Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Pavel Satsulin.
Pavel Satsulin is considered one of the premier strength training and fitness coaches in the world.
He has pioneered the development of various programs to improve strength, which he calls the mother of all fitness.
Indeed, today you will learn about strength as a practice, as a skill that can be applied to sports, that can be applied to general fitness, to getting leaner, to getting faster and to improving your endurance.
As Pavel Satsulin explains, by building one's strength through body weight exercises, free weight exercises and occasionally machines, one can develop incredible levels of fitness at any age.
We discussed some of the spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing strength feats like 100 pull -ups per week.
And we emphasize that one does not have to be seeking hypertrophy.
One does not have to be seeking getting larger muscles in order to get exceptionally strong.
I myself these days am focusing primarily on trying to get stronger and build endurance for sake of health and for general life reasons.
And because getting really strong turns out to be very beneficial in every aspect of life.
Today, you're going to learn how to get extremely strong.
you can add muscle if you want in parallel with that.
Or as Pavel Satsulin explains, you can pursue strength and flexibility for their own sake and there's tremendous value for doing so.
So today's discussion pertains to women, to men, and frankly, to people of all ages.
I do think that pursuing strength as its own thing, independent of muscle growth, which we hear so much about these days.
Everyone wants hypertrophy, grow muscle, this and that.
Pursuing strength as its own thing is a tremendously valuable endeavor.
Today, you're going to learn how from the world's premier expert in this topic.
You're in for a very special episode with Pavel Satsulin.
He is truly in a class all his own when it comes to fitness and strength training.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science -related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors and now for my discussion with pavel satsulan pavel satsulan welcome andrew a pleasure to be on your podcast i respect your work a lot thank you likewise thank you i will say that you and perhaps one other person have truly changed the way
that i think about fitness the way that i train and i'm super excited to talk to you today.
So I'm withholding excitement.
There are a bunch of different ways to think about this thing that we call fitness, strength, endurance, hypertrophy.
And there's so much information out there now.
How do you conceptualize fitness?
Meaning, do you look at things through the lens of, are we focused on nervous system, bone, connective tissue, or muscle?
Do you look at things through the lens of anterior chain, posterior chain, hypertrophy, strength?
I would just like to get your sort of high -level conceptualization of this thing that we call fitness with the idea in mind that most people would like to have some level of endurance, some level of strength, and feel healthy, and presumably look however they want to look.
But let's set aesthetics aside for the moment.
How do you think about this thing we call fitness?
Well, first of all, Andrew, is strength is the mother quality of all the other qualities.
So this is, again, it's a statement by Professor Matveev, Leonid Matveev going way back.
And without a foundation of strength, you cannot build anything.
So any athletic event requires a base of strength.
Of course, that shot putter is going to need much more strength than triathlon athlete, but they all need strength.
Speaking of which, in triathlon, in marathon running, in distance, in cycling, it's been proven that putting athletes on a heavy, low -reputation strength regimen, the kind that doesn't really add muscle but just makes you stronger neurologically, and it makes them race faster.
So once you're stronger, everything becomes easier.
How much stronger you need to get, that will vary.
Previously, in the Soviet Union, they had something called the model athlete.
So they figured out that for every particular event, your odds of succeeding are going to be much higher if you're able to, you know, squat this much or bench this much and jump this high and so on and so forth.
And this is easy enough to find these numbers for your individual sport and talk to various coaches.
For people who are not competitive athletes, you just want to enjoy life, you just need to think about having a reserve of strength for whatever it is that you might do.
So look at some PT standards in, let's say, in the military or in law enforcement and possibly apply them to yourself.
I don't want to impose my set of standards because there are many different, like I might prefer, you know, pull -ups and X and Y and Z, but if we're looking at strength as the foundation for general physical preparation, right?
So there's such a thing as general strength preparation.
That's part of that.
There's also special strength, which is sport -specific work that's different.
And there are different ways of getting this done.
But as you and I know that certain exercises are going to have a great carryover outside these particular exercises.
So as long as you're mobile, as long as you're symmetrical, and those are the things you have to address first, you need to look into work of Greg Cook, for example, then strength has to be your priority.
Once you have reached a certain level of strength that's appropriate for your sport or appropriate for your lifestyle, at that point you can just maintain it and focus on other qualities.
So I will give you an example.
Soviet scientists, Bysotsky and Jenysenka, they measured a number of athletes in 20 different sports, athletes of different levels.
So they evaluated various quality.
One was absolute strength.
Another was rate of force development, pretty much power.
And the third is the rate of muscular relaxation.
So how quickly the muscle can relax after contraction, which is very, very important.
And they have found that strength grew just very little from the intermediate level to the advanced level.
There's not a lot of improvement.
Power increased a little bit more.
but the speed of relaxation is just just shut up as the athlete became more advanced so it's again so strength it is the mother of all qualities but that's not the end all for everybody so reach the level that is appropriate for your sport or activity then just maintain it efficiently and focus on something
else if we talk about strength if we talk about other qualities or we'll get to them later.
What movements do you believe, if they exist, all people should include in their weekly routine someplace when thinking about how to develop, perhaps maintain but for most people it's going to be the goal of still achieving some strength.
Strength increase, excuse me.
I think there has to be a very low quantity of exercises, just very few exercise you want to focus on and i'm going to give you some options to choose from so what we try to do a strong first in my company my school of strength is we try to provide people with various simple very low tech high concept
ways of addressing reaching their needs because for one reason or another for this individual the barbell is the preferred tool for another it's a kettlebell or bodyweight or some or something else so i'm not going to say that if you don't do kettlebell swings or barbell squats, you'll never amount
to anything. That's just not true.
But you can pick some, you can pick some events.
So you definitely ought to do something for a posterior chain.
You absolutely do. If we are looking at the barbell, I would start out with the narrow sumo deadlift.
So this is narrow grip.
Not narrow grip, pardon me, but your stance is just wide enough to let your arms through uh your arms stay parallel to each other and so you just find a very comfortable stance for yourself so professor margill has been in your podcast he explained to you about the uh you know different hip architecture
and so on so you have to find whatever works whatever works for you and when people talk about functional strength training and then they start standing on a ball and juggle oranges doesn't make a lot of sense to me because that doesn't look like my life or yours probably.
Right. But if you have to get a heavy bag of groceries or something, you got a deadlift and the narrow sumo deadlift.
So if you look at powerlifters, an example would be classic example would be Ed Cohn.
That's a narrow stance sumo.
I'm not talking about wide sumo.
That's a very sport specific event.
And, uh, you practice that first, you learn how to hip hinge.
It's extremely important to learn how to hip hinge.
Again, uh, Stuart stress that how important it is for your back health and for your longevity.
So you learn to do that.
Then whether you decide to pursue the deadlift or not, if you decide not to pursue high numbers in the deadlift, maybe it's not appropriate for you, or maybe you're lacking the coaching.
A fantastic exercise for everybody is a zurcher squat.
So in the zurcher squat, you hold the bar like this in the crux of your elbows.
So it's resting right here.
It's possible to pick it up off the ground, but it's, You know, it's an advanced skill.
It's an advanced skill.
Better just to walk it off the rack.
The advantage of the Zurcher squat over, let's say, the back squat or the front squat is even if you have messed up shoulders, wrists, elbows, you still can do that.
Coaching the Zurcher squat is very easy, very simple.
And you have tremendous reflexive stabilization of your midsection.
It's just very, very powerful.
So you acquired that skill of getting tight.
So getting high numbers on that exercise in the Zurcher, so let's say an athlete could shoot for double body weight, that's a really good goal.
And the bar, for those listening, not watching, is cradled in the crooks of the elbows in front of the body.
Are the arms crossed?
You can hold them like this.
You can hold them like this or different ways of holding them.
You definitely would want to get proper coaching.
You don't want to bruise yourself.
You want to be comfortable.
You want to do it right.
But it's not, doesn't take a lot of skill to do that.
You find some pressing exercise.
And again, if we're sticking with the example of the barbell, the bench press has gotten bad reputation, you know, thanks to the gym bros.
And, you know, all gym bros is doing the bench pretty much.
Well, these days they also check out their phones, I guess.
Every set, between every set.
The 11th rep, I joke, people checking their phones.
Yeah, there we go. But if you look at athletes, the athletes who also do some lower body work, some posterior chain work and something for the midsection, and again, the Zercher's squad could address that, they are making a great use of the bench press.
So it's nothing. It's a very simple exercise.
Well, not very simple.
It's a relatively simple exercise.
And unlike other pressing exercises, it allows you to make strength gains with a very low volume of training.
So you can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger.
Good luck doing that in the overhead press or in the one -arm push -up or something like that.
So those are just a couple examples.
There are many other examples.
You can do snatch grip deadlifts.
You can list this very, very long.
We can address the same thing in the same way with kettlebells.
You can look in the bodyweight exercises.
But you need to find several exercises that have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond the ability to do this exercise.
If you just do curls, you know, you're going to get better at curls, but not at much else.
So Canadian scientists back in the 80s, Dick Bisail and his team made some interesting discoveries and they just found that doing something like extension is not going to carry over to the squat.
It just not. The coordination is so radically different.
so you find several exercises that you enjoy that don't hurt you that you have the equipment available that you got the proper coaching for and you pretty much stick with them and there is absolutely no reason for you to change these exercises it's possible to change them on the margins you know from a wide
grip bench press to narrow grip bench press squats with a pause and so on and so forth but you don't really have to do a great variety of things variety it's a good topic we can discuss this later but like looking at the example of weightlifting as much as we can find many reasons why variety could be
beneficial improved neuroplasticity reduced reduced risk of repetitive strain injury and so on but the so is the statistics in weightlifting there's no correlation between the number of exercises and the platform results.
And for people outside the sports, it's going to be the same.
So find this limited, just limited battery of exercises that you can do well, you can do pain -free and just enjoy them for years.
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Would a combination across the week of some sort of squat, let's say the Zurcher squat, perhaps a kettlebell swing or something else for a posterior chain, pull up and dip be a fairly comprehensive program?
Absolutely. I'm a fan of dips.
I like dips a lot. I heard you say that you were – some years ago you said that you were using dips for economy of time.
And I started getting into dips.
I haven't quite figured out the best way to load dips once – because once you get past 15, 20 repetitions of the body weight dip, it gets – it turns into something else.
Sure, absolutely. It turns into aerobic exercise perhaps.
perhaps uh luke ims uh he was a powerlifter from the golden age of american powerlifting he says anything over six reps is bodybuilding yeah i'm trying to stay in the lower rep range today i'll talk about this with you more because i think a growing number of people both men and women who are starting
to do weight training or really incorporate strength training into their program are seeking a combination of strength and perhaps endurance as well without putting on too much size maybe size and select body well andrew i think they need to uh do possibly several different types of types of training
but going back to your examples dips are fantastic if you can if your shoulders can handle them if you know how to do them it's a great exercise but not particularly democratic that's the problem so either you can do it safely or you can't and possibly it's possible to coach some people to do to do
the dip so if you're coaching somebody to do the dip the first prerequisite is to build up to a full skin the cap so it means you're hanging upside down you know look up what it means folks uh on a bar so you got to be able to get yourself in that position so if you're able to do that and if you're
able to get out of the position you know strongly and confidently there's a good chance that you can start up and doing dips and be coached into that if you can't probably not so either try to build up to that unless there are medical restrictions or not.
You mentioned the example of pull -ups.
Absolutely, pull -ups are one of the best general strength exercises.
And again, to your listeners, general versus special.
Special in Soviet terminology just means sport specific.
So the carryover when you start doing pull -ups, when you excel at pull -ups or the dips, you are going to get a carryover so far beyond this exercise, which is exactly the reason you do that.
So I like your choices very much.
What about specialized training for grip strength?
I believe that if somebody's large, if they can squat 500 pounds, if they can deadlift 600 pounds, I don't really care if the question is, can you open the pickle jar?
Sure. This is a critical home test.
I just get my wife to do it.
So grip strength is extremely important.
And you being a neuroscientist, you know the disproportional representation, the motor cortex of your gripping muscles and the forearm and everything.
And there is another reason why grip is so important.
So if you make a fist, if you make a very tight fist, you're going to feel the overflow of tension, your radiation going to other muscles.
So pretty much by gripping tighter, you are instantly increasing your strength in anything that you do.
And so a very simple example for your listeners.
Take some pedestrian exercise like curls and do as many strict reps as you possibly can the way you normally do them and then start just crushing that bar or that dumbbell or whatever that you're curling.
You will immediately be able to knock off several more reps.
So that makes you so much stronger.
And again, the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important.
For whatever reason, obviously it correlates with longevity.
We don't know why. We have no idea.
Correlation is not causation, so we don't know whether getting a stronger grip is going to make us live longer, but statistically it's worth a try, right?
So one can either find exercises that train the grip in the context of developing something else or train the grip directly.
So either way is great.
So the first example would be climbing the rope or doing pull -ups and weighted pull -ups on a rope.
That's a great way to train, obviously.
So what you do, the way you program it is, let's say once a week you climb the rope and a couple of days a week you do pull -ups.
That's a good way to go about it.
And you don't need to do anything else.
And another example would be some exercises like the kettlebell snatch.
When you start snatching a heavy kettlebell and you drop it from overhead, that eccentric loading is very, very powerful.
And that develops grip very, very well.
And again, right now we're talking more about what people in the grip world call the crushing grip, you know, how you squeeze something.
There are other types of grip that they differentiated.
But this type of crushing grip is what's going to help most athletes and non -athletes the most.
And I will also warn you that hanging on the bar and doing farmer carries, beneficial as they are for many reasons, It's not going to do that much for an evolving thing.
Interesting. I started incorporating farmer's carries, thinking it was going to improve my grip.
They're healthy. If you look at McGill's work, he will tell you that carrying too heavy objects, it's going to really pound your spine.
But on the other hand, asymmetrical carry, it appears to be very beneficial.
Then there's another interesting example.
Now right now, I'm not talking about grip training at all.
not even talking about strength training but I'm talking about sort of a former run.
Dr. Mike Prevost who used to work with the US Marine Corps and Navy he developed this very interesting protocol and a test called the kettlebell mile where you take a kettlebell that's approximately 30 % of your body weight and he has good reasons for why it has to be that way and you pretty much run
with this kettlebell and you switch hands as much as often as you want and it's a fantastic way to improve your running posture, to develop very stabilizing muscles and to improve your ability to rock.
But it doesn't beat you up as much rocking does.
You know, rocking, carrying heavy weight, that's, it's rough on the body.
So it's a fantastic way.
It's a fantastic way to, to train your endurance, an additional way.
How heavy is the kettlebell?
30 % because he says, when you start going heavier, it's going to affect your gait.
So you're not really, you know, you have to, you have to kick your hip over to the side.
it becomes something else.
That's a heavy kettlebell.
30 % of your body weight?
Yeah, I mean, I'm 210 pounds.
It's not trivial. Oh, it's probably something like 62 pounds or something like that, 70 pound kettlebell.
It's not, no, no, no, it's not trivial by any means.
But it's also not something you jump into immediately.
And also what's very cool is because you get to switch hands very often, you are not destroying your QOL and other stabilizers that are contracting isometrically.
And so what we're doing right now here is kind of a form of antiglycolytic training.
If your muscle contracts briefly and then relaxes, contracts, relaxes, and the contraction cycles are really short, you're able to avoid glycolysis.
You're able to keep that muscle working aerobically for a long time and not beat yourself down.
So to listeners who'd like to try it, start by walking with a kettlebell, pass, you know, switch hands off, and then eventually build up to running and obviously build up gradually.
Held like a suitcase?
Yes. Only, only like a suitcase.
Okay. Yeah, there's a podcast led by a guy named Cam Haynes.
He's a bow hunter. He's one of the people that really brought extreme fitness and ultras to the sport of bow hunting and is legendary there.
And for his podcast, he has, he carried the 72 pound rock up, it's about a thousand feet of elevation in the Oregon wilderness.
And I've done it. It's hard because of the shape of the thing.
And so you're moving it from shoulder to football carry to infant carry.
And you're not talking about that.
You're talking about suitcase on the right.
Correct. Are you trying to crush the grip while you're doing it?
No, no. This is not developing a grip whatsoever.
And you're running at 10, 20 minutes, 30 minutes?
Well, he says run for a mile.
That's the goal. And he has some numbers.
I can give you a link.
You can look it up.
Dr. Mike Prevost. And direct grip strength training is great as well.
So, for example, the best product for that would be the Captains of Crush grippers from Iron Mind.
Iron Mind is the company that started a serious grip training pretty much in modern era.
And their grippers are the golden standard.
Just make them puke, and that's going to improve their endurance.
And it does improve their endurance, but at a very high cost.
So in the Soviet sports science, there's a term, the cost of adaptation, comes from Felix Meijersen, professor.
So he was a cardiopathologist originally, but later again, his research and stress is amazing.
So there's the cost of adaptation.
And it's the same thing is pretty much as buying a car or a table.
You can get the same table for a lower price or you can pay the top dollar.
So you can increase your strength while at the same time blowing your back out, or you can increase your VO2 max while getting a resume in the process, or you can do it in a healthy way.
So one of the issues you have to look at, they're trying to lower the biological cost of the adaptation.
So in strength training, we do that by very carefully and not training hard too often.
So again, the American system is two weeks out of four.
The Soviet system, pretty much the same, although the planning is going to be different.
First, if we look at the cardiovascular adaptations, before we're looking into the mitochondria and into the muscle.
Most of the work should be done below the threshold, pretty much.
So what's the threshold?
So for runners, let's say you're running and you're able to maintain the conversation.
And when you start running too fast and you cannot maintain the conversation, you pass the threshold.
It's like you're going faster and you're breathing harder linearly and suddenly it goes like this, like a hockey stick.
So at that point, your body is no longer able to process all that acid and things are starting to get hard.
So there are certain implications.
There are certain implications for your muscles for sure.
We'll discuss that in a few minutes.
But for your heart, there are two things we're primarily trying to train.
One, we're trying to train the stroke volume, so pretty much how much blood the heart can pump out with each contraction.
And it's a very simple thing to do.
You get up to like 70 % to 85 % of your maximal heart rate.
So the heart starts stretching, literally.
So kuchung, kuchung, kuchung.
So this blood is incoming and the heart starts stretching.
And it requires volume.
Some, to the France riders, they might throw the food in the back of the cycle and they ride all day because that's what they've got to do.
And that requires that adaptation.
For people who just do for health, you don't need to do that much.
You know, 30, 40 minutes several times a week is enough.
But for a high level, you have to stretch the heart.
If you start redlining the heart rate, the heart starts twitching.
so there's no time for it to fully relax and stretch you're no longer really increasing your stroke volume and what you're doing right now you're strengthening your ejection fraction which is like the strength of the heart which is needed for athletes whose sports require red lighting heart rate if you're
a fighter, if you are a 400 meter runner you absolutely need to do that but what they found It went back to German research going to decades later and then the Soviet research.
If you start redlining your heart rate before you have that volume that you put in and built up the stroke volume, you're just heading for pathology.
So there are arysmias, there's all sorts of different things, the AFibs, all sorts of things that can start to happen that are bad.
And also, your performance is not going to be very high because, again, your stroke volume is not there.
And even for athletes who do that, they should do it for a very short period of time.
It's just too stressful, and it's just not needed.
Typically, it's a peak.
It's peaking phase for some weeks before leading up to the competition.
So pretty much steady state, steady state exercise, like riding a cycle or jogging or hiking, when you're still able to talk, it's the best, most efficient and healthiest way to promote that quality when you're increasing your heart stroke volume.
if you decide to get a little more intense at some point interval training is appropriate but unfortunately that's completely and totally messed up misunderstood it's like a catch all term high intensity interval training and Brent Rushall, a professor out of San Diego said this is nonsense this term
is a nonsense what does it even mean?
like what's high intensity?
and also here's a question what does low intensity interval training mean?
going back to taking a step to the side, but that discussion will help us when we discuss what happens in the muscle terminology.
So there are different rest periods between sets.
There is the ordinary rest period, which means you pretty much recover your function.
It's like you're just as strong or just as enduring as from the previous set.
There is the supra max rest period, when if you rest extra Sometimes you get some extra performance out of it.
And there is this stress rest period when the next set is going to be harder.
Your performance may or may not be compromised, but it's going to be harder.
So with ordinary stress or ordinary rest periods, that is called, in track, it's called repeat training.
You know, so you run 100 meters, then you rest for, you know, whatever, 10, 15 minutes, as long as you need, longer possibly, then you repeat it again.
And your performance stay this way.
Interval training, again, is established.
It just means that things are going to get worse from set to set.
So that's the definition of interval training.
The irony is that interval training was designed to increase the intensity of exercise while reducing the demands on the body.
So if you look at the work of Fox and Edwards, their pioneers of interval training in the United States, they gave some great examples.
So let's say you're running for 30 seconds, and you're at this speed, and you're going to produce this much acid, and your heart rate is going to be this high.
Well, if you run for 10 seconds with short periods in between, at the same speed, you're going to produce a lot less acid, and your heart rate is not going to climb to the stratosphere.
And that type of training is very, very useful.
And interval training can be used for promoting any type of adaptation.
You can use it for hypertrophy.
So here's one training method I learned from my colleague, Fabio Zonin.
It was designed by Professor Masaroni in Italian, Mr.
Universe and Professor.
Okay, you take 80 % of your one rep max, let's say presumably eight rep max.
Set a five, rest for 30 seconds.
Set a five, rest for 30 seconds.
If you cannot do it anymore, you're done.
And then you come back maybe 10 minutes later, do it again.
That's an example of interval training again.
I see. and you can structure interval training for adaptations within the muscle, mitochondria and you can also do that for your heart so here's how you do it for the heart today there are a lot of fancy popular protocols but all you have to do is go back to what Germans did many decades ago here's
the premise your vegetative system, your heart your lungs, your plumbing, they have inertia so for example imagine yourself as a kid you run really really hard you run for 100 meters or less maybe and everything's fine and then you're talking to your body suddenly you start sucking with so that's an example
of uh of this inertia so if you get your heart rate up to about 85 to 90 percent one rep max and then you suddenly switch to jogging you don't want to stop because that's just way too way too hard for your heart without getting that venous return from muscles working.
What happens is the heart slows down, but there's that blood keeps on moving.
And the blood literally stretches the walls of the heart.
I see. So sprint perhaps 100, 200, 300, 400 meters and then jog back?
Traditionally, it was not quite a sprint.
The duration would be typical 60 to 90 second.
The intensity is such that you get up to top off at 85, 90 % of your heart rate max, something like that and then you jog until your heart rate goes goes to about 60 -70 percent so that's roughly about the same probably and uh that to look things up it's like german interval training that was done it
is based on very definite physiological events like this is what the heart does this is we're trying to do with the heart and is a instead of inventing some things that are simply trashed the body for no reason whatsoever.
And part of the problem also, Andrew, is it's very easy to get misled by quick gains.
And it happens in strength world and in endurance world.
Let's remember the years when you and I and every other male listener bench press their max once a week.
You're strong. Next week, you're stronger.
Third week, and you're stronger, like you're doing the maths, like, okay, well, I should be setting the national record by Christmas and maybe I'll be going to the world by summer.
And then at six weeks, you're done.
And for experienced athletes, it happens sooner, like after three weeks.
The same thing with endurance.
When you start doing glycolytic work, when you start redlining heart rate and increasing the asses, your performance jumps so quickly.
It's very contagious.
It's like, oh, not contagious, pardon me, it's very exciting.
And you think that you're going to keep going forever, but you really absolutely will not.
So if you want to train your heart, a good way of doing that is steady state work.
If you decide to do some sort of intermittent work, there are several different ways.
one is intermittent exercise that's more of a repeat in nature not interval which is very bizarre to people let's say that you go moderately hard for 10 seconds you go easy for 10 seconds and you do this for 30 to 60 minutes imagine doing that that's good work it is good work but you know what would be
shocking to you that you're not going to produce that much acid you're not redline your heart rate.
Better would be like 10 seconds of work, 20 seconds of rest.
That would be fascinating research that Swedes did back in the 50s and 60s in that.
It's amazing. If you keep the work periods short, you're able to not produce a lot of acid but just go very, very hard.
And you're going to be able to train your heart and your lungs in this manner too.
You can also do, and you also have peripheral adaptations in the muscles, mitochondria and so on, vascularis, some capillarization happening too.
But you know, it's also interesting, there's one particular type of, I hate the fact that it falls onto the high intensity interval training umbrella because it's not.
Because everything that sounds like HIIT, it's not good to me because it's just made up label.
But there's one type of training that delivers great benefits to your cardiorespiratory system.
and at the same time it also does that for you know for your mitochondrion even builds muscle in the same time in track it is called glycolytic power repeats and in the last 20 years there are several good papers that were done on that Dybala Bergamaster I think pardon me if I'm mispronouncing their
names but pretty much you do a wingate like a 30 seconds of hard exercise and followed by approximately five minutes of rest, and you repeat it several times.
Here's what's unique about this type of method.
It gets your heart rate up to about that 85, 95%, 90 % or something.
Then you're going to walk it off after that.
So you are going to get adaptations for your heart.
It's not the most effective way, but for healthy people, it's a healthy way and it's a very efficient way.
At the same time, we'll discuss later what happens in the mitochondria level, but also what's interesting, you're also likely to get built some muscle as well.
And typically, there is the conflict, which we're getting to this point about strength versus endurance.
Typically, there's a conflict of strength versus endurance because if you're looking in the mTOR on one side, AMPK on the other side, things seem to be like, okay, this is pulling one way, this is pulling the other way.
But somehow, this particular load, while promoting peripheral and central endurance, also endurance, at least in the fast and intermediate fibers, also does promote muscle growth.
Interesting. And what sort of exercise?
This is not sprints.
This would be kettlebell swings, for instance.
In the studies that were done, they used wind gates, they used cycle.
They cycled. Sprinting, if you are going uphill, you could certainly do that.
Because this 30 seconds is hard.
Yes. You're pushing.
You're pushing. Yeah.
Going in a track, it's too easy to get something messed up.
So going uphill, you can do that.
We do that with kettlebells.
We did this work in my first kettlebell school over 20 years ago, where we would do a set of, you take a heavy kettlebell, moderately heavy kettlebell, like, you know, for you or me to be like a 70 -pounder.
And we would snatch it really hard for a set of 20, 25 reps.
and then we just jog until the heart rate comes down and then we take this leisurely power lifting rest and we're gonna do it again and it's a fantastic way to promote various aspects of fitness so you're gonna get cardiorespirator endurance, you're gonna get peripheral adaptations, endurance in the muscle
and you're also building muscle at the same time the reasons for that here's the theory Again, all the conversations we have about this is what happens in the muscle, all these are theories.
We know pretty much if we do X, we're going to get Z, whatever, or Y, some kind of result at this point, but we may not necessarily know for sure.
So the following is another one of the theories, but it's another good, credible one.
So this is Professor Viktor Siliyanov.
So according to him, the preconditions for muscle growth, in addition to the obvious it's like food and things and hormones.
So when you reach a certain level of acidosis, only a certain level of acidosis, not necessarily very high, those hydrogen ions will make the membrane permeable to the hormones, they're going to enter and go into the nucleus and start doing their job.
So that's one of the part of the explanation.
Then at the same time, also, the free creatine, when creatine phosphate, that hot fuel, gets burnt off, that's also anabolic for one reason or another.
So there are some explanations.
Whether that's how it is or not, I don't know.
But the fact is doing a hard 30 -40 second set, followed by a very generous rest, we're talking about 5 -10 minutes, and repeating it five times, possibly more, it works very, very well.
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What should I do during my rest periods?
All right, well, first of all, whenever your heart rate is high, the very first thing is to not to suddenly stop because, uh, you want to, uh, there are valve one -way valves in the veins that whenever you contract the muscles of the legs, they help to milk the blood back through to the heart.
So basically they reduce the stress on the heart.
So just walk it off first, the first step, if your heart rate was high.
uh then the second thing is you want to do exercises you want to do relaxation myorelaxation muscle relaxation exercise what they are is if you watch boxers how they you know shake off their shake off their shoulders and drop and drop their hands and do things like that these exercises go back to the 30s so we
use them since the 30s and they use them with elite athletes uh kids in grade schools and everybody so these exercises serve several functions.
One is if you are doing an exercise that is strength exercise in nature, some of the cross bridges are stuck pretty much.
And so your muscle is a thixotropic.
It's like gel. So by moving your muscle in a passive manner, you get it unstuck.
And so you restore circulation, obviously.
And the other reason is, again, control of muscle retention is very, very important.
It's important to learn how to contract the muscle for strength it's very important how to relax for speed for endurance just for happy life if you look at the best sprinters note how relaxed their faces are when they're on their jaws relax how they relax their necks are so relaxation is something that's
practiced just like tension so regardless of what exercise that you just did shaking off we call this fast and loose drills shaking like passive like turn your muscles to fat.
So you want to do this for a little bit.
Then after that, it depends how long is your rest.
So if you're taking, it depends what exactly that you're doing.
In some extreme examples, let's say that you're a sprinter.
Remember we talked about doing sprint repeats, but let's say 100 meters and then 15 minutes, you think, wow, sounds like a great, great training session.
Well, the problem is these guys do need these 15 minutes to get the asset out of the system and have some other functions to recover.
But after a couple of minutes, the CNS excitability goes down.
So what the Soviets figured out back in the forties still is what you do then after you walked it off, after you shook it off, you here and there, you insert some very kind of like light and easy hops or whatever using the same muscle groups.
So these poor athletes really have a complicated rest protocol.
There's really no rest for the wicked there.
If you are a lifter who's taking very long rest periods in between.
Let's say you take those 10 minutes.
Then after your heart rate is down and after you shook off and after you walked in, you can just sit down.
You can do whatever you want.
Do not sit a slouch because obviously Stu McGill explained why.
That's not a good idea.
And speaking of slouching, one reason that runners get their backs jacked up after running or some endurance event is, again, they go into their knees and they you know get into that collapsed posture and uh their discs are really pliable and warm after the run and then suddenly put them into flexion and they
get messed up so yeah you also gotta like you point out to watch our posture but you really gotta watch your posture during recovery because you slump between your sets of squats and then you know you could blow something out right there interesting i used to think that i would have this recurring sort
of lower back hip thing that I finally feel is under control.
And I used to think that it correlated with travel and something about maybe not sleeping as well and traveling perhaps.
But what I've noticed is even if I just sit too much after training my legs hard, I end up with this back issue.
So just moving to a standing desk configuration after training legs, irrespective of travel, has really helped.
And I think, I mean, nowadays there's all this excitement about walking.
I don't know if you, you know, I don't know how much time you spend on social media, but like walking is the a new thing for 2024.
People discovered walking to lower post -meal blood glucose.
I mean, all stuff that's intuitive, great thing to do.
We'll see what happens in 2025, what the new thing is, right?
What's the next hot thing?
And I'm a fan of walking, but in no small part, because it just feels like it loosens up everything after training.
And I like to train early in the day if possible.
And I noticed a dramatic reduction in kind of aches and strains.
Also, the other thing you could do, I remember when I watched your podcast with uh stew mcgill you mentioned that uh the uh upward facing dog cobra helps you right putting yourself an extension into extension so for people who for whom that works it's uh you can just lie on the lie on the floor in your
elbows and just read a book so for example add strong first uh courses when people do exercise and then we teach them so we have several authorized postures so you either have to sit ramrod straight you know you can sit in the lotus or cesar or something like that.
Or you can, you know, half kneel still upright, or you can lie on your stomach.
So we do not allow this, this collapsed posture, because this is a great, great way to get hurt.
Plus, you know, you look like a slacker, when you're a slacker, mentally, you're not going to be focused on whatever you're supposed to be doing.
So I think that's, I think that's a good idea.
And to bring us back to, do you want to talk a little bit about the peripheral adaptations from endurance?
Okay. And then maybe we can talk about like, what should people, what should people do who are not athletes.
So a much bigger thing than the VO2 max is the adaptations, the ability of your muscles to extract and use the oxygen.
So this again, called this revolution, anti -glycolytic revolution comes from, uh, also Yulif Hoshansky.
Again, he's known as the father of plyometrics, but he's so much more than that.
And back in 1980, he looked at the typical endurance training protocols.
And he says, okay, everything—everybody's trying to push the athlete to the greatest degree of discomfort and make the athlete accustomed to that degree of discomfort.
And he says, that's just wrong.
Instead, we need to figure out how to postpone the fatigue and how to fight the mechanisms that produce the fatigue.
And he says glucolysis, anaerobic glucolysis, is the primary cause of that.
We could split a lot of hairs, is whether it's, you know, it's the glycolysis itself or it's the acid coming from ATP breakdown or whether it's non -organic phosphates or whatever.
But whatever it is, it always happens when the acidosis is running high, when acid becomes high.
So, that doesn't really matter which exact factor is.
So, he figured out you need to promote aerobic metabolism in the working muscle fibers.
So he decided that endurance training for high -level athletes and people who are not athletes, it will apply to you as well, has to be specific.
That's exactly why, like, that marathon runner who joined the MMA class and then sucking wind, his endurance is totally not specific.
Here's an example of specific endurances where you're using the same muscle fibers in your sport and in a mode that's consistent with that sport.
So Verkhoshansky would have people like skiers, for example, do this very long push -off on the ski and then glide.
Push -off and glide.
And, yeah, Sulayanov, who came after him.
So an example of that, you have this really powerful contraction of the muscles that are used in your sport, and then there's that relaxation during which the muscle recovers its myoglobin oxygen.
there's a small amount of oxygen in the muscle, and it requires the creatine phosphate fuel that is used for the short term.
So pretty much instead of relying on that acid -producing metabolism, glycolytic metabolism, that you start using, on one hand, to use lifter's metabolism, creatine phosphate, that's what fuels a set of three reps.
And on the other, you're using this marathon runner.
