian McKenzie, the main other co-author, is more of a practitioner, right? He'll dabble in science, but he has hundreds of athletes and thousands of athletes he's coached. And so we wanted to tackle this topic from both sides, like what's the science say, the research say, and then what are we seeing in the practitioner field? But to give people guidance. I think the mistake would have been to try to write a book

that literally went through every single fitness technology one by one right because the book would have never ended i'd have to do version two version three and every six months we got more and more and more so instead we try to top tackle the idea by concept right which is like what are the concepts behind it and you can actually change the can actually change the technology in or out, and I think a lot of our arguments are sustainable, which is we're not anti-technology. That is a tsunami, and you'd rather be on top of that wave than underneath it.

And so I'm not advocating or preaching, hey, give up your technology, check your phone less. Like, yeah, we all know that. What we try to say in there is, here are the common downfalls and some of the reasons people have failures when they use technology in their fitness performance training. And here are the ways you can use them to succeed. And I feel like we made the argument from everything ranging from heart rate variability to wearable full health monitors to a mirror. That's all technology technology what were the concepts

that constantly cause failure and one of the concepts that constantly cause success and how do we properly integrate them in our lives and that's really what we tried to do with the book is get through those ideas yeah you do it well and i think that there's and obviously there's science that backs quite a bit of it but even just like the science of walking i'd love to study on depression yeah in japan on the difference between walking in a city versus walking in a forest yeah like almost zero improvement going for a daily walk in the city versus going for a walk in the forest i made this uh mistake myself so i live in southern california i've been in long beach for you know getting close to three years and i And I'm pretty introverted for the

most part. I don't like walking around, like chatting to my neighbors about like, I'm usually in focus mode during the day. And I noticed it'd been like a year, a year and a half or something like that. And I've been walking around the neighborhood in my neighborhood, walking my two dogs. I have two shepherd mixes. I'm not a dog person. They're super high energy. They need a tremendous amount of exercise. Like a walk a day is not sufficient. They need to be run to exhaustion several times a day or problems happen, right? And I realized like, man, as I'm walking them around, I'm constantly wearing headphones. I don't know a single neighbor by face or by name at all. I don't even know what street I'm on. I know my street, but the one over, I don't even

know the name of it. If an emergency situation happened, I'm really in trouble. I don't have, if someone said go to Anaheim street, I'm like, Oh, where's my Jeep? Oh, I don't know. That's the next one over. Like it's 30 feet from your house. How do you not know where Anaheim street is? I didn't notice the trees. I didn't notice there was all kinds of amazing wildlife. We saw huge turkey vultures in the trees right by my house. I'm like, have you ever seen turkey vultures? Awesome. There's 100 pound sea tortoises

that have moved into the little river stream right by our house. There are seals in there all the time on their back, like eating fish, ripping a piece, all these things I'm literally walking by every day completely oblivious to. And I did it because I thought

I was being productive and efficient with my time. I got to walk the dogs. I got to take them out, get them some exercise. Oh, let me listen to this podcast. Let me take this phone call. And I was constantly trying to bring things in and not bringing the real things in. I was trying to bring in data and not bringing awareness in. What I realized was, oh, you know what?

Maybe I should take my headphones out. And this only hit me actually after I got some blood work done and my vitamin D came back, you know, insufficient. And so, of course, my honest reaction when you get blood work that says low vitamin D, what do you do? Most of us would say buy vitamin D supplements, right? And that was my gut. But then I stopped and went, like, wait a minute.

I live in Southern California. This should be, if I get vitamin D supplementation, that's covering, that's putting a bandaid. That's not fixing the problem. The problem is not my vitamin D is low. The problem is I'm living a lifestyle that I'm not getting enough vitamin D. Fix the lifestyle. Don't just cover up with vitamin D because you're then going to continually have to supplement with vitamin D. And so this all hit together at the same time when I went, okay, fine. I'm going to walk, I'm going to go outside and exercise the dog more, take them outside more.

Now, when I did that, like this whole cascade kicked off. I took the headphones out. I made my own orders. I'm exercising the dogs more. They get more exercise. They behave better. That reduces stress on my life and my wife, right? She's happier. Less things go wrong in my house. More time I get to spend with her. This kicked off.

Oh, also, it turned out when I'm walking, these guys are going for runs, and I don't have my headphones plugged in, ideas started flowing in. Problems I'd been working on started. Oh my God, this is how I'm going to solve it. And I get these amazing ideas. I started meeting people in the neighborhood. I started seeing all these things. Now I actually found a better place to take them where they get better exercise. It's closer to the house. It was 600 yards from my house. I didn't even know it

was there because I was so just like down, like hit down earth. And so when i fixed the lifestyle all these cascades of problems went away when i unplugged for a second and i fixed the approach that's when i was like oh my gosh this is this is the kind of conversations we have it's not that headphones are podcasting this bad for you but i maybe don't need them every single time i walk yeah every second of the day i don't need to be plugged in all the time because what am i missing out in terms of if you're constantly bringing in information you're never processing. You're never making sustainable changes. So that's just

one example of how I'm like, okay, these are conversations we need to have with people. You're having a hard time implementing the things you're learning on a podcast because you're listening to three and a half hours of podcasts a day. Then you're not taking any action, you're not processing, nothing's sinking in, you're not Then you're not taking any action. You're not processing. Nothing's sinking in.

You're not meditating on it or moving through it. Hell yeah, brother. That's amazing. Talk about some other things that have helped you with your mindset. Obviously, I had followed you prior to this, but we got a chance to really meet and hang out at the XPT event down in Malibu. Yep. And that was phenomenal.

I think they paired us up in the car together quite often. Yeah. And we were pretty glued yeah in conversation but um we follow a lot of the similar things that that improve and i spoke about this on a facebook live post uh a few weeks back but like things that give you carry over in how you deal with stress things that make you a stronger person internally as well as externally that help you map out life because there's no shortage of challenges or stressors in life. No matter how old you are, they keep coming at you. You keep getting tested and it's all perspective, right? And a lot of that has to do with what is the work that you put in on your daily basis to make

yourself a stronger, more hard-nosed person we we all have different backgrounds and we need to appreciate and embrace that so what's the stress for me is not a stress for you and vice versa and so I don't think we can give blanket prescriptions you need to go do a you need to go be but I think we can continue to search and try to have perspective now I come from that country background like I talked about right which is generally a very hard-nosed background I resonate very well with Jocko Willink, right? Those things are like, yeah, like, just get it done. That actually works well for me. That doesn't work for everybody else. So don't take that approach if you react adversely to that. And so I'll give you a couple of specific

examples that I like, but please, like, please understand this may not work for you. You may react the opposite. And if you do, great. Do something totally different. For example, I don't jive a ton with meditation. But some of my closest friends, it's the best thing that they've ever done. So I really encourage that. And I'm so happy they found that. And I've tried it. I'll probably try it again.

I keep, but for whatever reason. However, things like the cold exposure, immediate to effect with me, but hunger, fasting, huge effect for me. I hate it. I don't do well with those things. So I do that often. When I really need to set up a challenge, like that's what I'm going to.

And I've gotten a lot better over time. I've done a lot of playing with things like food frequency throughout the day. I feel best. I function best. My performance is highest when I eat a bunch of small meals throughout the day. Having said that, because of that, oftentimes then I choose suffering. And I choose to not eat. And I choose to do one meal a day for a while. Or I'll choose these other things because that's where I lack. And that's where I'm going to have to put a bunch of challenges. If we look at us physically, the human species, we evolved for a couple hundred thousand, maybe a couple of million years, depending on where you want to put the line,

doing everything we can to reduce and minimize stress because that improved likelihood of survival. We developed housing to reduce thermal stress we developed clothing we developed food and water so that we wouldn't go refrigeration and grocery stores medicine right so we improve our livelihood so great well the problem with all that was for the first 200 000 years it was very very effective and helpful but we got too good at it and now we are in this position we actually trace this is a whole separate episode of the For the first 200,000 years, it was very, very effective and helpful. But we got too good at it. And now we are in this position, we actually traced, this is a whole separate episode of my podcast, the nutrition one,

but we actually got to a place now where we have food abundance. And we have comfort abundance. We actually have to start choosing suffering and manufacturing discomfort. We've never had to do that before because we had a goal for the entire history of our species to minimize or otherwise eliminate suffering, and oh, fuck me, it worked. We're really good at it. Oops. Yeah. Now, the problem is we developed a biological system

that functions optimally when stressed. And when stressed in a variety of different ways. And we have reduced that stress and reduced that variation. And we've exchanged it for different kinds of stress. And so we no longer go through, say, periods of massively fed, then massive fasting, cold or hot, and we end up going a little bit overfed, a little bit underslept, a little bit underhydrated, and a little bit extra cognitively stressed, and we stay on that peg for years at a time. And that gives us chronic problems. Instead of going massive stress,

massive work, massive work recovery, underslept for a little bit, and then balancing that with massively slept, recovering 12 hours a night. We end up just going six and a half hours of sleep, a little bit under hydrated, a little bit overfed, and all of a sudden we feel terrible. So we have to step back and go,

whoa, the natural world has left us. The natural stressors have left us. We have cellular processes like heat shock proteins, cold shock proteins, brown fat that are activated, we'll call it, during only things like thermal stress. As a byproduct of them, they do things like autophagy. They clean out dead debris, cellular debris, misfolded proteins, other things that cause problems. Well, they go dormant when they're not activated. They're not really stressed. So because of that, we actually lose that tertiary or secondary tertiary effect of cleaning up debris. We actually developed in a system that required that debriefing or defragging,

and now we've left that over and we wonder why we have these physical problems. So it sounds so counterintuitive, but to really reclaim our health, we actually have to now start re-choosing some of that suffering we engineered out. And we did that 40 years ago, 1954. So we realized, oh, we've gotten to the place, agriculture and lifestyle-wise, where we've almost eliminated all physical activity. And so we engineered and developed this whole new thing called exercise to replace the lost physical activity. Well, we actually realize now, okay, wait a minute. So if I work out really hard for 30 minutes a day, and then I sit around the other 23 and a half hours, I'm actually still in bad health. So now we have to replace the basal physical activity and we have to replace the high-end exercise. We're pretty good at those

things, but we haven't caught up with the nutrition. We haven't caught up with the thermal. We haven't caught up with the sleep or the hydration stuff. So that is really where we've got to start understanding the stress. And we can get that mental strength by choosing anything you want. In the book, we lay some examples out. But say, for example, you have a really hard time getting hungry and you feel terrible. Good. Maybe that's your stressor. And maybe you start with an eight-hour fast. You don't have to go into a five-day fast, right? Maybe you're fine with that. You don't have a problem with food, but man, you really struggle in the cold, like my wife. Were you at the XPT we did in Mexico? No, you were at the Malibu. Malibu, yeah. Okay. So my wife is terrified of cold.

Terrified. And she used to want to go to an XPT event, right? Want to go out? I'm like, okay, we're going to go. We're going to go to this Mexico one, but you have to do the cold. And we practice at home, and she got her toes in it and freaks out, you know?

Jumps out. When we get down there, and it's moments before getting in the cold and everybody else is in there and now keep in mind a little context here tasha is in her mid-30s grew up in southern california like gabby reese is her idol like this is this is who she grew up on and she's like oh my god gabby's right here first of all i'm not super starstruck, but like super happy to meet someone I looked up to my whole life. And she's in legitimate panic. She's in a panic attack. Her fingers are cuffed over her hand, her mouth like that.

Like she can't breathe. And she's like, she's going to do it. She goes through this whole charade. She gets in. She does the whole three minute, literally over her right shoulder is Gabby, over her left shoulder is Laird Hamilton. They're talking it through. She's not breathing hardly at all. She said later, easily, one of the two most difficult things I've ever done in my life. For some other people, for me, probably you, like, it's kind of uncomfortable. It's not that big a deal.

So for me, that's not an adequate stress. I have to do other things that get me to that level. She did her three rounds and second rounds either. By the time she did her third round, she's like, this wasn't actually that bad. She got sick as fuck the next day. Because she was such a stress on her, it wiped her out. But then she was able to translate that when she went back to work and her assistant was being shitty. She was like, okay, this isn't that big a deal.

When her mom's being shitty or whenever she's having a bad problem, she's able to go like, well, it wasn't as bad as the cold. It wasn't as bad as that. And so now we've gained that mental strength, which is a long answer again to your original question, which is how do we, how do we improve that thing? Some of us can just grit down and go like, I'm going to perform. And some of us, though, we can gain some of that by just exposing yourself to things that are uncomfortable. And if that means a cold shower once, maybe that's enough. Maybe that means you jumping in the ocean and doing SEAL training for two weeks. Okay, whatever it is for you.

It's not good, bad, or better. There are things that I'll probably panic about just as much as she would if she did the ice. But I have to do a different exposure. So I think the more that we can just look back on ourselves and go okay i'm really good here here here but i'm going to choose some discomfort over here well there's going to be growth there so yeah that's massive brother yeah well i love i love the quote that uh truth is one pads are many yeah right and i think the more we embody that with how we choose to eat food yeah how we choose to train, as long as we have a general interest and we really can stay focused on doing and trying new things. I power lifted one day and it didn't work out for me.

You've got to stick with some stuff for a while and then change it up. Same thing goes if you're going low carb. Don't tell me you tried a ketogenic diet for one week and failed. Give it a shot if you're going to give it a shot if the goals make sense what the outcome is then there's there's one thing i'll add to that because most scientists are really against keto okay well i try to help them keep perspective what's the problem with doing something that doesn't have scientific merit okay don't even worry about that part of it but just say that doesn't what's the problem with doing something that doesn't have scientific merit, okay, don't even worry about that part of it, but just to say that it doesn't, what's the problem with doing something that doesn't have

scientific merit, simply for the physical challenge, what's the problem with that, why not go, you know what, there's no scientific reason, there's no physiological benefit here, but I'm going to make a challenge, we're not going to have coffee for two weeks, why, not for the physiology, but just for the fact that like we're going to choose to do something difficult, and we don't like it, and then, boy, that's a good thing. That's something we should be promoting, encouraging. So you decided to go no bread or no carbs or no potato or whatever, no rice for a month. Okay, that may or may not have a physiological health benefit.

That can all be discussed. But how about for the fact of just saying, well, I set a goal that was really tough, and I did it. That's great. We should celebrate that shit. That's a really good thing I did it. That's great. We should celebrate that shit. Like that's a really good thing for most people. That doesn't always have to have a science or a physiology base behind something other than just saying, I set a goal and I did it and it was hard. It was great. Oh yeah. We got to encourage ourselves to work a little, a little bit harder and to challenge ourselves in new ways. And let's celebrate when we, we, we take a task and it's difficult and

we accomplish it. Let's celebrate it. And let's not bitch and whine about the fact that you didn't want to do it that's what it really comes down to right people are are jealous that you did something really hard and they didn't want to do it so they say there's no benefit there the science is a joke yeah my sister was like who cares why are you gonna starve yourself fasting is the dumbest thing i've ever heard of yeah like uh you know without trying to dive too deep into that, like, what's wrong with it? You know, like, I'm not going to wither away here, you know? Exactly. There is quite a bit that points towards this having a huge benefit to the body.

Yeah, I mean, you could, I could pick apart the science, no problem. It's very limited to humans and all this stuff, and I could really hammer some of that science. But I still do it a lot of times for a bunch of other reasons. Like, I like to do it when I have important things to do. And I'm under the weather, if you will. I don't feel good. And to me, it's a mental challenge of going, yeah, you don't want to do this. This is going to suck. You're hungry. And you're going to fucking perform anyways. And that, to me, drives that athlete in me, that competition, because I don't have that athletic portion in my life anymore.

I don't do it all the time, but sometimes I like to wake up, and everything else is gone from my life. All the other shit is gone, and I'm so down on that day because everything is important, and I don't feel good. Actually, you can put yourself into flow that way.

You can line yourself into flow by doing things like that, and what's the problem with doing that occasionally? feels great and when you finish that day you're like fuck dude yeah that's real accomplishment this is really good i feel great today hell yeah brother well thank you so much for joining us and uh tell people where they can find you obviously we'll throw a link up in the show notes to unplugged it's a phenomenal book uh we're gonna be jumping on a facebook live which will actually be gone before this is over. Yeah, it'll be gone before we air this.

Too bad, suckas. Where are you at on the social medias? Yeah, you can find that book. The podcast is on iTunes, Stitcher, bodyknowledge.com, all that stuff. My website and my social, my social is, you know, Andy Galpin, DR, Dr. Andy Galpin on Instagram for the most part. Twitter, Facebook, all that stuff. But then my website is just andygalpin.com. And I just launched that. I don't even know if you've seen, have you seen much of it? I popped into it. So what I'm basically doing is taking all of my university material, my nutrition lectures, all my classes on strength

and conditioning, programming, all that stuff. And I'm putting that all up on my website for free. There's no membership fees. There's not even a newsletter to even sign up for if you wanted to. There's a Patreon account attached to it if you want to contribute. But if you can't, like, don't not buy yourself coffee or not buy your wife a Valentine's Day gift or whatever because you give me eight bucks or something. But really, like, my goal is to put my whole university curriculum up and just give it away um all this stuff so that if you want the details of program design stuff that's going to be up there if you want the physiology if you want

more metaphysical stuff or epistemology everything i do is going to be up on that website and it's going to be just totally free and open access to everybody in the world forever there will never be a charge on that thing so Awesome, brother. Cool, man. Hell yeah. Thanks for jumping on. My pleasure. Appreciate it. Yep.

Thank you guys for listening to my man, Dr. Andy Galpin. It was a real treat having him in town. He stayed at my house for a few days here. We get to dive into breath work and a lot of cool stuff. He's actually helping me prepare for the Audit 6 Invitational. It's going to be right here in Austin at the Audit Academy. We're going to be doing a little jujitsujitsu tournament and that will precede ebi coming in eddie bravo invitational the day after so i have a one submission only eight minute match and uh due

to dr any gulpin's wealth of knowledge and working with professional athletes and fighters i couldn't help myself but actually try to pick his brain a bit and get dialed in on some great breathwork techniques and cardio. So hopefully that pans out and I don't let him down. Thanks for listening, guys. All right, guys, you've got questions. I've got answers. Every Wednesday at 6 p.m. Central Time, I'm going to be on Onnit's main page on Facebook doing a Facebook Live Q&A. The Facebook Live Q&A runs for 30 minutes.

If you can't make it at 6 p.m. Central Time, all you have to do is write in your questions, and I'll be sure to get those answered for you, either by writing it or talking about it on the Facebook Live, which you can check out at any point in time after the show airs. But be sure to tune in live if you can. We're going to get a lot of information rounded out, talking about the podcast, talking about different health topics, and I think you'll enjoy it.

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