Our Episode

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.

Today we are discussing fitness.

Fitness, of course,
is vitally important for
cardiovascular health,
for strength, for endurance,
for lifespan, for healthspan.

I can't think of anyone out
there that wouldn't want to
have healthy hormonal function,
healthy cardiovascular
function, to live a long time
and to feel vital,
that is to have a long healthspan as well
as a long lifespan.

Fitness and fitness
protocols are tremendously
powerful for developing all of that.

However, despite there
being an enormous amount
of information out there on
the internet and in books
and elsewhere, it can
be a bit overwhelming.

So today's episode is really designed
to synthesize science based
tools that we've covered
on the podcast, some
with expert guests like
Dr.

Andy Galpin or Dr.

Peter Attia, or world
renowned Movement specialist Ido Portal,
or physiotherapist and strength
and conditioning coach, Jeff Cavaliere.

We've had all of them as
guests on the podcast,
and each and every one
of them provided a wealth
of knowledge in terms
of the various things
that you can do to optimize very specific
or multiple aspects of fitness.

Today, we're going to do
something a little bit
different than usual.

Typically on the Huberman Lab podcast,
I offer mechanism upfront or first,
and then we talk about
protocols that you can use
that really lean on those science
and science based mechanisms.

Today I'm going to describe
a specific protocol
that serves as a general
template that anyone, in fact,
everyone can use in order to maximize all
aspects of fitness.

So that includes endurance,
strength, flexibility,
hypertrophy, aesthetic changes, et cetera.

However, this general
framework can also be modified,
that is customized to
your particular needs.

So if you're somebody
who really wants to build
more strength or bigger muscles,
you can change the
protocol and the overall
program according to that.

And I'll talk about very
specific ways to do that.

Or if you're somebody
who really just wants
to maintain strength, but
you want to build endurance,
we'll talk about that.

And of course, we will
cover real life issues,
such as should you train
if you are sleep deprived,
what about food?

When should you eat?

What if you haven't
eaten and you're hungry?

Should you still train?

Et cetera, et cetera.

We're going to cover all of that, again,
in the context of this,
what I would call foundational
template of fitness.

Now, this foundational template of fitness
is something that I personally use.

In fact, I've used it
for over three decades,
hard to believe that I'm that old,
but I just recently
turned 47, and I still use
this basic protocol or
template across the week
and modify it according to
what my particular goals
are that year, that month, even that day,
because I, like you,
live in the real world
and sometimes I've been traveling
or I miss a workout, yes,
it does happen, or life
isn't organized in exactly
the way that I need to in
order to have everything
go according to the
protocol that's on paper.

So we're going to
discuss real world issues
and how to work with the
real world issues in order
to get the most out of
your fitness program.

And again, by the end of today's
program, I can assure you,
you will have a template
protocol that you can build
up from, build out, change and modify,
and that will really serve
your fitness goals according
to the science and what
peer-reviewed studies
and the experts that
appeared on this podcast
and other podcasts really
tell us is best and optimal
for our fitness.

I'm pleased to announce that
the Huberman Lab podcast
has now launched a premium channel.

I want to be very clear that
the Huberman Lab podcast
will continue to be released
every Monday at zero cost
to consumer, and there will
be no change in the format
of these podcasts.

The premium channel is a
response to the many questions
we get about specific topics,
and it will allow me to really drill deep
into specific answers
related to those topics.

So once a month, I'm going
to host and ask me anything,
so-called AMA, where
you can ask me anything
about specific topics
covered on the Huberman Lab
podcast and I will answer those questions.

Those of course will be recorded.

They will also be other
premium content available
to premium subscribers such as transcripts
and short videos of new
tools and unique tools
for mental health, physical
health and performance.

If you want to check
out the premium channel,
you can go to hubermanlab.com/premium.

There is a $10 a month
charge or $100 per year,
and I should mention that a large portion
of the proceeds from the
Huberman Lab Premium Channel
will go to support scientific
research that develops
the very sorts of tools that we talk
about on the Huberman Lab podcast.

The rest of the support
for the Huberman Lab Podcast
premium channel will go
to supporting the regular
Huberman Lab podcast.

Again, that's hubermanlab.com/premium.

Before we dive into today's
content about fitness
and fitness protocols, I want
to tell you about a brand
new study that is very exciting
and frankly very unusual.

This is a study that was published
out of the University
of Houston, examining
what I would call a micro
exercise or a micro movement.

It's a very small movement
of a very small portion
of your body, in fact, just
1% of your musculature,
that when it's performed
continuously while seated has,
at least what they
report, are very dramatic
positive changes in terms of blood sugar
utilization and metabolism.

So the title of this study
is "A potent physiological
method to magnify and sustain
soleus oxidative
metabolism improves glucose
and lipid regulation."
This study was published in iScience,
and as I mentioned earlier,
it is getting a lot of
attention and it's very unusual.

Without going into all
the details of this study,
let me just briefly give you a little bit
of the background.

First of all, you have a
muscle called the soleus.

The soleus muscle is a more
or less wide flat muscle
that sits beneath what most
people think of as their calf,
although it's part of the calf muscle.

The other portion of the calf
is called the gastrocnemius.

The soleus sits below that.

Now, the soleus muscle is a unique muscle
because it's largely slow
twitch muscle fibers.

It's designed to be used continuously
over and over again for
stabilizing your body
when you're standing upright, for walking.

This is a muscle that's
designed to contract
over and over and over again.

In fact, you could walk
all day on this muscle
and most likely it would not get sore.

You probably done that
and it did not get sore.

In contrast, a muscle like
your bicep or your tricep,
if I were to have you
perform hundreds or thousands
of repetitions, even
with a very lightweight
one pound weight or a two pound weight,
eventually it would fatigue.

You would feel a sort of a burn there.

It's a very unusual set of
muscles to use repeatedly.

But the soleus is an unusual
muscle in that it really
is designed to be used continuously.

Now, this study was focused
on how people who sit a lot
of the day and don't have
the opportunity for a lot
of physical movement or
maybe who don't even exercise
at all can improve their metabolism
and glucose utilization.

Without going into a deep dive
about glucose utilization,
because we've done the
deep dive on this podcast,
episodes such as metabolism, et cetera,
you can look those up at hubermanlab.com.

They're all timestamped
and available there.

Anytime you eat, your blood
sugar goes up to some extent.

So your blood glucose, as it's called,
goes up to some extent.

And then insulin is a hormone that's used
to essentially chaperone
and sequester and use
that blood glucose or
it's basically the idea
is you don't want blood
glucose to go too high.

Hyperinsulinemia is something associated
with blood glucose that's
too high because insulin goes
up to essentially match
the level of blood glucose.

You don't also don't
want to be hypoglycemic,
you don't want to have
blood sugar that's too low,
and insulin is involved
in both regulating peaks
and troughs in blood sugar, blood glucose.

So we can basically say,
and this is very simple,
but we can basically say
that you don't want blood
glucose to be elevated
too much or for too long.

That's not good.

In fact, people who have
diabetes because they don't
make insulin, people who
have type 1 diabetes do not
make insulin at all, their blood glucose
is so high that they
actually have to take insulin
in order to regulate otherwise
their blood glucose can
go so high that it can damage
cells and damage organs.

It can even kill people.

People who have type 2 diabetes are
so called insulin insensitive.

They make insulin, but the
receptors to insulin are
not sensitive to it,
and so they make more insulin
than normally would be
made and blood glucose
isn't regulated properly,
et cetera, et cetera.

The take home message about blood glucose
is that you want your blood
glucose levels to go up
when you eat, but not too
high and you don't want them
to stay elevated for too long.

This study looked at how
people who are largely
sedentary or at least sitting
can increase the utilization,
the clearance of glucose from
the bloodstream after eating,
and they also looked
at overall metabolism.

For people, get this,
that were using just that
1% of muscle, the soleus,
by doing what they call a soleus pushup.

So the soleus pushup can
be described very simply
as if you're sitting
down with your knee bent
at approximately right
angle, like a square corner,
and pushing up, or I should
say lifting your heel
while pushing down on
your toe and contracting
the calf muscle as it were,
and then lowering the
heel and then in lifting
that heel again, lowering the
heel, lifting the heel again,
each one of those is what
they call a soleus pushup.

This study had people
continuously do soleus pushups
and they looked at things like
blood glucose utilization,
they looked at metabolism and so on.

Now, a couple of important
things about this study
before I tell you what they discovered,
which was frankly pretty miraculous,
almost hard to believe,
and yet I believe the data
looked to be collected
quite well, and there
are a lot of statistics
and the study looks to be quite thorough.

First of all, they used
an equal number of male
and female subjects.

There were a wide range of
body mass indices, okay?

So this wasn't just super
fit people or people
that were purely sedentary and not fit.

They used a wide variety
of ages, time of day,
people who tended to walk
a lot or not walk a lot.

They measured changes
in metabolism and blood
glucose utilization and
people that had done
these soleus pushups while
seated in the laboratory,
and I must say,
they had them do these
soleus pushups for quite
a long while, continuously.

So they had them do it
for as long as 270 minutes
total throughout the day.

So if you divide that,
that's four and a half hours,
you might say, well,
four and a half hours of
lifting the heel and putting
the heel down, lifting the
heel, putting the heel down,
that's a lot.

But they didn't always do it continuously.

They had some breaks in there.

So this is the sort of
thing that you could imagine
you or other people could do while seated,
while doing Zooms or
while on calls or maybe
even while eating, doing
that sort of thing.

Although I'm not suggesting
that you constantly
be focusing on soleus
pushups throughout your life.

The point is that people
who did these soleus
pushups experienced dramatic
improvements in blood
sugar regulation and in
metabolism despite the fact
that the soleus is just 1%
of the total musculature.

So here I'm going to
read from the abstract
about what they found,
people who did these soleus pushups,
despite being a tiny muscle and using very
little local energy...

In fact, they measured muscle glycogen,
the burn or essentially
the utilization of fuel
within the muscle, and
there was very little
utilization of fuel
within the soleus itself,
and that's because the soleus
has this unique property
of needing to basically
keep you going all day,
walking all day or moving all day.

What they saw was a large
magnitude, for example,
52% less postprandial,
that's after a meal,
glucose excursion,
So 52% less increase in
blood glucose and 60%,
six zero less hyper insulinemia,
so reduced levels of insulin.

They also, miraculously,
observed that despite this being,
again, a small muscle, 1%
of the total muscle mass,
so very small oxidative use,
they saw big improvements in
systemic metabolic regulation.

So this is interesting
and I think something
that we should at least know about.

I'm not aware that anyone's
replicated this study yet.

I know there's a ton of
excitement about this study
in the popular press, and if
the data turn out to hold up,
which I like to imagine they will,
I can understand why
there's so much excitement.

What this means is that if
you're somebody who cares
about blood glucose regulation,
you want to keep your metabolism running,
please don't stop exercising,
the other ways that you exercise.

But if you're somebody who
wants to maximize your health,
doing these soleus pushups
fairly continuously
while seated is going to be beneficial.

And in addition to that,
I know that there are going
to be people out there who,
for instance, might be
injured or you're traveling
and you're stuck on a plane
or you're in the classroom
and you're forced to study
all day or take notes all day.

You're just not getting
enough opportunity to get
those steps that you want to take,
whether or that's 10,000 or fewer or more,
getting enough steps or movement.

Maybe you don't have time
to get out and do your run,
or maybe you're also running,
weightlifting and doing
yoga classes and things
of that sort, but you want to
further improve your fitness,
at least in terms of
your metabolic health.

This seems like a terrific,
very low investment way to do it.

Certainly zero cost.

It does take a little bit of attention,
so you have to divert
your attention from other
things you're doing to
make sure that you're still
doing these soleus pushups.

I'm sure that many of you
are going to have a lot
of detailed questions such
as how high did they lift
the heel and did they contract
the muscle very hard or not?

Couple of things about that,
they did not have subjects
really contract the muscle hard.

They did measure the angle of heel raise
and it was anywhere from 10 to 15 degrees
so they didn't have to go way,
way up on their tippy toes
or things of that sort.

In any event, 270 minutes,
four and a half hours of
doing these soleus pushups
is a lot, but by my read of the data
and the rather significant,
or I should say very significant effects
that they observed on
blood glucose regulation
and metabolism, et cetera,
seems to me that doing less
would still be beneficial
and that you don't necessarily
have to do the full
270 minutes in order to get the benefits
that they observed.

More about the study includes the fact
that the benefits they observed
were very long lasting,
as long as two hours after a meal,
they could still see this improved
blood glucose utilization.

I don't know because I wasn't able to find
it in the methods whether
or not they were doing
the soleus pushups while
they were consuming blood
sugar in this study.

The point being that if
you're somebody who cares
about their fitness, this
study is interesting,
because what it means is that, again,
if you are forced to be
immobile or sitting longer
than you would like,
if you're stuck in a meeting or Zooms
or class or on a plane, et cetera,
or if you're simply trying to add a bit
more fitness and metabolic
health to your overall regimen,
soleus pushups, at least to me,
seem like a very low investment, simple,
zero cost tool to improve
your metabolic health.

For those of you that
want to peruse the study
in more detail, we will provide a link
to this paper published in iScience
in the show note caption.

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,
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Let's talk about fitness and let's talk
about how you can develop
the optimal fitness
protocols for you.

So that includes what to
do each day of the week
and your fitness protocol across the week,
and indeed across the month and the year
and even year to year.

When we had Dr.

Andy
Galpin on the podcast,
he said something very
important that we want to keep
in mind today, which is concepts
are few, methods are many,
that is there are an
infinite number of different
programs and exercises
and set and rep schemes
and different runs and burpees
and pushups, et cetera,
et cetera that one can follow.

However, there are really
just a few basic concepts
or principles of muscle physiology,
of cardiovascular function,
of connective tissue
function that provide or set the basis
for the adaptations that we call fitness
or that lead to fitness.

So I'm going to list those off now.

We can talk about a fitness
protocol that's really
aimed mainly toward developing skill.

That's one.

Or speed.

That's another.

Or power, which is speed times strength,
or specifically strength, or hypertrophy,
growth of muscles, or endurance
such as muscular endurance.

Muscular endurance is, for instance,
your ability to stay in
a plank position or to do
a wall sit, to sit on an
invisible chair against a wall,
or other forms of endurance like near
pure anaerobic endurance.

So a one minute sprint or
less or a one minute all
out cycling on stationary
bike, this sort of thing,
or endurance that occurs
in the kind of 3 to 12
minute total duration range.

So that might be sprints or high intensity
interval type training.

It could be an all out swim,
it could be all out row.

That's another form of endurance,
taps into different fuel systems,
different aspects of muscle
physiology, et cetera.

And then endurance that
lasts 30 minutes or more,
which is typically what people think
about when they think about endurance.

But of course, the other
forms of endurance matter.

So we've got skill, speed,
power, strength, hypertrophy,
muscular endurance, anaerobic endurance,
what I would call 3 to
12 minute endurance,
although it goes by other names as well,
and 30 minutes or more endurance type
exercise and adaptations.

Each and every one of these
requires different principles,
different concepts in order to improve,
say your muscular strength
or your hypertrophy or both.

However, there's a general
theme that sits beneath
all adaptations leading to fitness,
and that's what we're
really going to set down
as the base layer,
the foundation of everything
we talk about today.

And that's that we need
to think about what are
the modifiable variables?

Again, I'm borrowing
directly from the episode
with Dr.

Andy Galpin.

He was the one that said,
modifiable variables are the
key thing to think about.

What are you going to modify?

What are you going to change
in order to increase one
or some of the various things
I listed off before, skill,
speed, power, strength,
hypertrophy, endurance,
et cetera, et cetera.

And some of the key concepts that emerge
from that discussion are
that we need to think
about progressive overload.

Normally when people hear
about progressive overload,
they think about adding more
weight to a bar or picking
up heavier dumbbells,
but that could also be
progressive overload in
the context of running up
a hill of steeper incline
or running a little bit
faster or a little bit further
and so on and so forth.

Now, as I promised earlier,
today we are not going to
drill into each and every one
of the mechanisms that
underlie the different
adaptations that are
going to develop speed
and strength and endurance, et cetera,
because that was covered in the podcast
with Dr.

Andy Galpin and the other podcast
with experts that I mentioned earlier.

And we again, will provide
links to those podcasts
if you want to drill
into those mechanisms.

Instead, what we are going
to do is we're going to start
with a program that
essentially is designed
for you to maximize all aspects of fitness
to the extent that you can
simultaneously maximize
all aspects of fitness,
but then to change or modify that protocol
so that if you want to
build up more, for instance,
strength and you want to
just hold onto the endurance
you have, you don't
want to build endurance,
at least not in that week or
that month, you can do that.

Or if you want to improve your endurance
while maintaining your
strength, you can do that.

And so on and so forth.

Most people, I do believe,
would like a combination
of strength and endurance
and flexibility and
maybe even hypertrophy,
particularly for certain
muscle groups that maybe are
not as well developed
as other muscle groups.

They want to bring
balance to their physique,
both for sake of aesthetics
and for sake of health
and for sake of general functioning,
to maybe even to eliminate pain,
the protocol that I'm going
to describe really works
as a foundational
template for that as well.

So let's drill into that
foundational protocol
and I'll keep referring to it
as the foundational protocol,
not because it's the one that I use,
although it is the one that I use,
and not because it's the
one that we're talking
about today, although
it's the one we're talking
about today, but because
we need some general
framework from which to build out the more
specific protocols that
we'll get into in a bit
more detail later.

So in this foundational
protocol for fitness,
what you'll notice is
that on any one given day,
you're going to focus on one
particular aspect of fitness.

Maybe it's endurance, maybe it's strength,
maybe it's hypertrophy, in particular,
it might be hypertrophy for
a particular muscle group
or muscle groups.

That said, across the entire week,
it's designed to bring
fitness and different forms
of fitness to all aspects of your body.

So this particular protocol begins
on Sunday, although that's
simply the day that I happen
to begin the protocol.

And again, this protocol is not important
because it's the one that I follow.

I follow it because it is important.

In other words, it's a
protocol that's really gleaned
from the scientific
literature and the experts,
that is for you.

So this fitness protocol
is really about you.

I just may refer to it as
the one that I follow simply
for ease of communication.

And for me, my week begins on Sunday.

So I do my very best to
get a workout in on Sunday.

And for me, that workout is
that of a endurance workout.

It's designed to either maintain
or increase my endurance,
and the endurance type that I'm referring
to is endurance of 30 minutes or more.

In fact, for me, the goal
is always to get either 60
to 75 minutes of jogging.

So this would be
so-called zone two cardio,
people probably have
heard of zone two cardio,
but if you haven't, that's okay.

Zone two cardio is something
that you could measure
with a heart rate monitor or other device,
but you don't need to.

Zone two cardio is the kind
of cardiovascular exercise
in which you're pushing yourself to move
such that you're breathing
faster than normal,
your heart is beating
faster than normal, however,
you are still able to
sustain a conversation.

But if you were to push
yourself any harder,
that is move faster or
go up a steeper incline
at the same rate you happen
to be at any one moment,
you would lose that ability to speak,
you wouldn't be able
to complete sentences,
you would be out of breath or you'd have
to pause mid-sentence.

Now, it's near impossible,
even with a heart rate monitor,
to stay exactly in zone
two unless you're very,
very skilled at that.

So I don't obsess over that,
and in fact I don't wear
a heart rate monitor
when I do this exercise, but for me,
the goal is to head out
on Sunday and get 60 to 75
minutes of jogging in zone two.

Now of course I like to jog,
but that doesn't mean
that you have to jog.

You could replace jogging with
rowing on a rowing machine
or maybe even rowing an actual boat
if you have access to that
or cycling or swimming,
something that allows you
continuous movement for 60
to 75 minutes at that zone two threshold
we talked about earlier.

For me, that can include some
hills, and when I say hills,
they could be very steep hills,
but I simply slow my pace
down in order to stay
in that roughly zone two range.

Or it could be that they
are more low grade hills
and I might just slow down
a little bit or I might
even push myself a tiny bit that day.

But really I'm just trying
to build that long endurance.

I'm trying to build up
my capacity or maintain
my capacity to go a long
distance without fatiguing.

Now some days, meaning
some Sundays, since I tend
to do this almost always
on Sunday, although there are exceptions,
instead of doing the 60 to 75 minute jog,
what I'll do is I will
head out for a long hike
that could be two and a
half hours or three hours
or maybe even a four or five hour hike.

Sometimes it's very long.

And I'll do that sometimes
simply to mix up the routine,
because sometimes jogging
and jogging the same routes
gets boring to me.

I do enjoy running,
that's something I've been
doing for a very long time,
but sometimes it just
gets a little bit tedious
and I want to do something different.

Also, sometimes I want
to be social on Sundays.

I want to head out on a hike
with my partner or I want
to meet up with friends
and hike with them.

And so taking a long hike
on Sunday is something
that also could be quite social.

And then I don't have to
worry about also getting
in my workout when I'm
heading out on a hike
with my partner or going
out to meet with friends
or things of that sort.

I will say that there's a specific tool
or a specific change that
you can make to this Sunday
long endurance, or at least
what I consider long for me,
I mean it's by no means a marathon
or an Ironman, but this
long endurance training,
and that's the use of a weight vest.

So something that I've
really started utilizing
more recently, and by more recently,
I really mean within the last year or so,
is I purchased one of
these weight vests that can
be anywhere from 10 to 50 pounds.

What I use in the weight
vest is irrelevant.

But it certainly changes
the level of effort required
when taking a hike or even a walk.

Now there's an additional
benefit of the weight vest,
which is that if you
are going out for a hike
or even for a walk for social reasons
and you're with somebody that's not quite
at the same fitness level that you are,
frankly it's a little bit
rude to just keep walking
ahead of them and running
back or running ahead
and running back.

Oftentimes you really want
to spend time with the person
and you don't want them to feel
as if they're holding you up.

And so the weight vest
is a terrific way to get
some additional work, then,
as you'll find if you wear a weight vest,
it is additional work
on, say, a shorter hike.

So maybe the person
you're with only has time
for an hour long hike,
or maybe they just don't have
the fitness to do a two hour,
three hour hike.

So I'll throw on the
weight vest and I'll head
out for a walk with them
or a hike with them,
or sometimes I'll go out on a long hike
with a weight vest myself.

So again, the point of this, for me,
Sunday, although it could fall
on any day for you, workout,
is really to build up
that long form endurance.

And this fits well
with what Dr.

Andy Galpin
and Dr.

Peter Attia referred
to as the real need to
get in some long endurance
type work at some point
or even multiple points
throughout the week.

For me, this long Sunday
jog of 60 to 75 minutes
or long Sunday hike or
weighted walk or weighted hike
really accomplishes that goal.

Sometimes leads to a
little bit of soreness,
particularly in my
calves or if I'm wearing
the weight vest, sometimes
my midsection will get
sore because I'm trying to remain upright.

So I think it also builds
up some muscular endurance,
not just cardiovascular
endurance, but again,
throughout the entire time
that I'm jogging or hiking,
what I'm trying to get to
is a place where I can feel
that my pulse rate is definitely elevated,
but it's not so elevated
that I have to stop
because I'm out of breath.

And because I know some
people out there might be
really neurotic about this sort of thing,
if you have to stop because
you're out of breath,
that doesn't mean that
you blew the workout,
that you now aren't getting endurance.

Of course, you're
getting benefits from it.

So I'm not absolutely
neurotic about always
staying exactly in that heart rate zone.

I might stop and have a
conversation for a moment
if it's a longer hike,
although I really try
and keep moving and I try
and push myself just a little bit further
than where I'm exceedingly comfortable.

And so for me,
doing this long Sunday
hike or jog really provides
a foundation, a base
for endurance that then
the other endurance workouts
that I'll describe later,
that take place later in
the week, can build on.

Now, as I mentioned earlier,
we will get back to the
mechanisms that this taps
into and why this is so useful.

There are multiple benefits
to doing these kinds
of endurance type workouts
in zone two cardio.

But by putting it at the
start of my week, again,
my week starts on Sunday,
I'm sure that regardless
of how the rest of the week goes,
that I got my endurance training in,
and of course I'm going to want to,
and I will do endurance
training other days
during the week, but if
something comes up or I happen
to get sick or I'm really
behind in terms of work
and I can't get other workouts
in, this Sunday long jog
or hike really provides that fundamental,
I can honestly say foundation,
for cardiovascular fitness
and endurance that I can
hang my hat on and say, okay,
I've got that one in the bag,
and I can then look to other
days of the week to focus
on other aspects of fitness.

Now, a really important point to make
about this Sunday endurance
workout is that allows
you to check off a box and
that box is 75 or so minutes
of zone two cardio, because
as you may have heard,
either in this podcast or
from others out there like
Dr.

Peter Attia, getting
180 to 200 minutes
of zone two cardio per week
has enormous positive effects
on longevity and enormous positive effects
on general health, again,
in terms of cardiovascular function,
but also metabolic fuel utilization,
also in terms of your
musculature and your ability
to use your body over
long distances for long
periods of time.

So while it doesn't complete
all 180 to 200 minutes
per week, it certainly
gets you a good distance,
pun intended, toward that goal.

Now, I want to acknowledge
that some people might
be starting a fitness program,
and so 60 to 75 minutes of
jogging might be too long
or a three hour weight vested hike,
or some people might even
do what's called a ruck,
like you wear a rucksack,
that might be too much,
in which case certainly
start with less and go
on flat ground and go
at the rate that allows
you to get into zone two,
but that is not excessively
difficult for you.

And then as you build up fitness,
you can add time or you can add weight
through a weight vest,
or if you don't want to
buy a weight vest or can't
afford one, there's a
simple solution to that,
I actually have a good
anecdote about that.

One time I was heading out
for a hike with a friend
of mine, he was a former
SEAL team operator,
I'll never forget this,
and he said, oh yeah,
"I'll bring you a sack."
And I thought he meant like a sack lunch,
like he was going to bring lunch.

And I showed up and he
basically gave me a backpack
that was loaded with a bunch of stuff
and the backpack weighed about 40 pounds.

And then we took a hike.

So I was thinking lunch, he
was thinking weighted backpack,
and weighted backpack or
even just any kind of strong
sack that you can put over
your shoulders or even carry
in your arms, it's going to
work exceedingly well to build
in some extra requirement for effort.

So you certainly don't have
to purchase a weight vest
in order to get the benefits
of bringing additional
weight along with you on these
long cardiovascular events.

But again, build up over
time, you can add time,
you can add weight,
and that's also a really nice
feature of adding weight,
which is at some point your
schedule might be such,
or you just don't really
want to keep adding more
and more and more time on
this long endurance Sunday,
in this case, workout,
in that case add weight.

You can also, as you build up fitness,
you can add speed to it,
your zone two and what
zone two is won't shift,
but what work is required
from you in order to get
into zone two will shift.

That is as you get more and more fit,
you'll have to move faster
and or bring more weight
in order to stay in zone two
and that will simply tell
you that you are indeed
improving your endurance.

Okay, so then Monday
rolls around and I, like
most everyone else out there,
I work on Monday, I get
right into my emails
and preparation for podcasts and running
my laboratory, et cetera.

However, I make sure that at some point
on Monday, and for me that
some point is typically
and ideally early in the
morning, so 7:00 AM or so,
I train my legs on Monday,
so that includes quadriceps,
hamstrings, and calves.

Why do I do that workout on Monday?

And what is that workout designed to do?

Well, that workout is
really designed to make sure
that I'm either maintaining
or building strength
in my legs.

And this is not simply
for aesthetic reasons.

This is not simply to
grow bigger calves or grow
bigger quadriceps and hamstrings,
although it can accomplish
that as well depending
on how you train.

We'll talk about details of training.

The reason for training legs
on Monday is several fold.

First of all, they are
the largest muscle groups
of the body, and by training your legs
on Monday, it sets in
motion a large number
of metabolic processes that
carry you some distance
even through the whole week in terms
of elevating metabolism,
in terms of amplifying
certain hormonal events
in your body, et cetera,
that are really beneficial.

In addition to that,
I'm of the belief that the
legs are the foundation
of the body, and provided
you can train legs safely,
that training legs is vitally important,
not just for strength of the legs,
but also for strength of your entire body.

Again, some of that is
through systemic hormonal
effects because if you're
going to train the large
muscle groups of your body
under substantial loads,
you will get systemic release of hormones,
not just testosterone, although
certainly testosterone,
but also things like growth hormone...

You get increases in
all sorts of so-called
anabolic hormones that
even if you're somebody
who's not trying to increase muscle size,
because I realize a lot
of people are not trying
to do that, these are hormones that shift
your metabolism and your
overall tendon strength
and ligament strength
and overall musculature
into what I would call
a strong foundation.

So for me, Monday is leg workout.

It also just feels good
to get the leg workout
out of the way earlier in the week,
and it accomplishes another goal,
which is that I sometimes
will take one or two days off
of a leg workout because
they can be very intense
and they are large muscle groups,
and I'll explain what
I do on the off days,
they're not pure off days,
they actually include some
recovery type training
or even some all out training.

But by training legs on
Monday, I'm able to get
what I consider the hardest strength
and hypertrophy workout
out of the way, and, again,
set all those positive
physiological effects in motion
for the entire week.

The other thing is that no
workout exists in isolation.

What you do one day is
going to be determined
by what you did the previous day.

And even though the previous
day I may have taken
a three hour weight vested hike,
never are my legs so
sore from that long slow
endurance work, because
it is long and slow,
that I'm unable to train legs.

Contrast that with a, say,
high intensity interval training workout,
which comes later in the week,
and my legs might be sore.

In fact, they might not
even be recovered such
that I'm able to do a real legwork,
I want to say a real workout.

I'll describe what that means in a moment.

So legs come on Monday, and I think
that for those of you that
are using or interested
in using resistance training,
I suggest getting your leg
workout done early in the week.

And for those of you that
have heard the phrase,
don't skip leg day, I will
go a step further and say,
don't skip leg day, in fact,
make leg day your first day of strength
and hypertrophy training.

Put it on Monday.

Okay, so now that we're talking
about resistance training,
the question is going to
come up about sets and reps
and all of that business.

That was covered in a lot
of detail on the podcast
with Dr.

Andy Galpin, and
I'm going to get into some
of that detail now,
but I'm going to wait until
I describe the entire set
of workouts for the week before
I go into even more detail,
because there's a way of
what's called periodizing
that is changing the
sets and reps, et cetera,
across the week, and
indeed from month to month,
that's really optimal.

But I don't want to make it seem as if all
of that just pertains to the leg workout.

It actually pertains to all
of the resistance training.

So I'll just give you a couple of teasers
about the key principles
of resistance training
that I think are almost
universally, if not universally,
then generally accepted
in the strength training
and physiology community.

And then later I'll get back to some
of the overarching
principles that apply to all
strength and hypertrophy
workouts across the week,
including the ones for the
torso, the arms, et cetera.

Okay, so legs fall on Monday, I should say
that leg workouts, like all
resistance training workouts,
for me, consist of about, again,
I'm not neurotically attached to this,
but about 10 minutes of
warming up and then about 50,
five zero, to 60 minutes of real work.

Now, of course, some of that is
going to be rest between sets,
but by real work, I mean really hard work,
not necessarily to failure,
we'll talk about failure in a little bit,
but hard work where I'm
struggling to complete
the final repetitions,
if not going to failure
to continue to move
the weight repetitions.

And again, the entire work
portion of that workout
is about 50 to 60 minutes.

Why?

Well, past 60 minutes,
you start getting increases in cortisol
that really impede recovery.

And I personally am somebody
that does not recover
very well from high intensity exercise.

I realize that within the
literature, it is believed,
and I think generally accepted,
that when you stimulate muscle hypertrophy
or strength increases, it
impacts the nervous system,
it also causes things like
protein synthesis, et cetera.

There are a number of
different forms of adaptation
that occur to give you muscle
strength and size changes.

And these days people
talk a lot about needing
to stimulate muscle
growth or muscle strength
at least every 48 hours.

But I can tell you that I
recover route there slowly,
and I benefit from working
the same muscle group
about twice per week, with longer,
or I should say more days of rest
in between those workouts.

So if I train legs on
Monday, believe it or not,
I'm only training legs on Monday.

I do not have a second leg
workout during the week.

However, on Friday, I do a high intensity
interval training session
that serves two purposes.

One is it serves the purpose
of triggering a certain
type of endurance and
getting my heart rate
very, very high.

And in addition to that,
because of the way I do that workout,
it acts as a sort of supplement or a more
moderate intensity workout
for quadriceps, hamstrings,
and calves, such that I at
least never lose strength,
and in fact, generally
build strength from one leg
workout to the next, provided
I'm doing things correctly.

So what I'm not referring
to is the kind of classic
super high intensity training
once per week and then
not actually training
that muscle group again.

For me, it's really training
each muscle group twice
per week, once directly
and then once indirectly,
either during another
weight training workout
or during a cardiovascular,
I should say endurance training workout.

So again, legs on Monday, the
workout is 50 to 60 minutes,
after a brief warmup.

I generally pick two
exercises per muscle group.

So again, I'm doing calves,
I'm doing quadriceps,
and I'm doing hamstrings.

You should pick the
exercises that work for you.

So that's why I'm actually
not going to share
which exercises I use.

I'll give you a couple suggestions
about the ones I do use,
but really, exercise selection,
as Dr.

Andy Galpin pointed out,
is a very important variable.

And the key thing to
emphasize for that variable
is that you need to be able to
perform the movement safely.

So I know there's a huge debate out there,
and people love to argue
about whether or not one
can squat or deadlift
for long periods of time,
or should or should not.

Some people say you absolutely should.

I personally do not squat
and do not deadlift.

I've actually never done much
squatting or deadlifting,
and I know some people
out there are probably
rolling their eyes or switching
the channel at this point.

But I can say that for me,
I've been able to achieve the strength
and hypertrophy goals
that I've been seeking,
doing things like leg
extensions and hack squats
or for hamstrings, doing
things like leg curls
and glute-ham raises or
for calves doing standing
and seated calf raises and so on.

I think a key principle
that everyone should pay
attention to is one that was taught to me
by an excellent strength coach years ago,
and I still use this and
at least it works for me.

For each muscle group,
try and find an exercise in
which you get that muscle
into a weighted stretch position.

So this would be, for instance,
the standing calf raise,
down at the bottom,
it's weighted and you're
in a deep stretch provided
you're doing the movement correctly.

As well as another exercise
where you're getting
contraction in the shortened
position of the muscle.

So for the hamstrings,
that would be the leg curl,
for the calves, it would
be a seated calf raise,
for the quadriceps, the leg extension is,
if the machine is designed
right and you're doing
it correctly, the peak
contraction is largely going
to occur at the legs extended position,
but then another exercise
for each muscle group
that puts the muscle
into more of a stretched
or at least a larger range
of motion or compound
type movement,
but ideally where there's
some stretch there.

So I guess I will tell
you what exercise I do,
for the quadriceps is
going to be leg extensions
and hack squats.

I use hack squats because
I don't do free bar squats
for safety reasons, and I
like the hack squat machine.

I'll do leg curls and glute-ham
raises for hamstrings,
and I'll do standing calf
raises and seated calf
raises for the calves.

Again, those are the movements that I use
because I can perform them
safely in the repetition
ranges and with the weights
that are required for me
to either maintain or build
leg strength and calf strength.

But you might decide that
for you, dead lifts are
absolutely essential and terrific,
or squats free bar squats
are absolutely terrific
or front squats.

I'm not here to tell you which
exercises to do or not do.

I am telling you that it's probably wise
to at least consider doing
at least two exercises
per muscle group, probably three maximum,
if you ask me if you're
doing your entire legs
and calves in one day.

But to think about doing one exercise
where the muscle's brought
into that shortened
peak contraction position,
like leg curls or leg
extensions or seated calf raise,
and then another exercise
for each muscle group
where there's more of
a elongation and maybe
even a stretch on the muscle group.

In fact, that's a principle
that you'll hear me talk
about later when I talk
about training other muscle
groups for strength and hypertrophy.

So now you know approximately
how long to train,
you might be somebody who
can get away with training
for an hour and a half,
and that won't impede your recovery.

For me, that really starts
to impede my recovery.

Also, if I'm staying on task,
that 60 minute limit
really works well for me.

Do I occasionally train for 75 minutes?

Yes, because if I'm waiting
for a piece of equipment,
sometimes I have to just wait longer.

So that happens.

But I really try and
keep the total duration
of the workout shorter.

How many sets and reps and rest intervals?

Well, that was covered by
Dr.

Andy Galpin as well.

Without getting into the total science,
here's a brief summary
of how to structure that.

It's pretty clear that
if you're going to do
lower repetitions and heavier weight,
that you're going to want
to do a bit more volume.

I know that this spits
in the face of what a lot
of people think, but so if
you're going to do five sets
of five, and I would
consider five repetitions
low repetition range, heavier weight,
and if you're going to train
with higher repetitions,
you can do fewer sets.

That certainly works for me.

I generally follow a program
where for about a month,
so three to four weeks,
I will do all my resistance training
in the repetition range of
about four to eight repetitions.

So that's rather heavy.

A few more sets.

So it might be anywhere from three to four
sets per exercise.

Again, still just two exercises.

And longer rest between sets,
anywhere from two minutes
to maybe even four minutes
if it's really heavy leg work.

And then for the next month,
switch to repetition range
that's closer to 8 to 12,
maybe even 15 repetitions per set,
but do fewer sets overall,
so maybe just two to
three sets per exercise.

Again, just two exercises
per muscle group typically.

And shorten the rest between
sets so that it's more
in the 90 second,
maybe even as short as 60
second rest between sets,
but typically 90 seconds
to about two minutes or two
and a half minutes.

So basically it's one month heavier,
the next month, slightly lighter,
although I wouldn't say lighter,
I would say moderate weight
and moderate rep range.

That tends to work well for me.

It also adheres to a
principal that came up
during the discussion, again,
with Dr.

Andy Galpin,
that for hypertrophy,
you really can use
repetition ranges anywhere
from 5 to 30, three zero, reps.

But he emphasized changing
the repetition ranges
in order to offset boredom.

Frankly, I like to train heavier.

I enjoy training in the
four to eight rep range.

However, I notice that
if I do that for more
than four weeks in a
row and I don't switch
over to training in the
8 to 12, maybe in 15
repetition range for about a month,
well then I can't make
continuous progress.

I start to actually lose ground.

But by switching back and forth,
I actually can make
continuous progress at least
across the year.

So I hope that that principle,
or I should say that protocol
was communicated clearly.

It works very well, I assure you.

Does that mean that I
never get 10 repetitions
on a week when I'm supposed
to train in the four
to eight repetition range?

No.

Occasionally I'll venture up
into the 10 repetition range,
but I really try and cluster
the low repetition work
for about a month, again,
across all workouts and all exercises
and the slightly higher,
I would even say moderate
repetition work across
to the next month.

One thing that you'll
notice since we are talking
about total fitness programming
is that during the months
where you are doing
moderate repetitions, you'll notice
that your endurance work
will actually be facilitated.

And I do not think that's a coincidence.

In fact, it's not a coincidence.

It's because when you
are training very heavy
or in the heavier range,
lower repetitions, et cetera,
you're tapping into different
processes in those muscles.

So when you head out for
that long Sunday hike,
or as you'll soon hear,
whereas on Friday you're
going to do high intensity
interval training, what you'll notice
is during certain months
of weight training,
when you're training more
heavy, those workouts will feel,
literally will feel
different than they will
during the months when you're doing
moderate repetition work.

I am not a competitive athlete.

I'm not running races
or triathlons like some
of my friends.

I'm very impressed by them.

I'm really just trying to get overall
cardiovascular fitness, overall strength,
overall hypertrophy where I
need it, maintain muscle size,
et cetera,
in muscle groups where I'm
just trying to maintain.

That's really my goal.

So I'm not trying to optimize
any of these workouts
for any one performance
feature, but in a little bit,
we'll talk about how you
can change various aspects,
that is, variables of these
protocols, in order to say,
for instance, really emphasize hypertrophy
or really emphasize endurance.

Okay, so with what I would call a standard
endurance workout done
on Sunday, and I say
standard because most people,
when they hear endurance,
they think of the ability to endure,
to continue in a repeated
movement or exercise
over some period of time,
with that workout done on Sunday, and then
with the leg workout done
on Monday, you can feel
really good about how you're
heading into the week.

However, after training
legs on Monday, I experience
that doing cardiovascular
workouts the next day
is either inefficient or at
least doesn't really allow
me to completely recover
from my leg workout.

Now, I realize that
some people are going to
immediately scoff at that, and in fact,
there are really beautiful
papers out there talking
about how one can
actually do a fair amount
of cardiovascular exercise
without interfering
with their strength and
speed and hypertrophy
improvements and vice versa.

In fact, there's a terrific
review that was mentioned
on the podcast with Dr.

Andy Galpin.

This is a review that we'll
provide a citation to,
and a reference and a link to,
which is the review by Murach
and Bagley, which talks
about whether or not there's interference
between strength and endurance workouts.

Really interesting review
if you want to peruse that.

But with all that said,
I like to take Tuesday as a no endurance,
no resistance training day,
but that doesn't mean that
I'm not doing anything
for my overall health and fitness.

On Tuesdays, I do a series
of heat cold contrast.

In other words, I get really,
really warm and then I
get really, really cold,
I get really, really
warm and I get really,
really cold repeatedly.

And the way I do that is by
getting into a hot sauna.

So for me, that's really hot,
but I've built up my heat conditioning,
so please don't do this
unless you've built up
your ability to withstand heat.

And I'll get in for about 20 minutes.

Sometimes 15, but usually 20 minutes.

Then I get out and then I
will get into an ice bath
or a cold water bath
that's about 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Again, don't get into water that's so cold
that you go into shock.

I'll explain what a good
cold stimulus could be
for you and how to determine that.

Or if I don't have access
to my sauna and my ice bath,
what I can do if I'm
traveling is I will take a hot
bath and then alternate with cold shower,
hot bath, cold shower.

It's hard to do hot bath ice bath
unless you have two baths.

I don't know any hotel rooms,
at least I've never stayed
in one that has two baths,
although I'm sure they're out there.

But for me, this is heat cold contrast.

And really what this day
is about is two things.

First of all, I'm trying
to accelerate recovery
from the leg workout I did previously.

Also, if you listen to our episode
of the Huberman Lab podcast
about deliberate heat
exposure or you listen to our episode
of the Huberman Lab podcast
about deliberate cold exposure,
I talk about some of the
benefits of heat and cold,
and I get into a lot of details
about how you can access heat.

You can do baths, you can do saunas,
you can even take hot showers.

If you don't have access to any of that,
you could even wrap your
body from the neck down
in a garbage bag, plastic
garbage bags, believe it or not,
wrestlers used to do this,
put on some sweats and go running.

That'll get you warm.

Again, be careful not to
overheat and then you can
get into a cold shower.

So there's a lot of ways,
depending on your budget
and what you have access to.

I don't use cryo, these
cryotherapy chambers,
they're hard to find.

They're expensive.

Again, I use sauna and
ice bath and I will do
anywhere from three to five
rounds, which is a lot,
anywhere from three to five rounds of heat
for about 20 minutes and
cold for about 5 minutes.

How cold should the cold be?

We covered this in the episode
on deliberate cold exposure.

Here's a general rule of thumb.

It should be cold enough that
you really want to get out,
but not so cold that it's unsafe.

And that will vary from person to person.

So I cannot give you a
simple prescriptive there.

Same thing with the heat,
hot enough that you're
sweating and that you want
to get out, but not so hot
that you're running the risk
of injuring yourself or killing yourself.

And again, that will vary
from person to person.

So you have to build up slowly,
be careful and build up empirically.

I do that on Tuesdays again as a way
to accelerate recovery and
because it's very clear
that there are cardiovascular benefits,
maybe even benefits for the brain related
to the cardiovascular
benefits because of course
the brain needs a lot of
blood flow and needs a lot
of nutrients and other things flowing
into and out of there,
debris out and nutrients and
other things into the brain.

Heat can help accelerate
that or improve that.

And so I'm doing that to
improve cardiovascular function,
improve brain health, and
then the cold contrast
provides a sort of accelerator
on that or an amplifier
I think is the better way to phrase it
on that process because in the cold
you get vasoconstriction
and then in the heat
you get vasodilation.

And so you're maximizing that process,
which is actually a neural process.

Nerves actually innervate
the blood vessels
and capillaries and even the arteries
in order to allow that
constriction and dilation
process to occur.

So Tuesday is really about recovery,
but my recovery day isn't necessarily
about just laying around
and not doing anything.

I might still also take
some walks that day.

Remember, I want to try
and get that 200 minutes
of zone two cardio across the week,
and sometimes, not often,
but sometimes I'll get
in a few minutes or more
of walking quickly that day.

But generally I'm working
a lot on Tuesday as I do
on Monday, and I'm a
little bit tired and maybe
even a little bit sore from my leg workout
the previous day Monday.

So I try and get that hot cold contrast.

There are other benefits
to hot and cold contrast.

We have a description of
the different protocols
for hot and for cold and their contrast
at our Huberman Lab newsletter.

You can find that by
going to hubermanlab.com.

Go to the newsletter tab under the menu
and you can sign up.

You can actually download
those protocols very
easily without even signing
up if you just want to
access them straight off.

So Tuesday is really about
recovery and about getting
some additional cardiovascular benefits
from heat cold contrast.

One other thing that's
built into the rationale
for doing a lot of heat and
cold on one day as opposed
to doing it every day...

Well, in addition to it
being a little bit more
convenient because certainly
some people don't access
to heat and cold sauna and
cold dunks et cetera every day.

So maybe getting to do
that one day is more
accessible or feasible.

But in addition to that,
it's very clear that
while there are benefits
to doing sauna often,
and we talked about this
in the deliberate heat
episode and the episode
with Dr.

Rhonda Patrick
when she was a guest
on this podcast, it's
also clear that if you do
sauna seldom, that is once a week,
but you do a lot of it on
one day, so in this case,
it's an hour, if it's,
remember, it's one more,
it's three to five rounds
of 20 minutes of sauna
followed by about 5 minutes of cold or so,
by doing that all on one day,
the peer reviewed research that's covered
in the episode on deliberate heat,
this is a study out of Finland,
showed that you get massive,
even 16 fold increases in growth hormone,
which are extremely
beneficial for metabolism
and for recovery.

So these massive increases
in growth hormone are seen
when you are doing these sessions of sauna
that are repeated on the
same day and you're only
doing that about once a week.

Whereas if you do sauna more often,
there are certainly benefits to that,
but it's time consuming and
you need access to sauna
more often than one day
a week if you're doing
it more than one day a week.

But if you do it one day a
week and you're doing a lot
of sessions within that
day, as I've detailed here,
you see these massive
increases in growth hormone
that are not observed if
you're doing sauna more often
for the other benefits of sauna.

Now the effects of cold are many,
it's not just vasoconstriction,
but the effects of cold
are also counterbalanced
by some of the problems with
deliberate cold exposure
that maybe you've heard about
on this podcast and a lot
of other podcasts and seem
to be a kind of a buzz theme
on Twitter and elsewhere.

And the point is this,
there are a number of
quality studies showing
that if you do deliberate cold exposure,
in particular ice baths
or getting into very cold
water immediately after an
endurance training session
or a strength and hypertrophy
session, it can indeed, yes,
it can disrupt or prevent
some of the adaptations
that you are seeking with
strength and hypertrophy
and endurance workouts.

Okay, so you heard that right.

And I believe that to be
true based on now several
quality peer-reviewed studies.

So by doing your deliberate cold exposure
on Tuesday, you're not
going to get those effects,
that is the blocking of
hypertrophy or the blocking
of strength improvement or
the blocking or prevention
of improvements in
endurance that would occur
if you immediately got into the ice bath
after a hypertrophy strength
or endurance workout.

Now the caveat to that is if
you are somebody who likes
to do cold showers,
I am not aware of any
data that says that cold
showers cannot be
performed after a strength
hypertrophy or endurance workout.

Cold showers are different
than submersion up
to the neck in an ice
bath or another cold body
of water for a number
of different reasons.

In fact, they tap into different aspects
of the nervous system entirely.

We don't have time to go into that now,
it's covered in the episode
on deliberate cold exposure,
but the simple point is by doing your heat
and cold contrast, or hey, listen,
if you're somebody who
doesn't have access to sauna
or you don't like hot
baths and you just do
some deliberate cold
exposure on Tuesday, you are
doing that separate from
your strength and hypertrophy
and endurance workouts such
that it will not impede
the benefits of those workouts.

Okay, so long endurance on
Sunday, leg resistance training
on Monday and on Tuesday,
heat cold contrast.

That brings us to Wednesday.

And on Wednesday we get back
to a resistance training workout.

And the resistance training
workout that I emphasize
on Wednesday is one in
which you train your torso.

Yes, literally your torso.

I know this is counter to
this so-called bro science
of bro splits.

I don't know who originated that term,
it's a terrible term.

It essentially alienates
anyone who's not a bro
or considers themselves a bro.

But in any case,
this is not about training
chest or back or shoulders.

In fact, it's really about
strengthening the muscles
of the torso and of
course includes the chest
and the shoulders and the back.

And I'm sure, as I say this,
a number of people out
there who are obsessed
with hypertrophy and
muscle growth and filling
out their shirts or whatever
it may be, are thinking,
oh no, this is just kind
of all around fitness.

But no, the point is,
on Wednesday you train your
torso and that's going to
involve some pushing, so that's,
for you that might include
some training of things
like bench presses or
incline presses as well
as shoulder presses or lateral raises,
things for the shoulders
as well as for the back,
some pulling exercises.

These could be bent over
rows or chin-ups or pull-ups.

Again, there are enormous
number of exercise for each
and every one of these muscle groups.

Now, I believe there's a
clear benefit to training
all these muscle groups
together on the same day,
because much in the same
way that training legs all
on one day can lead to
these systemic effects
because they're large muscle groups,
working both the pushing
muscles and the pulling
muscles of the torso on one day,
at least in the context of this program,
is very time efficient,
and tends to wick out
into a number of different dimensions
of health that at least I'm
interested in and I think
a lot of other people are interested in.

What are those?

Well, let's think again,
I want to be strong in not just
my legs, but my upper body.

I also may want, may want
to engage some hypertrophy,
to grow certain muscle
groups in order to create
a sense of balance.

I could be for aesthetic reasons,
but also for balancing
strength and for health of,
and the integrity of
the joints, et cetera.

And in addition to that,
by training a bunch of different
muscle groups together,
you have the opportunity
to get the more systemic
hormonal effects and
metabolic effects that occur
when you're not just
training one muscle group
and isolating that one muscle group,
but rather training a bunch
of muscle groups together.

So Wednesday I train torso
and I do that in push
pull fashion just for
kind of time efficiency.

Sometimes that means doing
a pushing exercise and then
a pulling exercise.

Sometimes it might even
mean doing a set of pushing
and then a set of pulling
and going back and forth.

However, if you're in a gym,
in particular, a crowded gym,
please don't be one of those people
that colonizes multiple
pieces of equipment and says,
I'm working there, I'm working there,
and that can be quite a
dance and it can be hard
to orchestrate a workout like that.

So sometimes it will be
starting off with a set
of shoulder presses and
then doing all your sets
of those and then moving
to your chin ups and then
moving perhaps back to
shoulders and realizing, ah, oh,
someone's on the machine that I wanted,
or using the equipment that I wanted,
so I'll just finish up the pulling,
I'll finish up the back work
and then go in to the push.

I don't obsess over the
alternation in any kind
of strict way.

I really just try and get the
muscles of the torso trained.

And again, it's two
exercises per muscle group.

And one of those exercises
is going to be something
where there's, I realize this isn't
physiologically accurate, but a shortening
of the muscle or where they,
at the end of the movement,
the muscle is under maximal contraction.

I could throw out some names of exercises
just for purpose of understanding.

So this would be like cable
crossovers for the chest,
the peak contraction is at the end,
whereas something like an incline press,
there's more of a stretch
provided it's done
over a full range of
motion at the beginning
of the movement.

So again, something
where there's a stretch
and something where
there's a peak contraction.

For the shoulders, it's a
little bit harder to do,
although there are ways to do that.

And Jeff Cavaliere has
excellent workouts available,
zero cost, on YouTube.

He also has excellent programs
on his athleanx.com site.
but certainly has a lot
of excellent protocols
on his YouTube and Instagram.

But on YouTube you can
put in his name and any
muscle group that you want to train.

And he has some terrific
videos describing exercise
choice and other features
of exercise parameters.

Again, a peak contraction
or shortening of the muscle,
peak contraction exercise
and a stretching exercise.

And so for the back, one might say, okay,
a seated row or a bent
over row or a dumbbell row
where the elbow is
brought behind the torso
for a peak contraction movement.

And then for more of a
stretching movement might
be something like a chin up or a pull-up.

And as I say this,
I understand that stretching
and peak contraction
aren't the exact terms that
one would use if they were
a physiotherapist or a strength
and conditioning coach,
but I think for the
typical person who's trying
to generate strength and
hypertrophy in those muscles
or maintain strength and
hypertrophy in those muscles,
this kind of nomenclature
way of describing
it at least should be
clear and even efficient.

And just to remind you,
as with the leg workout,
the total duration of the
torso workout is going to be
50 to 60 minutes after a brief warmup.

The sets and repetitions
are going to be dictated
in the same way that I described earlier.

So for about a month it's
going to be more sets.

So anywhere from three to five sets
in the lower repetition range,
so four to eight repetitions,
so that's going to be heavier
weights and longer rest
as I described earlier,
the rest intervals.

And then for the next
month it's going to be
moderate repetitions, fewer sets,
the same way I described earlier.

And if you want more
details on all of that,
you can find that in
the newsletter related
to the optimal or
foundational fitness protocol
that you can access at hubermanlab.com.

One thing I should note
about the Wednesday torso
workout is that I am a
big believer in training
the, what I believe is the highly avoided,
or at least overlooked but
vitally important aspect
of total body stability,
strength and safety, really,
safety, which is the neck.

Now I realize a lot of people
don't want a large neck,
and I totally understand
for aesthetic reasons
why they don't want that.

It's kind of interesting
actually, if you think about it,
that people who have a
large neck are often told
they have no neck.

People say that guy has no
neck or they have no neck
when in fact they're referring to the fact
that they have a very large neck.

I don't know how that came to be.

Somebody put in the comments why that is,
how come when people have
a big neck they refer
to it as no neck.

So why do I train the neck?

I train the neck for a couple of reasons.

One is years ago I had an
accent where I actually fell
off a roof and I'd been
training my neck at that time
for a sport that I was
involved in and I walked
away from it with a sore
neck but not a broken neck.

And I thought, wow, it's
really great that I have
been training my neck.

In addition to that,
I was once in a car accident
where I was parked...

I just bought the car, was
my first new car purchased,
parked in that car with my mother,
my grandfather in the
backseat at the red light
and someone rammed into us at full speed.

Now fortunately, none of us
were hurt.

We were all rattled.

And once again, I was very
sore in my back and in my neck.

But I think one of the
reasons why I was able
to essentially walk away from that,
I didn't have any sustained damage was
because I trained my neck,
but I started training my
neck for sport and I continue
to train my neck because I
notice when I don't train
my neck I start getting shoulder issues.

And if you talk to an
excellent physiologist like
Dr.

Kelly Starrett of The Ready State,
is an excellent channel,
you can find them on all the social media
and standard channels
or you talk to anyone
out there who really
understands the strength
of the torso and the upper
body and even the back.

What you learn is that, of course,
being the upper portion of the spine,
stabilizing your neck is very important.

Now, training the neck can
be a little bit detailed
and specific and even
dangerous if you do it wrong.

Again, Jeff Cavaliere has
a terrific set of videos
on training the neck properly.

I know a lot of people
out there might think neck
bridges and I used to do neck bridges.

I occasionally still sneak in
a neck bridge here or there,
although I don't recommend
it because in discussions
with Jeff, he will tell
you, and it's true,
that the discs eventually
go and you can run
into serious issues from doing bridges
and it doesn't happen
gradually so you can't
notice it happening.

It just happens suddenly.

So I might occasionally do a neck bridge,
but in general I'll train
neck by wrapping a plate
in a towel so that I don't
end up with an imprint
of the weight value on my head or face.

And then moving the neck
from side to side or front
or back, and again, we'll
provide a link to those videos.

It's a terrific set of
videos that describe
how to train your neck
properly and safely.

So even if you're not
trying to grow your neck,
you definitely want to
make sure that you use
some light weights to
make sure that your neck
is stable and upright.

And I say stable and upright
because it's very clear
that for reasons related
to texting and staring down
at computers and related
to weak neck relative
to the rest of the muscles
that stabilize the spine,
a lot of people,
their default stance or
their default posture
is with chin forward and that's not good.

Not only is it aesthetically not good,
but it also can create all
sorts of issues related
to back pain and headaches
and things of that sort.

This is a real thing,
training your neck allows you to stand
upright, sit upright.

I even believe that it
allows you to do things like
public speaking or have
conversations with people
on the street in a way
where you are front facing
as opposed to looking down.

So Wednesday is torso
and neck and then comes
Thursday and that means
another cardiovascular
exercise session,
although it's a brief one.

Unlike the endurance training
on Sunday, the cardiovascular session
on Thursday, and again,
for me it falls on Thursday,
but for it could fall
on a different day depending
on when you started
this protocol, is going
to be about, again,
about 35 minutes of, for me, running,
although it could be rowing
or it could be cycling,
it could be something of that sort.

The goal of this workout
is what's important.

The goal of this workout is to tap into,
remember that long list
that we talked about earlier
where you've got skill and speed and power
and strength and hypertrophy, et cetera,
different forms of endurance,
is to get into that range of endurance
where your heart rate is
elevated quite a bit more
than zone two,
but that you're not really
going all out sprint.

So what that means for me
is warming up for about 5
to 10 minutes.

That could be jogging, a little
bit of light calisthenics,
might even be hopping
on a stationary bike,
although to be honest I
loathe the stationary bike,
and then setting a timer
and doing about 30,
but ideally 35 minutes of what I call
75% to 80% of all out.

Okay, now I realize this
spits in the face of all
you heart rate monitor wearing
super techy exercise types.

But when I think of all out
sprint, I think of 100%.

And what is that?

In my mind that's somebody is chasing me
with a needle full of
poison and I am sprinting
away at maximal speed.

That for me is 100%.

So after a brief warm up,
what I'm going to do is
go out, typically outside,
although sometimes it
has to be on a treadmill
if I'm traveling, and move,
run for about 30 to 35 minutes
at about 75% or 80% of that all out.

What that means is that I'm
striving to keep a steady pace,
but in reality I don't.

I sometimes have to stop at
a stoplight, there are cars,
please don't run into
traffic just to maintain
that speed and that timing,
that would be terribly
antagonistic to fitness,
in particular, lifespan.

That running tends to be running
in which I'm breathing
hard so I'm not able
to restrict myself to
purely nasal breathing.

And I should have mentioned earlier,
on the Sunday long ruck
or weighted hike or jog,
if I'm alone, I try and
do pure nasal breathing.

If I'm with other people or I'm talking,
obviously I'm not going
to do pure nasal breathing
because I'm talking, although
I'm sure that sometimes
they wish I was doing
pure nasal breathing.

That Thursday workout
accomplishes a number of things.

First of all, it really
gets my heart rate up
and it improves multiple
aspects of endurance,
because as you recall earlier,
the different bins of
endurance that include
muscular endurance, anaerobic,
that 3 to 12 minute range
and then 30 minutes or longer,
none of them really precisely
match what's accomplished
in this 35 minute or so
cardiovascular session
where I'm pushing hard but not all out.

But that's exactly the reason to do it,
which is that it taps
into multiple fuel systems
for the muscle and multiple
aspects of the heart
and capillaries and
arteries and veins that are
involved in generating that movement.

So it really cuts a
broad swath into multiple
categories of endurance.

And also just keep in mind
what this foundational
or optimal fitness protocol
is really designed to do.

In my mind, a foundational
fitness protocol is one
that leaves you or has you
in a state where if you need
to walk really far and
carry a bunch of weight,
you can do it.

If you need to lift a heavy
object with your legs,
you can do it.

If you need to run really
fast for two minutes,
you can do it.

And if you need to run
a little bit further,
like maybe in 10 minutes
for whatever reason,
you can do that.

So it's a really kind of
all around fitness program
and that 35 minute run, again,
could be swapped with a 35 minute erg row.

Or sometimes if you only have access
to a stationary bike, you could do that.

I suppose if you didn't
have access to any equipment
and running is not your thing,
one thing that I have done,
especially if I've been
stuck in a hotel 'cause
I arrived late someplace
and I really want to get
this workout in, you could
do the dreaded burpee.

I know there are a lot
of opinions out there,
some people think burpees
are downright dangerous,
other people love burpees.

You could do that.

Or you could do really fast
but full jumping jacks.

I know that's a little PE class, right?

Physical education class-ish.

But sometimes if I need
to get the workout in,
what I'll do in a hotel
if I've arrived late
in particular day of travel
is I will find the stairwell,
the fire stairwell, I'll
make sure by the way
that I can get back into the
building 'cause I've been
locked in those stairwells before.

And I will simply walk
really fast up the stairwell
as many flights of stairs as there are,
or maybe even jog it, not quite sprint,
but a run up those stairs
over and over and over again
in order to get that 35
minutes of 75% to 80%
of max output cardiovascular work done.

And if I'm really just
restricted to my hotel room,
I'll just do jumping
jacks for 30, 35 minutes,
sometimes while watching something on TV.

And believe me, if you're
doing full jumping jacks,
like really extending your legs,
really getting arms
overhead and really doing
the full movement, by the
time you hit five or six
minutes you are going to be
sweating and your heart rate
is really going to be up.

I also sometimes will
travel with a jump rope.

I always try and travel with
a jump rope and skip rope,
much to the dismay of
the people who are housed
below me in the hotel room.

Skipping rope, I should mention,
can be a very effective way of getting
cardiovascular training
while you're on the road.

But in all seriousness,
if you're in a hotel room or an apartment
and you can't really jump
high and you're very good
at jumping rope, what you'll
find is it's not going to
get you into that higher
elevated heart rate zone.

Okay?

It can be great for
zone two type training,
but if you're really
good at skipping rope,
and I wouldn't say I'm really good at it,
but I've done enough skipping
rope that I can just kind
of cruise and talk and
it, it's more zone twoish,
even feels like walking at times.

Now you can do double unders
where you're really jumping
and putting the rope
under you twice each time
or crossovers, et cetera,
depending on your skill level.

But again, if you're in an
apartment or you're in a hotel,
that's going to be harder to do.

And because there's some skill involved,
sometimes you're stopping more often
than you're continuing.

By the way, and I just
have to mention this,
a really terrific Instagram
channel is @anna.skips.

This is a teacher, a science teacher,
or I believe it's a math,
maths as they say in the
UK 'cause she's in the UK,
maths teacher.

I don't know Anna, but I
know she skips 'cause she has
this amazing Instagram
channel called Anna Skips.

And what's really cool
about her Instagram is she
shows you her progression
from not being able to skip rope at all
to the absolutely incredible
types of rope skipping
that she's doing each morning
while getting sunlight,
which of course is
essential health protocol.

So check out Anna Skips on
Instagram, really inspiring
and made me want to get
better at skipping rope.

I'm still working at it.

Okay, so with that
Thursday cardiovascular,
let's call it endurance,
but cardiovascular training workout done,
around roles Friday and
on Friday I'm going to do
another cardiovascular training session,
and I alluded to this earlier,
but this cardiovascular
training session is also
designed to tap into some
of the ability of hard,
I should say high intensity
interval training,
to tap into strength and
hypertrophy increases
for the legs.
'Cause remember, we train legs
on Monday and what the science tells us
is that protein synthesis
in a muscle group can
be stimulated about every 42 to 72 hours.

And so we've had Tuesday off,
Wednesday off and Thursday
off and you don't want to
lose progress that you
made from that terrific
Monday leg workout.

But in order to make sure
that you can do the other
things that follow in this
program and pick back up
on Monday with another leg workout,
at least for me with my recovery abilities
and my work schedule,
I'm not going to do an
entire other leg workout
because it's going to set
the whole thing out of whack.

That is, I won't be
able to consistently do
the same workouts on the
same days of each week.

Now with that said,
a little bit later I'll
explain what happens
if you have to miss a workout
and how you can combine
days, et cetera.

But I really strive to
get certain workouts done
on certain days consistently
at least as best I can.

So Friday is high intensity
interval training,
and that can take a
variety of different forms.

For me, the ideal thing
to do, for me, again,
you could do something
completely different.

Exercise choice, again, should be governed
by what you can do safely
so you don't injure yourself
and that you can perform
effectively and that gets
you or provides you the
stimulus that you want.

And what I'm trying to do
on Friday is get my heart
rate way, way up.

Talked about this in the
episode with Dr.

Andy Galpin.

In addition to the benefits
of getting 180-200 minutes
of zone two cardio per week, minimum,
it's a really good idea to
get up to that max or near max
heart rate at least once a week.

And you're not going to do that
for very long periods of time.

You're not going to do
that for 30 minutes.

You can't sprint all out for 30 minutes
unless you're Steve Prefontaine.

If you haven't seen
the movies "Without
Limits" or "Prefontaine,"
you should absolutely see those.

He was able to go out and run 12 laps,
what seemed to be an all
out sprint or close to it.

Incredible.

But most people are not
going to do that or going
be carried away on a
stretcher if they try.

These high intensity
interval training for me
ideally would be on so-called
assault bike or Airdyne bikes.

So these bikes that have the
fan, which might seem like,
oh, just cools you off,
but actually there's a
lot of resistance there.

So what I will typically
do is a 20 to 30 second
all out sprint using arms and
legs and then 10 seconds rest
and then repeat all out sprint for 20
to 30 seconds, 10 seconds rest, repeat.

And I'll do that for anywhere
from 8 to 12 rounds, which,
trust me, even if you start
out a little bit less,
or I should say not all
out intensity or effort,
by the time you hit
the fifth or sixth one,
you will be certainly
headed into if not near
your maximum heart rate.

Now what is your maximum heart rate?

Do you need a heart rate monitor?

No.

If you like using that
sort of thing, great.

But again, Andy Galpin
beautifully supplied us
with the information.

He said if you take the
number 220 and you subtract
your age, that for most people, most,
is going to be your maximum heart rate.

Although for certain
people who are very fit
or certain ages, that's
not going to apply.

So it's a little bit too crude to measure,
but it's a good starting
place and you can look up
other information or see
that podcast episode,
we provide the link to it
in the show note captions
if you want to get more details on that.

I don't use a heart rate monitor.

What I'm trying to do is get to that point
where I quote unquote
feel like I want to die.

Now I don't want to die,
and please don't die, right?

If you're not in good
cardiovascular health,
do not just jump right
into this fitness protocol.

But I want to get to the
point where I really feel like
I could not pedal any
faster or pull any faster
on the assault bike, the Airdyne bike,
or if I'm doing this workout
in a place or at a time
or because I choose to
not use a bike or a rower,
'cause you could also use a rower,
I will simply do sprint jog intervals.

I will sprint for 20 or 30 seconds,
then jog for 10 seconds,
sprint for 20 or 30 seconds,
and then jog for 10
seconds and just repeat.

I used to have a big field
next to my laboratory,
my old laboratory, and I
used to bring my bulldog
Costello out there.

He was really good at the
first sprint part and then
he would just lie down and watch.
he didn't even do the jog part.

I would just go back and
forth, back and forth,
back and forth, panting
like a bulldog nonstop,
barely able to recover
before sprinting again.

And the basis of this workout
again is several fold.

First of all, it's to get
the heart rate really high,
up towards maximum heart
rate at least once a week.

So you accomplish that this Friday.

Also, if you are
sprinting and then jogging
or you are really pushing
hard on an assault bike
or an Airdyne bike, or
using a, for instance,
a skier or a skier machine or any number
of different cardiovascular
training tools,
you are going to get
activation of the legs,
of course not to the
same degree as you would
with squats or dead lifts or
leg extensions or leg curls.

That's simply not the case.

But you're going to trigger
strength and hypertrophy
and other types of adaptations
in those muscle groups.

So this for me also represents
the second leg workout
of the week where I'm
not touching any weights.

One important point that
I don't think I've heard
mentioned anywhere else,
but that I hope to have
Dr.

Kelly Starrett on
the podcast to discuss
and that I've discussed
with him one on one,
which is be careful with
all out sprints or all
out anything cardiovascular exercise,
you can get injured doing those.

So for instance, if you
go out and you just sprint
across a field, all out,
20 or 30 seconds and
then walk back and can do
it again and again,
don't be surprised if the
next day you have some
sciatica or even some pelvic floor pain.

I don't recommend going
all out on any movement
that you can't perform with perfect form.

Okay?

So for me, I really try and
stay away from all out sprints.

I'll sprint it about 95% of what I can do
because I find if I go all out sprint,
I don't know what the reason is,
but it might be an over
extension of a limb
or something like that,
I'm not a sprinter,
I'm not a sprinting coach.

I do hope to get Stu McMillan
on here or Dan Pfaff,
who are excellent sprinting coaches,
at some point they were world
class sprinting coaches,
but I'm not a pro sprinter,
I'm not even a amateur sprinter,
I'm a fitness sprinter.

So the Airdyne or assault
bike or the rower is really
a safer option for me.

And if I'm running or I'm doing some sort
of movement where I'm
unconstrained, really,
in terms of how far my stride is,
I mean I'm obviously
constrained by the musculature,
I'm really careful to not overextend or do
something like that.

And the only way to do
that is to not go all out.

So again, the goal for this Friday workout
is to really get the heart rate high,
do high intensity interval training...

A number of different
ways you could do that.

You can look up HIIT,
HIIT workouts online,
find the one that's best
for you and really pick
something that's safe that
you can do consistently,
and I believe that ideally
will also trigger a bit
of either strength and
hypertrophy and speed
power maintenance or even
give you a little bit
of a stimulus so that by
the time you roll around
to that leg workout on,
again, on Monday, you've got
a little bit of an additional
boost to your leg strength,
hypertrophy, speed and power.

So we've covered Sunday
through Friday, and then
Saturday rolls around and
Saturday is when you train arms,
calves, and neck.

So this may sound as if
you're training a bunch
of small muscle groups, biceps,
triceps, necks and calves,
and that's true, but I
should mention that you are
also training your torso a
second time and you're doing
it indirectly, or
sometimes not indirectly.

Why do I say this?

Well, keep in mind, again,
that for strength and hypertrophy,
you're going for that once
about every 48 to 72 hours,
you want to stimulate that,
on Wednesday is when you
train your torso, right?

Chest, shoulders, back and neck.

You've had Thursday to
rest, Friday to rest.

I know a lot of people are
going to want to emphasize
those body parts and
they're going to think,
oh, you have to train it twice a week.

But if you have modest recovery ability
or low recovery ability, such as I do,
and you're doing these
other cardiovascular
training sessions, et cetera,
well then, on Saturday is
when you will train arms,
calves and neck directly.

But included in that,
remember, two exercises per muscle group,
one with a peak contraction,
one with somewhat of a stretch in there.

Included in that, I
suggest doing some sort
of dip movement, which I
think it was Pavel Tsatsouline
said the dip is synonymous
with or at least similar
to an upper body squat.

Excuse me, Pavel if I got that wrong.

Maybe it wasn't you that said that,
but big admirer of his work,
and certainly the dip is
a great exercise to hit
multiple muscle groups,
chest, shoulders, and triceps,
maybe even some back to
some extent depending
on how you do it.

So doing some dipping
movement will indirectly
stimulate strength hypertrophy, et cetera,
in the chest and shoulders
and including some sort
of pulling movement for the bicep,
like a chin up or palms facing movement,
pulling up from to the bar,
especially if it's a
close grip type movement.

But even if it's a wide
grip type movement,
will of course trigger strength
and hypertrophy, maintenance
or improvements in the biceps,
but will also trigger strength
hypertrophy in the lats
in the back.

Okay, so Saturday is this arm workout
that I'll just give an
example of a potential
workout where you might
do a few more exercises
and maybe not just two,
but maybe three to make sure you get
the torso indirect stimulation.

So what would this look like?

Well, this might be your
sort of classic dumbbell
curls for the bicep and maybe incline curl
for the bicep because
it has more of a stretch
on an incline bench,
and then you might finish
with two sets of chin ups.

So palms facing you, chin ups,
or three sets of chin-ups depending
on whether or not you're
in a heavier load month
or a more moderate weight month.

Again, activating the biceps
muscles 'cause arms day,
but also activating
strength and hypertrophy
in the lats or at least maintaining it
so that, because you're not training
those torso muscles again
until Wednesday, you're not
allowing the hypertrophy
and strength gains that you generated
on Wednesday to atrophy, to disappear.

Then, thinking about triceps,
it might be some sort of triceps isolation
or peak contraction movement.

So that could be tricep kickback or some
overhead extension would
be more of a stretch
type movement than a kickback.

But then also doing regular old dips.

You might even start
with dips, which again,
are going to activate those
torso muscles and the triceps.

And then calf work in the same
way that you did on Monday.

And neck work...

Again, I am a believer
in training neck multiple
times per week.

And if you are able to
finish all of that in 45
or 50 minutes, great.

Most people will find
when you're doing a lot
of small muscle groups,
it actually takes longer
because you have to go around
to more exercises.

But again, just adhere
to the same principles
we talked about before,
about 50, five zero, to
60 minutes of real work
after a warmup with an
asterisk next to that,
that if someone's on the
equipment or you can't find
the dumbbells you need, et cetera,
then maybe 75 minutes max.

But really trying to not
extend that workout too long,
making sure that you
activate the arms directly,
but also activating the
torso muscles indirectly,
and again, I won't repeat
it this time, again,
but following the same
weight and repetition
and rest interval scheme
that we talked about earlier,
a bit heavier, lower reps,
more sets and longer
rest for about a month.

And then alternating to more repetitions
yet fewer sets, right?

Shorter rest intervals and
do that for about a month.

This carries through
for all the resistance
training workouts regardless
of the day of the week.

So we've completed the
total arc across the week
and we can summarize
it as saying Sunday is,
let's just say long endurance,
Monday is leg resistance training,
Tuesday, heat cold contrast,
Wednesday, torso training plus neck,
Thursday, I would call
it moderate intensity
cardiovascular exercise, so that 35 minute
moderate intensity
cardiovascular exercise,
Friday, high intensity
interval training of sprinting
or some variation thereof
and Saturday, arms, calves,
neck and torso, indirect work.

That's the total structure.

But I want to emphasize again,
you do not need to start this on Sunday.

That is, you could make the
long endurance work start
on Tuesday and then just fill in the rest
as described before.

It's really up to you.

There's another important
point I want to make,
which is that neither
I nor anyone is going
to be successful in
doing the exact workouts
on the exact same days of
every week because of travel,
work, illness, other demands, et cetera.

The thing about the
schedule that I like so much
that I do believe that
will benefit you as well
is that you have some flexibility there.

What's the flexibility?

Well, let's say you train
your typical Sunday workout
of endurance, then you train
legs on Monday and then
you don't manage to do
your heat cold contrast
on Tuesday for whatever reason.

Well, you can put it on Wednesday.

Just make sure that if you're going to do
the cold stimulus, that
you don't do it too close,
not within four, ideally
eight hours after the training
of torso, but you could do
it before or you could do it
just heat and skip the cold
that particular week, right?

Not ideal, but better
than not doing anything.

Let's say, for instance,
the leg workout was particularly brutal,
you don't sleep that well on
Monday night or Tuesday night.

Well then should you do the
torso workout on Wednesday?

Well, I would say,
why not move the heat cold contrast
to Wednesday and then
push that torso workout
to Thursday and maybe also
try and do that 35 minute
run on Thursday every once
in a while rather than lose
the total control of the program and let
everything shuffle forward.

Here's the basic principle.

I do believe that any
one of these workouts,
whether it's for endurance
or resistance training,
can be shifted either
one day forward or one
day back, right?

You could delay it by a
day or you could accelerate
it by a day in order to
make sure that you get
everything done across the week.

In fact, I would say the best way to think
about this foundational
fitness program is not
from the details up,
but from the top down,
from the big picture down to the details,
and say to yourself,
once a week you're going to
get some long endurance in,
another day during the week,
you're going to make
sure that you get a kind
of moderate faster endurance workout in,
and then one other day during the week,
you're going to get an all out sprint,
high intensity cardiovascular
exercise workout in.

You're going to get those
three workouts in somehow.

And then in addition to that,
you will also do resistance training
for every muscle group in your body.

And that means doing your legs
hard at least once a week,
your torso hard at least once
a week and your arms hard
at least once a week.

And of course you are
also paying attention
to training your calves.

And I do, for reasons I described before,
believe that you want to
train your neck at least
to keep it strong.

You may not want to
generate hypertrophy there.

People vary in terms of how
quickly their neck grows.

Some people grows very, very fast.

Other people, for the life of them,
they can't get much
hypertrophy in their neck.

But keeping that neck strong,
at least through some very
light work to moderate
weight work, very, very important,
for reasons I stated earlier.

If you set out those goals,
then the specific days that
you do each workout isn't
as critical, but the specific spacing is.

So for instance, you're
not going to want to do
your high intensity
interval training the day
after you train your legs,
because if you're doing
that high intensity
interval training correctly,
you're going to be
taxing your legs and
eating into their recovery.

And so you want to space them
out by two or three days.

So I think you'll notice
that the point is really
to optimize everything on
the whole rather than any
one specific aspect of
training or adaptation.

Now that said, I do realize
that some people might
be hyper focused on things like strength
and hypertrophy and the
aesthetics that come with it.

A key point about strength hypertrophy
and weight training, and this is something
that has been covered
on multiple podcasts,
certainly the one with Jeff Cavaliere
and with Dr.

Andy Galpin and the one
that I did on building muscle
strength and hypertrophy,
the solo episode.

And that is the following,
it is the rare individual
who has perfectly
balanced musculature, right?

Most people can be a bit quad dominant
or hamstring dominant,
or they have trouble
activating their glutes
or somebody has a terrible
time trying to activate
their chest muscles,
but they're very strong
in the back, et cetera.

It's very clear that we can
know that not just based
on aesthetics, right, but based
on deliberate contractibility
of those muscles.

So I don't want to get into
this in too much detail
for sake of time,
but this is something that
has peer reviewed research
to support it and was
also discussed extensively
with Jeff Cavaliere when he was a guest.

And that actually he's really
popularized this notion
and it's absolutely true,
which is that if you can
contract a muscle very hard
to the point where it almost
feels like it's cramping,
if you can do that even
when there's no weight
in your hand or there's
no resistance against it,
so you're just using your
mind muscle connection
to contract that muscle
hard and isolate it,
chances are you'll be able
to generate hypertrophy
and strength gains pretty
easily in that muscle
compared to muscles that you
have a harder time activating.

So during all resistance
training, that mind muscle link
is really important, so much
so that some people will
even try and emphasize
contraction of the muscles
in between sets, et cetera.

I personally, because I'm
not somebody who likes
a mirror when I work out, and
I'm not somebody who wants
to spend time in between
sets flexing muscles
and et cetera for whatever reason,
I want to actually rest between sets,
and I'm more concerned with performance
during those sets and
really putting my mind
into the muscle during the set,
I really try and emphasize
deep relaxation between sets.

And so here's a tool that again is built
out of science and I should
say peer reviewed studies,
some of which are being done in my lab,
but other labs as well,
which is that in between
sets what I really strive
to do is to bring my heart
rate down as much as possible,
calm myself down as much as possible,
and I'll do the so-called
physiological sigh in order
to do that.

That's two inhales through the
nose, back to back, [sighs]
and then long full
exhale through the mouth.

I just did it partially there
for the sake of time, again.

So a big deep inhale through
the nose and then sneak
in a little bit more on a second inhale
to maximally inflate the
lungs and the alveoli
in the lungs, and then a
full exhale of all your air
via the mouth to empty your lungs.

That's the fastest way that
we are aware of to calm
your nervous system down.

And really, in between sets you can use
that to calm yourself
down and conserve energy.

But then as you move into
the weight training set,
you really want to ratchet
up your focus and attention
to the muscles that
you're going to be using.

Now, I'd like to acknowledge
that there's a huge range
of parameters in terms of
how to actually perform
during the set.

You can focus on a
particular muscle and try
and really isolate from the
beginning of the movement.

Some people will really
try and isolate it only
during the peak contraction.

Some people accentuate the negative.

There's speed and cadence.

There are, again,
remember, concepts are few,
methods are many.

And if you're interested
in the various methods
of eccentrics and concentrics
and all the different
ways of changing up cadence
and so forth during sets,
there's an enormous amount
of quality information
out there, far too much for
us to get into detail now.

But what I describe the general principles
of how to set your mind, if
you will, during the set,
you should be focused on the
muscles that you're using
and or moving the weight.

If movement of the
weight is more important,
you can either focus on moving the weight
or challenging muscles, right?

You can either try and
isolate muscles and make
specific muscles do the work
or simply moving the weight.

Moving the weight is
going to be more geared
towards strength
improvements, but focusing
on the muscle, so called
mind muscle link is going to
shift that very same set
more toward hypertrophy.

I realize I'm painting
with a broad brush here,
but nonetheless this
is grounded in the way
that the nervous system
governs muscular contraction.

And while I think most people are familiar
with the number of different
variables associated
with the resistance training,
sets, reps, rest intervals,
cadence, et cetera, there
are also a tremendous number
of very important variables
for endurance in any kind
of cardiovascular training.

And there are a lot of excellent resources
out there about that.

I think the most important one,
in fact I will go on record
saying what I believe
to be the most important
variable for any endurance
or cardiovascular training
is that because it's
a repetitive movement,
that you are able to
complete the movement safely,
meaning you're not putting
your body into range
of motion or into positions
that can damage joints
or put you in any kind
of compromised state.

And some people might think, well,
that seems kind of silly.

But if you've ever set the, for instance,
the seat too high on a
stationary bike and then
done Airdyne or assault bike
type interval training sprints,
if it's set too high and you're
over-striding, as it were,
the next day, you can really
pay the price in terms
of some back pain or sciatica.

And sometimes that pain can
extend for quite a while.

So of course you don't want
to approach any exercise
with so much caution that
it's neurotic and preventive
and yet you don't want to
approach any exercise in any way
that's so cavalier,
forgive the pun, Jeff,
that you're also going to
compromise the integrity of your joints
and musculature and connective tissue.

Let's talk about some real
world practical variables.

For instance,
let's say you get a poor
to terrible night's sleep.

Should you train the next day or not?

Well, that really depends.

I can honestly say I've
had some of the best
training sessions, resistance training
or endurance training
sessions after a really
poor night's sleep.

But that's the rare event.

More often than not, if
I'm not sleeping well,
I've had a terrible night's sleep,
the next day I will just
skip training that day.

I know that will shock a
number of you out there,
or perhaps you're
already calling me names,
weak, et cetera.

But I find that if I've slept
really poorly or I've had
a very stressful event
the day before and I don't
sleep well, training
the next day sets me up
for getting ill and getting
ill sets me up for not
being able to train for multiple days.

So it is my preference in
that case to skip a day
and really focus on recovery.

And then, as I mentioned earlier,
slide that workout to the
next day and rarely double
that workout up with another workout,
but then just slide the
schedule forward by a day.

But I really try and strive,
that is, I really try to
double up at least some
workouts later in the week in that case,
so that I can get back
on schedule of starting
the seven day protocol
again on the same day.

I don't want to be
excessively vague there.

What I'm trying to say is I try and adhere
to the same schedule, but if
I get a poor night's sleep,
I'll just simply skip
the workout the next day,
slide the workout forward.

There is one exception to that,
and it's an important exception,
which is there are times
when I've not slept well
or I've had some
particularly stressful event
the day before and haven't slept well,
but I'm able to do so-called NSDR,
non-sleep deep rest the next day.

So there have been times
when I've only got three
or four hours of sleep the night
before and I'm feeling
really behind the ball
the next morning, but I really
want to get my workout in.

So instead what I will
do is a 10, but ideally
in that case a 30 or even 60
minute non-sleep deep rest.

And there's a 10 minute
non-sleep deep breath protocol read by me.

But it is a non-spiritual, non-mystical,
science-supported non-sleep
deep breath protocol
available on YouTube.

You can simply put my
name, Huberman, put NSDR,
and Virtusan, V-I-R-T-U-S-A-N,
into YouTube and you'll find that script.

There are other NSDR scripts
that you can find now
on Spotify and on YouTube.

And if you fall asleep
during those non-sleep deep
rest scripts, that's great.

And if you don't,
you will also find that it
will restore your ability
to perform mental and physical work.

So there are times when I
haven't gotten as much sleep
as I would like,
or I'm feeling a bit more
stressed for whatever reason,
and I'll do NSDR, and
then I will go train.

And that often works
fabulously well for me.

And then I don't have to
skip a workout entirely
just because I didn't
get a good night's sleep.

A lot of people ask whether
or not you should train
fasted or fed, and this is
a very controversial area.

I personally prefer to
do my cardiovascular work
not having eaten anything
in the previous 3 to 10 hours.

And typically that's because
I wake up and I'll do
the cardiovascular training
within about an hour
of waking up, sometimes later,
because my first meal
generally falls, generally,
not always, falls around 11:00 AM.

I don't do any kind of
formal intermittent fasting,
but typically my meal schedule
somewhere between 11:00 a.m.
and my last bite of
food is around 8:00 p.m.
but I'm not super strict about that.

I might eat in as late
as 9:00 p.m. and I might
eat something at 10:00 a.m.
if I wake up really hungry,
I might have something
before 11:00 a.m., I'm not
neurotic about it.

But in terms of training,
I like to train fasted and that includes
the resistance training
workouts and those come early
in the day for me.

And typically if I'm going to train legs
on Monday, for instance,
which is when I train legs,
I'll make sure that the
night before I'm ingesting
some starch, some carbohydrate,
like rice or pasta or
something of that sort to make
sure that when I do that
morning leg workout,
I have enough glycogen in
the muscles, et cetera.

Again, nutrition is a
somewhat controversial area.

In fact, it can evoke very
strong feelings 'cause
I know we've got vegans
and we've got omnivores
and we've got carnivores
and people who are keto.

This isn't really the format for us to get
into all of that.

I think the rule to follow is figure
out what optimizes your training
for your particular training goals.

For me, that most often
means training fasted
and then eating pretty soon after I train.

And if it's a high intensity
resistance training workout,
and frankly, all of my
resistance training workouts
are pretty high intensity,
I'm not going to failure on
every set, but at least, say,
about 30% of those sets
I'm going to failure.

And the other sets I'm
working very hard nonetheless,
well then I eat some
starches after I train
and I also ingest some protein in the form
of a protein drink or a meal that includes
some protein food.

But I don't like to eat before
I do resistance training
or at least not within the hour or two
before I do resistance training.

There are exceptions to that,
and I should say that the
same basically applies
to endurance work.

If I'm going to head out for a run,
typically I don't want my
belly full of food or any
food at all, but there
are times where I wake up
hungry and I very much
need to eat something
or I have something
scheduled socially like
a breakfast and I'll have
that breakfast and then
an hour or 90 minutes
later I'll do my workout
because I want to make sure
that I finish the workout.

I, again, am not neurotically
attached to training
fasted or fed.

For me, fasted is preferred,
but if I have to train fed,
better to train than to not train at all.

We haven't talked so much
about flexibility yet,
but we did an entire episode
of the Huberman Lab podcast
on flexibility and I
encourage you to check
out that episode if you're interested
in increasing your flexibility.

But the basic takeaway from that episode
is that if you look at what
I like to call the center
of mass of the research,
that is most of the studies
and what the conclusions
of most of the quality studies point to,
so not the exceptions,
but the kind of general
rules that have been gleaned
over time from multiple labs over multiple
decades, et cetera.

What you find is that static stretching,
that is, holding a stretch
and in fact exhaling
and relaxing the midsection
and torso and relaxing
into the stretch as opposed
to staying full of air
and tense, but mentally
and physically relaxing
into the stretch, but
not stretching maximally,
that is not extending as
far as you possibly can go,
but more like 60% or even less.

And then holding those
static stretches for anywhere
from 30 to 60 seconds and then repeating,
doing that two or three
times throughout the week
for multiple muscle groups,
so it could be for your quadriceps,
could be for hamstrings, for your lats.

There are protocols out there.

In fact, we have a newsletter
that is focused entirely
on protocols for
flexibility and stretching.

You can find that again
by going hubermanlab.com.

You don't even need to
sign up for the newsletter,
although we invite you to if you like,
but you can simply go there,
scroll down to the
flexibility newsletter and all
the protocols are there
for each of the muscle
groups, et cetera.

But what I typically try
and do is some stretching
in the evening, because
I train in the morning,
as I'm perhaps getting ready
for bed or if the TV is on,
which in our house doesn't typically go
on because we don't
have a TV, but of course
there are computers and people are
on their computers, et cetera.

Well, I'll try and do some
stretching while I do that.

I also have a standing desk,
so during the day at work,
regardless of whether or not
I train that morning or not,
or I'm going to train in the afternoon,
I'll try and do some static
stretching for my hamstrings,
my quads, my lats, my shoulders, my back,
really doesn't take much
time and I really try
to space that out
throughout the week, which,
if you look at the peer reviewed research,
matches well to what's
known to be most effective,
which are going to be short,
repeated sessions ideally every day.

But truth told, I fail.

I categorically fail.

I was about to think of
whether or not I ever
stretch every day.

I fail to do it every day,
but I get about three or
so stretching sessions
in per week.

And again, it's just static hold,
trying to really relax into the stretch.

Now the relax into the
stretch is something
has been talked about
in martial arts circles
and Pavel Tsatsouline has an
excellent book on stretching,
we can provide a link to
that, talks about this,
has a lot to do with relaxation
of the nervous system
and the way that the
nerves innervate muscles
and allow for stretch, if you will.

Also, the way that the
tendons and ligaments
are innervated by nerves.

The converse is also true.

And here, again, this is
a principle that Pavel has
put forth, I believe he
calls it irradiation,
meaning irradiating out or
emanating out from a source,
which is that while exhaling
and relaxing the torso,
the midsection, some
people call it the core,
although some people don't like that term,
can facilitate relaxation and stretching
through a larger range of motion.

So too can contracting
the core, the midsection,
or gripping very tightly with the fist can
facilitate muscular
contraction because of the way
that the nervous system heavily,
we can even say over-represents
the fists in the brain.

And so how would you apply
this to your overall
foundational fitness protocol?

Well, it turns out that, let's say,
you're doing a movement that
involves one limb moving
and then the other, let's
say it's bicep curls,
just for sake of example,
turns out that you will
actually be stronger
in moving that dumbbell
with the arm that happens
to be moving if you grip
the handle very tightly,
but also grip the handle of the opposite
dumbbell very tightly.

Now that said, in between sets,
I encourage you to do the opposite.

To try and completely
relax in between sets,
combine that with the physiological sigh,
and then when the set,
the next set commences,
employ that very strong grip, both, again,
of the weight that's moving and the weight
that at that moment might be stationary
or in isometric position.

So the nervous system, of course,
is what controls muscles and that operates
in both directions.

If you want to relax,
try and use long exhales,
maybe even physiological
sighs and really concentrate
on mentally and physically relaxing,
in particular your core and your fists.

And if you want to generate force, right,
you want to move a heavy
barbell or dumbbell,
you want to do a chin up
with the maximal force,
that's when you can employ the opposite,
which would be to grip
the bar or dumbbell,
et cetera, very tightly.

And you want to contract
your core or even fill
your body with air as a, say,
plug all the leaks, et cetera.

So this gets into kind
of form and movement,
which is an extensive
near infinite landscape
of discussion, again, that we
don't have time to go into.

I just want to mention those
two nervous system related tips
because I suppose as a
neuroscientist, they appeal
to me because they're
grounded in fundamental
principles of how the nervous
system innervates muscle.

And I know that they will benefit
you the first time you
use them and every time.

Speaking of grip and
nervous system and fitness
and longevity, Dr.

Peter
Attia, who is a medical doctor,
was a guest on the Huberman
Lab podcast and provided
an enormous wealth of information
on that podcast episode.

I really encourage you to check
it out when you have time.

And of course has his
own spectacular podcast,
The Drive with Peter Attia.

Peter, Dr.

Attia, I should say,
often talks about certain
movements or exercises
that you should perform not
just to improve your fitness,
but also to touch into or
measure how fit you are
and how well you are
progressing toward a long
lifespan and healthspan.

And one of those includes
the ability to hang
from a bar for a minute or longer.

And there are a number
of different expectations
that one can have of how
long they should be able
to hang from a bar depending on their age
and their fitness level, et cetera.

Please check out Dr.

Attia's podcast
and his various social
media sites to get more
information on that.

But what I can tell you is
that if you're going to hang
from a bar and you want to
hang from that bar as long
as possible, which turns
out to be a interesting
and important metric of your health,
then gripping the bar very
tightly will actually help.

Earlier we talked about
whether or not to train
if you're sleep deprived
and how to recover
from what I would say is
moderate sleep deprivation
by doing NSDR as opposed
to total sleep deprivation
like being up all night or having a truly
miserable night, which case,
I think you should just
skip training the next day
and slide it forward.

Now, a similar issue
comes up from time to time
where people wonder whether
or not they should train
or not if they're sick.

And here there's all
sorts of crazy gym lore
and sport specific lore.

For instance, I used to hear this,
when I ran cross country,
there was this adage
that if the symptoms were
from the neck up, you could still train.

That is if you were really
congested and you had
a headache, you could still run.

Whereas if it was in your
chest and in your lungs
you couldn't run.

I don't think there's any data whatsoever
to support whether or not that's true
or whether it's not true.

For myself, and because
my general goal is to be
training and fit over time,
but also to include general
health in the fitness equation,
that is to not be sick or chronically sick
and certainly not to
get other people sick.

If I have a little tiny sniffle,
like I think I might be
getting sick, even then,
I'm a little cautious in
the sense that I'm not going
to do my typical workout.

I might stop at about 15 minutes earlier.

And I would do that not by
neglecting any body parts
or anything of that sort.

If it's a weight training workout,
by simply reducing the
total number of sets,
I probably wouldn't do any
sets to failure, if I did,
I might reduce the total
number or percentage of sets
to failure from about 30%
of sets to maybe closer
to 10% of sets, something like that.

And if it was endurance work,
I might throttle back by 10 or 20%.

And I will shorten the total
duration of the workout.

And I often find that
because of the known, yes,
peer reviewed known immune
system enhancing effects
of exercise, sometimes
that alone will allow me
to avoid getting sick.

But of course I'm also
careful to get home,
take a hot shower, not stress myself out,
if I can avoid getting
myself stressed out and focus
on sleep, NSDR, other forms of recovery,
good nutrition, et cetera.

If however, I have a real sniffle, a cold,
I'm not feeling well or
I think I might be coming
down with a flu,
I absolutely do not train
and I don't get back
into training of any kind
until I'm completely recovered.

So what I'm basically saying is that, no,
I don't believe you should
train if you're sick.

And perhaps equally importantly,
when you come back from
a layoff of any kind,
whether or not because of
illness or for whatever reason,
I do believe that because
your body is a bit untrained,
it's not ideal to jump
right back into maximal
training and to take one,
maybe two weeks of ramping
up to the full duration
and intensity of workouts
that then I would continue on
going for however many
cycles I can complete
before I hit another
sickness or I hit another gap
in my schedule due to family obligations
or other obligations, et cetera.

So we've covered a lot
of tools and protocols
and variables related to fitness,
but we have by no means
covered all the available
tools and protocols and variables.

Before we wrap up, I do
want to emphasize one tool.

It's a very easy, in fact, zero cost,
very low time commitment tool.

And this was one that was provided, again,
by Dr.

Andy Galpin when he was
on the Huberman Lab podcast.

And it's a tool that there
is excellent research
to support the effectiveness of,
and that I do believe
should come at the end
of every training session.

And that's to do three to five minutes
of deliberately slowed breathing.

It sounds so simple,
three to five minutes of
deliberately slowed breathing.

So this could be while
you're in the shower
or when you arrive at your car,
you might sit in your car quietly and do
that if you have time or maybe
even while you're driving back to,
or onto your next destination,
just to really slow down your breathing,
to really look at the
recovery period that has
to follow each training session.

And of course, during
which the adaptations,
the changes that make you
more fit than you were
going into the exercise occur.

And that three to five
minutes of deliberately
slowed breathing has been
shown in Andy's group
and in related experiments,
not exactly the same,
but related experiments
in our laboratory, in other laboratories,
to really so-called
downshift the nervous system
and really set you up for
maximal recovery, rapid recovery,
and allow you to lean into
the next training session
with full intensity
when that training session
eventually arrives.

So it's a very simple tool,
but a very potent tool
for your overall fitness.

So thank you for joining
me for this discussion
of what I'm calling a
foundational, or yes,
we could even get bold and call
it an optimal fitness protocol.

Although the word optimal is a tricky one.

There's no real optimal fitness protocol.

And today what I've
really tried to focus on
is this foundational protocol
because it does allow
you to check off most,
if not all the boxes related
to strength, endurance,
hypertrophy, speed, power, flexibility.

It will also teach you how
to regulate your nervous
system up and down.

That is to ramp up and focus,
mind muscle link, et cetera,
and then quickly calm
down, physiological sighs,
three to five minute decompress breathing
at the end of training, et cetera.

Really, even though I
talked about the protocol
that I follow, and again,
that we will provide as a
newsletter at hubermanlab.com
if you want to look at it in more detail,
even though we talked about it
in the context of what I do,
again, I really want to
emphasize that this protocol
and the description of
this protocol and all
its variables is really for
you and for you to tailor
to your specific needs.

So please, take the
protocol into consideration,
but do not treat it as holy,
treat it as a starting point
from which you can adapt it
to your specific fitness needs.

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but in many previous episodes
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So thank you for joining
me today for our discussion
about building your optimal
toolkit for fitness.

And last but certainly not least,
thank you for your interest in science