The Nick Bare Podcast - 084: The Evolution of Hybrid Athlete Training with Dr. Andy Galpin

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Dr. Andy Galpin and I explore everything related to human performance. From advanced training regimens and the science behind strength and power to the history and evolution of fitness trends, we cover it all. Understand the unique coaching methods used to optimize athletic performance and the importance of personalized training programs. Discover how to enhance VO2 max without running, and gain a balanced perspective on fitness that includes strength, endurance, and flexibility. 00:00 Welcome and Introduction 00:24 Exploring Human Performance 05:23 The Journey to Performance Science 11:34 Coaching Elite Athletes 32:29 Balancing Life and Performance 38:08 Strength, Hypertrophy, and Power 41:20 Understanding Force and Velocity 41:43 Examples of Power in Action 42:44 Optimal Power Production 43:38 Power vs. Strength 44:09 Misinterpretations of Power Training 45:07 Hypertrophy: Muscle Growth Explained 46:35 Training for Specific Attributes 50:24 Skill and Movement in Athletic Performance 53:46 Hypertrophy in Athletic Training 56:05 Strength and Power for Endurance Athletes 01:00:42 VO2 Max and Cardiovascular Training 01:05:00 The Evolution of Hybrid Athlete Training 01:17:04 Balancing Different Training Goals 01:20:51 Final Thoughts and Reflections Strength, endurance, and wellness supplements to fuel your performance. SAVE 10% at BPN Supps: https://bit.ly/nickbare10audio Follow: IG: instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: youtube.com/@nickbarefitness Keep up with Dr. Andy Galpin: We educate, entertain, and inspire the world through story telling. https://www.andygalpin.com/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/drandygalpin/?hl=en

What is going on, guys, and welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today, I sit down with Dr. Andy Galpin, who is a professor and scientist of human performance. Now, I first came across Dr. Andy Galpin through the multi-part podcast series that he did with Dr. Andrew Huberman. And it's an absolutely incredible multi-part series that I highly recommend you guys listen to. And since listening to that series, I've wanted to sit down and talk to Dr. Andy Galpin, I had the opportunity recently. In this episode, we talk about the evolution of hybrid athlete training,

the difference between training for strength, power, and hypertrophy, ways to train each while you're in the gym, and also different levers that you can incorporate into your training into your lifestyle to maximize your full athletic potential. So let's dive right into it. Dr. Andy Gallupin, welcome to the podcast. And it's a pleasure to be here. I know this was, I got to apologize to you because I was a bit of a pain for this entire scheduling process.

So I appreciate you bearing with me, man. I'm really pumped to be here. No, I appreciate it. I understand you got a lot going on. And I appreciate you making time for me. Yeah, man. I'm excited. So before we dive into your background, what you do, what you're interested in, all things, performance.

As I was preparing for this episode, I was previously telling you, my son is three weeks old now. And I was giving him a bottle a few days ago. And I threw up Netflix and on Netflix was this new, it was live, unfinished beef. I don't know if you saw it. It was the hot dog eating contest between chestnut and Kobayashi. Okay. And as I'm thinking about this episode with you and around all things, performance being physical, sport, individual outcome based, they're going over Chestnut and Kobayashi's training routine where there's like mouth and jol exercises and water chugging and stomach stretching. And there's a taper. And they're positioning almost as it's a marathon prep or they're, they're, they're, they're, about to go into the octagon for a UFC fight.

And Joey Chestnut ended up setting a new record of 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes. And I don't necessarily have any questions around this whole show or episode, but just the parallels between performance as you practice and you help people achieve and just recognizing the amazing physical achievement. that human beings can accomplish no matter what that is. Man, I'm here for it all. The funny part is I started off my career in very traditional American sports. So I played football, basketball, baseball, all those things. I started with the athletes I first started with were NFL players, major baseball players. But that said, I actually, one of the reasons I'm in this field is because I love,

if you're not watching this at home, you couldn't see. But my face was just grinning ear to ears yourself. that only because that was a really fun way to start here. But I actually, what I found over the years is it's not that I love football or baseball or things like that. It's, I really love human performance. And so when you, when you're going over that, like things are racing through my head of going, yeah, this is dope. Like I'm so into it. I'm, I don't really care what the sport is. I don't care what the activity is. I'm really down and super interested in people. And however graciously, we want to apply that term. But people just pushing the back.

of human performance, whether this is 40 sporting context, that's fine, whether it is just feeling better and you're never going to compete in a sport. Like, I don't really care. I love people just trying to look, feel, and perform better. So I'm off for it, man. That's, that's dope. I want to be a part of team Kobayashi or team chestnut. And let's figure out to get these guys to 88 or 90 hot dogs. It's wild. It's absolutely wild. Yeah, totally great. I love it, man. So I want to set the stage a little bit to provide some context. and this might change the way that you shape some of the discussion as we move forward. A lot of my audience, a lot of people that consume this content are high performers, athletes,

people who want to get after it. They're training for marathon PRs. They're trying to get stronger. They're potentially now training for like a high rocks or an Iron Man or something of that nature, not necessarily just your everyday individual looking to perform to be healthier, move a little bit better. So I just want to provide that context of that's who I speak to on a regular basis. And I think that's where a lot of your expertise actually exists as well, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, 100%.

I mean, that's what we spend most of our time on. We, of course, have you work with everybody in all walks of life. that's certainly where we started and where we've where we've built our entire model is what's it take what's it look like how do we go about performing our absolute best and to do any of those sports you're talking about and any of the athletes that I currently coach right so you're talking about the Fred warners right an all pro middle linebacker to the john rams one of the best golfers in the world to some of our guys that run fortune 50 companies and some of our things like that like we are actively coaching the best performers in the

world and they have to be ready physically and mentally and recovery and all of that has to be there. So it's not just running fast. It's not just thinking clearly. It's all of that, right? How well do you make decisions under high speed, high pressure, high fatigue? And all the sports and activities you mentioned are the same thing. So yeah, man, I love those things and make the situation as hard as you can. Give me the most ridiculous circumstances. And that's when our team will absolutely get the most fired up. I am curious where your interest for performance optimization came from and started, and I'll share a little of my background first.

When I started playing sports when I was younger, it was playing sports because that's what was expected of me as I was growing up. And I always downplayed my full potential from athletic performance. I thought growing up that I just wasn't born with the, God-given ability to run a fast marathon or lift heavy weights. And then as time progressed and I actually put effort towards this training, I realized, oh, I have the potential to achieve athletic great performance if I just stay consistent with it. So from the beginning, it wasn't necessarily a passion in mine until I realized I can actually achieve

X, Y, and Z. and I think a lot of other people realize that at some point as well. But for you, where did the interest come from? You know, I actually would say it's very similar to many exercise scientists that I know and the fact that athletically I was in the middle. So I was a lot better for the most part at everything than everyone I grew up with. But I wasn't that good relative to the broader world. So I grew up in the country in a small town.

So I was really good there, but I was. was also not really good relative nationally. And so what that does is it gives you that perfect middle ground where I wasn't so good that everything came easy. I was not going to be a division one recruit. I was not going to walk on and be an All-American immediately, right? I wasn't kind of break world records or national records. At the same time, I was good enough to where incentives matter, because I did have accolades and I did get the attention. And so I would look at that from the community I grew up in and would think, okay, you're this small kid from this small town. You're never going to make it against the big people unless you outwork them.

And so when I did outwork them and when I did do things better, I did jump leapfrog those people. And I did pass them by. And that is insanely addicting, right? When you're looking at other people and their physical attributes are so much better than yours and they come from a big city or something like that. And they had advantages and they had strength coaches and speed coaches and stuff. and we had nothing. And then to beat them through hard work and studying more and paying more attention and diving into the field, it's just insanely addicting.

You just want to get better. But at the same time, again, I wasn't so good that it's like I didn't really matter what I do. I'm still going to beat all those other kids. So that's initially what drove it. Being one of the first kids from my town to leave and play college sports was a big deal. So I had all those motivations. And then once I got to college, it was the same thing.

Where I played football at, we had a lot of kids that would come down from Oregon State, that would come from the University of Utah. So it would come from these Pactan schools. And then they would show back up at our smaller university. And so it was wanting to make sure that my job never got taken. So I came in and leaffrogged a bunch of kids immediately. But then there's always this threat of like, what happens if one of these University of Washington kids pops down? Now I said, like, you're not playing anymore.

And then when you're done with college football, you're done. So I didn't want that. And so I was always like no matter how well I was doing. And I did okay, but I didn't do exceptional in college. I never wanted to lose my job. So initially, I just wanted to play. And I wanted to keep playing. I wanted to be able to play because I love football so much.

And then from there, you know, growing up again in the country, my parents were very supportive in the fact that they didn't really care what I did professionally. They didn't care of my brother or sister did. But they just wanted to make damn sure we did not do it. they did. And so I worked with my parents. I worked with my dad in road construction growing up, right? Just doing that. And we did that because he was basically like, I want you to understand what this life looks like if you don't do something better. And so I didn't really want to do that for sure. Like it wasn't hard to convince me. I didn't want to build roads physically with shovels.

My whole life, like that was a pretty easy sell. And so it was like, what are you going to do? And then I didn't know. I wanted to have all those incentives. just talked about. And so my idea kind of going into college is like, what if I could do something like this professionally? I know I didn't want to be a sport coach. I didn't want to coach football. I officially, actually, when I initially graduated from undergrad, I went straight into strength conditioning coaching with pro athletes, pretty high level. It didn't take me very long to figure out. I didn't want to be a full-time strength coach either. And so it was sort of like, I want to be in this field. At the time, there wasn't an academic route. There wasn't sport science for the most part. There

was not strength conditioning as a scientific discipline. I didn't even know anybody, by the way, growing up that had a PhD. My family isn't full of doctors and lawyers. I had no idea what these things were. So I didn't know. And if you're a scientist, you were doing some science thing that I had no idea about. So this path wasn't really there. I just was like, I'm just going to stay in sports.

I don't want to be an athletic trainer. I don't want to be a strength conditioning coach. But let me just continue to forge forward. and more education was never going to harm me. And so I did that until I was able to finally craft the field that I wanted and effectively make my own career, which is I still coach some people. I mean, that means literally I have athletes in the gym that I'm their strength coach for. Like to this day, I still do that.

And I'm also, of course, running studies in our lab. I'm working with people remotely. I'm doing science education. I'm teaching. So it's a little bit of blend of all those fields, right? If you're a coach, you're also a teacher. So I like to teach. I like to educate.

We like to have conversations like this. I like to be in the field a little bit, but I get to do all of them in a little tiny bit so that I'm not overwhelmed and just feel like I'm in a run. And I have plenty of autonomy and innovation where I can go and kind of do and create whatever I want to do in all the outlets I have. So that's really where it all came from. And that's how I got effectively to where I am now professionally. How many athletes or individuals did you say you've worked with? over time oh i don't even know uh what i can say is we've i've coached professional athletes in

over 15 major sports every sport in america uh all pros hall of famers si young winners a multiple one-pict gold medalists and silver medalists uh men women young old we've coached weight loss category stuff uh strength sports endurance sports ball sports uh you sort of name it i've i've done I've directly coached in just about every darn thing you can imagine. Road record holders and many sports. So I don't know what the number would be, but it's been a lot. 18-year-old sensations to 44-year-old starting to get back to the Olympics

and kind of all in between. Well, I asked that question because I wanted to go back a little bit. You mentioned that growing up playing sports, you were kind of middle of the pack. and passing people or getting stronger, getting faster, and beating other people became this addiction, do you find, based off that cohort of all the people you've worked with, that that is more common than the exception where

the person who is either subpar performer or the underdog or middle of the pack applies this stimulus of training and experiences these adaptations, gets stronger, beats the people that had the God-given talent and ability, but didn't put in the same level of work. And they're the ones that go on to break records and win championships.

No. Honestly, no. I was recently with hanging out with Cameron Haynes, and he asked me a similar question about, you know, what wins more at the highest levels of sports, hard work, or talent? And the honest answer is, it's talent. I have dealt with many people who,

they were just better than everyone in the world at 21. That's just what happened. And they do work, but they're not that person you describe. They're not the middle of the pack person that overcomes everyone in breaks world records. That can happen, but most of these people who are winning Syrians

or winning MVPs who are all NBA players, a lot of them are just so much better. Skill-wise, they are so much better. And that tends to shine out really early. So I would say on aggregate, the ones that I've worked with are probably not that. That said, I have major selection biased. So if they're coming to work with me, they probably already have many of those intuitions you have. I have not dealt with a lot of people who don't really work hard and don't do stuff.

There's been some. Some people have just like come in and pay this, kind of check the box off and just not really done much. And I'm like, oh, okay. And they still have done all the things, right? In the sport. So I don't have a fair shake. I don't market people. We don't go out and we don't have deals with teams where they have to come work with us, like a strength coach, you have a team where that athletes are forced to come work with you. Every one of the person athlete I've ever coached has come to me directly. And so by default, they're ready to work and they want to do things more than the average person. So within the group I have personally coached, it would look more like your question.

Yeah, they have gotten after it and passed by, but on an aggregate, being around enough sports, the ones that are the best, the best, it's not always that. Sometimes they are just way better than people. So what I can tell you, though, is when I started my career and still to this day, the ones that I have the closest, most meaningful relationships with, the ones that are like a part of my family that know my kids and stuff like that are oftentimes the ones that are like that because I see something in them, right? We're like, oh, the world is against you.

whether you just had a bunch of bad luck or nobody cares. And that means a ton more to me. So if you look at the Helen Marullis's, the Tatiana Suarez's, these are female wrestlers. Like, who knows and who cares about them? They don't have performance staffs and they don't have millions and millions of dollars of fondness to go after things. They're in a sport that nobody cares about. I'm saying that in a tone on purpose, right?

Especially in 2015, like with Helen. even in the early days of the UFC fighters, unless you're the top, the top, there was not much money there. I just wanted, I got really excited about someone who's going to give their soul to go after something,

and probably no one's going to care. Besides like them, that was what I had the most interested in. I've had that same bond with high profile people that have done very, very well, but they still have that same mentality. Trevor Bauer, Trevor was a great example of that,

was just not particularly loved as a child, if you will, and just had a huge, F-the-world mentality. And that took him all the way up to winning a SIE young and having the highest contract in sports. So those people I have a personal stronger bond with oftentimes. And I can name a bunch of other ones. But yeah, that's actually what drove me mostly to promote sports. And in fact, to go back earlier, when I said I started with the NBA guys or NFL guys and major like baseball guys and then I realized they didn't want to do that, it was because of the exact opposite.

I had probably 17 or 18 guys went in the first round of the NFL draft. And we had probably three Sun Young winners and a bunch of all-star baseball guys. And it took me five months and I was like, I don't want to work with any of these people. And I left that. And I was like, I'm going to go back to science because all of them were the exact opposite. They were not there at all. They were, for the most part. So that pushed me away.

That pushed me away from coaching for a long time because I'm like, I don't want to deal with this. this is not fun. And it wasn't until I got into some of these other people, the Morgan Kings, like female weight lifters. Like nobody cares about these people in 2014, 15. And so that's what brought me back, to be honest. I don't know if I'm chasing a rabbit hole where there's nothing, but is it possible that you can reverse engineer talent?

Because, I mean, talent for me is an observation. Like someone either has it or they don't. But then if you break it down objectively, like, well, what makes them talented? And can you then work on those weaknesses to reverse engineer? Most definitely. You're not chasing a rabbit hole. You're chasing.

This is my career. We have taken many people from moderate level careers to All-Stars to three, four, five extra years to decent paydays to change their family history paydays. Yeah, yeah. So you can 100% to that. What we can't do necessarily are. some attributes. I can't make your arms longer,

but that's an advantage in your sport, right? I can't make you just simply have better instincts on the football field. If you just aren't familiar, you don't grasp the concepts. But what we can do is stack the deck everywhere else. So we can make sure that your sleep is phenomenal. We can make sure that your physiology has no performance anchors. This is what we call them.

So these are things that are putting stress on your system and bringing you down in a way that is nonspecific, or even is specific, but it's not specific to your goal. These can be things you're aware of or unaware of. And once we strip that out, that allows you to then put as many intentional stressors into the system as possible. And stressors drive adaptation. And so that's what we have so many of these cases of people just having these

historic and massive responses. We're like, what the heck? We took out all the stressors that were non-specific to your adaptation. We took all of them out as like a bit facetion. but you get the point, right? We strip a bunch of these performance anchors out. Then we let physiology get guided into direction and then adaptation start happening at this fast rate

and all of a sudden levels to start jumping up. So yeah, man, you can 100% engineer that and that is absolutely what we do. I've heard you talk about levers a lot and I do want to talk about levers, but I don't know if I've heard you mentioned anchors before. Yeah. What are the low-hanging fruit anchors

that people can identify and fix? for performance. This is like the bane of my existence in terms of career. When people hate or complain about podcasts that I do, it's generally because I never give a specific and direct answer, right? And the honest answer is because I'm trying to give you the most genuine answer because I'm not the guy who's like, oh, it's all about your testosterone or it's all about your hamstring strength or it's all about it.

Because the reality of it is I've seen 50,000 things be the performance anchor for an individual person. It is honestly completely different for the individual. It can be the simple stuff. It can be the fact that you're not drinking water. Yes, it can be the fact you're not eating whole foods. For sure, we've seen those be the case. But it could be wildly different things too.

These performance anchors can be what we call visible. These are things you see and you feel, right? So you know you're in back pain. You know you're not sleeping well. You're feeling like you can't make decisions while your word recall is poor. You know you're drinking alcohol. Great. That can happen.

A ton of times, though, it can be hidden stressors. This is how we're afforded them. These are things you don't feel. This is micronutrient imbalances. This could be a pathogen. This could be an immune compromised state that you're in. It could be CO2 tolerance. It could be a breath rate issue.

It could be HRV. Like, there's tons of things that are there where you're just like, I don't know specific what it is. And my most genuine answer is I've seen all of those and more be the case as the one lowest hanging fruit for somebody. So the reason we have our coaching model, the way that we do is we collect months of data on people so that we can come back and say, hey, for you, Nick, the two lowest hanging fruits are going to be some nighttime breathwork and a eating more fiber. Great. Like what? Yeah. Oh, so it's fiber. Fiber. Everyone's eating more fiber.

No, no, no, no. Maybe just for you and your physiology, that would be the lowest hanging fruit. And so being able to have a ton of data, though, that allows us to give hyper precision recommendations is been the key for us in all of our high performance because you're all exercising. You're all taking your diet seriously. You're all recovering. You're doing all the things you would know to do. But now we have to get some objective data behind you that goes past your perception and

your thoughts of like, oh, greens are bad or dairy's bad. We're like, okay, on the colloquial, I don't give a shit. what about for you and your physiology? That's the level that we have to get to to make those big performance changes, and that's what we do. So the answer is, like, what is the lowest hanging through? It's going to be the same five things you hear on every cliche about sleep and hydration and food. Like, yes, those are all true.

But the question is always what's the most true for you? I know there's a lot of people who financially can't afford high-level personalized coaching. So they're consuming and they're applying. this generalized information that they're just learning about online. But what I'm curious is what kind of incremental progress in performance have you seen people make going from generalized information to personalized? Like how big of a difference does it make? Okay.

That's a really great question. On one sense, and I appreciate you asking it that way, I grew up with very little resources personally, you don't ever need to spend a dollar on coaching. You can perform super well without a single blood test without getting your sleep tested. That's canned. I know because I've done it. We have coach people that I mentioned a bunch earlier, but they have no resources and never did. And we won world championships and gold medals in those cases. So I don't want this to ever feel like this is a money game at all. Okay. So yeah, you can do that. That said, you can also get a lot better information when you have actual information to work with.

So for people that have, you know, 300 bucks is all you can afford or zero dollars. Okay, fine. What do you do? I guess the answer to you cross me directly. How big of a deal is it? It can be huge. It can be everything. It can really be the difference between getting again flounding around and another massive

contract. It's not always, though. We sort of joke sometimes people will do all this stuff with them. and then they come back and we're like, all right, you need a multivitamin and a therapist. Like, it can be that straightforward. But if you're asking whether or not that can be the difference, yeah, and we've seen this a ton of times make a huge difference. But if you can't afford any of that stuff, what you can do is control your own detail.

So what do I mean by that? Try to change one thing at a time. So if you're going to try a new supplement, if you're going to try a new training program, if you're going to try a new recovery tactic or breathwork or something, don't try three or four at once. and you don't have any idea what's happening. Now, the beauty of some of the, when you have unlimited funds, we can get all that done at once. We can go faster.

And so what we're really doing is just speeding up the experimental process. But if you don't have any access to that, try different things, do one at a time and take diligent notes as much as you can. And in fact, like a really good example that is how you feel, your subjective perception of how you feel is extremely highly correlated to your HRB. In fact, we've looked at this across millions, like literally millions and millions of data points, and you will get a statistically significant similarity between someone just objectively rating how they feel in the morning, and they're actually a tarpe.

So you can get really, really damn close with a lot of metrics if you're just paying attention and you're stabilizing the system. When things are in chaos, you're eating different things at different times, you're going to bed at different times, your day programs. then we have a really hard time figuring out what is good, bad, or otherwise. And so stabilize, control as many things as you can reasonably, and then change one thing at a time would be my strongest advice for someone that can't afford any high-level coaching or blood work or anything else. That's great. So question around that.

Subjectively, we can evaluate how we feel and wake up and we can alter regulate training and recovery based off of that. Is there a downfall or a downside or a negative consequence of relying too much on objective data and letting the numbers dictate how we feel, what we do, everything? Yeah, another phenomenal question. We would never, ever coach somebody based on their blood work alone. We will never go after a marker. I would never run you through a sleep test.

and then change your habits based on those data. Never. It is always matched to subjective experience. So in our sleep stuff, we're looking at, yeah, like all your sleep data in details, but then also how do you perform the next day? What is your cognitive experience? What is your recall? What is your energy?

What is your sleepiness? What is your fatigue level? Those are all subjective things, right? We always, and we are very clear about this at all time. we always actually say this back to ourselves a bunch. The subjective data are actually king on top of the objective data. Because physiology is unique. It is many athletes, blood work I've looked at, right?

You're talking thousands and thousands at this point. There's still unique physiology, right? So I don't necessarily know how you respond at given levels of any, pick your marker, right? And so if I'm looking at you and your numbers are fantastic and there's something, maybe a marker up or down in a blood or something like that, or we saw something, something going on in the stool sample and like, oh, that's a little bit off. Technically good, but you're self-reported is phenomenal. Your numbers are going up or continuing to progress.

You feel great. I'm probably not coaching that. I'm probably leaving it alone. I might sit back and watch and go, okay, great, what's happening there? So there is always room for unknown. As much as we feel comfortable with all the physiology, again, there is far more unknown and there is known. And so we always rely on performance and subjective testing above and beyond anything else.

So coaching off of objective metrics alone is a problem. Now, you have to be careful if you're only relying on subjective. The beautiful part about blood work, for example, is it doesn't care about your sport psychology for the most part. Like, it doesn't care if you're nervous or anything else you've heard in a podcast or something like that. Like we can really see what your physiology is saying. And I say that because we have seen many, many, many cases where somebody says things like, oh, I'm not stressed. I have very low stress. at all. And then we can actually look at a number of markers like sodium potassium ratios,

match that up with DHA and cortisol and a handful of other markers. And we can say, oh, albumin is another great one. All that stuff can tell us a very different story. And what can happen there is the difference between psychology and physiology. And so while we always will say things like stress is stress, it is treated equally, regardless of where it comes from, that's true. But you may not be perceiving any mental stress. You don't feel stress. But if your physiology is screaming at us, then we see the same thing with like respiratory rate. We see the same thing with resting heart rate. We can see this in a number of areas where we can say, okay,

psychologically you aren't feeling pressure. You aren't feeling overloaded, but your body is. And it's not happy with where we're at. We need to make some changes. And this is a very common thing that we will see for one of two reasons. Sometimes people are just really on and out of tune with their body. Some people, men in particular, just in my coaching experience, if you ask them how they're doing,

they basically say, feeling pretty good, coach, like every damn day. Like, that's basically the only response you get. Women are completely different. You'll get, like, I'm at a 6.3 out of 10. I'm at a 6.9 today. Like, they're much more graded. So I actually trust female, again, on aggregate in my coaching experience. I will trust my female athletes.

If a female athlete tells me that they feel like, like crap, okay, that something is going on. If a male tells me they feel like crap, something really bad is happening. Like for an order for them to be like, oh, I feel kind of crummy today. They must really, really, really feel in the tanks. So you have to be careful there. And I actually did a whole podcast on how do you differentiate this is peaking and plateauing stuff and whether or not you're like, man, am I over trained?

Do I need a day off or am I just kind of being weak? Do I need to push through it mentally? You can tease that out pretty well. But so objective, subjective, they both need to be a part of your equation. There are pros and causes of subjective. there's pros and cons to objective and there's no perfect system. You just have to understand those pros and cons, understand your athlete or yourself, and then try to make the best system you can for that person.

With that observation of men not necessarily admitting when they feel stressed or overworked, is it more common from your experience that men are oftentimes more overtrained than women? Like, will men dig theirself in a hole? No, great question, but I'd say no. No, I haven't personally experienced that. I think for a couple of reasons, I'd say, again, my experiences, men are more likely to stop. Where they're not going to complain from the wrong word. They're not going to vocalize that feeling.

And that can be because of the braggadocio, they don't want to. But honestly, my experience is, they just don't even realize it. They're just not as in tune with what's going on. They just don't even realize it, where the women are more likely to be like, yeah, this is part of the suffering and I'm just going to go there. So I can certainly say you will see men and women on both sides of that equation. It's more of a person-to-person question than it is male to female, I guess is the most appropriate answer, right? So I could give you examples in my experience of men being both sides of that equation, women as well. So we will, again, I'm hesitant, you can see how hesitant to say like this, because it's not just a male versus female thing. And sometimes that can make things worse. And all of a sudden people are like, oh, coach women this way, coach men this way. No, coach people. Coach people the right way. That's the most determinant factor is the individual person. We've got a lot of data in my lab actually to show that too. But that said, just sort of on aggregate, I would not say men have generally been more in the hole than women have.

of. We've seen them both in bad spots. Okay. This is kind of a side question. Going off of sleep and more so applicable to like the chapter of life that I'm in right now. I'm telling you, my son is three weeks old right now. So sleep is not in abundance right now. It's broken throughout the night as we're waking him up to feed him. what do professional athletes or professional performers do who this is their job, this is their career when they have a newborn? Like what have you seen?

Because I thought this a lot recently. Are they waking up in the middle night to feed their children or are they in a separate room sleeping nine to 10 hours? Okay. This is going to sting a little bit. We have dealt with this. I mentioned Fred Warner, NFL player. He's got a baby.

Their season starts a week. a few days from now. Travis Barker, another person, drummer, I coach. He had a baby, and he's on tour, right? So he's all over the world playing rock concerts, and he's got a, you know, family baby. So female athletes, this is a different answer, but for the male athletes, most of them are going to try to be around their kid

for the first few weeks or month, depending on where they're at. And then from there, they have to separate their sleep. And so oftentimes they're either sleeping, the separate rooms or they are having to sort of a rule that, hey, mom is doing all the wake-ups at night especially. So I can't say that that's every athlete that we're done, but most of the athletes I'm thinking up through my head that's going through that, that's just how they have to approach you. You're going to, it's hard because a lot of the men don't want that. They want to, they want to go through that experience. I know I did. When my kids were doing that, I wanted to

get up too because I just wanted to experience the entire thing of having a kid. But the reality of it is, my wife was like, well, if you do that and then A, B, and C happens professionally, this whole family's in trouble. Right. Or we're going on. So it is actually, you're being selfish by doing that. And I was like, whoa, what? And she was so gangster about it.

She's like, you're being really selfish because then you're, you're not going to do A, and B and C, you're going to go slower. You can just, you know, you're not performing. That's not about performing at your best, but you're performing really poorly. right if you're going through that you're performing really really poorly so for a little bit so she gave me like a month with both kids she's like cool you do the thing for the month but after a month like you're going and sleeping downstairs and like you have to be able to perform and so the way that we did it was i woke up way earlier took care of all the things for her as much as i possibly could

so then she could just get right to dealing with the kids and didn't have to take out the trash and like do all that little stuff that's not important. And then I just will straighten the work mode. And you see the kids and all that. But that's how we handle it. So I just shortened my sleep duration. Wasn't sleeping as many hours because I was waking up earlier, going to bed a little bit later to take care of things on the book end of it.

But I was just sleeping fully through those hours I had rather than getting up frequently throughout the night. So a lot of the athletes that we've been around high performance have done a similar thing, where again, they give it maybe two weeks or a month depending on their thing. And then after that, you just have to set it up differently. you have a very short window in pro sports. Oftentimes it's three to four years. And there is a balance, right?

It's like, what do you want? Yeah, but you're also going to have kids once. You're going to have that kid one time. But most of them are going to say, I have to do what I have to do for our family. And that's the sacrifice I have to make. Yeah, I was curious about that. I was thinking through it this past week just with lack of sleep, waking up early to run.

Yep. You start dragging. You're thinking, how do some of these athletes who, whose job, I mean, their family depends on their performance. Yeah. How do they show up and do that? Yeah, especially if you're thinking about like the Olympics. You got a one-time shot, maybe ever.

Once every four years, it's a really hard one. Or one of the more common cases is say you're a professional athlete and you've made, you've been playing for two to four years and maybe you've made three to four million dollars. That's pretty awesome, right? But that's not life-changing money, not anymore. If you can get that second contract, you're talking about $3 or $4 million relative to $30 or $40. And so it is sort of like, hey, you've got to get this done because we have to get that second contract. If not, you're out of a job, out of profession, out of a career.

We've got some money. We have an ice little house, but we got a couple of years at most. So that second contract in most sports is literally life and family changing. And they just have to deal with the baseball players. We've had a lot of baseball players do that. We've had actually, I have one who had to take almost like six or seven months off. Like lost the entire season, basically, because there was all kinds of problems with the kid. Actually, I've had this happen to two major baseball players.

And it basically ended their career. Effectly, they came back, were really, really bad the rest of the year and then got released the next year and really never made it back. Not to say that that's guaranteed you to happen, but it's really hard to sport like baseball to take seven months off. others like John Rom did it pretty well I was able to really handle it so you know it's a tough one but but the reality

is like I said the stakes are so hot with those people that it's it's hard to not go get your sleep so you can do you need to do to set your family up for life yes it's reducing risk with as many variables

as possible to achieve success I would love to switch gears a little bit being more, I guess, tactical around some of the performance outcomes. And I know there's a huge population, I'd say more so than none, that think that going into the gym and moving weight around is kind of just like this one thing. you're trying to achieve all the same performance outcomes just by walking into the gym. But if we break down strength, hypertrophy, and power, I mean, you can train those three different systems, not necessarily always independently, but focused on one of those at a time when you're in the gym. Can you just high-level break down the differences between strength, hypertrophy, and power?

Sure. You can actually just run this mathematically. It's a really easy thing to think about it. If you start off, we'll just button everything against strength. So this is force production. This is mass times acceleration. When you hear strength, hear force. That's Newton's. That is what it is, right? How much can you lift one time?

There are plenty of ways one can define strength, but just to make things simple right now, it is at its most fundamental level, the maximum amount of load you can lift, move, push, pull, drag, however you're defining it, one time. Not how long can you drag that for, not how many times can you do it. it is the maximum force you can produce. The way that we would test this in our laboratory, as you would stand on a force plate or set on a force plate or whatever you're going to do, and you would exert the highest amount of force in a couple of second window, and we would just look to see how high that number can get.

The functional equivalent to this is if you were thinking about a sport like, and I'll almost say it because it's going to mess people, but a sport like a strong man where you're going to lift a car or drag a train or push a bus, they actually are generally not strength competitions. It's funny enough. Certainly a display of strength, but it's not a quote unquote technical maximum strength effort because they're doing multiple repetitions.

It's still really, really heavy, of course, and all that. It's impressive and awesome and fun and all the positive adjectives I could throw out of it. But it's quote unquote, not a maximal strength because they're doing multiple repetitions. A true maximal strength are the events in Strongman when they say, okay, the winner is going to be the person

that lifts the heaviest truck wants or whatever the case is, right? So that's maximal strength. Well, what's power then? Power is simply that force multiplied by velocity. It is work done over a given amount of time. And so what we're looking for here is to say, okay, great, you can produce a certain amount of force, but then how fast can that thing move? And if you actually plot force over velocity, you get a curve. It's called the force velocity curve.

It's one of the times science makes sense. What that basically means is the heavier something gets, the slower it can move. that is a non-negotiable, basic physical law, the lighter something gets, the more potential you have to move it faster. Okay, that's just what it is. So at some point, though, if we think about power being force multiplied by velocity,

you want both to be high, right? Because you're getting multipliers on both sides. The most amount of force or the most amount of velocity. What that means, though, given the force velocity curve, is if I do something really heavy, it'll go slow. So a maximal strength lift won't be powerful because it'll be too slow. The other of that spectrum, something extremely fast and light, won't be powerful either because there's no force behind it, because there's no mass.

Let me give you a couple of examples. If I said, okay, I'm going to throw three implements and we're going to play a game, Nick, you and I are going to throw these at each other's face. And you get to go first, right? And you can either throw a 200-pound boulder. you can throw a baseball or you can throw a wiffle ball at me. Which one of those would you throw if your goal is to kill me? Well, you might be think, oh, I'll do the 200 pound boulder, right?

But you would barely roll that shit over. It would hit my face and there would be a lot of momentum behind it because it's heavy, but there's no velocity. It wouldn't do much damage other than the mass there. It's just too heavy. If you threw the wiffle ball, you could throw that thing really fast, and it would sting, but it's not going to do anything because there's no mass behind. You look at the baseball, though, and that would kill me because it's a little bit more mass

and almost the same amount of velocity, a little bit less, but a lot more mass and that's going to have danger. That's power. It's almost always done at a little bit lighter end of the spectrum. The classic number people will say is peak power happens at like 30% of your maximum force production. It's not really true. sometimes it's 30, 50, 70, kind of dependent on what you're doing.

But that's the best way to think about power versus strength. It is how much damage can happen because I can get the best of both worlds. If you think about something like a squat, you will have the most power production in your squat, generally around 50% of your 100 max. Lower than that, it's too light. You'll jump way up in the air and there's not enough, you'll go fast, but there's not enough force. Heavier than that, you go too slow. That's different for every person.

rough number. If you compare that though to like a snatch or a clean, that peak power happens on those at like 80 or 90% of your water amounts. That's why those are much more powerful movements. So fundamentally, that's what power is and that's what strength is. Now, the other thing to really be careful with us and pay attention to is when I say power is work over time, because that's what it is mathematically, that does not mean you want a long amount of time. You want the shortest amount of time. That's the speed component. So what you will not get power from is doing as many repetitions as you can. Because if you're doing more than one repetition, fatigue sets in and you start to go slower. So the time component is not an endurance thing here. There's been a lot of

misinterpretations about over the years. It is short. It is non-fatiguing. It is peak maximum velocity that you can obtain with a moderate to low load. That is true power. reduction. So doing box jumps for a set of 30 is not a power exercise. The first might be, but the reality of it is when you know you've got 30 reps to do, you're only kind of doing as many as much effort on the first rep that you have to just to get on top of the box, because you know you've got 20 more, 29 more to do. And so it is not a peak velocity or a peak force activity. It is a kind of moderate power activity sustained over time. Some sports, that matters, not saying it's a bad way to train, but it's not going to achieve peak power.

That'd be getting you better, maybe sustaining your current power level over time. That's fine. That's there. But that's a fundamental difference. So those two are there. The other in the spectrum is then hypertrophy. And when you're talking about there is simple muscle growth. And that is no longer a functional outcome.

That is not as having to do with your capacity to move. It is a muscle size. And so when we understand that fundamental concept, speed, power, force, velocity, those things are actual attributes, physical things we can test and measure on a time domain, on a force domain, on a force plate. Hypertrophy is simply an expression of how physically large you are. That is relevant because now that determines a lot about how we approach these things. If I'm training for force and I'm not producing force, it's not the optimal way to get better

in producing force. if I'm trying to improve power and I'm not producing peak power or really close to it in my training, I'm not going to improve it. Hypertury, though, it doesn't matter how we get there. As long as we get a net result of muscle growth, then it doesn't matter if it's fast. It doesn't matter if it's slow. It doesn't matter anything else. It's just trying to get a stimuli into muscle to achieve muscle growth.

So your options when training for hypertrophy are really large. Again, you can go fast. You can go slow. We can talk about all the different. methods and types of ways to get hypertrophy. But when it comes to speed, power, or strength, the prescription needed in training is much more specific because we actually have to match the attribute to the adaptation.

So how does training power necessarily contribute to increases in strength? If I'm going for one rep, say at 50% of my one rep max, but I'm focused on speed, Yep. How does that assist in strength development? Phenomenal question. So at its core, it won't. Because remember, if we look at power, we're looking at work over time.

But it's also force velocity, work over time, but mathematically it is the same thing. So I apologize for going back and forth. If you run the equation, it's just different levels. So let's think about power as force times velocity. So in theory, if I improve my power, that means either my velocity improved or my force production improved. If you're doing something like 50% of your 100 max, it's unlikely to be enough force to develop, to drive increases in force production. You're probably getting better by increasing velocity. That's how you succeeded there.

So your power went up because your velocity increased. Now, that said, if you're working at the heavier end of the force velocity curve, then you're actually potentially going to drive some force increases because you're actually working on force production and you're just doing it. as fast as you possibly can. Remember also, force is mass. So the weight, the load, the weight that in science, we wouldn't refer to like body weight as weight. It's mass, right? That's the more technical term. But force is mass multiplied by acceleration. So this is another key. People forget acceleration is half of the equation of force production, which is another way to say, acceleration is half of strength. Half of it is the weight. Half of it is the weight.

Half of it is acceleration. So in your power training, if you're also developing acceleration, then by de facto, you're working on force and therefore strength as well. And so by training at 50% if you're working on the velocity or the acceleration part of the equation, that's how you kind of backdoor your way into greater strength. But it's not the best way. The most specific way to improve strength, you know, just again, according to the sort of the books here, it's not a real programming recognition, but most specifically, you have to spend as much time trying to produce peak force as you possibly can. So if you look at classic powerlifting, and I apologize for the term, but power lifting is actually the sport of one-ret-max peaking. In this conversation,

it should be called like force lifting or strength lifting. But nonetheless, it's the sport, squat, deadlift, bench press, one-ret-max is king there, right? They will work on peak strength, And they will work on acceleration a lot. And that's the exact reason why. Because they want to go after mass as well as acceleration, because that is what's going to truly optimize total force production. I know I throw a lot of terms out to there. You want to go back over anything?

It's a lot of physics, volume mechanics are there to digest. No, I have one question coming off of that. You know, physique sports and physique development aside, is primarily focused on hypertrophy, building muscle, building size. When you're working with athletes, is it rare that you're focused on hypertrophy? And is most of your focus on strength and power production? Rare would not be the term, but it's not the most common.

You're right. This would be a performance anchor. So in going through your analysis, whatever sport you're in, If we identified that there is a functional deficit in, say, force production or speed, okay, then I'm going to break that down. And I'm going to say, why? Is this a skill issue? And by a skill, I don't mean like shooting basketball.

I mean movement skill. You don't know how to produce force. There's force there in the system, but you haven't learned how to express it from your foot to your left hand. So we have leakage in the system. you're not firing the right muscles in order. You aren't transferring power appropriately. Your actual technique in the sport, you're almost coming up too high or it's coming too low.

So the very first thing we actually work on is, is the capacity already there, but you're just not getting as much out of your system that you currently have. That is often the case. In fact, many, many times that's the case. So this is simply a skill, and by now again, I'm saying a movement skill issue.

This is why your true strength coaches are going to talk about strength and speed are skills. That's what they mean when they say that. There is an urge just muscle fiber capacity. Yes, that's also true. But this is a skill issue. So step number one we're trying to identify.

Do you just not understand how you have to move to produce more force or more power? If you look at like the speed into this of the world, a true sprint coaches, people that are coaching the Olympians look at Altus and that group. And Dan, those guys, they're going to talk about your tempo and your rhythm and your rhythm and timing. You're like, what the hell is tempo and rhythm have to do is sprinting? A ton, a ton, because everything has to be contracting and relaxing in the perfect rhythm. If not, when your left hamstring is contracting, but your quad is supposed to be relaxing, but it's not, that just locked your leg up, right? Now, it's not locking it up. I'm being dramatic there, but if it's

locking it up 3%, that's that difference between shaving off a couple of 100 seconds, right? So it is a rhythm of contract, relax, contract, relax, and smooth. That is really, I'm honest, the first wave. If someone comes to us with that question, that's the stuff we're trying to figure out. Like, how well do you move, transfer force? There are connective tissue lines through your body. Are they transferring again from your right knee to your left shoulder blade appropriately and things like that? That all aside, let's say they pass that.

Everything's down there. Then we're going to look at them and say, okay, great. Is this a velocity issue? Is this an acceleration issue? Is this a force issue? Unless they pass all those tests. We say no, no, no, it's none of those things. We feel like they're getting, you know, she's getting everything out of her body absolutely possible there.

But you're undersized. Then at some point, mass does matter, right? I mean, look at the sports of Olympic weightlifting and power lifting. We continue to set world records in those sports without going up body weight at all, which says we have the capacity to continue to develop power and strength about adding muscle mass to a large extent. and we are clearly not there because we're continuing as a group to set records in those sports without gaining any more muscle mass and people are lean as hell in those sports. That said, there's a huge overlap between muscle size and muscle performance.

So if you're in a sport like power lifting or weight lifting, and I've coached many world record holders in those sports, male and female, outside of those sports, then we're probably going to look and say, hey, look, maybe putting on a little bit of muscle is an easy win. here. And if we identify somebody is under muscle and that circumstance, then yes, we would fold in the more classic, we'll call it bodybuilding, hypertrophy cycle training. So that's one case when we were bringing in. The other case, and this is much shorter, don't worry, would be if we simply feel like we need that for joint integrity, connective tissue health, asymmetries are there

between, say, right side and left side. So we will use a technology called Springbok. Springbok analytics lets us do full body MRIs. We can identify the volume of every muscle on your body. And so I can look at your right vassus lateralis, your outside quad muscle, compare that to your left vassus lateralis muscle. I can see are they undersized for your frame? Is one bigger than the other one?

If so, by how much. I can look at that compared to your glutes and your adductors, and we can understand maybe it's not a whole body asymmetry or lack of muscle, but maybe we need more muscle in your, your carries minor. We can see how that's happening. We do this with our pitchers,

major league baseball. Like how is the shoulder girdle, how's a rotator cuff changing muscle size over time? Because we do an MRI every single year. So if there may be some hypertrophy training in there, it has nothing to do with them being undersized, but it may be some postural, some joint integrity.

So we do this post injury, right? So you torn ACL, you torn Achilles, you come back. Are we really sure that the soleus is back? That's that back of your leg, calf muscle that goes all by the bottom there. Maybe you're back to play, you don't have pain and your PT gave you the green light, but if we still see that it's 15% lower than your other side and it wasn't like that prior to injury,

then we may continue to develop hypertrophy in that soleus until it truly gets back to function. So those are the cases in which we would go after hypertrophy, but as you stated your question initially, It's not generally where we spend most of our time as most of our athletes, but those would be the two primary cases in which we would spend a lot of time on a bird tree. I'm glad you mentioned sprinters because, you know, as a runner myself, when I think of running, I think of endurance running, longer distance. Okay. I rarely think about sprinting unless it's around the Olympics.

And then I realize there's these people who are incredibly fast in the world. And I understand how applicable strength and power is for someone who is sprinting, shorter distances, just great production of force moving forward. Outside of reducing risk of injury, how beneficial is hypertrophy, strength, and power for endurance athletes that are longer distance? outside of just kind of like you mentioned the joint support, for example. Yeah, of course. Okay. So another awesome one. Hypertrophy is an outlier here because there is no way ever we're being strong and powerful is bad for an endurance athlete.

It's never going to hurt, right? Now, it may not be the biggest ticket, most important thing you have to work on, but if I could just take a dial and turn you up and give you 15% more power, you only ever got. better. There's no scenario in which an endurance lot thing gets worse when they get more powerful if it didn't compromise their training or injuries. But it was. Muscle size is not the same, though. You have to move mass as an endurance athlete. So you don't necessarily just want to dial that number up as high as possible. So muscle size, we have to pay particular attention to. This is a little bit different for a swimmer versus a runner. A runner, this really, really matters, right? A rower, it matters, but there are different considerations depending on the

sport that you're in. So we have to treat muscle size a little bit differently in those ones. We actually, I just got done doing a client program last week, a 60 year old who is trying to qualify for Boston, female. And she's very significant undersized. We need to put some muscle mouse on her. Now, that's rarely the answer we give to endurance runners, especially the decent ones already. But she's at a level where we deem it to be, you can't, you don't have the horsepower to stay healthy, to regulate your metabolism. But that's the exception. Most of the time, it's like, okay, can we keep you healthy and then keep the muscle size we have around you? Right. Now, if you look at the high-level endurance runners, especially like, look at the

world record marathon. We're talking, we'll just call it two hours at this point. We'll break that down. You know how fast of a 100 meter dash that is? I think, I can't remember exactly no way, but it's like a 12-second hundred meter dash or, you know, 12 and a half second. It's a 60-second 400 meter. You have to be really, really fast to do that. So you're never going to run a fast marathon if you're not fast period. You have to functionally be fast. So that makes sense. Every endurance work gets better when you are faster. And there is a mountain of data to support that. Again, if it's compromising your endurance work, okay, sure, like don't do that. But with that excluded, if you can get faster and more powerful, things get better. Muscle mass is a little bit

different. So we will look again to break down the athletes endurance performance and say, why aren't you running that race faster? Why aren't you swimming that thing faster? Is it a technique issue? Is it a fueling issue? Is it a recovery issue? Is it your training program? And then, of course, speed and power strength would be one of those many, many variables that we're going to consider. And if we deem that to be a problem, then we may focus on it. But sometimes it's not. Sometimes people are really fast ready, but they're bunking or their warm-up sucks or any other number of variables are there. And that's what's really, that's their performance anchor for them. So we will almost always add power and strength in or at least keep it around if they're already doing it.

But muscle mass is a different answer. Yeah, I've trained with and worked alongside a lot of endurance athletes who neglect strength power. and hypertrophy, and they oftentimes every season come across with some sort of injury. And then on the flip side, I see the athletes who might be sitting a little bit heavier, slightly, but incorporate the strength, power, hypertrophy training, and rarely get injuries. And if they do, they recover a whole lot faster. Yeah. I mean, you can easily put in the strength and power stuff and not gain any mouse.

Easily. So there's just no detriment to doing it. It's not a lot of volume. It won't take a lot out of your central nervous system or peripheral nervous system. It won't delay recovery or fatigue. It doesn't take that long. You're not in the gym for an hour and a half, and it's not fatiguing. So there's just very little downside to incorporating true speed, power, and strength stuff for neurosathlete.

Again, we could have a different conversation about muscle mass. But one would argue, this is, again, how you stay healthy from a connected to your perspective. So pretty good idea. Kind of on the tangent of running, briefly talking about V-O-2 Max, if someone's sport or someone's competition does not require improvements in running, what is your go-to exercise or movement to improve

VO2 max? Because again, to add to that, for a lot of people who want to start incorporating some sort of cardiovascular training into their programming, improve their VO2 max, they start running. They're not a runner. They add too much volume. They get injured. So they stop running. They stop doing all cardio. What? What?

What's the best option, in your opinion, if running isn't necessary? And you nailed it. There are no sport has a higher injury rate than running. Yeah. It's kind of a trick of math a little bit because there's a lot of people can run. But yeah, you're dead on right there. The assault bike, man. The assault bike is perfect for that.

It involves a lot of muscle mass. In fact, we do a lot of our VO-2-Max testing with the assault bike. I know that Roman, Fulman at the UFC, at the UFC's Performance Institute, has developed an entire VO-toam access for fighters on the assault bike, and it's been validated against a traditional treadmill or med malac cart. I will often do that because if you don't run or don't know how to run well, then you get really bad numbers on a treadmill anyways. Because your legs are cast and up blowing up way before you truly get to a cardiovascular failure point.

So you don't get great numbers. On a bike, it is harder because now basically it is how well can you handle the quad burn. And if you can't, then you tend to give up there. The other problem with the bike is, there's not a lot of muscle mass involved. So you generally can't get to a true peak. If you're reasonably trained on the bike, you can certainly get great numbers. A well-trained cyclist will get better numbers on a bike than on a treadmill. But in general, for the person you described, yeah, let's get the most amount of muscle mass involved where I can still stabilize and standardize it.

And that's the assault mic. I generally don't like the rower as much candidly because it's hard to, you know, get back to the bottom and come back up again, you end up losing time in your anterior tip tends to fatigue a ton because you're trying to pull so hard to get back down. So it's not great. And then you'll, if they don't know what they're doing there, they, you know, the back is in a questionable position there. And I don't like them thinking about that.

I want them to get on something where they don't feel like they're going to fall off and they're going to get hurt. And the only thing stopping them is wanting to die, you know, heart wise or lung wise or whatever. So the assault bike is a phenomenal option for that. Are you talking about the assault bike in terms of actual testing for VO2 max or or training to improve both? Okay. Yeah, yeah.

So it's the same thing, right? So we can get a true number on the bike on the on the assault bike. And then training wise, you're getting the most amount of muscle incorporated. And you can get a lot of stuff done in a very safe position where we're not have to worry about Achilles and knee injuries because we're running or back injuries because we're doing kettlebells or anything like that. And we also have a direct metric in front of us. So we can know the wattage or the RPMs and things like that. So in the timing, it's all very standardized. So we get the benefits of the treadmill bike, but we get the other benefits of like maybe

doing kettlebells or something like that. So it's a perfect match. So from a training perspective, it's phenomenal. Would you program with that similar to the way you program running where, you know, say, for example, you used the 80-20 principle where 80% of the time you're spending on the bike, it's these easy longer distance rides and then 20% of time if you're doing intervals, sprints, high intensity efforts? You can.

I generally don't though. So generally for anything that that low intensity, injury risk is so low, I want to develop tissue tolerance. So that's what I want you outside locking or like jogging or something, right? We're not going to get killed that way. If you're talking about really low intensity stuff, then I actually want you outside and moving at all possible. let's build up the connected tissue, the safety, the load management, all that stuff, or the pool or whatever we're going to be in.

And then anything above that, then we'll probably get on the bike. Have you seen over time, and I heard you mention this in the multi-part series you did with Andrew Heberman, talking about the evolution of, I'll just use the popular term now, hybrid athlete training, where it's a combination of endurance and strength training. And you had a really great example of kind of the evolution of that journey of the last couple decades where historically strength athletes wouldn't even touch cardiovascular conditioning and then endurance athletes wouldn't touch strength training. They'd run away from it.

And then over time, we've seen people add it back in, pull it back out, add it back in. where have you seen that evolution kind of come from and go to and where are we moving into the future? Like how are endurance athletes respecting strength? How is strength respecting endurance? Sure. I'll give you the short version of that story and land us home here with where I think we're at right now. If you look at the history of exercise science and exercise physiology is a scientific discipline, this all started in what was called the Harvard Fatigue Lab. And this is literally a lab designed in early 1900s to study fatigue. Now, this was not about sports, but this was for industry. So how long can somebody work in a coal mine?

It's a minimum amount of calories we need to send our soldiers to. How much water does somebody need at 100 degrees, 105 degrees? It is things like that, right? So working in factories, military, things like that. So they were studying fatigue, calories, thermal, exhaustions, hydration, things like that. Okay. So that started moving along. Then the World War II ended in that lab shut down.

The funding ran out for it. And a few years later, we had some things change the history of human sports, if you want to call it that. You had Roderver Bannister. You had the Mount Everest was climbing 1954, I think. The same time you had the four-minute mile eclipse, 1954. Same year you had the DNA double helix surface that are coming out. So all this stuff starts coalescing and it's like, whoa, bam, sports become huge. Now in 1954, there becomes a science for economics.

and is science for performance and a science for physiology. So then you start, you have a 20 year run where you have scientific fields moving into exercise performance. People running labs, building human performance labs and looking at nutrition. This leads you up into the 1970s where you have nutrition coming on board. We start to realize, oh my gosh, carbohydrates are really great for exercise performance and protein builds muscle. We didn't know these things prior to this field emerging.

Well, that entire field of scientists were endurance athletes. So runners, swimmers, and cyclists. In fact, if you listen to the old timers, you'll hear stories about how they would go for three-mile jogs, and like the entire campus would stop and watch them because they were waiting for somebody to die. It's like, that's how foreign exercise was in the 1950s and the 60s. At this time, you still had a large amount of people talking about, even in the scientific community, that strength training was bad for you. There's a good reason for this.

One of the most staunch advocates of it in early 1990s died of a heart attack early. And so people were like, see, we told you. We told you. You're going to die. And so it was a very anti-strength training and starting to promote endurance running and cycling and swimming in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. All the science was in those areas because that's what the scientists in those areas liked to do personally. You start seeing the explosion of the marathon. People are signing up for it.

It's becoming a pastime and activity. Women get introduced much later, but when they get in, like that participation explodes. In the 1970s, though, that all started to change because Arnold Schwarzenegger, pumping iron came out, and people started going, whoa, he's not dead. Lufriigno's not dead. And wait a minute, he literally is Conan. These guys are the incredible Hulk. You can literally take a normal person and make them into a superhero. I mean, just think about the power of that in 1970, 1975.

There isn't the internet, there isn't the TV, and you have these young kids with comic quotes, and then they're seeing a real person in that character. It's like, holy shit. So now you've got a whole generation of people going like, I want that. How does that happen? And so now scientists start studying that stuff, and it turns out people aren't dying from it. And it turns out we're not losing flexibility, and we're not losing any of these other things

that people need the negative claims. In fact, it's the opposite. These people are healthier with greater ranges of motion. And oh my gosh, their cardiovascular system is fantastically healthy. And the entire place has to shift. And so 1970s, 1980s, 1990s launches bodybuilding. People have become megastars in the field. You've got Ronnie Coleman's going off.

You've got gyms. You have commercial gyms for that matter, right? You have exercise equipment, a billion-dollar industry. you have TV, you have workouts on TV, and most of these things are a strength train and their body body body. Well, then you start cruising in the 1990s, and now the NSAA has taken off. NSEA, the National Strength Commission Association, started for the most part at the University of Nebraska. 1980s in Nebraska football is dominating the world. Why? Because they're the first people lifting weights.

And the people are going like, what are these athletes doing? So now strength training starts becoming into athletics in the 1990s, right? It starts smashing. And now everybody's doing it. Because if not, you're getting completely crushed your left behind. So you got football training, you got endurance running going on in the early 1990s, and then you've got bodybuilding. Well, at some point in those throughout the 1990s into the 2000s,

now you've got kids in my generation, born in the late 70s, early 80s, early 90s, growing up going like, well, I like the football thing, but then I also like the science thing. But there's no science in this stuff. So now we start going to school and start getting PhDs and start running scientific laboratories looking at that stuff, not just endurance cycling and swimming, but now we want to know the science of high intensity training, the science of lifting weights, the science of power training.

So we start developing labs and expertise in those things. Early 2000s or so, people start looking at now high intensity interval training. Why something we had been doing came from sports, came from Nebraska, came from strength and conditioning, never was in the exercise science field for the most part, and people started saying, look, I'm doing this in my training. I feel phenomenal. This has to be healthy for me. 2010, people start catching wind to this.

2015, now people are talking about high-intensity training. At the same point, in those 2000s, like 1990s, people are tired of being in the gym for two and a half hours. The average person is getting the gym equipment in their garage, and they're coming home after a day of work, and they're doing an hour and a half arm workout. And they're going, God, my elbows are hurting now. And now I'm not 22 anymore,

because when I started this in the garage, 1885, I was a kid, and now 20 years later, everything hurts. And it's forever. Now I got kids. I got a job and I can't do it. Enter CrossFit. CrossFit comes in and says, hey, hey, we'll get you in and out in 20 minutes. It's going to be big compound movements. It's lifting weights like you like. It's not endurance running. All these other options. Remember, are hour long workouts. If you're in terms out that you're running for hours at a time or swimming, if you're bodybuilding, you're in there for hours. And CrossFit comes in and says, we'll get you in and out 20 minutes. And we'll get huge results because we're doing big complex movements. And oh my God,

people loved it, right? Then the science at the same time on high intensity interval training starts coming out and it's so supportive. And CrossFit just erupts, right? Taking over, everything else is kind of dying out because people are tired of getting hurt and don't want the time in that. People that are running are getting hurt and losing muscle mass and that's not great. And the the strength training people are realizing I'm hurt and I'm so out of shape. I can't walk up the stairs in my own house without really like they stop you don't like to feel like that when you're 50 you don't mind it when you're 32 when you're competing you start getting older you're like I'm tired of being out of shape all the time and I saw plenty of power lifters that that happened to so

so I know that's the case so boom crossfit enters it field two maxes are going up endurance is improving I'm losing a ton of fat I'm getting stronger I'm doing more interesting workouts that's a lot shorter well then you got the 2010s kind of roaring on and then people are hitting the wall. People are getting broken. People are getting real injuries. Why? Because not a lot of the coaches there are emphasizing technique. Everything is being done to maximum effort and fatigue. Way too high volumes, way to high intensity. And then a lot of the coaches in those spaces. I mean, look what Brian McKenzie did, started cross-fend endurance and then started to realize, shit, everybody is getting buried here. These normal people who are going high-stressed jobs and leaving

the gym taking pre-workouts going these high-stressed workouts are frying. Nervous system. is getting tanked. Everything's him. And so we had to come back out of that bubble and go, okay, wait a minute. And by the way, also, CrossFit was like so anti-anything anything bodybuilding, anti-machines, anti-isolation. We don't need any of those things. We squat and deadlift and burpees. And then it's like, okay, well, what about that shoulder thing that's constantly hurting? What about that ankle? And so then slowly that field had to evolve. You see a lot of people leave it and brain down and say, okay, great. So there's some magic area of the high intensity, but we can't do it all the time. And there's some magic to that long duration stuff, but we can't do that as our only thing.

And there's some magic to that bodybuilding stuff, but we can't do that as our only thing either. And then you just saw the field move in to say, okay, great. What if we had some pieces where we went longer duration, lower intensity? No one if we had some pieces where we do short, high intensity work and some heavy stuff and some corrective exercises and maybe some mobility. Kelly Starrett, okay, great. Maybe we should open up a little bit before we get into bad positions with load and add some fatigue on there. And now the field is sort of landing back in this place of like, all right, now everybody's

basically doing the same thing. It's what we were doing in strength conditioning in the early 2000s. It's a little bit of kind of everything. And now the last big pivot here has been extending that from jerks like you and I in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s who just love this shit to the longevity space, to the obesity space. And saying, actually, it's this stuff. It's these traits that all of us need. Look at the research.

now. One of the most significant predictors from a physical attribute perspective for longevity, for wellness span, for lifespan, it is your leg strength, it is your foot speed, it is your grip strength, it's your view of two max, it's your low resting heart rate, it's low body composite or good, it's having enough muscle mass. Like these are the things that are going to stack up of almost any other health metric we have. And you look at that and you're like, okay, so I need to be able to go for a long amount of time at a low intensity. I need to be able to be relaxed and calm. I need to not burn myself out. I need to have some high quality muscle. I need good mobility and flexibility and balance and speed and power. And you're like,

all pretty sure I just designed an athlete. So we all kind of just landed back on being like, I guess we should all just be as athletic as possible. Not only care if you can shoot the basketball very well, but we should have the rest of those attributes for most of us to live our best lives as long as possible. And what, it took us about 50 years from this. 70s to to kind of come back full circle? I call it 100. 100. Yeah, because I mean, really, you started this thing.

This genesis happened again, 19, 19, 19, 1912, 1924. Like, these are some big landmark years in the field. We're basically 100 years later. We didn't do much for the first 25 years in terms of like sport performance. But the genesis of exercise physiology and nutrition for exercise and energy balance stuff, But it's really basically a 100-year-old field. So that's why I'm loving my training personally right now. I'm training for a high-rox.

And the last couple years have done bodybuilding competitions, Iron Man triathlons, ultras, marathons. And what I found with this high-rox training right now, it's a perfect balance of all things where I have my easy runs, 80% of my runs, weekly are easy runs. Then I have my tempo workouts. I have my track workouts, critical velocity. I have my strength training, which is a good balance of power, strength,

and hypertrophy. And then I have my high intensity interval training, which is my high rocks simulation circuits. Like I'm going to do one this afternoon. And I truly feel like right now I'm in the best shape of my life because it's balanced across all of those different disciplines. Feels great. Yeah. I mean, what you're going to see is most people will have that answer. If you were, again, answer was different when I was in my 20s. I really just wanted to be powerful and strong. I didn't care about my overall fitness or conditioning or endurance at all. And now a little bit older than that, I'm much like you.

I'm like, I actually feel really good when I can go up and down the mountain for five hours. And like, I feel great after that. But then I definitely want to do some stuff really hard and I want to get after it. And then you got to balance that so I don't hurt all the time because eventually you just get really tired of hurting. Yeah. I've done through his evolution. where it's all in on strength, all it on power,

all in on size, eat as many calories as possible. Don't run. Don't take the stairs. Limit movement as much as possible. So I've gone to all the extremes. I've gone to the extremes of just endurance training where I stop lifting because I want to lose size.

And you find out going all in on one, sometimes it's required for that goal. But holistically, overall, it's out of balance. I'm super into it, man. Like, I'm super into, I don't think people should do the same training their entire life. I agree.

I think you should totally do a year where you optimize for serving. Do six months and you do a CrossFit competition. Do, like, do these periods. Like, you have so many years of athletic life in you. You have decades and decades. You don't have to be around in your entire life. I think you should absolutely optimize for a hunting trip one year. and like just do all kinds of different stuff

I think again most of us feel pretty good when we're doing all of a little bit there but I think you did it the right way because now you can look back and one you had a lot of fun man I'm sure you did all kinds of cool stuff and you probably won't get hopefully you'll do another bodybuilding competition

maybe or something right and then you'll go do another triathlon that's I think that's great I think everyone should do that it fresh and you get humbled You get humbled by the things you don't know. You're learning new skill, your student again.

And it forces you to remove ego to get better. Yep. So I enjoy it. Yep. I mean, my friend Dan Garner had his first kid and as a lifelong, like, well, he was an athlete back in his younger years, but he's basically a bodybuilder for the most part. And he had his kid. He's like, all, I'm going to run a marathon in my first six months. Not a runner at all, like at all.

And then I think within six months having his kid. he ran his marathon, reasonable time too, and then he had a lifetime PR bench pass. So he was just like, all right, I'm going to do something entirely different. And then he's done some bodybuilding things since then. But he's done a different stuff. So I think it's a really cool idea to have lots of different goals. And I don't think people should stay with one thing for more than a few years at least. I agree.

No, I agree. Well, Andy, I appreciate the time today. all the insight info guidance it's it's been great and you know your current podcast perform it's been a huge resource uh so excited for future episodes that you guys will be launching awesome man i really appreciate your support on that season one is wrapped up we had 10 episodes they are all out now and then uh i think we'll probably start filming the season two here pretty soon that's awesome i appreciate it man yeah thank you so much, man. It was a great time. Anytime I get to talk about kind of the history of the field, I really love it. So phenomenal questions. Thank you so much. Your patience getting this thing

scheduled, man. It was a blast. All right. Thanks, brother.